by RW Krpoun
I lifted Hatcher bodily through a gap and pushed my way after her, only to find her on all fours digging in the dirt. “You all right?” I asked as I lent Provine Sael a hand.
“If this is a city, where are the streets? Walkways? Anything?” The Nisker sat back on her heels and looked around. “We’re a hundred feet in, and somehow Torl has kept us on a straight line,” she pointed a throwing axe. “We’re aimed straight between two rows of buildings, and I’ve dug a foot down and only found dirt.”
“Plenty of dirt streets in the Empire,” Hunter noted.
“True,” Hatcher conceded “But they usually have ruts, and there’s bits of pottery, bent nails, that sort of thing if you dig.”
“Grog, come here,” Torl motioned me over. “Chop this through,” he indicated a foot-thick trunk that was nearly horizontal.
I pulled out my axe and went to work; despite its size, the shaft chopped easily, because once past the leathery outside bark it was pretty soft and wet inside. When I had cut it apart, I stepped back and scrubbed the blade clean with a handful of dirt.
Torl pulled his skinning knife and poked, cut, and dug into the open ends of the trunk, frowning. Finally he stepped back.
“Anything?” Provine Sael asked.
“I don’t know,” the scout muttered, plucking a broad yellow leaf and using it to wipe his blade clean. “Things are not adding up. Anything on the Arts?”
“Nothing,” Hunter shook his head. “We could let Rose roll around in here until she was old enough to marry.”
“Could this thing be just one big plant?” Hatcher asked from where she was lying prone, her chin on the dirt. “I can’t see any trunks, just the occasional small tendril going into the dirt.”
“Possibly,” Torl nodded. “Could it have been created by the Arts?”
“Modified, yes,” Provine Sael nodded. “That has been done a bit in the past. Nothing on this scale, but given recent events that would seem to matter very little.”
“You see anything else?” Torl asked Hatcher.
“Bones, and not a few. Animals and birds, I would guess, but I’m no expert.” She stood and brushed the dirt off her clothes. “Grog, give me a boost.”
I lifted her up to a swag of vine and she scooted up to the upper reaches of the greenery, thumping a throwing axe into the vines occasionally to provide a handhold. After a minute all I could see of her was her boots.
“See anything?” Torl kept his voice low.
“Yeah.” Her boots shifted and a hand extended down, holding a throwing axe by the head, the shaft pointing to our left. “Can you take a reading on that?”
“I can.”
“Good.” She scooted down and dropped onto my shoulders. “There’s something about two hundred yards in that direction.”
“What?” Provine Sael cocked an eyebrow.
“I don’t have a clue,” Hatcher advised cheerfully. “But it’s there.”
“We looked from the hill and saw nothing,” Provine Sael looked back. “Although we are west of the hill.”
“Look, I’m no scout,” Hatcher drummed on my head. “But what I am, is someone who still has all her fingers after finding and disarming a lot of pretty nasty surprises, and a big part of the reason why is that I look at things and spot the little details, the tiny differences. Two hundred yards from here the lay of the plants is subtly different from any other areas I could see from up there. I’m not saying it is unique, but it is different.”
Provine Sael nodded. “Very well. Torl, lead us in that direction.”
“Let me lead,” I drew my dirk. “Hatcher saw bones. This is not a good place.”
“I’m not worried about being surprised,” Torl advised me.
“When’s the last time you killed something up close and personal?”
He hesitated, frowning.
“Let Grog lead,” Provine Sael suggested. “This is more his and Burk’s forte. Hatcher, get down.”
The scout nodded thoughtfully.
By myself I would have become lost within moments as I ducked, crawled, and climbed through the tangle of twisting vines, but Torl stayed hard on my heels, telling me when to guide left or right. It was not difficult work, just confusing, and at times the maze of green, brown, and yellow seemed to press in too close and my chest grew tight, but I shrugged it off and pressed on; a High Rate of the Ebon Blades did not fear plants.
Then the plants tried to kill me.
I was squeezing between two near-vertical strands when a blade came at my throat; I didn’t really see it, nor the wielder, but I hadn’t survived sixty death matches by needing a lot with which to fight. I parried instinctively with my left arm, feeling the blade skate across the stud-reinforced leather as I twisted and lunged, driving the dirk into the wake of the attack. The point hit something that flinched, so I drove in with all my weight behind it. When I felt that it was about half the blade-length in I levered down and shoved up at the same time, trying to get the point up under the foe’s rib cage or sternum.
There was no accompanying scream, but something like a club belted me clumsily about the shoulders on my right side as I forced the blade in and up, stepping into the effort, determined to kill quickly, before the foe’s parried blade could be brought back into play. Up close the margins for error are no thicker than that of a good steel dagger or dirk blade, and sometimes even less. When you are winning, Master Horne always hammered into my thick skull, you did not hesitate or pause until the foe’s corpse is starting to cool.
As my dirk’s cross guards hit the chest I realized that I was nearly nose-to-nose with something that wasn’t even remotely Human, or even Ukar: what had tried to stab me appeared to be like someone had twisted vines as thick as my wrist into a Human-shaped doll six feet tall. It had been punching at me with a long left arm that ended abruptly in three foot-long fingers, while the right arm ended in a hardwood spike, the blade I had instinctively blocked. A sort of head, too small for the body, perched between jutting shoulders, wood antlers sprouting from the sides of its skull,
Its eyes looked like a pair of malachite pebbles (I had seen malachite for sale in a booth at the Concourse), only alive somehow; they were fixed on me as the life in them went away, although I couldn’t really explain the difference between the two states.
I wrenched my dirk free as the thing slumped to the dirt, the blade coated with pale greenish slime. Stepping back, I checked on all sides as Torl scrambled to join me.
“What the blazes,” he breathed.
“It’s dead, whatever it is,” I plucked a big brown leaf and wiped my blade clean as I moved to make room for the others.
“Well, that’s ugly,” Hatcher noted.
“Have you ever seen or heard of anything like this?” Provine Sael asked Hunter after they had moved up; one look at Torl’s face already answered that question.
“No.”
“Let me have your work knife, Burk. Grog, drag the body out flat.” Provine Sael knelt by the corpse and used Burk’s knife to expand the fatal wound, sawing it into a sort of ‘Y’ shape the length of the torso. She probed within the thing’s chest and abdomen for a while, then stood and gave Burk his knife back. “It is neither a mammal, fish, nor fowl,” she announced somberly. “It is a plant, with a rudimentary skeleton that is very much like wood, a bark-like exoskeleton that provides additional structural support, and minimal organs. No mouth, no reproductive organs…I expect it draws nourishment from sunlight.” She nudged its primitive hand with the toe of her boot. “Its brain would seem to be about where the heart is on a Humanoid creature. I doubt it is much more intelligent than a dog, but that is purely a guess.”
“Where did it come from?” Hatcher asked, wonder in her voice.
“From the vines,” Torl answered, kneeling by the corpse. He poked into its chest cavity with his skinning knife.
“Look, bits of plants don’t just go running about by themselves,” Hatcher shook her head.
“They ac
tually do,” the scout didn’t look up from his probing. “Seeds, for example, and you can grow entirely new plants from shoots. Potatoes…”
“Yeah, sure, but they don’t literally run around and try to kill people.”
“Well, just add this to the list of broken rules we have encountered,” Hunter took a swig from his pocket flask. “I think you are right: this is just one big plant, and it can grow…whatever in blazes that thing is.”
“So why isn’t the entire world one big vine patch?” Hatcher eyed the plant growth around us. “This thing is like a forest that fights back.”
“I suspect that it is here for a reason,” Provine Sael said thoughtfully. “A specific purpose, possibly for defense. Hunter?”
“If it can produce sub-plants capable of at least semi-independent action, then yes, that would make sense. And it also suggests that the parent structure, the heart of this mass of vines, is at least partially self-aware.” He stroked his goatee. “Which would mean we are in a very vulnerable position, depending upon how much control it has over its component parts.”
“Torl?”
The scout stood, wiping his blade on a leaf. “Plants do react to developments; trees secrete sap to close off wounds, for example. But plants work on a far different cycle than creatures of flesh; we’re near the edge of it, so if its heartwood is at the center, it may not yet be aware we are here.”
“How far until we reach Hatcher’s irregularity?”
Torl glanced around. “Roughly fifty more yards.”
“All right,” Provine Sael frowned down at the corpse. “Grog, cut its arms off, and we will proceed. Once we have investigated the irregularity, we will withdraw and consider our options.”
I moved slower as I led the group, but no one complained; Torl actually drew his sword, the first time I had ever seen him do that except to oil it. Burk stuck with his shield, but he exchanged his star for his short sword, and I stuck with my dirk. I don’t mind fighting in close so long as I have the right weapon.
And it was needed: a short while after we started moving again another of the plant-things or vine-men came at me, and I heard startled exclamations behind me as well. This new one blended well, just as the last one, but at least I knew that trouble was near. This one had two of the clumsy three-finger hands, each clutching a long shard of flint, but otherwise was identical to the first.
It led with a clumsy double-thrust, but it was slower than it needed to be; I slapped the right thrust with my left hand, directing the point into my steel breastplate, where it snapped, and parried the left with my dirk. My left-hand slap continued to grab the thing by its jutting shoulder, and jerked it towards me, surprised at how light it was relative to its size. It managed to parry my dirk-thrust at its center chest, which showed pretty fast reflexes and arm joints that bent more and in different directions than mine.
Head-butting the vine-creature rocked it back as I flipped my dirk around and drove the point downward between the recessed neck and the left shoulder-mound; it tried for my throat with its flint while it punched my lower ribs (I was still gripping its shoulder), but hitting the steel neck-guard snapped the flint’s point, and a crude vine fist was no match for steel.
The point slid in and I threw my weight into thrusting down; it helped I was nearly a foot taller and over twice the thing’s weight, and that Provine Sael had been generous when we bought our weapons; my dirk was top-notch tempered steel from its point to the threaded tang-end, and it didn’t even slow as it slid into the thing’s chest from above. The vine-man sort of quivered a couple times when the blade was half its length in, and then went limp.
I drove it in its full length and twisted the blade before withdrawing and releasing the thing to thump onto the dirt. “Only one leaves the pit, that is the rule,” I told it before turning to check on the others.
They had been attacked by two, one with a spike instead of a right hand, and another armed with flint, but both were down, the spike-thing blackened all across the front of its torso and head, and the other hacked off at its knees and its chest split open.
“I don’t think it even saw me,” Hatcher grinned, her knives in hand and a liberal splatter of bright green mush across her torso. “Burk blocked it and I came at it from the side.”
“It literally fell on my blade,” Burk shook his head.
“Smells like overdone squash,” Hunter noted of his kill.
“Well done,” Provine Sael noted primly. “But let us continue onward; I fear time is working against us.”
Hatcher’s irregularity was walled off; vines had closed together tightly, creating a wall that curved to either side in an oval barrier.
“I’ll take a look from the top; Hatcher sheathed her knives. “Grog…”
“No.” Provine Sael stopped the Nisker with a hand to the top of her head. “Grog, chop through the wall. We stick together,” she added to Hatcher. “At least until we understand more of the plant’s capabilities.”
The vines weren’t all that tough, as I had determined earlier, and the axe I had taken from the bandits back at the karst was well-made, although designed for battle. I simply chopped on a line from about six feet high down to around a foot from the ground, and Burk dragged the cut ends to the side, which wasn’t easy as they were badly entangled, but Burk is strong even by brute standards, and it only took a few minutes before we had an opening large enough for Torl or Hunter.
Hatcher slipped through long before we were done, knives in hand, and immediately blurted out a curse. Provine Sael followed, her staff under the back of her belt and her short sword in hand. Hunter waited until Burk and me had the hole finished, twisting carefully to avoid the mush-dripping ends of the vines. Torl followed, then Burk.
I chopped a few more vines at the top and lopped some more on the sides before stepping through; like Hunter, I didn’t want a lot of glop on my clothes. I was running short on clothes that weren’t patched and stained from getting cut up in fights.
The wall enclosed an area about fifty feet across, more or less; Hunter had created one of his balls of light because vines as thick as my finger had intertwined across the top, cutting the light to a spattering of dots of sunlight across the area. The air was heavy with the stink of decomposition, and a step from our opening I saw one of the vine-men sprawled on the dirt, badly hacked and rotting.
There were a couple more nearby, one with a short single-bit bearded war axe embedded in its chest. I stepped over and pulled the axe free as I tried to take in the scene.
Provine Sael and Hatcher were crouched over a child lying in the dirt, and there were the bodies of two fighting men nearby, both dead and fouling the air with their decay. New-growth vines were sprouting from their bodies, although after a second look I realized that they weren’t sprouting from, but were growing into the corpses.
Torl was kneeling by the bodies, studying the vines, while Hunter was using his dagger to dig into the body of yet another vine-man. Burk was on the far side of the oval, keeping his eyes moving.
“Torl,” Provine Sael spoke without looking up. “We need to get out of the vines in the quickest way possible. Hatcher, check the bodies and gather any bags.”
The scout caught my eye and pointed at the wall; I turned, planted the bearded axe into a vine, and started chopping with my axe. Burk came over, took the bearded axe, and joined in. In no time we had a sizeable opening, and since it wasn’t hard, we just kept going, chopping a path through the vines. Torl followed behind us, correcting the direction but otherwise letting us go. After ten yards we started working on a one-brute front, one chopping, the other catching his breath and pulling cut ends to the side. It felt good to have a simple chore, a mindless task with a purpose, and it wasn’t very long until we broke through to the belt of dead dirt.
“That was good,” I stepped out into full sunlight.
“This is a decent axe,” Burk examined the bearded axe. “I’m going to hang onto it until we’re done with these vine
s.”
Torl followed, a pack across one shoulder and a skull of some sort of creature dangling from his other hand. Hatcher followed, dragging three packs, then Hunter carrying the child Provine Sael had been working on, and finally Provine Sael herself.
As Hunter passed me I saw that it wasn’t a child Hunter was carrying, but a thin, bearded Nisker who looked deadly pale.
“Back to the wagon,” Provine Sael instructed.
Burk took the Nisker and I gathered up Hatcher’s packs, and put her on my shoulders because she was red-faced and winded from her exertions.
“Who’s the Nisker?” I asked as we circled the hill.
“Dunno, but he’s one lucky bastard. Or he will be if he lives. What are the odds he would be found? A million to one?”
I wasn’t sure how much a million was, except that it was a lot, so I didn’t comment.
Chapter Eleven
At the cart Provine Sael worked on the Nisker while Hatcher stood by, doing something to help; Hunter sat with his writing kit and labored over a strip of parchment, and Torl set off to scout. Burk posted himself as guard on the hill, I walked a security perimeter a hundred yards out from the camp, and Pieter sat and wove cane strips into wicker.
When I was satisfied that nothing had followed us and returned to the camp Hatcher was sitting by the Nisker and writing something, Provine Sael had set up her cot and was asleep, and Hunter and Pieter were sitting out of earshot of Provine Sael, talking, Rose in her cradle at Pieter’s feet. I joined them, but all they were talking about was old books and older wine.
After about an hour Hatcher came over and joined us.
“Any change?” Hunter asked as Hatcher unfolded her stool.
“He finally went under,” Hatcher sighed tiredly. “He’s burning up with fever, dehydrated, underfed, and assorted other problems. The stump where Province Sael amputated his left arm doesn’t smell of gangrene, so maybe that’s been stopped.”
