by Michael Shea
"You see between its eyes and jaws that `X' of muscles, or nerves, or whatever they are? X marks the spot."
I got a lot of run behind my throw, and heaved the stick up toward the alien planets of its extinguished eyes.
Instant death missed Barnar by somewhat less than a handsbreadth, for that was how far he chanced to be standing beyond the arc of the stinger's thrust. Whip-quick, the great, pinned corpse folded in half on the iron axis of its implement. Its caudal barb stabbed forward with a force that imbedded it deep in the chestplates its legs were jointed to. I saw, above the spasmic working of its mouth-tool, the butt of my spear protruding from the softness it had found to en-scabbard more than two-thirds of its length.
We did not risk the convulsions that might attend retrieving my spear, and found me another among the weapons so profusely littering that waste of carcasses and martial engines.
A short time later we were edging out to the limits of our cover amid the battle-debris, and viewing the more barren moulting-ground's vast perimeter. Looking out over the impossibly broad frontier we planned to prevent the nimble, determined Wimfort from crossing, Barnar burst out with a short, disgusted laugh. "Let him be damned," he said. "He'll break cover where we can see him in time to catch him, or he won't. I'm going to sit here awhile, and sooner or later we'll find out which of these it is to be. To hell with everything else. I'm going to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting still for as long as the opportunity lasts."
I thwacked his shoulder consolingly, but couldn't come up with any comforting reply. I wandered around a bit, looking listlessly along the frontier. And, a quarter-mile or so down that border, across a little clearing that separated two large heaps of wreckage, a small shape moved. The movement was abrupt and dodgy, like that of a lizard sprinting from covert to covert. I was already running, half-crouched, weaving toward the place, keeping all the cover I could manage between me and it.
So fast I went, more flying than afoot! On what strength, drawn from where, I'll never know. I'd more than half reached him when I saw my quarry again—back of a last trash heap bordering the open grounds. There Master Wimfort crouched, and gathered himself for the spring. Just then he put me in mind of a young lion on a first kill. There was that clownish lack of finesse alloyed with mortal seriousness in precisely equal measure. The boy was no longer, in strict truth, a boy. He was abundantly ridiculous, and he was also truly kill-ready. He had been at work on a weapon of scavenged parts. He'd gotten a seven-foot fragment of heavy spear-haft. He'd lashed a battle-ax by the handle to one end of this, and had spiked and lashed to the other the broken blade of a splendid sword—like a falchion, broad and razor-edged at the point. Around his haft's balance point he'd wrapped himself two hand-grips of leather cording. His strategy was plain from his weapon's design. This was no casting-spear—it was to be used like a jousting-lance, the ax at the other end providing an option of chopping blows as well.
Even as I studied him I neared him at a mute-foot sprint, praying for the few seconds' luck that would suffice to get me within range to outrun him before he could bolt far enough onto the moulting-ground to bring the titan slaves down on us. Four seconds would have done it, and of course, I didn't get them. He saw me, and without the shadow of a hesitation, leapt out on the wounded, wormy plain below the mountain. We pounded across that meaty resilience, our desperate drives converging toward one of the tertiary monsters lying in full moult a scant three-hundred strides ahead of me.
Alas! A scant two hundred and fifty strides ahead of Wimfort. But our ruin was already accomplished—I saw it then, though I couldn't curb the insane persistence of my legs' pursuit. The boy was oblivious. Still running at full tilt, he raised and couched his lance. Beyond and above him, a stingered giant hanging five hundred feet off the plain swung around to us the remorseless black globes of its eyes, and sank gigantically toward us.
The great abdominal cask that was Wimfort's target had thrashed itself clear of its parent-husk and gotten about half-submerged. Up-ended, it towered ponderously, rocking with its gluttonous labor. The boy, uttering a shout of rapture, drove his point full against it.
Obliquely, I noted his weapon's fragmentation, his collision with the grub, his stunned fall—foreseeable details. Primarily, I watched the Regatherer's dive toward the boy as I ran to intercept it. It loomed down, its spike drawn up and under, strike-ready. I vaulted up with the cast, flung myself into free-fall after it to put some heft behind the stick's flight. My eyes popped with the snap I put into the toss. My fall back to the ground seemed almost leisurely as I watched my spear take root, watched the giant's dive become a death plunge as it folded convulsively in the air and sank its stinger hilt-deep in its own swollen underbelly. I tucked my head, hit the ground, rolled to my feet. The Regatherer's cargo spilled in black cascades behind it as it tumbled toward its ruin. I ran toward the boy, stumbling once at the shock of the giant's fall.
The Regatherer's torrential wound had drenched him, yet he was almost dry by the time I got to him. Not from that black brew's running off him, but from its soaking into him. It drained into his skin as quick as water melts into dry sand. But his hair was still half soaked, and in picking him up, I slipped my left hand under the back of his head to support it, and the demon blood sizzled on my palm.
I had to put him down again—he was coming around in any case—and dance around trying to shake the pain off my hand. The stuff couldn't be rubbed off; it burnt me for a bit, and then it became a painless black dust which I blew on, and was cleansed of. Yet I must testify to an unnatural thing the Elixir bred in the part of me it touched—for since that occasion I have been what I never was before—perfectly ambidexterous, and have long behaved right-handedly from habit only.
Seeing the boy gain his feet, I seized his arm and hauled him back toward the cover of the battle-zone's mortuary maze. He promptly had his legs well under him and was running with a will. Having what he sought, and craving to get it safely home, the boy now became scrupulously cooperative. At least two Regatherers were moving toward their fallen sibling already, and scanning around for an enemy. I told Wimfort where to dive and he did it instantly and flawlessly—under a toppled chariot. I flung myself supine on a heap of relatively anthropoid dead, and ceased to move.
We were not discerned—the stingered giants were soon patroling the area in force, but not knowing what they sought, they seemingly spared scant lookout for things of our order of magnitude. How many whales ever die of fleas? And once a second squad of Regatherers had completed our victim's obsequies—completed, that is, the lapping-up of all that its broken belly had spilled—these patrollers retired, and returned to their hovering-places above the moulting-grounds.
Just as we were setting out to find Barnar, he came stealing into the clearing. Together we guided our now obedient charge to a clearing farther back from the unspeakable mountain. Barnar had seen what had happened, and we found nothing to say to each other. We sat ourselves down, not knowing what else to do. Listlessly, I began a minor repair of my boot-binding. My friend sprawled back against a broken battering-ram. He balanced his ax on the toe of its handle on his fingers' ends. He would hold it upright awhile, shifting his hand to keep the balance, and then he would let it fall forward through one full turn and bite into the cheesy white world-floor—into Sazmazm's vastly mislaid skin. Then he would pry it free, and repeat the process.
For a while, Wimfort poked around cheerfully in the debris, savoring his deed, his successful rite of passage into the pantheon of heroes. He sang, he whistled, he whispered to himself, like a carefree child gathering shells in a beach.
But soon his exaltation began to fill him, swelled in him unendurably. Big with the sense of being already in possession of everything the Elixir could obtain for him, continued calm became a visible agony for Wimfort. He'd been poking with a mace he'd found among a heap of armor, and muttering ever more feverishly. I saw him pry out of the heap a particularly fine piece of work—a brazen shie
ld, graven with a stylized earth-wheel surrounded by astronomical symbols. I thought he was going to try its weight. Instead, he began to hit it with the mace. Each blow released an even greater shout of triumph from him. He danced like a demon, whooping and smiting the shield till it rang like a gong, marring the artful metalwork. By the time Barnar had wrenched the mace from his hands, he was entirely transported. He grinned unseeingly at us, who were at that moment in his eyes but two more of the legion of scoffing oafs who had long mocked and thwarted his ambitions, and who were now, with the rest, about to witness his vindication.
"Ha!" he shouted. "Ha! Now who's going to be laughing, and who's going to be gnashing his teeth, eh? How's it going to be now? What about the jabóbos, hey my friends? Do those slimy Priors argue and debate with us about our ancestors' sacred herds? Do they presume to tell us who our herds belong to? Will they still presume, now that there's no tract of earth I can't encompass with the mere spreading out of my ten fingers here? Oh, mark me now, my friends: Let my return be on First Market Day; and if that's the day I get back home, then on Second Market Day, let them step outdoors and look about their countryside, and see if they can find anywhere in all Prior Kairnlaw one jabóbo, one blade of grass, or even one muddy streamlet in all their parched dominions. They won't find any of those things—but then, they won't even get outside their doors to look for them either. Because before first light on that same morning, their own swords will jump from the scabbards on their wall-pegs, and hew them all to pieces in their beds, and spare not a babe or a greybeard among them!"
There was more, much more. When his histrionics ceased to be dangerously loud, they abated nothing in intensity, and we sat down again, unspeakably melancholy, and let them roll through our ears. There was a lot about Kine-Gather's great future as its nation's capital of rivers, prime pasture-land, and jabóbo herds. There was a good deal about which of Kine-Gather's sister cities would share but subordinately in her fortune, and expiate their various crimes against her with shovel-work in her offal-yards. Following this, there was abundant information about every folk or city the wide world over which had ever had dealings with Latter Kairnlaw, and about how their fates were to accord with their treatment of his beloved fatherland.
We sat morosely as this wealth of data was lavished on us. With our eyes we questioned one another, and saw no answers.
XIX
Freedom! That belabored word! It is a big, empty word, and yet, when some experience reminds us what freedom is, how clear and particular its meaning becomes, how unspeakably sweet, and full! I once had the experience of walking up to that word, and gazing into its measureless amplitude, upon all that it contains. I could see the word as I approached it—it looked like a small, raggedly square patch of blue. I walked through a stony, steel-paved dimness. My mind was mostly numb, with little more than one idea in it, which I muttered to myself for my own instruction: "That is freedom."
I kept walking, and as I got closer to the word it began to fill out. A minute blackness swam into the blue patch. Its shape told me it was a hawk, and its size—in telling me its distance—reminded me of the depth of that blueness. With a pang, I remembered that depth.
"That is the sky," I pointed out to myself. I began to walk faster. Beyond the hawk—far beyond—was one small, gauzy scarf of cloud. Steadily I approached. Distant mountains sprouted from the bottom of the sky's frame, then the intervening plains unrolled toward me from their feet.
And then I stood on freedom's very doorstep, and looked directly into it. It was made of stone and sand and tough, green scrub, and was studded with blunt, grey mountains on whose crests unmelting snows lay, sugar-white. And over these lay a blueness so deep and rich you felt it like a chill down to your bones. Across all of this the winds moved at liberty, and these winds were inhabited by japes and corbies and hawks and crooked-winged finches.
"The thief! The lanky one! He's back!"
The garrison, all rousing at once to the soldier's cry, swarmed to assemble. I nodded to myself. The thief, the gaunt one, was back, and the thick one too. I believe I beamed down at them one brief, idiotic smile before I went back to beholding freedom. I viewed the inching movement of a herd of horn-bow being driven across a stream out on the plain. I noted the low, tender hum the wind made crossing a patch of dry spar-grass just down the slope from Darkvent. And, observing that the sun was westering toward a fragile net of cloud-wisps on the horizon, I foresaw the red-and-gold fire-trellis that would frame its setting in half an hour or so. After these few brief discernments, it startled me to find that the garrison was all mounted and drawn up a few yards below the shaft-mouth, with Charnall and Kamin mounted at their head, and Kamin looking as if he'd been waiting awhile for my attention. The necessity of focusing my attention on the Rod-Master caused me to heave a deep sigh. I did it unthinkingly, and the moment after, realized its agonizing ambiguity to a father all coiled up to seize on my first expressions for the report of his son's fate. I almost smiled.
"We've got your boy back for you, Rod-Master."
Perhaps some private resolution had frozen his jaw till I should speak the first word, for it thawed now and his lips parted. Still, nothing came out of them.
"Hello Charnall," I smiled. "How does it go with you, my friend?"
He looked absently into my eyes, rubbing his baldness gently with his left hand, as if to force into his brain the reality of my return.
"We knew you were near," he said slowly. "I knew it through the Life-Hooks." Suddenly, he smiled back at me. "Didn't I foretell it? Didn't I have a feeling about it? You found the Privateer of Sordon-Head?"
"We did indeed. He is a rare man, Charnall. A great man."
"Yes. So I thought he must have been—must be."
"Show me my son!" It was a choking roar. We looked at Kamin. His beefish face was congested with rage. He thought we were playing with him—that there was nothing else in the wide world but his particular concern to occupy anyone's mind. So like his son he was! But his concern, at least, was for someone other than himself.
"I'll show you your son," I told him quietly. "And only that—show him to you. When our Life-Hooks are removed, your men withdrawn and our payment arranged before us, when these things are done, we will release him to you." I turned, and called back down the shaft: "Barnar! Bring him out to the light!" I turned to Kamin. "Come in, you and Charnall. You can bring two guards for your person if you distrust us, but no more."
I almost laughed at the needlessness of the last admonition. Kamin had to use his most compelling scowl to get even his captain and one other man to attend him. I led them in, and felt them grow tense behind me when they heard a rumble welling out toward us. I led them a few strides within and bade them halt. We watched a murky bubble of torchlight rise at us from Darkvent's gullet. In the bubble was Barnar, the torch in one hand, and his other hand on a rope across his shoulder. Beyond him you could just make out the ore-cart he was hauling up the gentle grade.
He stopped a short distance from us, lashed the rope to a beam, and waved cheerily to Charnall. To Kamin he said: "Here's your boy, Rod-Master." Holding his torch above it, he reached one arm into the cart and sat the neatly trussed boy upright on the shredded cable we'd packed him in, so Kamin could see him plainly.
"Father," the boy said.
Barnar drew his sword. "And here is our safeguard against any treachery you might intend. Note the tautness of this rope." He laid the sword's edge upon it. "The slope here is gentle, but constant. In a few seconds he would be rolling right along. Farther down, the pitch grows exceedingly steep."
"Before anything else," I said to Kamin, "the Life-Hooks Here and now." The Rod-Master nodded to Charnall. The mage plucked from his tunic a bit of parchment which his lips voicelessly rehearsed before he set his hand to my chest and spoke the spell. I did not despise this in him. On the contrary, in matters of sorcery give me every time the careful plodder over the slap-dash man. I felt a terrible pain which at first made me thi
nk I had been betrayed. It was the hook coming loose from my heart like a rusted-fast spike from dried wood, and I recognized what had seemed agony to be an intense pang of relief. When Charnall had done the same service for Barnar, my friend took the control-ring from him and pocketed it.
From the mouth of the shaft, I showed Kamin where we wanted beasts with our gold and weapons drawn up, and how far off his men must be deployed, before we'd let him lead his boy out of the shaft. The Rod-Master didn't move at first. He looked at me with hate and scorn. "How cooly you carrion-birds barter with the life of a defenseless boy."
I was paralyzed with rage myself a moment. All that I might say to him surged into my throat, and died away there, since I knew its futility. At last I said: "I tell you this, Oh Rod-Master, and no more than this. In paying what you do, you underpay us shamelessly. I do not cavil—we asked as much as we could carry and still outrun you if you proved treacherous. I don't expect to convince you, but I simply tell you, for the record, we shall always consider you and your people to be greatly in our debt. And now, let us have done with one another, for in all truth, I loathe the very sight of you."
Stolidly, Kamin turned, then checked himself and, as if in afterthought, disdainfully waved to Charnall his dismissal. The mage jumped up, clicked his heels in the air, and then solemnly bowed to his former captor. Kamin strode out into the waning light—all red and gold on the hillside—and the three of us, as from another world, watched his arms waving and his soldiers dispersing to his will.
Then Charnall looked at us. "I do not believe you have done this," he said. "And I never really believed you could do it, save in brief flashes of irrational excitement."
"We've just had a great deal of irrational excitement," Barnar nodded. "We'll tell you about it on the way to Shormuth Gate."
