It was beautiful, but I was more interested in the pit dug out in the center of the room. Clearly ancient, it was a shallow bowl wide enough for a man to lie down in. The clay had been chopped out with crude tools, perhaps just sticks plunged into the earth, and the sides had been smoothed by hand. There were streaks and grooves clearly made by someone’s fingers in the clay that formed a spiral pattern all the way around the sides and down to the center.
The bottom was hard and blackened by fire, though any signs of ash or fuel was long gone. Around the edges of the pit were four wooden stakes, each with a dry, brittle piece of sinew tied to it.
Next to the pit was a pile of charred bones, each with symbols carved into its surface like scrimshaw. The bones were brittle and brown with age, but the symbols were still crisp and vivid.
Chuck scattered the bones with his boot. “Strung out over a fire looks like a bad way to go.”
“If you see one of these rituals call for a warm glass of milk and a cookie, you let me know,” I said. “I assume this was meant for the same spirit that Prime has been courting, considering how we got down here.”
Anne came over and picked a bone up with two fingers, then dropped it and wiped her hands on her jeans. “These are still a little bit goosey, but I’m not getting anything from the rest of it. I guess it’s too old.”
I snapped off a piece of the ancient sinew and crumbled it between my fingers. “Do you remember the part of the fox’s vision where all the wooden men were collecting bones and passing them to Prime? This must be why. Whatever this thing is, it likes fire and bones.”
“I guess,” said Anne. “But there were dozens of bones in that vision. Maybe hundreds. This is, what, five? Could be for something completely different.”
I shrugged. “Or maybe Prime is after something a hell of a lot bigger than what these guys were doing. But it doesn’t matter. We just need to focus on keeping Prime from getting the Heart and then this will be over. Let’s keep moving.”
We left through the arch of roots on the far side of the room. The tunnel here was lined with so many roots that the earthen walls were no longer visible, each casting shadows in the flashlight beams so that the entire tunnel seemed to writhe as we walked.
We ducked under massive roots that occasionally jutted from the ceiling and more than once had to push aside wet clumps that blocked the path entirely. That, plus the fact that the ground was wet and sloped downward slightly, made progress difficult and frustrating.
At first the roots looked clean and healthy, but the further down the tunnel we went the more they began to smell musty and show weirdly-shaped black fungal growths.
After about a quarter of a mile we reached an intersection where a smaller tunnel joined with ours. Anne stopped and put a hand on my chest to bring me to a halt.
Prime stepped out into the tunnel in front of us, followed by a troop of wooden men.
32
Prime grabbed the closest wooden man and hurled it down the corridor towards us, powering it with an arm the size of one of my thighs.
I shoved Anne out of the way, slamming her into the side of the corridor. The flailing creature hit me like an oak dresser tossed off the back of a speeding pickup truck, lifting me off of my feet and hurling me backwards into Chuck.
We went down in a heap. I got lucky and caught the wooden man’s wrists before it could remove my face. I snapped both of its wooden forearms, but that didn’t stop it from wrenching the right one off completely and ramming the splintered end into my stomach. I lost my breath, but fortunately it wasn’t able to pierce my skin.
Chuck reached past me and stuck the muzzle of his .45 into the blood knot on the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger. The knot burst, splattering both of us with cold, sticky blood. The wooden man went limp.
I shoved the body away and got to my feet. Down the tunnel, I could see Prime moving away as fast as he could, enormous shoulders and head hunched to fit, tearing out roots that snagged on his thorny hide.
Several wooden men followed behind him, but two remained side by side blocking our path. Each was holding a piece of colorful plastic in one hand. I recognized what they were at the same time the smell of gas reached me.
They were lighters.
In unison, the two creatures raked their hands across the tops of the lighters. Their gasoline soaked bodies erupted into sheets of flame that licked at the ceiling and threw off ropes of black smoke. They braced their feet and spread their arms wide, blocking the tunnel as Prime raced for the Heart.
Once again, Prime had proven to be too damn smart.
The fungal growths on the roots turned out to be flammable, adding heat and noxious, oily smoke to the already choking blaze.
Anyone sane would have backed off and retreated down the tunnel towards safety and breathable air, but when you find yourself racing a wooden man because a fox told you to, it’s a little late for sane. Besides, I believed the fox’s story. Letting Prime get his hands on the Heart was out of the question.
I drew Hunger and charged at the barricade of flaming monsters. They stood their ground, arms spread, flames rolling up their bodies. The one on the left lunged for me, trying to grab me in an incendiary bear hug.
I rammed Hunger into its chest with both hands and shoved the creature sideways with everything I had. Sparks exploded when it hit the tunnel wall. Hunger punched through its back and pinned it there.
I yanked my hands away and winced at the blistered, cracked skin I saw there.
“Duck!” Anne’s scream reached me and I threw myself to the floor just as a wave of heat passed over my head. The other creature just missed wrapping its burning arms around my neck.
Gunshots boomed in the narrow space, followed by a sharp bang behind me. The blood knot on the creature standing over me burst open as one of Anne’s bullets found its mark, venting steam like a log full of sap on a campfire.
She fired again and the wooden man pinned to the wall collapsed, dangling limply from Hunger. I yanked it out and let the body fall to the ground. Hunger was no warmer than usual.
We left the bodies burning on the wet clay floor. The walls and ceiling were still giving off a lot of smoke, but since it was rolling up the slope of the hallway behind us, the way forward was clear.
We pushed onward, Anne and Chuck coughing and wiping at their bloodshot eyes. Prime had gotten a good head start on us, so we picked up the pace to a near jog despite the slippery floor.
At first the thin roots hanging out of the ceiling were a nuisance, slapping us in the face as we passed through them and dripping water down the back of our necks. Pretty soon they got thicker and seemed to snag on hair and clothing more often than not. It wasn’t until the roots in the sides of the tunnel began lifting up to brush against us that I realized that they were actively trying to stop us.
Before long the tunnel was filled with grasping tendrils that reached out for us from all sides, weakly curling around anything they could reach. The roots were spongy and spotted with the repulsive fungus that grew on everything down here. The deeper we went, the less root seemed to show through the growths until it seemed that the fungus itself was reaching for us.
We covered our heads with our arms as best we could to keep the questing tips out of our faces and moved faster. I took the lead, ripping through the thicker parts so that Anne and Chuck could follow and ended up draped with torn off roots that squirmed against my shoulders and back.
It was obvious that we were in the spirit’s domain now, and that it was doing its best to make sure Prime got to the Heart first. Still, the vines were never able to muster enough mass or force to completely stop us, so we pressed forward blindly until we stumbled out into open space.
I yanked the remaining vines off of me in disgust and threw them back into the tunnel. Anne and Chuck were gasping with the effort, hands on knees, looking like coal miners after a shift, sweaty and covered in streaks of clay and fungus residue.
We had exit
ed into a vast cavern that was easily sixty or seventy feet high and almost twice that wide. Embedded in the domed ceiling was a gigantic white crystal shaped like a piece of quartz. It was luminous, giving off enough milky white light to fill the entire cavern.
Rising up from the cavern floor was a grotesque parody of a tree made entirely of the black fungus from the tunnel. Its mouldering bulk reached nearly to the roof of the cavern.
The bare limbs formed a cascading tangle that bent to the ground like an oak, heavy and thick and close to the trunk, tapering to brittle tips at the ends.
Descending from the ceiling was a ring of clean, natural looking tree roots that hung into the open space above the towering tree-like fungus. The center tap root, longer and thicker than the rest, ended in a peculiar looking knot which resembled a lacy framework cage with something suspended in the center of it. The cage dangled low enough to nearly touch the monstrosity below. I figured that it contained the prize that Prime and I were racing for, the Heart.
Movement caught my eye as I stared at the cage. Climbing up one of the long, drooping fungal branches was Prime, already halfway up.
33
“Stay here.” I made sure that Hunger was secure in its holster and approached the tree, keeping one eye on Prime as I walked. He was only halfway up, which surprised me considering what I’d seen of his strength and agility so far.
He reached out his right hand and placed it gingerly on the tree, watching carefully as his hand made contact. Then his head swiveled downward to look at his left foot as he guided it slowly into the crook between two branches. Once settled, he pushed with his foot and pulled with his hand, raising his body smoothly and watching intently to make sure he didn’t bump into any of the surrounding branches.
I didn’t understand why until I reached the tree. The black skin of the trunk was studded with hundreds of roughly chewed holes. Glossy black bodies drifted in and out of them, swirling lazily from one to the other. The entire tree emitted a hollow, droning buzz.
Crunching noises caught my attention. A few feet to my left was a shimmering clump of the insects on a pile of wood chips and vine fragments. Only the edge of a mask-like face identified it as the remains of a wooden man.
Insects drifted in and out of the mass, lumbering ponderously through the air like fat bumblebees, light glinting off of their slick, obsidian bodies. Even ten yards away I could smell the sharp, vinegary odor coming off of them.
They had serrated mandibles that looked too big for their heads and pinched wasp-waists which grew into long, segmented abdomens. Their fat legs hung limply from their bodies as they drifted between the buzzing pile and the trunk of the tree.
The thought of being consumed by a swarm of flying wood-chippers was terrifying. The Trickster had said that the forest would test us, not murder us. I briefly considered throwing something at the tree to try and catch Prime in a swarm of the things, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if I disturbed a hive the size of a small building. Best to stick to the original plan and get to the Heart first.
The lower half of the limbs had no insect holes in them, likely because they were too thin to tunnel through. My legs dangled free as I pulled myself up using only my hands, barely feeling my own body weight.
I reached the thicker section of the branch quickly, slowing down to keep it from swaying as I moved. Once the limb got to be about six-inches thick, it began to show evidence of burrowing.
As the branch thickened, it also became more horizontal and rose into a long, flattened arch that ended at the trunk. Instead of trying to balance on top of it, I simply hung underneath and moved hand-over-hand.
That was my first mistake. From underneath you can’t see the holes. As soon as my left hand came down I could feel a rough splintery circle beneath my fingers. My middle finger was instantly jerked against the hole and I felt the skin tear. I yanked my hand back and clenched it into a fist against the pain.
That left me hanging from one hand, twenty feet off the ground, with blood running out of my fist and dripping off my elbow. I hoped the smell wouldn’t excite the hive. That would be bad.
I forced my injured hand open against the sticky pull of the rapidly congealing blood and examined the wound. Using my thumb to pull back on one of the edges, I saw bone and what looked like the end of a tendon. When I flexed my hand and all my fingers but the middle one curled in. Well, at least the thing hadn’t managed to get those jaws around the whole finger. I had no doubt that that it would have sheared clean through with little effort.
I held the wound closed with my thumb, hoping that if I gave it a minute, my body would seal up the skin enough to keep me from leaving a bloody trail across the hive.
Looking up, I could see that Prime was now two-thirds of the way to the top. I counted to sixty and checked the wound. A ragged black seam marked edges of the cut, and it clearly hadn’t knitted closed yet, but I couldn’t give it any more time.
I managed a one-armed chin up to get my face even with the branch so I could see where the holes where, then grabbed a spot with my injured hand. I felt the skin tear open as I put weight on it, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Watching for holes required pulling up to the branch with every handhold, which was slow and difficult. As I moved higher, the branch got thicker and increasingly hollow. I could feel the vibrations of the heavy insects scuttling along the inside and began to wonder if my hands were going to plunge through the bark into the hive itself. Occasionally an insect would be walking on the branch around a hole and I would have to wait for it to duck inside or fly off before continuing.
Every inch forward was slow and tedious, but that extra caution got me to the trunk alive. It radiated a moist warmth and the droning buzz was much louder here.
Insects heaved themselves out of the trunk only to walk a foot and duck back down inside while others launched into the air to loop around and enter again on the other side. Lots of nervous motion, but peaceful. I hoped they stayed that way. It wouldn’t take much for them to boil out and reduce me to a scattered pile of gnawed bones on the ground below.
Once I had my balance I stretched up for the branch above me. It wasn’t directly overhead, so I leaned forward until my fingers grazed the rough bark. And there I stood, suspended by tiptoes and fingertips in the tree. Try as I might, I couldn’t make up those last few inches that would let me close my hand around the branch. I was going to have to jump.
I pulled back and crouched, just a little, and steadied myself with my right hand on the trunk, feeling it vibrate under my fingers and touching it as lightly as I could.
I was going to have to make this. Prime was nearly at the top. I fixed my gaze on the branch above me and held my hands up like a basketball player about to make a free throw. My left hand grip wasn’t reliable, since one of my fingers wasn’t working, so the grab I made with my right hand needed to count.
I jumped, pushing off with my toes as smoothly as I could and only snapping my legs straight at the last moment, hoping to keep the movement from jarring the tree too badly.
I failed. The branch shuddered and let out a sharp crack as the wood split. I grabbed the branch above me just as the hum of the hive notched up in pitch. Insects began to tumble out of the damaged limb, looping and circling around it in fast, tight turns.
I pulled my legs up and got to my feet. The next branch was close enough to grip, so I wrapped my hands around it. One of my fingers plunged into a hole. I yanked it back out like I had touched a hot stove and nearly fell, but fortunately there hadn’t been anything waiting for me.
The cloud of insects below was getting thicker and throwing off smaller groups who circled in a larger arc. One landed on my arm as I hauled myself up to the next branch. Its hooked feet gripped my thin jacket with surprising strength as it waved its open jaws back and forth in the air. It came to a decision and the jaws flashed down, snipping a piece out of the nylon shell before flying off.
Another insect
buzzed past my head, so close that its feet tugged at my hair as it passed. I flinched, but resisted the urge to slap at my own head as it passed.
The buzzing inside the trunk got louder as the alarm started to spread. Below me the knot of furious insects was thickening to the point where I could no longer see through it. In a few minutes, this entire fifty-foot-tall nest to which I was clinging was going to be covered in a seething mass of pissed off bugs.
So I leapt again, hard. The branch beneath me didn’t break, but it did bounce violently up and down, which was just as bad as far as the bugs were concerned. I shot upwards a good twenty feet and slammed into the underside of a branch near the top.
I clutched at it and managed not to either break it or fall to my death. It was close enough to the top of the tree to be too narrow to contain part of the hive, but the impact could clearly be felt where it grew out of the trunk. Fat, glossy bodies began tumbling out of the few holes that existed this high up.
On the plus side, Prime was just over my head on the opposite side of the trunk and the Heart’s cage was just above that.
Prime looked down when I made the tree tremble under the impact of my leap. His wooden face registered nothing when he saw me. He turned back skyward and inched up another foot.
I scrambled up onto the thin branch. An insect lumbered past my face, so I swatted it backhand. Directly at Prime.
It hit him on the thigh, and outraged, began chewing into his leg. Prime jerked and nearly lost his balance. I pulled myself upwards one more branch. I was nearly close enough to touch either Prime or the cage.
Prime reached down and crushed the insect in his fist, then tossed away the pulped remains. Then he gripped the bottom of the cage and used it to pull himself up.
I did the same and found myself staring into his wooden face through the smooth, clean roots that made up the cage bars.
Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Page 12