Take a human, blow it up to one and a half times its size, stretch its face and then cover it all with a thick mat of stinking fur, and that's what you have. Something big and too strong, if not overly bright—if the three of those things had been a bit faster, or a bit smarter, all of us would have been dead.
Ahira knelt over a severed arm and poked at the hand with the hilt of his axe. "Partially retractable claws, and the thumb's just barely opposable. It may be intelligent."
I felt at my side. It hurt like hell, but maybe that was all. I breathed deeply, and didn't feel the broken edges of ribs grate against each other, so maybe I was okay, too.
That's where age and experience had saved our asses. Most of the precautions you take are wasted ones; ninety-nine plus percent of the time that you post a guard, nobody's going to even bother him; the rear guard of the party is usually a waste. Young people learn that too quickly, and not only do their minds tend to wander—so does mine—they also tend not to be able to pay attention to what's going on.
You live through this sort of thing for a while, and your chances of surviving the next time go up.
Nothing to it, really. Nothing but effort and patience and concentration and luck. Nothing to worry about.
I wiped my trembling hands on my thighs.
"What the fuck are you?" Tennetty asked the dying creature.
The last of them rolled its head slowly toward her, its eyes wide with pain, certainly, or anger perhaps.
"Urrkk," it said, slowly, painfully reaching out claw-tipped fingers toward her.
And then it shuddered and died.
"Time's wasting," Ahira said. "Let's go."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In Which We Enter
Ehvenor and I Get Lost
Nothing endures but change.
—HERACLITUS
When you get to my age, you like a little stability. At least in the fucking ground under your feet.
—WALTER SLOVOTSKY
The mountain road bled off onto flat land at the shoreline, as we walked on while the morning fog crept in and the city insisted on changing in front of us. The road narrowed, became little more than shoulder-width, surrounded on each side by dense brush; we had to walk single file.
We walked for what felt like hours and hours; Ehvenor drew slowly closer. Dawn threatened to break over the horizon, while a light fog blew in off the Cirric, chilling me thoroughly to the bone.
Tennetty and I had switched off with Ahira and Jason, taking the lead behind Andy while they watched our backtrail. So far, so good.
The only trouble was Andrea: she was too calm, her steps too light and easy as we stopped at a fork in the road. I shook my head. That fork hadn't been there before; the road had twisted at that spot, but it hadn't forked.
It did now.
She smiled, and muttered a few quick syllables under her breath. "Right fork," she said, then relaxed.
Her eyes met mine for a moment. "It's okay to talk now; there shouldn't be any decisions for the next half mile."
"It would be nice if it didn't change for awhile."
"Don't count on it."
I tried to smile confidently. "How are you holding up?"
She shrugged. "I'm okay. I can handle this."
"Fine," I said. "But we can turn around any time you want."
Her eyes had stopped blinking. I didn't know what that means, I still don't know what that means, but her eyes had stopped blinking.
"I don't think so," she said. Then she corrected herself. "No, we don't turn around here. We keep going."
"We just lost the fork behind us." Ahira's voice was too calm.
I turned to see the road twisting behind us, vanishing off in the fog well beyond where the fork was. Had been. Should have been. Whatever.
"Good," I said. "I never liked it anyway."
Ahead, the fog thickened.
"Hey, Ahira? What say you and Tennetty switch?" Infrared can pierce fog a bit deeper than visible light, and dwarves can see farther into the infrared than humans can.
They did, and as we walked on, the fog thickened further, until I could barely see six feet in front of me.
"Let's close up, people," Tennetty said, beckoning Jason in tighter. "One for all and all for one, eh?"
I would have been tempted to protest, but Ahira nodded. "Makes sense. Andrea?"
She shook her head. "I can't think. The fog is too thick, on the ground, in my eyes, in my mind." Her shoulders hunched, as though waiting to receive a blow, then slackened as she breathed a spell, her fingertips working in front of her, drawing invisible letters in the air.
The fog drew in further, until I could barely see my feet, and Ahira off in front of me.
My heart started thumping.
Look—I'm not normally claustrophobic. A dwarf friend of mine (not Ahira; he doesn't like spelunking) and I once waited out a cave-in for three full days until rescue reached us. I didn't have any trouble; I taught him how to play Ghost in dwarvish. But there's something reassuring about the solidity of cave walls. Nobody can reach claw-tipped fingers out of a cave wall and pluck your heart out; the closeness of a dwarf passage doesn't hide pitfalls and tripwires, or strange creatures waiting to leap out of nowhere and . . .
Easy, Walter.
Andy was guiding us toward Ehvenor by magic; Ahira was looking into the fog, at least a little way farther than I could, protecting us from sudden attack. Tennetty, Jason, and I were useless, and a third of that really bothered the hell out of me.
"Just a little farther," Andrea said, off in the mist, just a shape, nothing more.
The fog rolled up to my knees, and then to my belly, and it was all I could do to see my hand in front of my face.
"Here," Andy said, "take a sharp right, and step forward. No, not the rest of you. Just Ahira. Okay, Walter, you're next."
I turned right and took a step forward, out of the fog, and found myself standing next to Ahira in the morning light and thick mud of a narrow Ehvenor street.
* * *
I wanted to run, I started to run, but the mud sucked at my boots. It would be like trying to run, well, through mud.
Besides, there was no reason to run. I had just been in dense fog, and now Ahira and I stood in clear light on a narrow street, surrounded by two-story wattle-and-daub buildings, up to our ankles in soft, brown mud. It could have been any street in any city, except for the way that faerie lights, bright even in the daylight, hovered motionless overhead, seemingly frozen in place.
Andy's voice was far away, but I couldn't tell in what direction. "Jason goes next," she said. "Right here. Yes, go right, right here."
And suddenly Jason, and then Tennetty, and finally Andrea herself were beside us.
I forced a smile. "Nicely done. I didn't know you could teleport."
Andy smiled; then reached over and gave me a peck on the cheek. "Thank you for the compliment, but true teleportation takes power and control that's only theoretically possible. For anything mortal," she added.
If that wasn't teleportation, I'd like to know what it is.
I guess the question showed on my face, because she shrugged and answered. "It's not teleportation. Teleportation is when you go from point A to noncontiguous point B, skipping the points between. This just happened to be right next to where we were, if you knew where to look."
The air was warmer than it should have been for this time of the morning; I'd expected it to warm up some, but not this much. Cold mornings are better. Give a hot sun a while to work on the typical city street, and it'll smell like it's been paved in well-aged horseshit. Which it has, come to think of it.
"Waddling Way," Andrea said, nodding to herself, beckoning us to follow her. A twisty street, lined by two-story wattle-and-daub buildings, it curved off sharply maybe a hundred feet behind us, and less in front. The buildings were too tall and we were too close to see much over them, except for the distant glow of the Faerie dome to the north.
It was all q
uiet, and empty, except for the mud, and the buildings, and the faerie lights.
"Is quiet," I said. "Too quiet, kemo sabe."
Ahira chuckled. "Shut up," he said, not meaning it, as we walked after Andy. "Take it while you can get it."
Tennetty turned about slowly, like a camera panning in a full three-sixty, which I guess she was, at least in a sense. I didn't blame her for wanting to take it all in—it was so ordinary, not at all what I'd expected Ehvenor to be. Where was the flickering? The street we were standing on was as ordinary and solid as any street I'd ever seen.
I was going to be the straight man, but Jason beat me to it.
"Where's all the flickers? Why is it all so stable?" he asked.
Andrea didn't turn around. "The flickering was from indeterminacy. Ehvenor is never really sure what it is, and the uncertainty has been growing. But whatever it is, we're here, and that's determinate. We're in only one time and place."
I had my usual reaction to explanations about magic:
"Oh."
There's three theories about how to make your way down a street in hostile territory. My favorite theory is to avoid it in the first place; you very rarely can get killed in places you aren't. Second best is to split the party in two, each group staying on one side, covering the other. It limits the field of fire of anybody hiding in buildings on either side.
Another theory is that you walk square down the middle of the street; the idea is that gives you time to react before anybody or anything can reach you.
I don't much like that one, so I moved away, toward the raised wooden sidewalk that skirted the alley.
"No," Andrea said, without turning around. "Don't. You might get lost. Can't afford that."
Lost? Look—I'm not the kind who gets lost. I don't have a perfect sense of direction, but nobody's going to lose me on the streets of a city, not without a whole lot of trying.
Right, Walter, so where's the fog bank that was up to your nose?
I stayed close.
Waddling Way twisted and turned for maybe a quarter of a mile until it forked around a vest-pocket park, the left road leading up a cobbled street, the right one down into more muck.
I bent my head toward Ahira's. "Want to bet which way we go here?"
"Right here," Andy said, clopping down into the deeper muck, sinking in almost to her calves.
"It rained hard here, and recently," Ahira said, his eyes never stopping moving.
"No shit, Sherlock."
We followed her down into the muck, our boots making horrible sucking sounds every time we lifted our feet and stepped—
* * *
—up onto the hot, dry dirt of the street, under the heat of an oppressive noon sun and the whistle of music in the crowded marketplace.
"People," Ahira said. "It's good to see people."
That was the moment I expected them all to turn from their buying and selling, sprout long fangs, and leap at me, but sometimes I'm lucky enough not to get what I expect.
High overhead, a dozen wood flutes swirled and swooped and dived through the moist air, moving fast as they piped their tunes, the high-pitched whistling dopplering up and down in counterpoint to the manic melody. Not great music; they played an eight-bar theme, repeated without variation.
We had to step aside, quickly, to avoid two horses—huge things, about the size of Clydesdales, although dappled, not solid—pulling a heavily laden wagon.
We pressed tight around Andrea, like a bunch of school-kids staying with teacher. Which wasn't so bad an idea.
Okay, okay, I'm slow, but eventually I get it: Ehvenor wasn't just unsure what it was, it didn't know when it was. Normally, it's easy to get from mid-morning to noon, but you don't do it without skipping over late morning. Unless everything, time included, has broken loose. Hell, it was possible we'd stepped from today into yesterday.
It was a market day, and the trading was brisk under the whistling of the overhead flutes.
Over by a pyramid of reed bushel baskets, an apple-cheeked appleseller haggled endlessly with a tall, raw-boned man in a traveler's cloak and floppy hat. Beyond them, one of the hulking beasts—shit, I'll call them urks or orcs until you've got a better name for them, thank you very much—gestured clumsily that the butcher was asking too much for one of his hanging haunches of mutton. Well, I hoped it was mutton; it could have been shepherd.
Beyond the street, the dome of the Faerie Embassy waited, separated from us by maybe two or three cross-streets.
"This way, and try not to bump anything," Andy said, working her way through the crowd as a heavily laden wagon clomped by, pulled by two enormous horses. The trouble with a crowd is that you have to suppress combat reflexes. I don't like strangers pressing up against me—I'd rather do the pressing. That's how you work a crowd, and I'm a pretty good pickpocket, actually. Not that this was the time to see if my pickpocketry was up to snuff.
We made our way down the street, past the filled stalls where an overweight appleseller haggled endlessly with a tall man in hat and cloak, past the orc arguing with the butcher, past the shops where the candlemakers wielded their frames and dipped their wicks, where a fat old basketweaver took another turn on the base of the frame she was building.
Something about it bothered me, and I gave Ahira a quick touch on the shoulder, then slipped back to the rear of our group, and looked behind. Yes, yes, you can leave trouble behind you, but monkey curiosity is a survival factor, if you don't overdo it.
They were still at it. All of them. The orc was still haggling over the cost of meat, and the tall buyer was still arguing with the short appleseller, and the basketweaver still hadn't—
A heavily laden wagon clomped by, pulled by two enormous dappled horses, each about the size of a Clydesdale.
And the flutes were still swooping and swirling overhead through the same eight-bar theme.
I pushed my way up to Andrea's side. "Andy—"
She raised a peremptory finger as she muttered another spell. "We go this way." She elbowed her way through the crowd, between two stalls, and into the cool of the day and the—
* * *
—dark of the night near the middle of the square. Well, triangle—three streets dumped on it; the buildings at their ends wedge-shaped, triangular, like pieces of stone cake. No windows, no doors, nothing.
A pedestal holding a statue stood in the middle of the square, although I couldn't see what it was a statue of.
Ever do that experiment where you find your own blindspot? It's pretty simple. You put two dots on a piece of paper about six inches apart, close one eye, and stare at one of the dots as you move the paper closer, seeing the other one only out of your peripheral vision.
Eventually, you'll pass the dot through the blind spot of your eye, the place where the optic nerve enters. And it'll disappear, although you'll still know it's there, and if you move the paper or your eye just a little, you'd see it, but don't: stare straight ahead.
That's what the statue looked like. Like I Can't See It.
Above and beyond it, straight up one of the feeder streets, the dome of the Faerie Embassy stood, flickering in the night.
Andrea hurried us along. "Quickly, quickly," she said, moving us toward another one of the feeder streets.
Ahira held up a hand. "No. Stop. What are we doing—"
She shook her head, her eyes growing wide. "No. We can't stop. It's all breaking loose." Her lips moved, her breath went ragged.
"It's not just the city anymore. It's falling apart." She gestured at the street that apparently led toward the embassy. "The Hand was right: it's connecting with the rest of the world." She gestured at the street. "Walk down that way, true, now it'll take you to Lost Lane, but Lost Lane won't dump you out on Double Circle—go north at the first corner and it will lead you down to the pits; the east road will bring you to a spot a hundred feet under the Cirric, just off the Pandathaway coast; west will drop you in a tree outside a village on Salket. It all," she wriggled
her finger, "touches. But you won't walk down there, will you?"
Great. Andy had an n-dimensional map of the city so crowding the inside of her head that she couldn't remember that the rest of us barely knew what the hell we were doing.
"Let's get the hell out of here," I said.
"No, it's not all of Faerie. Not in the solid regions. Just a piece of it. We go, before he gets here." Dragging Jason by the arm, she ran off toward the street.
What did that mean? He? Who, he? I broke into a sprint after her, Ahira and Tennetty at my heels. There was something behind us, something huge, but I didn't take a look at it. We reached the juncture of square and street only a few paces behind her.
"Boioardo?" I asked, craning my neck to look as we lunged into the night and—
* * *
—skidded to a stop two feet from the edge of the hot, flat roof. I stuck out an arm and stopped Ahira from bumping into Jason. A bright noon sun beat down on us, but the blue sky was covered with black bands, arcing from horizon to horizon.
"Quickly, now," she said, "over this way." We made our way down a ladder into an alley, and followed Andy down the alley and—
* * *
—into a vestpocket park, cool and green and minty against the heat of the late afternoon.
I would have said the trees were oaks, except that their bark was edged in silver, and the broad leaves chimed gently, like silver bells, as they rustled in the breeze.
Tennetty's breath was coming in ragged gasps, and I could have used a breather.
Ahira looked around. "Can we take a moment here?" he asked, over the ringing of the leaves. "Or do we have to run on?"
"Oh, yes," Andy said. "We rest here for a moment," she said. "I've muddied the trail enough for us to do that, at least."
One branch of the ancient oak hung long, within grabbing-and-hanging-on-while-you-grab-your-breath range, which I did. The bark was rough beneath my hand, its silver trimming cool.
Jason reached up and flicked his fingernail against a leaf. It rang like a tuning fork.
Ahira squatted on the ground. "Well, just in case we need to know, which way do we go next?"
Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (The Guardians of the Flame #06-07) Page 26
