by Lionel Fenn
"We'll stop here until morning," she said, looking around and nodding her approval of the site. "If we go any farther now, we'll only kill ourselves."
He didn't dispute her. His legs were so tired he couldn't have walked another step anyway, and his stomach was growling so loudly they would only have been able to sneak up on a deaf man who had been dead twenty days.
While she foraged for food, he was left with instructions to pull broad leaves from the trees to fashion bedding for the night. It took only a few minutes, once he got the idea to use the bat to loosen the branches. Afterward, he realized that his clothes were sorely lacking in the social graces, and for the first time in days he regretted losing his pack on the slope outside Kori. He sniffed, rolled his eyes, and with a glance toward the woods he stripped and found a series of natural if slippery steps down to the water. There he rinsed out shirt and jeans as best he could, slapped them against the rock until he thought his arms would fall off, then tossed them back up and decided the rest of him might as well get a good washing, too.
With a scan of the surface to be sure there were no shark fins or bathing foothi, he stepped boldly into the shallows.
The water was cold but not icy, and he lowered himself gingerly until he was sitting on the bottom. A little splashing for fun, a kick of his feet, and he understood the first level of an explorer's heaven. The flow eased his muscles, the river's whisper through the reeds made him delightfully drowsy, and it wasn't until he looked lazily toward the opposite bank that he knew he wasn't alone.
It was green, and it was long, and it had a bubble-like head atop a serpentine body.
It also moved rather fast.
He yelped and scrambled to his feet, fell, and thrashed until he was on his feet again.
It was still coming.
A shout now, and he backed up, lashing out with his feet. The watersnake dove, appeared five feet closer, and he could see two pair of lifeless black eyes measuring the distance between itself and its dinner.
He kicked again, reached down, and grabbed a rock from the riverbed; the first throw landed in the trees, but the second caught the thing in the middle of its back. It dove again, and this time when it surfaced it was already twenty yards downstream and still moving.
Damn, he thought; just when you thought it was safe to go—
"Very nice," Ivy said from the rock above him.
Gideon looked down at himself, blinked, and cupped his hands over his groin while he grinned sheepishly and tried to climb the wet steps back to the top.
"Don't flatter yourself," she said, not unkindly, and pointed to the water. "That. It only eats insects, but you did a nice job just the same."
He said nothing. He only glowered and shouldered her to one side before dressing, thinking that someone really ought to sit down and give him a comprehensive zoological lecture before his mind snapped and he found himself battling battalions of crazed and ravenous roses.
Then, as daylight slipped rapidly from the air and filled the forest with a disturbing, premature midnight, Ivy built a fire in a depression of the rock, made a crude spit over it, and fastened to it the corpse of a small headless creature he recognized right away.
"I thought they were poison," he said, pointing to the footh.
"Only when they bite you. This one never had a chance."
He looked to her sheathed dagger, to her gentle hands, to the half smile at her lips. "You're pretty good, aren't you?"
"I have my moments," she said.
"Then have a moment now. There's someone behind you."
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ivy whirled into a defensive crouch with dagger in hand while Gideon jumped to his feet and held out the bat in what he hoped was an attitude of prohibitive menace. The fire was between them and a shadow that moved out of the trees, the details of its features just beyond the light. But it was huge, and it was silent, and Gideon heard the faint ticking of what sounded like claws on the rock.
"You take the left, I'll take the right," Ivy whispered as she sidled into position. "Don't let it kill you."
Good advice, he thought somewhat sourly, and waited for her to be more specific.
Then he heard purring.
"I'll be damned," he said, lowering his weapon as he stepped around the firepit just as Red moved into the light. The lorra blinked once, then pressed its muzzle happily into his chest while his hand went instantly up to its head.
"What about me?" Tag said wearily from the animal's back.
"You want your head scratched?"
"No, but I'm hungry."
The reunion was made quiet by the silence of the forest, but it was enthusiastic and long, and by the time they remembered they were hungry, the footh had long since been charred hard as stone. Not to worry, Ivy assured them, and vanished to hunt again while Tag warmed his hands over the low flames and told Gideon how he had ridden the lorra all the way down to a meadow two days' ride from here. They had come across many promising signs of civilization, but when Tag tried to follow them, assuming the others would as well, Red had refused, plunging instead straight into the forest. Nothing the young man could do had altered the lorra's direction.
Gideon reached behind him, to where Red was lying down, and stroked the lorra's neck. Red purred and yawned.
"Loyalty," he said when Tag looked puzzled. "A unique bonding between man and animal. Red knew instinctively where I was, and he came to find me."
Red snorted.
Ivy returned with a pair of foothi, which she cooked over the fire. Red disdained the offered meat when it was done and roused himself long enough to defoliate a nearby tree. Tag fell asleep before he was finished, leaving Gideon and a nodding Ivy to listen to the river and watch the fire burn down to a handful of glowing embers.
"We're only missing Whale," she said as she lay on the bedding Gideon had provided.
"I would guess he's on his way to Rayn. I doubt if he could find us in this place."
"You found me."
"Luck."
"Nice of you to admit it," she said, closed her eyes and began snoring.
Gideon watched her for a long time before deciding he'd be no good to himself if he didn't sleep too, but when he looked around he realized that Tag had preempted the other bed, and it was too late now to make himself another. The noise he made was a cross between a sigh and a groan, and he crawled over to Red and rested his head on the lorra's flank. The giant goat stirred, sniffed his chest and hair, but didn't wake up.
Suddenly, Gideon sat up and stared at the animal's closed eyes. "He rode you down?" he said. "I fell like a goddamn rock, ended up in the goddamned ocean, and had to fight all kinds of beasts in this misbegotten jungle, and he rode you down?"
Red snorted in his sleep.
"It ain't never easy," he muttered, relaxing again. "But it would be nice, just once, to see what it's like."
Ivy hushed him sleepily, Tag moaned in a dream, and he crossed his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and winced at a sudden bright light that made him roll over and bury his face deeper into the lorra's fur.
"You going to sleep all day?" Ivy demanded, and he felt the toe of her boot prod his ribs.
He blinked and sat up, not feeling the least bit rested, his stomach lurching when he smelled a footh roasting over the morning fire. Tag was in the river, swimming.
"I think," Gideon said as he stretched the knots from his muscles, "I'll pass on breakfast."
"You'll pass out if you don't eat," she scolded.
He thought to argue when she sliced off a piece of meat and plopped it onto a palm-like leaf. He sought for an excuse to leave the room, the forest, and the world when Ivy grinned at him with a sliver of food dangling from her lips. And he knelt down and ate when his stomach told him not to be an idiot.
It wasn't bad.
It didn't taste like chicken, but it wasn't half-bad.
And by the time they were finished, right down to the bones and a goodly portion of the innards, and th
e fire was scattered to hide their presence from people and things he refused to ask about, daylight was already two hours strong.
Ivy, after checking the position of the sun and its shadows, led the way along the riverbank. Tag, stiff from sleep, swimming, and riding, followed while Gideon, who told himself he was the eldest and therefore needed the most rest, asked Red if it would be all right to ride for an hour or so. The lorra swung his great head around to give him a baleful look, then lowered himself to the ground so that he could climb on.
Once aboard, he wondered aloud if everyone who dropped off the edge of the world tended to become as leaves in the wind.
Tag dropped back and shook his head. "You die, usually. You get so splattered you couldn't be picked up with a pacch's tooth in a full moon."
"I didn't. You didn't."
"I know," the lad said.
"Why not?"
"Whale."
He closed one eye in a frown. "Whale?"
"Sure. He's..." Tag paused when Ivy looked back at him with a cautionary frown. "But he's going to know sooner or later."
"Sure he is. But does he have to know now?"
"I think he'd better. For Glorian's sake."
"Well... I guess."
"Well, I know."
"Excuse me," Gideon said, "but have I left the room without knowing it?"
"It's Whale," Tag told him, brusquely telling Ivy with a gesture to keep her mind on hacking a path through the forest. "He doesn't like everyone to know who he is."
Gideon's right hand brushed over the bat's hilt. "Who is he?"
"I don't know."
"Come again?"
"What I mean is, I don't know his real name. Nobody does. He just showed up one day and asked the Pholler if he could set up shop at the square. But you could tell he wasn't normal. Really strange, if you know what I mean."
"He did magic."
Tag's eyes widened. "Magic? What's magic?"
Gideon looked to Ivy, who kept her back turned. "Magic," he said, "is something... well, it's spells and things."
"Ivy has spells."
"What?"
"Sure. Look at her funny and she'll cut your tongue out."
Ivy's back stiffened and she felled a sapling with her dagger.
"That's not a spell."
"Oh. Well, I don't know about magic," Tag admitted. "But Whale does strange things sometimes. Like not falling off the world."
"Whale did that?"
Tag looked at him in disgust. "Well, if he didn't, we would have been dead, wouldn't we?"
Gideon considered it, accepted it, and didn't ask for an explanation. "It might have been the guy with the eyes, though," he said after a few minutes' silence.
"What eyes?" Ivy and Tag asked in unison.
He was startled by the astonishment in their voices, and the startled-deer look that widened their eyes. He had a feeling he should have mentioned the eyes a long time ago. And when he explained what he had seen in the forest beyond Kori, on the mountain, and during the fall, Tag began searching the treetops nervously, and Ivy quickened her pace until she was trotting.
"Is it something I said?"
"Later," Ivy said without looking around. "We'll have to hurry now. We have to get to Rayn before the Blood rises."
Gideon nodded, and concentrated on not falling from Red's back when the lorra began to pick up the pace. He dodged several branches, winced when one slapped back at him, and had to rap Red on the head when Tag fell and the lorra, blithely walking in his sleep, almost trampled him. That night they camped in a small clearing, feasting on a bird Gideon refused to look at before it was plucked and cooked. He slept, but again not well, and the next day was the same until just before sunset.
—|—
Gideon was walking beside Red, explaining to the lorra the difference between a hit-and-run driver and a blindside tackle, when Tag finally ran up to Ivy and tapped her shoulder. She stopped and cocked her head to listen, then grabbed the lad by his hide vest, lifted him off the ground, and tossed him into the nearest bush. By that time, Gideon had caught up with them, and he stared at Tag's struggles, not knowing whether to be amused or not. From the expression on Ivy's face, he read enough to decide to be neutral.
"Well, I can't read your mind," Tag complained, stamping his feet to shake off a coating of pale yellow burrs. "You should have asked me."
"Asked?" Ivy said, almost shouting. "Asked? You should have told me!"
"Asked what?" Gideon said. "Told you what?"
Ivy, her face lightly scratched from her battle with the flora, her chest rising and falling in barely contained agitation, turned on him and jabbed a finger hard into his sternum. "He says there's a road!"
"I know that."
"What?"
"He said that the first day. He found a road, but Red wouldn't let him take it." He grabbed her wrist then, before she managed to drill through to his heart. "If you recall, he said it took him two days to get to us."
"Red got lost."
"So if it took him two days, and he didn't know... what?"
"Red," Ivy said, softly and hard, "got lost."
Gideon looked back at the lorra, who began scraping his horns against a trunk to get the mildew off.
"The road," Ivy said, pointing so quickly with her dagger that he had to jump aside, "is over there."
"How far?"
"About two hundred yards."
Gideon turned on Tag, who shrugged. "Red got lost. How was I to know?"
"How did you know the road was over there?"
Tag's eyes rolled up, then he took Gideon's arm and faced him to the left. "You can see it if you look."
Gideon looked.
He could see it—through the woodland's gloom he could just make out a brighter lane of sunlight, which, if you weren't looking for it and didn't know what it was, appeared to be a break in the foliage, nothing more.
"That's a road," he said.
"Right."
"Then why the hell are we playing Frank Buck?"
"Who's Frank Buck?" Ivy asked.
Gideon shook his head, walked over to Red, and grabbed a handful of beard. Slowly, he forced the animal to look into his eyes. "You got lost."
Red purred.
"You didn't come just for me, after all."
Red's purr took on an edge.
"I apologize for the slur," he said hastily when the eyes shaded slightly darker. "But you still got lost."
Ivy, meanwhile, snared Tag's shoulder and shoved him ahead of her, through the underbrush toward the road. Gideon followed with a sheepish Red purring and nudging him from behind until they broke out of the trees and found themselves on a hard-packed dirt road. Tag grinned, Ivy cuffed his chest, boxed one ear, and made an impression on her sole with his left buttock before striding off without looking at anyone.
Tag picked himself up and followed meekly.
Gideon patted Red's neck and brought up the rear, whistling tunelessly to himself until, shortly after the sun passed its zenith, Red stopped and shook his head.
"What," Gideon said, then immediately called the others when he saw the lorra's eyes turning black. Ivy raced back, Tag not so quickly, and they watched the animal raise its head and sniff the air, clawed hooves digging into the ground until it lowered its head and aimed its horns at the trees on their right.
Tag and Ivy immediately had their weapons in hand.
Gideon was a bit slower, but soon enough to bring it to his shoulder when a shattering, warbling war cry burst from the forest and Red replied with a bellow of his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The lorra's panther-like bellow of defiance echoed through the dense foliage, and before it had faded, an explosion of leaves and twigs half turned Gideon away; when he looked back there were a half dozen creatures poised on the verge. He stared at them until a half dozen more appeared in the road a dozen yards beyond Tag and a third half dozen on the road to his right. His throat filled with sand, his arms began to tremb
le, and only an acute sense of self-preservation had him reach around Red's lowered head to thump Tag on the chest, to prevent him from going into his taunting dance again.
"My god," Ivy said with horror-laced fascination, "it's the Moglar!"
And indeed they were—stocky, swarthy creatures dressed in thick leathered vests and pleated kilts run through with glints of polished iron, in each hand spiked clubs that hissed through the air as they glared and grunted. They wore no helmets over their dark hair, and the boots they wore seemed little more than strips of hide wound around them, leaving their prehensile toes ready for emergency gripping.
There was something terribly familiar about them, Gideon thought as he watched those on his right begin a halting, almost simian advance, and when one of them drew himself up and brandished his weapon over his head, Gideon knew what it was—their proportions, the shape of their limbs and torso, the slightly distorted and pudgy features... They were dwarves, but of a sort he had never bothered to dream about back home.
Fierce, giant dwarves that towered almost to his shoulder.
Suddenly, as Tag was about to lunge forward with his woefully inadequate dagger, the largest of the brutes crossed his clubs over his chest.
"I am Kron," he announced with a self-satisfied sneer, in a voice that sounded like overfed swine starved for oxygen. "You are my prisoners. You will give over your lives to me without delay."
"Why?" Ivy said dubiously, her own dagger glinting in the last of the light.
"So that you will enter the home of the Wamchu in glory."
Tag paled.
Ivy gasped.
Gideon reached out a hand to pat Red reassuringly, the bat growing warm in his grip, a headache beginning to climb through his scalp from his nape. He didn't much care for the idea of having to fight these creatures, but Kron's attitude and the slavering of the other Moglar suggested rather strongly that he wasn't going to get to Rayn without breaking a few eggs. Assuming he would be able to get there at all.
"You will submit now," Kron demanded.
"You will perform unnatural physical acts upon yourself," Ivy retorted.
The Moglar's already dark face darkened, and he shook his head so that the black stringy hair that Prince Valianted his forehead swung back and forth like serpents seeking prey.
