by Dave Duncan
For the first time I had a decent view of Ayasseshas’s log palace. It seemed enormous to me, and an impressive tribute to her power, but already flames streamed from the windows. Some of the huts had been torched now, also.
In a few moments Black-white dragged out Quetti, who struggled and screamed, trying to run back into the dark. But the slender young wetlander in his weakened state was no match for the tall swampman. Black just lifted him up and held him at arm’s length, helplessly suspended.
“She’s dead, I tell you!” he kept repeating. For a long time Quetti would not believe him and continued to kick and squirm and rave, desperate to save the silkworms he had promised to the spinster. I thought that Black should have let him finish a task so nearly complete. The silk would have made him wealthy, and surely he had earned it.
At last Quetti came to accept that Ayasseshas had been shot. Then he stood submissively. Tears trickled down his silver-fuzz cheeks as the slugs fell from him also, one by one.
Smoke was billowing through the compound in acrid, eye-stinging clouds. The sun burned hot one moment and was a pallid white disk the next. We were all starting to cough.
I could see a few dead men lying around. Angels more formally clad than Black were stalking around, appearing and disappearing like wraiths in the haze, all bearing guns and obviously alert for trouble as they inspected the huts. Most seemed to be of lighter races than our swampman rescuer.
“I am very glad to see you, sir,” I ventured at last. My wits were returning, my parasites had gone, and I had begun to wonder about clothes.
For a moment Black-white’s habitual mournful expression broke into a smile, although his eyes were streaming tears. “I was very glad to see you, wetlander. You led us here.” He sighed, poking the sobbing Quetti, who was still as bare as me. “Turn around and toast your other side, lad. We’ll have to find some oil or something for you.” He started to cough.
Quetti rotated obediently, in silent misery.
“You followed me?” I said, working it out.
“Right. Two-white and I work a mean paddle. We followed you, and the rest came after.”
“You scared me just now, when you came in—How did you get in, anyway?”
We were interrupted then, but I heard later how the angels had triumphed by sheer audacity. Black and Two-white-lime had donned local costume and walked brazenly into the compound, unchallenged by the few remaining guards. As soon as they had killed Um-oao and captured Ayasseshas, the war was over. Despite his melancholy manner, Black must have been feeling very pleased with himself.
Another angel had come strutting over to us, a small man whose sleeve proclaimed him to be Red-yellow-green. He was perky, cocky, and weather-beaten, and so reminiscent of Lon Kiv that he could only be of trader stock. He rested the butt of his gun on the ground and pushed back the brim of his hat to reveal a sweaty lock of white hair. He looked us over in silence, wincing at the sight of so much raw flesh on Quetti.
“Any more of you whiteys around?”
Quetti was not speaking, so I said, “No, sir.”
He seemed relieved, and he glanced at the tall swampman.
“We’d best get these two out of here fast.”
Black nodded. “You’re not going to wait and waylay the others when they return, Red?”
The little man shook his head. “They’re victims too. Let them be.”
Then I remembered where “the others” had gone. I had been so overwhelmed by my own release that I had forgotten the danger to Misi. Choking with the effort of forcing so many words through my aching throat, I told of the raid on the traders.
The little man nodded. “We guessed as much. It was lucky for us, though. And for you, sucker.”
“But you must save the traders!”
He glowered. “They’re slavers! They all knew about you. It will serve them right! Let the spinster’s men kill them off, or be killed themselves.”
“Angels prevent violence!”
“Why should I risk my men to save either side?”
I was stunned with horror, not knowing what to say, but Black remarked softly, “They have children, Red.”
Red pulled a face and grunted. He pondered, tugging his lip. “Well, I’ll go and try. If I can get there before the battle, I may talk them all out of it.”
“Now wait a moment, great one,” Black said. “You shot the spinster. If her men learn that, they’ll use your guts for bowstrings.”
“I’ll tell them you did it!”
“Seriously…”
“No argument!” Red had to crane his head back when talking with the gangling black man. “You finish up here. I’ll head back downstream and see what can be done.”
“Damn it, Red! Spinster’s men meeting an angel?”
“Ex-spinster’s men!” Red’s face was turning an appropriate color.
“They may not believe that.”
“They will! I’ll take these two dupes along as evidence.”
Black regarded him very oddly. He glanced at Quetti and me. “Is that wise?”
“Who’s in charge here?”
Black’s face went stiff. “You are, sir.”
“Right! And you move this job along as fast as you can. That smoke may bring trouble, so finish the cleanup here and then scram. We’re overdue already, and Michael will bust me to seraph if we’re not all back soon. I’ll catch up with you if I can, but don’t wait for me. Understood?”
There was no more argument from Black.
“I won’t go!” Quetti shouted. “I want to see her.” The palace was a thundering inferno by then. I could feel the heat from it.
“She’s dead!” Red insisted. “I blew her brains out myself. And you’ll do as you’re told, you ungrateful little idiot.” That last remark was not completely fair. Quetti was taller than he was.
─♦─
Red-yellow-green had made a curious decision, one that was to be much debated and criticized in Heaven. His situation was perilous. He had a dozen angels, counting himself, and five chariots. The aggressive Shisisannis was somewhere in the area with upward of thirty followers. Warlike young men bereft of a beloved leader by an act of violence are prone to notions of vengeance.
Within the compound itself, now a choking mass of flame and smoke, were another thirty or so of the spinster’s victims. Most of them had been rescued from the pens, but, like Quetti, they were not necessarily grateful. They ranged from mindless husks like Old Faithful to fit and virile fighters like Ing-aa. In time, perhaps, most of them would recover their wits enough to head off in search of the families and tribes from which Ayasseshas had abducted them, and some might even resume a normal life again, but they were not yet ready to do so. The most hopeless cases were being quietly put out of their misery by grim-faced angels, although I was unaware of that at the time. Other angels, equally grim, were disabling the dangerous by breaking their throwing arms, a brutal but necessary precaution.
On the face of it, Red abandoned his troops in mid-campaign. He should have either ignored the trader problems or sent someone else to deal with it.
But the facts were less simple than that, and his thinking more complex. As I was to discover, Red’s intention was to save not the traders, but his own angels. He wanted to block any pursuit, and he had evidently concluded that the venture was too risky to delegate to anyone else. He took Quetti and me along as proof that Ayasseshas had been overthrown, and he may well have planned to kill us both if there was any risk of our falling into the wrong hands. Fortunately I was not smart enough to see that.
Soon I found myself sitting once more in the bow of an angel chariot. It was much more heavily laden than Violet’s had been, because it had been home to three angels, and angels tend to collect unusual personal things, like spare sets of clothes.
At my side, Quetti was hunched over in silent misery, listlessly applying grease to his welts. We were both wearing muddy fur pagnes, and mine was bloodstained. I worried that two light-ski
nned wetlanders might suffer sunburn, but the sun was too low in the sky to be very dangerous, and most of the river was heavily shaded.
Red sat amidships, steering the chariot as it floated down the oily water. The wind was rarely helpful, and he spent much time adjusting his sails.
Before we departed, he had ostentatiously laid his gun to hand and ascertained that we both knew what it could do. I could see why he might not trust Quetti, who was red-eyed and surly, but his attitude seemed to imply that he did not trust me either, and I resented that.
Nevertheless, I was free at last—or so I thought. Intoxicated by the sense of freedom, I floated amid rainbow dreams of being reunited with Misi. Had my throat not still ached so much, I might have burst into song. The only anchor on my euphoria was anxiety about what Shisisannis was doing. Our pace must be much slower than his had been, and so I fretted a little that we might arrive too late to stop the massacre—but only a little, for Misi at least would be safe. At every bend I twisted around in the hope of seeing a solitary canoe approaching, speeding my love toward the spinster’s lair.
Of course that canoe would also have contained Shisisannis himself and five or six young toughs. What would have happened then, I can only guess, but the problem did not arise. No craft appeared, and only the angel’s chariot tremored the reflections.
We ate. We slapped at bugs. We sailed on in silence down the tree-lined, tortuous river. Then the angel roused himself from a period of deep thought to scowl at his passengers.
“What’s wrong?” I asked uneasily.
“I’m just wondering what to do with you two. I have to get you out of the forest. It’s not safe for you.”
“Why not?”
His expression said that my ignorance was unbelievable. “Because silkworm eggs are easy to come by. Whiteys like you are just too tempting. You—Quetti? Where do you want to go?”
Quetti stared at him for a while and then just shrugged.
“Pilgrim, were you?”
“Yes.” Quetti turned his head away, looking sulky.
Red nodded. “Usual story, then. It’s a test. If you’re stupid enough to get caught, then you’re not smart enough to be an angel.”
Quetti’s blue eyes glinted. He muttered something that I thought was “Murderer!” Red would not have heard.
“You could have a fast trip home,” the angel said with a sneer. “Down this stream somewhere is the Great River. It’s flowing west at the moment, at maximum rate. It would be a hair-raising ride, but you could try it in one of the canoes.”
“He’d never get through the Andes!” I exclaimed.
Red shrugged, but he seemed surprised by my knowledge. “No, he wouldn’t, the shape he’s in. You’ll have to come north with me then, lad. The goatherds of the late desert are a hospitable lot; we’ll find a tribe to take you in until you heal. And you, cripple?”
“I want to be with Misi Nada…if she’ll have me. Wherever she is, that’s where I want to be.”
The little man curled his lip in contempt. Then he broke the news. The world fell apart. My mind seemed to die, and for a while his words made no sense at all. He had to repeat the story several times before I could understand.
As soon as Shisisannis had departed with me as his prisoner and the angel canoe in pursuit, then the rest of the angels had moved on the trader caravan. The men, predictably, had all fled on horseback. The angels had fined the other women a portion of their goods, which had then been burned, but Misi Nada and Pula Misi had been executed for slaving. Red had carried out the sentence himself, just as he had executed Ayasseshas, because no honorable leader would delegate so despicable a task.
I wept, my heart shattered into a million pieces.
Quetti studied my grief for a while and then remarked cattily, “Now you know how it feels!”
─♦─
That journey seemed endless. Red had not thought to bring food, and he dared not stop to catch any. Quetti curled up on the floor and seemed to go into a coma. I hunkered down in a silent agony of bereavement, my mind churning with regret as it strove to come to terms with the disaster. Red just steered and worked the sails, and grew ever more weary.
Certainly I had gone mad in the ants’ nest, for no sane man could have survived that ordeal for so long. Now, had anyone cared enough to ask, I would probably have said that my wits had been restored by Misi’s love and care. I can only suppose that my wits had been driven away again by the shock of losing her, for it was then, huddled in the bow of Red’s chariot on that smelly bug-infested river, that I made my great decision. No blinding flash of light or voice from Heaven announced the moment; it came slowly, imperceptibly…relentlessly.
Misi was gone, Sparkle an ancient memory. My children on the South Ocean would not even know my name, and anyway I could never find them. Heaven held no appeal. True, the angels’ coup against the spinster had won a brief twitch of admiration from me, but Red’s brutality had crushed it utterly. Murderer!
I had no desire to become an angel. So where could I go? What could I do?
No blinding flash…no carefully crafted logic…but when Quetti’s shout aroused me from my long reverie, I knew my purpose. I had made my decision. It is a sad commentary on a man’s character that, rescued from a horrible death and given back his life, he can think of no better use for that life than the pursuit of revenge. But revenge was my choice, and I even thought I could see how to gain it.
Of course, I had just been rescued from the spinster, so she and her methods were much on my mind.
And I was crazy again. That helped a lot.
So I chose my destiny. It would need superhuman luck and a lot more courage than I was ever likely to find, but I was in no mood then to consider those problems. I vowed that I would try, and I would let nothing stand in my way, not even Heaven itself.
—3—
I HAD BEEN DREAMING my mad dreams for a long time.
Quetti was sufficiently recovered to be sitting up and taking notice. He had yelled to draw Red’s attention to the canoes, cunningly buried under piles of brush. Red was still at the tiller, eyes blood-rimmed, cheeks haggard under a silver stubble.
“Grasslands!” I said. “I have to go back to the grasslands!”
“Then you can damned well walk!” the angel snarled. “Get that grapnel ready.”
─♦─
I have often wondered what thoughts went through Shisisannis’s head when he discovered the smoldering ashes of Misi’s train, which had also been her funeral pyre.
He must have known that he was seeing the work of avenging angels, for only they would have burned valuable trade goods. He must have guessed that he would now not be able to carry out his orders. Perhaps he feared that Ayasseshas in her fury would send him to the pens, for he did not take the news back to her right away. Instead, he left his canoes and led his whole troop off overland. Possibly he was clinging to the faint hope that the woman he had been sent to abduct was still alive and with the other traders, although he must have known how extremely slight that chance was. More likely he thought he was pursuing the angels. He had not seen them on the river, so he may have believed that he could run them down ashore before they found the spinster’s lair.
He probably caught up with the caravan. He may have had a battle. I bear the snakeman no grudge. I hope that eventually he found happiness again, but I do not know what happened to him.
What happened to me was that I arrived with a bone-weary Red-yellow-green and his other wetlander captive at a scrubby sand spit where the spinster’s canoes had been stowed. They were well camouflaged, and it was Quetti who saw them. There were no guards to challenge us as the angel grounded his chariot in the shallows. I tossed a grapnel into the shrubbery; he lowered sail. Then we all paused to stretch aching muscles and rub sore eyes.
Red scratched his chin and looked thoughtfully at his passengers—companions but not friends. He had won his gamble. He had evaded Shisisannis and could now destroy the enemy’
s canoes, saving his own men from pursuit. But he was not such a fool as to trust Quetti or me any further than necessary. Shisisannis and his men were obviously absent, so we were not needed as evidence of the spinster’s death. Now what could Red do with us? He would have to sleep sometime. He had placed himself in a very dangerous situation. Black had foreseen this and warned him. And us.
Were he unscrupulous enough, Red-yellow might choose to dispose of us before either of us was tempted to dispose of him. He could shoot us or just abandon us in the forest, but he would be breaking his angel vows.
Of course, I did not see all this then. “Now what happens?” I asked bitterly. “Will you go after Shisisannis?”
The angel shook his head and bared his teeth in a humorless smile. “I never planned to. You stay here, cripple. You jump, boy!”
Quetti had hardly spoken since we began our voyage, his thoughts unreadable under his sullen pallor. He stared hard at the angel before rising and clambering from the chariot into knee-deep water.
I watched as he waded ashore and Red followed, carrying his gun and an ax. I watched, also, as Quetti was set to work smashing holes in upturned canoes. The angel went ahead of him, pulling away the shrubs that had been piled over them, but also staying on guard, keeping his gun at the ready and a watchful eye on both Quetti and the forest. No one emerged screaming from the trees to halt the vandalism.
To disable a fragile structure like a canoe is not difficult, and in short order the damage was done. It could be repaired, of course, but not soon enough for Shisisannis to lead his men in pursuit of the angels. Red had reached his objective, and now he came splashing back to the chariot with the ax. Quetti had been sent to retrieve the grapnel.
“Mission accomplished!” Red remarked with satisfaction. He tossed the ax into the boat—at the stern, out of my reach—and began to climb in after it.
Quetti yelled from the edge of the trees and waved. He was a long way from the grapnel.