Fable: The Balverine Order (Fable) (7 page)

When the night had rolled over into the morning, they had emerged from the cave, stretched, eaten the remains of some heavily salted beef they had picked up at the market the day before, and then set out upon the path that supposedly would wend its way up to Windside. What had amazed James was the steady drop in temperature as their relative altitude climbed. It became progressively colder. At first it was barely noticeable, but the farther up they went, the more steadily and dramatically the temperature fell around them. The rocky trail became steeper, and soon every step that James was taking required effort and force of will. He was vaguely annoyed to see that, on the other hand, Thomas wasn't allowing himself to be the least bit deterred by his surroundings. They could have been strolling along a pleasant path in the forest for all that Thomas was willing to acknowledge the difficulty of their surroundings.

“You could at least
try
to make it look like you're straining,” James had chided him. Thomas had simply grinned back, his smile the only thing visible within the darkness of the hood pulled up over his head.

Hours crawled one into the next, and the trail was getting narrower. It was becoming readily evident why horses would have been useless in this endeavor. There were points where the boys had to walk sideways in order to squeeze through, and James got himself hung up on his cloak several times, uttering profanities all along the way. “How much farther?” he had said at one point.

“How should I know?”

“Because coming up here was your idea!”

“Technically, it was the coachman's idea.”

“Great!” James had shouted, his voice rising. “So we followed some nameless . . .” Suddenly something overhead caught his eye, something falling directly toward Thomas.
“Watch it!”
he cried out, and, grabbing the confused Thomas, he yanked him back toward himself. A column of ice, as long as a man and sharp as a javelin, crashed to the ground right where Thomas had been and shattered into fragments.

Gasping, Thomas and James stared at it, and then slowly and softly, Thomas said, “You might want to keep your voice down. Unless you feel like bringing down a ton of snow or ice on our heads. That's what loud noises do around here.”

“So ...” He looked around nervously. “You're saying that if I lose my temper, it could kill us.”

“Pretty much.”

“Wonderful.”

That had been all the inspiration James had required to keep his mouth shut as they continued on their way. The path widened out a bit so that they were able to walk more normally after a time, but James was becoming increasingly concerned as the sun made its way across the sky, and no village presented itself. He was not enamored of the prospect of trying to find somewhere to make camp should night fall. For all he knew, Thomas's snoring would be sufficient to bring a drift down upon them. and they would freeze to death, buried alive beneath tons of snow. But he elected not to say anything of his concerns to Thomas because he had no desire to come across as someone who was constantly complaining. This was a quest, after all, and one did not whine about a quest even though the exact parameters of it were still a bit unclear to him.

They approached a blind corner of the type that always made James a bit apprehensive since he had no idea what to expect from around the other side. When they turned it, however, Thomas stopped in his tracks, and, as a result, James bumped into him with such force that the two of them almost went to the ground in a tumble of arms and legs.

“I'll be damned,” said Thomas, and James was beginning to suspect they both would be when, as he dusted snow off his leggings, he saw what it was that Thomas was reacting to.

“Windside?” he said, and Thomas nodded, and replied, “Has to be.”

There it was, just as the coachman had described. Spread out before them was a small valley that miraculously had taken shape right in the heart of the mountains. Neither of them would have thought the town could possibly be there if they hadn't been practically right on top of it.

The coachman had further been correct about it seeming as if the town had grown directly out of the sides of the mountain. There were small buildings in the valley, but there were also homes that appeared to be built right into the mountain itself. There weren't many, scarcely a handful. “Why would anyone live here?” said James wonderingly. “For that matter,
how
would they? Where do they get food? It's too cold for anything to be grown up here.”

“I don't know,” said Thomas, “but what I do know is that we're not going to find out anything standing right here.” With that pronouncement, he headed toward the nearest building, which could reasonably be taken as an inn considering it had the word “Inn” scrawled on a sign that was dangling outside, flapping in the breeze and banging up against the building.

They entered and were promptly greeted with a chorus of,
“Close the door!”
because the wind was blowing so stiffly that it nearly ripped the door right out of Thomas's hands. James stepped in behind him, and Thomas forced the door shut. There were several people, scruffy-looking men, scattered about the run-down interior, which consisted of a few tables and chairs, most of which looked a bit crooked. With the door safely closed, the men took the measure of Thomas and James, snorted collectively in disdain, and returned their attention to their drinks. A tavern wench, with a large bust and larger attitude, approached them with a swaying motion as if she were on the deck of a ship. “What can I do fer ya?”

“We, uhm”—and Thomas glanced around—“were hoping to get a room for the night.”

She looked them up and down. James thought she was trying to decide whether they were going to cause problems or not. “One room left upstairs,” she finally said, apparently concluding that they were harmless. “Second door on the right. Tight squeeze, but it'll do ya ...”

Suddenly, without any warning, she slammed her foot down on the floor. “Stupid wee beast!” she snarled downward. Then she looked back to the boys. “Got some vermin running around under the floorboards and in the wall. Ain't gonna be too bothersome for ye, is it?”

Thomas shook his head, and James did likewise. “No, not at all,” said Thomas, and he reached into his purse and extracted the requisite two silver coins. He flipped them to the wench, who scrutinized them and then bit down on one of them. “You're supposed to do that for gold, actually,” said Thomas.

She glared at him. “Telling me how t'do my job?”

“Nuh-uh,” he said quickly. She didn't appear completely satisfied with his hurried response but chose not to press the matter. “Also, I was wondering if you might point us in the direction of someplace called the Library?”

“It's at the top of the stairs.”

“Stairs?”

“Go out the door,” she said, “look straight across the valley, and ya can't miss it.”

“Okay, well . . . thank you,” said Thomas. “We'll just put our things in the room and—”

“Actually, we're in kind of a hurry, so we'll drop them off when we come back,” James said quickly, and then he pulled Thomas toward the door. “Just keep the room ready for us; we'll be back before you know it.”

“I doubt that,” she said, and that sounded rather ominous to James as they exited the inn.

“What was that about?” Thomas said in irritation the moment they pushed the door shut behind them.

“You really want to leave everything we own in the world in that room so that anyone could just walk out with it?”

Thomas was about to toss off an annoyed response, but then he paused and saw the wisdom in James's words. “All right, good point. So where are these stairs that she was talking ab . . . ?” Then his voice trailed off, and James saw where he was looking.

Directly across the valley, just as the wench had said, was a flight of steps. It seemed to go on forever, up the side of the mountain, and there was a fog bank that obscured whatever was at the top. They were just barely able to make out a vague shape that looked like a large building, which James took to be the Library they were seeking.

“Oh, perfect,” muttered James. He turned to Thomas. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Thomas affirmed, and James had to acquiesce. After all, they had gotten this far, so what was one flight of stairs? One incredibly long flight of stairs?

“Fine. No problem,” said James.

 

 

BY HALFWAY UP THE STAIRS, JAMES WAS
ready to throw himself back down. By the time they had made it three-quarters of the way up, James was ready to throw Thomas back down and then sit and point and laugh derisively as Thomas's sure-to-be-broken body thudded and thumped all the way back to the ground. He knew that it was an illusion, but it still seemed to James that no matter how much closer they drew, the end was never in sight. His breath became increasingly ragged, and his temper frayed.

Thomas, by contrast, remained in disgustingly good spirits. “Almost there,” he said for what seemed the tenth time. Each of the stairs creaked under their footing, and James continued to be concerned that one of them would snap under their tread. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon one's point of view—the stairs held up, and the Library remained attainable.

“Well—” Thomas started to say at one point, and James turned to him, and snapped, “If you're going to say, ‘Almost there,' Thomas, I swear to—”

“Actually, I was going to say, ‘We're there.' ”

“What? Oh.” James had been looking down for a time, focusing on his footing and keeping his face shielded from the increasing wind. They had reached a landing, a widened platform that was just a few steps shy of the top. “Okay, well . . . good. That actually went way more smoothly than I—”

“Don't move.” Thomas was speaking very softly, and James had to strain to hear him. “Not a muscle.”

“What?” He looked around. “What are you—?”

“I said don't move!”
His voice dropped even lower, to barely above a whisper. “We're being hunted.”

This time James did not respond orally. Instead, slowly, he turned his head in order to look in the direction in which Thomas's gaze was fixed. There was a snowbank positioned about ten feet away from them, and it didn't seem especially threatening as near as he could tell.

But then the snowbank moved ever so slightly, and then it rippled, and then it stretched and flexed its muscles, and that was when James realized that the snowbank had two small, yellow, vicious eyes that were staring right at Thomas and him. They narrowed as James made eye contact with them, and then he was able to discern the large head at the front of a sinewy body that was clearly ready to pounce. It was some sort of large cat, and its lips drew back in a snarl to reveal a fearsome row of teeth.

James's legs trembled, and suddenly that hideous home from which he had fled was starting to look a lot better to him. He remembered being told that animals could smell fear. If that was the case, this one was smelling pure, stinking terror.

“When it leaps,” Thomas said, never looking away from the beast, “you go to the left, I'll go to the right.”

“And we're doing that . . . why?” James was surprised by the evenness of his own voice.

“It'll be distracted, indecisive, for just a moment, and—”

While Thomas was busy explaining, the great cat leaped with an earsplitting screech designed to freeze its prey in its tracks.

It was partly successful, because although Thomas immediately leaped to the right as planned, James was riveted to the spot. The roaring beast came straight at him, and the only thing that prevented it from crashing into him and digging its claws into his flesh was Thomas's lashing out with his foot as he flung himself away, catching James in the hip and knocking him aside.

The white-furred cat landed between the two of them, its oversized head snapping this way and that. James saw that the creature wasn't solid white; there were small black spots all over it, faint but possible to see since it was close enough.

After a second's uncertainty, the creature apparently decided that James was the easier target. It whirled, its tail snapping straight out, and James saw its haunches go tight in preparation to leap upon him. He fumbled at the short sword dangling from his belt, and then the cat lunged for him.

James braced himself for the charge, and then he heard a scream of pain and was surprised to realize it wasn't his own voice. The cat was staggering and a still-trembling crossbow bolt was sticking out from its rib cage. James might have been the easier prey, but Thomas was now the more immediate problem, and the beast clearly was deciding to attend to him. Thomas was trying to nock another bolt as quickly as he could, but he was rushing. In his haste, he dropped the bolt and it clattered away from him, rebounded off the edge of the stairs, and fell away. There was no time for him to pull another from the quiver, and yet it didn't stop him from trying.

And just as the beast was about to attack Thomas, James's sword came clear of its scabbard. He swung it around, part desperately, part blindly, and he got lucky. The blade sliced across the cat's back right leg, severing the large tendons and hamstringing it. The beast screeched, this time not out of any desire to terrorize its victims but instead in pure agony. It tried to twist in midair, landed hard, and its hindquarters collapsed.

“Hah!”
shouted Thomas. Disdaining the crossbow, he instead withdrew his sword and moved forward, preparing to put it out of its misery.

But James remembered that there was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Before he could shout a warning, the cat pushed off with its still-functioning left hind leg and cleared the distance between it and Thomas with a single thrust. It knocked Thomas off his feet and down he went, the sword tumbling from his hands. The creature was all of six inches away, and it brought its claws upward, ready to strike, and given one second, it would have torn away Thomas's face.