“You can’t leave her!” Wisteria said. “What if the Blade Kin find her?”
“She’s right, by God!” Scandal said, “Give her to me before I blow my britches!”
“Perhaps she will move in with the Dryad who watches that forest,” Phylomon said. “Even if a Blade Kin finds her, that’s his problem.” Though he was trying to comfort Wisteria, she frowned in response. Behind them, Tirilee picked up her food and robes and began to follow.
That night they camped in a deep glen among pine trees. They made a tiny fire and put it out early. Dire wolves howled, their deep voices echoing over the mountains, deep and haunting.
For a long time, Tull sat on watch. So near to Craal, he could not sleep. It seemed like a miracle to him that they had not encountered more of the Blade Kin yet. A light snow fell and the world was hushed so that Tull could hear each dry snowflake land upon the icy crust. At midnight, he woke Scandal and put him on duty, then lay with Wisteria.
He put his hand upon her belly, felt to see if there was any roundness, if the child grew yet. He felt nothing but Wisteria’s soft flesh, and that alone made him smile. She stirred in her sleep and grabbed his hand, pressed it tight against her stomach, and Tull slept.
He dreamed it was a sunny day, and that he was a child lying upon the ground, staring up at a pea vine that grew incredibly high as it twisted around the trunk of an ironwood tree. And upon that vine was a woolly black caterpillar, climbing the twisted vine, higher and higher, heading for the sun. As the caterpillar reached the top of the winding stair, it split at the back, and its black skin fell away, and a glorious butterfly emerged with enormous wings in shades of iridescent black and purple. It flew away.
Tull was so startled that he woke. He had the strange sensation that he had dreamed the dream that inspired Huron Tech to build his great tower, and he wondered if it were possible that Huron could have had that dream in this very spot, as if Huron had left the dream sitting there for the next sleeping person to pick up.
It was a strange thought, the kind of thing Tull sometimes thought about when drowsy. He wondered, If I sleep in Scandal’s inn at a bed where a thousand people have dreamed, what dreams will I find there?
Tull heard heavy feet kicking up snow. A scream rose, a high-pitched shriek like the cry of an owl, and Scandal began cursing. Tull jumped up, naked, and grabbed his spear and rushed forward. Wisteria cried out and Phylomon and Ayuvah scrambled for weapons.
Scandal was struggling with someone dressed in fur robes, had thrown the person to the ground, and blood dripped from the innkeeper’s shoulder. Tull rushed forward, saw that Scandal held Tirilee, and the Dryad was kicking at him.
“Help!” Tirilee shouted, “He’s raping me!”
Tull grabbed Scandal’s leg, and the fat man kicked him, trying to stay atop Tirilee.
Ayuvah and Phylomon pulled at Scandal’s arm and Scandal growled, “Watch it! I can’t let her go. She stabbed me!” Scandal held Tirilee’s knife arm, and backed away with Tull pulling at his shoulder.
“What’s going on here?” Phylomon shouted, and Tirilee crawled back a few steps.
“Scandal tried to rape me!” Tirilee said.
“No—I,” Scandal protested, “I couldn’t take the smell. She was sneaking into camp, stealing things, and.…” He held his arm, and there was a small nick on it.
“So you tried to rape her,” Phylomon said.
Tirilee got up. The smell of wheat fields and wildflowers emanated from her. She was shaken and crying and looking at the men in horror. Wisteria put her arms around the Dryad, brushed back her silver hair. But Tirilee pushed Wisteria away and took off running up the trail toward Craal. Wisteria shouted to her, but the Dryad kept running.
“Leave her,” Phylomon said. “She needs to stay away from us for awhile.”
“It’s dangerous out there!” Wisteria shouted.
“It’s dangerous here, too,” Phylomon argued. “She carries danger with her. Her Time of Devotion is nearly upon her.”
***
Chapter 13: The Pass
The pheromones of the Dryad lingered in the air, upon the wagon, upon the eating utensils, upon the clothes. Though Tirilee did not come back, for Tull it was as if she never left.
He feared her return. He feared it worse than the knowledge that they were almost to the summit of the pass, and once they crossed the summit, they would be in Craal.
Tull went to bed after an hour and dreamed that Tirilee was in Craal riding the back of Adjonai, as if the God of Terror were her beast of burden.
In the morning, they found Tirilee’s footprints heading up the canyon. Tull kept wondering if the Dryad would return, for she craved men as much as they craved her.
At midday, Born-in-Snow came down from the mountains and hooked up the wagon. They traveled through a treeless valley, and reached a glen at the top where they found why Tirilee had not returned.
Two men had been making a fire-less camp in the wooded glen. By all signs, they had stayed put for at least a week. Tirilee had stumbled into their camp and had been dragged down by one of the men. After a short scuffle, she’d managed to slit their throats.
Phylomon checked the ground for signs of others, his gaze lingering on the bodies. Both men were missing their right ears, both had carried guns, both wore tattoos of a black hooded figure upon their arms.
“These men were Blade Kin,” Phylomon said. “Brotherhood of the Black Cyclops.”
“Some kind of guards? Maybe a band of them?” Scandal asked.
Phylomon said, “The Brotherhood is not a band, it is a sign of ownership. Members of the Brotherhood belong to Tantos, the Lord of Retribution. They enforce Craal’s laws, gather taxes. It looks as if they saw Tirilee, waited to catch her. Most likely they saw her silver hair in the moonlight, knew she was a woman. I doubt they knew what kind of trouble they had on their hands.”
“Her kisses would have blinded them,” Tull said. He imagined the lust they had felt for her as they died. They would have been helpless.
“Maybe,” Phylomon said. “Either way, she killed them. We should thank her for that. We’d not have been able to cross that meadow back there without being seen.”
Tirilee’s tracks forged ahead through the woods. Phylomon gave a gun to Wisteria, taught her how to load and aim it, gave the other to Scandal, and they moved on for two more hours until they climbed a small hill. Before they reached its summit, Phylomon motioned for them to stop.
Phylomon knelt and whispered, “When we cross the softly, take great care. Walk softly. Ironwood woman says that the Blade Kin have a small fortress on the other side of the pass. We must see if we can skirt it in the dark.”
They crossed the top and stood in the shelter of a stand of pine. Below them, not a half mile downhill in a narrow gulch, squatted a small fortress made of gray stones, with a turret to hold a cannon and six crenelated towers, each trailing smoke from the evening cooking fires within. Beyond that was a wide valley without snow, and far beyond that a range of brown hills.
Tirilee sat hunched, waiting for them at the tree line. She stepped forward pointed at the plains, and said, “Friends, welcome to the kingdom of Craal!”
Until that moment, the fear Tull felt from the Dryad had blinded him to the fear he felt at the thought of entering Craal. He looked across the plain and saw that which he feared most—an army of at least a hundred thousand men camped in black tents on the plain, fields black with their war mastodons. At the sound of that name, Tull felt the earth wrench under his feet and a knot of terror twisted in his belly. The ground itself roared like thunder, and Ayuvah cried out and fired his rifle into the air.
Tull turned to look at him, for the sound of gunfire would surely raise the Blade Kin. Ayuvah was staring at the fortress, at the army down below, his mouth and eyes wide with terror, and Phylomon struggled to wrest the rifle from the Neanderthal’s hands.
My God! Tull thought, This is Craal! The blood pounded in his ears with a
great roar. Against his will, his feet turned as if to run back to Smilodon Bay, yet there was no strength in them. He could not move them.
It is only kwea, he thought, trying to control his fear, and he felt his blood seemingly turn to ice in his veins. A great cold pierced him.
“Adjonai!” Ayuvah called, falling to the ground in fear.
***
Chapter 14: Facing the Dark God
Tull followed Ayuvah’s line of sight, and out on the plain below, beyond the army with its endless lines of tents, a giant rose from the earth as if he had suddenly wakened.
He pushed himself up from the ground and crouched. He was a powerful creature, with a heavy chest and purpled skin, with hands like a buzzard’s talons. His great black loincloth hung nearly to the ground, made of dust and tatters of the night.
His face was a decaying husk, the image of a man consumed by his own ruthless passions. A sickening green light glowed from his eyes, and diseases flowed out from his feet like rivers.
In his left hand he carried a wooden war shield covered with snakeskin that shone with despair, and in his right he held a shimmering silver kutow with two stone ax heads that radiated terror. Upon his brow was a crown of fiery worms that wriggled and twisted high in the air as they struggled for release.
Tull wanted to run. This can’t be real, he thought.
He knew that it could only be kwea, an illusion born of his own fear, but he recalled Phylomon’s words: “You seek the face of the God of Terror!”
Tull stood face to face with the Adjonai, and he was forced to believe what his eyes told him.
Tull shouted a war cry and pulled his kutow from the scabbard at his back.
The god turned to gaze upon Tull, and Tull returned the monster’s gaze steadily, but his legs began to tremble.
The god watched Tull with disdain. His monstrous voice cracked like the bones of men, and he commanded Tull, “Assume your position in the great wheel of evil.”
The great wheel of evil … Tull thought, where the souls of men were damned to trudge in endless circles, praising the god of terror. Tull knew that he should die, give up his life now.
The weakness in Tull’s legs increased, and Tull could not tell whether it was the earth or his own legs that shook. He felt himself struggling under a great weight, as if the breath was being crushed from his lungs. He suddenly understood that the god wanted him to kneel, that the god was trying to force him to his knees. Tull struggled to hold his legs straight, and the god simply glared.
Wisteria grabbed Tull’s arm and shouted, “What is it? What is it?”
At Wisteria’s touch, Tull’s strength seemed to renew. Energy flowed into him. Tull closed his eyes and basked in her touch, invigorated by it. He remembered the kwea of their wedding night, and it fed him like fruit in the desert.
He let her hold him for a long time, and when he looked up, Adjonai had vanished back into the dust.
Ayuvah was on his knees, sobbing in the snow. Scandal bent over to help him up. “God rot you,” Scandal said, “did you have to fire the gun?”
Tull went to Ayuvah, held the Pwi. “Adjonai is not here,” Tull said softly. “He is not even real. He is only a phantom created by our fear. Think of Etanai, back home, the kwea of your wedding night. He will go away. You and I, we are like children who imagine monsters in the night because we are afraid.”
Ayuvah held Tull’s leg for a moment. “No,” he said. “It was not our fear. It was the sorcery of the Blade Kin that made him real. Still, I feel him leaving.”
Tull looked at the small border fortress, at the bleak valleys of Craal beyond with its endless tents. He watched it, saw how they could skirt the army by cutting through the forests to the north. Out there, in cities beyond the edge of sight, forty million Pwi lived in slavery. How many tears of pain and despair have the Pwi cried here? Tull wondered. How much blood has watered the land?
The kwea of their torments saturated the air, and the sky was unnaturally dark. Their nightmares had seeped into the ground, seeped into the tiny white roots of every tender blade of grass. The land looked permeated by filth and evil and rot.
Tull had always imagined that the sky over Craal would be as blue as the sky over Smilodon Bay, that the grass would be as green. Yet the kwea of this place felt foul.
Down below them in the valley, a dozen men and two women, all wrapped in bulky furs, issued from the fortress gates at a run, casting searching glances along the hillsides. Seven of them carried guns. By a strange trick of acoustics, Tull heard one man say quite plainly, “It was a warning shot, I tell you!”
Phylomon, Born-in-Snow, and Wisteria all crouched low.
Tull knelt beside Ayuvah, put his hand to his shoulder. “At home, your wife dreams of your caress. Hold her in your dreams now.”
Ayuvah lay on the ground, gasping in great breaths, and after a moment he whimpered. “I cannot go any farther. My legs will not let me walk into Craal.”
“Then I will carry you,” Tull said.
Phylomon took Ayuvah’s rifle, cracked the barrel and put a shell in, then took another handful of shells. “No one’s going into Craal for the moment,” he said. “We’ve got an hour till sunset, and I hope to God we can get them mad enough to come up after us.”
Beside him, Born-in-Snow gazed down into the valley and grinned a feral grin, the type of expression Tull would not expect from a vegetarian until he remembered that the Hukm only grin in anger, when they are ready to kill.
Phylomon sat in the snow, propped his elbow upon his knee, and aimed the gun. For a long time he held his breath, then gently squeezed at the trigger.
When the gun sounded, one of the women in the valley below spun and dropped. Phylomon cracked the barrel open, inserted another shell.
The men below them jumped for cover, and those with guns began firing seemingly at random, but a bullet slammed into the branches over Tull’s head.
“Damn,” Scandal said, “Why shoot the woman?”
“Among the Blade Kin, one woman will take several husbands,” Phylomon said. “If we’re lucky, we can turn half those men into widowers.”
Phylomon took a long slow aim, fired a second shot. One man’s head split open as the bullet lifted him and knocked him back a dozen feet in the air.
Scandal raised his own gun, took aim, but Phylomon signaled for him to wait.
Phylomon shouted in Pwi, “Your slavers have taken my wife, Feyava! Bring her back to care for her children, or I swear, many more of you will die!”
The slavers below seemed awestruck at the thought of a single Neanderthal attacking them. One shouted, “Are you Pwi or Okanjara?”
“I am Pwi,” Phylomon shouted. “I will return in two weeks. Bring her, or more of you will die!” Phylomon squeezed off a third shot, killed a man, then fell silent and did not move.
Heavy snow began to fall. For nearly an hour, the slavers below held to cover, but then retreated to their castle, dragging their dead. When they were safely within the gate, Phylomon breathed easier.
“They will come for us tonight. I know the Blade Kin. They cannot let such a challenge remain unanswered. They lost three today, and they know their two guards are dead. They will come out in force to hunt for one mad Pwi. But we will hunt them.”
Beside him, Born-in-Snow growled deep in the back of his throat.
***
Chapter 15: Slavers and Slaves
The group returned to their wagon. Born-in-Snow had the mammoth pull it back down the canyon. Their tracks skirted precariously close to a high bluff, wet with deep snow, and once they passed it, Phylomon pulled the wagon a quarter mile, till he was partly hidden in a glade, and loaded the swivel gun.
The snow continued to fall in great flurries, and the wind sent rooster tails of snow showering from the cliffs above. In the space of three hours, their tracks were covered.
Born-in-Snow took out his war club, wrapped it in leather to give it strength.
“Remember, when
you go to the fortress, kill only the Blade Kin,” Phylomon warned Born-in-Snow in finger language. “Leave the slaves. Leave the people in cages.”
Born-in-Snow shook his fist in the air in sign of acknowledgment, turned his back and trotted away, his white fur blending in with the snow.
They waited. Thor was but a narrow green disk, hidden behind dark clouds. Snow mounted. Phylomon watched their trail in earnest, but never saw the Blade Kin. Sometime in the early morning, Born-in-Snow roared. Phylomon aimed the cannon at the cliff above and fired.
Walls of ice and powder roared free of the canyon walls, breaking trees as if they were twigs, destroying everything in their path. The Blade Kin shouted, tried to beat the onrush. Phylomon saw them then, figures dressed in white, scattering from the cliff in the moonlight, but the snow was deep and thick, and no man could run so fast.
When the avalanche subsided, snow and ice crystals still filled the air. Born-in-Snow rushed over the snow from his hiding place, making sure none of the Blade Kin had escaped the avalanche. Phylomon and the others rushed to help him, but before they reached the spot, Born-in-Snow began racing up to the fortress in Craal, taking vast strides six-feet across.
Phylomon, Tull, and Ayuvah dug in the snow, and recovered several guns from the dead. They went back to their wagon where Wisteria was waiting.
“God, what do we do now?” Scandal asked.
“We sleep,” Phylomon said. “Or at least, some of us should sleep. It has been a long day, and we have a longer one tomorrow.”
“But shouldn’t we help Born-in-Snow?” Wisteria asked.
Phylomon pondered. Once inside the fortress walls, the Hukm would seek out guards and kill them, and next would come the women and the children in their beds. It was not work that any of these innocents from Smilodon Bay could stomach, yet they had no other choice. If they were going to assure their escape from the pass, it had to be done.
“Born-in-Snow has sworn to take twenty lives in retribution for his brother. He does not want our help,” he answered. “Go to sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Page 9