Darkthunder's Way (26 page)

Plant life was everywhere: trees and bushes and herbs with a thousand shapes and flowers of two thousand colors, all of it lush and healthy, and much of it of species none of them could immediately name. Most of it afforded them no problem, though every time the laurel or cedar grew thickly David felt that strange sensation of being watched.

Birds were omnipresent, too: jays and cardinals and mockingbirds and others David did not know, all crying out in tones that stopped just short of language. More than once David caught sight of Fionchadd cocking his head and looking thoughtful, and wondered if the Faery might hear more than mortal ears could discern.

Their captors, who had neither offered names nor demanded them, had loosened their bonds for a promise of good conduct, though David wondered why they had even bothered in the first place, since they obviously had the power of freezing men where they stood.

And powerful too was the white glare of sunlight that was both brighter and far, far hotter than the dry Georgia August they had abandoned. The women still had their staves, Calvin’s knife, and Fionchadd’s bow, but the boys had shed their shirts early on and now marched along with their packs slung across rapidly reddening shoulders. The greatest discomfort, though, came from the terrain itself: mile on mile of ever-steepening ascents followed by equally precipitous slopes that at times had them nigh onto sliding.

Eventually, though, the shadows began to lengthen and the landscape to grow even more rugged as the inclines grew sharper still and rocks began to thrust up among the trees. David became aware of an ever-increasing dull rumbling—half sound, half vibration—that buzzed in his ears and thrummed up through his feet to set his heart a-racing to some distant, subtle rhythm.

“Ahyuntikwalastihu,” Calvin muttered behind him.

“Didn’t know you spoke the lingo,” David whispered back.

“I don’t much, just a word here and there. I—”

“Silence,” the taller woman hissed, and shoved him.

But still the sound grew louder.

It was almost exactly at sunset that their captors finally pushed through a high screen of laurel and brought them to a halt.

They stood on the edge of a vast canyon carved in the hard rock of the mountains by the ribbon of river they saw far below. Mist rose from the left-hand side, where a cataract poured from some invisible crag into an unseen pool. The thunder of water was deafening—and was echoed, David realized suddenly, by a similar rumbling from above. He glanced up and saw the clear sky beyond the trees to their left suddenly obscured by fast-racing clouds rolling in from the north.

“Tallulah!” Calvin exclaimed. “I’ll be damned if this isn’t Tallulah Gorge!”

“It can’t be!” David whispered. “Not the same one, anyway. Besides, that’s miles and miles from where we started, and never mind that we’re in another World. We
can’t
have come that far.”

“Miles in our World, maybe,” was Calvin’s cryptic reply.

Alec bent over to rub his thighs. “My legs certainly wouldn’t argue.”

“It is Hyuntikwalayi,” their taller captor said.

The name buzzed in David’s ears, definitely not English this time, perhaps because it was a name, yet slowly they rearranged themselves and he found he understood:
Hyuntikwalayi: Where-it-Made-a-Noise-as-of-Thunder.

“It is not far now,” the tall woman told them. “You will follow.” She stepped toward the brink and turned abruptly left—apparently down the sheer cliff face. David saw her head bobbing along for a moment and then it was gone. His heart sank.

But when he got to the edge, prodded none too gently by the other woman, he saw a narrow trail gouged out of the sheer cliff face, nor more than two feet wide—but at least it wasn’t a bridge. These kinds of heights he could handle—sort of.

The trail skirted along the cliffside for a way, growing ever closer to the waterfall. Soon David felt the first cool spray on his face, and in another instant found himself standing on wet rock not five feet away from the glittering froth. The lead woman motioned him forward and he followed her not under the falls, as he had expected, but around a sharp, almost invisible kink, and behind it. The ledge widened, and there they paused while the tall woman took a stick of dry wood from a stack nearby and, by some means David did not observe, lit it.

“Come,” she mouthed above the din of the falls. “We are there.”

David dragged himself up from where he’d been leaning against the damp wall and followed her up a short tunnel that grew wider and dryer as it gradually ascended.

A sudden turn of corner plunged them into blackness, save for the torch, but another brought them into the presence of light—an eerie flickering that seemed to come from the stone walls themselves.

They were in a cave, a vast chamber at least a hundred feet to the side and twenty high, studded here and there with clumps of dome-shaped boulders. Various dark openings appeared to lead off it—probably into other caverns. There were no direct signs of habitation, though the place was clean, if musty-smelling, and had a floor of white sand curiously marked with swirls and spirals.

“This is our house, come in,” said the woman, and David realized he could hear again: the thunder of waters was reduced to a dull tremble in the rocks. He looked around as his companions crowded in behind, prodded by their shorter captor. His eyes were getting accustomed to the eerie lighting now, and could make out another light source as well: the true light of day streaming through a pair of openings high in the opposite wall. By the ruddiness of that light and the length of the fading shadows, David knew the sun had set.

The shorter woman had not followed them in. “I go to meet our brother,” she told them.

“See that you tell him all,” her sister replied.

The woman nodded silently and darted out.

David did not know what to expect next, so he simply waited, as poised for action as possible, exchanging nervous glances with his equally wary companions. It was hard though, he told himself wryly, to maintain one’s guard when one’s feet were reduced to blistered tatters.

Apparently the remaining woman did not fear their escape, because she completely ignored them and marched to the right-hand wall. There she set her hands to either side of her head just above the ears, and with the nonchalance with which an Atlanta matron might perform the same act in a wig shop, lifted off her long hair and hung it on a nearby peg. She turned then, and David started at the alienness of her hairless scalp. Bare breasts or no, bare scalp was an instant turnoff.

“Smooth as a damned pumpkin,” Calvin muttered.

The woman’s eyes flashed angrily. David could see, as she returned to them, that her head was not shaven but truly bald.

“You may sit for a while,” she said brusquely. “Our brother will be home soon.”

David could not help heaving a grateful sigh as he sought out a place on the nearest lumpy boulder. But just as his backside grazed the surface, it rose straight into the air and smacked into him.

“Christ!” he yelled as he tumbled forward. Then, “Shit!” as a glance over his shoulder showed him claws protruding from the bottom of that supposed boulder—claws and scaly legs above them, and a little further to the left a viciously beaked head big as his own where tiny red eyes stared balefully at him unwinking.

“Hell of a place to put a turtle!” David grumbled, struggling to his feet.

“You are not sitting,” the woman noted with a touch of amusement.

“Not hardly,” David snapped. “I…I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”

“You do not
like
our furnishings?”

“I’m…I’m used to stuff that’s a little less lively’s all.”

“Please yourself.”

“Can we sit on the floor, then?” Calvin ventured.

The woman shrugged and calmly arranged herself on the turtle David had vacated—which as calmly lowered itself and returned to somnolence.

Calvin apparently took the gesture as consent and sank down on the white sand as far as possible from the nearest “stool.” David slipped on his T-shirt and joined him against the cave wall. Alec did likewise; only Fionchadd remained standing.

David glared at him. “Even
you’ve
gotta be a little bit wasted!”

“Certainly I am. But there are more ways to rest than by sitting.”

“Whatever,” David grunted, and flopped his head back against the rock, already half asleep. And then he did sleep.

—Until something brushed his right hand, something cold and dry and scaly.

“Shit!” he cried, jerking upright. “What the
hell
was that?”

He glanced around and discovered that his friends were sleeping, even Fionchadd, who apparently dozed where he stood—and then realized, to his horror, that the floor was now crawling with snakes of every size and description and color—rattlers and copperheads prominent among them.

David did not dare move. He was not afraid of snakes, no way, not where he was from. But this many…and so many kinds…and a bunch of them definitely poisonous…and the rest—who could tell? He wondered what one did for snakebite here.

Scales brushed his bare side where his shirt had ridden up, and he held his breath as twin moccasins slid across his belly. A movement on his left showed him one lodging comfortably in the angle between his arm and body. He could not suppress a shudder.

Low laughter made him look up. The bald woman was still there, sitting calmly on her turtle as she played absently with a handsome diamondback as big around as her arms that she was allowing to twist and turn about her upper body until its spade-shaped head was opposite her tattoo-framed lips. The whole effect, David thought distantly, was rather kinky.

Thunder sounded then, and he started in spite of himself, and was only mildly relieved to find himself not full of fangs.

The woman slipped from her—mount or seat, David didn’t know which to call them. “Our brother comes,” she snapped. “Quick, Pale-man, I do not know how you are awake, but since you are, you must rise to meet him.”

More thunder, and louder; and a blast of wind howled into the cavern from the gallery outside.

A man strode into the room—if man he might be called. Certainly he was the tallest man David had ever seen, and his thick chest and slender waist, his long legs and arms were perfectly proportioned—as was obvious from the near nakedness in which he presented himself. A knee-length loin cloth of white leather was his only clothing, though it bore beadwork designs that David supposed were meant to represent thunder and lightning. Twin golden bracelets coiled around each of his brawny arms, one above and one below the elbow, all of them gold and all of them in the form of serpents; and more ornaments of shell and metal and feathers glittered here and there upon him. His hair was as long as the woman’s, though caught up in braids that hung to his hips; and his skin was as white as theirs, and held that same disconcerting glow. But what most caught David were his eyes: red, and glittering with fury. It was like glancing through clear air to far-off lightning.

As if feeling David’s stare, the man locked gazes with him and returned it measure for measure before turning his face to the women, the shorter having joined her sister. “Who are these strangers that you have brought into my home?”

The tall woman inclined her head. “Strangers they are, in truth. They come from the Lying World. They killed Awahili.”

“So I have heard,” the man snorted. “Yet they live! Have I not taught you the Law? Begone from my sight! I will deal with them myself!” He reached for his waist, and suddenly a golden dagger glittered in his hand.

“Wait!” cried the woman, who had not moved an inch.

“The fairest one carries a mighty sign upon his finger!”

Her brother glared challenge at her, but reached out and grabbed David’s hand, brought it roughly to chest level. He said nothing for a moment, but David could feel his eyes dancing over the ring, tracing the paths of the two intertwined dragons.

“He bears the image of the uktena,” the woman ventured.

“That does no more than get him a hearing before I pronounce his doom,” the man replied, then looked back at David. “Speak, Pale-man. Have you no tongue? Or”—he glanced at the women—“have my sisters stolen it from you? They are very fair, are they not? Neither of them have husbands.”

David swallowed awkwardly and wished his friends would awaken, but they slept on. “No…sir,” he managed. “I can talk.”

“Then do so: why did you slay the eagle?”

“
I
didn’t kill it,” David protested, and immediately regretted it.

“Then who did?”

“The strange one,” the woman inserted. “The one with hair like brass. He has a wondrous bow.”

The man frowned at her, then inclined his head toward Fionchadd. “I would see this weapon.”

The woman retrieved Fionchadd’s bow and handed it to her brother, who studied it intently. “Yes, I have seen one almost this well made, once, in the house of my uncle, Asgaya Gigagei. A gift it was to him from an adawehi of the Nunnehi. Yet this surpasses even that one, for there are ten kinds of wood in it, each with its own medicine. He who made this was very wise in the ways of the spirit world. Truly he must have been an adawehiyu!”