Entangled (12 page)

The two grim warriors who’d stalked the Uglies all day materialised, pale as ghosts, from the gloom of the forest. Their shaggy hair clung lank around their shoulders and their powerful heavily muscled bodies were slick with sweat. They were moving at a fast jog, their eyes to the ground, intent on the trail, silent and focused. Then one pointed ahead where the track led under the last trees and out onto the steep open meadow beyond. The mountainside here was already in deep shadow but a ray from the setting sun burst through a gap in the surrounding peaks and showed the Ugly column still climbing far above.

Risking a quick glance round the trunk of the tall black pine she’d taken cover behind, Ria saw the outlanders jog forward. They were peering up through the trees for further glimpses of the column and didn’t seem to suspect that a force might have been left behind to deal with them. The simple plan, when she gave the word, was that she and her eight Uglies would step out and rain spears and stones down on them from point-blank range, catching them in a lethal crossfire.

They came on, their bare feet falling quiet as leaves on the forest floor. Closer … Closer … Ria was about to give the order to attack when the Uglies stepped into plain view, surrounded the outlanders and threatened them with their big clunky spears.

This was fucking unbelievable. ‘What’s happening, Brindle?’ Ria pulsed.

‘Make them surrender’ – his thought-voice was stubborn, like he knew she wouldn’t agree but had decided anyway. ‘Take prisoner. Don’t want to kill.’

‘No way they’re going to surrender,’ said Ria. She’d stayed hidden: ‘Get those spears into them now!’

But still no spears flew and for an instant the two groups faced off in silence.

Ria could see the outlanders had recovered from their initial surprise.
They turned and grinned at each other, exposing mouths full of yellow teeth filed to sharp points. They must have thought the Uglies mad not to have slaughtered them already.

Time seemed to stop, and Ria heard the sounds of the forest – the rustle of wind through the treetops, the creak of branches, the call of a nightbird, the distant howl of a wolf. She noticed that one of the outlanders was carrying a sack made of coarse woven cloth. There was something bulky inside it, staining the fabric. He held the sack dangling from his left hand, bumping against the ground. His right hand moved towards the hilt of a flint knife sheathed at his waistband.

Surging out from behind the tree, Ria snatched a stone from her pouch and hurled it at him. The light was bad, but not that bad yet – the stone whizzed across the track and there was a solid
CLUNK!
as it hit him square in the brow. He staggered, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell on his face. From the opposite direction, out of the corner of her eye, Ria glimpsed the blur of a tomahawk whirling towards her, dived to escape it, and somersaulted back to her feet, shocked to see two more outlanders, whose presence she hadn’t even suspected, running in to attack out of the gathering darkness.

She could throw well with both hands and pulled two more stones from her pouch as the outlanders shouted terrible war cries and clashed with the Uglies, hacking and stabbing in a frenzy of violence. The whole scene was chaos. In a heartbeat she saw three of the Uglies slaughtered, their bodies bloody and battered underfoot as the fight rolled over them.

Ria threw with her right hand first, hard and fast, fetching a tall outlander a vicious blow to the back of the head, felling him in a heap just before he got a knife into Brindle. She saw another of the Uglies killed, and chose his attacker for the left-hand shot but Grondin stepped in on him first, thrusting his big spear through his chest and splitting his heart in a splash of bright blood. The surviving Uglies beat the last outlander to death with their clubs and axes. As suddenly as it had begun it was all over.

Ria darted forward. The men she’d hit lay close together, unconscious but alive. She didn’t want them on her trail again.

She looked around. The scene of the ambush was littered with fallen weapons. She plucked up a flint knife and tested its edge. Good enough. She’d done this to rabbits and deer more times than she could remember.

Ria dropped to her knees beside the big brave who she’d seen carrying the sack; he’d fallen on his face when her stone hit him. He stirred, groaning and muttering as she straddled his back, grabbed a handful of his hair with her left hand and jerked his head up off the ground. Reaching under him she stabbed the point of her knife deep into his neck just below his left ear – a roar of pain now, thrashing and struggling – and sawed its blade sideways through the gristle of his throat, releasing jets of hot reeking blood.

When she was sure he wouldn’t get up she climbed off him and turned to the second outlander, slumped in a half-seated position against a tree. He was still unconscious. She felt no pity for him and slit his throat too.

Both men gurgled, hissed and bubbled as their blood drained into the ground. For the count of ten Ria sat on her haunches between them, watching them die. It was the first time she’d killed humans. But it was no big deal.

Then her eyes fell on the sack.

She hefted it, found it was heavy, and upended it on the forest floor. With dull thuds and a bounce, two battered and bloody but still recognisable heads rolled out.

Duma and Vik.

Two sets of freshly severed male genitals followed.

It was a long march up the mountainside. They would never have made it in the dark, with four dead to carry and three of the others injured, if the whole Ugly column hadn’t returned to help them. Even so it was a tough climb.

At last, in moonlight, they reached the dense stand of bushes and small trees that grew all the way along the base of the wall of cliffs towering at the summit. Grondin turned to his right with the rest of the Uglies pacing along behind him.

Ria still hadn’t spoken to Brindle about the bungled ambush, or whose fault it was. She wasn’t going to tonight. ‘What’s happening here?’ she asked, pointing at the cliffs

‘Secret Place has secret entrance. Watch. You will see.’

A few moments later Grondin stopped in front of an unremarkable section of undergrowth and began to move the branches and thorns aside revealing that a path, invisible to passers-by, had been cut through
the thick trees and bushes leading all the way to the cliff face. He entered with Brindle and Ria and the rest of the group followed. The last ones through closed up the gap in the undergrowth behind them and they all surged forward into the shadows of the thicket.

Because her eyes had not yet adapted to this deeper darkness, Ria didn’t understand what happened next. One minute they were in amongst undergrowth, with gnarled roots and dry leaves underfoot, then suddenly the atmosphere changed. It was damper, there were sounds of dripping and running water coming from several different directions, and she found herself slipping on smooth wet rock.

‘Cave,’ Brindle informed her. ‘Very long cave. Runs all the way through mountain. Comes out on other side.’

Then flints were sparking and tinder flared into flame that was transferred to little fat-burning stone lamps in the hands of several of the Uglies. The flickering light sparked a fantasia of reflections from thousands of stalactites that hung poised overhead like glittering icicles.

Ria had been in a cave before, just two years previously. Though quite different, it had been every bit as spectacular as this one. She’d been hunting with Hond and Rill and they’d pursued a wounded deer through a narrow opening in a hillside into a huge echoing chamber. There they lit their lamps and found themselves confronted in all directions by breathtaking images, painted in red and black: humans who were part bison, others who were part lion, and outlandish animals combining the heads, bodies, legs and teeth of many different species – the denizens of another world bursting through into this one, emerging out of fissures and from behind bulges in the rock.

It had been one of those caves that had been decorated in the longago by the Painters, an ancient people ancestral to the Clan. According to old myths told around the campfires they had discovered a way – now forgotten – to enter the spirit world and afterwards had painted these images of the strange and terrifying beings they met there.

‘Not forgotten.’ Brindle said. ‘Uglies still know way to spirit world.’

There were no paintings in this long eerie passage through the body of the mountain. Whenever the flickering torchlight reached its walls Ria saw only bare, polished limestone dripping with water and overgrown with calcite deposits – here resembling a mammoth, there a serpent, here a bear, there a bison. Sometimes stalactites descending
from above joined up with stalagmites rising out of the floor to form pillars, and forests of pillars, through which they had to thread their way. Sometimes the roof was so far above their heads it could not be seen; at others it was so low that they had to drop onto their bellies and wriggle, becoming smeared with thick, wet mud. At one point the side walls also closed in around them to form a tunnel so narrow that Grondin had great difficulty getting his bulky shoulders into it, and so long that Ria thought she would never emerge and must end her life here entombed in the mountain. There were ledges poised above roaring underground rivers, treacherous potholes and deadfalls, and a labyrinth of side passages in which, Brindle assured her, those who did not know the correct route could wander until they starved without finding their way out.

‘But you guys do know where you’re going, right?’

‘Yes. Our Lady of the Forest led us to Secret Place. Showed us the way.’

‘Our Lady of the Forest? Who’s she?’

‘She’s a great spirit, Ria. Watches over us.’ And he sent into her mind an image of a group of Uglies passing through the cave system led by a beautiful, very tall woman with blue skin.

A little later the dank, almost stifling mineral atmosphere that had enveloped them for so long began to freshen and Ria felt a rush of night air. Then she was clambering over fallen rocks and debris to emerge at last on a moonlit hillside, under blazing stars, the peaks of snow-capped mountains gleaming in the distance and the cheerful glow of campfires visible just a few bowshots below. She looked to Brindle for an explanation but he had become morose and lost in thought. ‘Secret Place?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Secret Place. But something wrong.’ He began to run down the hill, stumbling and falling, picking himself up, stumbling again. The other Uglies also broke into a run and Ria was carried along in the stampede. ‘What’s happening, Brindle?’ she cried out: ‘Why are we running?’ But there was no reply.

As all this was unfolding a weird, dejected mood descended on her, she began to tremble as images of the fighting in the forest flashed before her eyes, and she suddenly felt alone and full of misgivings about the Uglies.

How did she really know she could trust them?

Maybe she’d made a terrible mistake coming with them into their own territory. There wasn’t a hope she could find her way out through those caves without their guidance.

She slowed to a walk, cursing under her breath, and steered a course towards a group of solemn, shadowy figures standing round a large fire that had burned down to its embers. Something was going on at the fire that seemed to be attracting a lot of attention.

Maybe something cooking?

As Ria came closer she recognised with horror that a human body was roasting in the embers and now, as she watched, it was dragged out by the Uglies. The females fell upon it in a frenzy and began to tear loose and consume great handfuls of its burnt and blackened flesh. With a single blow from a flint axe one of the males hacked off its head and another – Brindle! – smashed the base of the skull with a stone bludgeon and reached inside to extract the brains.

Ria’s shock at Brindle’s betrayal was so huge it left her reeling.
You had me fooled all the way
, she thought.

Then she turned to run.

Ria ran helter-skelter down the darkened hillside, her heart pounding, breathing in short heaving gasps. She ducked and dodged around boulders and between trees, careening off unseen obstacles, gasping with shock and pain. She was repulsed by the thought that her body would be next for the fire, her brains next for the cannibal feast.

What a fucking betrayal.

She hadn’t condemned the Uglies’ near-catastrophic stupidity during the ambush, because she’d wanted to believe such faults stemmed from their good and gentle nature.