The Kar-Chee Reign (13 page)

Lors’ chin was bleeding where a sharp stone had cut it in ricochet. He grinned a twisted, terrified, yet quite triumphant grin, shot his hand inward, directing. “Go on, Liam! Go on! I’ll cover you! Go — ”

But Liam shook his head, pulled out two more of the strange but unquestionably potent points, handing as before one to each brother. “Shoot these —
there
,” he said, pointing. “And try for as much distance as you can get.”

The clouds rolled around, thinned, thickened again. Here and there something lay upon the ground, still; here and there something thrashed and bellowed and bled. Lors and Duro nodded. Their other shots had been of need hasty and impromptu. Now, for the moment at least, nothing seemed to be pursuing them. They hefted the points, spoke briefly to each other, made swift, skillful adjustments of their crossbows, downed them, foot against lever for the pressure that hand and arm couldn’t give, cocked them, raised and loaded, aimed, holding them a bit higher than before.

They shot.

Through the haze they saw a group of Kar-chee, black chitinous exoskeletons covered and gray with dust, chirring and gesturing in front of that great closed gate which led — which led where? — which led below, wherever or why-ever —

Thud-thud —

As they dashed for their lives deeper into the fissure, and, suddenly remembering, slowed, clutching more tightly on the sacks and skins containing the explosive points, they retained one single swift-flashing recollection of the great blast of fire and steam and scalding air and boiling mud that came vomiting up and out from that hellish corridor where once the Kar-chee had chirred and gestured and where once that door had been.

And Liam, too, clutched at the sheepskin packed with the blue and flashing points, but even tighter was his grip on the curious object that had been standing so casually there among the engines where the Kar-chee had stood distributing the points; the object between his shirt and skin, warming his heart. He had had no chance to take more than the most rapid and inconclusive glance at it; it was perhaps even likelier that he was wrong than that he was right….

But he might be right!

And in that case what he held would be a map.

A
FTERWARD HE
was to compare their retreat through the mine-caves to the passage of a troop of ants crawling through a sponge caught in a high wind. Over quivering ground, pelted by falling debris, half-stifled with dust, singed by burning air, more than once finding that either the roof or the floor or sometimes both the roof and the floor of a corridor they had planned to take had given way — such was their trip from the Kar-chee cavern to the world outside.

But the world outside seemed little if any more stable. No sky appeared likely to fall down in upon them, true, but the land quivered. Offshore, far off-shore, a great bubble broke the surface of the water, and a great puff of steam rose and vanished into the air; presently the hot and muddy breath of the vexed sea-bottom reached them. Again and again and again….

While they watched, fascinated, alternately sweating and chilled, an entire headland slid, sighing and rumbling, into the ocean. Their ears were next buffeted by soundless concussions. As they stood, straining to hear, the earth rose and fell and rose again. Carefully they lay down their sacks and skins of warheads and subsided into sitting positions. Cracks and chasms opened, closed again with the sound of thunder-claps, only to reappear — so it seemed to their bemused and confused sight: as though a chasm was a living creature, now hiding and now disclosing himself — elsewhere.

And after these great shocks came stillness and silence.

Several of them made as though to get up, but Liam gestured them to remain where and as they were. His eyes were rapt and intent; the eyes of the others followed his without being able to see what he could see — but never doubting that he did see. “Wait….” he murmured through slightly parted lips. They waited, uneasy but content. Cerry felt as she had upon that night when she had known that it was for him to lead and for her to follow and that he was one of those about whom tales were composed and songs sung: seers and doers and heroes….

And after the silence and the stillness came another quake, and this second one was greater than the first. And after that one they looked at him again and still his eyes (the one brown as loch-water and the other as blue-green as the sea itself) were focused afar off and again he said, this time in a whisper, “Wait….”

The third shock was mild and brief, and after it subsided Liam rose to his feet in one swift motion and stooped and carefully picked up his burden and walked off, silent and absorbed. And they silently followed them, all of them.

The face of the land was much changed in places. Here had been a stream and now already the gravel of its bed was drying in the sun; there had been an old water-course dry except in the rainy season: now it rolled to the roiled sea in a torrent of liquid mud and it stank of the bowels of the earth. Once they had to detour inland because where the path had led now lay a new lagoon of water still faintly streaming and full of dead fish; but once they were able to proceed straight on through because what had been a high ridge of rock was now a flatland. Such marvels were many, but most marvelous of all was a hushing pillar of flame where natural gas, long imprisoned beneath the earth, had been freed and, rushing to the surface, had been met by a transforming touch of fire.

It was having gone but a short way beyond that they saw the Kar-chee.

There were a number of them — six, perhaps, or seven — and they stood upon their four lower limbs with their huge two upper limbs in the folded manner common to them, as though engaged in silent meditation and prayer. Only one of them looked up as the people came suddenly out of the woods, and this one made no motion other than the lifting of its head. Liam turned back on a diagonal course; Lors did the same; so did Duro, Fateem, and the others … except Rickar. He, as though unseeing, continued walking as he had been. Liam snapped his fingers. Clicked his tongue. Said, finally, low-voiced, Rickar — ”

A second Kar-chee lifted its wedge-shaped head. And a third. And Rickar gasped and halted. He looked wildly around him. What happened next was probably attributable to the fact that his whole mind and body told him to run but that he remembered — now! — Liam’s words of warning in the cavern:
“Don’t stumble. Don’t drop any of these”
— the blue detonation points. — “
Don’t run — but if you
do
run, lay them down — gently — first, and just leave them lie….
” So he bent forward and deposited the sack he was carrying, and turned to run away after his friends.

And a fourth Kar-chee lifted his head, and a fifth.

And Rickar took two long steps. And saw that his friends were not running at all, but walking at a steady pace. He walked after them, perhaps half-a-dozen paces more. Then he realized what he had done. And he tried to undo it. He turned around and went back.

The act was confused, but it was not cowardly, and he might in the end have gotten away with it — if he had walked. But he did not. He ran. He ran back and he stooped. And the Kar-chee broke out of their own introspective detachment, or whatever mood it was which had been holding them fast; the Kar-chee were all around him and the Kar-chee were upon him and held him fast. One low and mournful cry he uttered; then he was still.

It was but a moment before they had the sack and knew what was in it. Perhaps they might have killed him then and there … but, although the people had seen, all of them, the Kar-chee cuffing the man in the cavern back to be baited by dragons, neither then nor anywhere else had they seen, nor heard — save in legend — of Kar-chee actually killing any human being themselves. This they seemed to leave to the dragons. And there seemed to be no dragons about.

Rickar’s friends looked on to see him dragged away — but for a moment only. They dared not use the blue warheads, of course — but the brothers Rowen still had in their pouches conventional crossbow bolts. At Liam’s nod they shot once … twice … so that the bolts landed in front of the retreating Kar-chee. The Kar-chee hesitated — but they did not stop. So Lors and Duro loaded again. And this time they loosed their bolts into the bodies of the two Kar-chee carrying Rickar between them, dangling. He fell. The Kar-chee stumbled. And then — and this was curious — it was as though the same train of thought now passed through the minds of the Kar-chee, for the one carrying the sack of blue detonators stooped and laid it on the ground; as he was doing so, two others seized Rickar, who had been too dazed to escape. And the others surrounded the injured Kar-chee; and all of them began to run.

They were heavy-laden, but they had four legs to run with, and the recocking of the heavy crossbows could not be done in a second. Then, from far off, but again and again, and each time nearer, came the call — the questing call — of a distant dragon. The people saw the wounded Kar-chee fall, saw the others — Rickar now swinging limply back and forth — race away. And then, at another command from Liam, they turned and walked rapidly off.

• • •

Old Gaspar trembled and shook. The quake had not unmanned him as this had. Liam felt for him; he had not realized that the Chief Knower had so much softness in him.

“My son, my only son … what a blow … what a blow,” he repeated. And then, shaking his head, lips trembling and eyes brimming, he asked, “How could he have done it?
You
— you have lived in ignorance; but
he
was a Knower. I knew that all was not well with him in his heart and that he lacked proper zeal to fulfill the obvious intentions of Manifest Nature … but still — but still! To engage in the blasphemous futility of resistance — !”

And his wife, old Mother Nor, covered her face with her hand and withdrew, silently, silently shaking her head.

The ark — and the other arks in process of building — had inevitably sustained some damage in the upheavals. Gaspar and his council of elders now set to work at quickened speed to repair, finish stocking up, and be gone. “For already the work of punishment and destruction has begun!” — thus, their cry.

But Liam had not quite the same notion.

“There’s no doubt that the Kar-chee had begun to put this place through the usual process. But I doubt that they’re ready for it yet. In fact, I’m confident that they’re not,” he told his small band of followers.

“Do you think that what’s happened has been just natural phenomena?” one of them asked, somewhat doubtfully.

Liam shook his head. “No. I’m sure that we set it off ourselves by firing the blue thunderheads down below, there! That cavern? — and the corridor we saw leading down from it? From the looks and the smell of it it seems to me that the Kar-chee were mining or sapping or perhaps just sampling and exploring down there. But likely not
just
— did you see how wary they and their Devil-dragons all were when the door on it opened? How they looked up and how they all kept on looking till the door closed?”

Lors said, softly, “And we blew it open again! We dropped the fire into the tub of oil….”

“Something like that. But I’ve been wondering and wondering, now…. It does seem to me that two fire-charges shouldn’t have done all of this. And the Devils weren’t ready to have it done, either — else they wouldn’t have been down below in danger of being crushed to death like grubs or beetles. No….

“I think there must be another explanation, and I think that this is it: the Kar-chee had made that corridor, that shaft, to tap the hidden fires beneath the earth. And they planned to drive it even deeper and they must, I think, have had a great store of the blue fire-heads in that shaft. What drew their attention and kept it there? Eh?
Danger!
”

Lors repeated, “We dropped the fire into the tub of oil….”

The conversation was not slow, leisurely, philosophical. It was quick, excited, grim. And it turned, abruptly, onto another tack, as Liam opened his shirt. “Look at this,” he said, drawing something out.

This
was a something for which they had no name or word, having never before seen it nor anything like it. They looked at it as he had directed and made sounds of awe or bewilderment as it changed shape in his hands: he drew it out … he pushed it back into a smaller compass than before … he showed them to what extent it was pliable in his hands … how now it became globular and now cubical and now it was flat…. And with each change, and, it seemed — if one looked quickly and closely — even without each change of shape, the designs upon it changed … changed … subtly changed….

“What is this?” Fateem asked, whispering.

“I am not totally sure,” His voice had dropped, too. “But I am almost so — I believe this is what was called by men,
a map!
But it is not a man-made map, it is a Devil-made map — a Kar-chee map! I’ve always, as long as I’ve known that such things had ever been, wanted one. But not one like those very few I’d seen, ancient and worn and crumbling and of no practical use because they showed things as they had been, hundreds of years ago — ”

“Before the Devils came …!”

“Yes … ‘before the Devils came.’ And, since then, do we not know? — what changes occurred? No! We do
not
know! Only that changes
have
occurred. Look! Look here — Do you see this?” His finger traced the curious outline upon the curious surface. “Do you know what it is? It’s a map of this land, this island! I’m sure of it. Or rather I should say, ‘This is how this island appears upon this map.’ — now. Thus it appears as though we were birds, looking down on it from the air as though floating fixed in one place.
Now
— ” His hands moved, the “map” moved, the design changed, flowed, changed, stopped … more or less. “And this is how it looks as though from the side, but at what angle I am not sure, and … follow my finger … it goes right down from the top to the sea and beneath the sea … down … down … so … down, to where the island grows from the bottom of the sea the way a tree grows from, well, the bottom of the air — ”