by Michael Shea
“These must be your weapons. Please tuck them in your belts. You’ll find if you throw them hard enough, it won’t matter what part of the witches’ bodies you strike. More of that anon, but first, gentlemen, as all of us hate to be misjudged, I apologize to you in advance for a little demonstration I must make at this point. Please note your arms.”
The directive was superfluous, for the pair had already dragged back their sleeves with cries of loathing, and begun, helplessly, to scratch themselves. Foul, weeping pustules clustered wherever their nails raked, but they could not desist.
“You sample my one poor compulsion over you,” Hounderpound said. “I can afflict you with it wherever you may be ashore, on any part of your persons. Do forgive me—” Already the pair found their skin whole and clean again. “—but these witches, though loathsome, are on your scale. Ashore, you might feel quite alienated from the needs of one such as I, and might find it easier to neglect the killing of those whose crimes you’ve never borne the weight of.”
Hex, whose pulses had scarcely ceased racing, shrilled: “We’re in no position to resent this doubt of our honour, Kagag Hounderpound! You are mighty, we are slight! I can only say you’ll have no cause to regret engaging us. May I voice one misgiving?”
“By all means!”
“We are not Thaumaturges. Won’t our lives be seriously at risk, attacking witches with stones?”
“None, I’m happy to say! No risk! You must heed my prescription closely of course. Here it is then, in sum quite a simple matter. If you swim to this nearest cove you will find a spring to refresh you. Then make your way north—the little spits are easy to overclimb—and several coves upcoast you will find the witches’ tenement. A rock stands near it, where you can hide. At sunrise they will come out, and will perform an incantation over the surf. It has three verses. Before these verses are finished, rise and hurl the stones at them. Aim as best you can but remember force is most important. This last thing above all: When they fall, drag them inland on to thoroughly dry sand. Don’t let their bodies fall into the sea.”
Shivering in advance, Hex and Sarf lashed their boots to their belts. It was with great loathing they re-entered the sea. The swell, at least, seemed bated, as though just here the titan behind them could cause the sea to hold its breath.
Greedily at last their footsoles greeted the little crescent beach. They squeezed the coarse sand in their fists as lustily as they drank from its stream, and then bathed in it. They wrung out their gear and dressed. A kind of bitter cress grew on the banks, and they found their stomachs held it down with a good grace. Now there was enough light to reach each other’s eyes closely. Hex saw that Sarf was ready for the killing, and, knowing this, he realized he was too. Sarf led off, and they climbed the first landspit.
The dawn’s fan was saffron now, and subtly gilt the foam-lacquered sand of the next beach. The holes their feet punched out as they crossed it were like script in linearity. Above all else, Hex found, this killing felt like a passport for re-entry of the world—a vengeful demonstration of identity and mission here at the gates of a land that was sure to prove as dangerous and apt to cast them down as other lands had been.
“In order to get back in the game, one antes up a bit of blood,” he said aloud. Sarf shrugged, attacking the next landspit without glancing back. Hex understood his friend’s impassive stride—he felt a touch of trance himself, for amazement at the stupendous being who had taken them in hand still buoyed them, as the hand itself had done. Evil both men felt he was, but, by sheer presence he diminished the stature of any opposing beings the pair could imagine. After a second empty beach they topped a further landspit, and ducked back, their goal before them.
At the beach’s centre, where the sand met the grassy bluffs that walled it, stood a hut, an ill-joined box of driftwood fragments. Beyond this were drying-racks hung with rags of netting, and, keel-up on the sand, a punt of the same miscellaneous wood as the hut, and as ill carpentered. About halfway between the hut and the avengers’ covert stood the rock that Hounderpound described. The pilgrims leapt off the landspit and made for the rock. The rag that draped the hut’s door shuddered. They hit the sand, but it had been the breeze. They scuttled ahead to cover.
Peeping from here they saw fish skeletons littering the sand before the hut. A stench, too, hung round the hovel. It was ranker than Hounderpound’s had been and its persistence, in the presence of the onshore wind, was uncanny. The east was now a multiple arch of light, each concentric curve a gradient of gold. A flicker of movement overhead made Hex’s heart thump.
It was a river of glides, a hundred feet above, flowing along the rim of the bluffs on the updraught they made. The birds hung cruciform, perfectly synchronized, the stream of them endless. Their beauty, the clarity and directness of their movement through time, gave Hex a pang, made him feel deep-sunk in the flounderings and muttering pauses of men. There was a crisp sound that Hex knew was a foot treading dried fishbones. Low to the sand, the pair looked out from either side of the rock.
It seemed to be the witch who came out first, for the ape-jawed, bowlegged hulk had dugs. That it was the warlock became clear when his white haired spouse, with far bulkier paps, followed. Loin-wraps they had, no other clothes. With an idle, shambling disunion they moved towards the surf and as they did this the torch of the sun’s rim kindled on the horizon. Hex pulled Hounderpound’s stone from his belt. At their nearest pass he noted that the witches’ lower canines were so pronounced, they made little dents in their upper lips.
For a moment they were simply an old couple pottering among the seawrack. The witch wet her feet, and stood scratching her ribs and staring at the particle of new sun. The warlock bent with a grunt and picked up a mussel shell. Holding this out towards the sun, he tilted it. A dash of water fell from it, into the inrushing surf. The old woman spat into the same wave, and then cried out in a voice that was rough but precise, like a coarse saw sinking into soft wood, stroke by decisive stroke:
“Curse you, Kagag Hounderpound!
We damn and ban you from this ground!
On ruin, Hounderpound, you gloat,
And under swarming shipwrecks float
to see the dead rain dreaming down;
The storm-broke hull
Soon crowns your skull;
In your museums of the drowned
Long galleries of trophies bloat.”
And Hex felt them like sawstrokes, cutting the sinews of resolve, for the indictment resonated with his own unarticulated judgement of the giant. But how could he dare do other than serve the monster? Did Sarf feel this? The woman spat again, as the warlock tilted a second libation from the shell, though he had not bent to fill it. Again she confronted the growing sun, now a thick bar of fire, a melting ingot.
“Curse you, Kagag Hounderpound!
We damn and ban you from this ground!
For in the wrestling sea and storm
All crafts or lives escaping harm—
All such survivors wake your hate!
All ardent wills
Whose ships and skills,
Whose dwarfish toils outswim their fate,
These gall you, these unbroken forms!”
Hex clutched Hounderpound’s stone as though it were his sole handhold on this shore. What were they themselves, he and Sarf, if not flung stones—found and saved by the giant to be hurled against his enemies? And, powerless things that they were, they should fly obediently to their targets, for granting at length they found their immortality, what would it be but infinite dolour, poxed by the titan’s revenge? He dared not look round at Sarf, and yet he waited because he was hoping—he realized—to hear his friend leap up, and see his stone fly, and then he would be freed to do the same. Already the hag intoned the third verse of her malediction.
“Curse you, Kagag Hounderpound!
We damn and ban you from this ground!
Withhold your huge, unmaking hand!
This patiently wave-ha
mmered sand—
This smithied gold—won’t feel your touch.
No, nothing that breathes
Outside the seas
Will strangle in your envy’s clutch,
Nor shall your claws unshape this land!”
While the indictment rang, Hex could not cease to listen and receive it, and at the same time his fear set his rage a-boil at the witch, her paralysing of his body with the sound of truth. Finding he had let her speak, had let pass the time the giant had bid them strike, his terror galled him, goaded him to his feet. His arm cocked back to throw, and just then the last quatrain’s meaning caught up with them. In a kind of perfect perplexity between attack and fraternity, Hex’s hand subverted its own cast—balked and flung awry—almost straight up.
But, as if alive and craving its target, the stone swooped impossibly, its swerve so severe it actually struck the shoulder of the hag, even as Sarf’s stone, thrown with more purpose, whirled out and jarred off the warlock’s head. The witches fell as though abruptly legless. They thrashed where they lay with a horrible, helpless energy. The old man spanked the sand with chest and loins, his eyes sand-blind, his mouth a gasping hole, his arms appearing welded to his sides. His wife had fallen closer to the water. She writhed in the same fluid, armless way, her hip and flank wet with foam. Her face strained towards the sea as if she would drink it. She seemed stronger, her eyes more brightly desperate than her mate’s. And then, overwhelmingly, Hex felt with her, wanting only one thing—that she reach the sea.
He launched too suddenly, lurched to a fall near her feet, which he shoved as he went down. Rising, he found Sarf beside him now, and they staggeringly hustled her out into the surf up to their hips. She had grown heavier, her thrashing more powerful and rhythmic. The wave receded, and the foam as it drained off her was dissolving her hair, and eroding her shoulders. Galvanized, they dropped her—a silver streamlined shimfin now bucking forward into the resurgent surf, and out to swimming depth on its recoil.
Uprooting their feet from the sea’s tangle, they dashed to the warlock. The piscine force of his floundering had enfeebled shockingly. The sand clotted on him, caking him like grave-loam as they hoisted him. Offshore the metamorphosed hag’s silver muzzle, flanked by the two huge, knowing opals of her eyes, broke surface and cried out to them, the grainy flute burst like melancholy itself above the breakers’ noise. They charged the surf with the he-witch to ram him home with one grand thrust.
He went under like a stone, the sand smoking off him. As the suds sped past their middles they watched him through the clearing water. There was no dissolution of his form. His head rose weakly to look down through the water. Shakily, his hands began to drag them there, strengthless crablike hands laboriously climbing towards the abyss. The surf dragged out again and Hex and Sarf, panicked, fought beachward.
For the shimfin had erupted much nearer, and hung watching them. She seemed, so tapered and compact, a single, silver muscle, an ancient, perfect thing taut and strike-ready with their punishment. But impassively she looked them ashore, and then dived towards her mate. Neither reappeared.
Retreating to mid-beach, the pilgrims stood. The cove’s new and terrible emptiness held them like a detaining guard. An appalling beauty flooded this empty stage. The sun was up, and the sand glowed like an infant’s skin. The bluffs, furred with varied grasses, burned sweet-green, ochre and a smoky silver. Still rivering past their crests, the glides shed their benediction of silence on the ocean’s patient lamentation. Hex drew back his sleeves and viewed his arms. With cautious hope, he quoted:
“ ‘Nothing that breathes/Outside the seas…’ Could she be wrong here, and still have the power to hold the giant offshore? I think he would have stricken us by now if he truly could.”
“Why did you throw?” Sarf’s tone was almost grieved.
“I didn’t grasp the sense in time. You?”
“I let your cast trigger mine. I was too unwilling to begin.”
“Do you think he will live?”
Sarf shook his head, but not in answer. A faint, sickening tension had entered the air. The surf, they realized, had ceased to come in. They saw that the waters lay in jumbled, retreating ridges that ponderously recoiled en masse from the shore. The travellers sprinted towards the bluffs.
The most creviced and gently pitched of these rose behind the hut. Here they flung themselves on to the bluffs’ knees, and began to climb. Hex was hindmost. As he gained six, twelve, twenty feet of elevation, he saw the ocean, like the gathered-up skirts of an immense mantle, pull twenty, forty, sixty yards back from the beach, leaving rags of foam on the weedy, gutslick floor. Twenty-five, thirty feet up. Something was wrong with the horizon, too. After a heartbeat, Hex knew what it was: the sun was again half-sunk below it. Thirty-five, forty feet up, nails splitting, mashed knees seizing purchase when soles or fingers slipped. Too far to climb—oh, much too far!
For now, front concave, the sky-blotting wave moved forward with titanic pomp, and now with his eyes too he clawed at the slope. He seized the earth in mad, wholesale embraces, fighting to heap space beneath himself. Fifty, fifty-five feet, sixty… The huge tactile aura crushing against his back became a sound, a hiss. He saw the tops of the bluffs still far above, the rim of their grave. The hiss became a vast, velvety rumble, and then he was exploded at the sky.
He was a wheeling, blind nothing ascending, a jot of foam in a geyser. A touch to the rockface would erase a limb, but lacking the touch, he was immaterial, disengaged, and had long instants to visualize his back-fall, a hundred feet back down, to be milled between the ocean and the earth. Praying, as the upsurge slowed, he twisted in the cliff’s remembered direction. The climb slowed, reached its peak, that instant’s stasis. Hex clutched for earth, and hugged a sudden massy knob that miraculously greeted this grope. His fingers sank deep into the matted roots of grass. Flat as a starfish his middle pressed harsh granite, and he fought to shed the wave’s retreat, ton by ton. The pressure wrung soul and sense from him. But then, gasping, he lay in the light again. He was at the bluffs’ crest.
Sarf, dropped farther inland, was already afoot, and shouting:
“It’s Hounderpound! Run!”
Half a mile offshore the giant stood visible to the waist. His barnacled shoulders flashed fanglike in the sun as he bellowed wordlessly, shaking his fist at the shore. Then he struck the water and a wave as high as his own chest sprang up to the limits of vision in either direction and grimly rolled towards the land. But Hex too was up now, broad meadows stretched before them, and they knew that this wave they could outrun.
18
Stilth
Kneeling in moonshadow, Bramt Hex worked up a gob of spit, and with his forefinger rubbed it into the latch and rusty hinges of the shed door. Clustered at the farm compound’s farthest corner, the hounds already bayed where Sarf, skulking in an outer ravine, taunted them with hisses and flung stones. Soon the farmhouse door would open; right now, Hex got the door of the chuckchuck shed open without a sound.
Through the acrid dark within he moved along close to the wall, where floorboards were most mute and firm. At the rack of perches where the sleeping fowl drooped, he paused to gloat an instant over this deftness he and Sarf had gained in recent weeks, like the great Tricksters of legend. He smiled to think this, and at the same time fancied the thought.
With a single pulse of speed—it must surprise even himself to be perfectly smooth—he snatched a chuckchuck from its perch. The birds slept with their stemlike necks looped backward, heads tucked under wingtops, and as he plucked up this one he wrenched the neck into a tighter circle, breaking it. He stifled its feathery, hammering throes against his chest, and hooked its neck through his belt. Then he snatched and killed its neighbour. Securing this, he crept back to the door. Still the spell of legendary figures seemed to lie on this thieving, so timed-to-the-whisker was it. For commotion now spilled out of the farmhouse, and sleep-blurred shouts moved towards the dogs. Hex grasped
the door’s handle—and froze.
Repeated midnight thieveries had given him faith in the slightest crawlings of his skin. And now some infrasensory goad told him, with a pang, that someone stood just outside the door. Its panels showed him a dark outline that featurelessly faced him. He brought his sword out, not otherwise moving. Was he going mad, waiting here past the critical point when nothing stopped his exit? Sarf would have already retreated up his ravine. Outside the door, a man cleared his throat.
That was all. Perhaps a breath was drawn for speech. If so, the would-be speaker changed his mind. There was one faint footstep, clearly part of a retreating series, and no more. Now doubly afraid he had hallucinated, and dreading that the hands would be thinking to check the shed by now, he opened the door. Outside, only the fences’ silhouettes, shadowed on the bone-pale dust. He ran to the fence and heaved himself over near the cornerpost. A cone-shaped object capped the post—he had not seen it going in.
Indeed, it was a cap. Of leather, conic save that its apex was a limp knob, not a point. Not pausing to wonder at the act, he snagged it and pulled it on as he ran for the shadows beyond the farm. The perfect fit of it gave him a thrill of pleasure even as he dodged and hunkered. Under it his very thoughts almost seemed clearer, distincter—in its envelope—to his inner ear.
Two days later, at sunrise, they gnawed and sucked bare the last of those pilfered chuckchucks’ bones. When they had washed their hands and faces in the dew-charged grass, Hex unbelted his pouch, whose contents had survived the shipwreck no more than damp at the edges. Sarf laughed.
“Really Hex! It’s right there after all, plain enough, isn’t it?” He meant Kurl. The grassy coastal hills they had followed so long, and now camped in, ended perhaps twenty miles north. Hex looked across them, their green bulge intermitted by hollows, their snaky shoreline lace-trimmed from the sea’s froth. Then they ended—the shore became a straight edge and the terrain a vast flatness blackly sloping to the water: the ancient lavaflow of Kurl. Hex nodded, but pulled out Banniple’s rescript of Ongerlahd anyway. The gentle sub-curate had traced on its reverse the cartographer’s scarcely more than conjectural sketch of Kurl. It was the terrain inland of Kurl, where names alone hung, unattached to any graphics, that Hex wanted to brood over again.
