Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (16 page)

“Which Creator are you?” Phylomon said at last.

“By the Starfarers I was named Seven. By the Pwi I am called Zheforso, Ruler of Mankind—humans, Neanderthals, Hukm, and Mastodon Men.”

Phylomon’s heart leapt within him as he recalled the giant creatures of the forest, the great ogres that sat like totems. Though the other Creators would lend a hand in destroying mankind, Zheforso was the only one who could rebuild them all again someday.

Phylomon’s throat swelled. He had so many questions, yet only his fear spoke. “May I leave?”

“If you desire,” the worm answered.

“You will not kill me?”

“You may live, for the moment,” the worm said, and Phylomon heard a strange tone in its voice. The creature was obviously not accustomed to speaking to humans—when it spoke, it did not modulate its voice with emotion well—yet Phylomon could detect a certain reverence that the worm might have once accorded his ancestors, but which Phylomon himself felt he no longer deserved.

“Yet you will kill my people?”

“Yes.”

“And you will recreate us someday?”

“The populations must be controlled,” the worm answered.

Phylomon took one long last look at the grandeur of the cave—the vast trees, the ogres feeding beneath them.

Yes, totems,
he realized,
monuments to Zheforso’s power.
Phylomon wished that he had enough time to explore this cave, see what wonders it hid.

The Creators are programmed to
protect
above all,
Phylomon knew,
and only Zheforso has the power to rebuild mankind. If this one dies, the others will be forced to change their tactics. Their programming will not allow them to exterminate us completely.

“If you only knew how much I want to return to the stars,” Phylomon said, his mouth dry. “I would have left this planet, if I could. We would have taken ourselves away, if not for the Eridani.”

He pulled out his knife, and with a trembling hand cut into his arm and removed the black hover mine, small compared to other hover mines, yet so much more powerful. The disk was covered with blood, as if it were his own bloody child.

The great worm sniffed and recoiled in fear, its whole mass shuddering. Phylomon saw an opening then, a mouth perhaps a yard wide.

Phylomon pushed the detonator and tossed the bloody thing toward the worm, hoping to get as close as possible, and he grabbed his sack of weapons, leapt for the water.

At the far end of Zheforso’s hallway, the giants roared as a brilliant strobe of flames burst through the canopy of trees.

Rivers boiled, and great birds larger than dragons dropped from limbs, their feathers streaming flames like meteors.

The giants beneath the earth fell more slowly, yet even for them death came swift.

***

Chapter 28: The Flight

The small ship lay dead in the water. It’s only motion came as it lifted and fell at irregular intervals, bobbing over the waves.

Tull had stopped the engines hours before, and now he held Fava in his arms as the poison wrung sweat from her. Moonlight shone faintly through the one uncovered window, and Fava begged, “Water.”

Tull went to the barrel, pulled on the tap, and found that he had to wait long for the water to issue out. He filled a small jug, brought it back to Fava.

“We are going to need more fresh water,” he told her. She didn’t answer. “I’ll have to watch for an ice floe. We have been skirting enough of them. Perhaps we can melt some ice.”

Tull gave the water to Fava, then got up. He looked out the single uncovered window. He could see no more birds on the deck, no ice floes; he could see very little at all except the endless ocean.

He went outside, closing the door quickly, carefully walked the deck, untying the tarps that covered the windows.

They had sailed barely forty miles from shore; he listened. The voices of serpents spoke underwater nearby.

Closer than he expected. He looked toward the sound. There in the distance, perhaps three miles off, was Tantos’ ship, a dark blotch on the silver line where the water met the sky.

Tull ran inside, gunned the engines, and raced due east, giving the little boat full throttle. It leapt over the waves, and Tull stood hunched at the controls, watching behind.

After a few minutes he realized the ship was falling behind.

“Good,” Tull whispered, but he felt something, a cool touch inside his chest that made his breath come sharp.

It could have been only a flashing pain from his wound, but he knew it was more. A fear took him then, something that threatened to ruin the peace that had built up inside them. Atherkula was following on the ship.

He watched for an hour, until the ship dropped below the horizon, then Tull ripped some cloth from his shirt, pointed the boat east, and tied the throttle on full.

Tull went to Fava, held her fevered head in his lap. Sweat dripped from her, making his legs damp. His back ached. The pain in his chest was sharp and thick, and he tried to sleep.

In his dreams, Tull sat at a campfire where blue smoke wreathed up from the wet wood, and around him ancient Pwi danced. Men, women and children—faces tattooed with whorls and spirals above the brow—sweated and leapt for glee around the fire, joined hand in hand, twisting and singing, while some of the elders only sat around the outskirts of the fire clapping hands to keep beat with the drummers and the flutists.

The smell of baked salmon came strong on the wind, and behind him was a long hogan where a half-wild dire wolf nursed her cubs in the doorway.

In the dream, Tull realized that this was something that had happened long ago. Only once in his life had Tull seen one of the old Pwi who had cut his face and rubbed in the ashes needed to make the whorls and spirals.

Not in anyone’s living memory had the Pwi dwelt in the long hogans with their sod roofs. He listened for the words of the song, but they escaped him, as if the singers were all speaking in some foreign tongue.

Yet here and there, he heard snatches of words. “
Tcho-fethwara, Tcho-fethwara
,” no darkness, no darkness.

Were they calling for an end to darkness? he wondered, or do they sing of their fears? He watched their faces, and knew they did not sing from fear.

He felt the cool wet wind whipping his cheeks, smelled the rain. Out beyond the edge of the campfire, the grass grew short and vibrantly green. Tull was suffused with the sweet sense of belonging, as if the people dancing around him were dear friends. “Come dance with us, and sing the song,” a voice whispered, and in the dream he heard a girl say something about grass and sunlight.

He listened carefully to the words, realized that the vowels had shifted, but that he knew the words. “The grass will raise its face to the sunlight. The grass will raise its face to the sunlight.”

Suddenly, Tull understood. Spring was coming, and the ancients wanted him to come join them, wanted him to come help sing the song that would bring springtime.

Tull rose from beside the fire, and the line opened up, and he grasped the hands of an old woman. He looked her in the eye as they leapt and twisted, saw the braided cords of her gray hair, the merry gleam in her eye.

“Yes, Spirit Walker,” the old woman said, “we must sing in order to bring the sun. Otherwise, spring will never come.” Then Tull recognized her. He looked down at her feet, saw her black moccasins with daggers before the silver moon, the Spirit Warrior.

Tull gripped her hand tightly, found himself shouting in her face. “Who are you? Why did you leave me?”

“I am Thunatra Dream Woman,” she said, and she pulled out of his grasp and broke from the line.

An old man behind her took Tull’s hand, and Tull danced around the fire, straining to see the Spirit Warrior, but she disappeared into the crowd, leaving Tull with only the music of drum and flute, the wild reverie, the sense of companionship and something lost. They danced in circles, sometimes throwing their hands in the air to look skyward and spin in time to the music.

Tull listened, learning more and more words to the song of spring, until at last, dazed and weary, he broke away and threw himself on the ground, winded.

Others had done the same, and he listened earnestly to one of them talk, a young man who told of making a great spear and who spoke eagerly of joining the coming mammoth hunts.

An old woman sat in the darkness, sewing beads to a dress, while a father spoke to his girl about the sweet potatoes and onions they would plant the next day and the harvest to come.

Tull just lay with his head spinning, giddy with a sense of peace and ease. He looked up in the sky at the bright stars that seemed to float in the wind. Thor was up, and as Tull stared, his heart nearly stopped: There were no red drones in the sky.

Tull woke, realized that in the dream there had been no humans, only Pwi. Thunatra had sent him a dream of a song that had been sung centuries before he was born, a song sung before the Starfarers ever went to war with the Eridani and fell from the sky, bringing their slavery and their weapons.

As Tull lay beside Fava, he wondered why he had dreamed this, wondered how the Spirit Warrior sent the dream.

Thunatra Dream Woman had died three hundred years ago, yet somehow she was communicating with him. A Spirit Walker could learn the spirits of others by touching them with the lightning of his soul. The sorcerers of the Blade Kin bound others with the shadows of their soul. But the Spirit Warrior was using a different power, somehow touching Tull in order to
send
messages.

He pondered the implications, wondered if he could learn to speak to the spirits of others, as the old woman did.

After a bit, Tull woke from a light sleep. Fava’s head had dried, no longer sweating, though a light fever remained. Tull kissed her forehead, then got up, checked the window.

In the distance he could see the lights from the iron ship. It was gaining on him again. Tull changed course, heading southeast toward Hotland.

Surely they will not chase us so far,
Tull thought.
We are nothing to them, only a small boat.
But a voice in his mind said,
You are in one of their small boats, at the isle of the Creators. Curiosity will drive them.…

He kept a steady course for several hours, until the sun began to rise golden along the skyline. It would be a clear, beautiful day.

He glanced behind. The ship was there on the horizon. His lungs hurt, and Tull could no longer stay sitting. He wished that Phylomon or Darrissea were still here. But they were back on the island, so he tied the wheel in place, staggered down to the cabin, and slept like one dead.

He woke to a booming sound, hours later.

Fava was on the floor, sweat pouring from her forehead. She crawled up, looked out the window. “The slavers are on us! They’ve fired over our bow!”

“We’ll keep going,” Tull said, feeling a great sense of peace. “They don’t want to kill us. They want to question us first. They want us alive.”

He did not know if it were true, did not trust his own words, but he realized with certainty that he would rather die from quick violence than be taken captive again.

The ship loomed behind, tried to pull alongside for boarding. Tull took the wheel, zagged away from them, abruptly turning due south, and the great ship, unable to match his maneuvers, kept going straight.

When they caught up to him a second time nearly an hour later, Tull veered east, and soon sighted land.

The sun was setting when they veered south again, and the great ship lumbered after. They did not have far to go before they spotted the entrance to a small river. The ship fired its cannons, raising flocks of black pterodons that flapped out over the water, their long kite-shaped tails floating behind.

Tull veered west, out of cannon range. As the ship tried to turn, he circled them, heading north, hugging the coastline in the darkness, then steered into the river he’d spotted hours earlier.

The passage over the shoals at the mouth of the river was bumpy, and twice the boat hit the sandy bottom as it plunged over breakers. Fava had gone back to sleep, but she stirred and moaned, then lay looking at Tull as they headed upstream.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Hotland,” Tull said.

Worry lines formed above her brow. “What are we doing here?”

“We need fresh water,” Tull answered, “and the Blade Kin are still on our trail.” After what seemed only a few minutes, the boat scraped bottom, and Tull cut the engines. Outside, small waves lapped the hull, and Tull could hear the forest sounds around them, the chirping whir of frogs in the spring, the honking of a hadrosaur in the distance. Tull had never been this far north. He looked out the window.

They were in a forest of twisted red madrone, without leaves, that marched over the hillsides. Down closer to the water was a marsh with trees that looked somewhat like cottonwood. A small sailfin dinosaur chewed water plants in the chill evening air.

“We can’t go upstream in the dark,” Fava said. “The water is too shallow. We’ll end up on a sandbar.”

Tull waited, unsure what to say next. “Shall we anchor, or tie up?”

“The Blade Kin have shore boats,” Fava said. “They’ll follow us.”

“I know,” Tull sighed, and he calculated. The shore boats, with their single masts, would go slower than this boat, but a thermal wind stirred the trees, blowing inland. In two hours, maybe three, the Blade Kin would be on them.

Fava said, “We have to head over the ground.”

“And do what, remain trapped here in Hotland for the rest of our lives?” Tull asked, suddenly angry, enraged at the Blade Kin who would not leave him in peace, who for his entire life had somehow managed to leave him not one hour of peace.

Fava stood unsteadily, went to the controls, pulled a cover panel off, and reached in. Inside was a small white cube. “If we take the power cube, maybe they won’t take our boat. We can hide, wait until they leave.”

Tull acquiesced, for there was nothing else to do. He floated the boat downstream a bit, then gunned the engines to full speed and ran the boat aground in the mire, well offshore, then tied the boat to a fallen tree, just in case rains swelled the river over its present bank.

Tull was tired, and his lungs ached, yet he managed to help Fava up into the trees while struggling through the mire carrying two guns and a small pack filled with food. In the darkness they made their way into the hills, twice startling large creatures that looked like giant rats feeding in the underbrush.

Tull’s lungs burned and his heart hammered. He felt as if he were making great exertions, but accomplishing little. He ambled like some old man, moving no faster than a walking pace. Fava could manage nothing better. They both knew they would not be able to outdistance the Blade Kin. Their only hope would be to hide.

By sunrise they found themselves in a small brushy thicket. Tull staggered in, covered his tracks behind him, and Fava slumped beside him, gasping for breath. “You’ve been awake all day,” she offered. “I’ll take first watch.”

Tull lay next to her warm body, covered them both with his cloak, kept a gun in his hand.

“I love you,” he whispered before he fell asleep, and in his dreams, Tull ran.

***