Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (21 page)

Rudy sighed. He'd have to hunt again that day, for his rabbit meat was nearly gone. He changed the bandage on his ankle, cannibalizing another strip from the hem of his frayed surcoat for the purpose, and examined the wound worriedly. He had no idea what blood poisoning looked like or how long it took for red streaks to show up. Ingold had taught him emergency spells to keep gangrene at bay, but Rudy had no idea whether he'd executed them properly or not. It was borne upon him how gross was his own ignorance and how much he would have to learn, provided he ever got out of this mess alive. He cringed at the thought of all the knowledge he had passed blithely by in the good old days when he could go to a doctor, a grocery store, or —God forbid!—the cops as a last resort. As he climbed down out of his shelter, he remembered Ingold's saying that he had wandered this desert alone for fifteen years. No wonder Ingold had been so utterly self-sufficient. Rudy picked up his worthless staff and headed west again.

He walked throughout the day. Keeping the wind on his right, he knew he was heading west, though no sun broke the eternal overcast of the clouds. At times he wondered what he would do when he came within sight of the Seaward
Mountains. But what the hell was he worried about? he asked himself. You'll be dead long before you get in sight of them. There was no reason for him to go on, but he did, like an ant crossing a football field. He wondered what had become of Ingold, whether the Dark had gotten him or whether it had been something else, that unseen other power that the White Raiders feared. What would become of Gil, stuck here forever in an alien universe?

He crossed a high, treeless stretch of barren rock, and the lands around him were now mostly pebbles and sand, a desolation in which only an occasional scrap of saltbush would grow. Blown sand and snow stung his face, the cold cutting through the bandages to torture his leg. In their shabby gloves, his fingers were numb. Three days he had been alone, moving like a ghost through this empty land —longer than he had ever been alone in his life. Though solitude had always bothered him less than he knew it bothered most people, his soul had ached yesterday and the day before for companionship—someone, anyone, a total stranger; he'd even have settled for his sister Yolanda. But he found that he was becoming used to the company of his own spirit. Though he still shuddered at the thought of spending months and years alone, as Ingold had done, he could now imagine, as a faint echo of the reality, what it would be like.

Twilight was settling down again. He wondered where he would spend the night. The land around him was utterly flat and desolate, without rock, without tree, without more than a few isolated patches of thin brush. He felt weak and exhausted, but knew that he had to keep going until he found something. To lie down and sleep in the open would be death indeed.

A movement caught his eye. It bobbed, stalky and awkward, on the crest of a stony ridge, yet there was a curiously catlike quality to it… Rudy froze. It was a tricky time of day; the graying light fooled the eyes, and the threshing of the few bits of brush in the wind masked the steps of those that hunted in twilight Dooic? he wondered. Christ, not again.

Then he saw it, a streak of gray in the distance. It ran weightlessly over the sand, a blurred ripple of wolf-colored feathers and the pale gleam of a beak like a scythe blade.

There was nowhere to run and no hope of outdistancing the bird, but Rudy ran. He felt the grinding pain in his leg and rib and ran anyway, sprinting desperately into the twilight, without any thought but hopeless escape, like trying to outrun a speeding car. Rocks bruised his feet, and his breath sobbed in his lungs. Behind him, he could hear the soft, light thud-thud-thud of clawed and padded feet. He couldn't look back; his mind blanked to everything but staying on his feet and running faster. He felt no pain, no tiredness, only desperate terror. He ran blindly into the sinking twilight.

When he fell, his first thought was that his bad leg had given out. But the hands he threw out to catch himself met nothing, and he plunged over the shallow cliff and down through a yielding tangle of branches that had masked the pit beneath. In the half-light and confusion, he felt twigs tear his hair. He slammed into something wooden and rough-barked that took the skin off his face as he half-rolled, half-slid down the last two or three feet to land in the fresh-turned earth below. Too dazed to understand, he rolled over and looked up. Ten feet above him, skylined on the edge of the brush-fringed cliff, the horrible predator bird stood, cocking its head to look down at him, as if at a loss to understand how he had suddenly gotten down there. For a heart-stopping moment, Rudy wondered if it would jump down after him. He could never fight it in this pit, even if he hadn't broken his sword, or his arm, or both, in falling. But the bird only ruffled up its feathers in disgust, opened its swordlike bill, gave a hoarse honk of displeasure, and stalked away into the dusk.

Rudy leaned back against the post behind him and closed his eyes. He felt that he could sleep or faint or die—it didn't matter which. But after a time, he told himself he wasn't out of the soup yet and he'd better sit up and take notice if he didn't want to come to a bad end.

He opened his eyes and looked around.

Fantastic. I've fallen into a mammoth trap.

There was nothing else it could possibly be. Most of the overroofing brush had been pulled down in his fall, revealing the edge of the pit against the fading sky. The place smelled of new-dug earth, and white fingers of roots poked from the black walls near the top. In the center of the pit, three huge stakes had been driven into the floor, and it was against one of these that he'd fallen. He used it to pull himself upright and pressed his hand to his abraded cheek. Cheer up, he told himself. You could have impaled yourself on the way down.

Now who the hell, he wondered, would build a mammoth trap out here? Is there a town of some kind… ?

White Raiders!

Fantastic.

He slipped back down the pole to slump at its base, his head supported in his hands. Maybe I should have impaled myself, he thought. At least that would be fast. How come just when things look blackest, I turn around and they get worse?

All I really need now to make things perfect, he reflected bitterly, is a mammoth, The ground shook.

Distantly, the high, squealing trumpet of a beast in pain reached him, along with the booming thud of massive weight in flight and the swift pounding of hooves.

If I stay right where I am, Rudy thought tiredly, the goddam thing will land directly on top of me and then I'll be mashed flat and out of this whole mess.

No, he decided. With the way things have been going lately, I'd just be maimed and then I'd still have to deal with the Raiders. But Christ, they have horses. Even whole and healthy, I couldn't run from them.

What the hell
. He lurched to his hands and knees and crawled to the corner of the pit closest to the direction from which the mammoth was coming, where he would have the most chance of its falling over and past him as it went down. The ground rumbled with the earthquake of its feet; it was squealing like a bugle, the sound shrill in Rudy's brain. The noise was like an approaching Panzer division, inescapable, blotting him into a dusk-enshrouded nightmare of noise and fear. The vibration of it shook his bones. Then he looked up and saw it silhouetted against the sky—a massive brown head, a mountain of flesh as large as a two-storey house, its trunk unflung and its eyes red with savage pain and fury. Dark blood splattered its pounding feet to the knees. Trapped below it, Rudy could only stare upward in horror. The sound of its feet, its voice, and the sea roar of the hooves went round and round in his brain. A horse and rider flashed past on the very lip of the pit, the man's braids gleaming whitely in the gloom. Hypnotized, Rudy watched the mammoth balk and swerve from the edge; its teetering feet showered him with dislodged rock and earth as it hung suspended above him. In what looked like a slow-motion cinema, he saw the man on horseback remove an arrow from his quiver and nock it as the mammoth shied and raised its trunk in a deafening scream of rage. The horse reared in panic, hooves inches from the edge; the rider drew his bow and aimed through the thrashing melee of shadow and weight and motion, of flying mane and fur and the titan bulk of the thing bearing straight down on top of him. In slow motion the arrow left the bow, floating, it seemed to Rudy, with calm deliberation across the dozen feet of intervening distance, to bury itself to the feathers in the mammoth's glaring red eye. The huge beast flung itself upward with a final scream of agony, rearing on its treelike hind legs, and seemed to hover, weightless, over the pit in which Rudy sat, trapped and immobile with terror. Then, like a mountain avalanche, it fell.

At first there was only utter stillness and the low, incessant moaning of the wind. Rudy was aware of diffuse dappled light, the smell of cut mesquite and blood, and the damp cold of earth beneath his bruised cheek. He sighed and choked his breath short at the pain in his cracked rib. He tried to move and couldn't. To hell with it, then, he decided, and lay still. His head ached, but without the hallucinatory confusion of last night's chaotic dreams. Horses, noise, and the slow, graceful flight of a detached arrow against a twilight sky merged together in his mind, but his last clear memory was of that monstrous mountain of writhing, screaming flesh plunging down into the pit on top of him, blotting out the last of the light. He took two very slow, very careful breaths and did a mental stocktaking of his body, isolating it limb by limb, as Ingold had shown him how.

First, he was alive, a circumstance that rather surprised him. His head ached, and he had a massive lump on one side. His left leg felt weak and painful, but no worse than it had yesterday, and he thought, though he couldn't be sure because he could not move his hands to check, that there were a few more ribs cracked. And that brought up the last point—he couldn't move his hands.

They were tied behind him.

For a few moments, he wondered if the White Raiders had merely tied him up and left him for the scavenger rats. But a drift of smoke reached his nostrils from the other side of the cut brush that walled him in, and he heard the muted nicker of horses. He lay face down in some kind of brush shelter; that much he could gather, but his face was turned toward the wall, and all he could see was the tangle of gray-leafed twigs and the chain of ants that crawled inoffensively along them. He wondered if he was alone, but didn't particularly want to give himself away by looking.

He listened instead, letting his mind grow quiet and his breathing still. He found that this emptying of the thoughts was easier after the days be had spent in the loneliness of the desert. All things receded except his sense of hearing. Slowly the sounds came to his listening ears—the soft scritch of dry grasses in the wind, the clicking of dead leaves, the infinitesimal whisper of feet passing close to his shelter, and the silken, crinkling shear of a skinning knife separating hide from flesh, accompanied by the sudden strong renewal of the blood-smell. Skinning the mammoth? There was a faint stirring of a garment nearby, and the thin creaking of leather as the guard at the door of his shelter shifted his weight. So there was a guard.

Rudy extended his senses, sending them like runners along the ground, blindly seeking by touch the nature and bounds of the camp. Some sounds made no sense to him— soft little shaving noises and then the muffled tap of rock on wood. He become aware of more feet and the smoke and wood smells of a fire being stirred. A gust of wind chilled through the camp, bearing a distant scent of snow, and he heard a kind of glittery clinking sound that he thought was familiar, like a wind chime made of bones.

For some reason, the sound frightened him.

Soft feet swished in the sand, with a smell of feral grime and sweetgrass. He heard another, almost soundless creak of leather as a second guard stood up. He heard no voices—maybe they talked in sign?—but he knew the roof of the shelter was too low to stand under. They would both be outside. He turned his head cautiously to be sure and saw two pairs of soft-booted legs visible through the low arch of the shelter's opening; beyond was the ghostly flickering of a pale daytime fire. On the other side of the fire stood a glass-festooned magic-post, its streamers twisting faintly in the wind, like a scarecrow set to frighten away the legions of Hell. In front of it, a woman warrior with long barley-colored braids was driving stakes into the ground for a sacrifice.

Rudy had a bad feeling about whom they'd elected for that.

Stay calm
, he instructed himself over a blinding rush of panic. Ingold taught you an undoing-spell, and it worked fine back at the camp. Nevertheless, it took him three tries that nearly cut off the circulation in his wrists before he finally felt the bindings slip and was able stealthily to work his hands free. His ankles were bound as well, but it was quicker to work the knots loose by hand. He kept his movements to a minimum, aware of the guards still standing outside. He felt almost smothered with apprehension. He knew already what he had to do.

They'd taken his knife and sword, along with his cloak and gloves. But if he could get to the horse lines undetected, to steal two for himself and cut the rest loose, he stood a chance of getting clear away—and mounted, maybe making it all the way to the Seaward Mountains after all. Even covered by a simple illusion-spell, he knew it would be impossible to sidle between the nearer guard and the one standing by the front door, but the shelter was merely a kind of yard-high pup tent made of cut mesquite, open at the front and only loosely covered at the back. He could hear nothing close by.

The illusion-spell was simple, as all illusions were. Stink-bug, Rudy decided. Harmless, black, little, trundling along minding its own stinkbug business. Who the hell looks at a stinkbug? He had practiced illusion under Ingold's critical eye and had been rather proud of the results. To wear an illusion was to feel against his skin a wind made of cold fire, a soft, glimmering cloak of misdirection that made him appear, as so many things in this world appeared, to be something he was not.