by Jack Conner
Avery wrestled with himself. At last he cleared his throat. When the others looked to him, he rolled up his left sleeve.
“They died because of me,” he said. “I would be honored to bear their names.”
The others glanced at each other, apparently uncomfortable. Maybe by being marked with their friends’ names he would become one of them, and they did not want to open their group up—not to him, not tonight, even if he was the person they had sworn to follow. Come on, he thought. He needed this. It frightened him how much he needed this. Mari and Ani were long gone. Sheridan was a traitor. He had no one, not one person in this world. He didn’t even have a home, or a bed to curl up in.
Finally Janx nodded his huge head and came to sit beside him. Lifting his needle, he said, “You ever had a tat before?”
“No,” Avery admitted.
“This’ll hurt.”
“I’m ready.”
Hildra and Muirblaag came forward. Hildebrand chattered loudly.
“It’ll hurt less with this,” Hildra said, and shoved a bottle into Avery’s hands. He drank. Muirblaag clapped him on the back, and he coughed.
“You ready?” Janx said.
Avery sucked in a breath and nodded.
Janx hadn’t lied. It hurt like hell.
* * *
His arm itching, Avery traipsed through the forest the next day, right behind Muirblaag. Between them they carried Layanna on a makeshift stretcher. Avery’s arm burned, but he held on tight. Sometimes Layanna slept, sometimes not. Avery would catch her staring up at him, or the sky overhead, and he felt oddly self-conscious. He felt closer to the others than he had before, and it may have been his imagination, but he thought they acted more openly around him, too.
Toward afternoon, Layanna climbed out of the stretcher and walked a ways by herself, limping along with the help of a wooden stick Muirblaag carved for her. She could only walk for a short period before she needed the stretcher again, but in another hour she was once more afoot. The periods of walking grew longer and the periods of resting shorter. Avery was amazed again at her recuperative abilities. He reflected that nothing about her should shock him after seeing her turn into an amoeba monster. He still remembered the screams of the soldiers dying in her stinging tentacles or engulfed in her otherworldly acids.
That night the band came across the ruins of a small village that crept up a mountainside. Stone houses jutted like crumbling teeth through undergrowth, and large spiders wove webs between half-collapsed walls. After burning out the spiders, the band made camp for the evening. The mountain winds blew very chill that night, and Avery only protested a little as Janx and Hildra made a fire in the shelter of a wall. Layanna was placed near it and fed with the meager foodstuffs they possessed. She tore into the jerky and gulped water like a fish.
Avery smiled. “You have a healthy appetite.”
Smacking her lips, Layanna glanced up at them. “What I need now is something from the sea.” She’d spoken in Octunggen and Avery had to translate for the others.
Hildra smirked. “The only thing fishy we have is Mu.” She slapped him on the shoulder. “Eat him with my blessing.”
Layanna’s gaze moved to Muirblaag as if sizing him up, and the fish-man shifted uncomfortably.
“Hildra was joking,” he said.
“Good for you,” Layanna said in her thickly-accented Ghenisan.
The others chuckled nervously.
“Why don’t we get some shut-eye?” Janx suggested. “We’ve gotta go down into the valley tomorrow, or find a way across to the next mountain. We need our sleep.”
“Fuck that,” said Byron. He was staring at Layanna. “It’s been long enough. She’s awake now and I want answers. For starters, what the hell is a Collossum, honey?”
“I don’t think that now is the time,” Avery said.
“Not human,” said Layanna, surprising him.
The others leaned forward. “Where are you from, sunshine?” Hildra asked.
“Not here.”
“Did the Octunggen make you in some lab?”
“No,” Layanna said. “I say further nothing about that.”
She doesn’t trust us with the truth, Avery realized. The thought that she couldn’t even tell them what she was, after all they’d been through already, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit.
She yawned, and Avery said, “I think that’s it for tonight. Let her rest.”
“No,” Byron pressed. “One more thing. She hasn’t even told us where we’re going. Some presence, she said. Well, what presence?”
The others murmured agreement, and Layanna returned their gazes quietly. She seemed about to say something, then hesitated. At last she yawned again and said, “I am tired much.”
She closed her eyes and stretched out, and the others stared at each other. Avery shivered in a sudden mountain wind.
“She won’t even tell us where we’re going,” Byron said. “Not what she is, not where we’re going. Gods damn, but I don’t like this.”
* * *
They began seeing rays.
At first it was simply one, far off, a black wedge against the sky drifting over the mountains. A few days later, they spotted a second. They were far apart, miles and miles to either side of the band. After a week, three rays cut the sky. They circled closer, then closer.
Pressing on, the group crossed the shoulder of one mountain to another. They ascended through a pass, then picked their way down into a tangled, dark valley, littered with recent bones and ruins. The smell of rot was thick on the air. The trek up the next mountain was arduous, and as they climbed toward its summit cold winds howled around them, sometimes pocked with snow. Winter began to set in with a vengeance, worse with the elevation. Snow-covered fortresses hunkered from cliff sides, austere and beautiful. Avery huddled in his coat.
He showed the others how to camp and find trails. They were city-bred, unused to nature, but his father had taken him camping often growing up. Avery remembered the long nights of listening to the creatures of the forest outside his tent as his father told him a story. Avery’s memories stirred as they went deeper into the mountains.
He tended to Layanna often. Her wound had become infected, and he cleaned and dressed it with care. She would have been at risk for severe fever, even death, but after feeding her extra-planar facets in Hissig her uncanny recuperative abilities were able to help her, along with Avery’s attentions. His small medical supply dwindled, and he tried to use it sparingly. As they pushed even deeper into the mountains, and Layanna grew better, she guided them; she said she could sense where to go. On previous hikes, Avery had stuck to the foothills, to the relatively safe frontier, the areas where ngvandi typically did not go, but now he might as well have been on a different planet. He could no longer see Hissig save the lights of the city reflected off clouds to the east, and that only at night.
They pressed deeper, and deeper. Mountains piled up around them.
The rays followed.
Chapter 13
A ray glided to the west.
Avery sat in the ruined tower of some ancient fortress smoking one of the last cigarettes side by side with Hildra, also smoking. In companionable silence, they shared a flask containing the last whiskey and stared at the sky, where to the west floated the great shape of the ray, visible mainly as a blackness against the low-lying clouds. To the north floated another.
“Think they can sense her?” Hildra asked. “Your mermaid?” Her monkey Hildebrand perched low and apprehensive on her shoulder, staring in the direction of the nearest ray. He had a nut halfway to his mouth but was too distracted to eat it.
Avery sipped from the flask and grimaced. “They must. She’s drawing them closer and closer. It’s only a matter of time before they come on us.”
She accepted the flask back, took a swig. “Then what? We’re screwed?’
He took a drag on his cigarette. He didn’t smoke often and found it harsher than he would have cared fo
r. Nevertheless he enjoyed the pleasant lift it brought to his mind. “Layanna says she thinks she can counter whatever psychic blasts the rays might hurl at her. But even without the psychics, the soldiers on the rays have weapons that can hurt her, even kill her, like Sheridan did.”
“I’m more worried about us.”
“They can kill us, too, of course.”
Hildra rolled her eyes.
“You wouldn’t like to see the war ended?” he asked.
She expelled a column of smoke at the sky. “Sure. Why not? I’m in. But if it comes down to it, a choice between us or her, no offense, bones, but I’m sidin’ with the humans. She won’t even tell us what she is or where we’re going.” She took a long pull on the flask, made a face. “How can we trust someone like that?”
“She’s told us she’s one of the Collossum, and she did save our lives.”
“She needs us, that’s all. And don’t forget about Jay and Hold.”
“I won’t.” He touched his arm gingerly, though it had healed.
She nodded, accepting this. “I know, bones. But ... shit, I saw Jay’s brains explode out the back of his fucking head.” She blinked as if to get the memory out of her mind.
“For what it’s worth, I think Layanna feels badly about their deaths.”
“How can you tell? She’s so ... cold.”
Avery had noticed that, too. “She needs to be. She can’t afford to get attached to us. She can’t allow herself to hesitate if it comes time to sacrifice one of us. Not unlike what you were just saying about her, I might add.”
Hildra sighed and slumped against the wall. “I don’t like this, Doc. This is out of my normal line, if y’know what I mean. I guess I’ve helped out a few fugitives, but ... fucking rays? You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Her eyes flicked to the horizon, where a ray was just sweeping before a snow-capped mountain peak. The creature’s wings flapped once, slowly, with a crack of rolling thunder, and its spiny tail dipped up and down. That was all. Except for those small movements, it might as well have been a statue, vast and black and merciless.
“We’ll make it,” Avery said with more assurance than he felt.
“Pardon me for sayin’, bones, but you’re full of shit.”
“You’re not the first person to say so.” Taking the flask back, he sipped, then sucked a drag off his cigarette. He let the smoke play in his mouth, mix with the taste of cheap alcohol. “We’ll make it.”
He glanced at the ruined fortress around them. It was huge and sprawling, with a dozen great towers lancing the heavens, all capped white with snow. Most were broken, their tops missing, even snapped off halfway through, and their remains lay at the towers’ bases, huge mounds of snow-covered rubble. From time to time a cloud of batkin would shiver from the inside of one of the towers and sweep off into the night, or return to their roost gorged and full and dripping.
Down below in one of the frost-covered courtyards Janx strolled, unlit cigar clenched in his jaws. Layanna was resting in the ruins of the keep, where presumably Muirblaag and Byron rested, too. Over the past few days, Avery had learned that Byron was an accomplished singer, and when the band judged the night to be safe, he would entertain them with songs of adventure, gilded cities and tragic romance. For someone who despised history so much, he certainly could make it exciting.
Hildra touched Avery’s arm suddenly and pointed out at the night.
A ray drifted closer, its huge broad head aimed in their direction.
Perhaps afraid, Hildra pressed against his side, and he could smell her, a mix of spice and musk, whisky and cigarettes. He was grateful for the contact, and the warmth, for he felt suddenly cold.
“Maybe we should get goin’,” she said.
“Leave Maar Keep?”
It was a private joke between the two of them. They had decided amongst themselves that this must be the infamous fortress of Count Hyssmyr, who had held Prince Cort prisoner for years and finally walled him up in the catacombs only for the prince to escape, rescue Princess Syra and flee into the mountains, there to engage upon the epic adventures which had made them immortal and, if legend held true, had ended the War of the Severance.
Hildra did not smile. “I mean it, bones. That fucker’s comin’ straight at us.”
Avery frowned, studying the ray. It was not actually coming directly at them, he saw, but at a slight angle. Its psychic pilot must sense Layanna’s general direction. If he came close enough ...
“You may be right,” Avery said. Snow settled on his hair and mustache and began to melt. He drew his jacket tighter about him.
“It’s coming from the east,” she said. “If we leave here and bear north I bet we miss—”
A scream rang out. A long, terrified scream.
Then another, and another.
Avery and Hildra stared at each other. As one, they ran down the stairs.
* * *
Hildebrand chittered in fright as they reached the courtyard and bounded across it.
Janx was already moving, rushing around a blasted statue toward the mass of the keep that reared above them, its roofs and gables crusted with age and snow. Fierce gargoyles with bloodstone eyes glared down at them, some with horns or tongues missing, some with lichenous growths jutting obscenely from them, making them look eerie and monstrous.
Janx reached the great archway, where hundreds of years ago a thick metal-banded wooden door would have hung but was long gone, and vanished inside.
Heart pounding, Avery followed.
It was cold but dry inside, and the wind blew weakly. Ice-slicked stone pressed down on him, inset torch sconces a mockery of warmth and light from a distant age. A small light flickered ahead, around a bend in the tunnel. A candle hunched at the base of a set of winding, age-bowed stairs. Janx leapt up them, two at a time. Avery came after, not as adroitly, breathing fast and shallow. Screams echoed off the walls.
They passed down another hall, with the roof missing above and snow fluttering down, then another, this one with roof intact. Lights flickered from a room ahead, making shadows dance across the corridor walls.
Avery, hard on Janx’s heels, burst into the chamber, what must have been some concubine’s bedchamber at some point long ago, or even a holding cell. Legend held that Princess Syra had been locked away in the highest tower, but who really knew? She might have been locked in this very room, if she had ever existed at all.
Layanna, Muirblaag and Byron had laid out sleeping blankets on the cold stone, but they weren’t asleep at the moment. Muirblaag and Byron struggled under netting that had been thrown over them, while Layanna occupied the center of the room, arms flung back, head uplifted, floating amidst the substances of her otherworldly amoeba-self. Pink-tinged tentacles and flagella wriggled from bulging pseudopods, and strange lights shone from the amoeba’s interior.
Gripped in these tentacles were half a dozen ngvandi. It was the ngvandi who screamed so hideously. They writhed and twisted in the grip of the stinging, electric tendrils, convulsing and shuddering. As Avery watched, Layanna drew one of the creatures inside the amoebic wall, causing the surface of the material to ripple as the ngvandi was engulfed. Her organelles bunched aside, and the otherworldly acids began eating at it. Skin peeled from muscle, muscle dissolved against bone. The ngvandi screamed soundlessly as its eyes boiled away and streamers of flesh floated about its head.
The other ngvandi howled and twisted, but soon enough they went limp in Layanna’s embrace, and she laid them almost tenderly on the floor. Smoke trailed up from two of the corpses, while others appeared chemically burned.
“Shit,” Janx said, sounding stunned. He shook his head and crossed to Muirblaag and Byron, helping them out of the nets. “What happened?”
Muirblaag struggled from the netting, winded and out of breath. “Fuckin’ bastards ... just pounced on us.”
Avery studied one smoking body. It could have been a brother to Muirblaag, though it was not quite so tall and muscular. Another of t
he corpses had yellow-and-red fish scales, and another green.
Layanna still floated, encased in her amoeba sac. The fluids of the ngvandi she’d drawn into herself swirled around organelles and ... into them. She’s feeding, Avery realized. Gooseflesh crept up his arms. Of course, it made sense. The ngvandi would have the same extradimensional elements as anything from the Atomic Sea.
“I think we’d better go,” Avery said.
“Fuckin’ aye,” Byron said, dusting himself off. “I’ve had it here.”
“Hildra and I saw a ray coming this way.”
“We don’t need any rays,” Janx agreed. “And fuck knows if the mutes’ll be back.”
Muirblaag looked bleak. “They will. This is what they do when they find travelers in the mountains. They send in a stealth party to steal the women to breed with, then the real attack comes.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Avery said. “They made no move against Hildra.” He turned to her.
Or where she should have been. She had been right on his heels.
There was no one there.
“I ...” He felt weak all of a sudden. The ngvandi had taken her, quietly and with ease, right from under his nose, and he hadn’t noticed a thing.
“Damn.” This was Byron. He blinked and began to pack his things.
Janx turned hard eyes on Muirblaag. “What’ll they do with her?”
“What do you think?”
“Gods damn!” Janx kicked over one of the lamps, which broke into pieces. “We have to get her back.”
“Agreed,” Muirblaag said.
Byron wiped a hand down his pale, sweaty face. “Shit, guys, you really wanna ... ? I mean ...” They stared at him mercilessly, and he sagged. “Shit.”
Avery heard a sound in the distance, faint but audible. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Hells with that,” Janx said. “We’re goin’ after her.”