Web of Defeat

by Lionel Fenn

  The bat swung and missed, but memory caused the creature to swerve deftly out of the way, dislodging a chunk of the mountain with a trailing foot. The debris fell far to the north, the only sensation of impact a slight trembling of the ground.

  "Grahne!" he called.

  "In a minute," she snapped, dropping the axe and the dagger but hanging onto the sword and the mace.

  The dragon-form made a third pass, but one so halfhearted he was able merely to step out of the way, a puzzled frown marking his wonder that the creature hadn't once used its fire. The only reason he could think of for such an error in judgment was that it wasn't an error at all but a function of the dragon-form itself—it was for all its hideousness only an illusion of dragonness, not the actual beast itself; and while it might rend and tear and otherwise cause severe damage, that was only an extension of what Chou-Li herself could do.

  She couldn't breathe fire, and her dragon would look awfully stupid spitting iceballs at its prey.

  He grinned as he watched the beast swing high and vanish into the smoke-cloud above the volcano's mouth.

  He stopped grinning when he remembered that the creature that had attacked him on the plains of Rayn had exploded in a fiery collision with the earth.

  Okay, he thought, so there's another reason.

  "Grahne!"

  "Now, you just be patient," she said testily, dropping the sword to pick up the dagger.

  He swung the bat like a cat's tail, reminded himself that the target was above him, not in front of him, and glanced up just as the monster streaked out of the clouds, wings high and back, mouth open and teeth dripping, claws catching Hykrol's unearthly light and turning it to scarlet lances.

  Gideon had the feeling Chou-Li wasn't playing anymore.

  But he steadied himself, positioned his feet, and wondered why heroes in this spot always claimed there was no better way to die than defending one's honor, one's friends, and one's sister. That, he thought, was the raving of a lunatic, or a man who had nothing better to do but hang around getting bashed.

  Botham would have loved it.

  The dragon-form leveled and aimed for his head, the blue eyes frigid, the claws flexing in anticipation.

  He squared his shoulders, swung and missed, and sprawled on the ground as the thing veered sharply away, shrieking, because Grahne had finally decided on the mace and thrown it with all her strength at the ridge of its spine. It plowed through the scales and the thick skin, and lodged somewhere in the vicinity of its second liver.

  The added weight to such a delicately balanced flying machine, however, did more apparent harm than the injury it suffered; the dragon-form wobbled erratically, wavered, and only barely managed to prevent itself from crashing into the side of the peak above the cave. That it slowed was a good sign, and he scrambled up the slope after it, taking aim at the tips of the laboring wings and knocking them off easily, though he was in turn knocked violently to the ground when a belch of fire exploded at the cave and set a small avalanche in motion.

  Trying to avoid the main thrust of the fall, he threw himself to one side and a rock slammed into the small of his back, another bounced off his right foot, and a third would have crashed his skull had not Horrn knocked it out of the air with his sword.

  The dragon-form wheeled about, raised its head, and took a deep breath.

  The blue eyes didn't wink.

  Grahne threw her battle-axe at the fragile joint of wing and shoulder, and dove behind the boulder when the shock of the weapon's strike caused the thing to fire prematurely. A lance of flame thus passed over Gideon's head with a sputtering roar, and it was a warm several seconds before he knew he hadn't been fried, though his new shirt would probably never be the same again.

  His eyes half-closed and his mouth twisted with pain, he returned to his feet and limped and swayed in for the kill.

  Suddenly, the air began to shimmer.

  "Wait!" he yelled at Grahne as she drew back her arm and aimed her dagger at one of the eyes.

  "Wait!" he screamed at Horrn, who was readying what remained of his sword for a lunge into the rippling putrescence of the creature's underbelly.

  The air continued to waver, and the temperature continued to fall, and even the terrified dragons who had taken to the skies hovered around to see why their oversized cousin seemed to be shrinking, congealing, compacting, contracting, and growing the most wonderful blue silk skin they had ever seen.

  Within seconds the transformation was complete, the air returned to normal, and the temperature was already rising toward the eruption point again.

  "Amazing," Gideon said.

  The dragon was gone; Chou-Li stood midway between Gideon and the cave and put her hands on her hips.

  Horrn gaped; Abber regained consciousness and cringed; Grahne slowly sharpened the dagger against her thigh.

  "You ruined my Web," the wife of Lu Wamchu accused with an angry pout. "Do you know how long it took me to make it? Do you have any idea what something like that takes out of a woman, especially when she's in a hurry?"

  "Chou-Li," he said, approaching her cautiously, using most of his strength to keep himself from shivering. "Chou-Li, I need your help."

  She stared at him in suspicion, toyed with her bangs a moment, and froze Horrn's spikes when he tried to get closer. "You need me?"

  Gideon wiped his free hand on his jeans and holstered his bat as a gesture of good faith. "I do."

  She looked frankly at Grahne and shook her head. "I don't think so. You destroyed my Web."

  "I had to do it."

  "No, you didn't," she said. She sniffed. "And even if you did, you didn't have to kill all my pets."

  Images of the acidic Qoll made him grimace; images of his death made him pause.

  "And you don't need me. You're just saying that so I will not burn you with my cold."

  "But I do," he insisted, and lowered his voice. "Remember the plan?"

  The woman's Oriental features creased into a thinking frown, smoothed out again, and she smiled. "Ah."

  "Yes."

  Abber whimpered his support.

  "And you will do this thing for... for me?" There was still doubt, yet still there stirred the willingness to let this hero prove himself to her. "You will not, as it is said, stab me in the back?" She glanced at the bat. "Or whatever."

  This is it, he told himself; now you have to lie like a rug and make her like it.

  He nodded.

  She shook her head. "I do not think so." A glance at Grahne frosted the tall woman's furs. "I think you want me to help you destroy my sister. Then you will destroy me before I can trick you into doing something else." Her finger waggled at him, and a brief hailshower pelted his chest. "I am not so much a fool, hero, that I believe you can change so much just for me."

  They were an arm's length apart, and he could feel the icebergs of her emotions bobbing on the sea of her ambitions. Behind him, his friends gathered and whispered among themselves. He didn't know what they were saying, but the drift of the few words that did reach him suggested mutiny of some sort.

  "Chou-Li, listen," he said, and dropped to the ground when her arm shot out, her finger pointed over his head, and Grahne screamed. He turned on his knees and saw his friends huddled together, while overhead the dragons, who had decided that all this food was too good to waste on such a lovely afternoon, dove toward them. They didn't last very long. They went from dragons to really ugly iceballs in less time than it took Chou-Li to lower her arm again, and the only thing they had to worry about was getting crushed in the fallout.

  The explosive impacts raised the temperature several degrees.

  Chou-Li blew on her nails and dusted them on her chest.

  Gideon rose, watched as the last of the pyres sputtered out in the wind, and looked back and into a glittering pair of blue eyes. "Thanks," he said quietly.

  "They bother me," she said. "Besides, they are my sister's pets, not mine. I cannot stand them. They remind me of—"
<
br />   "Your husband?" Grahne said, unable to stand the suspense of not knowing what the two were talking about.

  "There!" the woman said to Gideon. "See? She does it too."

  "What?" Grahne asked her as her flesh rose in goose bumps that confused the configuration of her chest to no end. "What did I say?"

  Chou-Li, however, was striding angrily up the slope, Gideon hurrying behind and waving his friends along. "All the time," she muttered, her hands slapping at her thighs. "All the time. Not one sentence am I allowed to finish before someone tries to read my mind." She whirled around, and they ducked instinctively. "It is frustrating, do you know that? Do you know how frustrating it is?"

  "Well, actually," Grahne said, "I do."

  Chou-Li sniffed. "Yes, I am sure."

  "My uncle does it all the time."

  Chou-Li looked to Gideon, who nodded without prodding. "Is that the truth?"

  Grahne smiled. "Sure it is! And I tell you, it's really really hard for someone to stay happy when someone else is always on your case about this thing and that thing and why don't you get a husband, Grahne, before you're too old and no one looks at you anymore." The smile broadened. "I just ignore him. It's the only polite thing to do, don't you think?"

  Chou-Li toyed with her bangs again, ran a hand down the side of her dress to the slit at her hip, and beckoned Gideon to join her as she continued on toward the cave.

  "I will help you," she said at last.

  Gideon, feeling the effects of all that dropping and getting up again, could only smile his gratitude and ask her with a glance why she had changed her mind. Chou-Li, for her part, answered only with a shrug of her silken rounded shoulders, ignoring the yelps of those behind who had discovered that the shadow she seemed to be casting was only the cold-burn marks left behind by her slender bare feet in the eons-old lava.

  The yelps grew louder when the ground began to tremble and the air turned red.

  "Show-off," Chou-Li muttered.

  Gideon looked up. "What? You mean, that's Thong doing that?"

  "Yes. She amuses herself with such minor things."

  If that's a minor thing, he thought, what the hell is a major thing?

  The ground shook again, and cracks began to appear in the rough grey surface. Gideon leapt over one, straddled another, and finally darted into the cave when a boulder the size of Rhode Island bounced off a ledge and cratered the slope with a magnificent but superfluous bellowing sigh.

  "There is one thing," the woman said before the others arrived.

  He waited.

  "When it is over, you must promise to let me know when you are going to trick me so I have the chance to trick you first."

  He waited.

  "It is only fair. I am going to do most of your work for you."

  He waited.

  She held the others at the mouth of the cave with a casual lift of her palm. "If you do not," she whispered, "then I will not. And she will destroy you all. Starting," she added, "with that silly white duck."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gideon, torn between shouting for joy and tearing the woman's head off, grabbed her shoulders without thinking. "Duck? She has the duck?"

  Chou-Li writhed under his grip, her lips parted, her eyes half-closed. "Yes," she sighed.

  "Where?" he demanded.

  "Back there," she said, and pointed.

  "Are you sure?"

  Her knees bent slowly in the throes of her wintery passion, and as he tried to keep her from falling, he found himself looking down at her, and at the glassine contours the dress formed over her slight but womanly figure. He swallowed, released her, and blew on his fingers to prevent the frostbite from taking permanent hold. Then he peered into the cave and didn't much like what he saw, which wasn't surprising, he thought, since there wasn't much he had liked about any of this from the very first earthquake he had felt before the tent fell on his head and Tuesday had talked him into trying to change her back by reminding him of his promise.

  Grahne, sensing his awkward predicament, immediately enveloped his hands in several layers of furs while Chou-Li, seeing his predicament, glared haughtily at the tall woman and, when she wasn't looking, froze the heels of her benst-hide boots to the cave floor.

  It was Jimm who prevented an outbreak of violence by stepping beyond them and shading his eyes to see into the dark that lurked at the cave's far end. "I can't see anything," he said. "Are we going back there? Is it safe? Gideon, are there any more dragons to worry about?"

  Abber thumped the rocky ground with his staff. "No," he declared. "The dragons have been banished from this land by the hand of the grand Wamchu."

  Something growled in the dark.

  "But," the grey man added as he backed away, "if it's a panther, don't anther."

  Gideon pushed between the two women and took out his bat, stroked it for the bluelight, and sent the bobbing globe ahead. Chou-Li marveled at the spell, but said nothing as she strode confidently over the rock-strewn floor, leading them deeper into the mountain until, when he looked back, he could see no sign of the entrance.

  Here, the volcano's rumbling echoed.

  Here, the fresh rush of lava down its beds was the constant roar of a waterfall.

  Here, he thought, is the pits—the first of which they were able to walk around without any trouble. He glanced down out of curiosity, but there was nothing he could see because the bottom, if it had one, was too far away, though he wondered with a frown about the pinpricks of light that flared now and again before he moved on.

  They looked like eyes.

  Tiny, nasty, hungry little eyes.

  Some yards away, the second pit required hugging the cave's walls, which were warm and damp and covered with a mossy slime to which the bluelight thankfully gave no color.

  Abber, lamenting the fine layer of silt that had dulled his loincloth, tripped over a pile of small jagged rocks and damned whoever had left them in his way; when the volcano rumbled again, and more rocks dropped in a dusty shower from the ceiling, he apologized and began using his staff like a white cane.

  The third pit was little more than ten feet in diameter, but the ground around it sloped so sharply toward its mouth that they were forced to join hands in a human chain and inch their way along the lip.

  Gideon saw the eyes again.

  "Chou-Li?"

  "Do not worry. They do not eat meat."

  "Like the dragons, right?"

  The woman frowned. "Of course not! Dragons cannot live without fresh meat every day."

  The fourth pit spouted noxious steam.

  The fifth pit, around a sharp bend in the cave, was small and filled with brackish water over which tiny white insects flew, while under the surface large white fish circled patiently. Horrn tried to spear one with his sword and was left with only a smoking hilt he shoved into his belt with a shrug.

  Then the cave took a sudden downward trend, narrowed for several yards, and abruptly opened into a cavern that looked less like a cathedral than a huge hole in the mountain. There were no stalactites or stalagmites, no ledges, no colonies of bats, no pits, no draughts of fresh air, no awe-inspiring colors streaking the walls.

  At the far end there was a large pile of whitened bones.

  On the left there was a large pile of bones with some meat still on them.

  And on the right, Thong was tying Tuesday to a spit over an open fire and whistling.

  —|—

  "Now, cut that out!" Gideon shouted as he ran toward the duck, the woman, and the shimmering flames.

  He realized right away that his warning was not the most dramatic he could have issued under the circumstances, nor was it the most eloquent; on the other hand, it did do the job as Thong, startled by the intrusion, backed away in earnest haste as he approached and scooped his sister into his arms. Quickly, he brushed off a few sparks that had landed on her feathers, and unwound the rope that kept her wings pinned to her sides. The spit he kept in his hand while he gently lo
wered Tuesday to the floor and tried to figure out where, on a duck, he should search for a pulse.

  "She is not dead," Thong said in disgust while she adjusted her crimson sarong.

  He was horrified. "You were going to cook her alive?" He rose and aimed the pointed end of the spit at her chest. An unnatural calm settled his anger, and his expression became so bland that the woman backed up another step and balled her right hand into a defensive fist. "Alive?"

  It was then that she became aware of the others, recognizing her sister with a shake of her head and a derisive snort that turned a few benst ribs from bleeding raw to well-done by the time the smoke cleared.

  "You were supposed to stop them," she said to Chou-Li. "They are not supposed to be here."

  Chou-Li sauntered over and kicked loose dirt on the fire. "I did my best, sister. But I was overpowered when they saw through my disguise and ended my attack. I am not so good at dragons as you are, you know."

  Thong eyed her suspiciously. "And are you now a captive of the miserable little hero who destroyed the best pet I ever had in my life and who ruined our jungle home and who stole our masseur and turned him into a sniveling little rodent who is no longer fit to touch the flesh of my form?"

  Her sister shrugged.

  Abber sighed.

  Horrn made a few passes with his swordless hilt and tugged at an earlobe when no one seemed to notice.

  Gideon stepped around the dying fire. "Alive," he said flatly. "You were going to cook her alive."

  "Stay back," Thong warned.

  "Alive," he said tightly.

  "You are not to take another step," she ordered with a hiss.

  He did.

  A tiny fireball exploded at his feet. Though Abber dropped into a cower and Horrn sidled behind Grahne, Gideon ignored it and jabbed both spit and bat toward Thong's midsection.

  "Alive."

  Thong raised her hands. "You will come no farther, hero," she warned yet again. "You are out of your league here. And I am tired of your meddling."

  "And I have just about had it with all of you!" he shouted, so loudly that the cavern produced echoes, so forcefully that both Grahne and Chou-Li fairly swooned in admiration, and so angrily that Thong's expression was a clear indication of her wonder, fear, and a suggestion, no more, that perhaps she had better look for a quick exit.