by James Maxey
“Maybe the hammer is like a bloodhound,” I speculated. “It has to have some reference point to use for tracking?”
Infidel’s face went blank as I said “bloodhound.”
“You’re thinking of Menagerie, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said.
We flew on through the darkness for some time before she asked, “Is this all my fault?”
“I don’t see how you can be blamed for the insane plans of a two-hundred-year-old witch.”
“But what if I’d killed Menagerie when the Black Swan told me to? None of this would have happened.”
“The Black Swan also told you to kill Greatshadow and you didn’t,” I said. “I think you made the right call. I think, against all odds, you converted an enemy of mankind into a grudging ally. I heard you explain your reasons to Zetetic. The Isle of Fire should remain untamed. I can’t agree more.”
“Am I crazy to want to raise our daughter there?”
“No,” I said. “It’s dangerous, but it’s the only place in the world I’ve ever felt that life makes sense. You saw how happy my grandfather was living with the Jawa Fruit tribe. The island can be paradise if you respect it rather than trying to tame it.”
“I know,” said Infidel. “I want our daughter to love exploring the jungle just as much as we did. I want her to be able to appreciate nature by getting dirt and blood under her nails as she stalks her own meal. But I don’t want her growing up as some naked, unwashed savage like your grandfather. I want her to read the books that you loved. I was bored by operas and museums and cathedrals when I was a girl, but now I want her to see these things, so that she can understand the beauty that man is capable of producing. How do I do this? How do I raise a child to be both wild and refined, civilized and feral all at once?”
“You’re describing yourself, you know,” I said. “Half-forest-dragon, half-princess. The ultimate blend of beast and beauty. My god, I never stood a chance. You captured my heart the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“Oh, that was just lust,” she said, dismissively. “I was pretty hot when I was twenty.”
“You’re pretty hot now,” I said.
“Actually, right now I’m freezing,” she said. “My nipples are hard as walnut shells.”
“It’s lucky you ditched that chrome-plated bra.”
She laughed, but then her voice went serious. “I’m scared, Stagger.”
“Of being a mother?”
“What do I know about raising a child? What do I know about anything? Other women have mothers, sisters, best friends they can talk to. People who can tell them what to expect, what to worry about and what to shrug off. I don’t have any of this. I’m thirty years old and I can rattle off a list of about three hundred people who’ve vowed to kill me, and precisely two people I count as friends, and they’re both dead!”
“Two?” I said, instantly regretting that I sounded surprised she had a second friend.
“There’s also Aurora,” she said. “I mean, it’s dumb. A month ago she was nobody to me. But I really connected with her on the dragon hunt. She told me her secrets, I told her mine, and... I dunno. There was a bond. It was almost like I had a sister. Which is why I feel so strongly about keeping this promise.”
“I understand,” I said. “But she won’t know if you keep the promise or not.”
“How do you know? You’ve managed to keep tabs on me.”
“I saw Aurora move on. She went to her heaven... the Great Sea Above.” I glanced up. “Maybe she’s up there right now, looking down, watching us streak across her sky like a comet.”
“If she’s watching, she knows what a mess I’ve made,” said Infidel. “Old Infidel would have shrugged this off. New Infidel intends to clean things up.”
“Your newfound devotion to cleaning will probably be a big help in motherhood.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“As for advice on childbirth and raising kids, Gale Romer can probably give you some guidance.”
“She’ll charge me for it,” said Infidel. “We’re not really friends. I was just a mercenary she employed. I liked her as a boss, but I can’t say we were close. And after all the grief I’ve caused her on this trip, she probably hates me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Infidel couldn’t return to her own family for assistance. My father was a monk and would be of no use; my mother had been a whore who abandoned me at an orphanage. I wasn’t her only child, but even though I have a dozen half-siblings out in the world, they’re strangers to me. My grandfather would probably be willing to help, but, as noted, he’s gone feral. Also, while Judicious seemed remarkably sound in body and mind, it was no trivial matter that he was a whisker away from his hundredth birthday. It was no certain thing he’d be around in nine months.
“I don’t know what the future holds,” I said at last. “But if my past is any guide, things always work out.”
“Not always,” she said.
“Often enough,” I said. “My gut tells me everything will be okay. My gut tells me you’ll be a great mother.”
“You don’t have a gut anymore,” she said.
“Well, my brains tell me.”
“You don’t have brains either!”
“True. All that’s left is my soul. And if a soul isn’t the ultimate judge of the rightness of things, what is?”
“Hmm,” she said, before the faintest flicker of a grin crossed her face.
We flew on in silence. I felt as if she were happy for the moment, or at least in a state of relative peace, and I worried that it would be too easy to tip her mood back into worry.
Slowly, a curious thing unfolded. The sky at our backs grew noticeably lighter.
“Everything’s turning blue,” said Infidel as she slowed, turning back to watch the sky.
I slipped out of my shell to verify that this was so. An eerie twilight had broken through the gloom, distinctly azure in hue. Then, with no fanfare, the bright white upper edge of the sun peeked above the southern horizon. I’d never appreciated seeing the old dragon Glorious quite so much.
I wasn’t the only one happy to see the sun. The internal glow of the Gloryhammer had intensified. The weapon gave off a slight crackling sound. Infidel held the weapon toward the distant orb.
“Feel this,” she said. “Put your hand on the hammer.”
I placed my gloved root on the shaft, but felt nothing. “What should I be feeling?”
“The hammer is sort of humming. It’s almost like the purr of a kitten when it’s being held by someone it knows.”
“The Glorystones fell from the sky when Glorious first merged with the sun. Maybe the hammer remembers him. They’ve been separated for over a day now, since the sun never appeared on the Sea of Wine.”
“Maybe,” Infidel said.
But if the hammer truly had a memory, it was not allowed to dwell for long on these recollections. After a leisurely stroll across the horizon where it never quite got airborne, the distant sun once more began to recede.
We turned north and flew on, the landscape beneath us aglow in the relatively bright twilight. Against this backdrop, anything dark stood out, and far ahead I spotted specks upon the ice, small as fleas. I pointed toward the dark forms with my gloved hand. Infidel nodded and altered our course to investigate. We soon came to see that our targets were moving. As we closed upon them, the specks became two large humanoid figures crouched over a gray mass on the ice. They had their backs to us; the gray smear they were hunched over proved to be a large seal they were butchering. As one of the butchers moved to the side, I spotted tusks jutting from his lower jaw. Ice-ogres!
Infidel came in low. The Gloryhammer caused long shadows to stretch before the ogres. They turned back to look at the source of the light, raising their hands to shield their eyes.
“Sorrow,” I said. “Right now would be a fantastic time for you to teach me the ice-ogre word for ‘hello.’”
“Awk,” she responded almost
instantly.
“I can manage that,” I said. “Awk! Awk!”
We were several hundred yards away. Between the faintness of my squeaky voice and the rush of wind, I can’t believe they heard me. Nevertheless, something triggered them to choose this exact second to abandon their kill. They ran toward a ragged-looking patch of ice. This proved to be a deep pool of slush leading to the ocean beneath, or so I deduced as they disappeared into it.
“Damn,” said Infidel, landing on the ice where they’d just stood.
“Do ogres swim?” I asked.
“They’re excellent swimmers,” said Sorrow. “If they had time to fill their lungs they can last almost twenty minutes underwater. Their high body fat helps retain heat. They can travel miles beneath the ice; they use their tusks to bash their way up through thin spots.”
“Weird,” said Infidel, with her ear almost pressed to mine. “I can hear you, Sorrow. Just barely.”
“It’s the sympathetic vibration of the other half of the seed pod.”
“Have you... have you been listening to everything we said?” Infidel asked.
“I told you before you left that I would hear what Stagger heard. But, don’t worry, I haven’t been paying attention to your confessions of maternal inadequacy. We’ve been preoccupied here by the arrival of Levi. The whales messages found their mark.”
“Levi? Gale’s oldest son? He showed up fast.”
“It turns out he has his mother’s talent for shortcuts,” said Sorrow. “Though that’s not really the thing that stands out about him.” I waited for a elaboration, but she had said all she had to say on the subject.
Infidel said, “I feel bad that we scared them off. They’d done a lot of work.” She was looking at the seal. It was in a relatively advanced state of butchering, the skin flayed from the muscle and stretched out to create a tidy workspace. Neat slabs of meat were spread over the surrounding ice, faintly steaming as the winter air sucked out their moisture. The nutrient-rich organs, like the heart and liver, were laid out as neatly as if they were in a butcher’s window. The skull had been worked free from the spine and set aside, the lidless eyes forced to watch the dismemberment of the body. Either the ogres were fast workers or we’d frightened them away from the fruits of several hours’ work.
“Maybe they’re heading back to the village to sound a warning,” I said. “We might be close.”
“Maybe,” said Infidel. “But I didn’t see anything like a village anywhere near.”
“Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to slip beneath the ice and figure out which way they’re going.”
“Go,” she said.
I let go of the silver threads and slipped from my shell. I willed myself down through the ice, shuddering from both the chill of my environment and the existential crises that confronted me every time I let go of the illusion of solidity and embraced the advantages of my spectral nature.
In the water, the ice overhead was a pale translucent gray-blue through which the twilight seeped. From above, the ice looked uniform, but from beneath it revealed itself to be riddled with cracks. Since we’d been flying up from the south and hadn’t spotted a village, I had a hunch that the ogres were heading north. I pursued, and a moment later spotted their faint auras. I flashed toward them just as they reached a gap in the ice. With powerful kicks, they burst upward, doing what can only be described as a reverse dive. Once above, they began to run without so much as a pause to catch their breaths.
I continued to give chase, hoping they’d reach their destination soon. They didn’t. I couldn’t accurately tell time, but I’m certain I gave chase for at least an hour. The blue twilight that had persisted after the sunset receded once more to black. I had only starlight to see by, but it was sufficient to reveal that the frozen ice the ogres ran across was now bordered by actual land, steep cliffs a half-mile high.
At the second hour of their headlong flight through the darkness, I began to wonder if Infidel would give up on waiting for me. I should have committed to a time limit, but planning ahead wasn’t something either of us was famous for. The ogres showed no signs of weariness as I floated beside them. Aurora had told me she was a runt among her kind, and assuming that these two random specimens were closer to average, she’d been right. They were each at least ten feet tall, broad-shouldered, with arms and legs packed into seal-fur tights that fit like second skins. Given the tightness of their pants, I had evidence that these were males of the species. Their faces were the same pale blue-white as Aurora’s, but squarer. Their brows were dappled with hemi-circular scars that reminded me of overlapping scales. I’d seen similar scarification as decoration among river pygmies, who sometimes marked fish-scale patterns along their shoulders and spines.
Just as I’d decided to give up and return to Infidel, I saw a glow on the northern horizon, completely different in nature from the brief sunrise I’d witnessed earlier. I flitted upward and found the cliffs cut back in a sharp V shape a mile across at the open end. Within was a frozen bay, decorated by what looked like hundreds of perfect hemispheres packed closely together. My lack of perspective made them look small at first, until I saw ogres going in and out of them through sealskin curtains. Drawing closer, I saw that they were hollow domes of ice almost fifty feet across. Most were topped with dark black holes from which smoke rose; the fires within lit the structures with a dim yellow light. Black shadows moved menacingly against the backlighting. The atmosphere above the village had the distinct aroma of rotting fish and burnt bacon, a scent reminiscent of the whale oil the Wanderers burned in their lamps, but much stronger.
Having at least a minute’s lead on the two startled hunters, I flitted into the nearest dome. The smell within was so foul I reached up to pinch my nostrils, forgetting the intangible nature of both fingers and nose. In the central fire pit they were burning what looked like cow patties, though of course there were no cows within a thousand miles. Perhaps they were ogre turds; at least a dozen of the beasts were packed into this dwelling. They’d shed their clothing and went about naked. The floors of the ice dome where carpeted with thick sheets of skins, and the warmth of the room was surprising; I wondered how the walls survived. A mother ogre was nursing three youngsters simultaneously; she was equipped with four working breasts. I’d never noticed this excess of mammary glands on Aurora, but Aurora had typically dressed in a manner that concealed the true contours of her body. She’d worked for the Black Swan for two years before I learned she was female.
The ogres within the dome all lifted their heads at once. The two hunters were close enough to the village that their shouts could be heard. Flitting back outside, the commotion grew; not only were the two hunters shouting as they covered the last few hundred yards toward the village, but news of their arrival was being trumpeted in deep-barreled baritones from dome to dome.
I couldn’t understand a word, as my link to Sorrow was now several miles distant. Again, I never claimed that some future monument to me would be engraved, “The Man Who Thought Ahead.”
The cacophony of voices reached a crescendo as the news reached the furthest edges of the village. From my aerial position I watched as the two hunters were led along what looked to be a well-trodden path to the north. I quickly spotted why. Unlike the jagged, natural-looking cliff on the southern half of the V-shaped bay, the northern cliffs had been carved into an impressive edifice. The face was sheer granite, polished smooth, and riddled with windows and balconies. Statues of ogres sat within alcoves. I was looking at either a palace or a temple, or some blend of both.
Before I could go within to investigate, a white-clad figure emerged from the torch-lit interior of the highest archway. This was an ogre even larger than the two I’d been chasing. A cheer went through the crowd that gathered beneath. They began to chant, “Tarpok! Tarpok!” I guessed it to be his name, though perhaps it was just a more formal greeting than “awk.”
Tarpok stuck out a beefy arm and the crowd fell silent. He called out to t
he crowd with a voice powerful enough to rattle window glass and startle the horses, if the village had possessed either glass or horses. Though I didn’t speak the lingo, I sensed from his tone that he’d asked a question; most likely, “What’s all the racket?”
The two hunters were pushed to the front of the crowd and shouted back something. They both waved their hands as they spoke, and between their gestures and inflection my translation was, “A two-headed creature from the stars swooped down and attacked us! We abandoned our catch and ran for our lives!”
Tarpok asked a short question that made the crowd laugh. My hunch: “Maybe you chewed some bad blubber?”
The two hunters bowed, placing their hands over their hearts in the near universal gesture, “I swear it’s true.”
The ogre in the window responded with an appropriately solemn and studious look. I drew closer. Tarpok was a good twelve feet tall, and solid looking. I mean, none of the ogres would blow away in a stiff wind, but something about their subcutaneous fat gave most ogres a doughy look. Tarpok was chiseled. What I thought had been white clothing was in fact his bare skin, all the better to display the elaborate tapestries of tribal scars that decorated his imposing form. I also noted that he had four dark blue nipples; apparently this was standard ogre anatomy.
At last, having posed in dramatic contemplation for a sufficient length of time to build suspense in the crowd, the big ogre thrust out his hand in a stiff salute and screamed, “Hack hack hack hack!” or words to that effect, which, judging from the jubilation that followed must have meant, “I believe you! I will find this star-beast and kick its ass!”
A smaller ogre appeared in the shadows and handed Tarpok a large horn carved from a narwhal’s tusk. He blew into the end with a long, tooth-rattling “BLAAAAAAAAT!” As the note trailed off, a dozen shooting stars streaked down from the heavens, as if they’d been shaken loose by the call.
Tarpok disappeared into the shadows. I watched the window for his reappearance, since the crowd continued gazing in that general direction. A minute later they cheered with excitement, but I didn’t see him. Then I realized he was now on top of the cliff. He was wearing a black cloak I assume was whale hide, with matching pants of the same material. He had a battle-axe with a head the size of a coffee table slung over his back, and in his left hand he carried a harpoon that was more menacing than even the Jagged Heart, a twenty-foot-long shaft of iron with the tip hammered into a flesh-mangling mess of razor-sharp serrated hooks and barbs.
