Angel Isle (25 page)

A huddle of spellbound travelers was crowded against the base of the creature, some of them scrambling over each other as they struggled to get nearer, while others, loosened from the weakening enchantment, were beginning to break away and, still in the grip of the nightmare, stagger sobbing up the slope. For a last, awful moment, before everything changed, Maja caught a glimpse of what they were running from, as several of the tentacles closed around a man the monster had snatched from the pile, tore him, still living, limb from limb, and started to cram the pieces into its mouth. It continued to scream as it chewed.

Only when the mist had almost cleared did it seem to wake fully to its danger. Its glaring red eyes craned toward Saranja like weed in a running stream. Several arms snatched victims from the pile, swung back and hurled them toward her. Any one of them, if it had reached her, would have knocked her flat, but instead some force seemed to slow them in their sprawling flight and swing them deftly aside and let them tumble gently onto the ground. One by one they picked themselves groggily up, stared around until they saw the monster, gave a yell of horror, and rushed away. If they had friends or loved ones still down in the pit they didn’t stay to look. By the time Saranja completed her circuit almost all of them were gone.

She halted, took Maja’s end of the cord, knotted it round the length she was holding to form a noose and hauled it in hand over hand until it tightened around the creature’s stem. The clawed tentacles plucked violently at it, but it held firm.

She drew herself up, threw back her head and gave a shout, in a voice Maja had never before heard from her.

“Haddu! Ah! Haddu-haddu!”

She turned, and with long, loping strides, dancer’s strides, she circled the pit again, drawing the flaming cord tight as she went. The creature was too stupid to recognize the new threat. While its tentacles heaved and picked at the first loop the second loop enclosed them and bound them tight.

Twelve times she circled the pit, winding the cord steadily up the trunk. The monster continued to howl until the fiery spiral reached its mouth and bound it shut. By the twelfth circuit it was a writhing column of flame from the bole to the top, with only a cockade of eye-stalks waving frantically above.

At the end of the twelfth circuit Saranja halted.

“Up!” she said, and led the way back to the ridge, paying out the cord as she climbed. She turned to face the pit.

“Haddu!” she called again. She twitched the cord.

Immediately it streamed toward her, and hand over hand as it came she fed it back into the jewel she had drawn it from. The process seemed effortless, but the force was enough to twist the monster’s stem, faster and faster, through all twelve windings, until its released tentacles flailed helplessly out around it. By the time the end of the cord had disappeared into the fiery gem the creature had twisted itself free of its base, and, still spinning, still on fire, was rising into the air, higher and higher, until its howls started to fade into the sky.

Saranja raised her arms above her head.

“Haddu!” she cried for the third time, and brought them down in an imperious gesture of ending.

Flame like a lightning strike plunged down, carrying the monster with it. In the bottom of the pit a vast, sulfur-reeking hole opened to receive it. Still howling, the monster vanished into the earth and the hole closed over it. The edges of the pit began to tumble down to seal it over and they backed away.

“How did you know to do all that?” said Ribek in an awed voice. “You don’t even like magic.”

“Not me,” said Saranja in her own voice. “Him.”

She gestured at Zald.

They crowded round to look. For a moment they saw, grinning out from the depths of the jewel, a little scarlet imp face. Its thin tongue licked its lips in remembered relish, and then there was nothing but the glow of the jewel.

“Back to the road, I suppose,” said Ribek. “If nothing else as nasty as that happens to us on this journey I shan’t be sorry. Bless you, Maja, for remembering the water.”

He was doing his best to speak lightly, but Maja could hear the deep shudder in his voice. It had been the kind of nightmare it’s no use waking up from—you only lie in the dark, remembering it, still too afraid to move a muscle. Benayu was staggering as if still half drowning in the dream. Ribek put an arm round him to help him along. In silence they began to trudge back toward the Highway. Before they had gone far Sponge came racing out of the dark to greet Benayu with puppyish ecstasy—a bit of the real world, a tiny step toward making everything sane again. It was going to take a long, long time.

“Let’s hope the horses are all right,” said Saranja. She must be feeling the same, Maja realized, in spite of what she’d done.

“Yes, they’ve loosed the demons,” said Benayu in a low, shuddering voice. “We haven’t yet seen the worst of them. The Watchers must be mad.”

They walked on in silence. The rocks threw heavy moon-shadows, so black that they seemed solid. In that distorting light many of them had demon shapes. A man appeared, walking toward them, leading a mule. This was an ordinary trick of the moonlight, Maja knew, this sudden appearance—or would have been, back at Woodbourne. Not here. He halted and waited for them to reach him.

“Let go, Jex, for a moment.”

No. Nothing unusual for miles around, except the residual throb of the buried pit behind them. And not even a glimmer from the black bead on her amulet.

“I think he’s all right,” she whispered.

Still, they stopped several paces from him. He stayed where he was, leaning on his staff.

“Good evening,” he said in a mild, precise voice. “I take it you are returning from that extraordinary and dismaying event. Are you the last to leave?”

“You’re not going back!” said Saranja.

“Indeed, that was my intention. I would have stayed to watch, only my legs would not let me. But now I have mastered them, and found my mule….”

“There’s nothing to see except desert,” said Ribek. “The thing vanished into the ground and the pit closed up over it.”

“I can still take measurements and readings, perhaps.”

He was mad, Maja decided. He mightn’t be any kind of magic worker, but perhaps there was something a little bit odd about his own individual magic. She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t think about anything. Now that they’d stopped walking she was swaying with exhaustion and hunger. Benayu looked even worse than she felt. He’d been walking all day when he shouldn’t have walked at all.

“Please don’t go,” said Saranja.

“I appreciate your concern, madam, but…One moment…forgive me…Yes. I remember being picked up by that thing and hurled through the air. It was difficult in the circumstances to pay close attention to my surroundings, but for an instant I saw—I am almost certain I saw, and that it was you I saw, for you hold yourself in exactly that manner—saw you striding across the slope with a line of fire trailing behind you. Forgive my impertinence, but is that the case?”

Saranja’s mouth was open to answer but no voice emerged. She was not good at lying, leave alone inventing a lie on the spur of the moment. Ribek moved easily into the gap.

“I’m afraid my sister is not at liberty to talk about it.”

“I fully understand,” said the stranger. “It is dangerous to admit to the possession of any such powers, even when the authorities are fully occupied with events around Tarshu. But perhaps, since we are alone in this place, I may be permitted to assume that what I thought I saw was indeed the case, and that I and my fellow travelers have you to thank for rescuing us all from that terrible predicament. I do so from the very bottom of my heart.”

“Oh…er…thank you…,” said Saranja.

“And if there is anything I can do in return…”

“You don’t have any food in those saddlebags, I suppose,” said Ribek quickly.

“Indeed, I do. I’ll be only too delighted….”

Prattling on, the man moved to the side of his mule and with deft fingers unbuckled a saddlebag. Maja sat down to wait with her back against a rock. An unknown time later she was lying curled on a rug on some kind of swaying platform with a smell of horse and harness in her nostrils and fragments of salt fish and soft bread in her mouth. She had no memory of how they got there but they tasted as if they’d been very good indeed.

CHAPTER
12

T
hen it was day. Maja was lying on the ground now, and in her own bedroll, by the feel of it. Low voices were talking close by—Ribek’s and…Oh, yes, the stranger they had met last night. Something to do with water mills. The stranger seemed to know a lot about water mills. She groaned and tried to sit up, but every joint and muscle complained, and she let herself collapse and groaned again. Instantly Ribek was at her side, his arm under her shoulders.

“Don’t move,” he said. “We’re staying here. Saranja says the horses have got to have a full day’s rest. Here, try this. It’s something Striclan brewed up. It’s good for aches and pains, he says.”

Gently he eased her up enough for her to sip from the mug he was holding to her lips. The blood-warm liquid had a heavenly, rich, autumnal smell, and was both sweet and bitter in the mouth. A tingling glow flowed through her as she sipped, and she lay back down with a sigh.

“My sister’s only twelve,” he explained to someone, “and we must have done getting on two days’ march yesterday. She’s been doing too much anyway. She was a plump little thing when we set out, but look at her now.”

“Of course she must rest. And your brother too,” said the stranger’s soft voice. Striclan must be his name. Something funny about him. Not now. Later.

“A little gentle exercise this afternoon,” the man went on. “And I will give Miss Saranja an unguent with which to massage her. I would do it myself, but I imagine that as her guardian you would prefer…”

“She’s a child still. No harm,” said Ribek, obviously relishing his role as official protector of the two women.
Huh!
Maja thought.
We’ll see what Saranja has to say about that!

“Spiced pumpkin bread for breakfast, Maja,” said Ribek. “He’s got a traveling larder in those saddlebags of his. I’ll toast you some.”

It was as near heaven as Maja could imagine, lying in the morning sun—still welcome after the night chill of the desert—with Ribek feeding little squares of Striclan’s toasted pumpkin bread, oozing with wild honey, between her lips. Funny name. Funny man. She could sense his oddness through Jex’s mild shielding. Forcing herself into something like wakefulness, she concentrated on the stranger.

Yes, there he was in his magical essence, just as she’d have expected, busy, eager, interested, self-confident, like quick, cheerful, clever music, music to dance to. But under that, almost unnoticeable beneath the surface dazzle and fizz, something much slower, much more deep and thoughtful, like huge cloud-islands drifting along on a summer day, grand and calm, but full of hidden thunder.

Interesting, but not now. Too tired.

She slept dreamless, and woke again, this time in the evening cool. Her left forearm, lying close beside her cheek, had a pleasant, pungent smell and was faintly greasy to the touch. She eased herself up without a twinge and looked around.

Something had woken her—Ribek’s voice, “Hold it!” and a sudden rush of movement.

Benayu was asleep beside her, as if he had never woken. Beyond him, Saranja had been grooming Pogo, but had just turned and was staring over Maja’s shoulder. She dropped her brush and broke into a run. Maja too turned.

Ribek was there, sprinting toward three people a little distance away. One of the men was the stranger, Striclan, who’d been talking to Ribek about water mills when Maja had first woken. The other two were squat, dangerous-looking men. Each of them had a knife in his hand. Striclan was holding his staff across his body in both hands as if he was about to try and push them away with it. He gave it a quick twist and it came apart. One piece fell to the ground. He flicked the short piece in his left hand at one of the men. A cloud of powdery stuff shot into the man’s face and he staggered back, coughing and choking. The other man had dropped his knife and was backing away because the point of the narrow sword Striclan held in his right hand was pricking into his throat. Ribek slowed, reached them, picked up the two knives and said something to Striclan, who nodded, apparently unperturbed. He spoke briefly to the second man, who walked off, cursing, to help his friend.

Striclan picked up the fallen section of staff and slid the sword blade into it, screwed the bit that had held the powder back into place and was holding his staff again. Saranja joined them and they walked back together to where Maja was sitting.

“…on the open road, in lonely places, perhaps,” Striclan was saying. “But in my experience Imperial way stations are much too well run to allow this sort of thing to happen. The authorities in Talagh…”

“They seem to have lost their hold for the moment,” said Ribek. “They’re too busy with what’s happening around Tarshu, I suppose. You know about Tarshu, I gather.”

“To say I know would be an exaggeration. I was hoping to go to Tarshu, but was turned away, with no reason given. Since then I have heard only rumors, but they have been consistent enough to compose a truthful scenario. The city is said to be under seaborne attack by invaders generally referred to as pirates, though they appear to be much more disciplined and organized than any pirates I have had the misfortune to encounter….”

“Where we come from, we call them Sheep-faces,” said Ribek.

Striclan giggled, mysteriously delighted. He fished a little pad and stylus out of his pouch.

“That’s good. That’s very good indeed,” he said. “I must make a note. But surely that means that someone in your area must have met, or at least seen, some of them, in order to bestow a visual sobriquet upon them. You told me your mill was among the northern mountains, whereas I understood this incursion to be a purely coastal affair….”

“Just rumors, same as you,” said Ribek. “A sort of flying ship with a human crew exploring the passes into the Empire. Fierce fighting the other side of the Great Desert. That sort of thing.”

Striclan nodded, apparently accepting this as a perfectly good explanation, and made another note on his pad. But Maja had sensed a sudden stirring of his deeper, other self, as if what Ribek had told him had been much more interesting and important than a few improbable rumors from a remote corner of the Empire.

“And that unpleasant phenomenon we encountered last night?” he said. “Some of the others here in the way station escaped much as I did, thanks to Miss Saranja here. They are talking of it having been a demon of some kind. Furthermore, travelers from the south reported that some kind of storm demon had recently attacked the city of Larg, and been driven off by magical means. I had been under the impression that demons, if they ever existed, were a phenomenon of the distant past, of the same order as rocs and unicorns, but the consensus seemed to be much what you were saying about that pair of thugs just now, that these two, and perhaps others, had emerged because the relevant authorities were preoccupied with the struggle around Tarshu. Can that be the case?”

“It was a demon all right, wasn’t it, Saranja?” said Ribek. “Or you wouldn’t have been able to deal with it.”

“I suppose so.”

Striclan was writing on his pad again, and seemed not to notice the grudgingness of her tone, and the slight headshake. Ribek answered with a nod and a hand gesture to say he knew what he was doing.

“And the possibility of one’s encountering further such, ah, creatures?”

“Last time it happened, far as I know, was several hundred years ago. It wasn’t quite like this, as what you call the authorities are still there, only they’re busy at Tarshu. That time they’d been pretty well wiped out, and suddenly there were demons everywhere. Even so, I wouldn’t think this one and the one at Larg can be the only ones.”

“Ah. In that case, how would you feel about my traveling for a while, if not in your company, at least in your general vicinity? I’m afraid this may seem an impertinent request on so short an acquaintance, but let me explain. I am employed by a wealthy scholar, who has dedicated his life to compiling an encyclopedia describing all the various peoples of the Empire. He is particularly interested in their beliefs about, and interactions with, magical and other paranormal phenomena. No single man could complete such a task in a lifetime, so he employs me, and others like me, to investigate and report on allotted areas, and he then collates our reports. I joined the Highway a little north of here, having completed an investigation of the desert tribes, and was on my way to Larg to dispatch my report. But I was very alarmed by our encounter with that creature last night, and if others of that kind are likely to beset the Highway, I would prefer to be in the company of someone who is equipped to deal with them, as Miss Saranja so evidently is.”

“We weren’t going to Larg, I’m afraid,” said Ribek. “We’re traveling north.”

“I can equally well send my report from Farfar. I shall have to go there in the end. But please don’t feel that you are under any obligation to agree. The obligation is wholly on my side. And of course I won’t ask you to make up your minds on the instant. I must water my poor mule, and perhaps we can meet later this evening and you can tell me what you’ve decided.”

“Of course,” said Ribek, rising with him. Striclan bowed to Saranja, raised a hand in farewell and turned away. They waited for him to move out of earshot.

“Why did you tell him all that?” said Saranja. “He’s been very helpful, but I don’t trust him.”

“So that he’d tell us stuff about himself,” said Ribek. “He’s got to have seen Sheep-faces too, or he wouldn’t have thought us calling them that was funny. What did you make of him, Maja?”

“He’s like what he is, I think. Only there’s someone else inside him. Someone secret.”

Ribek nodded.

“Let’s go and water the horses,” he said.

“I haven’t finished grooming Pogo,” said Saranja.

“Bring him when you’ve done,” said Ribek, reaching for Rocky’s halter. “You bring Levanter, Maja. I want to know more about this fellow. We’ll probably have to wait in line. See what you can pick up. Come along, old boy, water.”

There were a horse and a mule at the trough, another waiting next in line, then Striclan with his mule, then another horse ahead of them. All these desert way stations had deep wells reaching down to water sources far below, with a horse trough beside them. The system was that two animals drank at a time while the well-master’s slave wound the buckets up and down to keep the trough filled. The travelers waiting next in line haggled over the fee and bribe with the well-master, as Striclan was doing now. Maja could sense his enjoyment of the process. The only strange thing about him was that he seemed absolutely unshaken by his encounter with the demon last night.

Ribek handed Rocky’s halter to Maja, unhooked his flask from his belt, emptied it into the sand and hooked it back on. He fished in his wallet and withdrew the water-charm he’d made last evening. Casually he swung it beside his hip, as if he merely needed something to fidget with while he waited. Maja felt the strange magic flow, far gentler than the old tribeswoman’s insistent, almost bullying tone. Ribek wasn’t commanding the spirit, he was asking. Maja felt the spirit’s weary answer. Ribek persisted, pleading, and it gave in and Ribek looped the cord round his wrist and left it dangling.

The two animals at the trough finished drinking and their owners led them away. The next horse and Striclan’s mule moved to take their places, and the man immediately ahead of Ribek began the absurdly elaborate process of dealing with the well-master.

As if for something to do while he waited his turn, Ribek wandered over to the trough, unhooked his flask again and filled it from the flow of the next bucket into the trough. He put it to his lips, swigged, sluiced the water round his mouth and spat it into the sand. As he returned to his place he offered the flask to Striclan.

“Like to make sure,” he said. “Lot of arsenic in some of these desert wells. Only a trace here, plus a bit of copper.”

“If you say so,” said Striclan. “I doubt if I’ve that fine a palate.”

Nevertheless he took a mouthful, sluiced it round as Ribek had done, but then swallowed.

“I believe I can detect the arsenic,” he said. “Copper, you say? Curious.”

He sounded completely casual, but for a moment it was as if that hidden inner self had come alive, full of interest, thoughtful.

“Just a trace,” said Ribek, and returned to Maja. As she waited for him to settle with the well-master she wasn’t surprised to see Striclan making a rapid note in his pad. The other man’s horse finished at the trough and she led Levanter to take its place. A moment or two later Rocky joined him, while Ribek strolled round to the wellhead and emptied his flask over the edge, swilling the water round as it gurgled out.

“I’m hoping there’s a trace of his saliva round the rim,” he murmured. “Let’s see.”

He took the charm from his pouch again and started to swing it. The magic flowed, and the spirit answered at once. Ribek listened for a moment, and laughed aloud.

“What’s up?” said Maja.

He bent to whisper into her ear.

“He’s one himself.”

“One what?”

“Sheep-face.”

“He can’t be! Anyway, he doesn’t look like one.”