The Scarlet Cavern

by Michael Dalton

  I hadn’t forgotten the linyang behind me. When the leader’s eyes suddenly shifted away from me and over my shoulder, I spun around – just in time to see the other one swinging her staff down at my head.

  I caught the staff and her arm and turned away, pulling her forward and over me. The throw yanked the staff out of her arms. But while a human her size would have gone flying into the alley wall, possibly breaking her neck, she somehow twisted around in midair, struck the wall on her feet and sprang back to the ground. The leader had to leap upward and past me to avoid her, tumbling in midair off the opposite wall.

  Cats. I was fighting cats.

  Before the linyang I had disarmed could react, I struck at her with the staff. She tried to get into a defensive stance, but I had half a step on her and connected hard with the side of her head. Down she went.

  Once again, I had foes on either side of me. I charged forward at the linyang with the crossbow, who was struggling to reload, and drove the staff into her forehead. She went limp and collapsed.

  But when I spun around again, the leader had grabbed the crossbow the other linyang had dropped. I was far enough away from her that she got a shot off before I could get any closer to her. The bolt struck me right in the chest, and a cloud of bitter roses exploded around me. I stumbled, falling to my knees.

  I fought to resist the kiralabar as I had the first time, but my reserves of energy weren’t enough to throw it off immediately. I saw the leader reloading and stalking in my direction. She stopped a few feet away and aimed directly at my face.

  And that was the exact moment I saw Kisarat appear behind her, jaws open wide, and sink her fangs into the leader’s neck.

  The linyang let out a screech like a cat that got its tail stepped on. Then she went limp and collapsed. Kisarat dropped her like a sack of garbage.

  Ayarala was there, helping me to my feet.

  “Tsulygoi, we need to get out of here. Now.”

  They helped me up. I was still dizzy from the kiralabar, but I saw a wagon at the end of the alley. I had just enough focus left to grab my backpack and katana as we stumbled forward. Ayarala helped me into the wagon, and I rolled into it, lying on my back. Kisarat leapt into the driver’s seat and spurred the kabayang at the front forward. The wagon lurched and began rolling down the road as Ayarala knelt down beside me.

  The adrenaline from the fight began to subside, and the world closed in.

  Chapter 10

  Ihad been under general anesthesia a couple of times in my life. The kiralabar was the same. When I awoke, it seemed like it had been only a few moments, separated by a gray fog. But I looked up and saw the sun low in the sky. Ayarala was up front driving the wagon.

  Kisarat lay next to me, head on my chest. I slowly remembered what had happened, and hugged her. She pulled herself closer to me.

  “Thanks for saving my butt.”

  “I did not think. When I saw her, what she was doing, I just struck.”

  “Is she dead?”

  She didn’t answer for a few moments.

  “Yes. I felt her heart stop. She could not have survived the amount of venom I gave her, not in her neck. I should have held back, but . . .”

  I ran my fingers through her emerald hair.

  “It’s okay. How long have I been out?”

  “Half the day. Ayarala said you absorbed enough kiralabar to kill five females, yet you were only sleeping peacefully. We have put the village many miles behind us.”

  I sat up. We were rolling down a paved road through the forest. The landscape had mostly leveled out. I could see the mountains in the distance.

  Ayarala turned around.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I had a nice nap. Pretty good, actually.”

  “Kiralabar will do that. A normal dose, at least. With you, I am not sure.”

  “That group of linyang. It was the same one I saw in the forest, yesterday morning. I’m sure of it.”

  “I thought as much,” she said.

  “Why, tsulygoi?” Kisarat asked. “Why did they attack you?”

  “I don’t know. But they were trying to take me alive.”

  “I recognized their clothes,” she said. “I have seen them before. They were mercenaries from Phan-garad.”

  “You mean some tsulygoi’s wives? Like you were telling me, how they take them for protection?”

  “Did they look like wives?” Kisarat asked.

  They had not, in the sense that I didn’t really remember what they looked like. Neither pretty nor ugly – just deadly.

  “No.”

  “They are part of an independent group. It hires soldiers out, to anyone who can pay them.”

  “Which doesn’t explain why they wanted me.”

  “No. But if someone sent those five, others will come after them. Especially now that I killed their leader.”

  I pulled her close again.

  “You did what you had to.”

  I lay there holding Kisarat for a minute or two as my head cleared.

  “What took you guys so long? I was getting worried.”

  She didn’t answer me right away. Ayarala laughed.

  “Tell him.”

  Kisarat snuggled with me.

  “I wanted to get you more massit.”

  I laughed softly with Ayarala. “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached around behind her and pulled out a canister similar to the other one, except this one was sealed and heavier.

  “This kind is better than the other, and the other can was a bit stale. iXa’aliq did not take it very often. It is good, you will see.”

  I sat up against the front of the wagon bed. Kisarat laid her head in my lap as I played with her hair. We were in an area of low rolling hills. The road behind us curved around out of sight about a mile back. The sun was going down and the clouds above were starting to color with the sunset, though the light was more purple than sunsets on Earth.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving along the edge of the forest a half mile or so back, the same kind of lithe black form I’d seen when we left. For a moment I wondered if we were being followed by another group of mercenaries, but there was only one and it had looked more like an animal.

  “Are there busang down here?”

  “No,” Ayarala said. “What did you see?”

  “It looked like one.”

  “It may have been a matsak.” I got the sense of a fuzzy, cuddly creature. “They are black like busangs, but harmless. They climb the trees to eat the fruit.”

  “Are you sure it was not a panikang?” Kisarat asked.

  “No. It is not dark enough, is it?”

  “A what?” I had gotten the connotation of another race, but they hadn’t mentioned it before and I felt a tinge of concern from both of them.

  “The panikang are . . . a clan like the talalong and dwenda,” Ayarala said. “But they only live by night and have little to do with other clans. Many fear them.”

  “There are superstitions about them,” Kisarat said. “Much of it is nonsense for ignorant people. But there are stories about them stealing children, and similar things. They are known to protect their lands and people fiercely.”

  “The sun is still up,” Ayarala said. “They would not come out this early. I am sure it was a matsak.”

  I watched for a few minutes but saw nothing more. I wondered briefly about possible pursuit. Then I realized that if anyone had seen the fight or seen us fleeing it, and had been coming after us, they would have caught up to us long before I woke up. So whatever we had left behind, it apparently wasn’t enough to put us at immediate risk.

  “Where are we going?”

  Kisarat looked up at me.

  “There is a rooming house that is not much further ahead. We should be able to sneak you inside. It would be safer than sleeping in the open. Not many people use the road now that the train is running.”

  I envisioned trying to slip throu
gh the front door of a hotel like we had done in the village.

  “That sounds kind of risky.”

  “No, you will see. It will be easy.”

  ◆◆◆

  As it happened, it was even easier than Kisarat had expected – because the rooming house had been abandoned for at least a talon. It was closed up, and the front entrance was covered in windblown dust and dead leaves.

  I saw what she meant though, because it wasn’t a single house but rather a long single-story building not unlike a roadside motel. The rooms were like individual cabins linked together under a single long roof. Off to one side was a semi-open building that was apparently the stable.

  “What do you think happened here?” Ayarala asked.

  “The train.” Kisarat said. “It must be. With so few people on the road, there would be no business for them.”

  “Where does that train go?” I asked. “Surely not just between Phan-garad and that village?”

  “No,” she said. “There is another city, Yama-Kana, beyond the mountains. The train goes around the far side. Phan-garad and Yama-Kana worked together to build it. If you followed this road far enough, you would reach Yama-Kana. But the whole route is a trip of a sampar and a half. By train, a day. So no one who can afford a ticket uses the road. And all the trade that can goes by train now.”

  Ayarala untied the kabayang and let them browse through the overgrown grass around the rooming house. She left the fourth on a long tether attached to the stable door.

  “Won’t they wander off?”

  “No. A herd of kabayang will do next to nothing unless the leader of the herd does it first. That one I left tied. The other three will not leave it.”

  The owners of the rooming house had pretty much removed everything of any value they could take with them. Some of the larger furniture had been left behind, but nearly all the bedding and similar materials were gone. The main room, which had served as a bar and restaurant, was stripped clean beyond some broken bottles, plates, and similar debris scattered across the floor.

  Still, it was better than sleeping out in the open. As the sun went down, we herded the kabayang into the stable and set up camp in one of the rooms that still had one of the foam-block beds. We went over to the abandoned bar, and Kisarat made dinner for us using a crystal heating plate she’d brought. While she was cooking, I searched for any liquor – or whatever the folks here drank – that the departing owners might have missed.

  I found nothing at first. But after a few minutes of rooting around under what appeared to be the bar, I found a ceramic bottle way in the back of one cabinet. It was long, narrow, and opaque, with incomprehensible (to me, at least) writing and designs on the label. I pulled the stopper from the top; it seemed to be about half full and gave off a sweet but distinctly alcoholic aroma.

  “Look what I found. What is this?” I wanted to be sure it wasn’t cleaning fluid before I tried it.

  Ayarala came over and examined the bottle. She gave a little gasp.

  “This is malvina. I wonder how they missed this. This is an expensive variety.”

  “Meaning what? Some kind of liqueur?”

  The meaning seemed clear enough to her.

  “Yes. It is made from a type of alag, like what Kisarat served us, but from a different fruit. It is distilled further to make malvina. The process is long and difficult, which is why this must have cost many pikala.”

  A kind of brandy, then.

  “Let’s try it.”

  “Only a little. Too much will make you sleepy like the kiralabar.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

  There were no glasses in the bar, so I distributed the malvina using what we’d brought. I didn’t know if it was truly alcoholic, but the effect was the same, both on me and the girls. I needed to keep my wits about me, so I stopped at one glass. But it was good. Ayarala and Kisarat ended up having three, getting drunk and giggly by the time we went back to our room.

  ◆◆◆

  The girls stripped out of their clothes and lounged on the bed while I cleaned my armor. The kiralabar-loaded bolts had left a sticky black resin on the breast- and back-plates. I was a little concerned about knocking myself out again, but Ayarala assured me that it lost potency quickly in open air, which was likely why they were using glass bulbs to deliver it. She explained how the stuff she carried had to be tightly sealed inside a bottle.

  “What do you hope to do when we reach Phan-garad, Will?” Ayarala asked.

  “Do you think this other tsulygoi would meet with me, as iXa’aliq did?” I asked.

  “Do you mean aJia’jara?” Kisarat said.

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot say. He would not meet with me, but I suppose he hardly needs more wives.” She laughed. “He has dozens. But he has always made much of his supposed link to the makalang. For the true makalang to arrive at his door, I think he would be very interested indeed.”

  “Traveling through the city will be more challenging than the village,” Ayarala said. “If you are seen, there will be a spectacle.”

  “I can stay hidden in the wagon. And, maybe we do it at night. Are there gates into the city, walls, anything like that?”

  “No, the city is open,” Kisarat said.

  “So that’s what we’ll do.”

  She rolled over and hung her head off the edge of the bed. Her hair fell down in an emerald cascade. She smiled at me.

  “The malvina has made me desirous of mating.”

  Ayarala laughed and rolled over on top of her, putting her chin between Kisarat’s breasts.

  “How are you not sore after last night?”

  “I am sore as if I had ridden a wild kabayang for hours. But I cannot stop thinking of it.”

  Seeing them lying naked together like that gave me ideas I didn’t want to think too much about, at least until they were recovered a bit more.

  “You told me that mating is not about pleasure, at least normally.”

  “That is what the legend of the makalang is about,” Kisarat said. “To mate, and to know pleasure as well.”

  “It is normally only a thing females do, as I told you,” Ayarala said. “To choose to mate is to choose to leave that behind.”

  Kisarat lifted her head and smiled at her.

  “But not for us, awasa-late.”

  Ayarala leaned forward and kissed her. Kisarat tried to kiss her back. They fumbled with it for a moment or two. Then Kisarat sat up next to her.

  “This thing with the tongues is confusing. My fangs keep getting in the way.”

  I took an uneven breath.

  “Maybe you two need to practice.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Will you practice kissing with me, awasa-late?” Kisarat asked.

  “Yes, let’s practice,” Ayarala said.

  I watched them kissing drunkenly on the bed for a few moments, then went back to cleaning my armor. They needed a night off, and if I watched them any longer, I might do some serious injury.

  ◆◆◆

  I woke up as the sun began streaming in through one of the windows. The girls were asleep on either side of me, Kisarat again in a tight little serpentine ball, Ayarala flopped against my chest.

  I managed to slip out of bed without waking them up. I wanted some massit. I wasn’t sure how to use Kisarat’s hot plate, so I found the jet-boil in my backpack and filled it with water, then took the massit canister out to the porch in front of our room. Remembering the busang, I grabbed my katana just to be safe. I hesitated over my armor before pulling the chest pieces over my head, I figuring the rest of it could wait.

  There was a bench. I sat down and brewed myself a cup of massit.

  Kisarat was right – this stuff was better than what she’d had back at the house. It tasted stronger and fresher, not like coffee in any real sense, but with the heat and bitterness of a good cup of java. I sat there for a few minutes just enjoying it.

  This was my fourth day on
Taitala, but it felt like I had been here a lot longer. It was taking on the same feel as my deployments to Iraq, the sense that I’d left the rest of the world behind and entered a different moral universe. Except here, I really had left the whole world behind.

  I wondered what was going on back on Earth. My disappearance had surely been noticed by now. My car would have been found in the parking lot. There was probably some search-and-rescue operation going on. I wondered what Jacqueline had told the kids, if anything. I wasn’t supposed to get them for another couple of days.

  Then I had another troubling thought. If I had actually traveled to a different star system somehow (the coma possibility was still there in the back of my mind), it was a journey of multiple light years at the very least. Perhaps thousands, or even millions. It seemed to take only an instant, but did that mean anything? I knew that, relativistically, that apparent instant could have lasted thousands of years. Maybe everyone and everything I knew back home was gone by now.

  The only lead I had was aJia’jara, and he might know nothing at all.

  That is, if it even mattered.

  I leaned forward and rubbed my forehead, trying to forget the elephant in the room. But it wouldn’t go away.

  I had kids. But they weren’t really my kids. Biologically speaking.

  Richard and Jacqueline met at work. Their both being married hadn’t deterred them from sleeping together, but it had induced them to keep things secret for a long time. Divorce would be messy, and sneaking around was fun. So when I finally accepted just how long their affair had gone on, and what it overlapped with, I knew there was an issue I had to face up to. It took me months to even get to the point of doing anything about it. The question itself wasn’t hard to answer. A matter of swabbing my mouth, and Cassie’s and Hunter’s. Mailing the test kit in and waiting for the results.

  Far harder was steeling myself to open the envelope when it arrived a couple of weeks later. Even though, deep down, I knew what it said. In retrospect, there had been signs, little things Jacqueline had said and done, here and there. Maybe she had tested them herself, maybe just counted the days between this and that.