Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  This time the explosion was like a bomb going off. Fire leaped from the muzzle, and simultaneously the malformed head of the creature seemed to disappear. The other creatures sprang back, shrieking like startled gulls, but he could hardly hear them for the ringing in his ears.

  "Run!" Even at a shout, his own voice sounded as though it were far away, floating through cotton. "Come on!"

  He grabbed at the nearest hand and tugged its owner, who turned out to be Martine, up the slope. The creatures had let go of Florimel, and now one of the inhuman shapes lurched in front of him. Paul shoved the gun into the thing's midsection and the creature bent double and flew backward as the gun detonated again. The creatures were leaping around the darkened nest in growing confusion, but Paul could only concentrate on what was just ahead of him.

  Trusting that the other two were following, Paul dragged Martine toward the tunnel from which a little light washed out, praying that it was the sun. He had to duck his head as he entered the lower passage, and a surprise swipe from one of the creatures almost took his face off. Terrified, Paul squeezed the trigger, not bothering to aim. He didn't think he hit it, but the muzzle flash and the explosion of powder sent the creature squealing away down a side tunnel.

  A dozen more steps and his heart sank. There was no sun. The tunnel widened into a broad space with a great fire pit in the middle, the flames surrounded by a crude ring of blackened skulls, both animal and human, and a corona of burned split bones. Several more of the monsters had backed against the wall, startled by the sudden appearance of the escaping prisoners, but they looked as though they were mustering the courage to attack.

  No sun. We'll just stagger through these tunnels till they surround us or we run out of bullets. . . . The adrenalized numbness wore away a little. He realized he was already gasping for breath, that his wrist ached from the kick of the pistol. Behind him, Martine was jerking frantically at his arm.

  "It's no good," he said. "Just their . . . their kitchen. No sun."

  "Keep going!" She was fighting to control her voice. "You're going in the right direction. Go on!"

  He could only hope she knew what she was saying. The little party hurried forward through the flaring yellow light. He waved the pistol, backing several of the creatures out of their path. One would not be bluffed, so Paul fired again. The thing fell to the floor in a hissing, writhing heap, forcing them to inch around it with their backs against the damp clay of the tunnel wall. Its guts had spilled onto the ground and the stench clawed at his nostrils.

  How many bullets gone? Do I have any left?

  Time became something not quite calculable as they stumbled through the nest. With every branch the tunnels seemed to get smaller and smaller. Paul began to feel horridly certain that Martine had made some miscalculation, that one or two more turnings would lead them into a tube where they would have to crawl on hands and knees, and from there into a wall of dirt where they would be trapped.

  No, that was the war, he told himself. The shrilling of the enraged spider-buffalos was all around him. He felt his thoughts fragmenting. Keep your mind on what's in front of you . . . in front of you. . . .

  "Go to the right!" Martine shouted. "Paul! To the right!"

  He hesitated because at that moment he honestly could not think which direction was which. He felt Martine shoving him from behind and allowed himself to be guided out of the tunnel into a passage that turned sharply upward, a twisting path through cracked and broken rock.

  "I see light!" he said excitedly. A circle of dim, twilight blue hovered a hundred meters above him, but this was no trick, no monster's cookfire: there were faint stars in it, real, honorable stars, as welcome as the faces of old friends. "Hurry!"

  He reached back to help Martine over a stone that jutted into the passage like a crooked tooth and had a moment of panic when he could see no one behind her. Then T4b and Florimel lurched into view, made clumsy by their hurry to get out of the corridor below.

  "They're coming," cried Florimel as she pulled down stones and earth, shoveling them with her hands into the tunnel opening to slow the pursuers. "Dozens of them!"

  Paul could not make his way up the steep tunnel with only one hand free; he shoved the pistol into the pocket of his torn, muddied coveralls and began to climb, stopping every few meters to reach back and help Martine. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder. As Paul felt the first breath of outside air wafting down the tunnel onto his face, Florimel shouted that the creatures were forcing their way into the passage below.

  Paul reached the top of the hole and dragged himself out, gasping in his first breath of clean air in hours. He had only moments to look around as he helped Martine and the others out, but what he saw did not encourage him. They were in the middle of a stony mountainside almost bare of vegetation, a thousand meters above a valley floor already drowned in evening shadow. The top of the rocky ridge was much closer, but only after a terrible climb across jagged stones and loose scree. . . .

  "We have to go down," he gasped as he and Martine dragged Florimel over the lip of the hole. Behind her T4b was muttering in terror and dismay, and almost knocked the older woman down the steep slope to certain death in his hurry to get out of the tunnel.

  "Right behind me," T4b gasped. "Grabbin' my legs, them."

  "Let's go," Paul said. "Maybe they won't follow us across open ground."

  He didn't really believe it himself, and the hope proved futile by the time they had slipped and skidded a dozen meters from the tunnel. A horde of the spider-buffalos spilled out of the hole onto the hillside. They gulped and jabbered excitedly, peering around nearsightedly until one of them saw Paul and the others, then the whole bristling crowd of them came boiling down the slope like termites out of a split log.

  Paul drew the pistol and aimed it at their pursuers. The jerk of the gun's detonation knocked him off-balance so that he stumbled into T4b and almost sent them both tumbling down the mountainside, but although the closest of the creatures recoiled from the shot, halting the pursuing pack for a moment of milling confusion, none of them fell.

  Paul turned and hastened downhill behind his companions. He was fairly certain he had no bullets left, and carrying the gun in his hand was a terrible risk to balance, but the thought of facing a rush of those hairy things with only his bare hands was too much. If it wouldn't shoot, he would use it as a hammer.

  I'll smash a few of those ugly faces back in the other direction before they get me. Even in his own head, the words sounded like the most pathetic and useless sort of bravado.

  Martine was in front now, but at the rear of the line Paul could barely muster time to wonder about the wisdom of letting a blind woman lead them. The footing was terrible, loose stones and shallow soil everywhere: he could only pray Martine's strange gifts would make her a better guide across such terrain than others might be. As it was, every hurried step threatened to start an avalanche: Paul alternated between clinging to T4b's shoulders for balance and supporting the teenager in turn when patches of loose stones turned into little rockslides below T4b's feet. Florimel was clearly in pain and could move only slowly, but they could better accommodate her pace in their downward scramble than if they had been fleeing across even ground. Even so, Martine had to stop every few steps and help the German woman onto the next relatively stable spot.

  Paul did not dare lake his eyes off the slope in front of him until a sudden squealing from their pursuers, a shrilling chorus that sounded something like panic, made him turn back. Several of the monsters, scuttling too quickly across a section of scree already loosened by the passage of Paul and his companions, had started a slide. As Paul watched, the rocky earth crumbled away beneath them and they went hissing and shrieking down the mountain, freefalling in a hail of loose stones and dirt. For a moment Paul felt something like hope, but only a few had fallen, and although the rest had to stop and clamber uphill to make their way around the deadly section, it was the briefest of delays.

  The su
n had now disappeared between the horns of the stark mountain range on the far side of the river basin. Cold shadows climbed up out of the canyon. Paul could almost feel his heart freezing inside his chest.

  We'll never make it. We'll die here in this idiot, backwater world. . . .

  A horrid wet barking noise, very close, stopped him in his tracks. He whirled to see two of the creatures crouching on a promontory just above him, twisted mouths open and drooling with excitement. They had found a faster way along the mountainside and had outflanked him from above.

  The nearest leaned out over the edge of the rock shelf, long legs drawn up beside its head like some hairy midnight cricket. Paul only had time to let out a little shout of surprise and dismay before the thing unfolded itself in a powerful spring.

  To his complete astonishment the beast missed him, even seemed to jolt and change direction in midair. It landed heavily at his feet, limp as a flour sack, and skidded a few meters down the slope to lie unmoving below him. The second monster leaped just as the crack of the gunshot that had killed the first reached Paul's ears.

  The second spider-buffalo sprang only a little way down-slope to land just above him, and had time to rear up on its legs and snatch at him before something went past Paul's ear like the crack of a whip and punched into its matted chest, drenching him in an explosion of blood.

  Whoever was firing now shifted aim onto the large crowd of spider-buffalos farther up the slope. Bullets pinged off of stones and sent up gouts of dirt, but an almost equal number struck their targets; within seconds a half-dozen of the creatures were tumbling down the hill while the rest let out bubbling shrieks of dismay, eyes rolling with terror.

  "Get down!" Paul scrambled forward and yanked T4b to earth, then huddled facedown while shots winnowed their pursuers. He could turn his head to one side just far enough to see Florimel's back where she lay nearby; Paul could only hope she had not been hit, and that Martine was safe on the other side of her.

  The chase and almost inevitable capture of a meal had now turned into a spider-buffalo's worst nightmare. The rest of them scrambled back up the slope in a disorderly rout, leaving their dead and wounded scattered on the mountainside, some of the carcasses still bouncing from the impact of stray bullets. If Paul had not been so tired and terrified that he could barely remember his own name, he would have let out a bellow of triumph.

  A few shots followed the survivors until they disappeared into the shadows of the rocks far above, then the mountainside was silent.

  "What. . . ?" Florimel rasped. "Who. . . ?"

  Paul waited, but there was no shout of warning or welcome. He sat up and cautiously looked around, trying to guess where the shots had come from, but could see nothing but the darkening mountain. "I don't know. I just hope they're on our side. . . ."

  "There," Martine said, pointing.

  Two hundred meters down the hillside, near a jumble of boulders that looked very precariously perched, a light was moving. Someone was waving a lantern, signaling to them. It was just a small thing, a wavering gleam still faint in the last rays of the sun, but at the moment Paul thought it looked like a glimpse of heaven.

  The person who held the lantern was small, face almost hidden by a scarf and hat pulled low, and the long billowing coat also seemed too large for the slight frame, but Paul was still surprised when the stranger spoke in a woman's dear voice.

  "You can just stop there," she drawled. "There are a few guns pointing at you, so unless you think you can outrun a bullet better than those things that were chasing you, I suggest you tell us your business."

  "Business?" Florimel was so tired her temper was as raw as her voice. "Business? Running for our lives from those monsters. They were going to eat us!"

  "It's true," Paul said. "And we're grateful you drove them off." He tried to think of something else to say; he was so exhausted he thought he might collapse any moment. "Just don't shoot at us. Do you want us to reach for the sky?" It was about the only thing he could remember from netshow westerns.

  The woman took a few steps toward them, holding up the lantern which was now the main source of light on the mountainside. "Just hold your water for a minute while I get a look at you." She peered at Paul and his companions, then turned and called over her shoulder, "They look like real folk. More or less."

  Somebody shouted something from behind the boulders that Paul could not make out, but apparently it was agreement; the woman with the lantern waved them forward.

  "Just don't do anything too fast or tricky," she said as Paul and the others staggered down the slope toward her. "The boys have had a long day, but they'd be willing to kill a few more if they had to."

  "Bitch talk that fenfen," T4b muttered sourly. "Don't like it, me."

  "I heard that." The woman's voice had gone cold. A pale hand appeared from the voluminous sleeve, the small gun pointed right at T4b. "I don't need Billy and Titus to deal with you, boy—I'll put you down myself."

  "Jesus!" Paul said. "He didn't mean it! He's just a stupid kid. Apologize, Javier."

  "Sayee lo, you! Do what. . . ?"

  Martine grabbed his arm and yanked. "Apologize, you idiot."

  T4b stared at the muzzle of the derringer for a moment, then cast his eyes down. "Sorry. All tired, me. Those things tried to kill us, seen?"

  The woman snorted. "Just watch your mouth. I may not be a lady myself, but we got a few in there who are, not to mention some young ones."

  "We're sorry," Paul told her. "We thought we were all going to die down in that nest."

  The woman's eyebrows rose. "You got out of one of them nests?" she said. "Well, that's something. My man will be pretty interested to hear about that, if it's true."

  Paul heard T4b's intake of breath and turned a stifling glance on him. "It is true. But we wouldn't have made it without your help."

  "Tell it to Billy and Titus when you go in," she said, gesturing to a space between two standing boulders. "They did most of the shooting."

  Paul ducked his head and stepped through into the flicker of flames in a dark place—for a moment it was so much like the nest that he could not help fearing some terrible trick.

  "Annie is a fair hand with a buffalo gun herself," someone said beside him. Paul turned, startled. "Shoots better than she dances, anyway. Don't let her tell you different." The man who had spoken had long, fair hair and a face freckled with dirt that Paul realized only later was gunpowder. Several other people stood behind him, hanging back in the shadows where the firelight did not quite reach.

  "That is Billy Dixon," the woman said as she and the rest of Paul's friends filed in. The cavern knifed far into the hillside but was screened on the open end by an ancient tumble of boulders. Paul could see these survivors had picked their fortification well—only a few chinks between the great stones let in any sight of the evening sky. "Billy might be the best hand alive with a Sharps gun—even my man would allow that was true."

  Dixon, who had a long straggling blond mustache and the beginnings of a serious beard covering his broad face, showed a smile but said nothing.

  "And my name is Annie Ladue," she said, unwinding the scarf. She was attractive, or should have been, with a sharp chin and big, heavy-lidded eyes, but her teeth were bad and one cheek was marked with a long horizontal scar. "If you behave, we'll get along well. Titus." she called over her shoulder, "what's going on out there?"

  "Nothing," a deep voice said. "No sign of nary a one of those devils, 'cept the dead ones." A tall black man with a very long rifle swung himself down from a higher spot among the rocks—a look-out post of sorts, Paul guessed. He landed beside them with a thump.

  "And this is Titus, who perforated that jackalo what was jumping down to give you a haircut and shave you wouldn't have forgotten, mister," Annie said.

  Paul stuck out his hand. "Thank you. Thank you all."

  After a moment's hesitation, Titus took it. "You would have done it for me, too, wouldn't you? Ain't no question of skin when som
ething like that is coming after someone."

  For a moment Paul was puzzled, then remembered that this was supposed to be nineteenth-century America, where things like racial differences still meant a lot. "Absolutely," he said. "Except I don't ever want to shoot a gun again."

  Billy Dixon gave a little snort of amusement and wandered off toward the depths of the cave. The other inhabitants were coming forward now. As Annie Ladue had said, many of them were women with children. In fact, except for a couple of old fellows who hobbled up to look the newcomers over and congratulate the shooters, Billy and Titus appeared to be the only young men in the cavern.

  "I'm glad you enjoyed the show, Henry," Annie told one old man notable for what looked to Paul like complete and utter toothlessness, "because you can go pick up the Springfield and stand first watch. It oughta be cool now, and mind you don't bang that barrel on any rocks." She turned to Paul and the others. "This way we stand a chance of getting some good out of him before he gets into the liquor."

  The ancient laughed and went off to get the gun. Annie seemed to be one of the leaders, if not the leader. Paul was intrigued, but it was not enough to overcome his weariness. The adrenaline had worn off and strength was running out of him like air from a punctured tire.

  "Do you folks want something to eat?" Annie asked. "There's not much, but there is some beans and hardtack, which is sure better than nothing."

  "I think we just want to sit down somewhere," Paul said.

  "Lie down," Martine quietly amended him. "I need sleep."

  "Then you all better come over here and bunk down in what we call the shooting blind," their hostess said. "That way we can keep the young ones away—if you try to lie down back where everyone else is at, the little rats will be all over you." She led them up a narrow makeshift path through the tumble of stones that screened the front of the cave until they reached the flat top of a boulder several meters across. A few animal skins scattered across it—Paul guessed they were buffalo hides—made it look quite inviting; At one edge the old man she had called Henry sat staring out through a crevice between two large stones, a long rifle propped beside him.