“If it was a different one, I would have done something more vehement than commenting on it.” Mahliki’s humor sounded forced.
Ashara sympathized. She wiped sweat from her brow. It was hot and close in the cave, and her entire body ached.
“Vehement?” Maldynado asked. “Truly? Exuberant is usually the response the ladies give me.”
A rifle thundered near Ashara’s ear. The makarovi let out a soft grunt as the bullet struck its jaw, but despite its injuries, it seemed largely impervious to the ammunition. Arrows would be even more useless, though it hardly mattered. Like Maldynado, Ashara had lost her weapon in the scramble to hide in the cave. Amaranthe had been shooting periodically, trying to slow the creature down.
“I’m low on ammunition,” she said.
“It’s not doing anything, anyway,” Maldynado said.
“I know. But I keep hoping Sicarius will hear the noise and show up to help. You would think they would have found Mahliki’s trail by now.”
“Assuming they didn’t run into the shaman.”
Amaranthe fell silent. Ashara had been hoping for rescue, too, but did the others even know about the makarovi? Or were they tracking the shaman? He should be nearby if he was controlling the makarovi, but Ashara didn’t know the extent of his powers, other than that his talents were far greater than the average practitioner’s. He might be a hundred meters away or five miles away. Still, the sound of those rifle shots ought to travel far in the quiet forest.
“About that shaman,” Maldynado said. “How did you get away from him?”
“I don’t think I did,” Mahliki said.
“What do you mean?” Amaranthe asked.
“He and his men captured me last night, and I couldn’t do anything to escape. I do appreciate you trying to buy me time to do so, Ashara.”
Ashara grunted. As if being knocked off a cliff by a cougar counted as buying anyone time.
“But they didn’t take my pack away from me. Nobody else wanted to carry it. After the group stopped to rest, I worked my way into it, which wasn’t easy with my wrists bound. I pulled out some of the fungi I’d been dehydrating.”
“Fungi you’d been dehydrating,” Maldynado said. “I wonder how many other women in the world say such things.”
“Not the ones whose apple baskets you’re usually fondling, I’m sure,” Amaranthe said, then fired again. Her bullet struck the makarovi square in the nose, and it backed away for the first time, letting out something between a roar and a sneeze. “Should have aimed for that before,” she muttered.
“I’m only fondling Yara’s basket right now, and you’re right: talk of fungus drying doesn’t usually come up.”
“Ashara,” Mahliki said, “do you remember how I said the spores might act as neurotoxins to humans?”
“Vaguely,” Ashara said, her gaze toward the entrance. The makarovi had not reappeared. Had Amaranthe’s shot hurt it badly? Or had it sensed someone coming? She believed the hole might be large enough for it to crawl through now, but if it had been injured badly enough, maybe it couldn’t climb up.
Ashara inched forward, tempted to stick her head outside to check. If one of them could slip away and find the others, Basilard’s young priest friend might be able to break the shaman’s hold on it.
“I’d made a powder to examine when I got home,” Mahliki said, “but I decided to throw it in the shaman’s face, in the hope that he would inhale it and it might affect him like a drug. It was a vain hope, but from my own brief interactions with it—remember how it made me lightheaded?—I thought it might be particularly virulent. I managed to fling some in his face when he didn’t have any protective measures activated. We were walking through the woods, and he didn’t realize I’d gotten my hands free. He had just smiled and said something about calling in help to deal with those tracking him.”
Ashara grimaced as she listened, imagining that makarovi chasing after Basilard. What if it already had? What if there wasn’t any help coming, because the rest of the team had already been dealt with?
She took a couple of steps toward the exit. The makarovi still hadn’t reappeared, and she couldn’t hear its grunts and growls. The stench hadn’t gone away, but like that of a skunk, it might linger long after it left the area.
“As I said, I wasn’t expecting much,” Mahliki continued, “but he surprised me—and his men—by tipping over backward and thudding to the ground with his eyes rolled up in his head.”
“He’s lying unconscious somewhere?” Maldynado asked. “That can’t still be true, or his beast wouldn’t be after us.”
“I’ve had a sense a couple of times of an unlikely intelligence from the makarovi,” Mahliki said. “I wondered if he was linked with it when I hit him, and it caused… I’m not sure if this can happen, but maybe he got stuck in the link, seeing the world through the makarovi’s eyes.”
“Powerful shamans can do that,” Ashara said. “I’m not sure about getting stuck, but I’ve heard of some of them dying because they abandoned their own bodies and were so caught up in being in the form of some powerful predator that their human bodies were killed. It would be dangerous to link so intimately with something with such strong predatory instincts as a makarovi.”
“Dangerous, how?” Amaranthe asked.
“You might lose yourself in the link, start seeing your allies as dinner. Maybe the fungus—”
A shadow blotting out the sunlight was Ashara’s only warning. The makarovi lunged through the cave opening, snarling and reaching for her.
Caught halfway to the exit, she threw herself backward in a clumsy roll. Sharp claws slashed through the back of her shirt, and fresh pain assaulted her as her skin split open. Someone grabbed her, hauling her farther back. She glimpsed orange flame flashing across the floor of the cave, and then a thunderous boom pummeled her ears.
Rocks slammed down. Dust clogged the air, flowing down Ashara’s throat and making her gag. She turned her face toward the back wall as utter darkness filled the cave, the opening blocked. She couldn’t see anything, and her stunned eardrums could not hear anything except a dull roar. She had no idea if the makarovi was trapped or if it had escaped in time. She had no idea if they would ever escape.
• • • • •
The stink of the makarovi came to them first. Basilard increased his speed, darting around Sicarius to take the lead, even though he did not have a weapon suitable for fighting such a creature. None of them did. With his hand clenched around his dagger, he ran through the trees, only glancing at the tracks on the ground. He saw debris littering the earth next to a towering rock pile up ahead, but almost missed the significance and ran past.
“Stop,” Sicarius said at the same time as a glance at the trampled earth told Basilard that something had happened here.
A tangle of makarovi prints had decimated the grass and churned the ground into mud. Blood spattered some of the rocks, which were gouged and scraped and dented. One rock had been hurled into a nearby tree so hard that it was embedded in the bark.
“It didn’t walk away from here,” one of the hunters said, pointing at the tracks and circling the area.
“Something happened up there.” Sicarius gazed up at the rock pile.
Basilard touched a hand to a bloodstained boulder, an ominous feeling settling over him. Then he pulled himself atop it, climbing carefully, looking for what he assumed the makarovi had been looking for.
“There may have been a cave.” Sicarius had backed up and was gazing higher up the boulder mound.
May have been? Basilard did not want to imagine that a cave might have existed, offering shelter to Mahliki, and was now gone. Taking her with it? Or had the makarovi pulled her free? He hadn’t looked too far around the clearing, not wanting to chance across her mutilated corpse.
Basilard spotted what may have once been an opening in the rock face, but only crumbled rock lay within it. Nonetheless, he pulled himself up toward the gap, wondering if there might be some
way in that he couldn’t see from his angle. But when he drew even with the bottom of the crevice, it wasn’t a way in that revealed itself to him. The tip of a shaggy limb stuck out from underneath the boulders, its long, sharp claws curled over the lip of the rock.
He flinched, as if the creature might slough off the debris and leap out at him.
“What is it?” a hunter called up.
Death, Basilard signed. It wasn’t explanatory, but it was one of the signs he could make with one hand. Since he was clinging on a vertical surface, that was all he could manage.
“Whose?”
“The makarovi,” Sicarius said, though he was still on the ground and shouldn’t have been able to see the paw. Maybe he had spent more time reading the tale of the prints. “It would have had to be lured in there.”
That was what Basilard was afraid of. He banged the hilt of his dagger on a rock, then leaned his ear against the cool stone. Nothing except the wind rustling through the trees answered him. He tried one more time, striking the rock harder.
Three faint clinks sounded from within the boulder pile. A surge of hope filled his chest.
Basilard waved for the others to come and help, then started pulling out rocks without bothering to explain why. Surely they would understand. Besides, he needed his hands for more than signing. Who knew how much air Mahliki had or how injured she was? If the rockfall had killed something as indestructible as a makarovi…
Sicarius joined him before his thoughts could grow darker. Jomrik climbed up right behind him. Until they cleared out the entryway of the cave, there was not much room for them to work—indeed, all three of them were hanging off the side of the boulders and pawing at rocks with one hand. There wasn’t any room for the Mangdorians to join them. But they soon had more of the entrance revealed, and two of them could stand inside while shoving boulders through the crevice and down the hill.
“See if there’s a way in from the other side,” Sicarius told the Mangdorians, speaking in their own language.
“What?” Jomrik asked in Turgonian.
Sicarius repeated himself.
“Good idea. Considering that someone went to so much effort to bury this makarovi, it seems a shame to unbury it. And it’s stinking like a skunk run over by a lorry and left out in the sun for a week.”
Basilard kept shoveling rocks aside, not pausing to respond. Sicarius, who could have spoken as he worked, did not respond, either. His face never revealed his thoughts, but his eyes were intent and focused. As cool and indifferent as he always was, even he would not wish to inform Sespian or Starcrest that Mahliki had died while out on a mission with him.
The Mangdorians succeeded in levering some of the boulders off the back side of the big rock pile, but in the end, the first moan of life came from Basilard’s side, from somewhere beyond the smashed and quite dead makarovi.
“Mahliki?” Sicarius asked, a slightly puzzled tone to his voice. The moan had sounded masculine rather than feminine.
“She’s here somewhere,” Maldynado said, his words coming out as a groan. “Under me. I think.”
Sicarius grew still. “Amaranthe?”
“She’s under me too.”
Sicarius hadn’t been slow before, but now he grew less methodical and almost frenzied as he pulled at the boulders. Basilard struggled to match his pace, digging around rocks they couldn’t move and pushing away those they could. Jomrik stood in the entrance and rolled their debris outside.
After a few more minutes, they succeeded in finding Maldynado’s arm, then pulling him out of the rubble. The rocks had been piled to the ceiling on top of the makarovi, but fewer boulders layered the back of the cave, a good thing because Maldynado and Amaranthe weren’t the only ones buried. Mahliki came out next, and Basilard’s chest tightened with concern when he saw Ashara, her eyes closed, her face a rictus of pain. She had already been injured, damn it. What had she been doing here, battling the makarovi?
Darkness had fallen by the time Sicarius and Basilard helped all four of their battered friends down to the ground. One of the Mangdorians lit a fire in the shelter of a cliff. The wind picked up, and brooding clouds promised rain. So long as his comrades survived their ordeal, Basilard would gladly suffer monsoons.
He pulled two of the hunters aside. Will you return to the gathering and find a healer willing to come?
He could see hesitation in their faces, then one of them replied, “It might be that nobody will come with us, now that we’ve… made our choice. None of us ever expected to return home again.”
Ask anyway, Basilard signed firmly, even though he felt sympathy toward the young men because he knew exactly what kind of reception they could expect. And he knew that in a way, he had helped lead them to it, to becoming fighters instead of tricksters. Someday, he might regret it, especially after he had time to dwell on the consequences, but not today. Also, tell them of Hykur. He must be buried.
That sobered the hunters, and they did not object further. “We will see to it, Leyelchek.”
“A healer, yes,” Maldynado said from the fire. He, Mahliki, and Ashara had collapsed around it, all injured and weary. Amaranthe sat against the cliff wall, slumped beside Sicarius, leaning on his shoulder for support. “Perhaps a pretty woman who will gently sponge the blood and grime from us as she attends our wounds.”
“Is that all you can think about, Maldynado?” Mahliki asked. “Pretty women?”
“It’s not any worse than what you think about. We weren’t on the ground for more than three seconds before you were asking if anyone had seen your pack.”
“My samples are in there, all my tools, my research.”
“Yes, all incredibly boring things, far less interesting than pretty women. Besides, you all should be thanking me for saving your lives.” Maldynado waved one dusty arm flamboyantly as he spoke. “It was I who remained conscious and was able to respond to that tapping on what was almost our burial cairn. I was the one who tapped back and let them know we were in there.”
“I was conscious,” Amaranthe said. “I would have tapped back if you hadn’t been on top of me with your knee in my apple basket.”
Sicarius narrowed his eyes toward Maldynado.
“That wasn’t my knee,” Maldynado said, losing his flamboyance under that stare, “but I promise you, I didn’t enjoy it at all.”
“Someone is going to have to explain to me what exactly an apple basket is,” Ashara mumbled.
Basilard laid a couple of thick branches on the fire and squatted next to her. You’ll have to return to the republic with us to further your education in Turgonian euphemisms.
He signed it as a joke, but he watched her face for a reaction. She had endured so much out here; would she have any interest in returning? Would she be able to? Once Ambassador Shukura heard that she had helped them instead of hindering them, he might attempt to make her life difficult. Basilard intended to explain everything to the president, in the hope that he could do something about the Kendorian. Of course, Basilard would also have to explain that he was no longer the Mangdorian ambassador. Would Starcrest have any reason to help him in any manner once he learned that?
“With us?” Ashara asked. “Are you going back?”
At least long enough to report the happenings between Kendor and Mangdoria. Basilard grimaced. And to inform the president of my dismissal.
“Aw, Bas, you’ll always have a job with us if you want one,” Maldynado said, apparently seeing no reason not to eavesdrop on a private conversation.
I didn’t realize you were in the position to employ people, Basilard signed, but managed a smile to go with the gestures. Even if Maldynado was a snoop, Basilard appreciated the sentiment. There hadn’t been time yet to think about what he would do next with his life, and he truly had no idea what he might be qualified for. If he stayed here, he would walk the mountains alone, as an outcast. If he stayed in Turgonia, only a handful of people would understand him, most of who were busy with their own careers.
How could he find employment if nobody could interpret his sign language?
“I know lots of people,” Maldynado assured him. “Lots of people who would love to do me favors.”
“Women people?” Amaranthe asked.
“Naturally. I’m sure I could find a business owner who could use a chief of security.”
Basilard grimaced again, this time at the idea of being consigned to a life that involved violence. He caught Ashara watching him, but couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. Mostly, she appeared to be tired and in pain. He wished he could do something for her.
“Perhaps an assistant chef, Basilard?” Amaranthe suggested.
“I don’t know.” Maldynado scratched his jaw. “Not everybody appreciates a man who forages for his weeds in disreputable alleys.”
They’re herbs, not weeds, Basilard signed, reflexively responding to the old argument.
The idea of working in a culinary capacity was more intriguing than spending his days as a security guard, but it also sounded a touch… sedate. Like something he might be interested in trying in another twenty years, after he had seen more of the world and had a few more adventures. He snorted at himself. After the madness of the last week, was it crazy that he longed for employment that involved adventures? Probably so.
“If they’re growing where people throw their refuse and where dogs water them, they’re weeds,” Maldynado said.
I will consider my employment opportunities this fall. Basilard nodded at Maldynado to let him know he appreciated the help, if not the condemnation of foraged herbs. I must first aid Ashara with a problem, if she is still interested in my assistance. He raised his eyebrows in her direction.
Ashara raised her brows in return. Had she not expected him to bring this up again? He certainly owed her a favor for her help this past week. A number of favors.
“I will have to heal fully before thinking about that,” Ashara said slowly. “And make sure I have a home that is suitable for, uhm—” She glanced at her audience. Mahliki had found her dusty, smashed pack and was rooting in it, and Amaranthe and Sicarius were murmuring to each other, but Maldynado watched brightly, seeming to think he was a part of the conversation. “Yes,” Ashara said, “I will return to Turgonia with you, for now.”
Diplomats and Fugitives Page 39