by Lionel Fenn
One of Lain's men screamed as an ice wasp took a chunk of his shoulder, another groaned when his wrist was gouged; Whale danced about trying to make use of his bombs, and Ivy slashed at the air with her dagger, swearing so hotly none of the creatures even tried to chomp her face.
Gideon arched his back when something landed on his spine and drew blood, smiled quickly when Lain thrust home. The ice wasp cloud thickened, Red bellowed in pain, and suddenly Gideon realized how stupid he had been. He tossed the bat aside, to Ivy's alarm, and yanked a flaming brand from the fire. The ice wasps buzzed in panic as he swung the flames at them, their attack swiftly becoming a rout when the woodsmen saw the tactic, approved, and even improvised by setting afire a few of the local bushes. In five minutes it was over, five minutes Gideon thought had lasted at least five years.
He looked to Whale, who was shaken and pale. "Thong?"
"Chou-Li," the former fat man said. "A cold bitch if I ever knew one. One last chance to stop us, I would assume, before we reach our destination."
Croker Boole said nothing, but any chance there was of his changing his mind was lost now, and Gideon knew it. Just as he knew that the wings he heard overhead were one of Chou-Li's manifestations, checking on her success. A prolonged angry screech told him she knew she had failed.
"Well," Lain said heartily. "What a night, what a night!"
But as he and Gideon sat together while wounds were bound and comforts were given, the fire snapped sparks at the night sky and a keening wind passed harmlessly overhead, and a shade of melancholy slipped over the man's face.
"Are you all right?" Gideon asked.
"Just thinking of my son," the woodsman answered.
"I didn't know you had one."
"Sometimes, when I have a bit of trouble with Croker, I remember him." He poked at the fire with a stick. "Bela is a good boy, really, but somewhere along the line I failed him in his teachings. He left me some while back to make his way in the world, and I haven't seen him since."
"Do you know where he is?"
Vorden nodded sadly.
"Do I have to guess?"
"Can't you imagine?"
Gideon followed his gaze eastward, into the ashen forest. "Oh damn." He touched the man's leg then. "This wasn't just a fluke, then, was it."
Vorden shook his head.
"If you hadn't found us, would you have gone on?"
The woodsman gave him a smile, brief and wise, and Gideon grinned back before taking a sip of the man's unbelievable brew and lying down to stare at the dark. The position of loyalties was odd in this odd place, and he wondered as he drifted off to sleep, with Lain's men humming in the background, what his own companions would do when this was over. If it was over. If they survived whatever waited for them tomorrow. If they ever had a peaceful moment again when they weren't pursuing or being pursued.
He thought then of home. Of the house. The living room with the overaged television set, the bottles of liquor in the cabinet, the kitchen, where dishes were done when needed, not when used, the bedroom and its shadows past midnight, the newspapers and their sports sections, the telephone that seemed to ring only when a stranger tried to sell him a subscription to a magazine he didn't read or never heard of.
He thought of the world carrying on without him.
He thought of his sister.
"Shit," he said, and rolled onto his side.
—|—
By noon the following day, his thoughts were much less charitable.
The border between Chey and Choy was more dismal than he had imagined. Despite the sun above, the grey-ashen trees and the powdery ashen ground were no lighter, no more appetizing than they had been the night before. It was a dead land through which wound webs and tentacles of mist that distorted perspective and buried shallow depressions into which he stumbled with monotonous frequency. There were leaves on the contorted black-boled trees, but of the same color and texture that reminded him of peeling dead skin, and he had no desire to see the life-forms he heard prowling up there—harsh, guttural birdcries, low mutterings to which Red replied with growls of his own, and a constant scraping as though a band of creatures were following them only a few paces behind.
The air smelled faintly of sulphur.
And though protests were made, Tag was placed on Red's back. Gideon knew the lad was afraid, and that fear had produced a bravado destined to bring down the worst of the land on their heads. By having him ride the lorra, Gideon hoped he would at least tone his challenges down.
Vorden Lain stopped singing.
Whale and Ivy each held one of the tiny bombs, the supply of which had been reduced to less than a dozen after the escape from the throne room in Rayn.
Gideon held his bat and drew some comfort from its warmth, its heft, and the fact that when he accidentally bumped it against a bole, the tree shattered into glass-like shards that turned to dust the moment they reached the ground.
And just past midafternoon he realized with a start he had been listening for some time to a continuous hoarse rumbling behind them. He stopped, looked back, and nudged Vorden urgently with an elbow.
"Ah," the woodsman said, "you've noticed."
"What is it?"
"Very likely a zed; perhaps a pair of them."
Gideon peered into the mist, which, over the past mile or so, had been rising steadily to waist height and growing thicker. "I don't see anything."
"They're short."
Ahead of them, Whale and Ivy had slowed to flank Red, who was tossing his head from side to side and grunting. Tag, with one hand buried in the lorra's hair, was trying desperately not to look around. When Whale glanced back and caught Gideon's questioning look, he shrugged and displayed one of the bombs.
"What is this zed likely to do?" he asked when Lain unsheathed his foil and whipped the air with it to limber up his arm.
"Attack."
"I gathered that. Could you be more specific?"
"From all that I have heard," the woodsman said, "it will first go for the most helpless of the group. Rather powerful, so I'm told. Hideous, most hideous. Its very look is rumored to turn a man to stone. Not, you understand, dear fellow, that I am opposed to ornamental statuary in my honor, but I much prefer choosing my own time and place, if you catch my meaning."
"Then we have to avoid looking at its eyes?"
"Rather difficult to do, as I gather it."
"Why?"
Vorden opened his mouth to explain and gave a warning shout instead, leaping backward toward Red, who had wheeled about with lowered head and a coarse grumbling in his throat. Ivy and Whale were at the ready, Tag had slipped to the ground and was beginning his war dance, and Gideon could only swing his bat to his shoulder before the mist began to roil and crest as something charged toward him just below its surface.
"Go for the eyes!" Vorden shouted as Gideon backed toward him.
"How? I can't see them!"
Another ripple in the mist as a second zed began its charge.
"No," Whale said, "you must take it in the throat!"
Ivy put her hands on her hips. "The snout," she said in disgust. "You have to do the snout first. Then the throat. Then the eyes. God, you don't know anything, do you?"
"M'lady," Vorden said in gentle contradiction, "with all due respect to your fair sex and wondrous beauty, it is the eyes to blind, then the throat to stifle, then the snout to kill. So it has been for generations, don't you see."
Gideon swung at the first shape, black and slender as it propelled itself through the mist. He struck something hard and heard a faint squeal of pain.
"The throat first," Whale said, edging his way forward. "If you take the throat first, it can't use its teeth. Then you blind it, then snout it. Goodness, it can't be more obvious than that."
"The snout," Ivy declared in a fierce whisper, "kills the lungs, you idiots. Then you strangle it. Then you blind it. The eyes, if you knew anything at all about zeds, are actually its heart. If you do the eyes
first, it dies!"
"Well, isn't that the point?" Whale asked.
Gideon leapt to one side and swatted the second creature over what he thought was its head. It reeled and fell back, squeals of agony rising to a pitch that began to hurt his ears. The first one returned from his left, and he was nearly knocked off his feet when it collided with his legs. He swung wildly and groaned when his jeans were ripped and something stabbed into his calf.
"The point, my aged friend," said Vorden, "is not in the killing but in the process of the killing. One simply does not dispatch an enemy without first giving the enemy a sporting chance."
"Hey!" Gideon called as he brought the bat down on the skull of the second zed and saw its dim shape crumble to the ground.
"Sporting chance?" Ivy yelped. "With a zed? Are you crazy?"
Vorden bowed. "I grant you a certain element of danger—"
"Danger isn't the word for it," Whale grumbled. "You have to understand the anatomy of a zed before you can attempt to destroy it before it destroys you."
"Can't we just chop it up?" Tag asked as he whirled about to find the danger.
"The lad is hasty," Lain said.
"The lad wants to stay alive," Whale said primly.
"Jesus!" Gideon yelled when the remaining zed came at him from behind, butting him behind the knees and bringing him down. He flailed into the mist and brought his weapon around one-handed, catching the zed on the side of its skull. There was a sickening soft noise as the head imploded, and the animal dropped instantly on its back. And not wishing to examine the creature more closely, he staggered to his feet and limped toward the others, feeling a rush of blood spill warmly from his wound.
"You can't stay alive unless you do the snout first," Ivy declared vehemently. Then she uttered a short scream when she saw Gideon lurching toward them. Immediately, they surrounded him, realized he was injured, and put him gently on the ground. Whale, however, understood in an eyeblink that the maneuver wouldn't do since he was now rendered effectively invisible. Again hands took his arms, and this time they placed him on Red's back while Whale reached into his pouch for medicinal contrivances. Ivy hovered worriedly. Vorden hovered around Ivy. Tag wanted to know if he had hit the snout, the eyes, or the throat first.
"How the hell should I know?" he said, wincing when Whale poured a vial of stinging cool liquid over the slash. "I just bashed their heads in."
"Very dangerous," Vorden said, looking over Ivy's shoulder.
"Are you all right?" Ivy asked, holding his hand tightly enough to collapse two veins and a few dozen capillaries.
"I don't know," he answered honestly. The liquid and subsequent balm Whale used to staunch the bleeding did little for the firepain that filled his leg to the knee. But it wasn't the pain that bothered him so much as the fact that this time, with the zeds, he knew that he could have died.
CHAPTER THIRTY
"You're limping," Ivy said the following morning.
Gideon allowed as how that was probably true, since Whale's ministrations were not entirely effective. The bleeding had stopped, and the flesh had closed miraculously over the wound, but there was an ache deep within the muscle that made him long for the whirlpool baths in the locker room, the deep heat of a hot tub in his own house; as it was, he knew that many more attacks like the one last night, and he was going to be more than a little useless to the group.
Though the sun was up, the heavy mist still lay over the ground, and he could barely see Whale and Vorden forging the way ahead. The two men were talking quietly, Lain every so often looking up to the sky.
"I don't like this place," Ivy said, rubbing one arm briskly.
He agreed, but it wasn't because they were nearing their destination. Even in daylight, the closer they came to Umbrel, the more dismal the forest became. The grey became more lifeless, the black less reflective, the trees themselves larger and more hovering. And it affected them all to such a degree that he hadn't heard a single laugh since they'd broken camp and said their good-byes to Croker and the others. It was as if every mote of humor had been drained out of him, and not even Red's occasional affectionate butting could bring him a smile.
"You don't like us either, do you?" she asked quietly, looking up at him sideways.
"Don't be silly."
"I'm not. You think we're crazy and selfish. Or worse."
He brushed a hand down his rumpled shirt and sighed. "Well, I have to admit, I'm not exactly inclined to give you all medals for your forthrightness."
"Is it Whale?"
"Part of it. What I mean is, if he's a magician, why doesn't he just magic Wamchu out of the way so we can all go home?"
They were ten paces farther on before she answered, nodding toward the thin man whenever she mentioned his name, telling Gideon that a long time ago, before she was even born, Wamchu and Whale had some sort of confrontation in the Lower Ground. Whale was victorious, but he had somehow failed to recover completely—either mentally or with his spells. No one knew the true story; they only said that things weren't the same.
And why, he asked, was Glorian so important? As far as he could tell, she certainly wasn't royalty or anything similar.
"She comes from Whale," she said, lowering her voice still further. "You're not to know that."
"His... Jesus, his daughter?"
"Of course not," she said. "If she was, then Tag would be his son."
"Oh."
"Granddaughter."
"Oh... brother." He batted a hand idly at the mist, half listening for anything that sounded like the approach of a zed, half wondering what other marvelous revelations were in store for him now. "And the duck?"
She said that Glorian had found it some while ago, and it wasn't long after she'd taken it into her home that Wamchu first began making trouble.
"Where did it come from?"
"Only Glorian knows."
"And why does Wamchu want it?"
"Only Glorian knows."
"What about Whale?"
"If the Wamchu wants it, Whale knows it can't be good. It's all to do with the Blood."
He wondered why none of this had been told to him earlier, decided to forgo more questions when the mist thinned, the trees grew more closely together, and they found themselves on the bank of a wide, rushing river.
It was red.
And it was obviously much higher in its bed than usual.
"The Blood," he said, pushing between Whale and Vorden to look down at the water.
Whale nodded.
Gideon hunkered down and reached out toward it, pulled back his hand quickly, and wiped it dryly on one knee. He could not see to the bottom, nor did he want to. Despite the fact it was clearly water, its color in the deepest regions was too dark, too red, too much like its name. And though he could detect no unpleasant scent or see anything vaguely or otherwise threatening beneath the surface, there was an electric tingling at his fingertips that told him more forcibly than anything Ivy or Whale had said that the Blood River beyond its banks would be deeply and evilly dangerous.
Hell, he thought then, it's just nerves.
Until he realized with a silent gasp that the river made no noise.
There were traces of whitewater, there were boulders poking through in the shallows, but the Blood had no voice. It flowed like smoke without the crackle of fire.
He stood quickly and shuddered, looked around, and saw Red picking his way along the bank, the others falling into a line behind him. Looking, he imagined, for a way across, and trusting to the lorra's instincts to get them there safely.
Curiouser, he thought, and curiouser. What are they going to do when they get the duck, throw it in the river and turn it to wine? That made as much sense as sprinkling down on it as Whale had told him.
—|—
Twenty minutes later they discovered the crossing.
A dark-stone natural bridge stretched between the banks, the river itself slipping under it in a shallow waterfall and emerging back in
its bed some fifty yards farther on. There was no mist from the fall. There was no sound. Nor was there consultation—the five and the lorra rushed across without a word, looking neither left nor right behind them. And once in the forest again, they virtually ran for the next half mile to put the sight and image of the Blood River behind them.
The ground mist was gone.
The land began to rise.
Gideon thought of home again and wondered just how desperate one had to be before a Bridge opened. He supposed there must be some sort of link between whatever worked the Bridges and the emotional state of the seeker, or perhaps with the seeker's mind. If you think hard enough about it... And he stared at a spot just off to his left, willing the glow to appear, and with it the way home and out of this mess.
"You see it too?" Whale whispered.
Gideon blinked. "See what?" He looked around then and saw the others bunching up as they walked, all of them including Red keeping a wary eye on something moving parallel to them back in the trees. He squinted through the odd shadows, not realizing he was still walking until he collided with Red's rump. The lorra eyed him with a grunt, and he patted the animal's flank absently.
"What is it?" he said, whispering as Whale had.
The armorer shrugged, looked back to Vorden, who was keeping close to Ivy. Tag was ahead, dagger at the ready, slicing the air and muttering to himself.
What it was, he soon discovered, was fast, whatever it was.
One moment it was alongside them, the next it was blocking the path at the top of a rise. The trees on either side darkened in its presence, and Tag scuttled backward, suggesting they surround it and cut off its legs.
"Which ones?" Gideon asked.
If it was a spider, it was abnormally large, abnormally round, abnormally covered with shifting, hissing fur; if it was a centipede, it was abnormally tall, abnormally multilegged, abnormally possessed of two sets of dripping mandibles that would have done credit to the Spanish Inquisition; and if it was insectoid at all, it seemed to have forgotten that most of its kind did not have a larynx.
It roared.
Its spherical head lifted above the trees and bellowed at the sky, trembling the branches, scattering the clouds, causing whirlwinds of dust to lift from the ground into instant choking fog.
