by Lionel Fenn
"I know. But Finlay and I were—"
"I know, I know. Abber told me."
Her near eye widened. "He saw?"
He snuggled deeper.
Tuesday turned around. "You saw, and you didn't say anything?"
Abber looked up from his meal and smiled an apology.
"Finlay," she snapped to the blacksmith, who was turning the spit taken from Gideon's belt, "take that stupid gag off and bash the sonofabitch."
Botham argued that he really couldn't take the time because benst ribs were terribly tricky in their cooking, and she didn't want her dinner ruined, did she? When she reminded him that her dinner these days usually consisted of a bunch of tasteless green stuff and a few unsavory insects, he almost changed his mind. But Abber jumped to his feet and began an expert series of begging pitches and pleading whines, which Botham soon found himself watching with such complete fascination that Tuesday excused herself from her brother's side.
"Damn," she said as she waddled toward the grey man. "Send a man to do a duck's job and see what you get."
Gideon rubbed his arms vigorously, sat up again, and looked around. "Where's Thong?"
"Oh, she ran away a pretty long time ago," Grahne answered.
"And you didn't stop her?"
"Well, she singed my hair, the bitch," she said angrily. "And we were trying to rescue you, remember?"
He exhaled slowly. "Yeah. I'm sorry."
"That's all right. I understand. Are you cold?"
He nodded. "Never been so cold in my life."
"That's all right. I understand. You'll be warm soon."
"Thanks."
"Oh, don't thank me. Thank Thong. She's the one who's going to blow up the mountain."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A dozen questions and the cousins of a dozen more lined up for consideration as Gideon tossed the furs aside, but he only had time for one: why blow up the volcano and let Lu know what she was doing? He didn't have the answer, but he suspected that the only way he was going to find out was by asking her, and the only way he was going to do that was by getting the hell out before the whole mountain came down on top of him.
He ignored Grahne's protestations about his health, the battering he had taken, and the way he yanked her to her feet when she didn't move fast enough. By the time she was able to run on her own, he was already at the fire, telling Tuesday to leave Abber's shins alone, telling Botham to get his axe, and yelling at Red to stop chasing Horrn around the cavern and get his ass aimed for the exit. It was a tricky maneuver, but the lorra eventually got the symbolic if not the literal meaning of the order and had soon left them all behind.
The bluelight was summoned on the run, and it wasn't long before they were skidding, racing, leaping, hopping, sidestepping, inching interminably slowly, and pelting around the mouths of the pits whose level of activity seemed to have increased since last they were seen on the inward trek.
Grahne was the swiftest, Gideon the next simply because she had hold of his arm and wouldn't let go in case he needed to think about what to do next.
Abber, his loincloth assaulting him as never before, used his staff as a pole to vault the obstacles he met, and most of the time found himself sailing over Horrn's head.
Red was long gone, his hoofbeats echoing like gunshots off the cave's now glowing walls, Tuesday's shrieks from his back adding a subtle counterpoint of fear.
"Why?" Gideon asked himself aloud. "Why would she do it?"
"Because she likes it," Grahne answered.
"Why?"
"She likes to blow things up, I guess."
It wasn't good enough. Nobody likes to blow things up just to see them blow up. Not everyone, anyway. There were, when he thought about, probably some who liked to see things get blown up, but they weren't like Thong. They didn't have dreams of conquering a world in order to get back at their husband for conjugal inattention.
And if she did blow up Hykrol Peak, both ends of it to be sure, Wamchu would know it, would soon figure out what was going on, and she would be as dead as her sister, though most likely only after a long and slow torture in the as yet unseen horror chambers of the Lower Ground, Choy.
Did she think she wouldn't be able to do it without the help of Chou-Li?
No; if that were the case, she wouldn't have asked him to help her kill the woman.
Did she think she would be able to do it with the volcano gone?
Who knew? That didn't make much sense, but little had since the day he had walked blithely into his pantry in the middle of the night and found himself in the middle of a pasture with a beautiful dark-haired woman who wanted him to find her duck.
Christ, what a mess.
The ground shook with renewed vigor, and large portions of the ceiling collapsed around them. The air filled with choking dust; heat and nauseating smoke vented from cracks that appeared in the floor; and a multitude of lower life-form cave-dwellers scuttled and crawled between Gideon's feet, nearly tripping him until Grahne, tired of the strain on her arm, lifted him on the run and planted him on her shoulder.
This, he thought, is humiliating; it was also a lot easier on his feet, and allowed him the opportunity to catch his breath while he shouted new directions to avoid new pits, new rockpiles, new bends in the cave's tunnel that led to boiling cauldrons of lava bubbling free from its primitive magma bed.
When the last pit was left behind, a dim light appeared at the end of the tunnel. Abber leapt onward, Horrn redoubled his speed, and Harghe's statuesque niece suddenly began to falter.
Gideon shook off her hand and dropped to the ground, took her arm, and pulled her on, noting how badly she was limping on her left leg and seeing as the bluelight combined with the light outside a long gash in her thigh.
"Why didn't you say something?" he shouted over the sound of the mountain falling down around them.
"You were thinking!" she shouted back, and smiled bravely.
"That's dumb!"
"I know. You should have been paying attention to where you were going."
Right, he thought, and had to throw himself sideways when he burst out of the cave in order not to drop over the edge of the ledge.
The slope was gone, crumbled and avalanched into the forest below; the trees boomed, the ground shook, and when he turned to look up he could see off to the left a series of steps carved deep into the rock.
"There!" he called, ducking away from a shower of burning stone and flaming ash. "She went up there!"
Holstering the bat and brushing the hair from his eyes, he raced over and began climbing, had taken four steps up when he realized he was alone.
"Well?"
Abber and Horrn were under the lip of the cave with Red, Tuesday, and Botham behind them, only Grahne remaining in the open as she bound one of her hides around the wound in her leg.
"Well?"
"It's too late, sirrah," Abber said with a gesture of the staff that took off one of the thief's hairs. "Climb if thou must, yet climb not if thou wilt live. Here! Here, I say, is the way to salvation, and the Dane take the hindmost."
Gideon grabbed for the next step when the mountain began to sway. "It isn't going to be safe if it collapses on you, you idiot! Tuesday, for god's sake, at least fly out of here, will you?"
She hesitated, consulted with the lorra, sighed and kissed Botham, and landed on her brother's shoulder. "Wheresoever thou goest, pal, so goest I."
"Jesus."
"First Kings, actually, I think."
Hykrol's far peak began to split at the summit.
"Does it matter?"
"It did to the kings."
He pressed as close as he could to the stone when a shower of burning debris splashed past him, hit the ledge, and flowed down to the pithiron forest. When it was over, he blinked his eyes free of sweat and looked down again.
"Finlay, take care of them until I get back!"
The blacksmith pushed stoutly to the cave's mouth and held his axe menacingly across his chest. Grahne
shoved him aside with a hip and tapped her dagger against her lip. He knew what she was thinking, and he shook his head, telling her this was his battle, not hers, and the only reason the duck was along was because she was afraid of heights.
Grahne blew him a kiss.
Tuesday didn't call her a slut.
And he began the slow climb that would take him to Thong.
—|—
The higher they climbed, the more violent was the ground's action, and he was glad that whoever had put these steps in had thought to make them several feet deep so that, when rocks and other matter came spinning toward him, he was able, for the most part, to press against each riser and escape most of the blows.
Some of them, however, hurt like hell, and after nearly an hour's work, he felt as if he had been beaten by a hundred rubber hoses. Yet there was no thought of giving up; Tuesday flew when she could, rode when she had to, and kept his spirits alive by composing inspirational duck songs which she sang and whistled in his ear. The idea that he would have to be able to get back at her or never rest in peace was the second strongest thing that kept him going.
The first was the fact that when he looked up after three hundred feet, he could see the summit.
And he could see Thong.
She was standing on what looked like a plateau, her back to him, hands on her hips, every so often tilting her head and spitting into a spuming, leaping, jetting wall of lava that washed over her without hurting her, and increased in size after each expectoration.
After examining the eruptions, Tuesday decided there was no sense in her getting any closer than she was; her feathers were beginning to brown, her eyes were beginning to boil, and she had, she told him apologetically, no desire to end her life roasted and served to Finlay on a platter.
He agreed, though reluctantly, and hugged her, kissed her brow, and took his bat in hand.
"You watch it, now," she ordered with a catch in her rasping voice. "Hit her where it hurts."
"Where?" he asked as Thong tilted her head and spat and the eruption rose higher.
"I don't know. In the head. How should I know?"
He nodded and kissed her again, closed his eyes and let an image of Ivy linger until he knew he was stalling. Then he wiped his face, his neck, the backs of his hands, his chest where the shirt was torn, his palms, his bat, and finally his eyes one more time.
"Are you finished?"
He wasn't, and he was. To be truly finished, he could have cleaned his bat to be sure there were no flaws that might cause it to fail him; he could have knocked the smoldering embers from his boots where they were burning into his soles; he could have changed shirts had he thought to bring an extra with him so that he might, if the occasion arose, attempt to use his charm where brute force would fail.
But involvement in such procedures would play into the woman's hands, and so he crept up the last step and took stock of the battlefield upon which he would soon throw himself on the mercy of the gods.
The plateau was, now that he had reached it, actually a huge depression a good mile or so across; its sides sloped gently downward here and rather sharply over there, and ran with red rivulets of lava moving too fast to cool and form a crust; and in its center was the hellish maelstrom he had previously seen only in nature documentaries—lava and steam and smoke and fire boiling and bubbling and spouting into the air, over the sides, through cracks in the walls into rivers that led to the helpless land below. And where there wasn't lava and steam and smoke and fire, there were curious dry spots that only gouted streams of ash into the wind that swirled the clouds above.
This, he thought, is going to be tricky.
The possibilities weren't exactly endless, but they were a bitch just the same.
If he moved too quickly, she might sense his presence, turn, and fry him without giving him a chance to try to trick her into giving him an opening to slug her with the bat; if he moved too slowly, she would probably sense his presence anyway and he would be dead and ashes to ashes before he had a chance to even think of something else.
This was all assuming she wasn't mad at him and didn't want to take him apart cell by cell before she got on with the good stuff.
The advantage he had was two-fold: the surprise she would have when she saw him here and not dead under the weight of the mountain, and the noise the volcano was making, which just might cover any noise of his own.
Which left him with only one problem—how not to get killed before he was able to wring or cajole or beg or seduce out of her the counterspell to the devastation she had committed upon Chey.
He didn't think he could do it.
So he stood up, and began walking.
There was, he understood at last, no possible way he would be able to talk to her. He had no choice but to try to rid the world of her, and trust that whether he made it home alive or not, Whale, for all the man's dithering and mistakes, would be able from the report of the trip to divine a method of his own for lifting the curse from the land.
Which meant he had to kill her.
Before she killed him.
Or, he thought as he was thrown to the ground when the eruption gathered strength, before the volcano killed him first.
Damn.
He got up and swayed forward, feeling as if he were on the deck of a burning ship. The heat was vicious and singed the hair over his eyes; the stench was enough to clog his throat with acid phlegm; the motion was enough to make him seasick, to make him wish he could do something to her so terribly vile, so inhumanly disgusting, that in her final moments she would not forget him.
A chance, something told him then; you have to give her a chance or it's no more than murder.
Closer; and the north wall of Hykrol's southern peak began to split apart, the lava flowing madly in that direction and ready, once a gap was opened, to spill down onto the Grassplain. Onto Terwin. Onto Harghe.
Closer; and the crimson of Thong's sarong blended into the crimson of the wall of molten fire that rose above her head and caused her to stretch out her arms and laugh.
On the other hand, the something told him, she was going to cook your sister alive.
Chance.
Alive.
Murder—it's murder—you can't do it, Gideon, you're a hero.
Harghe and all his people; Tuesday, and Grahne, and Whale, and Red; and he slipped to one knee when the north gap began to open, the lava built to a solid wall that pressed to open it even more.
He stood.
He gripped the bat in his right hand.
God forgive me, he thought, and took a last step forward.
She was less than a foot away, so intent on the construction of her destruction of the world she wanted for her own that she didn't see him, didn't hear him, only opened her arms and took a deep breath in preparation for the final breaching of the north wall and the unleashing of the forces that would accomplish her goal.
Gideon lifted the bat.
Thong raised her fists to the clouded sky.
Then he leaned forward, and tapped her shoulder, and shouted, "Boo!" in her right ear.
CHAPTER THIRTY
"Nothing," he said to Tuesday, "made much sense after that."
"Boo?" she said. "You said boo?"
"When she fell into the volcano, it was like some giant stopper plugged it up. One minute there was all this smoke and fire and stuff, and the next minute... well, you saw it. Everything suddenly fell back, that crust formed over the lava, and the earthquakes stopped."
"Boo?"
"I can't believe it. It's like a miracle."
They were sitting on a luxurious black footh robe in front of their tent. Ahead of them, the walls of Rayn were being decorated for the celebration that would begin that evening, in just two hours. All the stores were closed, all the workers were on holiday, and after two days' solid rain, the ground was suddenly so fertile the farmers were thinking of retiring a decade or so early.
It had been the ash, not a direct spell
, the ash of the volcano cursed by the sisters and taken over Chey by the wind.
"Boo," Tuesday muttered. "B—goddamned—oo."
"Sis, will you knock it off, for Christ's sake? That's all I've heard for the past week."
She plunked herself onto his lap and stared in his eyes. "But, Giddy, really! Boo? You didn't even hit her! You could have at least bashed her one for me."
"Hey," he said, stroking her neck, "a man has to do what a man has to do. Besides, it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Stupid."
"It worked."
"Lucky."
He said nothing. All morning she had been ill-tempered, complaining loudly about the excellent nine-course breakfast Botham had served especially for her, the sun that made her squint, the cool breeze that ruffled her feathers, the fact that Grahne spent a lot of time bending over to show them whence she had taken the fur that bound her injured thigh even though Abber had cured it as soon as they had climbed down the ruined slope of Hykrol after Thong had died.
Nothing pleased her.
And nothing would calm her down.
Gideon understood perfectly.
Just before the celebration began, Whale was going to bring her and Grahne into the Hold. And when the doors opened again, there was a good chance he would have his sister back again, the way she had been before he had lost her.
So he held her quietly for a long time and suffered her disappointment at his simpleminded solution to the last Wamchu problem, sang to her some of the songs she had created, kissed her, and wept with her when she admitted she was afraid.
"You know," she said, blowing her beak on a blade of grass, "I wouldn't mind it so much if I didn't think he may forget something."
"Like what?"
"Like my arms. Suppose it works but I still have wings? Or suppose it works and I still have these feet? God, can you imagine the trouble I'm going to have finding shoes for these things?" She held one up for him to look at. "I think I'm going crazy, Giddy."
He didn't ask her not to call him that; it was the least he could do, and he could always yell at her later.
The sun began to set.
Tuesday quieted, sat in his arms, and trembled.