The Companions (54 page)

“Wherever the Phaina takes us,” I said. “If she'll take you at all.”

Blessedly, he had nothing else to say, and I lay there in a mood of frantic resignation, a familiar state of mind. All het up, as Matty had used to say, and nowhere to take it, nobody to use it on. Whatever happened would happen. My only hope was that with the Phaina in charge, we might possibly get away alive. Though determined to keep watch, I was almost dozing when the howls began again, not far away.

“They're going to get us,” grated Gavi, with a jarring
laugh. “I thought when I escaped Belthos all those times, I wouldn't be prey any longer. Now here I am…”

We listened as the howls came closer, full of elation and wildness, interrupted by yaps and growls, almost playful. I smelled something, didn't know what it was, but saw Veegee's and Dapple's lips draw back from their teeth.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nuh noh,” said Scramble. “Monser.”

She could mean a real monster or just something large. The howls came on, the smell intensified. The Simusi voices were only yards away when they broke off suddenly. I sensed their surprise and—was it possible?—shock. I put my eye back to the crack and saw a dozen Simusi among the trees at the edge of the woodland. They were glorious. Even afraid as I was, I had to admit they were glorious. Their fur gleamed in the steely light; their eyes shone; they stood like monuments of bronze and copper, graceful, potent, huge. Was this what Witt had called dazzle? Their stillness made them seem almost dreamlike…no. Theatrical. Posed. With falsity at the heart of it. I would never have thought so if I hadn't seen what had happened to the dead one.

Something very large moved in front of the crack; the strange smell became a familiar one. P'narg. The great beast crossed the front of the hut, followed by several more, all standing high on their hind legs, regarding the Simusi with huge, immobile P'narg faces that showed amusement? Satisfaction? Perhaps hunger?

Whatever the huge animals meant or thought, the Simusi didn't intend to leave. Instead they began a noisy dance, yipping as they leapt from side to side, half-charging, half-retreating, each time a little closer. The P'narg merely stood, the nearest one running his talons in and out, great curved blades as long as my forearm that made a snicking sound as they slipped in and out of their bony sheaths. The Simusi joined in a resentful howl, which broke off in the middle. In the quiet I heard the voice of the Phaina from somewhere close outside.

What followed was quite confusing. Evidently the Simusi understood Phain-ildar without translation, for they replied to the Phaina's words before her lingui-pute translated them into common speech. When the Simusi spoke, however, they spoke in smells, which I could detect but not decipher, and which the Phaina evidently did not understand either, for the 'pute used two separate voices to translate simultaneously into Phain-ildar and Earth talk.

I sorted it out to go roughly like this.

The Simusi speaker: “You interfere with us again, Phain-being. Your smeller sniffs matters not your concern. Our prey is in that house. We want it. Our new dog-slaves are in that house, we want them!”

The Phaina: “I do not interfere, Simusi-beings. You are too hasty. What lies in this place is mine more than yours. You abide on the edge of our place by our let. What is mine I will go in and take out. What is yours, you may keep.”

The Simusi: “On our land, stink-marked by us or our creatures, anything that moves is ours to hunt as we will!”

The Phaina: “In all the gateways to Splendor, from end to end of the affinitum, anything that lives is mine to protect as I will.”

The Simusi: “We are the pure, the uncorrupted, whole in our skins, needing no protection and refusing protection for our prey…”

The Phaina, angrily: “You are puerile children, playing at being ancient, claiming to return to your primal state while living off the eyes, tongues, hands, shoulders, legs, and labor of others. You say you need no protection while a dozen other races provide protection for you!”

Silence, ending in a low growl that seemed to be coming from every Simusi out there. The P'narg still stood, still stropping their talons, a sound like knives against steel.

“I will go in,” said the Phaina. “I will take what is mine.”

The door swung inward. She stepped in. The P'narg came in behind her, filling the entire door and effectively preventing the Simusi from seeing inside.

“Come,” said her lingui-pute. “We have only a few moments to get out of sight.” Then she stopped at the sight of Witt, Gavi, and old Oskar.

I explained their presence in the fewest possible words.

The Phaina gave me a look of frank skepticism from her multiple eyes. “I cannot in good conscience leave them here to be eaten. Come now.”

The last P'narg was inside, the hut was filled with flesh, fur, and a musty odor. Outside, the Simusi were becoming louder and angrier. The Phaina crossed the hut to the back wall, laid her hands upon it, and said something which the lingui-pute did not translate. The wall shimmered, the P'narg lumbered through the shimmer, and we followed. I was the last one through except for the Phaina herself, who turned and gestured the shimmer to be gone.

We stood in nowhere, looking into the room we had just left as though separated from it by a pane of dark, watery glass. The door burst open. Half a dozen Simusi leapt in, teeth bared, eyes blazing, only to halt, confused. Other heads and shoulders filled the door behind them. The Phaina's lingui-pute began translating. “Where the stinkshit did they go?” “I had my teeth set for that human woman!” “My slave was with them! The one I was going to hunt tonight!” With an exclamation of disgust, the Phaina turned its volume down.

They began sniffing the small room, digging into the hay, throwing it in all directions. One of them ran a large sliver of wood into his pads and yelped in pain. One group went out, another came in. Evidently, each separate Simusi wanted to see or smell for itself. Eventually, after a great deal of dispassionately translated invective, most of it directed at the Phaina, they gave up and went away. Still we stood there, waiting, more or less patiently, and I took the opportunity to whisper into the Phaina's 'pute that a Simusi had been killed by the dogs.

She shivered against me and whispered back, asking where the body was. I asked if she had ever seen a dead Simusi.

“I have not. Their folk are secretive about their dying.”

“The dead one looks nothing like the live ones,” I said, offering her the recording I had made.

She looked at it, reset it in order to see it again, then spoke over her shoulder to the P'narg, in a voice totally unlike any voice I had heard her use. It was full of iron and anger, and the 'pute did not translate it. She handed the recorder back to me as she said the words that dissolved the glass.

We were back in the hut again, shambling after the Phaina as she went out the door. Three of the P'narg turned to the right, to go back the way we had come, falling from their erect posture into a six-legged gallop. I assumed they were going after the dead body of the Simusi in order to…hide it, burn it, get rid of it. Or maybe not. Maybe the Phaina wanted to see it for herself.

The rest of us followed the Phaina as she turned left and continued along the dike. An occasional howl drifted faintly from various directions. Even I could tell they were saying, “Not here. Nowhere here.”

“We will take a side street,” said the Phaina, when we reached the end of the dike. “There is a door here.” She once again used words that were not translated, and we went through a shimmer into somewhere else. We were on a mountaintop looking down into an enormously wide, mountain-encircled valley. Rivers crossed it; forests dotted it; dust rose from it, and as my eyes followed the billows to their origin I saw a great herd of fine, phantasmic elephants, marvelous elephants, hundreds of them, ears waving, trunks lifted, feet pounding the valley floor in a distant thunder. Beyond them I saw giraffe, and beyond the giraffe, herds of other creatures I could not make out except for their pooled darkness, flowing across the grasses like a tide.

 

We turned on the mountaintop and took one step out onto a spectacular desert decked with mind-boggling rock forms and ranges of huge dunes in various colors. On a far dune I caught the silhouetted shapes of camels. A small, long-
legged rodent burst from a thornbush and fled across my feet in a series of enormous leaps. A tortoise chewed reflectively on an ash-gray leaf. We slogged through sand and around wind-sculpted stones until another shimmer led us into a garden full of ravishing colors and scents, and from that into a jungle, perhaps the jungle from which Witt had been taken, for he cried out, then another shimmer took us onto a meadow under a violet sky without a sun.

“Each of those shimmers…that would be seen by others as a flash of light, right?” I asked the Phaina.

The Phaina gave me an admonitory look and continued toward a stone cylinder standing in the meadow, slotted in the same way as the key pillar on the battleground of Moss. Again making the high, keening sound, the Phaina strolled around the cylinder several times before settling upon a particular place to thrust her hand. A door emerged, another shimmer yet, and when we stepped through that, we were back on Moss in the saucer of blue fire, the place from which we had been taken.

 

As the Phaina closed the door behind us I glanced at the sky. It was just before dawn, with sufficient light to silhouette the trees around the eastern rim, turning them into a pattern of black lace against the sky. At one place, the pattern was irregular. Telling the others I'd be back, I trotted tiredly off in that direction to determine if the irregularity was perhaps a familiar willog, Walky itself.

As it was. It greeted me as I neared. “Oh, and you have escaped from the creatures! I have been waiting these many days, sorrowing perhaps that you would not come. Is this not remarkable! What is that tall one with you? Who are those male persons?”

“Come on, Walky,” I said. “I want you to meet the tall one, the Phaina. You will address her as Sannasees. You will be polite, won't you?”

“I will, oh yes, what great honor to meet a new peoples. Who are the hu-men?”

“Humans,” I corrected.

“But plural of man is men,” Walky said, sounding outraged.

I said, “It's not logical, but it's still humans. One of the men is someone I met on the other side, and I've known the other one for a long time.”

Accompanied by a great flurry of strolling foliage, I returned to my companions, where I introduced Walky to the Sannasees, to Oskar, and to Witt. Witt seemed more horrified than pleased, but the Phaina conversed with Walky at some length while all six of the dogs sat patiently by. I thought they were being patient, at the time, though they probably were suffering from the same overload of anxiety that I was. I very much wanted to sit down next to them, doing and thinking nothing, but my flesh crawled at the proximity of that gate. The Phaina had opened it this time, but it had been opened by Simusi before, and they could probably open it again if they got onto our trail.

I walked out onto the mosses and tried my link. It hadn't worked in Splendor, but it worked here. I reached Gainor, who was so busy asking questions and being glad I had returned that it took some doing to convince him we needed picking up, soonest.

“Not floaters if you've got something faster, Gainor!”

He got hold of someone else, and by the time the sun was chinning itself over the tops of the trees, shuttles were setting down at the edge of the battleground. The first person off was Gainor himself, though it took a while to recognize him. His hair was down around his neck and he had a beard. He was holding a young dog. Scramble and I met him halfway up the slope, as the others straggled toward the ship.

“What's happened to your head?” I cried. “And where did you get that pup?”

He just stood there looking at me. Finally, he asked, “How long have you been gone, Jewel?”

“Four or five days,” I said.

“Try sixty or seventy,” he replied. “This is one of Scramble's pups.”

Scramble made a sound, half a whine, half a human cry of confusion and pain. She turned toward me, ears laid back, and I saw she was stuggling to comprehend. Trembling, she turned back toward the puppy, smelling it all over. The Phaina came up beside me, speaking in that lovely, liquid language of hers. “I should have warned you all. In Splendor time can be either faster or slower, depending on where you are.”

Scramble whirled, uttered, a shout more than a bark: “Mine?” she demanded, “My ile?”

“Yes,” I told her. “It's your child. All the puppies are well and healthy, I'm sure…”

“They are,” interrupted Gainor.

“…it's just that more days have happened, and…”

“Ess,” her growl interrupted me. “Ai no…”

She knew? Well then, she knew more than I did. I watched helplessly as she turned with the big puppy at her heels and went down toward the other dogs, who were standing indecisively some distance away. I watched as the ritual of smelling and learning went on again. Veegee howled. Dapple answered. Behemoth growled. The Phaina went down toward them, and I heard her voice. I had not known her translator could create the smell language of the dogs, but evidently it could. The conversation went on for some time.

While the dogs talked, everyone else assembled at the ships, including Walky. The dogs came last, and as they went aboard, I went down the slope to the Phaina, so I could speak to her privately.

“Sannasees,” I said. “All our peoples have heard of the Zhaar, the shape shifters, the bane of the galaxy. You believed they were gone. It seems likely they were never gone, that they took this new shape and lived in it.”

She asked, “The thing you showed me, is it really true the three dogs killed it, unaided?”