by James Kahn
Beauty quieted down. The old man came up to him. “Sorry about that, mister. She goes kinda crazy, sometimes. Her old man was killed by bounty hunters. You better go.” He handed the Centaur his money back.
Beauty trotted out of the barn and sat in the grass about a hundred yards away. His head was beginning to hurt, but the fresh air cleared his mind.
It was a good lesson. He was a hunter not a detective. Houses, walls, cities were not for him. Besides which, he’d been too trusting in the stable, too unwary.
Too long away from the hunt.
He lay back and let the cool rising breeze dry the blood on his head. Time to sit and wait and watch. He could do more with his eyes and ears in an open field than in any barn or brothel.
He let his senses accommodate to the night, and set a vigil.
Josh opened his eyes. No more sleep hunger, no burning hypnotic light. He lay on his back in the room’s half-darkness, and for a moment couldn’t remember where he was. He turned and almost rolled over on Meli, lying quietly beside him. At his movement she jumped, then sat up straight, then hugged him happily.
“Oh, you’re alive,” she breathed, “I was so scared you—”
“What happened?” Josh raised himself up on an elbow. “What are you—”
“You just went down. I thought you were dead, I got so scared, I didn’t know what, you didn’t move, I was afraid to tell anyone, and then you didn’t wake up and—”
“Wait, wait,” he sat up. He looked down. He was naked. He looked at her questioningly.
“Well, you weren’t waking up,” she explained, “and I shook you and talked to you but I didn’t call Madam because she’d get mad, especially if she found out you wrote my name, but you still didn’t wake up, so I took off my clothes and … well, pretended like I was your lover and you just found me. Only I found you. Only you still didn’t wake up.” Her expression was one of self-satisfied guilt.
Josh was confused and annoyed by whatever had happened. He got up, quickly pulling on his clothes. This was the second time he’d suddenly fallen asleep like that—without warning, without choice. It disturbed him both because he felt out of control, and because it left him so vulnerable. He stared cautiously at Meli, fearful of all the treacheries she might have inflicted upon him during his failing consciousness.
She looked hurt. “I’m sorry if—”
“No, no, everything’s fine. Just—” he squeezed his temples, as if to press away his evil suspicions—“you were telling me something before, about a Griffin and a Vampire …”
She nodded. “They were waiting for their friend. They were mean.”
“Where did they go, Meli?” he asked.
“Madam told them to wait in room 21, down the hall. She said she’d let them know. They made a mess in the front room, they made someone leave, and everyone got angry at them, so Madam made them wait upstairs.”
Josh checked his knives. The wind was blowing constantly now; not hard, but enough so that the filaments in the light bulbs in the small room glowed a deep orange-red.
“Show me where,” he said secretively. He knew nymphs loved to reveal secrets.
Her face flushed and her eyes blazed with the fire of complicity, and she took his hand and let him out the door.
They stood noiselessly in the hallway, listening for sounds of danger. The coal-red electric wires along the corridor grew brighter and dimmer as the wind rose and fell outside. They started quietly down toward room 21.
There was suddenly a jumble of noises downstairs—loud voices, footsteps, doors. Meli looked at Josh—“I’ll go see,” she said, and ran down before he could stop her. He walked on alone, to room 21.
He put his ear to the door. Silence. He bent down and put his eye to the keyhole. Dull, electric-red flicker. He took a knife in each hand and began to turn the doorknob.
When he felt the latch click, he pushed the door open and lunged in on his haunches. Tense silence in a darkening room. The lamp on the table dimmed from blood-red to complete extinction, and only two small candles by the bed continued to shed light. Josh turned slowly, searching every shadow. When his stare fell on the bed, a shadow moved.
Josh raised his knife. The shadow stood up and walked to the edge of the bed: it was the black Cat he’d seen downstairs earlier. The Cat shook her head slowly back and forth at Joshua, then raised her paw and pointed to the open window, where the wind was billowing the curtains.
Josh gaped uncomprehendingly at the small animal. It whined. He walked up to it and scratched the top of its head, between the ears, and it lifted its head higher into the pressure of his fingers. There was a noise behind him and he swiveled, but it was only Meli standing at the door.
“Don’t mind her,” said Meli, indicating the Cat. “That’s only Isis. She’s kind of odd.”
“So-o-o-o?” purred Isis. It was half word, half meow.
“Nobody else here,” said Josh to Meli. “What was going on downstairs?”
“Just a bunch of King Jarl’s soldiers, come to have some fun.” Jarl, the Bear-King, had soldiers posted all through the areas south of Monterey—a “peacekeeping force” that had moved in following the Race War, and never left.
“Yarrrrrrl,” said Isis, licking her paw.
Josh said to Meli, “Are you sure they were in this room?”
Meli nodded vigorously. Isis jumped down to the floor, padded across the room, and leapt up on the windowsill. “Soouuuuth,” she meowed. Outside, the wind began racing.
Josh stared across the darkness, first at the strange little Cat, then at Meli. “What did they look like?” he asked.
Meli thought a minute. “The Vampire was tall, even for a Vampire. He had long long black hair, down to here, and his eyes were dark and scary. Griffins I don’t know, they all look alike to me but this one was big and I think he had a broken beak.”
The last candle flared and guttered, and then the room was dark. The wind wrapped the house.
Joshua’s pupils opened wide in the darkness. “I’m going to look around,” he said, and walked back into the corridor. Meli went with him.
They looked into rooms through secret windows Meli knew of. They saw things Josh had never even heard of before—things that stirred him, unsettled him. Passionate animals in compelling patterns of embrace, terrible scratchings, furtive moans. He wished he had time to write down everything he saw.
They tried hidden doors. Isolated candles lit their immediate surroundings. Forms and shapes moved out of corners and along walls in the darkened chambers, as the wind outside steadily rose.
Joshua stared through the long dark hall, out the window into the rising wind. He thought: dark hall, rising wind. Dark. Wind.
Joshua stopped. “Something’s wrong with the windmill,” he said.
Meli looked at him blankly.
“The windmill,” he repeated. “It was making electricity “when the wind was coming up, and now the wind is stronger but the lights are all off. Don’t you see?” He turned away. “Something’s wrong in the windmill.”
His pulse snapped up with the realization, and its implications. The prey was being run to ground.
“I’m going out,” he told her. “You stay here.” She looked at him quizzically, baffled. He hugged her briefly. “I’ll be back,” he said, and left.
Beauty stood motionlessly on the lee side of a slope that gave a good view of the whole panorama—house, barn, cottages, gardens. The smell of the creature was still in the air, but with the wind blowing so hard now, and shifting direction so much, the odor was impossible to localize. The ochre moon gave good light, though: Beauty would see what there was to see.
His head stopped hurting, and was even numbed, now, by the chilly wind. He had his bow out, an arrow loosely strung.
His beacon eyes searched the complex slowly, methodically. Main house, lantern-lit, mostly quiet, occasional laughter bubbling over on a flight of wind. Stables, quiet. Cows and sheep, asleep. Windmill, quiet and still.
Cabins, dark.
Windmill. Why was the windmill quiet and still when the wind was so angry and wild?
There was a movement by the back of the big house, and Beauty watched carefully as the lone figure ran a few dozen paces, stopped, and looked around. The figure stood frozen there for perhaps a minute, then began running—straight at Beauty. The Centaur raised his bow.
At a hundred paces he could see clearly it was Josh, so he lowered his weapon and waited. A few seconds later they stood facing each other. Josh was panting lightly. “The windmill,” he said. Beauty nodded.
They approached the old wooden tower from the east, walking in the shadow it cast by the low-hanging moon. Its top rocked slightly in the wind. One of the big propeller blades was broken and flapping; but still, in all that current, the fan did not turn.
They found the door around the other side, half open in the glare of the moon. Beauty readied an arrow; Josh unsheathed his steel. They entered in a crouch.
It was dark inside. Moonglow filtered through broken slats and rat holes in the walls, throwing distorted images around the circular room. Most of the floor was taken up by a large ancient generator that ran lines out to the main house, and up to the blades at the top of the mill. A long wooden ladder leaned against the wall, all the way up to a trapdoor that allowed the drive shaft to exit down.
The Accident was there, dangling by the neck from the severed drive chain that connected the big fan blades up top to the turbine generator on the floor. He was dying. Josh climbed up the ladder and cut him free, and the horrible creature tumbled to the floor.
They knelt by his broken body.
“Uluglu domo,” said the Accident. His belly was torn open, the mark of a Griffin.
“What’s he saying?” asked Josh. “Do you know their language?”
Beauty nodded. “Domo dulo,” he said to the Accident. “Odo glutamo nol?”
The ugly creature opened his eye for the first time, and looked at his stalkers. “Ologlu Bal,” he said, coughing blood. “Bal ongamo, nu ayrie gludemos, oglo du, Bal naglor nopar dos. Gluanda Bal seco, ologlu tas ululu. Endera Gor mororo gul endamo eglor.”
Beauty nodded. “Nglimo tu? Nagena gli asta log nak to.”
“Glumpata no glas enti borama, noglu esta tas Bal o Scree tudama glu. Tudama gluanda, Gor es to narag.”
“Ednatu?” pursued Beauty.
“Glisanda nef. Riaglo tor ologlu mindamo. Orogra tomo orogra mu. Ti do gorogla mel donu.”
Beauty shook his head. “Gluana no tomo, ululu gorono Gor.”
“Nef nef, gliamo,” said the beast. “Ologlu Bal enta gashto boro, ologlu lev Scree, es piram glu. Gogolasma. Engelli tor. Glidon gliamo, mirelli aj su gol.” With that he grimaced and died.
“What did he say?” asked Josh.
“He said he was betrayed by his friends, a longhaired Vampire named Bal, and a Griffin with a broken mouth, named Scree. They were supposed to meet him here, and they killed him.”
“Does he know where they went?” Joshua no longer had any thoughts, good or bad, for the Accident. His mind now focused entirely on Bal and Scree.
“They went south. Scree lives in Ma’gas’ at the edge of the rain forest. It is the pirate city. Bal lives even south of that. They have Humans with them, tied in a cart, but only Bal knew where they were being taken. This one did only what Bal said to do. He hopes now we kill them both. Bal and Scree. He said his name was Got and he was glad to die, for life is a river of pain.”
They were silent a few moments. There was a sound behind them, and they turned. Isis, the Cat, stood in the doorway. She tipped her head behind her, indicating the big house, and said, “Yarrrl.”
Josh went to the door and looked. Four lanterns swung and bobbed toward him, midway between the mill and the house. “Jarl’s men,” said Joshua. “We’d better move.”
They slipped out the door as inconspicuously as possible, but the moon snagged them. Voices amid the lanterns began shouting: “There is somebody in the windmill!” “Saboteurs! Get them!” “You there! Halt!”
Josh jumped on Beauty’s back. “Run over the hill in the open, then circle around back to the house.”
“I think the tune has come to leave,” suggested the Centaur.
“I have to see if Meli wants to come with us. She may be in trouble.”
Isis slipped into the night. Beauty galloped over the hill, the soldiers’ shouts and snarls getting more distant with every stride. He made a wide circle in the shadow of some trees, doubled back to the house, and stood, tense and alert, under Meli’s window. Josh got a foothold in some ivy and began slowly to scale the dark side of the brothel.
He was almost to Meli’s window, when the sounds of renewed commotion could be heard at the windmill. The voices barely carried over the raucous wind. “Murder!” “A dead Accident—” “The Centaur did it!” “He was—” “—someone with him—” “—get after them—”
Josh felt the ledge to Meli’s window, and with one final pull, hoisted himself up. Through the glass he saw her. She sat, naked, in the lap of an oriental Vampire. With one hand she reached up behind her, stroking his pale cheek; with the other, she reached down between her legs and stroked his insistence. His right hand reached around to her chest, rolled her tightening nipple between his thumb and long-nailed forefinger. Her head was tilted to the side, her eyes half-closed.
His teeth were buried deep in her neck, and cherry-black blood trickled down to her shoulder. She gasped.
Josh tapped on the glass. Meli looked up, saw his face, an apparition at the window. Slowly she brought her first finger up to her lips: Shhh. Imperceptibly, she shook her head. Her face was mischief and resignation together, and invited Joshua’s complicity. Their eyes met. Their eyes spoke. Joshua backed down the side of the house.
As he hopped on Beauty’s back, Jarl’s soldiers were raising the posse in the front room. Whoops, oaths, and growls could be heard. Madam said, “I knew that boy was Trouble.”
Beauty galloped off in the opposite direction from the way the soldiers had first seen him leave, and he didn’t stop running or changing course for quite a while. They weren’t just hunters, now; they were hunted.
CHAPTER 4: In Which The Company Doubles And Finds A Mascot
THEY ran for two hours straight; first south, then east, then south, then west. They made it to the seaside as the moon dipped under the horizon, and ran north through the salty surf for an hour before finding a place where a tumble of rocks and slate spilled into the ocean from the cliffs above. Up this stony spine they climbed, leaving no trail. They continued walking east again, sticking to creek beds and game paths for still another hour; and didn’t rest finally until they found a cave with a back door at the edge of a small wood, just as the false dawn opened her eyes. They slept until late morning.
The evening cool burned off slowly, even at the wood’s border. When Josh awoke, he .found himself nestled along Beauty’s furry belly, curled against the cold. He stood and rubbed himself all over, shaking off sleep; and then stood still, cocking his head, listening for anything the forest might be able to tell him.
The forest said much. The wind in the treetops was from the west, strong, bad for tracking. A woodpecker rapped out a lunchtime tune. A chorus of crickets entertained themselves: they were audience-shy, and could be depended on to stop their performance if anyone showed up for the show. The lighting was all dappled greens and browns, and Joshua never tired of it.
He took out some paper from one of his Scribe-tubes and assiduously covered it with small script from his quill, recording the events that had led them to this point. He tried to set the record in this way at least once a day, though he knew the Word was forgiving of occasional lapses. When the writing was done, Joshua rolled up the paper and returned it to the Scribe-tube he’d secured inside his boot. “The Word is great, the Word is One,” he spoke softly to himself.
Beauty arose, shook all over, and managed to provoke a jay into squawking at him for
a full minute. When the blue mad Bird finally flew off in ornery, self-righteous satisfaction, Josh looked over to Beauty and said, “Well?”
Beauty stretched. “Well, we need not worry about Jarl’s toads. If they pick up our trail at all, it will not be for days. We will be out of this land.”
“That’s only half a well,” smiled Joshua. “We’re on a pretty cold trail ourselves.”
“We know they headed south,” said the Centaur.
“South is a big place.”
“We could head direct for Ma’gas’, where the Griffin lives.”
“We don’t know they’re going there. And I’d rather catch up before they got that far.”
Beauty agreed. “I think we will do best to follow a loose trail between the brothel they left in the night and the Forest of Accidents.”
Josh looked doubtful. “That’s more east than south. Why that way?”
A brown Rabbit ran up, sniffed at some clover, began to chew. Beauty stretched his hind legs, one at a time.
“Griffins dislike walking, and Vampires hate work of any kind. These two have a cart full of Humans to drag along now that their muscular friend is dead. They will be wanting help.”
Josh nodded. “And another Accident is their best bet.” Beauty rubbed his rump against the bark of a crusty old oak. “I can see them bickering while they walk. ‘You pull, you old bat.’ ‘No, you pull, you miserable Bird, it’s my turn to fly.’ “
Josh laughed. “We could get ahead of them and volunteer to pull the wagon.”
“We already pulled Jarl’s hounds off their scent.”
“Say, maybe they could find other things for us to do. Draw their water … plant their crops …”
“Slit their throats …” suggested Beauty.
“Slit their throats,” chimed Josh.
“Surrrrrrre,” came a voice behind them. They spun around, Beauty rearing, Josh crouching low. Sitting serenely in a puddle of sunlight, feet tucked under her, eyes half closed, was Isis, the black Cat from the brothel.
