The Monsters of Stephen Enchanter

by Natelson, D. J.

  But there was no call to be wasting decent enchanting material, so he cut out the jaw and stuffed it in his largest pocket before continuing on through the field.

  The path was flat and easy, and as Stephen walked, life returned to his eyes and muscles. His feet picked up the old pace of walking, and his hands scooped snow into balls and threw it. After a while, he found a broken branch on the ground that would serve as a new walking stick. He walked, and let his mind think of nothing.

  The trees on the far side of the field were gnarled and close. They soon cut off the best of the sunlight. The way had shrunk to a deer path, and undergrowth snagged at his sleeves. He was leaving a trail of blood and broken twigs for Robin to follow.

  After a while, it began to snow.

  It would.

  Stephen wiped a hand over his face. When he withdrew it, he found the ground had plunged away from under his feet.

  No.

  What?

  Ah. He was standing on a plank over a pit. The rank smell of rotting meat rose to his nostrils and the wind fluttered his robes.

  Very, very carefully, Stephen stepped backward onto solid ground.

  Then he spotted the sign. There words were carved into the wood in the same handwriting that Stephen had seen in the notebooks of poetry in Robin’s cabin. They read, unhelpfully,

  Robin’s Bowl

  This wasn’t the third bridge, then. There went that hope.

  But really, what kind of deranged psychopath took the days and weeks necessary to dig an enormous hole in the middle of the woods and fill it with who knows what that was causing that awful smell of—

  Rotting meat.

  It occurred to Stephen that not even Robin could have dug Robin’s Bowl on his own. He would have needed a team of men, maybe multiple teams, all of them working around the clock for days. When they had finished, Robin would have needed a way to dispose of them—and what better way than to push their bodies down into the pit?

  Except . . . except this pit looked like it had been around for years. The bodies wouldn’t still be rotting. More importantly, it was cold, freezing cold. The cold would have preserved the bodies; he wouldn’t be able to smell them even if they were fresh. No; there was something else going on here.

  It didn’t matter. Stephen wasn’t going down there; he was going across. The path continued on the far side of the pit.

  The plank was solidly hewn and a good eight inches across. Stephen had crossed streams on logs and balanced atop fences. Admittedly, none of those had been balanced over a deep dark pit containing horrors in a booby-trapped woods run by a madman, but that was no reason to panic.

  Stephen held his new walking stick at either end for balance and, without looking down, crossed the pit.

  The plank didn’t creak. He made it across safely.

  Stephen breathed a sigh of relief, walked forward, and hit a wall.

  No; not a wall. Stephen shook himself off, gingerly felt his nose, and stood. He had been on the path, and there was nothing in front of him. The path wound off between two trees.

  Stephen gingerly reached out a hand and felt bark beneath his glove.

  An invisible tree? There were stranger things in the world. He moved his hands over the tree, searching for a way past. Another tree, equally invisible, grew flush with the first. And a third. And a fourth. The invisible trees grew in a semi-circle, each ending at the pit; there was no way through.

  Stephen gripped one of the invisible trees and tried to pull himself up it, but there were no low branches, no places to grip—and he did not dare remove his gloves.

  But there had to be a way through! Robin had said there was. Robin had said to follow the path, that the path was the only way through the woods.

  Robin was a liar.

  But Letitia had said the same thing and yes, she was a witch, but was it likely she and Robin were working together? Was it likely they had somehow come up with the same story?

  No. There must be another way.

  Stephen returned to the plank. It was where he had left it, and a gentle prod proved it to be as solid as ever. Stephen stepped onto the plank, and immediately warm air rose around him, whipping his robes, casting snow into his eyes. Wind whistled about his ears, and Stephen realized that the sudden change in weather was not magic, but physics. When he had crossed the first time, it had only begun snowing, and there was little wind. This time, the freezing wind and snow clashed with the increasing waves of heat from below to cause . . . confusion.

  He could still pass, if he were careful.

  Stephen threw his walking stick to the far side of the pit, got on his stomach and crawled across.

  The plank felt much longer this way. He could not help but see the darkness of the pit far beneath him, could not help but think how very far he could fall. Worst, the stench rose in increasing waves, nauseating, pervasive, inescapable. Then, just to cap it all, he could feel waves of magic-depressing coldness radiating from pure iron. The iron was close, practically under his hands.

  Under his hands? Not in the pit, surely. Stephen peered down, but that way was only blackness. And the iron wasn’t quite underneath him, it was also a little ahead. He squinted through the snow, and made out the telltale smoothness of iron. It was in bar form, hugging the wall.

  A ladder rung.

  Stephen edged his way to the end of the plank, found his walking stick, and tucked it under his arm. Then he lowered himself slowly over the lip of the pit and began climbing down. Partway, the walking stick fell from its tenuous position and dropped. Stephen listened, but didn’t hear it clatter on the bottom.

  Either it was a long, long way down, or the landing was soft. He’d know soon enough.

  Hand over hand, Stephen descended into the pit. The farther he went, the warmer it became. Ten feet down, Stephen’s face no longer stung with cold. At twenty, he began to perspire. At thirty, it was only the proximity of the iron that kept him from gasping with the heat. At forty feet, the temperature leveled off to bearable, although it had become stiflingly close, and the smell that had been unpleasant above was now almost tangible.

  Stephen ignored the smell. He was an enchanter; bad smells were comfortingly familiar.

  Stephen’s foot found the last rung, and he braced his feet against the wall to lower himself further down until he dangled. His foot barely brushed the ground—but then, Robin was a few inches taller than he. He braced himself for impact and released the rung.

  The ground sank away from his feet when he landed on it. Stephen flopped on it, then off it, and rolled to the real ground, another eight feet down. He threw out an arm and landed heavily on it.

  Stephen curled around his arm, crying quietly in the darkness. The thing he had landed on slithered past him, its warm, slimy flesh brushing his face. If it knew he was there, it made no sign of it.

  The smell was stronger than ever. He needed to keep moving. There might be more of those things, or other creatures, ones that would not take kindly to an enchanter in their midst.

  Stephen tentatively wriggled his fingers, rolled his shoulder, and bent his arm. He prodded the arm, feeling it up and down.

  No breaks. No dislocated shoulder. It would be bruised, probably severely, but he hadn’t expected to fall, and had been relaxed—and had managed to land well, spreading the impact throughout his entire body.

  It was partly luck, but mostly thirty winters of walking on ice with imperfect balance. One learned how to fall.

  But it still hurt.

  There were ways, Stephen knew, of enchanting something to give off light, but most of them took glass globes or mirrors or at least time to gather light from the sun. He had none of these and if he had, he wouldn’t have used them. If the creatures couldn’t see him, he wasn’t about to help them out. He stripped off a glove, licked a finger, rotated it in the air, and followed the airflow.

  He walked carefully, picking up his feet to avoid stumbling. The ground was packed dirt, but there were piles her
e and there—thick, gloppy piles. Twice, he stepped in them and sank up to his knees.

  The creature—or perhaps another like it—felt his vibrations and slid up to him. Stephen froze, but it made no attempt to eat him. It simply leaned against him and rubbed itself back and forth, as if it were scratching an itch. When Stephen stepped cautiously forward, it moved with him. It wasn’t doing any harm, and it didn’t stop him, so he did his best to ignore it.

  Stephen walked on, the creature accompanying him. After a while, a second creature joined them, then a third, until they were crowded behind him, almost pushing him on. Again, they did not seem particularly interested in him. They were joining ranks because that’s what the others were doing. In this way, Stephen found himself propelled upward and outward with far less effort than he had expected.

  When Stephen finally spotted the fading sunlight at the end of the tunnel, the creatures began peeling off. They didn’t like the cold. The one that had first joined him stayed the longest, still rubbing itself against him. But at the mouth of the tunnel, it too stopped.

  Stephen stepped into the open air, reeking of slime. He had been studiously not looking at his companion, but now he turned back, and caught the tail end of whatever it was that had guided him out.

  The creature was enormous and whitish, with little bits of pink under its skin, bisected at regular intervals, its backend thinning in a not-quite tail.

  A maggot. The pit was full of maggots.

  Stephen grabbed at the nearest bush and began vigorously brushing the slime off his robes—to no effect. He rubbed handfuls of snow on his robes, ripped off his gloves and used one of his scarves to scrape the goo from his face. He scrubbed his hands in the snow, managed to find a clean handkerchief, spit on it, and wiped the rest of the slime from his face and hands.

  Only then did he hear the gentle burbles of running water. He had found the third bridge.

  The third bridge. Robin’s Bridge. The most dangerous of the three, because Robin liked to give his victims hope, so he could watch it fade from their eyes as they died.

  On the far side of the bridge lay a narrow cliff. Trees clung to it, and Stephen used them to help him along, ducking beneath their lower branches, leaning on them when he grew tired. After a while, he began to relax again, to enjoy walking. A tune came to his mind, and he hummed and then sang it. You may be familiar with the song. Part of it goes like this:

  Red robin was so pleased with himself

  And had such a very stuffed head

  That he overbalanced and fell from a tree—

  And not a soul cares that he’s dead.

  “I’ve heard that one,” said Robin, falling into step with him. “I’ve heard every song about robins that has ever been written.”

  “Have you written any yourself?”

  “A few. Stop walking.”

  Stephen obeyed. He hadn’t really expected Robin to let him walk out. He had known Robin would catch him before the end.

  He should have spent those hours enchanting something. He would have, if he had thought any brief enchantment could overcome Dog. Instead, he had focused on speed, had hoped that would be enough.

  For that matter—“Where is Dog?” Stephen asked, finally turning to look at Robin. Robin was wearing the grey-white cloak that Stephen had seen in the house, only now he also had grey-white hat and glove and scarf and really, Stephen thought, it was no surprise he hadn’t seen him.

  “Savage,” Robin said.

  “He’s savage?”

  “I renamed him Savage. It’s a much better name than Dog. And he’s busy.”

  “I see,” said Stephen, and began to walk on.

  “Stop.”

  Stephen stopped. “Let’s walk as we talk.”

  “Certainly not. We’re closer than you think; there would be no time for a chat before you crossed the borders of my woods.”

  “What shall we chat about, then? Do you have another story for me?”

  “No. But we can talk until you can’t bear it any longer, and run for the edge.”

  “No man can outrun an arrow.”

  “Most men try, in the end. Won’t you?”

  “I might.” An idea had presented itself to Stephen, a difficult, dangerous, and most definitely illegal idea. He wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He was tired from a day’s walking, true, but mostly his fatigue was due to the wearing of stress and fear. But he had not enchanted anything since making Dog, and was brimming with magic.

  “Go ahead and run whenever you like. I do have other places to be, other people to kill.”

  “Robin—”

  “And don’t you try to bring up our deal again. I’ve fulfilled my part, and you’ll get no more out of me. My deal with the Fairy Queen takes precedence.”

  “Robin,” said Stephen, “Robin of Robin’s Woods, born of the town now known as Robin’s Haven, indentured of the Fairy Queen, murderer, liar: look at me.”

  Robin obeyed. There was a ringing, hypnotic quality to the enchanter’s voice that could not be ignored. As Robin met the enchanter’s eyes, tendrils of magic wrapped around his mind, bending his will.

  It was easy. The magic came to Stephen as if from long years of practice—because, of course, he had had long years of practice. Every time he had struck a pose, gone into enchanter mode, he had done the same. It had not always worked—in Crying it had been a bluff, and in Chubblewooble it had been canceled by bands of iron and running water—but he had done it. Angry villagers had been subdued to his will—as had reticent customers, violent drunks, and, indeed, the company itself.

  Bedazzlement.

  “Do not break eye-contact,” Stephen said, expertly calming the buzzing confusion in Robin’s mind. “Throw away your bow—throw away all your weapons, but touch nothing iron, and do not break eye-contact. Good. Now lie on the ground, looking at me. Lie on your stomach in the snow.”

  Stephen was backing up quickly, feeling his way past trees. He was almost at the edge.

  “Hold your breath. Keep holding it. Do not breathe.”

  Robin’s face went white, red, and at last blue. Stephen fumbled and almost stumbled over a bush. He couldn’t see where he was going, wasn’t sure he was still following the path.

  “Put your face in the snow!” Stephen barked. As Robin obeyed, Stephen turned and sprinted toward the edge of the woods.

  Robin leapt to his feet, roaring in fury—and his knees gave way, starved of oxygen.

  Where was the path? Stephen had lost it. He must be at the very edge of the woods, but the way out was blocked by enormous boulders. Where was the crack? Where was the exit?

  Robin regained his breath and ran after Stephen, drawing the one weapon he had been unable to throw away—a long, iron knife. Stephen whirled to face him, his own knife drawn.

  Dozens of rodent-sized creatures burst from the undergrowth and swarmed over Robin. Robin swung his powerful arms and stamped his feet, but more came, and more, weighing him down, bearing him to the ground. They danced over him with their spindly legs, pinning the arm with the iron knife.

  Stephen finally spotted the gap and stepped toward it—then paused. “I know you,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “Don’t I? I must know you.”

  One of the creatures detached itself from the swarm and hobbled toward Stephen. It was barely half the height of its companions, and tottered unsteadily on three legs. When Stephen crouched and looked down on it, it returned his gaze with great dignity.

  “You’ve done well for yourself,” Stephen said. “How have you made the others? Have you been channeling magic from me? I never noticed.”

  The spit-mud monster preened. “Didn’t take much. Wanted to survive. Magic running low. Needed help.”

  “I’m amazed your magic didn’t all run out before I was unbound. In truth, I never imagined that you’d be so alive. It must come from using myself as part of the enchantment. That’s fascinating. I knew there might be side effects, but I admit, I never expected them to be
so long lasting and impressive.”

  Stephen might have gone on in this vein for some time, had not Robin managed to free his mouth and yell, “Enchanter!”

  “On the other hand,” Stephen told the tripod spit-mud, “I’d rather we talk about this later. I’m in rather a hurry.”

  “Wait! We need—”

  “Not now; come see me afterwards.”

  Stephen stepped through the gap, out of the woods, and onto a royal road.

  XV

  These best laid plans, how strange they are