by Ren Cummins
“You’re too worried,” the young woman said. “What troubles you?”
“What’s gonna happen?” Rom said. “Everything’s going to change. Kari’s going to go off to school now, and I’m some kind of weird girl who fights monsters, and the first night I’m here people break into the shop…”
Briseida listened to her silently as Rom continued.
“And I’ve got Mully – and I do like you, Mully, I really do – but it’s kind of weird that he can talk, and there’s a bad lady who’s also like me and she wants to kill me or take my soul or something, and I don’t know what to do about that either…” She took a deep breath and was going to go on, but she thought better of it. “It’s just not fair,” was all she said.
“What’s not fair?”
Rom scrunched up her mouth. “Well, Kari’s going to be like the best steamsmith ever or something, Cousins…well, he’s Cousins, I guess. He knows just about everyone, and almost everyone likes him.” She leaned over the counter and rested her cheek on her arm while she scratched Mully’s fur. “Everybody’s smart, and all I can do is break things.”
Mulligan looked up at Briseida and tilted his head to the back office. She smiled and nodded. “Rom, dear, I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t have the answers you need right now. I know you’re a wonderful girl, and I think you’re absolutely clever. I think things aren’t quite how you think they are, but I also think that you do have a lot more to offer than just breaking things.”
“Like what?”
Briseida looked down at the grey-furred feranzanthum and caught his eyes. He nodded slightly.
Mulligan shrugged off Rom’s hand. “I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Let’s go sit down someplace comfortable, and I’ll tell you a few things I’ve started remembering.”
“Remembering?”
He shrugged, his small batlike wings flapping several times. “Memory put a lot of things in my head – more things than a little thing like me should have to know. It takes a little while to sort them out,” he explained.
“Besides…” his voice trailed off.
A strange discomfort was starting to build in Rom’s stomach. She looked sharply towards the general direction of the fields. “Do you –“
He nodded. “I feel it, too.”
She was already running towards the door by the time Mulligan was able to perch on her shoulder. “Bree!” she called back as she left the shop. “Tell Kari I’m going to the fields!”
Briseida watched as the girl and her small guardian animal ran down the street and turned a corner, out of sight. It was as the old books said of the Sheharid Is’iin, she thought to herself. Always in motion, rarely resting. Like the bees in the garden, like the hummingbirds, like the thunder from the sky.
Chapter 19: The Mundaline
Still two streets from the fields, Rom knew her sense was right – the workers were running past her in a chaotic stream, more than one bloodied and obviously injured. After being run into for the third time, she took a deep breath and jumped up and onto the nearest rooftop. From there, she took another relatively small jump and landed just near the edge of the final building towards the fields.
A small gathering of workers seemed focused on something not too far from the city itself – they were clustered in a loose circle, and something large and blue moved quickly among them. Screams and calls for help made their way to her ears. She tapped the bracelet and summoned her shepherd’s crook.
“Hold on tight, this is a long jump,” she said. Mulligan complied.
She kicked off, and the winds rustled through the folds and pleated gathers of the dress – only the sound of the fabric and the wind whistling past them could be heard until she landed, just beyond the men.
“Run!” she yelled to them. “Go on, I’ll take care of this!”
A few of the men were reluctant to leave this young white-haired girl – particularly, the ones who did not see her just leap more than a hundred feet across the sky – but enough did so to give her a clear view of the indigo-furred creature.
It was taller than her at its shoulders, with a black and matted mane and a single horn extending upwards from the tip of his nose. It had the look of a large dog, but with pointed ears and enormous bird’s wings protruding from its back. Its tail was long and flicking about, the end barbed with what looked to be a large assortment of quills.
“A mundaline,” Mulligan whispered. “They’re… really tough,” he said, falling substantially short of the mark for his efforts at nonchalance, but overcompensating as he continued, “but I’m sure you’ll best him.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “I feel much better now.”
She slapped the staff into the palm of her hand. “Hey, you! Big blue dog-cat-thing!” It fixed his attention on her and she began to back away slowly, drawing it away from the group of farmers. They opened the circle into a large curving line, standing as if to defend the city against this wild beast.
“Come on, you whatever you are! Come on and fight me!”
“You’re doing great, Rom, he’s definitely doing exactly what you’re telling him to do.”
“Hush, Mully,” she hissed.
“Do you have a plan for this?” he asked nervously.
“A plan for what?” She twirled the staff around a few times to keep its attention on her – the whistling sound created as the curved top cut through the air seemed to work.
His whisper increased in intensity. “What do you mean, a plan for what?”
She sighed. “You need to figure something out about me, Mully.”
“What’s that?”
She stopped moving backwards, and placed one foot back behind her, turning partially away from the creature and holding her staff in one hand, the top pointed low towards the ground. The mundaline paused, lowering itself towards the ground.
“I never plan things out,” she said with a smile.
The beast jumped straight towards her, claws flashing in the morning sun. Rom dove to one side, letting it pass her. The mundaline’s speed was astonishing; even prepared for its leap, Rom only missed having its claws disembowel her by a hand’s-breadth. And just as she was about to mentally congratulate herself for her cleverness, its tail smacked into her right leg, sending an instant shock of fiery pain along her side.
She tried to turn with the impact, but even as the creature landed and prepared for a second pass, she felt the tug of its tail as it pulled free. Looking down as quickly as she dared, she could see five or six barbed quills emerging from her dress, firmly impaled into her thigh. A strong burning sensation suggested to her that they were tipped in some kind of venom.
“Oh, that’s not good,” she grumbled, taking a quick hop-step back and bringing her crook up defensively. Her right leg twinged; the muscles were shivering in response to the constant painful irritation of the quills.
“What’s not?” Mulligan looked quickly down. “Oh,” he remarked. “Yes, that’s not good.”
“I’m open for ideas,” she said, jumping again as the mundaline pounced again. This time, however, she was ready and batted the tail away as it flicked her direction.
“You’re sure?” her small friend remarked, impossibly capable of faint sarcasm even in the midst of a life and death crisis. “I wouldn’t want to introduce a hint of forethought into a strategy that thus far…”
“Mully, I’m serious!” she interrupted, diving again, this time to the right. Her right leg was growing stiff; her last dodge was close enough that the mundaline’s claws caught on one of the pleats of her dress, tearing a small gash through the black fabric.
“Okay, okay, but this is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said, his voice rising slightly in timbre as he struggled to hold on to her shoulders. “You always jump in without thinking ahead…”
“Not now!” Rom snapped. Bracing herself on her left foot, she raised the crook and caught the mundaline in the neck as it tried to leap at her again. The thickly matte
d fur of its mane blunted the blow, however, but forced the creature to rethink its strategy nonetheless. It shook its head angrily, and flapped its wings once, sending up a brief gust of wind against Rom. The blast of air blew her dress, pulling at the quills that remained in her leg, causing her to wince again at the pain. It felt as if the entire region was split open and being prodded by dozens of tiny teeth.
“Sorry, Rom, I’m thinking of something,” Mulligan offered. He wanted to suggest taking a moment to remove the quills before they did any further damage, but there was no way to do that while the mundaline remained active. And while the mundaline seemed sick, it was still much stronger and almost as fast as Rom, while her injury was rapidly impacting her ability to fight. He knew that the mundalines normally attacked from the air when they felt their homes were threatened, but fought on the ground when hunting smaller prey. That realization didn’t make him feel any better about the situation.
There was something oddly familiar to Rom about the mundaline’s manner of pacing. It was almost like the alley cats that occasionally frequented the streets of Oldtown, but there was a manner of its eye contact that made her think back to the wild dogs she’d run across as a child.
Taking an opportunity to strike while the mundaline seemed to be patiently waiting for the quills’ venom to do its work, Rom thrust the crook out at its furthest reach. The large curved end smacked the mundaline smartly across the nose. The result was surprising; the mundaline jumped back, blinking its eyes and shaking its head fiercely.
“What did you do, Rom?”
Rom ignored his question, instead raising her voice imperially to the large blue creature. “Bad mundaline!” she said curtly. “Bad!”
The mundaline responded with a pair of sneezes, triggered by the bat on the tip of its snout, and cocked its head to one side, evidently confused by its prey’s response. Rom continued fierce eye contact with the beast, gritting her teeth and maintaining her crook extended towards its nose. To Mully, she directed, “Climb down and pull out the needles, quickly!”
With a nod of his head, Mulligan dropped down to hang from the belted sash on her waist and tentatively pulled on one of the thin quills.
Rom hissed. “Don’t just pull on them; pull them out!” She had to move to the left in a sequence of careful steps as the mundaline began to pace again, growling deeply in its chest. She jabbed with the crook again to make it reconsider; it paused, but started back the predatory circle towards Rom’s left side.
Mulligan yanked the first of the quills free, nearly causing Rom to drop the crook in the shock of the flash of pain that tore through her. The mundaline nearly leapt again, but she jabbed a warning thrust of the crook at its nose again, forcing it to flinch backwards.
The two pivoted around one another for several protracted moments, while Mulligan methodically plucked the barbed quills from Rom’s leg. By the time he was done, blood trails crisscrossed her right leg and her toes felt sticky inside the boot.
As Mulligan began to climb back up onto Rom’s shoulder, the mundaline pounced again, forcing Rom to jump straight up. She kicked off from the ground intuitively, but caught Mulligan mid-climb, sending him tumbling to the ground. He rolled into a ball, landing just behind the mundaline’s front paws.
The monster dug his claws into the soil, however, and followed Rom’s path over his head, his tremendous jaws wide open and yellowed fangs sparkling with tainted saliva. Seeing this, the young Reaper swung the crook ahead of her jump and down into a powerful strike against the crown of its skull with a loud thwok. The strike gave her leverage against her own jump, bolstering her angle and dropping her several meters out of range of its barbed tail.
Her right leg gave out on the landing; Rom tried to counter for this and failed, sprawling face-first into the ground.
Her ears rang, but she could hear Mulligan’s voice cutting through the dizziness. “Rom!”
She rolled over, whipping the crook in a defensive arc which struck the mundaline as it tried to land atop her. So powerful was the strike that it made her whole arm throb, and managed to knock the beast over onto its side. Rom got to her feet as quickly as she could. The wounds from the barbs didn’t sting as much anymore, but her leg was clearly not enthusiastically supportive of all Rom’s intended exertions.
The creature’s eyes flashed red and darted back and forth between Rom and Mulligan, as if deciding between the meal and a snack. Rom spun the crook over her head, hoping again that the high-pitched whine the motion produced would keep the mundaline’s attention focused on her.
But at that moment, Mulligan whistled briskly and launched himself high into the air with a burst of his wings. The mundaline responded with a mighty flap of his own wings, flying off after the much-smaller feranzanthum. Rom gasped, and tried to jump up as well, but her right leg flinched at the last moment, and she fell far past her target.
She stood, helpless, watching the two animals soar high into the sky above her, and tried to remember to breathe.
Chapter 20: Finding Allies Among the Dead
The brilliance of the sky embraced the tranquility of the voluminous rounded clouds above Oldtown. This, however, conflicted with the inner panic that consumed the feranzanthum’s frantic aerial tactics. He’d somehow managed to stay ahead of his pursuer until reaching the obscuring cloudbanks, but they blinded him as much as he hoped it blinded the mundaline. His efforts at aerial camouflage were hampered by the fact that the flapping of his wings weren’t entirely silent. Fearing being snuck up on by an aggressive predatory dive, Mulligan had to frequently break into the open sky, attempt to discern the location of the other creature and then slip back under the cloak of the cloud cover.
Principal of his thoughts were attempting to buy Rom time to heal up. Her enhanced metabolism should handle the toxins of the needles, he reasoned, but it would still be several minutes more before she was back to her full strength.
A faint whistling was all the warning he had; he drew in his wings at once and dropped like a small stone as the much larger mundaline dove past him. Mully shot his right wing out for an instant, sending him into a full roll to the left, just barely avoiding a quill-laden tail swipe.
I’m not designed for this sort of combat! He thought. Maybe if I get much larger, or when my horns grow in, perhaps, but for now all I have is being small and adorable. Not to mention being more clever than the average undead monster, he amended.
He was forced to concede that all the brains in the world might not help if the mundaline sank its claws into him. A shiver cascaded across his fur from crown to tail, and not from the chill in the moist-filled cloudbanks. He ducked again, shaking his head at the near miss. Ready or not, here we come, he thought, pulling his wings in tightly and forming a Mulligan-shaped spear, letting gravity work its own magic upon him. It had only been a few minutes; Rom was unlikely to be completely healed up, but whatever condition she was in, it would have to be enough.
The clouds spat him out, a thin trail of mist marking his passage straight down towards the ground. Though his eyes were mostly squinted against the stinging wind, he glanced up briefly – from his current vantage point, he was higher than the Wall; he could see into the gleaming spires of Aesirium beyond. Whether it was a trick of the light or the moisture in his eyes, the light seemed to be in motion up and along the needle-shaped towers. Motion? Movement? He mentally shrugged. Mulligan conceded that it was one mystery that was only a matter of time in the solving. With Rom’s temperament, no secret was safe from her unhinged curiosity.
The tree line was a broad green stroke across the landscape beneath him; the mundaline had chased him a bit about the clouds, and Mulligan had to make a series of small adjustments to ensure he returned to his original location in the fields below. He dare not look behind him, as much as he wanted to. The noise of the wind was so great that he couldn’t hear if the Mundaline was chasing him, so he held his course and speed. After all, he reasoned, it was all he could do. If the mundal
ine managed to catch him, there wasn’t much he could do about it now, anyway.
“He’s been gone too long,” Rom said to nobody in particular. The farmers were standing a good ways off still, while the strange young white-haired girl with the purple gem paced back and forth. Every few moments, she would stop and stare up into the sky for a sign, a shadow, a bit of evidence that Mully was all right. Suddenly, her eyes were drawn to a small dot, descending rapidly. Rom sheltered her eyes with one hand to try and see it more clearly, gasping in fear when she realized it was the mundaline diving towards her, and not Mulligan. A low growl rose in her chest. The pain in her leg was instantly forgotten.
It had tilted back its wings, and seemed to be gaining in speed as it approached – Rom imagined she could see its snarling maw from her position on the ground, and she tried to guess how many more seconds would pass before he was here. The additional thought occurred to her: going that fast, he’s really going to hurt me. She lifted the crook up over her shoulder, holding it firmly in both hands like the children on the streets did when playing stickball.
Her heart raced. She couldn’t remember feeling this scared. For that matter, it was hard to remember feeling scared at all. But just now, staring up at the rapidly approaching feral mundaline, Rom realized that she was terrified.
It was coming so fast; would she be able to hit it? It was practically a blur now, she could hear a high-pitched whistle of the wind streaking past its falling body. Could she swing the staff quickly enough? Could she dodge it? She considered how slow she must be in comparison to its blinding descent. I’m not fast enough, she realized. I’m not fast enough…
Even as she watched, her hands tightly wound around the mystically powerful staff, she felt the air grow thick around her. The hairs on the back of her neck stood straight out, and her mouth went dry. Even as she watched, the mundaline was slowing down; she could see it, she was certain, now. He still seemed to be moving at an extraordinary rate of speed, with the dark blue hair nearly flattened against his face and body, wings drawn back to guide him in with the fury of a lightning bolt.