The Visitor (35 page)

“Use soap and water if you like,” Dismé suggested. “I don't mind if you remove it. I've tried.”

They tried soap and scrubbing, reddening her skin in the process but making the sign glow only brighter.

“It's a substance we're not familiar with,” said Wolf, at last, through his teeth. “Chasm could identify it.”

“No, they'd be as baffled as I am,” confessed the doctor, with a headshake at Dismé. “I'm by way of being a small scientist myself, and nothing known to me glows like that. Certainly not the way it did immediately after the device hit her.”

“You saw it?”

“I did. Wolf, I respect you too much to lie to you. Something here is outside your experience and mine. You know the Tamlar story. Remember the pillars on the mound that P'Jardas spoke of? On the way here, we stopped at the storage yard where those pillars had been taken when the
Fortress was built. The pillars aren't there anymore. How many of the Council have been…what did you say, Dismé? Called?”

She looked into the distance and said, “Tamlar needed no call. I feel most of the others have been found.” Her voice seemed to come from very far away.

“How does she make that voice?” asked Flower, in an interested voice. “It's very clever.”

Dezmai turned to look at her, and Flower froze in place.

The doctor said, “It isn't a trick.”

“Oh come now,” said Wolf, sneeringly.

Dezmai opened her mouth hugely and roared the sound of great drums pounding. Around her the trees shivered, branches fell, leaves flew. The fire flared up and sparks went soaring away in lines of fire. Wolf, who seemed to be at the focus of the sound, was flung aside in a crumpled heap.

Dismé dropped her head and was silent.

As Wolf struggled to his feet, the doctor gulped. “Wolf, I think perhaps it would be wise if you and Flower ah…withheld judgement about the Council. For a time.”

“I'm sorry,” murmured Dismé. “She does what she likes, and she hates being ridiculed.”

“We know,” said Michael coming to put his arm around her shoulders, and looking piercingly at the others. “Don't we?”

Bobly and Bab assented quickly, as did Wolf and Flower more reluctantly.

“Show them Bertral's Book,” whispered Bobly. “Perhaps that will help them understand.”

The doctor fetched the book from his saddle bag and sat down with it in his lap, the two demons leaning over his shoulders.

“Lady Dezmai of the Drums,” he read.

“There must be some kind of device in the wagon to make that sound,” suggested Flower. “Some kind of amplifier.”

“
There is no device in the wagon
,” said Dismé in a tone of fatal decision. “You have doubted once. Do not doubt again.”

“I think that would be wise,” said the doctor. “Please, Wolf, Flower, bear with us. I don't know what's going on any more than you do, but I do know I bought that wagon just a few days ago, and there's no device in it.”

The two demons looked at one another skeptically, but they did not voice their doubts again. Instead, they crowned themselves with their Dantisfan, wound their turbans to hold the horns in place, made rather curt farewells and took themselves off, scarcely waiting until they were out of earshot before beginning to argue with one another.

“I apologize for them,” said the doctor, getting up to return the book to his saddle bag.

“No need,” said Dismé. “In time, they will either learn or Rankivian will take them.” She rubbed her head, fretfully. “I have the strong feeling that if we don't want to encounter black arts, we need to leave this place. Dezmai, dobsi, or demons—one or all of them has set my teeth on edge. Something horrid is coming this way, and we must be far away if we are to avoid it.”

They hitched up the wagon and set out again upon the road, not stopping until the dark was well upon them.

S
ummerspan five, fourday, evening: on a grassy promontory in the Comador mountains, a pair of anglers vacationing from Newland made themselves a sketchy camp out of a couple of bedrolls and a circle of stones around a small fire. They had camped the last two nights some way north and west of Newland. They had tramped on today to intercept the Outward Road and had followed it first west into the hills and then south along the valley to the old storage yard below. From there they had clambered up a narrow and well-hidden trail to the top of the promontory, where they had spent a twilight hour fishing the pools up the stream and back again before setting up camp.

The woods were behind them and the open air before them. Their view to the north included the smoke from a village or two in the Comador rumplelands, and a little east of that, light from a village in the flatland of Turnaway, past the Outward Road. It would take a bonfire to be seen this far, so someone was memorializing a marriage, a birth, or a bottling. From above, the near end of the Lessy road was hidden by copses in the valley below, but it emerged into the open farther north, where it curved to the east around the sides of two low hills.

Behind them, their fishing stream wandered through the forest, dropping in a staircase of talkative falls and mute
pools, to the edge of the precipice before them, where it slipped over a smoothed rockrim in a vitreous flow that entered the large pool, only its shimmer showing that it moved. From there on, the water was only a valley creek, running smooth a bit, then quicker and whiter over stones, becoming a crooked silver thread along the road they had come by, whiter and wider as it met other rills and brooklets until, at the road fork, it straightened north and east toward the wetlands that bordered Apocanew in Turnaway-shire: the lowest, flattest, and wettest of the shires, source of the subterranean river that drained all Bastion and kept it from becoming a lake.

The men had raked a bed of coals to one side of the fire and spitted half a dozen fat trout above it. On the fire, a kettle steamed alongside a pot of cornmush, beans, and bacon to which had been added a handful of peppers and some other common herbs, a mixture locally known as
much-a-plenty
. The fish took only a short time to cook, and the much-a-plenty had been cooked before they left home and heated several times since, so they soon filled their plates, took their jug of cider from the icy waters of the precipice pool, and sat crosslegged near the edge of the drop to enjoy their meal and the view. Darkness had fallen in the valley below them where the moon silvered the curves of the road and made of the landscape a painting in steely lights and ashen shadows, a view that brightened as the moon rose further and the fire died behind them to leave only a faint haze of smoke against the darkness of the trees.

“Look there,” murmured one to the other, in a whisper.

“Where?” grunted the other, older man.

“Shhh. Look down there at that largest pile of stuff in the old yard. See it? Now look left a little. What's that moving?”

The other stared. They both did, for several moments.

“It's big,” whispered the older man, suddenly convinced of the wisdom of quiet. “Really big.”

“Ayup, it is that,” whispered the other in response. They watched, fascinated, as the bulky shadow fell toward the
ground, then heaved up and moved forward, its head moving back and forth like the head of a serpent or, though they had never seen one, that great snake-headed bear of the north, weaving…

“It's smelling something,” whispered the younger man. “See, how it's sniffing all around the yard, and now it's sniffing the way back to the road.”

Indeed, the bulky shadow had reached the road once more, and was now moving along it, away from the valley, first into the trees, then out of them onto the first visible stretch of road that curved around the hill.

“Shadua of the Shroud protect us,” said the older man, getting up rather hastily and thereby dislodging his tin plate so that it went down the face of the stone like a tambourine, chingling and bashing as it went.

Far down the road the shadow froze, turned, rose to its full, ogre's height, and stared back the way it had come, head tilted to let it look upward at the promontory on which they stood.

As though by mutual consent, the two men had already frozen. Half standing, bent double, they remained as they were, every muscle tensed, their very breathing stilled, fearing even to blink. The wind blew into their faces from the valley. The faint smoke of the fire went into the trees. Both of them noticed this with heightened acuity; both silently acknowledged that the direction of the wind was extremely fortunate.

After a long, long time, an eternity to them both, the shadow on the road dropped down once more and loped away in a hideous shuffling gallop that took it beyond the curve of the hill. Even then the men did not move, for the road came into sight again, further on, and the shadow stopped again on that farther stretch to peer back in their direction once more. Only when the black blotch had reached the end of the second curve and gone on around the hill did the younger man stand erect and draw an explosive breath.

“What was it?” asked the older man.

“Don't know,” replied the other. “Don't want to know.”

“D'ja see the eyes?” asked the other from a dry mouth.

“Red,” said the other. “Red and glowing. Like coals. Shouldn't a been able to show up so far from here, but they did!”

“Demon?” asked the older man. “Didn't believe in 'em until now, but it had to be. What else?”

The younger man shook his head. “What d'ya think? Shoudn' we pack up and get out of here? Just in case it comes back.”

Without further discussion, they fell to clearing their camp, making up their packs, burying all evidence of themselves, including the ashes of the fire. They had come the easy way along the road in the valley, but without discussing it, they turned up the hill to take a steeper, wilder, and infinitely safer seeming route southeast through the Comador hill country toward home.

Part way there, one of them remembered the tin plate, which would certainly bear the scent of one or both of them. He spent the rest of the journey trying to convince himself that the thing would not come back to sniff it out.

 

Discipline at the guard post above Ogre's Gap had long been lax. Though considerable traffic had once passed that way, now there was so little movement on the road that the four guards, changed at the beginning of each span and assigned to watch two and two, night and day, had fallen into the habit of having one man watch the road during the day, while the rest of them slept, and having no man watch the road during the night while they all played cards and drank. Since the daytime watcher had also been up all night, he was usually asleep at his post. That is, during those times when he hadn't taken off to go fishing or hunting for his own amusement.

Thus it was an unusual state of affairs to find all four men awake and watchful late one night, a state of affairs resulting from the fact that one of them had allowed a wagon to pass that afternoon driven by two demons, a male and a female. None of the guards had ever seen a demon before, and the junior man, the one who had seen them this afternoon
had been asked to repeat his description of them until he was heartily sick of it.

“Look, they din't spit fire or spout smoke; they din't turn me into a frog; they din't look like nothing weird. They looked just like people only they had horns. That's it.”

“Was they real horns?” the sergeant asked, for the tenth time. “That's what I want to know. I mean, what's to stop some rebel from getting some horns off a cow and sticking them to his head and claiming to be a demon? To get out of Bastion? He could, you know he could.”

“Why would anybody do that?” the junior man demanded. “When anybody could just walk up over the top of the hill 'thout any trouble at all. Anybody can walk out of Bastion anytime, you know that as well as I do.”

“He'd do that to get a wagon out,” said the sergeant, to the sycophantic nods of his two cronies. “That's why he'd do that. To get the wagon out and the woman out and whatever was in the wagon.”

“They stopped and got out so's I could look in the wagon,” asserted the youthful guardsman, very red in the face. “There was a couple mattresses with blankets, and some bags with clothes in, and some books, and some food stores, and that's all.”

“Contraband,” muttered the sergeant into his moustache. “They was probably carrying contraband. I should report that.”

“Well, you go right ahead,” said the guard, losing his temper altogether. “And I should report you wan't even here, 'cause you were off fishing, and the other two of you wan't anywhere around, 'cause you'd gone with him and the three of you was prob'ly having yourselfs a nice swim whilst I had two demons to deal with!”

This statement so far leveled the grounds of accusation that the sergeant wisely decided to let that aspect of the matter drop. “It might be the first of a bunch,” he said, flatly. “Or, it might be headquarters, making a test shipment or even checking up on us. For the next few days, we'd better look sharp at whatever comes along.”

All four agreed that this would be prudent. Or, as they put it, “A pain in the ass what those wine-drinking bastards in Bastion get up to.”

So it was that all four of them were more or less awake when, just before dawn, the man assigned to the watchtower, the junior man, the same one who had seen the demons that afternoon, came creeping in the back door of the watch-house, leaving it open, and shook the sergeant to alertness in utter silence, with a hand over his mouth.

“What the…” demanded the sergeant, before he saw his man's face, which was white and stark eyed and frightened.

“Something coming up the road,” that man said. “Never saw nothing like it. A beast maybe, a big one. Not nothing we can handle, Sarge. Too big, moving too fast, and I think what we ought to do is turn out the lights and get out of here.”

The sergeant was braver than most, and stupider—the two qualities often going hand in hand. Already fully dressed he stalked to the door, tossed his quiver over one shoulder, took his spear in one hand and his bow in the other, opened the door with a crash, and strode out into the moonlight.

By this time the other two were reaching for their boots. The man who had reported gave his two fellows a frightened look and went out the door he had come in by, leaving it open behind him. In the wan light of predawn, the other two saw him running full tilt for the hillside and the cover of the trees.

That was about when the sergeant yelled, which brought the two to their feet. Then they heard a panicky shout, which made them turn in confusion, first toward their weapons, then away, toward the door. Then the sergeant screamed, a sound which went on interminably without any stop to draw breath, rising in pitch in a tortured shriek which neither of the men had ever heard or wished ever to hear again. They both made for the door their fellow had left by, but by that time they had delayed far, far too long.