by Dima Zales
Really, what could I do?
I sat there a while, hurting and deeply angry at myself. Then I heard a strange, rasping noise behind me. I twisted around to look, too exhausted and low to be as afraid as I probably should’ve been.
The ferns were moving weirdly. I staggered to my feet, expecting a mini to come darting out, but after a second, I realized it was the plants themselves that were moving — not just near me, but as far out along the plain as I could see.
I stared in disbelief as they writhed.
Not long ago I’d wondered what kind of world a tree would invent for itself. The idea that a fern might work essence seemed even stranger. A tree had size, longevity. But a fern?
All the movement had purpose, I realized — the ferns were churning up the soil. The plants closest to me pulled something up with a small explosion of dirt. They grappled it upright and began to coil around it, like vines. They climbed to the top, then shot out feelers, questing for something else to grip.
I’d recognized the object before they covered it. It was a massive bone, half as tall as I was.
With another burst of soil, a matching bone emerged and was propped up and covered. Then two much bigger bones were passed up and woven into place atop the initial ones. Then two more. I backed away. More fern-vines boiled out atop the twin columns, which were by then two or three times my height. More and more vines grew, until a seething mass of green loomed over me, stretching forward as the columns swayed and bent.
As the ferns proliferated, more bones were brought up from the soil and passed into the mass of plant matter, which bucked and writhed itself into shape to accommodate each new arrival. As vertebrae were added, the mass stretched to create a torso and tail. Rib bones gave the torso depth and form.
I looked away from the spectacle, hoping to see an escape route, but similar constructions were underway all across the plain. I wasn’t sure what to do. Were these things going to attack me?
I stumbled back as, almost at my feet, the plants churned up a massive skull. It was gigantic and had dozens of serrated teeth. As thousands of tiny vines passed it toward the growing creature, I scooped up my clothes. If this thing turned out to be friendly, I’d be surprised.
The ’pus grasped my calf and started climbing up. I limped downstream as fast as I could go, stealing looks over my shoulder at the growing monster I’d left behind. The skull was being hefted into place, vines wrapping around it at incredible speed. Even before it was fully covered, the creature shuddered and flexed, as though coming to life. It stepped forward and swung its head back and forth. Was it seeking me? All over its body, vines shot into the air and rewrapped themselves in a frenzy, creating a churning corona of green.
Across the plain, other creatures were on the move toward me. The skeletons the plants had resurrected were all dinosaurs. Some were unbelievably large, dwarfing the huge carnivore that had been constructed closest to me. Others were small. Minis were well represented. They must’ve learned the hard way to stick to the woods. Many of the creatures looked like plant-eaters, but that didn’t reassure me — some of them were enormous beyond belief.
Ahead of me, several reached the river bank and stopped, swinging their heads over the water. One of them was as tall as a five-story building. Panicked, I stopped. Others closed in from the side and behind.
I waded out into the river. I’d have to swim across. It was a long way to the other side, and I didn’t know what was in it, but that was my only hope.
About twenty feet out, there was a sandbank. The water there was less than a foot deep. On the other side of the sandbank was a drop-off. I stood looking into it. Things were swimming in the deeper water. Really big things.
Dozens of plant-dinos were massing where I’d stepped off the bank. They opened their mouths, as though roaring, but the only sound was the rasp and slap of fern vines. I was paralyzed, too terrified to jump into the deep water, with its huge, unknown creatures, but clearly unable to go back to dry land.
One of the dinos stepped into the water. Jolted into action, I turned and splashed my way down the sandbank, but I ran out of bank long before I’d passed the crowd of creatures waiting on the shore.
The splashing seemed to key them into my location, and more began stepping into the river. Desperately, I turned back to the deep water. Something huge was swimming in there — something twenty feet long, at least. I just couldn’t jump in. I stood there trying to make myself, and I just couldn’t.
I felt the ’pus tighten around my waist. A wall of water rose out of the river and, faster than my eye could follow, smashed into the nearest dinos. An avalanche of bone and shredded vines blasted back through the assembled creatures. The river churned, almost knocking me down.
I couldn’t sense whatever was happening, but it had to be the ’pus.
More dinos surged forward, and the ’pus flung another water wall at them. Then it did it again. And again.
Behind the carnage on shore, I could see the vines putting the destroyed dinos back together. The ’pus wasn’t going to save me. It was just delaying the inevitable.
And the delay was brief. Its sixth strike was noticeably weakened, and its seventh did little more than knock a couple dinos down. It tried once more, and only succeeded in misting the creatures with water droplets.
Its grip on me tightened for a moment, and then it just fell off. It landed in the water, slid off the sandbar, and sank.
With a cry, I lunged for it, but it had disappeared into the deeps.
I knelt there in the water, stripped of every hope. I held my hands up at the oncoming creatures.
“Stop! Please!”
They didn’t stop.
Things seemed to slow down. I saw the way individual plants unwrapped and rewrapped themselves over the bones as the creatures picked their legs up and stepped toward me through the shallows. I saw the gleam of their ancient teeth as they opened their mouths in soundless calls. I saw my own bones being passed through the ferns, being picked clean and buried in the peaty soil, locked in this place forever. I saw them resurrected into some horrifying parody of my body to destroy other intruders and add them to the sentinel horde.
The very core of me said, No.
Inside me, something tore. In front of me, something exploded. A roaring sound deafened me, and a wave of superheated air threw me back into the river’s deeper channel. Disoriented, I struggled for the surface, panicked and flailing.
When my head came up, I saw fire. Not just a little fire — flames everywhere. The air scorched my lungs. I ducked back beneath the surface and swam for the shallows. When I reached the sandbar, I crawled out onto it.
The far bank of the river was untouched, but the side where I’d walked was a work in devastation. The ferns near the river were gone — only blackened earth remained.
Unsteadily, I stood.
A wall of flame hundreds of feet long was marching away from me across the valley, toward the mountain. The bank was littered with bones. The smaller ones were burned almost to ash. The larger ones were still burning.
The wind kicked up from behind me and, in the space of a minute, rose to a gale that almost knocked me down. It howled past me, plastering my wet hair across my face. The fire accelerated and grew. As I watched, it reached the tree line and began sweeping up through the canopy.
I’d done this. I didn’t know how, but I had.
Exultation coursed through me.
Those things had tried to kill me, and I’d killed them instead.
I started shaking. It took several long seconds to realize why — I was laughing. I sat down in the water and let it take me, the weird, crazy laughter.
Finally, the laughing stopped, and I just sat there, too exhausted to move.
Eventually I realized I was quite cold, so I waded back to the bank and pulled myself out onto the warm, blackened ground. I had no idea where my clothes had gone, and there was no sign of the ’pus, so I just sat there, shivering, as late aft
ernoon became night.
22
In the wee hours of the morning, Ghosteater padded across the burned plain, the fine ash and crunchy cinders not quite shifting beneath his once-paws. He had almost reached the valley the evening before, but the firestorm had sent him racing back up the mountain. The soft creatures’ rainforest had protected him from the flames, but reaching it in time had been a near thing. His only other hope would’ve been to shelter in the silence, and that might not have worked out so well.
He saw the pup from far off, huddled on the bank, shuddering with cold. He noted her lack of garments and thought it strange. Then, ever cautious — or usually cautious, at any rate — he sat down and considered her.
She was undoubtedly the source of the working. The marrow of the valley had her scent to it. A fire-worker, then? He opened his mouth, breathing deeply and tasting the scents. No, not fire — heat. The marrow was thrumming with the echoes of the energy it had been worked to produce.
No wonder the émigré wanted her. The wolf chuffed, disgusted. Humans and their games.
The isolate’s cinder-filled wind played through his fur. The language it spoke was ancient and strange.
He looked back at the girl, curled up on the blackened earth.
Hatchling, the wind sighed.
Flee.
23
“Pup.”
I just about jumped out of my skin, then scrambled around trying to get up.
“I will not hurt you,” the voice said.
Finally I managed to get to my knees. It was hard going — my muscles were cramped from the cold.
I stared into the night, my breath coming in gasps. I couldn’t see whoever’d spoken. There were about a million stars in the sky, but no moon. It was very dark.
I tried twice to speak before I managed to make any sound.
“Who’s there?”
“Ghosteater.”
My mind wrestled with the word, trying to understand. Madisyn’s giant doggie? Here?
“Ghosteater … from Dorf?”
He materialized out of the darkness, silvery coat luminous in the starlight, and walked toward me on his footless legs.
“Did you come here for me?”
Stupid question. Why else would he be here?
“The émigré Cordus sent people. I came too.”
He looked up at the stars and took several deep breaths. Then his golden eyes came back to my face, and he studied me in silence for some time. Finally, he walked up to me, circled like a huge hound, and lay down.
“Lie here,” he said. “I will warm you.”
He’d get no argument from me — I was freezing. I lay down next to him and nestled my back up against his belly, which was soft and very warm. I was still cold, but it was a lot better than before. I fell asleep immediately.
In the morning, Ghosteater used his keen nose to find my jeans and sweater, which had drifted some way downriver. While he was off retrieving them, I searched up and down the river for the ’pus but couldn’t find it.
After Ghosteater returned with my clothes and I laid them out to dry, he gave all my bites a thorough cleaning with his tongue. I had trouble thinking of him as an animal, so it seemed weirdly intimate. I tried to squirm away, but he put a massive foreleg across me and held me down. Then he caught a large fish in the river and watched as I ate it. I felt like a toddler under the eye of a stern parent.
Once I’d pulled my still-damp clothes on, I started to search again for the ’pus.
“What do you seek?”
“I had a tree-octopus with me yesterday. It fell in the river right about here.”
Ghosteater waded into the water, passing his nose delicately over the surface.
“It is dead.”
“You can’t possibly know that!”
The great beast stood in the water, looking up at me in silence. Then he came back to shore and shook himself.
“Scent tells the story. There are great fish in the river. They eat small creatures.”
I stared at him, not wanting to believe it. He just looked back at me, matter of fact, emotionless.
I sat down. All the exultation I’d felt the night before turned to bitterness. I’d managed to save myself from my own idiotic decision to leave the rainforest, but I’d gotten my friend killed. It’d died trying to save me. With all the power it had, no fish could’ve gotten it if it hadn’t depleted itself fighting the plant-dinos.
Ghosteater sat nearby. For a time he watched me in silent interest.
“Big things eat little things,” he said at last. “Big things die. Then little things eat them.”
“It wasn’t just a ‘little thing.’ It was my friend. It sacrificed itself for me. It’s my fault it died.”
He pondered me, tipping his head to the side like a dog. He seemed to find my attachment to the ’pus mysterious and interesting.
“Can you tell if it was male or female?”
Ghosteater thought for a few seconds, seeming to roll the remembered scent over his tongue.
“Female.”
I nodded, feeling empty. I wished I’d known before.
My rescue may have been well in hand, but the next day and a half weren’t pleasant.
I didn’t really understand Ghosteater’s explanation of how Graham’s rock had brought me here. He could speak to me, yes, but communicating complex ideas seemed beyond him. I could only take his word for it that some of Cordus’s people were coming.
I wanted to leave for the coast immediately, but the beast refused. It would take me several days to climb back up the mountain, and we had no way to carry water. Furthermore, my wounds had left me weak and in a lot of pain.
So there we stayed, waiting for the rest of the party to catch up. Ghosteater caught fish. I watched. He ate them. I ate them. He drank water. So did I. I tossed and squirmed, trying to find a way to sit or lie that wasn’t painful. He sat and watched me, always silent unless I asked him something. At night, I curled up against him and tried to stay warm.
On my third day in the valley, I saw Zion, Kara, and Williams coming down the mountain. It was humbling. The walk that had taken me five days had taken them less than three.
I got up and walked across the blackened plain to meet them, Ghosteater by my side. When they saw me coming, they broke into a jog. But despite the hurry, when they reached me, there was an oddly awkward moment where we all just stood there, looking at each other. I was thinking it seemed weird to see people here. I don’t know what they were thinking. Maybe they were amazed I was alive.
Kara broke the silence. “Beth, are you all right?”
It seemed like a bizarre question. There were a dozen ways in which I was and wasn’t all right. I thought about it. In the end, I just said, “Yeah.”
She came forward and took my hand. Her eyes widened. “Jesus, what did this to you?”
Williams studied me with an unreadable expression. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s covered with cuts and puncture wounds. It’s like something bit her all over.”
“Mini-dinosaurs,” I said.
That was greeted with silence.
“We didn’t see anything like that,” Zion finally said.
“They were in the dry forest,” Ghosteater said. “The fire killed them.”
Had I really killed them all? I felt sick.
“Okay, then. Let me just fix those cuts,” Kara said, sounding disturbed.
It was a quick healing. When she was done, I felt a million times better. She even took care of my sunburn. Then we walked back to the river.
Ghosteater declared the huge fish in the river harmless to humans, so the rescue party members bathed. I sat there feeling beyond pathetic for not just swimming across when the plant-dinos were after me. Then again, there were ferns on the other side of the river, too.
Zion built a fire and Williams set up tarps and sleeping bags for the night. Ghosteater fished. We roasted what he caught over the fire.
&
nbsp; Eating cooked food was good, but it felt wrong not to have the ’pus there to share it with.
While we ate, night fell. I finally got a comprehensible explanation about Graham’s rock: it was one-half of a “carven strait,” a rare and ancient device used for traveling. They didn’t have to be opened with a working. Instead, they generated their own opening: if someone touched one stone, they’d be transported to wherever the companion happened to be. Apparently the art of making them was lost, and Cordus had been extremely surprised to find a set of them at large.
So although I hadn’t noticed it, there had to be a stone ball in the sea where I arrived that matched the one I’d touched in Justine’s room. Touching the one here would take us back to Cordus’s estate, where Graham’s rock was now.
After these explanations, an uncomfortable silence fell. No doubt they wanted to know what had happened to me, but I didn’t want to talk about it, especially not about the fire. Kara asked me a few questions, and I answered monosyllabically. When she persisted, I just got up and walked away, tossing them some lame excuse about stretching my legs.
I kept going a ways, well out of the circle of firelight. When I finally stopped, I looked up at the stars. There were so many of them. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in a blaze of white light, mottled with red and gold and swirls of darkness. I didn’t recognize any constellations.
I could taste soot at the back of my throat. The wind blew the stuff all over the place.
I had done this. I’d come to some little corner of the S-Em. I’d found Octoworld, Miniworld, and Fernworld, and I’d destroyed at least two of the three. I’d made a generous friend and gotten her killed.
At the same time, I’d survived. I’d survived what Graham did to me, and I’d survived my own bad choices.
The wind found the holes in my sweater, chilling me.
Eventually, Kara came looking for me, and I went back to the fire.
Everyone except Ghosteater crawled into a sleeping bag. No one said anything.
Climbing back up the mountain took almost two days because everyone had to stick to the slower pace I set. As we finally crested the summit, I was terribly afraid I would find the tree-’puses’ rainforest burned as well, but it was intact. The fire damage stopped abruptly as we walked into the rain: there were blackened earth and torched trunks on one side of an invisible line, lush ferns and towering trees on the other.