by Glen Cook
I got the hell out of there fast.
Daiged and Rhogiro arrived just as I did my fade. Then the masonry really started to fly.
Something flapped past. I dodged, afraid I had an owl girl after me. “Awk!” The flyer smacked into a brick wall. “This thing cannot see in the dark.” Flap-flap. “Garrett?”
“Where the hell have you been?” I felt around till I found the bird. It was really dark out now.
“You lost me when you stopped to eat. I had to tend to business elsewhere. I returned to a situation fraught with anticipation. As I flew up to reconnoiter it, the excitement began in earnest. I managed to trace you by staving close to the ugly one.”
I muttered something about pots and kettles, got the critter installed on my shoulder, and resumed moving.
“Gotten real exciting, hasn’t it?”
“They have begun to indulge in brutal destruction, like petulant children. Make for the park. And do move faster if you wish to get away.”
“I can’t go any faster.” I was slipping and sliding all over, barely keeping my footing. The water under the sleet had frozen into a treacherous glaze.
And then it started to snow.
Snow leaves great tracks — unless it comes down real heavy. It began to look like this was just the night for that.
Another big blockbluster of a battle shaped up behind us. The gods shrieked and squawked like divine fishwives.
“I need warmer clothes,” I said. “I’m going to freeze my butt off.”
“You can afford to lose some of it. Head for the park. Miss Cat should meet us there. She will take us to safety.” The bird was shaking too.
The snowfall lessened as we distanced ourselves from the battle, where thunder and lightning had begun to lark about. In fact, for a while that got so enthusiastic I figured Imar and Lang must be working it out god to god.
Them dancing gave us a chance to grab a new lead.
“I don’t got much go-power left,” I whimpered at the Goddamn Parrot as I stumbled into the park. The snow there was ankle deep and rising fast, but there was no ice or sleet underneath. It had to be real nasty back where it all started.
A breeze was rising, speeding toward the center of conflict. It slammed snowflakes into my face. They were big wet ones. I muttered and cursed. The Goddamn Parrot, just to be difficult, cursed and muttered. I trudged in what I guessed to be the general direction of the place where Cat had landed before. I couldn’t tell anything for sure. It was darker than the inside of a shylock’s heart.
47
“Garrett! Over here!”
Cat. I turned my head right and left to get a sense of her direction. I caught a toe on something, tumbled into a low place where snow had gathered eight inches deep. The Goddamn Parrot cussed me for being clumsy.
Cat appeared out of the milky shower. “Here.” She offered me a blanket. I noticed that she was dressed for the weather. Which suggested she had an idea what was going on. But I didn’t get a chance to ask. “Get up!” she barked. “We have to hurry. Come on! Some of them are on your trail again.”
Her name was apt. She could see in the dark. She seemed to have trouble hearing in the dark, though. My “What the hell is going on?” fell into the snow without so much as a muted thump.
Cat led me about a hundred yards at right angles to my previous course. And there stood all her winged sidekicks, muttering seditiously amongst themselves. The weather didn’t seem to bother Fourteen. The horses awarded me equine looks more laden than usual with the semi-intelligent malice of their tribe. But we did have something in common at last. They weren’t happy about being out here, either.
“Shake your tail, Sugar Hips. Ya got bottom feeders headed your way.”
I got a look at Cat’s crew because way up in the snow clouds a pinpoint of light brighter than any noonday sun had popped and had taken a dozen seconds to fade away.
Cat helped me mount one of her beasts. It seemed to be the same one as before. And, behold! For the second time running I managed to get on top facing the same direction he was. It was an age of great wonders.
The Goddamn Parrot wanted to say something but couldn’t squeeze it out. He couldn’t control his shivering. Parrots are not meant for cold weather. I tucked him inside my blanket. He slithered around till he found a way inside my shirt. Then he settled down to shiver and mutter to himself.
“Cat, will you please tell me...”
Somewhere a wolf howled. Somewhere something named Nog polished its only thought. I didn’t catch Cat’s shout, but it was no answer.
The horses started to run. My blanket flapped in the wind. I held on with my legs while I tried to get myself wrapped again. I was shaking beyond all hope of control. It couldn’t be long before the cold caused irreversible damage.
Fourteen zoomed past, bumblebee wings humming. “Grab your ass, Slick.” He giggled. The bottom fell out.
My mount had run off the end of something again. Its huge wings extended, beat the flake-filled air. The cold breeze roared past, not quite as chilly now. I started to worry about frostbite but soon had trouble keeping a sharp edge on my thoughts.
Fourteen buzzed around running his mouth till even my ride got fed up and tried to take a bite out of him as he zipped past. A couple of cherub feathers whipped past me. Fourteen squealed and headed for Cat, plopping down into her lap.
Another one of those incredibly bright points of light popped over the north side of TunFaire. There was too much snow to tell anything else about it. I was trapped in a cold bubble in a sea of milk.
That flash made the flying horses whinny in dismay. They redoubled their efforts to gain altitude. Fourteen started cussing. Cat asked him what was going on. The horses turned directly away from the flash. Cat’s mount drifted away from mine.
Curious. But I didn’t have much hope of finding out what was going on. Everybody was giving me the mushroom treatment, keeping me in the dark and feeding me horse manure.
It all had to do with the feud going on back there, of course.
Something came down from the north and passed between my mount and Cat’s. It went by too fast to see, arriving with a hiss, then leaving a baby thunderclap to mark its passing.
The horses yelped and tried desperately to get going faster.
Did my honey shout an explanation across, just in case it would help me stay alive? Sure she did. Right after she told me the guaranteed-to-win numbers I ought to bet in the Imperial Games.
I discovered that our course was southward because we arose above thinning clouds. I made out what had to be the Haiden Light at Great Cape, downriver thirty miles, south of town. We were way up high now, moving fast — and finding warmer air quickly, thanks to no gods. A little thumbnail clipping of a moon lay upon the eastern horizon, smiling or smirking.
I looked over my shoulder. TunFaire lay under an inverted bowl of clouds that flickered and glowed. Serpents of mist writhed upon the surface of the bowl and gradually sank toward the epicenter beneath.
The Goddamn Parrot got active suddenly. He wriggled till he got his ugly little head out into the wind. “Garrett. A dram of information. Shinrise the Destroyer turns out to be...”
“A Lambar Coast war god? Hangs around with cherubs and winged horses?”
“How did you know?” Next thing to a whine there, Old Bones.
“I remembered.” Under stress some guys just can’t shut up. Back when I was in the Corps we had had us one of those for a while, a kid from the Lambar Coast.
He had called on Shinrise whenever the going got tough.
One of those awful pinpoint flashes occurred on the far side of the city again. Ectoplasmic light expanded around it. For just an instant a point of darkness existed within that globe. Then cloud serpents began to spill down and twist into the lightning-laced mass below.
Lightning popped to our right front, close and over-poweringly intense. Cat and the horses screamed. Fourteen went on a cussing jag. Because I was still looking bac
k to the north, I didn’t suffer the blinding worst of it, but a brick wall of wind did smack me and almost bust me loose for one long and thrilling downward walk in the chill night air. I clutched mane hair and turned to see what had happened.
As I turned I thought I saw something cross the fragment of a moon. If I had not known that such things were mythical, the imaginings of men who hadn’t ever seen an actual flying thunder lizard, I might have believed it was a dragon.
I faced front as that insane light’s intensity dwindled to where it did not hurt the eye anymore. It was the same phenomenon again, only this time so close we got hit by the expanding ectoplasmic sphere. It smashed past me. My mount staggered. Blinded by the flash, he tried desperately to stay level while he recovered.
There was a hole in the night where the pop had taken place. It was a darkness deeper than that inside a coffin buried in an underground tomb on the dark side of a world without a sun. Then, just for an instant, something reached through that hole, something that was darker still, something so dark that it glistened in the light. Rainbows slithered over it like an oil film on water. It came my way, but I don’t think it was after me.
The Goddamn Parrot went berserk inside my shirt. Either he wanted to get away bad or he had decided to snack on my guts.
Fourteen squealed like somebody had set his toes on fire.
Suddenly it was colder than any cold I had endured yet. The reaching something popped back through its window of darkness. For an instant, before the hole shrank to invisibility, a dark alien eye glared through, filled with a malice that was almost crushing in its weight.
All that didn’t last more than a couple of seconds. My horse barely had time to beat his wings a full stroke.
The cold penetrated right down to the core of me. I knew, whether I wanted to believe it or not, that I had looked right into the realm of the gods. Maybe the eye belonged to something so unpleasant that the gods would willingly destroy my world rather than be forced to go back where that waited.
Hmm. That didn’t feel quite right, though I had a suspicion that I had just seen something a lot nastier than any of the gods who were complicating my life now.
Damn! I couldn’t see Cat anywhere. And my mount seemed to be having a seizure. Not to mention the fact that the ground looked like it was about eleven miles down.
I don’t like heights very much. They give me the jim-jams in a big way.
48
“Worse things waiting.” When I was a lad, that was the inevitable response of the old folks if you complained about anything. “You got it easy, young man. They’s worse things waiting.”
They knew what they were talking about, too.
I hung on. I kept my eyes closed tight while we fell. My mount banged the air feebly with spasming wings. It screamed a horsey scream, only about fifteen times as loud as a normal ground-bound beast might have.
Just the way I always wanted to go, at the age of four hundred and eight. Riding a waking nightmare.
“They finally got me,” I muttered. I took even tighter hold of the creature’s mane. This one damned horse was going with me.
Another horse shrieked from far above. Sounded like it was coming closer fast. I cracked one eye to see how far we had fallen. “Oh, shit!”
I should have known better.
My mount didn’t like the prognosis either. He got serious about the flapping and flopping and got his hooves right side down and his wings floundering around in the right direction.
The cherub came whirring out of the night, hummed around and around, just hanging out like he enjoyed watching things fall. He chuckled a lot. Then he held up suddenly, staring, aghast. “Oh, no! That blows everything.”
I looked around, spied a half-dozen tower-tall, transparent, and obviously pissed-off figures striding toward TunFaire. None of them were Shayir or Godoroth.
Neither did I think they belonged to the Board, whose controls had failed so abominably. It looked like some of the really big guys had decided to forgo normal business — making guys sacrifice their firstborn or sneaking up on virgins disguised as critters — while they attended to some emergency heavenly housekeeping.
Fourteen shot toward me, grabbed hold, scrambled up under my blanket. I grumbled, “It’s getting a little crowded in here.” That distracted me from the screaming I wanted to do.
The damned horse got it all together. It beat hell out of the air with its monster wings. To no avail. We had too much downward momentum. Whambomy! We hit. We shot on down through about half a mile of tree branches. Lucky us, they slowed us down. Lucky us, none of them were big enough to stop us cold. Lucky us, when we hit water I only went in up to my ears.
We surfaced. The horse whooped and hooted and gasped after its lost breath. The Goddamn Parrot wriggled its head out of my clothes again, began a wet and lonely soliloquy filled with every cussword the Dead Man could recall from about fifty languages.
Old Chuckles has been around a long time.
The cherub came out and hovered. He agreed with the bird.
It was all my fault.
Same as it ever was.
Personally, I was too busy being glad I was still in one piece to give either one of them a hard time. But good ideas for later did occur to me.
“Where the hell are we?”
Fourteen snapped, “In a freaking swamp, moron.”
That wasn’t exactly hard to miss. There were mosquitoes out there big enough to carry off small pets. Otherwise, though, it was your typically wimpy Karentine swamp. If you overlooked a few poisonous bugs and snakes, it would be completely safe. Nothing like the swamps we endured down in the islands, where we faced snakes as long as anchor chains and the alligators who survived by eating them.
I found myself not feeling at all awful — for a guy who had just missed falling to his death and had missed drowning only by inches.
That horse had one ounce of brains. He didn’t try to fly out of there. As soon as he got his breath back, he let out a couple of forlorn neighs. He seemed surprised when they were answered from above. Fourteen buzzed upward, rattling and clattering and cussing his way through the branches. In minutes he was back, a fresh, competition-class banger in his mouth. “This way.” My mount headed out. He was not inclined to hear suggestions or commentary from me.
The beast pulled in his wings completely. He proceeded as straight horse and regained his strength quickly. The cherub led us to solid ground fast. Minutes later, we left the trees. The horse broke into a trot that graduated to a canter and then a vigorous gallop. This continued for a while, the horse not growing winded but not getting off the ground either. We went over hill and dale and farm while Cat and her mount cruised overhead. Our course tended southwest. Time seemed to take the night off. Before long we left the farmlands.
I checked the moon. For sure, it hadn’t traveled nearly as far as it should have. We were on elf hill time. And covering a lot of ground. Already we were in territory that remained unsettled because people were too superstitious to live there.
A sudden vague glow limned some hills up ahead. It made them look like they were standing in a circle, looking down at something they had surrounded. “Oh boy.” It just got worse. I poked the Goddamn Parrot.
That gaudy chicken did not respond — except to bite my finger. Evidently we were beyond the Dead Man’s range. At last. With the Goddamn Parrot, mercifully, left with little command of his vocal apparatus.
Great. Once again I was getting a lesson in watching out what I wished for because my wishes might come true.
Those hills had to be the Bohdan Zhibak. That name translates into modern Karentine as “The Haunted Circle.” Over the ages a lot of really awful things are supposed to have happened there. And tonight, it seemed, the tabled Fires of Doom were ablaze inside the Circle. Fourteen didn’t want to get any closer. He was not shy about telling everyone about it.
49
Cat landed. We dismounted. She told Fourteen to shut up or go away.
I hung on to a stirrup in order to maintain my defiance of the seductions of gravity. I felt like I had been living in that saddle for days. I glared at Cat. “You saved me from those lunatics back in town so you could sacrifice me out here?”
“Calm down. Fourteen, you shut up. You can be put back away with your brothers and sisters.”
That worked on the cherub but not on me, though I protested, “I am calm. If I wasn’t a veteran of all that screwiness in TunFaire I might not be calm. I might have a case of the rattlemouth like my buddy Fourteen. But, I mean, what’s to get excited about, just because I find myself alongside the Haunted Hills? Just because there’s all that doom light burning up out of the ground over there without, I bet, there being a real fire anywhere around? None of that ought to frighten a mouse.”
I saw something move across the valley ahead of us, little more than a shadow hurrying, late for work. I didn’t want to be on its list of chores.
“Plans change, Garrett. Originally Mom just wanted to get you out of there. But that was before the disaster.”
“Which disaster? They come in strings lately.” I dug the Goddamn Parrot out of my shirt, looked around in there to see what damage he had done. I wasn’t going to die, but I was sore enough that I would have strangled the ridiculous little feather duster if he had not been too dull-witted to appreciate what I was doing. I parked him on my shoulder. He had just enough wit to hang on. Fourteen had a notion to take up residence opposite him. I did not feel guilty when I swatted him away.
“Which disaster? The breakdown of discipline. The squabbling. When they use their powers that way they weaken the walls of reality. What is that thing?” She meant the Goddamn Parrot.
“A really bad practical joke.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a parrot. Argh! Shiver me timbers! Like that.”
“I’m so pleased that you can maintain your sense of humor.” But she didn’t sound pleased.
“It’s all I’ve got that’s all mine. What the hell are we doing out here?” Not even Winger would have the numskull nerve to go wandering around the Bohdan Zhibak.