Beguilement (7 page)

The blue-clad figure, hanging head down, twitched and struggled. Beat the back of her captor with hard little fists, to no visible effect, except that the bear-man shrugged her hips higher over his shoulder and took a firmer grip on her thighs.

She was alive. Conscious. Undoubtedly terrified.

Not terrified enough. But Dag could make it up for her. His mouth opened, to silence his own speeding breathing, and his heart hammered. Now the malice had just what it needed for its next molt. Dag had only to deliver to it a Lakewalker patroller—and one so experienced, too—for its dessert, and its powers would be complete.

He wasn’t sure if he was shivering with indecision or just fear. Fear, he decided. Yes, he could run back to the patrol and bring them on in force, by the tested rules, be sure. Because the Lakewalkers had to win, every time. But Fawn might be dead by the time they got back.

Or in minutes. The three mud-men vanished behind the occluding rock wall. So, at least three in there. Of there could be ten.

To get in and out of that cave… No. He only had to get in.

He didn’t know why his brain was still madly trying to calculate risks, because his hand was already moving. Dropping bow and quiver and excess gear.

Positioning his sharing-knife sheaths. Swapping out the spring-hook on his wooden wrist cap for the steel knife. Testing the draw of his war knife.

He rose and dropped down over the side of the ravine, sliding from rock to rill as silently as a serpent. It had all happened so fast…

Fawn hung head down, dizzy and nauseated. She wondered if the blow she’d taken on the other side of her face would bruise to match the first. The mud-man’s broad shoulder seemed to punch her stomach as it jogged along endlessly, without stopping even when she’d been violently sick down its back. Twice.

When Dag came back to the valley farm—if Dag came back to the valley farm—would he be able to read the events from the mess her fight had left in the kitchen?

He was a tracker, surely he’d have to notice the footprints in plum jam she had forced her captors to smear across the floor as they’d lunged after her. But it seemed far too much to expect the man to rescue her twice in one day, downright embarrassing, even. Imagining the indignity, she tried one more time to break from the huge mud-man’s clutch, beating its back with her fists. She might have been pounding sand for all the difference it made.

She should save her strength for a better chance.

What strength? What chance?

The hot, level sunlight of the summer evening gave way abruptly to gray shadow and the cool smell of dirt and rock. As her captor swung her down and upright, she had a giddy impression of a cave or hollow half-filled with piles of trash.

Or war supplies, it was hard to tell. She fought back the black shadows that swarmed over her vision and stood upright, blinking.

Two more of the animal-men rose as if to greet her three escorts. She wondered if they were all about to fall on her and tear her up like a pack of dogs devouring a rabbit. Although she wasn’t entirely sure but what that shorter one on the end might have been a rabbit, once.

The Voice said, “Bring her here.”

The words were more clearly spoken than the mud-men’s mumblings, but the undertones made her bones feel as though they were melting. She suddenly could not force her trembling face to turn toward the source of that appalling sound.

It seemed to flay the wits right out of her mind. Please let me go please let me go let me go letmego…

The bear-man clutched her shoulders and half dragged, half lifted her to the back of the cave, a long shallow gouge in the hillside. And turned her face-to-face with the source of the Voice.

It might have been a mud-man, if bigger, taller, broader. Its shape was human enough, a head with two eyes, nose, mouth, ears—broad torso, two arms, two legs.

But its skin was not even like an animal’s, let alone a human’s. It made her think of lizards and insects and rock dust plastered together with bird lime.

It was hairless. The naked skull was faintly crested. It was quite unclothed, and seemingly unconscious of the fact; the strange lumps at its crotch didn’t look like a man’s genitals, or a woman’s either. It didn’t move right, as though it were a child’s bad clay sculpture given motion and not a breathing creature of bone and sinew and muscle.

The mud-men had animal eyes in human faces, and seemed unspeakably dangerous.

This… had human eyes in the face of a nightmare. No, no nightmare she had ever dreamed or imagined—one of Dag’s, maybe. Trapped. Tormented. And yet, for all its pain, as devoid of mercy as a stone. Or a rockslide.

It clutched her shirt, lifted her up to its face, and stared at her for a long, long moment. She was crying now, in fear beyond shame. She would deal with Dag’s rescue, yes, or anybody’s at all. She would trade back for her bandit-ravisher.

She would deal with any god listening, make any promise… letmegoletmego...

With a slow, deliberate motion, the malice lifted her skirt with its other hand, twitched her drawers down to her hips, and drew its claws up her belly.

The pain was so intense, Fawn thought for a moment that she had been gutted.

Her knees came up in an involuntary spasm, and she screamed. The sound came so tightly out of her raw throat that it turned into near silence, a rasping hiss.

She lowered her face, expecting to see blood spewing, her insides coming out.

Only four faint red lines marked the pale unbroken skin of her belly.

“Drop her!” a hoarse voice roared from her right.

The malice’s face turned, its eyes blinking slowly; Fawn turned too. The sudden release of pressure from her shirt took her utterly by surprise, and she fell to the cave floor, dirt and stones scraping her palms, then scrambled up.

Dag was in the shadows, struggling with three, no, all five of the mud-men.

One reeled backward with a slashed throat, and another closed in. Dag nearly disappeared under the grunting pile of creatures. A shuffle, a rip, Dag’s yell, and a mess of straps and wood and a flash of metal thudded violently against the cave wall. A mud-man had just torn off his arm contraption. The mud-man twisted the arm around behind Dag’s back as though trying to rip it off too.

He met her eyes. Shoved his big steel knife into the nearest mud-man as though wedging it into a tree for safekeeping, and ripped a leather pouch from around his neck, its strap snapping. “Spark! Watch this!”

She kept her eyes on it as it sailed toward her and, to her own immense surprise, caught it out of the air. She had never in her life caught—.

Another mud-man jumped on Dag.

“Stick it in!” he bellowed, going down again. “Stick it in the malice!”

Knives. The pouch had two knives. She pulled one out. It was made of bone.

Magic knives? “Which?” she cried frantically.

“Sharp end first! Anywhere!”

The malice was starting to move toward Dag. Feeling as though her head was floating three feet above her body, Fawn thrust the bone knife deeply into the thing’s thigh.

The malice turned back toward her, howling in surprise. The sound split her skull. The malice caught her by the neck, this time, and lifted her up, its hideous face contorting.

“No! No!” screamed Dag. “The other one!”

Her one hand still clutched the pouch; the other was free. She had maybe one second before the malice shook her till her neck snapped, like a kitchen boy killing a chicken. She yanked the spare bone blade out of its sheath and jammed it forward. It skittered over something, maybe a rib, then caught and went in, but only a couple of inches. The blade shattered. Oh no—!

She was falling, falling as if from a great height. The ground struck her a stunning blow. She shoved herself up once more, everything spinning around her.

Before her eyes, the malice was slumping. Bits and pieces sloughed off it like ice blowing from a roof. Its awful, keening voice went up and up and higher still, fading out yet leaving shooting pains in her ears.

And gone. In front of her feet was a pile of sour-smelling yellow dirt. The first knife, the one with the blue haft that hadn’t worked, lay before it. In her ears was silence, unless she’d just gone deaf.

No, for a scuffle began again to her right. She whirled, thinking to snatch up the knife and try to help. Its magic might have failed, but it still had an edge and a point. But the three mud-men still on their feet had stopped trying to tear the patroller apart, and instead were scrambling away, yowling. One bowled her over in its frantic flight, apparently without any destructive intent.

This time, she stayed on her hands and knees. Gasping. She had thought her body must run out of shakes in sheer exhaustion, but the supply seemed endless. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering, like someone freezing to death.

Her belly cramped.

Dag was sitting on the ground ten feet away with a staggered look on his face, legs every which way, mouth open, gasping for air just as hard as she was.

His left sleeve was ripped off, and his handless arm was bleeding from long scratches. He must have taken a blow to his face, for one eye was already tearing and swelling.

Fawn scrabbled around till her hand encountered the other knife hilt, the green one that had splintered in the malice. Where was the malice? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I broke it.” She was sniveling now, tears and snot running down her lip from her nose. “I’m sorry…”

“What?” Dag looked up dazedly, and began to crawl toward her one-handed in strange slow hops, his left arm curled up protectively to his chest.

Fawn pointed a trembling finger. “I broke your magic knife.”

Dag stared down at the green-wrapped hilt with a disoriented look on his face, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “No… it’s all right… they’re supposed to do that. They break like that when they work. When they teach the malice how to die.”

“What?”

“Malices are immortal. They cannot die. If you tore that body into a hundred bits, the malice’s… self, would just flee away to another hole and reassemble itself. Still knowing everything it had learned in this incarnation, and so twice as dangerous. They cannot die on their own, so you have to share a death with them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain more,” he wheezed, “later…” He rolled over on his back, hair sweaty and wild; dilated eyes, the color of sassafras tea in the shadows, looking blankly upwards. “Absent gods. We did it. It’s done. You did it! What a mess. Mari will kill me. Kiss me first, though, I bet. Kiss us both.”

Fawn sat on her knees, bent over her cramps. “Why didn’t the first knife work?

What was wrong with it?”

“It wasn’t primed. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. In a hurry. A patroller would have known which was which by touch. Of course you couldn’t tell.” He rolled over on his left side and reached for the blue-hiked knife. “That one’s mine, for me someday.”

His hand touched it and jerked back. “What the… ?” His lips parted, eyes going suddenly intent, and he reached again, gingerly. He drew his hand back more slowly this time, the lunatic exhilaration draining from his face. “That’s strange. That’s very strange.”

“What?” snapped Fawn, pain and bewilderment making her sharp. Her body was beaten, her neck felt half-twisted-off, and her belly kept on knotting in aching waves. “You don’t tell me anything that makes sense, and then I go and do stupid things, and it’s not my fault.”

“Oh, I think this one is. That’s the rule. Credit goes to the one who does, however scrambled the method. Congratulations, Little Spark. You have just saved the world. My patrol will be so pleased.”

She would have thought him ragging her mercilessly, but while his words seemed wild, his level tone was perfectly serious. And his eyes were warm on her, without a hint of… malice.

“Maybe you’re just crazy,” she said gruffly, “and that’s why nothing you say makes sense.”

“No surprise by now if I am,” he said agreeably. With a grunting effort, he rolled over and up onto his knees, hand propping him upright. He opened his jaw as if to stretch his face, as though it had gone numb, and blinked owlishly.

“I have to get off this dead dirt. It’s fouling up my groundsense something fierce.”

“Your what?”

“I’ll explain that later”—he sighed—“too. I’ll explain anything you want.

You’re owed, Little Spark. You’re owed the world.” He added after a reflective moment,

“Many people are. Doesn’t change the matter.”

He started to reach for the unbroken knife again, then paused, his expression growing inward. “Would you do me a favor? Pick that up and carry it along for me. The hilt and the bits of the other, too. It needs proper burying, later on.”

Fawn tried not to look at his stump, which was pink and lumpy and appeared sore.

“Of course. Of course. Did they break your hand thing?” She spotted the pouch a few feet away and crawled to get it. She wasn’t sure she could stand up yet either. She collected the broken bits in his torn-off sleeve and slid the intact knife back into its sheath.

He rubbed his left arm. “Afraid so. It isn’t meant to come off that way, by a long shot. Dirla will fix it, she’s good with leather. It won’t be the first time.”

“Is your arm all right?”

He grinned briefly. “It isn’t meant to come off that way either, though that bear-fellow sure tried. Nothing’s broken. It’ll get better with rest.”

He shoved to his feet and stood with legs braced apart, swaying, until he seemed sure he wouldn’t just fall down again. He limped slowly around the cave collecting first his ruined arm contraption, which he wrapped over his shoulder by its leather straps, then, fallen farther away, his big knife. He swiped it on his filthy shirt and resheathed it. He rolled his shoulders and squinted around for a moment, apparently saw nothing else he wanted, and walked back to Fawn.