All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  Lāākē began in a clearing close to the last lizard track. Working swiftly but methodically, he moved out from the center in a tight spiral, dragging the toe of his soft-boot along the ground. His foot bumped over an uneven spot. Yes, the ridge ran for some distance beneath the underbrush. He dropped to his knees, scrambling to find the corner. One man would not have the strength to lift a phantel door alone. Certainly not from the outside. But massive lizards began as lizardlings. There would be a smaller trapdoor built along the edge of the larger, a door within a door. One through which a lizardling could come and go. One through which a man might also pass.

  The thought of Aleesha, a woman of mountain sunshine, buried in a stinking lizard hole caused sweat to bead on Lāākē’s bare chest. The detached attitude he normally maintained while hunting threatened to slip. His fingers grew increasingly frantic. There. Finally. The small door opened. Lāākē slid from dusky daylight into a disconcertingly bright tunnel.

  Blue stones, larger versions of the ones exchanged at Cerrelean Choosing ceremonies, protruded from the walls, giving off a hazy glow. Wasobis claimed one could judge the age and depth of a phantel warren by the number of blue stones within. If that were true, this one had seen many hundreds of years and was probably as deep as a lightning lake. Five men could easily have walked the tunnel entry abreast, and just half the stones embedded in the walls could have lit a Wasobi village for generations.

  Lāākē nocked an arrow to his bow and sprinted through the tunnel, following his nose. The sloping passage took him deeper and deeper into the earth. He passed blue-lit chambers of a size comparable to those of the grandest Cerrelean castles. Not that Lāākē had ever seen a Cerrelean castle. No Wasobi had. But they heard tales of many Cerrelean wonders, told by blue-skinned captives whose heads eventually decorated Wasobi lodges. And in Lāākē’s case, told by his own mother.

  The passage ended in a modest chamber which branched into four new tunnels. A single sniff of the first two told Lāākē they’d not been used for some time. He started toward the third. A gut-wrenching sound made him pivot and dash for the fourth. He would find Aleesha there. He need only follow her screams.

  He raced through a maze of tunnels, skidding to a stop at the entrance of a large chamber. Discarded scales and old white bones littered the floor, gleaming in the unearthly blue light of a thousand wall stones. The phantel sprawled on one side of the room, scratching her belly with her middle legs, her indulgent attention on her lizardlings.

  On the other side of the room, three lizardlings, each the size of a man, crept toward their next meal, tongues flicking with anticipation. From behind a waist-high pile of bones, Aleesha screamed and hurled skulls and scales, bones and blue stones, whatever she could lay her hands on. They bounced harmlessly off the trio’s armor-like bodies. Each time a lizardling moved within striking distance, mother phantel’s tongue reached out to lift her offspring, repositioning it to begin stalking again. She was training them.

  Relying on Aleesha’s screams to cover the sound of his movements, her scent to mask his, Lāākē clamped two arrows between his teeth. Any hope of leaving this chamber alive rested on disposing of the adult first. Using the blue stones set in the wall as foot and hand holds, Lāākē climbed with reckless speed. At any moment the phantels might tire of stalking practice and begin striking drills. Their bladed tongues would cut and carve, sever and segment, careful not to kill. Not completely. Lizardlings preferred to eat their meals alive.

  Climbing the wall was relatively easy. The ceiling was a different matter. Bracing soft-boots and hands, Lāākē moved with muscle-burning strength. Sweat beaded on his face and dripped onto the glittering scales of the phantel’s back. Lāākē held his breath, but she seemed not to notice. The going was slow and difficult. He was still short of his target when his feet slipped, leaving him dangling, clench-fingered from a knobby stone.

  Aleesha’s screams turned hoarse and weak. But as long as she was still screaming, she was alive. Lāākē clamped his teeth tight on the arrows. He’d only get one chance. The instant he fell on the phantel, she would know, and her tongue was faster than he would ever be.

  He cocked his body up with his elbows and swung, releasing his hands, then snatching the arrows from his mouth as he fell. He landed, legs splayed around the lizard’s neck, each fist jamming an arrow through an eye socket. Her piercing shriek filled the chamber. Her head thrashed, launching Lāākē across the room. The razor edge of her tongue missed his cheek as it sliced past.

  He crashed atop the wall of Aleesha’s bone and stone fortress, silencing her mid-scream. Her expression incredulous, she grabbed him beneath his arms and yanked him in. A lizardling’s tongue ripped through the air where he’d just been. Lāākē found his feet and pulled his bow from his back. He reached for his arrows. He found only one. The rest lay strewn amongst the bones on the chamber floor.

  The trio crept forward, tongues whipping. Lāākē nocked his bow and shot the nearest. It collapsed in a tail-whipping seizure that sent bones and scales skittering.

  Aleesha lifted a leg bone half her own size, holding it like a fighting staff. Lāākē slung his bow on his back and did the same. The remaining lizardlings—one black, one brown—hissed, their middle legs pounding the ground, their jaws snapping. The black’s tongue shot out, ripped the bone staff from Aleesha’s grasp, and threw it across the chamber with such force it shattered against a wall. Lāākē leapt in front of her and the juvenile’s tongue sliced through his bone staff as if it were a blade of grass.

  From behind Lāākē a storm of bones and blue stones flew as Aleesha pummeled the brown lizardling, stalling his attack.

  Lāākē dropped half his split staff. The black’s tongue shot out again and wrapped the remaining long stub. But before the lizardling could rip it from his grasp, Lāākē lunged forward. Wielding the bone in club-like fashion, he rolled up more tongue with a twirling loop. Then he shoved full force, cramming the tongue-tied bone down the creature’s throat, wedging it deep. The lizardling stumbled and staggered, wheezing and heaving. It reared on its four back legs, its front legs clawing at the bone.

  Aleesha had deserted her bone fortress to draw the brown away from Lāākē with a relentless barrage of bones and stones. Lāākē drew his knife. He sprinted across the room and leapt onto the remaining lizardling’s back.

  “Run!” he shouted to Aleesha.

  She didn’t.

  Legs choking the brown’s neck, knife gripped in both hands, Lāākē aimed for an eye and stabbed with all his strength. The blade missed, deflected by impenetrable scales. The brown bucked, sending Lāākē skidding across the bone-strewn chamber. He rolled and the lizardling’s spiked tail missed him. Aleesha rushed to pull him to his feet and shove something into his hands.

  Bow and arrow.

  Lāākē’s arrow pierced the lizardling’s brain and it fell, tongue lolling. Across the room its siblings thrashed and jerked in the final spasms of death. Lāākē and Aleesha started for the chamber exit, then froze.

  The female phantel blocked the exit. Her tongue flicked from one dead lizardling to another, sniffing. She lifted her snout in an ear-piercing shriek of rage, blood gushing from the arrows embedded in her eyes. Lāākē’s spine iced.

  He’d failed. His arrows hadn’t reached her brain. She was blind, but not dead. Her tongue lashed out, searching.

  Lāākē grabbed Aleesha’s hand. They fled across the room to a small opening in the wall, not much wider than a man’s shoulders.

  “Where are we going?” Aleesha asked as he picked her up and shoved her in feet first.

  “No place good,” Lāākē said and followed. The tip of the phantel’s tongue nicked the back of his shoulder as he fell through the chute.

  There were no blue stones; just darkness worn smooth by centuries of blood and bone. They accelerated down the steep angle of the chute, faster and faster. The shock of cold air told Lāākē when they neared the bottom.

  “Curl
and roll!” he shouted repeatedly, and she must have, because she appeared unharmed when he tumbled out to land beside her among dozens of frozen, half-eaten carcasses.

  “Where are we?” Her words puffed white in the cramped blue-lit chamber.

  “The larder.” He pulled her to her feet. “This is where what isn’t eaten, up there, is sent for storage.”

  Aleesha’s brow furrowed and she touched a gentle finger to the place where the phantel’s tongue had nicked his shoulder. Lāākē winced. Not because the wound was deep or painful. It wasn’t. But though the lizard was blind, that brief tongue-touch had told it as much as its eyes might have.

  “We must get out of here fast,” he said. “She knows where we went. She’s coming.”

  They scrambled through the ankle-threatening maze of body parts, moving quickly into a cold, steeply-sloping tunnel. There were few blue wall stones to light the way, but it didn’t matter. Larders were built below the permafrost, buried as deep as the bottom of a lightning lake. Between the larder and the main warren there would be no other chambers, no forks leading to other tunnels. It was a long way up, and if the phantel entered this tunnel before they made it out, there’d be nowhere to go. They’d be trapped.

  So they ran. And Lāākē’s mind ran ahead of them, planning their escape.

  The number of blue stones increased. The air warmed. An entrance arch appeared ahead. Hope expanded Lāākē’s chest and he urged Aleesha to greater speed. The main tunnels and chambers of the warren would still be a good distance, but this was what he’d hoped for. They entered a room so foul his throat and eyes burned.

  Aleesha leaned against a wall, pressing her side, gasping for breath. Then her nose wrinkled.

  Lāākē dropped his knife, quiver, and bow. “Take off your gown.”

  “What?”

  “Take off your gown. Hurry.” He began stripping off his breeches.

  “Why?” she asked, but she kicked off her shoes and began to undo her gown, her eyes still on the knife.

  Now wearing nothing but a loincloth and boots, he stuffed his breeches into his satchel. He jammed her shoes in as well and held the satchel open to receive her gown. She stood before him in her own loincloth and breast bindings, arms folded over her chest.

  “The people of the mountains are not entirely ignorant of the ways of your people.” Beneath exhaustion and still trembling terror, dignity threaded her voice. “We know our heads are desired trophies. But I see no reason why I must undress.”

  While she spoke he’d knelt to remove his boots.

  She dove for his knife, and then held it before her in that silly overhand manner. He stood, tapped her head with one hand to distract her, and took the knife with the other.

  He knelt again, laid the knife back where it had been, and resumed removing his boots.

  “Do you think I would follow you into a phantel’s den for your head?” he asked. But she wasn’t wrong to be suspicious. Some foolish warriors would. The Wasobi assigned great prestige to a blue head trophy. “I do not want your head on my wall.”

  Lāākē stuffed his boots into his satchel. Then he shoved the satchel deep into a pile of excrement. He rubbed more over his body as he spoke. “The clothing holds the filth too far from the body and increases the chance she will pick up our scent.” He scooped a handful of excrement and plopped it into her hand, motioning for her to spread it over herself.

  He sighed with frustration when she just looked it. He scooped another handful and rubbed it over her legs. Reluctantly she began to do the same to her arms and stomach.

  A scratching sent a jolt through his body. He snatched up his knife and dove at her, knocking her from her feet, knocking them both deep into a pile of feces. His finger pressed her lips in warning. The phantel filled the doorway, blood seeping from its eyes. For too many heartbeats, the lizard’s tongue tested the air.

  Then it moved on.

  Aleesha stood and looked at the feces covering the pink painted swirls on her forearms. Then she looked at him. “Today I’ve been thrown into darkness, imprisoned and almost eaten by lizards, and now I stand nearly naked and covered in lizard filth before a complete stranger. I’m Aleesha, and I think it’s time I knew your name.”

  Her words brought his chin up, but it was the blue eyes staring so candidly into his that made his mouth go dry. Seen.

  “I am Lāākē.” He retrieved his satchel and they left the lizards’ latrine, cyan skin and blue now equally brown.

  Lāākē moved swiftly upward through the tunnels. Aleesha kept pace. With only one tunnel and one larder to check, the phantel would soon discover they’d gotten past her. She would return. And she knew this warren well. Even blind, she would find them.

  “Do these tunnels ever end?” The exhaustion and frustration in Aleesha’s voice matched his own. They’d encountered two dead ends and been forced to retrace their steps.

  “All warrens have at least two entrances, the main and an escape,” Lāākē said. “Both are at the surface. If we keep going up, we’ll eventually find one or the other.”

  Unless it finds us first. The unspoken thought hung in the air between them. Lāākē wished he’d marked the trail when he’d entered the warren, but there’d been no time. The tunnel they’d been following ended in a modest chamber with four entrances. Lāākē stopped.

  “What is it?” Aleesha asked. He grinned.

  “I’ve been here before. One of these will lead us out.” He chose the most upwardly sloping tunnel and they hurried on.

  When they turned a bend in the tunnel Aleesha made a sound like a child offered a sweet. Her eyes twinkled like blue stars above her dung-smeared cheeks. Before them, the tunnel ended. Not in another chamber, but in a trapdoor.

  They ran toward it. Their feet slowed, stopped.

  The trapdoor cracked open. A long tongue snaked through from above. Lāākē and Aleesha rushed back to the place where the tunnel curved. Pressed flat to the wall, they watched as the trapdoor opened fully, and it entered.

  Daddy was home.

  ***

  Lāākē and Aleesha fled back to the four-tunnel chamber, halting abruptly dead center. The blind phantel blocked one entrance, bellowing for her mate. From the tunnel behind them came an answering roar and the scrabble of rushing claws.

  They dashed down one of the remaining entrances and quickly realized their mistake. The tunnel sloped at an angle nearly as steep as the larder chute. And like the chute, there were no branching tunnels, no chamber entrances. Deeper and deeper they ran, the sounds of pursuit growing eerily more distant. Lāākē suspected the creatures knew they could take their time. This was a dead end.

  When they were easily as deep as the larder or more, the tunnel floor leveled. They entered a chamber large enough to host a thousand men, different from any they’d seen before.

  As in the warren above, stones decorated the walls, but they were uniformly small, no larger than might fit in a child’s palm. Stranger still, they’d not been placed at random. Instead, pink joined blue to form patterns; some decorative geometrics, others telling lively stories of hunts, births, and battles.

  The chamber ceiling was different as well. Glowing pink stone arched in stunning magnificence over a small paradise of white sand beach, crystal clear water and blue-stone lake bottom. Skillfully chiseled statues of various sizes stood in the sand facing the water. Made of the same gray stone as the Cup of Justice, they depicted fierce warriors, beautiful youths, and menacing water creatures.

  Aleesha circled a particularly brutish warrior. “I recognize this one. In Cerrelea he’s called—”

  A hiss from the chamber entry frizzled through Lāākē’s bones and sent them both reeling back to the edge of the water. The male phantel stepped onto the white sand with odd caution, head swinging from side to side, tongue poised ready between open jaws. His blind mate remained in the tunnel, visible but timid.

  The male’s tongue reeled out, testing the distance to his prey. He’d
need only take four or five steps to be within kill distance. Yet he hesitated.

  Lāākē’s already rushing blood began to pound in his veins like Wasobi war drums. What could frighten a phantel?

  He glanced at the water behind him. Blue pebbles beneath sparkling crystal.

  The phantel took a tentative step forward.

  Aleesha’s hand slipped into Lāākē’s. They backed into cool, startlingly refreshing water. Brown lizard dung fizzed from their feet, staining and then vanishing into the crystal water. Tingling energy wove up Lāākē’s exhausted legs, renewing and reviving every muscle in his body. Beside him, Aleesha’s breathing calmed, her back straightened.

  This was a lightning lake. Its pleasant waters lured the unwary, reviving and relaxing them, enticing them to linger. Perfect bait for the creatures that dwelt beneath its waves: beasts whose touch could strike a man dead with the force of a lightning bolt; monsters large enough to swallow a phantel in a single gulp.

  A faint churning stirred the water behind them. Suddenly the dung fizzing away from their legs felt like blood in the water. The hair at the nape of Lāākē’s neck tingled a warning. He scanned the water. Nothing.

  Cautiously the phantel advanced, giving Lāākē and Aleesha no choice but to retreat. Dung fizzed away from knees, thighs, hips.

  Aleesha released Lāākē’s hand and ducked beneath the water, coming up with handfuls of stones, polished smooth by a thousand years of waves. When she held them out, he almost smiled. These would do no more than annoy a phantel. Which was why they were perfect. He sheathed his knife and accepted the stones.

  “You gather, I’ll throw,” he said. She nodded her agreement.

  The phantel was nearly to the water’s edge. Its tongue lashed out, whipping close to Lāākē’s jaw. Hastily he backpedalled, shoving Aleesha behind him, forcing her to tread water.