World Warden, page 8
A seeming eternity later, although by his link it had only been about six hours, they broke free of the choking vegetation at last. The cool wind that greeted them at the edge of the forest was a welcome shock. Elias had forgotten that there existed something as fresh as the breeze. He could see the sky overhead, bright blue in the afternoon sun. Up ahead the low vegetation was still relatively thick, but the trees were interspersed much farther away from one another, and there were some rocky sections that promised faster going. Among the towering forest trees he saw a different species now. Its bark was rough and flaky, and it was tall but slender. At the top of its stalk, the trunk spread out in three different directions, cupping a roughly triangular section at the very top that had a broad crown of big flat leaves. Nestled immediately underneath the leaves were clusters of long jet-black pods that he estimated were about as big as his arm.
The trees looked like a distorted version of Terran palm trees. According to Elias’s link, the party was now less than fifty kilometers away from the coast.
“We’re close,” he said to Tristan. “The ocean’s not far away.”
Tristan smiled. “Yeah. It’s—” But something caught his attention, and he looked up. Elias followed the direction of his glance.
A phalanx of five adult Flyers swept over the canopy, flying in formation and screeching out a challenge. Vanor burst out of the forest and snarled right back, followed immediately by Siv and Narev. The Flyers did not land, however. They flew past them in the direction of the ocean and were out of sight in a few seconds.
“They want us to know they can attack whenever they want to,” Elias said with a frown. “We can’t let down our guard.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Tristan said, walking over to Vanor. This time Vanor did not challenge Tristan and merely crouched so the young man could easily climb onto his back. “When they come, we’ll be ready.”
Elias mounted Narev, and the three wurl surged forward through the undergrowth, moving much faster now that there weren’t as many obstacles in their way. Elias was on high alert for the next two hours, but nothing happened.
The sun was setting in the west by the time Narev halted on the southern bank of a wide river, panting. Siv and Vanor were nearby, and Elias received a request from Narev for him to dismount.
“Tristan, they want us to get off.”
“Sure.”
As soon as the two of them were on the ground, the three wurl walked to the edge of the river and drank deeply.
“I’ll stand watch,” Tristan said.
“Thanks.”
Elias filled their water containers, starting the automatic water purifying sequence in their canteens and the larger water packs they carried in a couple of backpacks. He went through their supplies, making sure that everything was in place, and then joined Tristan where he stood scanning the sky.
“I can’t see them,” Tristan reported.
“They’re around,” Elias assured him.
“Can you, like, feel them? Like you said you did a couple days ago?”
“No. But now that they’ve found us, they won’t let us go. They’re merely waiting for a chance. Flyers don’t like to attack headfirst. They like to wait for an opportunity. Maybe as it gets dark. I don’t know.”
“Should we make camp here?”
“I think we should keep going. Just for a bit.”
When the wurl were ready, Tristan and Elias climbed on their respective mounts again, and they continued going east. They followed the river, which grew increasingly wider with the passing kilometers. Elias did not have a record of this river on his link, but he did know that most rivers led to the ocean eventually. Vanor, who was in the lead again, appeared to share Elias’s opinion, because he kept close to the riverbank without deviating from it. Occasionally he would stop to glance up at the sky.
They were all on edge, and as twilight came over the land, Elias realized that they had to stop. He was exhausted, and he knew Tristan was too. The wurl might have been in slightly better shape, but if they were attacked at that moment, they would be at a severe disadvantage. They needed to find a place to rest for the night, even if the ocean was so close.
True night had fallen when Elias spotted a cluster of the palm-tree analogs very close to the river’s edge. Some of them were growing in the water, and they appeared to take advantage of the fact that the river widened dramatically at that point, forming a wide pool of uncertain depth that stretched north as far as the eye could see. Several large boulders lay haphazardly near the trees, and the ground was cracked and scored in places, as though an ancient cataclysm had befallen the region.
Unbidden, a memory came to Elias of similar devastation he had seen a lifetime ago, on the slopes of the Aberdeen mountains. The ground had also been rent asunder there, but now he realized what he hadn’t at that time: these were ancient battlegrounds. The scars on the land were the aftermath of savage battles between wurl queens.
Strangely, though, none of Sizzra’s memories recalled this particular place.
Maybe she didn’t fight here, or her mothers, Elias thought to himself as they approached. But if it wasn’t a Spine queen, then who did?
“Flyers!” Tristan shouted, and a screech from the sky echoed his yell.
“Get to the trees!” Elias said, with his voice and with his mind. The wurl obeyed him at once, even Vanor, and they sprinted in the direction of the tree cover.
They were barely in time. As Siv jumped between the tree trunks, one of the Flyer wurl swooped down from the heavens with white-hot glowing talons. Siv curled his body into a ball and fired a spine, but he missed his target.
Elias tumbled off Narev’s back and hurriedly relieved the wurl of the packs. Together, the five of them backed farther among the trees. They did not offer much protection, but it was something. One of the boulders was nearby, and Elias gestured to Tristan to stand next to it. Together, their backs to the rock, they unsheathed their weapons and watched the sky.
Two of the moons were out, but their light wasn’t enough for them to see more than faint shadows. The sky was clear, and once Elias saw the slender, snakelike outline of a Flyer against the moons, but other than that the night was silent. Too silent. It was as if all of the nearby creatures knew a fight was taking place and were cowering in their burrows, hoping not to be noticed.
“Can’t see them,” Tristan said under his breath. “Do you think Vanor or Narev can?”
Elias glanced at the wurl, who had spread out around them, spines flared up. He could sense their agitation and anger, but nothing more.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Stay alert.”
An hour passed. The third moon came out and improved the light conditions, but there was nothing to see.
Standing nearby, Tristan actually stumbled and bumped into Elias.
“Sorry,” he said, slurring the word slightly. “Must’ve dozed off.”
“They’re doing it on purpose.”
“Tiring us out?”
“Exactly,” Elias confirmed, pointing in the direction of Narev, who was still standing at attention but was evidently having trouble remaining awake. Siv was lying on the ground, still attentive but radiating exhaustion. Only Vanor refused to show any sign of weakness, but Elias could tell that even he was getting tired. “They’ll wait until we go to sleep.”
“We can do shifts,” Tristan offered. “I can take the first one.”
“Maybe. But how long will you be—”
A chorus of screeching in the night jolted them all wide-awake. The phalanx of flying wurl passed overhead, almost touching the treetops, leaving the foul stench of burning rock in their wake. Vanor fired a spine at them, but they were too far away and flew out of sight immediately.
“What can we do?” Elias asked. “Even if we sleep in shifts, I don’t know how to tell the wurl to do the same. I don’t think they’ll go to sleep until they really can’t take it anymore, Tristan. The Flyers are waiting for that moment. That’s when they’ll attack.”
The tiredness and multiple frustrations of the day were suddenly too much to bear. Elias knew true desperation.
We’re trapped. The Flyers planned it perfectly.
“Here they come!” Tristan shouted, and it was true. The five Flyers came back over the treetops, tucked their wings to their bodies, and attacked.
Narev, Siv, and Vanor fired a volley of spines, and one of the attackers dropped from the sky with a dying scream. The other four were undeterred, though, and they dived at the spot where Vanor was standing. At the last second, Vanor curled into a ball and fired spines to propel himself away, dodging the savage attack but crashing against a tree trunk in the process. Elias rushed forward to help him as he saw Vanor stumble under the exhaustion he had been hiding. On the ground now, four Flyers unfurled their wings and buffeted them with a synchronized blast of air that knocked Elias to the ground. Somewhere to the right, Elias heard Tristan fall down as well.
Elias jumped to his feet, but the Flyers were nowhere to be seen. Siv and Narev roared out their own defiance, looking up. From far off to the north and over the water, Elias heard the howls of the flying wurl, and he felt, clear and ice-cold, the singular overpowering will that was driving their actions. These males would attack until their prey was dead or they themselves died. She wanted it so. She had said to kill them.
“They’re coming again!” Elias yelled. “Everybody together!”
Narev and Vanor rushed to where Elias was standing, and Siv flanked Tristan.
The Flyers feinted an attack, forcing Siv to jump up in the air and fire two spines. They flew away, then came in for another attack. Upon landing, Siv stumbled.
There’s no way out, Elias thought desperately. The Flyers could keep doing this all night long, until the Spine wurl couldn’t react fast enough to dodge an attack.
The Flyers came at them again and landed high on the trunks of four of the nearby trees, dozens of meters above the ground. The bark of the trees sizzled beneath their talons. From their high vantage point, they snarled at the Spine wurl and the humans, their red eyes blazing in the night. They immediately began to weave down the trunks in spiral motions, like snakes, dodging spines as they went. Halfway to the ground, they all vaulted off and took to the air, soaring up with powerful downward thrusts of their wings. They climbed and climbed until they were almost out of sight and then turned, heading north until they were but dark specks against the far shore of the river.
Again, they came.
They’re toying with us.
Elias’s arms trembled as he held his spine, his muscles threatening to give out. He saw the four winged reptiles skimming the surface of the water as they approached, the silver moonlight outlining their slender scaled bodies, and Elias knew despair.
Suddenly he noticed a shimmer in the water.
Something bubbled in the river and burst out in a spray of warm droplets. Elias flinched, and he saw the Flyers swerve abruptly, almost as if they had hit a wall, and flap away from….
Nothing.
Elias blinked. There were ripples in the water, and the air immediately above it swayed and flickered like a hallucination on a hot day. As he watched, the ripples got bigger. Something was moving in the river, coming closer to shore, but the moonlight showed him—emptiness.
Narev, Siv, and Vanor growled threateningly.
The ripples stopped at the edge of the water. Elias’s attention was drawn to that spot. There was something there, but he couldn’t see what it was. The Spine wurl could sense it, he was sure.
The Flyers came in for an attack again despite the disturbance. They tucked their wings against their bodies as they had done the first time, eyes blazing, screeching at the top of their lungs.
Pulsating dots of bioluminescent yellow appeared in the river. It was as though a swarm of fireflies had congregated out of nowhere, dancing in the night. The dots outlined something long that broke out of the water entirely and rose meter after meter.
The creature flickered into view instantly when it shed whatever cloaking had made it invisible. Its dripping scales glinted in the moonlight.
It was monstrous and majestic at the same time, a mirage made flesh. Its reptilian body was partially submerged, but Elias descried powerful angular shoulders that ended in what he first thought were forelegs. He soon realized they were instead two moss-green writhing tentacles lined with streaks of yellow bioluminescence, each thick and bulging with muscle as they reached up into the sky. The creature’s neck had to be at least a meter long, and it ended in a triangular head that vaguely reminded Elias of the being’s Spine and Flyer kin. Its maw was segmented in three different parts, and as it opened, Elias was able to see that the mouth was terrifyingly big, carpeted with wicked teeth like a nightmare version of a Terran deep-sea anglerfish. It had a cluster of three red eyes that shone in the night.
Elias gasped, recognition finally having broken through the shock. He tried to speak, tried to warn Tristan to cover his ears.
He was too late. The creature sang.
It was a sound unlike anything Elias had ever heard. It traveled through the air but also into his mind, a simple but persistent thrum of rhythmical pulses that seized his attention and refused to release it. The beats tugged at his awareness and scrambled his will, and an upward glance revealed that he wasn’t the only one affected by it. As if in a dream, he saw the four Flyer wurl halt in midair. Their sudden terror sliced through Elias’s addled state, and he was able to focus on them clearly as he tried to block out the song, just in time to see how they attempted to fly away but instead froze again in the air, ensnared by the insidious sound that Elias knew had tunneled through their minds.
The Flyers fell. They hit the water with a splash, and the creature submerged itself in the river with them. Elias caught a fleeting glimpse of blurry yellow bioluminescence, violent ripples and bubbles, and a split second later the thing burst out again with its terrifying fanged maw open wide. It closed its segmented jaws around the exposed neck of one of the Flyers. The victim’s mental scream was horrible when six glowing tentacles burst out of the water and enveloped his wings and his body in a crushing, tightening grip. The creature dragged the Flyer underwater, and Elias watched in horror as the Flyer offered no resistance but instead met his own death while still paralyzed by the song.
The echoes of the rhythmical beat stopped when the creature disappeared beneath the river’s surface with its prize. Elias looked to the right, but Tristan was still frozen in place, his mouth half-open.
Vanor, Siv, and Narev were shaking their heads as if waking from a dream. On the surface of the water, the remaining three Flyers were doing the same.
Elias recognized the opportunity. “Vanor, Narev, Siv! Get them, now. Aim for their wings—don’t kill them!”
The wurl responded to his voice as though jolted fully awake. They focused on the Flyers still helpless in the water and attacked.
Incredibly, Elias realized that the Flyers could swim. They dived in the river and avoided the first volley of spines.
They never resurfaced.
Elias joined the wurl at the edge of the water. He watched until he was certain their attackers wouldn’t come back.
Tristan stumbled up to where he was. His voice trembled when he spoke. “What… what was that, Elias? That thing?”
Elias did not answer immediately. Together with the wurl, he scanned the surface of the river in alarm.
Is he still there? Is he hiding? How can I see something that’s invisible?
It was only after several minutes had passed that he was sure there was no danger anymore. He allowed his shoulders to relax, and he very nearly collapsed on the ground from exhaustion.
“Elias?” Tristan insisted. “That creature….”
Elias looked into Tristan’s eyes, his own mouth set in a grim line. “That was a wurl, Tristan. A Singer. The third kind.”
Chapter 6. Anger
OSCAR SPENT the next few days of his captivity in a sullen sort of silence, speaking only when absolutely necessary when Samantha came to give him his food. It appeared that his silence suited her perfectly, because she never attempted to start a conversation. In fact Samantha barely looked him in the eyes, and Oscar became convinced that she was only bringing him food because Dresde had told her to keep him alive as bait for his brother.
The hours of those days dragged on with leaden footsteps, punctuated only by random stabs of pain from his shoulder. The confinement started to affect him, and boredom set in. Oscar discovered he couldn’t concentrate on anything, and his many attempts to do something useful with his link ended in nothing. He would start reading a document or book and then become distracted with his own thoughts. There was a darkness around him that did not seem to leave, and it was particularly bad at night.
When the shadows lengthened, the creature in the cell next to him would often be more active. Sometimes there would be furtive little scratches on the wall that separated it from Oscar, and he was certain that the thing was looking for a way in. Now that he was silent most of the time, the creature barely moaned during the day, except around mealtimes, strangely. Oscar supposed it was Samantha who opened its cell twice a day, whether to deliver food or for some other unknown purpose.
Something about the darkness appeared to incite the creature to activity. Because of this, Oscar did not rest well at night. He tossed and turned, waking up frequently because of the pain in his shoulder whenever he placed weight on it, and also because he would often startle himself awake and turn on the flashlight in his link, shining in at every corner of his cell to make sure that the pale insect from his first night did not try to crawl back in and sting him as he slept.
There were also other annoyances. At dusk and dawn, winged bugs that resembled the flies he had seen in science textbooks back in Portree would come out. A few of them would flit into the cell and chase him around aggressively. Although they did not seem to drink blood, they appeared to be drawn to something on Oscar’s skin, and their high-pitched buzzing was unnerving, as was their size. Even with the wings, they were so small that it was nearly impossible to see them, and yet they made an inordinate amount of noise for beings that tiny. This meant Oscar spent many fruitless minutes swatting away at empty air, trying unsuccessfully to get rid of the creatures.
