Weavespinner

by James Galloway

  "How do I clean these?" she asked, holding up the smoking talons of the Cat's Claws, smeared with Demon blood.

  "Just wipe them off on the ground," he told her as he did the same with his sword. "The blood doesn't seem to harm the metal, but I don't like taking any chances."

  She drove them into the ground a few times to clean them, then retracted the blades and came over. Tarrin had just finished cleaning his sword, but he wasn't expecting what she did next. Jesmind hauled off and punched him in the jaw, felling him to the ground. Tarrin glared up at her as soon as the stars cleared--she didn't pull that punch, which would have taken the jaw clean off a human--but she glared down at him just as hotly, shaking her fist at him. "Don't you ever do that again!" she shouted at him. "It nearly skewered you!"

  "When you fight Demons, you have to take chances," he told her bluntly as he regained his feet, rubbing his jaw. "We can fight about this later. Right now, we have to get as far away from this thing as we can. There may be others up there looking for us, and this one might have told them where we are before attacked."

  She glared even more at him, promising him with her eyes that this was far from over, but she didn't argue. Tarrin picked up his sword and started off towards the north, to skirt the camp and reach the pass on the far side, and Jesmind followed silently.

  They moved very quickly, but both of them kept scanning the skies like rabbits in an open field watching for a hungry hawk. Vrock weren't the most dangerous of the Demons, but they could fly, and they could tell the other Demons where they were. The Demon's ability to Teleport anywhere they wanted to go meant that the entirety of Val's Demonic host could fall on them at any moment, so keeping hidden from the searchers was an absolute priority. They moved up into the pass, which opened into a narrow, uneven valley that had a frozen stream flowing down the middle of it and stands of scrubby pine and fir trees to each side of the stream They moved into the trees and stopped for a while, keeping watch on the clouding skies above, looking for any more large winged figures.

  After about a half an hour, when no others appeared, he realized that the Demon had attacked them without reporting in first, or at least he hoped so. But he wasn't about to take any chances. He realized that this close to Val's armies, moving around during the daytime was going to be dangerous, and moving at night may be the better option. Despite the intense cold that would face them, they would be harder to spot from the air if they did their travelling at night, when the darkness would make it easier for them to hide.

  Tarrin knelt down and took out the map, studying it as Jesmind continued to watch the sky from the edge of the trees. The series of interconnecting valleys was the easiest way through the mountains, and would put them closest to their destination, but it wasn't the only way. Not far from here, according to the map, there was a cave that went under a mountain and opened in a treacherous ravine on the far side. It would take days to where the cave let out by foot, and it may throw off any vrock that were looking for them. Actually, it was a faster way to go, but the map showed that the cave opened to a thousand span cliff with a hundred spans separating it from the other side. That ravine was in the base of a valley that connected to one that was along his chosen route. He pondered that for a moment. He'd have to use magic to get them across the ravine, a calculated risk, but the day or so of being underground and the sudden change of position would make it hard for the Demons to find him if indeed that one did manage to send word of their positions back to the others.

  And it would cut two days off their trip through the mountains.

  Tarrin checked the book. They had thirty-thirty-six days left before Gods' Day. He estimated that it would take them ten to twelve days to cross the mountains, and the seven to nine days he'd given to get to the mountains actually only took five. He'd have to stop to find a way to keep the Demons from finding them, which may take a few days...perhaps doing that up in that cave would kill two problems with one arrow. They'd be out of sight, away from the Demons, and if he did find a way to hide them from the Demons, it would keep them out of their hair the rest of the way across. He did not want to have to duck behind a rock every time he thought he saw a shadow in the sky. If he had to do that, they'd be slowed to a crawl in a place where being in the wrong place at the right time could strand them until spring.

  As if to reinforce that, snow began to fall on them, dropping flakes on his book of charts, causing him to quickly sweep them off with a muttered curse and put the book safely away.

  That cave seemed to be the best option. It would be a grueling path--he'd explored a few caves back home, and they involved a great deal of climbing up and down--but the gain they'd make by taking that route and the safety that it would offer to them would more than make up for the arduous nature of the journey through it.

  Tarrin crept up to the edge of the wood carefully and knelt in the snow beside Jesmind, who was looking up into the sky carefully. "Anything?" he whispered.

  "Nothing yet," she answered. "What was that thing?"

  "They're called vrocks," he answered. "We're lucky we killed it so fast. They're usually very nasty."

  "Just about any Demon is very nasty, love," she grinned. "At least we know these magical claws you gave me work on them. They went into its back easier than a pole through water."

  "Sorry if I scared you, but I have experience fighting these things," he told her. "They've got powerful magic, but they're also very smart and most of them are seasoned fighters. You have to attack them unconventionally, because they'll expect just about everything else."

  "Just warn me next time!" she huffed. "I nearly had a heart attack when it went by you! I thought it cut you in half!"

  "I did what I had to do to kill it and kill it quickly," he told her. "You don't get easy kills against Demons most of the time. Even without their magic, they're very formidable."

  "They didn't seem so formidable on the grounds," she scoffed. "From what I heard, the humans and Wikuni had their way with them."

  "They were dealing with some of the best fighters in the world, Jesmind, and they were heavily outnumbered," he said bluntly. "Once their magic and their invulnerability was taken away from them, they found themselves in a serious bind because they were facing humans and Wikuni that were just as formidable as they were, and facing a lot of them. The humans and Wikuni there were crack veterans, and the only Demons that could really fight back were the cambisi. And they killed nearly three times their number before they went down," he reminded her. "And if it hadn't have been for the Legions, they would have lost alot more," he added. "They're experts in large formation fighting, and they served as an anchor for everyone else."

  "I'll take your word for it," she said in a low tone. "How long do we wait?"

  "We'll be here until dark," he told her. "The map shows that there's a cave not far from here that leads under one of the mountains and lets out on the other side. It'll save us some time if we take it, and we'll be alot harder to find if we use it. We're going to pause there a while so I can figure out some way to keep the Demons from finding us, then we'll be on our way again."

  "I don't think I'm going to argue about that," she nodded. "If we have to crawl through the snow the whole way, we'll get to the other side sometime next year."

  "A little time invested now is going to save us a whole lot later," he affirmed.

  They retreated into the grove, and spent the rest of the day fearfully scanning the skies as the snow piled up around them. The dark clouds dumped nearly two spans of snow on the ground as they waited for dark, and the storm seemed to intensify as the day went on, the winds becoming stronger, the air colder, and the snow heavier as sunset approached. By the time the dark clouds above did start dimming with the setting sun, they were in the teeth of a full-blown blizzard, with howling winds that bent the trees and driving snow that reduced the visibility to almost nothing.

  "How are we going to find our way in this?" Jesmind demanded as they ventured out to the edge of the
grove as the light around them became very murky.

  Tarrin took hold of his amulet and chanted one of the spells that Camara Tal had taught him, a priest spell that would lock in on a certain location and guide him to it unerringly. He felt that strange surge of power rush through the Weave and into him, then release through him into the real world. Immediately, he knew that the cave entrance was seven longspans away, a thousand spans higher than his current position, and it was almost due east of them. The spell also showed him the easiest way to get there, telling him that he would have to go northeast around a peak and approach the cave entrance from the north.

  "I can find it now," he told her. "Come on, let's get there before we're buried."

  The going was very difficult. The snow was deep, and the wind caused deep drifts to form. He could barely see five spans in front of him, and he often had to plow through the snow to give his shorter mate a path to follow. The fierce wind was like a knife cutting into them, so cold that even he could feel it, and he paused to Conjure heavy fur coats for them to wear, tying them tightly at the waist to keep the wind from tearing them off of their backs. The coats got the wind off of them, but its force made them exert their inhuman strength to keep from being blown off course by it as Tarrin led them around the peak and towards the mouth of the cave. The wind was an ally to him, however, and he knew it. The stiff wind would even keep a Demon from flying, keeping the skies clear of them while they made their dash to the safety of the cave.

  That seven direct longspans of distance turned out to be nearly fifteen lonspans of travel, and it was such slow going that it took them most of the night. The cold was getting to Jesmind, and she staggered along behind him, her teeth chattering as her effort was exhausting her regenerative ability. They stopped frequently to rest behind anything that served as shelter from the wind, but things improved greatly when they finally got around the peak, and the peaks mass served as a partial break to the wind. It still swirled and howled around them, but it was a wind that had been forced to turn up the small box-end valley in which the cave mouth was located, so it didn't have half of the raging force that it had had in the main valley. Once they reached the box canyon, they moved with more speed and confidence, and though the snow was even deeper, coming up to Tarrin's waist in some places, he had little trouble bulling a path through it in which his mate could follow.

  Just before sunrise, as the main force of the savage snowstorm seemed to be abating, they finally reached the cave mouth...at least horizontally. The cave mouth was set thirty spans up a sheer rock face, a hole in the red rock wall of the mountainside, and it was a small hole. In a way, it reminded him of the hole that Sarraya had made for him in the side of the Cloud Spire, the hole that let him get into the lava tube that led up to the top and into the city. This one was considerably larger than that one, but it was still going to be quite an acrobatic display of flexibility to climb up there and squeeze in while hanging thirty spans off the ground.

  "That's it?" Jesmind demanded as she pulled down the hood of the fur coat he'd Conjured. "I'm going to lose all my clothes and half my fur trying to get in that!"

  "It's bigger than it looks," he told her as he pulled off his coat and handed it to her. "We'll have to take off the coats and throw them in in front of us, but we should make it." He put his claws in the stone and started up. "I'll go first. Let me get in, then come up. Make sure you take your coat off first and throw them in to me when you get there."

  "Why not leave them here?" she asked. "We won't need them in the caves."

  "Because I don't want to leave anything behind they can use to find us," he said calmly as he scrabbled up the icy stone.

  The opening truly was bigger than it looked, and to his delight, it immediately opened into a rather large irregular chamber whose ceiling was populated by quite a few hibernating bats. The interior was murky, even to his eyes, as the minimal light that got through the clouds above only had one small hole to filter into the chamber. Tarrin wriggled in quite easily and dropped down to the floor of the chamber, layered rather unpleasantly with bat droppings that felt were disgustingly squishy under his feet. He waited under the opening until the two coats flew into the chamber, him catching them before they fell into that unpleasant mess on the floor, and Jesmind slithered in effortlessly head first and dropped down to the floor.

  "Ewwww!" she complained, picking up a foot and putting it back down. "Tell me that I'm not standing in what I think I'm standing in!"

  Tarrin pointed up, and Jesmind followed his eyes. Then she glowered at the eerie carpet of brown furry bats coating the ceiling. "I don't think I'm ever going to groom my feet again!" she said with a queasy look.

  "Then they'll be crusty and smelly," he said absently, reaching within, through the Cat, and touching his Druidic power. A small ball of faint glowing light appeared over his outstretched paw, and he held it up and surveyed the room. "There's the opening that leads down into the mountain," he said, pointing at a small, roughly triangular opening on the far side of the chamber, which was only about two spans high.

  "It's pretty narrow in there," she frowned, bending down and looking across the chamber. "I hope we don't have to crawl the whole way."

  "Have you ever explored a cave?"

  "Not really, why?"

  "Because we just might have to crawl the whole way," he said. "Cave tunnels can be any size or shape."

  "You're making this trip better and better," she said acidly as she padded over towards the opening. "First you freeze my tail off, now you want me to be an earthworm."

  "Hold on, we have to deal with the light situation," he called.

  "Why not use that?"

  "Because I have to work to keep it going," he said. "I have a better idea."

  His idea was two little balls of light that were created by Sorcery, not Druidic magic. He wove the very simple spells, some of the very first spells that Initiates learned, and set them in a way so that they couldn't unravel when he stopped concentrating on them. The flows would pull against each other in a delicate knot of sorts, and that would keep the spells going for quite a while after he stopped maintaining them. Since they were such simple spells, he figured that they would last for six or seven hours before the flows of Fire and Air finally worked themselves free of one another and disrupted the spell. It was the trick that the Sha'Kar had taught him, a trick that he'd been very hard on himself for not figuring out on his own. Tarrin cleverly set one over each of their heads, hovering just over and between the tips of their ears, so its light didn't shine right in their eyes, and they would also serve a vital purpose in warning them when their heads were getting too close to the ceiling. The lights would go up into the ceiling and wink out when they were very close to it, and the sudden darkness was a warning they were about to bang their heads.

  "Cute," Jesmind said, trying to look up to see the ball of light, which only dipped back with her head as she moved it. It would stay firmly where it was set in relation to her body, just over and between her two white-furred ears, illuminating everything around her without a part of her body getting in its way. It did create two dim spots to each side of her head, shadows from her ears, but the ball of light was so close to them that it diffused light into those shadows well before it reached the walls. The white fur of her ears served to reflect the light as well, much better than his black ones, which made the area of light surrounding Jesmind much brighter than the one surrounding him.

  "Now that we have that fixed," he said, rolling the fur coat into a bundle and tying it onto his back, a possible cushion should he rise up and into a ceiling, "let's go find a clean place to rest a while, then we'll set out."

  They moved just beyond the constricting tunnel and found something suitable. It was a slightly wider section of tunnel that was straight and with a rather flat floor, but still with a ceiling only about four spans off the floor. They spread the fur coats on the hard stone and rested for a short time, then started out.

  The p
assage through the caves was much warmer than travelling the mountains above, but that lack of cold was countered by the sheer effort of travelling like that. True to his observation about caves, the tunnel they followed was almost whimsical in its dimensions. Sometimes it would be dozens of spans wide and high, almost like chambers, sometimes it was so narrow and small they would have had to literally wriggle through bending zig-zags on their bellies had they not had the advantage of being able to shapeshift into a much smaller form. In fact, in no less than four places they encountered that first morning, they were forced to shift into cat form to wriggle through tiny holes, which would have stopped any other spelunker that hadn't brought a pick and a shovel with him. The floor was rarely even, with shelves or fissures in it, higher on one side of the passage than the other, making footing a serious business for both of them. They occasionally had to climb up or down sheer rock faces, cliffs underground, vertical shafts that sometimes twisted and turned like the deranged machinations of some insane Wikuni plumber's most feverish fantasies. Tarrin could swear that one particular strange loop in the tunnel was almost like a thread inside the stone of the mountain tying itself into a knot. It went up, then down, then up, then down, and slid from side to side as it did so, giving it the illusion that it turned back on itself, like the floor of the passage actually rested right on the other side of the ceiling over their heads. Though the tunnel rose and fell in turns, the down parts were longer than the up, and Tarrin realized that they were descending deeper and deeper into the mountain's core. Stalagtites and stalagmites were everywhere, posing a very real hazard to their heads, and the caves were surprisingly wet, with water dripping from the ceilings or oozing from the walls. There were patches of actual mud in some places, and there was part of the tunnel where they were forced to swim along a narrow channel, a flooded part of the passage. It was a swim through water as cold as ice, and left both of them soggy and with chattering teeth when they got to the dry tunnel on the other side of the fifty spans of submerged passage.