It shimmered, thin flakes dropping away from its surface. The jacket was already more than half-consumed. Jehan set his jaw and grasped it tighter. Another sweep, and the dirty mass began to sink down, away. Where it had touched, Clairet’s coat was darkened, as if seared with acid. She shivered. He wove the flames downward, over her back legs, and the mud slid away before him. Without turning, he yelled, “Hold her head now!”
This time, the twin obeyed him. As her feet came free, Clairet sprang forward, ready to run. Four feet, eight, twelve, and she came to a halt. He could hear the twin murmuring to her, soft words he could not parse. The jacket was almost burned through. He looked around for more fuel. The chalky bushes were useless, and nothing else he wore was thick enough to last more than a minute or so. Well, apart from his boots, but those he needed. If he called to the twin to throw him something else, she would have to let go of Clairet. He made another wide sweep, urging the mud back toward the riverbed. They needed to get clear of here, and as fast as possible. He had no idea if they could. He had no idea how far the pony could go at all, seared and shaken as she was. He looked again at the bushes. If chalk would not burn, surely its coating might, and the bushes were clumped closely together. He had only to ensure any fire, however small, would spread. With his free hand, he groped for his small flask. His fingers fumbled, stiff and sore, abrasions catching in the rough weave of his jerkin. He dared not put down the jacket in case the flames went out. The flask slipped in his hand and he swore. He tightened his hold on it and pulled it free. He raised it and clenched his teeth on the cap to open it. The metal was sour on his tongue as he twisted. The cap came off, and he spat it to one side. He shook the contents of the flask over the nearest bushes and hoped. Cheap alcohol burned. Usually. He flung the remains of the jacket into the midst of the clump and stepped back.
The bushes ignited with a soft huff of air. Clairet leaped away from it, trembling, dragging the twin with her. Jehan ran to her head and took the end of the halter. He could not know how long the bushes would burn. But he could put the line of them between his group and the river and buy them a little time. Time enough for him to inspect Clairet’s injuries at least. Time enough, if they were serious, for him…His gaze drifted to the carbine and dropped away. If it came to that…He did not know if he could do it. He knew it could cost more than the pony if he did not. The mud was slow, but they would have to outpace it consistently to be sure of safety. Which meant he could afford only a little time for worrying and hesitation. He led the pony to the top of a low rise some twenty feet away and stopped. Her head dropped, for once without nuzzling into him. He ran his hand along her neck and felt her muscles jump. She was soaked with sweat and shaking.
Her right hind leg was raw, coat rasped away in places to reveal swaths of punctured, ragged skin. Blood oozed through it, bright red against the exposed flesh. Here and there muscle showed, or the white hint of cartilage or bone. Jehan swallowed, let his hands continue to caress her neck. If he could dress wounds like that—and he did think he had sufficient clean fabric anyway with which to bind it—he could not expect her to walk far. He shut his eyes, leaning into her, inhaling her scent. Too slow. Once again too slow. He inhaled slowly and opened his eyes. Stepping back from her, he rubbed her ear briefly, then reached for the strap that held the carbine.
There was movement near her back hoofs. He groped for the tinderbox. A flash of brown—not the mud returned but the ferret-formed twin. She wove about Clairet’s hoofs, pink tongue lapping at the nearest wound. He began to lunge, and the human twin caught his arm.
He pushed her away. He would not have the pony hurt any further. Tugging the carbine free, he swung it round and aimed its butt at the ferret.
The human twin bit him, sharp teeth meeting in the raw flesh of his left arm. He swung for her, and she jumped clear. As he raised the gun, she said, “No!” And then, “Helping. Washing to help.”
He stopped the blow in time, stood panting, the carbine hanging from one hand. She said, “Wounds…washing is good.”
He said, “They’re serious. You can’t…”
“We can try.”
He had nothing to say to that, although she was wrong. He shook his head, looked down. Get on with it, man. The longer he hesitated, the more Clairet suffered. He swallowed and set the carbine down. He untied the saddlebags, removed the girth that supported them, all the while murmuring soft nonsense to the pony. He could not carry everything that they contained. He would have to use up yet more of their scanty time to sort though them. The powder and shot were rolled up in his spare shirt. He unrolled it. Think of it as practice, nothing more. Measure, pour, load… His hands shook, spilling powder on the ground. Well, and that would ignite against the mud, later, too.
He stopped. Gunpowder. It was one of the few things of which he still had a fair supply. He could not burn the mud, but he could put obstacles in its way, or try to keep it to its banks. He looked up. The bushes smoldered feebly. If there were, say, a trench behind them…He did not know how large an explosion he could manage, but it would buy more time. Time enough, perhaps to get Clairet further away. And after that…He would not think of that, not yet.
He needed to concentrate. He had enough gunpowder. A trench long enough and wide enough to bulwark them from the mud would take many, many times more force than he could summon. He looked up. Tangles and tendrils of the mud seeped around the edges of the bushes closest to the river, reached out thin runners seeking choicer prey. He could not contain it, but perhaps—perhaps—he could damage it. He weighed the powder horn in his palm. Mud did not burn. Mud could not be usefully shot. But it could be blown up.
He was no engineer. But if he packed his hip flask with powder and wadding, if he soaked one of the cords that bound the saddlebags in alcohol and used it as a fuse…He groped for the flask again, setting the powder horn down at his feet. The air was cooling, although the breeze had dropped all together. There was no sound other than Clairet’s harsh breathing and the soft rasp of the ferret’s tongue. The light had dimmed, shadows lengthening toward sunset.
There was no sun to set. Jehan froze. Over to his right, the human twin made a noise halfway between a whimper and a gasp. The air darkened all around him. He reached for the powder horn.
From behind him, a quiet voice said, “I don’t believe that action will have the result you desire.”
He turned. For a slow, desperate moment, he thought it was Aude—brown-black garments, a hint of dark hair, a line and angle of the jaw. He took a step forward, dropping the flask, and came to a halt. Over an ocher scarf, the eyes that met his were long and black and cool. The ferret twin hissed. Jehan looked back at her. Her back had arched, fur standing in stiff upright outrage. Her sister had come to her side, teeth bared, dirty human fingers curled into claws. The stranger followed his gaze and shook her head. Her hair was long, longer than he ever remembered Aude’s being, swinging over her shoulder in a single heavy braid. She said, “I should have known.” And then, “Shouldn’t I?” It was not Aude’s voice.
“Man is ours,” the human twin said, fast and sharp.
“So?” The stranger lifted her hand. Jehan reached for the sword that was still not at his hip. She paused in her motion and raised her brows. Then she unpinned her veil. Her face was a long oval, pale as fish-belly skin. He shivered and moved closer to the twins and the pony. To his sword. A twin hissed at him, and he stopped. The human twin shook her head, fractionally. The stranger looked past him, toward the river and its creeping, slithering ropes of mud. She said, “Ah.” Then she looked back at the twins. “Caution is always better. But you tend to forget that.”
“Not us,” the twin said, and shuffled. “Wrong thing. Bad thing. Followed.”
“Woken,” the stranger corrected, gently. A shiver of fur worked its way down the human twin’s neck. Her nose lengthened.
She would change. She would leave him to explain all this. He said, “Don’t do that.” There was no time for evas
ions. Behind him, he could hear the slow crunch of grit and dirt as the mud crept closer. He reached a hand out to Clairet and rubbed her neck. She leaned into him, trembling. He risked a swift glance at her injuries. Where the ferret twin had licked her, the wounds looked calmer, already scabbing over. He said, “We have to get away from here.”
“Indeed.” The stranger looked at him again, face level and interested. “But I assure you that what you planned won’t work. Dead is dead.”
“It tried to kill us.”
“No. It merely tries to…to become what it remembers being.”
If so, its means were deadly. Jehan did not see that there was so very great a difference. Nothing here was safe, as far as he knew. Nothing was what it seemed, what it should be. He had no more reason to believe this stranger than he had to trust the white thing from the wood or the words whispered by the crystal trees. Or the twins. The stranger came closer, and both twins quivered. She came to a stop perhaps four feet away and made him a small, neat bow. She said, “Few humans come to WorldBelow, especially recently. I am Qiaqia, leader of the Darkness Banner, Cadre to the Grass King.”
It was hard to bow and to watch simultaneously. He bobbed his head, short and curt. “Jehan Favre, lieutenant.”
“Jehan Favre.” She spoke the name slowly, tasting it. Then she nodded. She glanced at the twins, and a small smile formed on her lips. “Yelena.” That was the human twin. “And Julana.” She put a hand out toward Clairet and the pony raised her head, sniffing.
Yelena stepped between her and the stranger. Qiaqia. The fur had spread over her shoulders. At the base of her spine, the beginnings of her tail showed. She shook as she moved and her voice was thin. But she put up her chin, said, “No.”
“Death was in the human’s mind.” Qiaqia’s tone was mild.
“Pony is strong. Clever. Pony is ours.”
Qiaqia shook her head. Then she dropped her hand, and, to Jehan’s surprise, began to laugh. She said, “That defense won’t work forever. And the animal is in pain.”
Yelena hissed, spine arching. From her feet, Julana echoed her. Qiaqia spread out her hands, palms outward. Jehan risked another glance over a shoulder. The mud still wound its way onward. Here and there the chalky bones of bushes broke through its surface, stripped of their bark and fragile leaves. He said, “What, then? If not gunpowder?”
“Now that,” Qiaqia said, “is a useful question.” She was no longer laughing.
“It retreated from fire,” Jehan said, “but I don’t have much to burn. I doubt the bushes would do more than smoke.”
“Fire isn’t my domain.”
That was not helpful. It did not seem wise to say so. He waited. She said, “The dead called me. Their memories were disturbed.” She looked again at the twins. “Disturbed by things—by beings—that were outside their proper place. Disruption, once begun, tends to spread. Has spread. The Grass King wouldn’t be pleased, if he knew.”
The twins pressed close, Julana winding about her twin’s ankles, Yelena hunching, sagging down. There was a moment’s silence. Qiaqia smiled. It was not like the earlier smile. This one held only knowledge, no amusement. She continued, “Fortunately—for you, anyway—the Grass King is in no state to know. If he were…” She shrugged. “If he were, none of these problems would have arisen.”
The words meant nothing. But her tone was full of knives. Jehan began to work his hand back along Clairet’s neck, toward his sword. The twins pressed closer together. His fingers closed over the sword hilt. The brass fittings were cool and familiar to the touch. This woman was one of the Cadre. The Cadre had stolen Aude. He said, “I’ve come for my wife.”
She considered him. “Your wife? Yes, I can see that.”
“You took her.”
“She was taken.”
He did not think he could draw the sword silently. Even so, he tightened his grip upon it. He said, “You don’t like disturbance. Give Aude back to me and it’ll be over. No more disturbance.”
Again, she smiled. “If it were only that simple. This isn’t WorldAbove. Our rules are different.”
He did not care about her rules. He cared about Aude. He glanced again over his shoulder, saw that the creeping mud was several feet closer. To the twins, he said, “We need to move.”
“You need,” said Qiaqia, “to correct your mistake.” She was looking at the mud.
He did not know how. He had chosen none of this. He said, “What mistake? It was there, in the forest. It followed me. It tried to…” He did not know how to say it. He did not know precisely what had happened at all. “It…it came after me. It wanted to…I don’t know, to steal from me. To make itself warm. Then it ran. It wanted the water.”
Qiaqia’s eyes narrowed. She said, “Describe it.” Her voice was that of a commander, now. Despite himself, he found he stood straighter.
He said, “It was white. It looked like a woman but thin, vague, like a ghost or…or a bone. It was cold, and it clung. When it spoke, it was as if it were, I don’t know, remembering from a long distance. It asked for water. She asked.” He hesitated. It did not seem wise to speak of the piece of stone hidden away in the saddlebag. He said, “I gave her some.”
Something in Qiaqia’s gaze changed. Softly, she said, “Water.” And then, “You woke this thing?”
“It was there. It followed us.”
“It came to you?”
He tightened his grip again on the sword. “I kept seeing it. Glimpsing it. And I thought…I needed to find Aude. Need to find her.”
“The thing you found was not your wife.” But all the edge had bled from Qiaqia’s voice. “Still, you may be right. This is not something you can remedy. Not yet, anyway. And not,” and there was the smile again, “at any time with a sword.”
Yelena said, “Bad thing. Not man’s thing. We said so.” Her voice was muffled, distorted. She was more than half ferret now.
Jehan said, “Can we go?”
“Soon.” But Qiaqia’s attention had moved on from him. She lifted her scarf, pinned it back in place. Then she stepped around them, steps brisk and neat, and crossed the few yards to the edge of the mud. It had grown, its mass swollen with bark and leaves and the blood it had stolen. The mist clung to it, lapping its sides. He could smell it, stagnant and sour and rotten. Claws of it reached for Qiaqia, and she stood motionless, her back straight, arms by her sides. He drew the sword. That was useless, or so she had implied, but it was all he had, that and the carbine, and he would go down fighting. Slim shining fingers of mud closed about Qiaqia’s ankles and still she did nothing. It began to climb, soft and sticky, popping and gulping its way upward. It reached her knees. As it rose, she lifted her arms, holding them out by her sides. The mud was piling up around her, surrounding her, and still she did nothing. Waist height and climbing…
She spoke, soft words whose shape he could not hear. The mud quivered. She lowered her arms, hands palm down, fingers spread, and touched its glistening foul surface. It creaked, groaned, shuddered. Tiny fractures spread outward from her touch, threading through the mass swift as fire. She spoke again, and the mud cracked. Clods of earth fell off, rolling and shattering on the ground around her. Flakes of dirt drifted to dust the branches of the bushes, coating Jehan’s face and shoulders, settling along Clairet’s back and in the twins’ fur. The mist eddied, swirled, faded. Coughing and blinking, Jehan rubbed his eyes, and found his hands as filthy as his face. Clairet shook herself, skin twitching, whickering as granules found their way into her cuts. He brushed them off for her, as best he could, sheltering as many of her injuries as he could. The scabbing, the calming from Julana’s attentions, had spread upward, working along her injuries, helping to close them. The air was full of grit and soil, falling slowly down.
Qiaqia stood, still upright, still calm, though her garments were thick with earth. Around her feet was a low, dirty mound. She stepped over it and turned, facing Jehan and the twins. Then she knelt and began to brush the surface of the
mound. Earth and leaf fragments and chippings of bark, brown on brown on brown. Her hands were long and thin, tendons standing out yellow under her white fish’s skin. The dirt crumbled under her touch, did not cling to her flesh. She did not look up. Now, Jehan noted distantly to himself, would be an excellent time to leave. But he did not move, fascinated by the steady movement of those ugly hands. The twins, both now fully ferret formed, curved themselves around his boots and leaned into him, as enthralled as he was. He could feel their breath, quick and regular, through the leather.
A thread of white, paler even than Qiaqia’s hands, ghosted up through the soil. White in darkness, glimpsed at, hinted at…Jehan thought of the forest and the stone aisle. Brush, brush, brush. More white broke through, bluish, like skimmed milk. He stiffened. Catching his alarm, the twins quivered. Brush, brush. Strands of milky hair drifted free, webbing out over the ground. A fold of gauze followed. Slowly, steadily, earth gave way to thin white limbs, a long torso, a head. The woman thing lay curled in a nest of soil. Her head was turned toward him; her eyes were closed. She did not breathe. Qiaqia sat back on her heels and looked at Jehan. She said, “This, I take it, is the thing you found in my wood?”
“Yes.”
“Then we must hurry. Things are changing, and more swiftly than I expected.”
He could hear Clairet’s breathing, pained and labored. Despite his best attempts, some of her remaining cuts were filled with grit. They could go nowhere with her in this condition. Qiaqia’s problems were not his. Bending, he began to unbuckle the straps holding the packs onto the pony. She could carry them no further. Well, and chances were none of them would live long enough to need most of what he’d packed anyway. If he did find a way through this place, if he did find Aude…He dropped the packs to the ground. The stone chip was in the left-hand one; he bent and fished it out, under the pretense of retrieving his comb. Then he unhooked the canteen. It was barely half-full, and the river was gone, blown to dust and memory. He shrugged, and opened it.
The Grass King’s Concubine Page 38
