Hunting Gods, page 28
part #2 of Fate and the Wheel Series
As soon as its foils were in the water, the Old Maid felt surprisingly stable. Even so, the sight of Fat Chance surging overhead like a fast-moving cliff, its sword-sharp seabone foil cleaving the foam not far from the dinghy’s port outrigger, made his throat tighten. He breathed more easily as the towing line was paid out and finally released once the dinghy was safely beyond the mother vessel’s stern.
While the Old Maid could match the bladeship’s speed, the swell – which caused barely a motion in the larger vessel, perched on its wave-slicing fin – made things aboard exciting, to say the least. Drenched with spray, Chet reflected that Jinsin, Byla, and the others who had volunteered to take Murrin’s translations home in the third dinghy, Qentas, had been insane. He felt a pang, realising that he had not seriously considered before that they might not have survived the journey.
As they arced away at right angles from the wind, Fat Chance spilled her sails fractionally to allow the Old Maid to keep pace. Before very long, the bladeship was just a smudge on the featureless horizon.
‘Hand’s teeth,’ chuckled Chet, amazed. ‘It works!’ He shook the captain by the shoulder. ‘It works, you mad old pirate!’
Where before the ship’s bright outline would have caught the eye, it seemed somehow to bleed into both the sea and the sky. It wasn’t that the bladeship was invisible. Once spotted, it was plain to see. It was just that without already expecting to find a something in that precise spot, it was remarkably easy to overlook.
The dinghy’s recapture was, if anything, scarier. Well astern of Fat Chance, Min hooked the scudding tow-line from the water and tied a quick-release knot to the bow cleat. The Old Maid bucked in protest as they were drawn in. Finally, another line was fastened at the stern and the dinghy was winched from the water – not quickly enough to avoid what seemed an age of drenching spray and instability as the dinghy debated whether to be a vessel of the sea or the air. Chet found his heart hammering like one of the ship’s bilge-pumps as he stepped, dripping, back on to the deck. He was also grinning like a maniac.
The grin faded as he instinctively turned, looking for Murrin.
A NIGHT AND DAY CAME and went. Then another, and another. Though Jarosh and many of the crew shared Chet’s premonitions of bad weather, and the skies often grew overcast, it never rained. The winds kept steady, veering gradually from north westerly towards the north east, forcing them to sail closer to the wind than Jarosh would have liked, but not enough to force them to tack.
The painted deck proved slippery. Jarosh, loudly cursing his short-sightedness, ordered a topcoat of thinned-down lacquer mixed with sand, with strategic areas left bare to avoid interfering with the smooth running of lines. The arrangement proved more secure than bare timbers had been. Some of the crew had already taken to calling the ship the Lucky Jagfish, after the pelagic species of predatory fish which its new paint-job resembled.
Despite their worst fears, there was no further sign of bright lights, nor of the skyworms.
A WEEK OUT FROM THE DEAD CITY, a call came down from Min in the lookout’s nest.
‘Land! Maybe. At least I think it’s land.’
Jarosh propped his hands on what passed for his hips, squinting up at the lookout. ‘What d’you mean, you think it’s land? Either it’s land or it’s not. What else is it likely to be – an omelette?’
‘I … I don’t know, Cap’n. I can’t rightly think what else it might be, other than land, but … truth is, I never saw anything quite like it.’
Allowing just a small sag of his shoulders, Jarosh shinned up the skinny pole supporting the lookout basket with surprising agility for such an ungainly-looking man. At the top, he put a hand above his eyes to shield them. Then he drew out his appropriated spyglass and stared through it for a very long time.
He returned looking subdued.
‘Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said, gazing fixedly east now, past the bow. He handed the glass to Wel. ‘I think it’s an island. Like an enormous, smooth dome rising from the sea.’
Chet squinted. He could make out nothing but a faint impression of something darker than sky. Looking as nonplussed as the captain, Wel handed him the spyglass.
As he stared through its murky optics he found it hard to better Jarosh’s description.
What he saw was a perfect segment of grey, rising out of the sea. To begin with it seemed to be perched on a sort of pedestal, but he quickly realised that this was the lensing effect of water evaporating off the sea. If the island (or whatever it was) possessed features, its distance made them invisible.
By the next morning, although they were making easily seven hundred kelemytors a day, the ghostly island had barely grown. Chet lowered his sextant and scratched his head.
‘I’m not very accurate with this thing. But if I’ve got this right, comparing my readings with the ones I made yesterday – which correlate pretty well with our water speed readings and the steadily decreasing angle of the sun at zenith … that thing is still more than four thousand kelemytors away.’
The captain and first mate’s jaws slackened.
‘It’s at least fifty kelemytors high. And I don’t think it’s a dome either. I think it’s a ridge.’
Jarosh and Wel nodded soberly. The three found themselves joined by Calin, Frindar and Paleg, who had seen the sextant and come to investigate.
‘It looks like a wheel,’ Paleg said, eye pressed to the spyglass, his reedy voice hushed. ‘Like the edge of a giant cartwheel sticking out the water.’
THAT EVENING, BEFORE HIS customary game of cards with Fraim, Wel, Paleg, Calin and Frindar, Chet’s last view of Paleg’s Great Grey Cartwheel was in the last rays of daylight as the sun set in what the compass stubbornly maintained was the north-northwest. The sky around the boat had cleared. At the base of the Cartwheel’s slopes of slightly mottled sunset-pink, however, a thin band of a paler pink had formed.
It looked like a band of orographic cloud.
There were problems with this observation. Chet tried not to dwell on how the cloud formed an almost perfect arc, like part of a concentric ring within the larger ring formed by the Cartwheel. He tried not to think about how, if he squinted through Murrin’s spyglass directly astern, he sometimes fancied that he could make out a minute bump against the clear evening air: a shape like the Cartwheel’s, but less than a thousandth of the size. And he especially tried to ignore the way in which, keeping pace with the sinking of the sun below the northern horizon, a wedge of darkness rotated slowly across the Cartwheel’s face until, an hour after the sun itself had disappeared, the last red sliver at the Cartwheel’s northern edge was finally extinguished.
What we absolutely do not need is more weirdness.
Taking a deep breath, Chet stowed the spyglass, went below, and kept his thoughts to himself.
CHAPTER 26
____________
And Inhale
CORD BIT INTO COLL’S WRISTS. To either side he could hear the others struggling with their own bonds. He had been deliberately hung so that his toes barely touched the floor, making it a painful, exhausting struggle to maintain the flow of blood to his hands. The floor was a platform of some kind. It shifted and creaked as he danced on tip-toe. Somewhere far below, he could hear Homollon’s enraged snorts. He hoped his friend was not antagonising his captors.
If I had but one knife …
Their weapons had been stripped from them with cursory efficiency. With their assailants beyond reach in the trees, Homollon had surrendered without so much as a bellow. Then had come the endless, blindfolded journey to wherever they now were, strung by wrists and ankles from poles as Homollon, in a spider’s web of ropes, was led quietly behind.
From the sounds around him, it felt as though they were in a clearing on high ground with a wall to one side. Hesitant sunlight and a warmish breeze played on his skin. He couldn’t smell much beyond vegetation and his own and his fellow captives’ fear. All around was the rustle of wind-blown leaves. It sounded like the palm thatch on the Jurkekrarj.
Since their arrival, an argument had been raging amongst their captors.
He heard the approach of several pairs of loping footsteps. There was rustling and shuffling nearby, and a murmuring further away that he suspected was from Keyenti. Above a sudden waft of urine, which he suspected also came from Keyenti, he could smell a musky, very female scent. Something above him creaked.
His blindfold was ripped from his head and he found himself looking into a pair of richly brown, almond-shaped eyes.
The face around them was flat-nosed and pushed forward round the mouth, but strikingly proportioned, with petal-like small ears and a mane of golden-orange hair erupting from a widow’s peak at the centre of a sloping forehead. Full lips were parted just enough to reveal strong white teeth with enlarged lower canines. Despite his discomfort he could not prevent his eyes wandering down over a pair of large-nippled breasts to curving hips and slightly outward-canted legs. The woman’s arms were long and, like her legs, looked very strong. Had she not been covered in a fuzz of brown and orange-striped fur, with something like hands where feet should have been, he might have found her startlingly handsome.
Thoughts along these lines were immediately quashed by the look on her face. The expressions of the similar men and women – or whatever they were – who had removed the blindfolds from the others did not instil confidence either.
Then his lungs contracted in a little gasp as he saw where they were.
HE AND HIS COMPANIONS hung over a platform lashed together from what looked like stems of giant grass. He tried to remember the name for it. Bamboo? Between the stems he could see that they were perched on a cliff-face swathed in climbing plants. In a clearing far below, he saw Homollon flaring his trunks at a circle of striped figures who were pointing spears and arrows at him. Honeyed light from the sinking sun flooded the valley. To either side, on similar platforms linked by ropes, ladders and walkways, were what at first glance looked like bushes or piles of vegetation. A second glance revealed openings he suspected were doors and windows.
He looked up. Beyond the frame of sturdy bamboo poles to which he and the others were tied, overgrown white rock rose towards the sky. Further platforms clung to it, all draped in green. He was beginning to think that the vertical village had been designed to be hidden.
He glared at the strange woman.
‘Father – I still say we should let the river have them,’ she said, baring her canines. Her voice was dark and slightly husky. Coll wondered with a fresh spurt of concern what had happened to Orlis.
The taller male next to the woman clacked his teeth together. ‘Not yet, Ahiel. We need to know why they are here.’
There were equally striped and pugnacious-looking monkey-people all around the edge of the platform. More than two dozen of them, all with bows or spears braced against the platform or resting on their shoulders. He tugged against his bindings, wondering if he could force his hands through. This caused the woman to smile.
‘I wouldn’t bother, flatfoot. Arriel are very good at knotwork.’
He felt Mashino stirring to his right. ‘You are the Arriel?’ The Tysian sounded surprised.
‘What do you know of us?’ Suddenly the imposing male was hanging from the web of overhead poles on his big, muscular hands, with Mashino’s throat in the grip of one of his feet. ‘Answer me!’
Despite the clearly choking grip, Mashino kept his expression level. ‘Only what is in the texts of my citadel,’ he gasped. ‘You are described as bodyguards for the gods. Mercenaries, originally. Then the story has it … that the sacrifice of the Arriel earned the trust of the gods … before you fell from the historical commentary some time after the last Time of Ashes.’
These last words caused Ahiel and her father to stiffen, visibly.
‘And now … I would guess that you … are guarding the temple … of Acara Ahuaga?’ Mashino’s naturally tan face was almost purple.
‘We should burn them,’ the Ahiel woman repeated. ‘Quickly. We should never even have touched them.’
‘You are making a terrible mistake.’ The voice this time was Murrin’s, directly to his left. Strain had made it higher than normal. ‘In the name of the gods, please listen to us! We are being followed. Our pursuers will soon be upon you as well. We must reach the temple before it is too late.’
‘We are aware of your pursuers,’ the woman barked hotly, rounding on Murrin. Coll thought he saw a spark of fright in her big, dark eyes. Fleetingly, he thought she would attack the scholar. ‘They are being dealt with.’
‘You do not understand what you are dealing with!’
‘Oh?’ Grasping an overhead pole with her long arms, she seized Murrin by the lapels of his journey-soiled tunic, lifting him bodily off his toes, and made as if to punch him in the face with the fist she made of her other foot. ‘And what do you know of them, flatfoot man?’
Murrin’s eyes flicked sideways, towards Coll. It took him a moment to realise that the scholar was looking not at him, but past him.
Then things happened very fast.
In a movement which was surprising for such a bulky man, taking his weight on his wrists in a way which must have been very painful, Murrin whipped his knees upwards and straightened his legs, knocking the woman’s clenched foot-fist to the side.
Distracted by his glance, she was slow to react. She still clung to his tunic, but the blow had been another misdirection, and her grip now served Murrin. Pushing off her knee with his calf, he managed to flip his legs around her neck, bracing against the cord tied round his ankles as he squeezed his tree trunk thighs together.
As she beat and clawed with all four hands at his back and legs, Coll saw that Mashino had somehow escaped both his wrist-bonds and the feet holding his throat. Deflecting the blows made at him, he had used the dangling body of his captor like a climbing tree, and now had the much larger man’s neck bent sideways between his arms.
Then Murrin and Mashino were staring around wildly at an advancing ring of spears and nocked arrows, Mashino shouting ‘Back off! Back off!’ with an urgency Coll had never heard from the librarian. ‘I can break his neck instantly – so drop your weapons and back off! If any of you attacks us, your leader and his daughter will be dead. Is that what you want?’
Mashino bent the neck a little more, causing its grimacing owner’s eyes to water and his arms to shake. The woman was making a snorting sound, her eyes rolling back inside her head.
‘Is – that – what – you – want?’
The advance stopped. The two sides stared at each other. The spears and arrows were not lowered, but at least nobody had used them yet.
‘Well,’ said Tankentaer. ‘This is interesting.’
‘We are not your enemies!’ From the way Mashino licked his lips, his mouth was as dry as Coll’s. ‘Unless you are in the thrall of what pursues us.’
The only response was a lot of very effective glowering and baring of teeth.
‘Kill them,’ croaked Ahiel, from the grip of Murrin’s thighs. Veins were bulging at her temples. ‘We know the blight … works men’s minds, makes things seem … how they are not. These men … have been in contact with it. They admitted as much! Our lives … mean nothing. You must kill them now, and …’ she made a strangled noise ‘… burn the bodies!’
Given Murrin’s weight, Coll was very impressed that she kept her grip on the poles.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she gargled. Her bulging gaze was now fixed on Murrin. ‘Kill one of them! Any one … doesn’t matter.’
There was the squeak of bows being flexed.
‘All right,’ Murrin cried, catching a nod from Mashino. ‘Stop! We will release them – but lower your weapons. We will do this very slowly. And we want one thing in return.’
Coll’s wrists were really starting to hurt. He could barely feel his fingers. ‘You are in no position to make demands,’ said the man whose neck was being torqued between Mashino’s arms. The effort of speaking was making him drool.
‘Nonetheless, we request the right to speak. As my friend has told you, we are not your enemy.’
‘Yet you seek the temple.’
‘Yes, we seek your sodding temple! Now, I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that your purpose is to guard the temple from what I call the Corruption, and my friends here call the Time of Ashes. Am I close? Well, we are trying to thwart this very thing – it’s the reason we must go to your temple! But time is very short. Have you not noticed? The world to your west is already burning!’
The man’s eyes narrowed.
‘Do it,’ he growled, after a pause. ‘Place your arms at your feet.’
There was an angry murmur from the weapon-brandishing crowd. ‘Father?’ spluttered Ahiel.
‘That’s enough. Do it!’
There was a lot of clattering as bows, spears and occasional swords or knives were tossed resentfully on to the platform. Looking very wary, Murrin allowed Ahiel to prise herself free of his legs. She flung them away from her as she backed hand over hand along the poles, leaving him swinging on his cord like a piece of fruit. Mashino released his grip and sprang to the floor, backing towards Tankentaer’s dangling legs.
Ahiel’s father dropped breathlessly to his hand-feet, his muscular bulk intimidating even in a stoop.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘kill them.’
Coll yelled and thrashed. It was all he could do. He heard the others who were still tied up doing the same. He was vaguely aware of Mashino slipping into a guarding stance. All around, bows and spears were being seized. A ring of sharpened metal began contracting towards them.
‘Wait!’ Ahiel’s voice, rising above the commotion. ‘Not yet. Everyone – wait!’
Coll stopped his impotent bellowing, tore his gaze from the approaching spears and looked at her. She was staring at him fixedly. More specifically, at his chest.
