Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (42 page)

Hedia stopped beside Melino, then moved a bit to the side for better footing. Rock had scaled from the cliff in irregular chunks. Even the larger slabs were apt to shift when she put her weight on them, so she had learned to be careful.

She didn’t comment on the situation, since she had nothing useful to say. She hadn’t forgotten the magician’s dismissive response to her recent question, but she suspected that her faintly supercilious smile was as cutting as any verbal insult she might offer.

Melino looked at her; for want of any other companion, Hedia suspected. “I’ll have to use the
Book,
” he said miserably.

She raised an eyebrow slightly higher. “Well?” she said. “That was why you got it, wasn’t it?”

Hedia smiled. “As I recall…,” she added, stretching. “I carried out my part of the business.”

“Nodens bugger you!” the magician said in sudden anger. “Do you think that magic of this level comes without cost?”

Hedia let her smile broaden. “I’ve never met Nodens,” she said. She was speaking for effect; in fact, she
had
heard her son and Pandareus discussing that British god, along with his Thracian, Carian, and Galician equivalents. “If you’ll introduce us, though, we’ll see how things develop.”

Melino started to raise his staff with an expression of fury. Hedia said, “Don’t,” and gripped the hilt of the dagger hidden in her sash.

If he lifts that thing higher, I’ll grab his arm with my left hand and keep stabbing until he goes down.…

The magician swallowed and turned to face the cliff again. He used the short end of his staff—the portion above his grip—to flick the
Book
open. Hedia relaxed, but she didn’t remove her hand from the dagger for the moment.

The
Book
boomed a syllable. It wasn’t a word in any language Hedia knew, and her mind wasn’t even sure in retrospect that it had been a sound that her ears heard.

The world shivered. For a moment there were a hundred separate Hedias, occupied in a hundred different fashions. Then the Cosmos was whole again, and Hedia stood in front of an entrance whose framing pilasters and pediment were carved from the living rock.

Melino staggered. Hedia supported him and didn’t even smile with satisfaction. She was so relieved at the renewed chance of escape that she was able to forgive the magician’s contemptuous dismissal as they crossed the bridge.

The demon waited ten feet ahead of them in a square-sided tunnel. Her glowing figure was the only light. She looked over her shoulder at the humans, smiled, and walked on as she had ever since they entered the Otherworld.

The demon’s smile reminded Hedia of the one she had given Melino when he realized that the basalt would resist anything but the
Book
’s powerful spell. She wondered if the magician had the same knack for irritating other men as he did the females who had come in contact with him.

Although the demon walked at her previous measured pace, she was clearly drawing ahead. The tunnel’s floor felt slippery despite seeming solid enough.

Hedia gestured. “There’s something wrong with the ground,” she said.

She glanced to the side. The coarse black stone was barely visible in this light, so she touched the wall with her fingers. “Melino,” she said. “We’re moving backward.”

“This isn’t right!” the magician said—or moaned, better. It was a foolish statement unless you thought that whoever was punishing you might be moved by pity. In the present case, Hedia wouldn’t have wasted her breath.

Melino opened the
Book
as before. This time the word no mortal lips shouted made colors reverse themselves: the demon became a deep indigo and the tunnel walls were a white as opaque and featureless as the blackness of an instant before.

The light returned to normal, what Hedia supposed was normal when one was being guided through a tunnel by a glowing demon. The temperature dropped abruptly, making the floor feel cold even through the soles of Hedia’s heavy sandals.

Melino was wobbling again. Hedia caught him.

“Come,” she said, putting her right arm around his torso. She tried to lift his left arm over her shoulders, but the magician clamped the
Book
to his chest. She wasn’t sure he was aware of her presence.

“Come,”
she repeated more urgently. The demon wasn’t waiting as she had when they were blocked by the sheer cliff. The glow of her flesh would be visible for a very long distance, but the details of her figure were already blurring.

Hedia began walking with quick, short steps, half-pushing and half-dragging Melino. She wouldn’t be able to carry him, at least not for long, but he fell into step after a period of stumbling and grunts.

Hedia lengthened her strides, forcing the magician to keep up with her. They had almost caught up with their guide by the time Melino straightened and shrugged out of her grip.

“I’m all right,” he said. He sounded like a man on his deathbed. “I can walk by myself.”

Until the next time,
Hedia thought, but she shifted away from him. Only now did the demon glance over her shoulder and smile—but this time at Hedia, not at the magician.

Hedia smelled fresh blood, an odor familiar from the arena but unexpected here. The floor had been bare stone when they entered the tunnel. Now it showed cracks crawling across a rime of hoarfrost. They oozed a thick fluid whose red color might simply have been the demon’s glow, the only light in the tunnel.

Judging from the smell, the ooze was surely blood. Still tacky, it clung to the soles of Hedia’s sandals. She smiled coldly.

She was probably spattering her lower legs with every step, but she wouldn’t be fit for polite company until she had bathed and changed her whole wardrobe anyway. It was unlikely that she would be meeting polite company until she returned to the Waking World, so her appearance was well down the list of the problems that concerned her.

She wondered how far they had to walk in this tunnel, but she didn’t ask. She would walk until she got to where they were going—or she dropped. She wouldn’t be ready to drop for a very long time yet.

Hedia laughed. To her surprise, the demon looked back at her and chuckled pleasantly.

Melino glanced from one of them to the other without speaking. Hedia and the demon laughed again.

They walked on.

CHAPTER
XIV

Alphena sat up carefully. Her head throbbed, but mostly that was bearable. Once a flash blinded her, and she felt as though her skull were being ground between millstones. It was just a flash, though, gone as suddenly as it came.

She turned her head and threw up, leaving a splash of bile on the baked earth. Immediately she felt better. Enough better—she smiled at herself—that she began to wonder when she next would get a chance to eat.

On the ground before her lay the idol she had used as a shield. She rotated it so that she could look at its remarkably ugly face, but she didn’t pick it up.

“You may call me God, mortal woman,” the idol said. Its iron tongue licked, but it had already cleaned as much of its face as it could reach. “So long as you provide me with regular sacrifices, I will continue to spare you.”

Anger, then amusement, danced through Alphena’s mind. Between them, the emotions brought her back to full alertness.

“I won’t call you God,” she said. She curled her feet under her, but she wasn’t quite ready to rise yet. “And since I’m not staying around here—”

Though she didn’t have any better place to go that she knew of.

“—you’ll have to find someone else to sacrifice to you.”

Alphena leaned forward, preparing to get up. The horse-headed giant was already bloating. Dead on the ground, it looked even bigger than it had while she was fighting it.

“Wait!” said the idol. Alphena thought she heard desperation in the raspy voice. “You need me, Alphena. You won’t be able to do anything without my help.”

That was pretty much Alphena’s opinion too, but she wasn’t sure that a talking stick would help much. She said, “What sort of help?”

“Will you call me ‘First’?” the idol said. “Or perhaps ‘Chief’? It means the same thing in Ashangi.”

Alphena made a production of considering. “I’ll call you First,” she said. “If I have any reason to speak with you in the future.”

Having made the threat clear, she added in a milder tone, “What’s this horse-headed thing?”

Instead of nodding, she gestured with the sword.

“And why did it try to kill me?”

She needed to wash the blood off her sword; mere wiping wouldn’t be enough. And she needed to bathe, because she was as red and sticky as the weapon.

“A magician set the Ethiopes, your Horseheads, to hunting the Daughters of the Mind,” First said. He sounded relieved and cheerful. “He left one of the Ethiopes behind to kill any of the Daughters’ allies who were following them. And you fed the Ethiope”—he was crowing in triumph—“to me, gracious worshiper!”

Alphena wasn’t a grammarian, but she couldn’t have grown up around her brother and not found herself noticing the details of words. In sudden realization she said, “First, you said ‘worshiper,’ singular. If I go off and leave you, how long will it be before your Ashangi come back here?”

“Surely you would not leave me, Alphena?” the idol said. She heard fear, not assurance, in his tone. “I will help you.”

“How long?” Alphena demanded in a louder voice.

“They will never come back,” First muttered. “This place will be accursed ground until all things have rotted and the jungle reclaims it. All things, even me.”

Alphena lifted the idol in her left hand. It felt heavier than it had when she jerked it loose from its base. She rose to her feet slowly, thrusting the sword and idol out in front of her to balance the weight of her torso until her legs straightened. Her head throbbed with the effort, but not unbearably.

“First,” she said. “If you don’t do what I tell you to, I’ll leave you here. Do you understand?”

Standing, Alphena felt the presence of the Daughters dancing about her. They weren’t visible, but in the corners of her eyes she sensed them moving.

“Lady Alphena,” the idol said in a hurt tone. “I am a just god. I would always help my worshiper to the best of my ability.”

“All right,” said Alphena. “Then take me back home. To Carce or to Puteoli, I don’t care which. I want to go home!”

The catch in her voice took her by surprise. She had gone through so much today! She just wanted to be in her own room with her mother. She
so
wanted to see Hedia again.

“But Alphena…?” First said. “Where is Carce? Where is Puteoli? Show me where these places are and of course I will take you there.”

Alphena sniffled with despair. She started to hurl the idol away, but the control she was learning from Hedia stopped her. If she was ever to get out of this jungle, she needed the idol’s help even more than she needed the sword in her other hand. There was no chance that she was going to throw away the sword.

She hid her face in the crook of her right arm and cried. Nobody was here to see her. If somebody did appear, Alphena would be so pleased that the embarrassment wouldn’t begin to bother her.

She lowered her arm and faced the idol. She swallowed. “I don’t know where Carce is,” she said. “I don’t know where
I
am now.”

She hoped the idol might speak. He didn’t volunteer anything, and she was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have an answer to a direct question, either. She didn’t ask, because she wasn’t ready to handle more disappointment.

Alphena itched and ached all over. Flies were buzzing around her and the dead Ethiope. Both the fresh corpse and the blood caking on her own body were beginning to reek in the hot sun.

“First,” she said. “Do you know where water is? I need to get this … I need to clean all this blood off me.”

“I’ll guide you, Alphena,” First said brightly. He really
was
afraid of being left to rot. “The village is a little back from the river for safety’s sake—the Ashangi travel by canoe. I’ll take you right there.”

The idol twisted in her hand as though someone were gripping the other end. She remembered the impression she’d had of the wood shifting by itself into the path of the Ethiope’s thrust—and the way the flint spearpoint had shattered on contact. There’d been too much going on at the time for her to have paid attention to the details of her survival. Now, though …

She began to realize that First had been a friend to her even before she became aware of him as a person. Well, as an individual.

The idol pointed to the gate through which the Ethiopes had burst. “Ah, Alphena?” he said. “You’ll want to keep your sword with you while you bathe. There are crocodiles in the river.”

“I’ll keep the sword with me,” Alphena said as she walked out of the ruined village. She wished Hedia could have heard her. Not long ago she would have screamed, “Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I’m not going to leave my sword behind!”

She still felt that way, but—First had saved her life, which was one thing; and First was her best hope of surviving and possibly even getting out of this muggy pit, which was an even more important thing. Hedia didn’t seem to temper her—low—opinions of other people, but she had taught Alphena that she didn’t always have to say what she thought.

New growth was already re-covering the trail. Mostly it was leaves flopping over the track from both sides, but there were also vines dangling down from branches and a blotch of striking purple mushrooms—which Alphena decided to hop over instead of striding through as she started to do. Mostly she brushed by, but once she hacked off a thorny stem leaning across the path.

She thought of what the idol had said about rot and burial in the returning jungle. The same would happen to her bones unless she managed to get
out
of this place.

She came out onto the river unexpectedly, though when she saw brown water through the gap in the undergrowth she realized that she had been hearing its deep whisper even back at the village. The bank was a slope of red mud, partially covered by vegetation. Mostly the foliage trailed from plants rooted above in the jungle floor.