Tomorrow, they started hunting or started going hungry. Free choice. What they would hunt was a different question. They’d have to find some animal as deaf as they were, with the amount of noise they must be making, not able to hear the crack of a stick underfoot or the shuffle of dead leaves. Or something with defenses like a porcupine, that didn’t damn well care. Not enough open space to see game before it heard them.
Can a god starve to death? Interesting theological debate. I’ve never tried. But then, I never thought I was a god before. Not sure I do now. He wiped his fingers on his pants, swatted a persistent mosquito, and picked up pad and pencil.
We’re in Siberia.
He chose that as a generic big empty place with trees. And mosquitoes. Besides, the one place they had seen people, yesterday, looked a hell of a lot like a Soviet or Czarist labor camp. Not a death camp, not the Nazi thing, no gas chamber or crematorium, but none of the workers got paid and nobody but the bosses ate anything like decent food or enough of it and if you died, nobody important cared.
But this was good land. Not the Russian taiga, where you couldn’t do anything with the miles and miles of trackless boggy bug-infested land except grow trees on it. Slowly. This was northern hardwood forest, decent soil at worst, and if these kinds of trees grew well on it, the climate wasn’t too wet or too dry, too cold or too hot. The kind of land people grabbed, white people or brown people or black people, when they found it. And, if they could, killed off any prior inhabitants who objected.
Another one of the things he couldn’t remember was that he couldn’t remember how he knew all those things.
She took the pad and wrote, They have airplanes. They have helicopters. They have railroads. Why don’t they use this land?
They’d seen a flight of four helicopters headed in the general direction they were running from. None of the choppers strayed from their flight plan, none of them seemed to be searching. They’d seen jet aircraft overhead, contrails high in the daylight or blinking lights high at night. Flyover country. Nobody in any hint of a descent or takeoff pattern.
Or searching pattern. That baffled him. And her winds reported emptiness in the forest around them, just the deer and other game and predators you’d expect. And not very much of them. One of the odd facts he’d picked up in his centuries—a mature forest didn’t support much wildlife. You got more deer, for example, in cut-over or burned-over land where the food grew within reach. In late spring or early summer, all the chestnuts and acorns and the like on the ground had been picked over. He’d found an un-chewed beechnut or two, cracked them, all empty hulls. The squirrels knew. They were professionals.
She’d finally admitted that her hearing was shot to hell, too. Admitting her injuries was . . . a weakness, he guessed, un-godlike behavior. Just admitting it took her a full day, and she’d looked ashamed when she scribbled it out in the early twilight. They’d been talking—well, scribbling—about standing guard in the night.
Another note from her. That logging camp. Doors looked like they were built to keep things out more than in. She paused and pulled her notepad back. He hoped she was paying more attention to the forest, to standing guard, than to her writing.
My winds don’t recognize anything I don’t know, but they see things I don’t know. Same as back at the bunker. I told you they sensed something out there. It wasn’t the guards and booby-traps.
Now she was admitting that she lacked omniscience. Next thing to go in the godly triumvirate would be omnipresence, he guessed. All this humility was probably good for her character, bitter as she seemed to take it. He’d never felt like he was all-knowing or all-powerful or everywhere, but he was a trivial god at best.
Not like Mother. She’d never admit there was anything she didn’t know, couldn’t do.
He scribbled Dragons? and passed it to her.
Once again, choosing a generic title for the whole spectrum of big unknown dangers. Maybe he should have gone with evil djinn haunting the wastelands, but she’d told him to lay off the cultural and Qur’an references. He didn’t feel up to coming within an inch of killing her again. A quarter inch.
The note came back. Here be dragons? No. Dragons would leave trails. Tracks. Piles of dragon shit.
They hadn’t crossed any trails or tracks larger than a large deer. Elk, maybe, or moose, cloven pointy hoof. Not reindeer, those had rounded hooves. These critters looked heavy, judging by tracks at one of the marshy areas, softer ground but not that soft. Also something like a bear, broad pads and toes with claws, weight similar to the moose by the depth of the print, but the track didn’t look quite right to him.
He couldn’t remember where he’d learned to read tracks, either.
She moved around the tree where he could see her, turned her back to the arc of forest he could watch, and scribbled some more. Conversation works better when you can see faces.
Look. Those trackers we killed? Winds say nobody followed them. Bodies just lay there. Food for ravens and crows.
That gave him second thoughts. He already knew she hadn’t been telling him everything. Sometimes ignorance could indeed be bliss.
She was writing again. Apologize for not telling you. I’m used to living with humans. If I tell them everything, they go crazy.
As if he wouldn’t go crazy. But if she was going to start apologizing for things, he’d have to start thinking of her as a person. Not just a royal pain in the ass. Upsetting to his worldview, that.
Those guard towers with the big searchlights. Biting things that don’t like lights. Hunters who had quit chasing two murderers from another world. A song, maybe fifty years back, about a sheriff who didn’t worry too much about a fugitive in the Everglades—if the mosquitoes didn’t kill him, the snakes and gators would . . .
No windows on the ground floor, not even rifle slits. A lot of insects seemed to stay close to the ground.
He wrote: Fireflies?
She cocked her head to one side, thinking. She didn’t wince while doing it. The bruise on her face had faded, and his own aches were settling down to a background murmur.
Maybe. Or something like them. Some reason why people don’t dare live alone out here, can’t hunt and fish. But if that’s it, why haven’t they attacked us?
He thought about the few game trails they’d crossed, the animals they hadn’t seen, about the scarcity of game her winds reported. Not enough food? They have to hunt more territory, so we haven’t run into them? Yet?
Or they didn’t attack in masses until their scouts had time to gather a swarm together. Like in the tunnel. And then he remembered the cemetery, all out of proportion to the size of the camp that fed it. With fresh graves, judging by the heaps of dirt. At least they buried their dead, which implied they hadn’t been eaten alive by the fireflies.
Disease?
She stared at his note. She stared at him. He wished she would go back to staring at the forest behind him.
Mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever, malaria. Bugs carried other nasties: dengue, sleeping sickness, dozens of diseases—hell, fleas transmitted plague.
Something transmitted by fireflies, maybe?
She stared at his added note. Stared at him. Then scribbled. I don’t get sick. Do you?
That sort of implied that she bought it—plausible working hypothesis. He tried to remember. He’d been injured more times than he could count, but sick? No. But these aren’t our germs. Don’t know if they’re obliged to respect foreign gods.
Then: No fireflies in our world. He swatted another mosquito. They seemed to think his blood would work for breeding purposes, human or not.
What diseases did this crew carry? If the hypothetical Big Boss God had a master plan, why did He or She have to include so damn many parasites? The last creek they’d waded across had leeches, equally interested in minor-god blood.
Could tie into the apparent brown tint to the population. Wouldn’t have taken much more to wipe out the first few waves of European colonies—both
Jamestown and Plymouth tottered on the edge, and the Spanish focused down south where they could steal the silver and gold.
She was scribbling again. Just keep moving.
He nodded. That had been the prescription in that old song, as well.
Addendum, from her note pad: Which way to the Seal?
Decision time. Trust that buzzing annoying ache in his molars, the shortest route to the Seal, or trust the unknown source of the smell that wasn’t a smell, the sandalwood?
I’ve always thought salamanders were like friendly unknown cats met on the street, walking up to me expecting a chin-rub and ear-scratch before we go our separate ways. I should trust one for tactical advice? Elementals aren’t that smart. Am I following a salamander, or something else? To what end?
Which side are you on?
He pointed a bit south of “east” and the railroad line—the direction the sandalwood told him. The railroad would be the path of least resistance. The sort of thing Mother would set up.
That was east by Mel’s compass, anyway, and it agreed with the observed data. Like, sunrise happened off in that general direction. Plus, it still led away from the bunker that had guarded against their entry. Putting more miles between his ass and the guns suited him just fine.
Any idea how far?
He glared at her. Shook his head. I’ve never done this before. It’s getting weaker. I’m probably getting stronger. I didn’t know how far away it was when we started. All I know is, we’re closer today than we were yesterday.
He grunted his way to his feet, leaning on the cane. All this backcountry mileage, chancy footing and up and down and around hills, irritated his hip. As the other aches died down, that one grew and grew. Downhill actually seemed worse than climbing, a side effect of the shorter leg, and orthopedic shoes didn’t soothe all the difference. Just keep moving, as long as the land didn’t throw a wrench into their gears in the form of a wide river, a gorge or cliff they couldn’t pass, a swamp like the one in that song.
Or even a damned ocean. He felt the Seal, but like he’d told her, he had no idea how far away. All he knew was, it was closer. Closer than an unknown distance still added up to an unknown distance. Half of infinity is still infinity.
If it faded away, if that crack broke all the way through and killed it, would he lose the tracking of it? He didn’t have experience to judge, not even a guess. In theory, observer interacting with observed, as it grew weaker, he grew stronger. Maybe he’d even be able to find it if it broke. When it broke.
If he believed Mother.
Who, Mel reminded him on a regular basis, wasn’t his real mother—who had been damned flexible in her interpretation of the truth in all the years he’d known Her, in other ways as well. Centuries.
But he was beginning to think “when” rather than “if,” the longer this took. What the hell would he do with broken magic first dreamed up and then forged by Suleiman bin Daoud?
No illusions—I’m a smith, not a wizard. I never even knew this shit existed before last week.
He shouldered the pack with another grunt. Still heavy. Using up all her bombs and eating almost all her food hadn’t lightened it that much. He wasn’t carrying it out of misplaced chivalry. She was the deadly warrior goddess, swift as her mountain winds. He didn’t want anything to slow her down if the shit hit the fan.
XVII
So that’s what made those tracks. Albert concentrated on looking both non-threatening and non-tasty at the same time. Maybe “dangerous enough to not be worth the trouble” was a better choice.
He studied the thing in the low, late afternoon light. Best name he could come up with on short notice was an armadillo bear. And short notice was what he had. They faced off across a small clearing in the forest. By the time they’d seen each other, they were maybe thirty feet apart. Bear-sized, large for a black bear or maybe smallish for a grizzly, bear-shaped with big teeth and long claws, but covered in dark brown scale or plate armor like an armadillo or pangolin. Armor on those was laminated bone or horn, wasn’t it? Tough and resilient.
Okay, so that’s evolution’s answer to fireflies.
How she could free up her attention to scrawl a note and wave it under his nose, escaped him. Maybe she could move as fast as her winds. He couldn’t. That made him the obvious meal if the bear wanted one. Old joke—“I don’t have to run faster than that bear, I just have to run faster than you.”
Albert had a conscientious objection to being a meal, even for a bear.
The “bear” gave them a glance, curious but not much, the attitude of something that was used to being the roughest, toughest bastard on the block and not needing to prove it to anyone. Then it went back to tearing a rotten log apart, probably looking for delicious squirmy beetle grubs and termites.
Yeah, a firefly would have a hard time finding anything to bite on that, if it curled up to protect nose and asshole and anything else soft. He thought they would have some problems getting either buckshot or pistol bullets through the armor, if they had to. Looked like a job for either an elephant gun or maybe a shaped-charge anti-tank rocket. Or, at a minimum, one of those automatic rifles they’d left lying on the forest floor. He could have figured out how the safety and magazine latch worked by now.
Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
They’d been looking for a place to camp for the night, some place more or less level and more or less clear of rocks and roots and without any big dead limbs overhead and not in any drainage path in case of the rain they hadn’t had yet. Did not look like this was that place.
He felt the cool touch of a breeze on the back of his neck, wind changing around sunset, and the bear must have whuffed or chuffed or something because dust and splinters of dark rotten wood blew away from its nose. The bear jerked, all attention on the strangers now, as it rose up on its hind legs. Albert changed his mind. Big as a grizzly, seven feet, eight feet tall.
Okay, so we haven’t either of us had a bath all week. No need to get so huffy about it.
Albert had been wondering how long Mel was going to be willing to share her small backpacking tent with his stinky carcass. Or for that matter, he with hers. Neither of them wanted to get downwind of themselves. But they probably smelled strange to an educated nose, as well as filthy. He doubted if minor gods wandered through here on any regular basis.
The bear was still staring myopically across the clearing. You could read its thoughts on that armor-plated ursine face: “What the hell are these strange human-shaped objects that don’t smell like humans?”
The wind shifted again, bringing the reek of Big Mean Carnivore back across the clearing and with it an undertone of rotting wood and dirt. In the course of all that, Albert had unsheathed his sword-cane and added the knife in his left hand.
Showing his claws. He was pretty sure Brother Bear recognized them.
Yes, he still had her pistol hanging on his waist. No, his instincts didn’t go for it. Rational thought followed reflexes, pointing to the armor and the fact that he’d already decided a 9mm pistol didn’t measure up to the target. Always use enough gun . . .
Not that he thought he needed one. The average bear was a pacifist.
This bear dropped back to all fours, must have whuffed again judging by the spray of leaves under its nose, and bounced toward them a couple of feet before stopping. Albert had just labeled that as a bluff charge, now they could back away from each other and everyone could go off with honor satisfied, when he felt the distant boom of her shotgun by his side, sound still deadened by his hearing loss, and the bear’s face exploded in blood.
Dammit, why the hell did she do that?
Two more booms, again as much felt as heard, and he saw chest armor dent and bounce back, shot deflected into the dead leaves and dirt splashing up. The bear charged their smell and sound even if it couldn’t see through its ruined eyes and Albert jumped to meet it, more afraid of her and her shotgun at his back. His sword-cane stabbed like a bayonet through butt
er into the bear’s chest. He sidestepped the front claws and let go of his cane’s grip and the bear stopped in its tracks, head swinging around, bewildered.
Knife in his right hand now, Albert slashed the bear’s neck and the scales parted as if nothing more than paper. Blood spurted. He stepped back, panting, shaking, with time now to be scared. The bear collapsed in slow motion, knee joints weakening and then giving out completely. Unbalanced bulk toppled the beast over on its side. It jerked, once, twice, and then more blood flooded from its mouth. Not pulsing now, just flowing.
Dead. After she’d blinded it, that was mercy.
Dammit.
Albert wiped his blade with dead leaves, hands shaking, jerked his sword-cane out of the corpse and wiped it, sheathed both blades.
Still shaking, still panting, he pulled out the pad of paper and pencil.
Why???
He underlined it three times, squiggly lines because of the shakes. Then, on a separate page because it seemed to demand it: Goddammit!!!
She stared at him. She started talking, jumped up the volume and shouted to the point where he could actually pick out syllables and words—they weren’t English. Biting down on her words and rage, she pulled out her own pad.
Attacking you!!! With her own three heavy underlines that damn near tore the paper.
Then, also separate page, You asshole!!!
This from the woman who had gotten pissed off because the trackers had forced her to kill some dogs . . .
He scrawled. Bluff charge. Then: Ahimsa.
No underlines, this time. But her face blazed with anger and she balled up her fist, before appearing to think better of it. Maybe she remembered the last time.
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