“And as many furcots.”
“… and their furcots could fight one of these things?”
“Too big, too strong,” Born told her.
“I thought your jacari poison would kill anything.”
“Silverslith skin is too thick,” he explained. “Also, jacari poison works on … on”—he searched his memory for the ancient term—“the nervous system.”
“Then why wouldn’t it affect a silverslith?” Cohoma asked. “It’s got to have some vulnerable points.”
“When it comes, you show me,” Born muttered. “Anyway, silverslith has no nervous system, the tale says.”
Logan’s willingness to credit the creature with the ability to go long periods without rest or sleep did not extend this far. “Oh, come on, Born,” she said with the confidence of superior knowledge, “every animal has a nervous system.”
“Has it?”
“An animal couldn’t live without a nervous system, Born.”
“Couldn’t it?”
“At the very least,” she added, “it must have some kind of rudimentary brain and central locomotor system.”
“Must it?”
She gave up. Cohoma hadn’t paid much attention. He was still musing on the fact that this thing pursuing them could put thirty furcots to flight.
“Look, how much of this is true and how much of it has been embroidered by the survivors of that attacked party? Naturally they’d want to make out the invulnerability of anything that forced them to run.”
Born was about to reply, but Ruumahum interrupted him. It was unusual for a furcot to break into a conversation between persons. Ruumahum did so to keep Born’s adrenalin level low until more energy was needed later. “Silverslith tree,” he growled softly, “only thing in world Akadi change march-path for. Big persons shut up now and watch own path.”
That information was enough to cause Logan and Cohoma to overlook the fact that they had been given an order by an overgrown pet. They pondered it as they hurried on in silence.
Meanwhile Born continued to turn his earlier thought over and over in his head. He tried to argue his way out of it; it held him tight as a grazer’s arm. He tried to avoid it; it stood firmly in the way of his thoughts like the silverslith’s Pillar-tree. Temporarily he managed to forget it by cursing himself for failing to recognize the tree for what it was. That huge, dry, inviting shelter, so empty, so shunned. Fool! “Fool’s fool!” he muttered aloud.
“And I with you,” Losting muttered nearby, but Born hardly heard him.
“Don’t berate yourself, Born. You said there was no way of telling what it was,” Logan told him.
“No. If it had been lower, Ruumahum would have scented it. But it was far, far up the trunk, near the very top probably, hell-hunting.”
“Hell-hunting?”
“Fishing the night sky for air-demons,” he explained. “Reaching up to pull down fliers at the treetops, like the one that attacked your skimmer when it fell.”
“Oh,” she murmured. Another sobering thought. “It did not sense us till it started downward. That’s when Ruumahum smelled it.”
They finally found the globular leaves growing to one side of their treepath. Geeliwan saw them, moved with Ruumahum to stand watch while Born and Losting cut and prepared several. Though if the silverslith attacked, they could give the humans only a couple of extra minutes.
A little of the fire pollen and they had real light again. It cheered Cohoma and Logan. At least they could see where they were stepping now. At the same time, Logan expressed a new worry to Born. “Won’t these make us easier to see for any other local predators?”
“It does not matter now. The silverslith is too close. No other creature of the night will come near, having scented it. They will run, too. Have you noticed the silence?”
Logan listened and knew what Born meant. The usual night sounds, the normal whistles and clicks, beepings and hums interspersed with an occasional deep-throated roar, were missing. Only the constant drip, drip of the rain remained, punctuated by a wandering wisp of lost wind. They hurried on in eerie silence.
“It nears,” Ruumahum soon rasped. “Slowly, but it nears.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Born,” Logan said at the same time, gasping, fighting for breath. “I can’t keep this up. I don’t know which’ll go first, my eyes or my legs.”
“Then,” Born said, sighing heavily, making the decision he had been putting off for hours, “it is better to start now.”
“Start where?” The query came from Losting.
“Down … to the other levels.”
Neither Losting nor the giants cared if the monstrous apparition now close on their trail heard their shouts and yells.
“What’s the good of descending to another level?”
“We’ll only lose the daylight when it comes.”
“The silverslith will follow us easily,” Losting added. “Follow us forever. You know that, Born.”
Born looked at his ally and rival. “Even to Hell?”
That was the first and last time either Cohoma or Logan ever heard a furcot produce anything like a startled grunt. Losting was too stunned to reply as Born continued.
“I will not stay to argue with you, Losting, or with any of you. I am going down to the Seventh Level, if the silverslith still follows. Down to whatever is there.”
“Death is there,” Geeliwan sighed.
“Death to wait here, sleek friend,” Born reminded. He looked ahead to Losting again. “We know what the silverslith will do when it catches us. At the very least, we may find a new way to die.”
“Born, you said yourself that to go to the Lower Hell, the surface, was certain death,” Logan said softly.
“Less certain than to stay here. Maybe the silverslith will not follow, for it lives here near the top of the world. It may live equally well among its relations at its bottom, but we do not know that. I think it is a chance, at least. I will not try to force any of you to come with me.”
He would do what he thought best, assuming the others would see the wisdom of his ways and follow him. That was what he had always done. It worked now as he began the slow descent to depths unseen, plunging into even blacker, more ominous darkness.
They followed, all of them, but not out of respect for his greater wisdom, as he thought. They followed because in a crisis, uncertain people will follow whatever leader declares himself. In that respect Losting proved himself as human as Logan or Cohoma.
Cubbles and lianas came and went. Downward-sloping tree branches, parasitic growths the size of sequoias and greater passed and were left behind. One such tree sprouted a thousand thick air-roots all entwined. They used them to drop with greater speed for many meters. They left the Fifth Level behind and entered the Sixth, moving into a region of brown and white and purple growths that started crowding out the green.
Then they were through the center of the Sixth, then through its bottom, to emerge into a ghost world. A world feebly lit by torchlight that seemed to huddle close to its parent wood in fear. A world of Pillar-tree bases with boles as big around as starships. Buttresses, multibladed and massive, rose on all sides. There were glowing fungi the size of storerooms, which thrived and grew in a riotous profusion of obscene, grotesque shapes. Small glowing things crawled in and among them and hid from their torchlight.
Here there was no morning and no evening, no day and no night—only a perpetual darkness that belonged neither to the sun or the moon. Even though the phosphorescent fungi and their twisted relatives gave enough light to see by, the torches were kept lit. It was a cleaner, purer radiance than what shone here. Yellow and red and white light issued from around them, a ghostly, ethereal evanescence, which suggested outlines rather than whole forms, hinted rather than described.
At last they came to a stop at the base of one ridge-backed buttress, the final stairway to the surface. A cluster of orange saplinglike growths grew here—things that would never know the internal
logic-magic of photosynthesis. They had surely reached the ground, the Seventh Level, Lower Hell itself. Yet, there seemed even here to be another level below, for nearby the ground turned soft, sticky and wet, thicker than water, thinner than mud.
Logan turned, breathing painfully, and stared back up the way they had come. The buttress behind her was like a dark brown-black cliff. Above it she could detect only darkness and the faint glow of distant fungi. There was nothing to indicate that a couple of hundred meters above them was a world of light and green life that pulsed and rustled with wind and rain.
It was humid here to the point of suffocation, though only an occasional persistent droplet from the still falling night-rain penetrated this far. The rest had been absorbed or caught high above by a thousand million bromeliads or other water-holding plants. The rare drop was a reminder that they had not died, that a living green world still existed above this dark place.
Born also turned his gaze upward along the face of the wood, solid as granite. “Ruumahum?”
“It comes still,” the furcot muttered after testing the air. “But slower, much slower, even cautiously.”
“We have no time for caution.” He turned to Logan and Cohoma, indicated the swampy morass which spread around their tiny, dry peninsula. “I know nothing of footing like this. Yet we must leave this spot before the silverslith’s fury overcomes its care.”
Long moments, precious moments, came and went while all four humans considered the problem. Logan found herself running a hand up and down the side of one of the orange trunks that flared from where the buttress of the great tree entered the water. More than anything else they resembled bright red-orange reeds, though they surely were no member of the reed family.
She took out her bone knife and tried the material. It cut, but not easily. The fiber was dense, not pulpy or water-filled, but they had axes. “Born, see if you can locate something that would serve as cord. Some kind of vine or something. I think these will make a decent raft—a machine for traveling on the water—if we stack them crossways two deep.”
They worked so fast it was a wonder no one lost an arm or leg in the building. As each orange bole was felled, it exuded a thick odor redolent of stale onion. Construction proceeded apace when Born and Ruumahum returned with loops and loops of some sticky, gray waterplant coiled around themselves.
Logan and Cohoma laid and held the “logs” and instructed Born and Losting on how and where to set the ties. All the while, Ruumahum and Geeliwan kept watch on a ridge above.
Their periodic guttural warnings, shouted down from high up on the buttress, indicated that the silverslith was still moving and with that same unnatural slowness. It did not occur to anyone to wonder at the monster’s caution.
It did, however, occur to Logan suddenly to ask, “Born, we didn’t ask permission, emfol, whatever, of these, did we? Isn’t that against your religion, or moral stance, or something?” She indicated the felled logs.
“They are not of the forest, of my world.” He looked disgusted. “They are a kind of life I feel only distantly akin too. I cannot emfol with them. There is nothing to emfol with.”
“It’s finished,” Cohoma announced loudly, forcing Logan to stifle further questions. Fascinating as this still unresolved thing called emfoling was, survival was more important.
A shout drifted down to them. “Quickly, Born!” Ruumahum again. “It sees us. It comes fast now.”
Seconds later, it seemed, both furcots had rejoined them at the base of the buttress. The hair was erect on their necks, and they glanced continually upward. Logan stared up also, as did Cohoma, but as yet there was nothing to be seen. Their meager equipment thrown aboard, the two furcots climbed on. At least there was no space problem. The raft was big enough to hold twice as many men and furcots. Cohoma, Born, Logan, and Losting all shoved, lifted and shoved. The raft refused to budge.
“Ruumahum, Geeliwan,” Cohoma directed, “move to the far end of the raft a little!” The furcots did so, and this time when the humans shoved, the raft slid cleanly into the brown sludge.
The first thing Cohoma did was test the depth of the muck. The split section of tapering reed disappeared until his fist was immersed. They would not be wading through this.
The thick liquid made for slow paddling, but by the same token, it also helped support the makeshift raft. Everyone pushed furiously, their progress hampered initially by Losting and Born’s ignorance of paddle mechanics. But they learned quickly. With increasing speed they made their way out a considerable distance from the shore.
Above them the black sky arched high overhead. It was like rowing silently through some unimaginably vast, dark cathedral. The vegetation growing on the little patches of dry earth and on the trunks of dead or living trees was dense, but there was no furious desire to reach for open space here, since there was no need to compete for the sun.
“Where’s the tree we came down?” Logan asked. She squinted back the way she thought they had come. Everything beyond a certain distance looked the same, since the light from the glowing fungi did not reach very far. Then she saw the thing and knew which bole it was they had come down, and what a silverslith was, and she screamed.
It stopped when it reached the base of the buttress—at least the front part of it stopped there. The rest of it extended back up the tree, up and up into the blackness beyond for an unknown distance. Its body was a fifth as big around as the Pillar-tree itself. It looked like an animated forest, its cylindrical body bristling with thousands of independently writhing cilia the color of polished antimony. They reached and clutched at the air. The head was a bloated horror, a creation of an aberrant nature. Numerous pulsating mouths dotted the globular head, gray teeth sprouting in every direction. Tentacles grew around the mouths seemingly at random, and the whole nauseating visage was liberally pockmarked with featureless black blots that may have been eyes.
It uttered low mewling sounds, incongruously soft. These rose and shifted to a high, piping titter that sent icy chills through Cohoma and Logan. The head alone stretched out many meters over the water. It swung slowly from side to side as if it were smelling the surface. Then the head lifted. Though those black orbs went in all directions, it felt to Cohoma as if it were staring directly at them.
“Oh, my god, my god,” Logan croaked. “It’s seen us.”
“Not like this … not this way,” Cohoma was moaning.
“Be quiet and—what do you call it—paddle!” Born growled through clenched teeth, though he was as frightened as the giants, and fresh sweat dropped from his forehead.
They had gained real distance on the raft and were well out on the water. But the silverslith had pursued them into Hell itself. Born sensed that it was not about to be deprived of its prey.
It reached out for them, mewling loudly. More of that seemingly endless body flowed in humping motions down the Pillar trunk and along the buttress, and still the tail was not visible. It was not yet trying to swim. Instead it was stretching to the left, reaching for the buttress of the next major growth.
Born saw with despair that by moving in this fashion, it would soon be able to pluck them from the false safety of the raft without ever having to touch water. Losting saw it too, and together the hunters began a frantic search for a crevice, a crack in the base of one of the enormous boles where they might hide, though such was the strength of the silverslith that it would rip even those huge boles apart to get at them.
A faint rushing noise sounded behind them, like a child stepping into a vat of grazer lard. Then the water erupted, vomiting forth a colossal, soulless shape so vast it could not be believed. The thing occupied the whole broad basin of open water they had just crossed.
The behemoth ignored them just as Born would ignore a leaf falling on his head in the forest. They were not worth bothering with. Long multijointed legs with claws the size of small trees shot out and hooked around the stretching form of the silverslith. A single eye bigger than the giants’ skim
mer flashed for a merciful instant between those taloned legs. What they could see of its body, where it emerged from the water, was a mad hybrid of the sacred and the profane. For it was encrusted with jewels—emeralds and sapphires, topaz and tormaline, set in weaving patterns of natural luminescence. It was overpoweringly beautiful, awesome, terrifying.
Everyone fell and held tightly to the orange logs and gray lashings as the raft began to rock, caught in the turbulence spawned by that titanic battle. Born knew nothing of swimming and tried to conceive of breathing water. He decided he would rather be eaten.
Hours later, it seemed, the rocking finally subsided. When Born was able to raise his head, the first thing he saw was Ruumahum and Geeliwan standing side by side at the rear of the raft. The furcots were staring at the water behind them. Born struggled to his knees. There was nothing behind them now but silence—silence and the far-off shining shapes of distorted fungi and lichens lit by their own cold, internal light. And distantly, a soft bubbling sound, which a child might have made by blowing into water. Of the silverslith and the hell-born that had come to meet it, there was no sign.
Logan sat up, emotionally and physically exhausted. She wiped the hair out of her eyes and tried to get her heartbeat under control, with little success. Born watched her for a moment, found his paddle where he had shoved it between two logs, and then resumed paddling.
“Which way, Jancohoma?” he asked. There was no reply. “Jancohoma, which way?” he repeated, more loudly.
Cohoma pulled out the compass, found his hand was shaking too badly to take a reading. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and stared at the luminous face. “Better … better turn us a little to the right here, Born. A little more … more … Losting, don’t you paddle yet. There, now paddle together.”
They forced themselves not to think of what they might be paddling over, of what a touch of the paddle might stir to wakefulness. They were almost too tired to care.
Logan leaned back, lay down on the smelly logs and stared up at a tiny universe formed by glowing mushroomlike things growing upside down from the bottom of a major branch high above. “You wouldn’t think Hell could be so beautiful.” Her expression twisted, and she suddenly looked over her shoulder at Cohoma. He sat behind her, his head between his arms, and he was shaking. “Jan, if we meet another raft, let’s ask its pilot directions, even if he’s got a three-headed dog with him.”
Midworld Page 15
