“Keep an eye out,” he warned his sisters. “It’s possible the Crub booby-trapped its trail like it did the shelf in Mr. Gemimmel’s store.”
“I don’t think so.” Pithfwid glanced back. “From the way its odor is starting to skip forward, I think it must have accelerated when it got to this point. Maybe as much as twenty miles an hour.”
“Pretty fast, for a rat.” Rose ducked beneath an overhanging branch.
Pithfwid could reach that kind of speed, but his humans could not, so he was forced to moderate his pace. Occasionally, N/Ice would go ethereal and dart on ahead, the leaf carpet parting beneath her with the speed of her passing, but each time she was compelled to return and rejoin her siblings. When she wanted to, she could travel faster than any of them, but there was no point in doing so. Without the cat’s discerning sense of smell as a guide, she could get lost.
Two hours later they were deep in the forest. The mist had lifted, to be replaced by scudding clouds around which the sun occasionally peeped as if spying on them. If they kept going this way, Simwan knew, in another hour or so they would hit State Highway 32 He wondered if the Crub’s scent would persist on concrete, or if someone even as sensitive as Pithfwid would lose track of it among the swirling fumes of diesel and gasoline. He asked the cat as much.
“It’s possible.” Contemplating the prospect, Pithfwid slowed. “The Crub stinks, but so do cars and trucks.” He looked around, gazing into the stands of high trees. “Before we hit the highway, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure we’re on the right track. I’m almost sure that we are, but it’s possible the Crub could have laid down a false scent trail and then doubled back, just in case anyone tried to track it by smell.”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll see if I can scare up some locals,” Rose responded.
“Don’t you mean ‘scare away’?” N/Ice couldn’t resist sniding.
Her sister made a face. “Be nice, girl, or I’ll pull your ectoplasmic self inside out.” Turning, she faced away from her brother and sisters, cupped her hands to her mouth, and began to cry. Not a sad cry, or a lonely cry, but more of an inviting one.
No hawks responded, however, nor any eagles, nor circling falcons or dozing owls. After a few tries, she reluctantly conceded their absence. “Not hunting time, I guess. Or else everybody’s asleep, or just nesting.”
Amber stepped forward. “If your birds aren’t around, then their prey ought to be.” Kneeling and pulling up the sleeves of her sweater, she pursed her lips and began muttering much softer sounds. Some of them were actually below the range of human hearing—but not Deavy hearing.
For a moment they thought Amber’s efforts would prove as unproductive as had those of her sister. Then Simwan heard the first of several slight, barely audible, skittering noises. The gorgeously colored dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor like bits of weathered bronze began to shift and crackle in places, disturbed not by wind but by things moving beneath them. More and more movement accompanied the persistent rustling. Like a collapsing ring, the motion centered on the sweater-clad children, until it finally revealed itself in the form of dozens of small figures who emerged in unison from beneath the leaf litter.
They were mostly brown, though some flaunted patches of black or white on chest, belly, or tail. There were field mice, and dormice, and pack rats, and voles. They gathered themselves in a neat semi-circle facing the visiting humans, preening their nervous whiskers, twitching their tiny noses, eyes like matched black pearls considering one another with as much interest as they did those who had summoned them. Simwan dropped into a crouch, the better to be nearer eye level with them, and said nothing. Amber had called them forth, and Amber would know best how to talk to them. Amid all the soft squeaking and chirping, Pithfwid resolutely remained where he was. He could not, however, keep his tail from switching back and forth at the sight of the assembled, and when no one was looking he would raise a paw to swiftly and surreptitiously wipe a curl of drool away from the corner of his mouth.
Amber greeted them. “Thanks for answering, people of the forest floor.”
One mouse, slightly larger than the others, stepped forward and stood up on its hind legs, whiskers quivering as it regarded the much bigger human.
“When one who knows how to whisper the right whispers emphatically, we always come. What is it you need?”
“Someone has stolen the Truth from Mr. Gemimmel’s drugstore. We need to get it back before it can be used to work mischief. We’re pretty sure it was taken by a relative of yours, and that it was brought this way.”
“The Crub,” Simwan put in, so that there could be no misunderstanding.
Mention of that name caused a commotion among the assembled, though since it was a congregation of small rodents it was a very quiet commotion. Some of those who had responded whirled and fled in terror, disappearing among the leaf litter and the roots of the silently watching trees. But a few—bold, determined, or both—remained.
“We have nothing to do with the Crub. It and its followers cast all our kind in a bad light,” the stout mouse exclaimed forcefully.
“Did you see it come this way?” Amber asked. “We’re following its scent trail.”
At this, a dozen of those in attendance promptly dropped their own sensitive nostrils to the ground, and not for long. “So that’s the source of the awfulness we’ve been smelling around here,” the rodent spokesman muttered. “Now it makes sense. No fakery in this, then. It’s the Crub itself for sure.” One tiny paw rose and pointed. Eastward again, Simwan observed. It was reassuring to know that Pithfwid had been following the right track all along.
“Not a diversion?” he inquired, just to be sure.
The mouse speaker shook his head vigorously, small round ears quivering. “Not a chance, man. The stink is too strong.” The paw swung around accusingly toward the shape of a large yellow and purple cat who was struggling hard to feign indifference to the gathering. “And tell your friend to stop looking at me like that. This is a called conference whispered by you, and I won’t have him looking at me and thinking of mouse mousse.”
“Pithfwid!” Putting his hands on his hips, Simwan glared over at the cat. “They’re trying to help us.”
“Sorry.” With great dignity, the cat turned so that his back was to the semicircle of concerned rodents. “I can’t help it. Sometimes instinct trumps intelligence.”
One thing the mice couldn’t tell them was how far ahead the Crub might be. Given how fast it was moving, they were unlikely to catch up to it until it reached its intended destination. As he strode through the woods, Simwan wondered where that might be. Where would something as vile and conniving as the Crub choose to hole up? Tarrentville? Maybe as far away as Lordsburg? He supposed it all depended on just what the Crub intended to do with the Truth, now that it had it. He checked his watch. If they didn’t catch up to their quarry by one or two o’clock, he and his sisters would have to turn around and head back. Otherwise they wouldn’t get home until well after dark.
On the other hand, if they managed to make it as far as the highway, they would know exactly where to pick up the trail again tomorrow morning. They could mark the spot, and wouldn’t have to spend half a day traipsing through the woods in search of it.
But they never got to the highway. Long before they could even hear the first hornetlike whiz of passing vehicles, they found themselves confronting a thoroughfare of a different sort. It brought them to an abrupt halt.
Though he carefully sniffed of both sides of the singing, swiftly running stream, Pithfwid couldn’t pick up the Crub’s trail on the other side. It was as if the thieving rodent had deliberately and thoroughly and cleverly washed himself clean of scent in the cold, fast-moving water.
“Or maybe he swam downstream and then came back out,” Rose ventured. At her suggestion, they all found themselves looking in that direction, to where the water wended its way noisily and
deliberately through the flanking trees.
“He could have gone upstream, too,” Simwan pointed out. “Swimming where he could and walking on the rocks where the current was too strong. Not only is there no way of telling how far he might have gone before he came back out onto dry land, we can’t even tell which way he went.”
Rubbing up against Simwan’s right leg, a presently puce Pithfwid growled in frustration. “No question about it—the reek stops at the creek.”
“If he crossed the stream, maybe a stream-dweller noticed his passing,” N/Ice pointed out. She immediately crouched and began inspecting the moist earth that rimmed the stream. Bending low, her sisters commenced examining the slick rocks that lay both in the water and onshore. Opting for a higher vantage point, Simwan chose to search while standing upright, with the sharp-eyed Pithfwid riding on his shoulder. It was important to look from as many different angles as possible, because you never knew where the sun was going to strike. And if you didn’t look at just the right place at exactly the right moment where the sun happened to be hitting, you could look right at a skippl and never see it. Which is what most people, and all Ords, invariably did.
This is because skippls look just like the sparkles of light that sunlight makes on water. Gaze at the rippling surface of a lake, his dad had told Simwan and his sisters during one summer outing, and you’ll see dozens, hundreds, of golden flashes of light on the water. Reflections of the sun that will make you squint your eyes and squeeze out tears. The one reflection that doesn’t do that is a skippl. They’re closely related to the gneechees, Martin went on to explain, which are the creatures you think you see out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn your head to look straight at them, they’re gone.
“Hey!” Letting out a shout of recognition, Pithfwid rose up on Simwan’s shoulder and pointed. His cry brought the searching sisters running in their direction.
Simwan stood by the side of a small cascade, staring at the smooth rocks that formed the upper ledge. The waterfall was no taller than he was, but among the numerous glints of light that filled the falling, he thought he could just make out several half-foot-high columns of sparkle that didn’t appear to conform to the rest. They were moving more slowly, persisted longer, traveled in a slightly different direction, and if you looked really, really hard, you could make out what appeared to be arms and legs fringed with lissome, transparent fins.
Rose arrived first, panting excitedly. “Where?” She stared into the waterfall, trying to locate the source of her brother’s excitement.
“Up higher,” he instructed her, “and more toward the other side.”
“I don’t—oh, there they are!” Bending slightly at the waist to get a better angle, she pointed out the golden shapes that were behaving slightly differently from the other glints of light that filled the falling water.
“Good spotting, brother,” Amber complimented him as she, too, tracked the now decisively identified creatures.
“It wasn’t me.” Reaching up, he stroked the cat clinging to his right shoulder. “Pithfwid found them.”
“That’s only logical.” The cat purred as it lifted its spine against the caressing hand. “After all, they are living in a cataract.”
“Hi there,” Simwan called out, extending a hand outward, palm facing up, as he had been taught to do during a period of home-schooling whose subject matter had nothing to do with ordinary chemistry or biology. “If you don’t mind, we need to talk to you for a moment.”
For a few seconds, lights with legs seemed to coalesce into a hovering ball of shimmer. Chancing upon the intensely bright phenomenon, an Ord would have shaded his eyes and moved on. Simwan and his sisters knew better. The skippls were considering their request.
Separating itself from the center of the glow, one shard of light sliced in their direction, dancing delicately across the water from ripple to ripple, until it stood gleaming in the steady flow. Then it performed a short but impressive hop to land neatly in the middle of Simwan’s proffered, outstretched palm. Once removed from the water that was its home, it was much easier to make out the skippl’s twiggy, delicately feminine limbs. Set apart from the distortions caused by sunlight, her face now stood out clearly. Like the limbs, her features were narrow and minimal, as if someone had taken a pencil and sketched a few short, quick lines of face onto a beam of sunshine.
“Whatdoyouwant?” Her high, musical voice reminded Simwan of the upper reaches of a piccolo. He had to strain to make out the reply. Skippls talked almost as fast as they moved.
“Something stinky this way came,” N/Ice told it. For good measure, she made herself go an ichorous shade of green, like pea soup that had been left out too long in the sun.
“Something ferocious, fat, and full of evil, bearing with it stolen Truth.” Pithfwid punctuated N/Ice’s colorful effort by taking a deep breath and making himself turn a color that might best be described as that of chromatic vomit.
Words and color-cues had the intended effect. Glistening like a melting bracelet painted by Dalí, the skippl nodded, turned, and pointed. Light flashed in two different directions at once. It was an impossibility of physics—but then, so were skippls.
“Surenoughsawitpass. Wentthataway, movingfast. Biguglyug. Redeyesfullofawful.” The slight shiver in the skippl’s voice as she spoke was more full of meaning than any lingering spoor could have been.
Despite the lowing cloud cover, there was still enough glare off the surface of the stream to force Amber to shield her eyes as she peered across the creek. “Was it still heading east when you saw it?”
The skippl moved to the very edge of the water, beyond whose cheerful supportive gurgle she could not long survive. “Theywere.”
Close by Simwan’s right ear, Pithfwid muttered softly. “‘They’? There were more than one?”
Light flickered and flashed: the skippl’s way of nodding. “TheCrubwasnotalone. Travelingwithescort. Nastythings.” If light could be said to shudder, the skippl certainly did. “Smelledbadthey. NotasbadasCrub. Hurttolookatthem.”
Straightening, Simwan stared off into the forest, wondering exactly how much farther it was to the highway. “If the Crub had company, the trail should be stronger.”
“Truthyouspeak.” The skippl prepared to return to her watery home. “Overhearwaygoing. AllwaytoNewYork.”
“New York?” Amber swallowed hard. “You mean, New York City?”
“Yes,” the skippl responded. “Theytalkingaboutit. Whilepassthisway. GoingNewYorkCity. Theysay. Crubhome.”
And to think, Simwan mused, that he had worried about how they were going to find the Crub if it had holed up somewhere in the vicinity of Clearsight. But if it had gone to New York … Even an oversize Truth-thieving fiend like the Crub could find a place to hide itself in New York.
“It doesn’t matter,” declared Rose, breaking the silence that followed the Skippl’s revelation. “We have to find it and get the Truth back, no matter where it’s gone to. We have to for Mom’s sake. We promised Mr. Gemimmel. We promised ourselves.”
“Besides,” added Amber, “it’s the only chance we have of stopping the development. People have to know the truth, and for them to know the truth, it has to be around.”
A daydreaming N/Ice had to be reminded not to let herself drift off into the trees. She came back to reality, and the ground, with a thump as her feet once more made contact with the earth. “So, all right, then. We’ll go to New York. If that’s where the Crub has gotten to, that’s where we’ll have to go.”
“Uh, N/Ice,” Simwan reminded her, “you girls are just twelve.” He didn’t add that he was only sixteen. “Mom and Dad might not want us traipsing off to the big city, much less on a potentially dangerous hunt for the emperor of all rat-things.”
Rose and Amber and N/Ice exchanged a tripartite look before turning back to him with what could only be described as expression
s of sisterly pity. “Big brother,” Rose told him gently, “you didn’t really think that’s how we were going to put the request to Mom and Dad, did you?”
“Well, I …” he hesitated.
“I believe,” Pithfwid murmured from his perch on Simwan’s shoulder, “that your sisters have something of a more feline bent in mind.”
“If you mean sneaky, shifty, and devious—” N/Ice began.
Amber cut her off. “Leave it to us to think of a way to get permission. You’re going to have to act as chaperone, at least in name, so I suppose we’ll have to let you in on it.”
“Once we have whatever it is,” Rose concluded confidently.
“Notathingtochase, istheCrub,” exclaimed the skippl worriedly as she listened to their conversation. “Becareful, youngsolidones. Blessingsofwater, maytheycoverandprotectyou.” With a hop and a slide and a jump, the skippl was gone, returned to the cataract from whence she had emerged.
Simwan glanced skyward. It was getting late, he realized. And looking more and more like rain. They might as well start back, especially now that they knew the Crub’s destination. He’d only been to New York once in his life, and that was when he had been about the coubet’s age. Now it appeared that he was going to go back, but this time in the company of his sisters and not his parents. And Pithfwid, of course. To find and bring back the stolen Truth.
If they all caught cold, standing out in the damp and the wind, no one would be going anywhere, he knew. “Let’s get moving. You guys can tell me all about your plan on the way back.” He started off along the trail they had made.
“Plan? What plan?” exclaimed Amber innocently. “We don’t have a plan, brother. But we will by the time we get home, won’t we?” Rose and N/Ice chimed in with equally chirpy confidence.
What they didn’t know as they left the stream and its apprehensive cohort of skippls behind was that the always-chary Crub had done one last thing as it had hurried on its way toward the big city accompanied by its noisome band of escorts.
The Deavys Page 4
