The Cloud Roads (3 page)

But that thing wasn’t Fell—he knew that from its lack of scent. It might live on the island, drifting with it, and just hadn’t needed to hunt yet. Or it might just be passing through, and had used the island as a place to shelter and sleep.

He thought it must have been sleeping when he had reached the ruins, or he would have heard it moving around.
Idiot, you could have been dinner.
If it had snatched him in his groundling form, it could have snapped him in half before he had a chance to shift.

If it attacked the camp, what it was or why it had come here wouldn’t matter much; it could still kill most of the Cordans before they had a chance to take cover in the jungle. Moon was going to have to warn them.

Except he couldn’t exactly run into the center of the camp yelling an alarm. If he said he had seen it tonight, while sitting out by the river...No, he could hear that the camp wasn’t as quiet as it had been when he left. It was a warm night, and there must be others sitting or sleeping outside, who would say they hadn’t seen anything. He would look as unreliable as Tacras and no one would listen to him. He would have to wait until tomorrow.

When he went hunting, he would walk down the valley toward the sky-island. That would give him a chance to scout the island by air again, to see if the creature was still there, if it would come out in the daylight.
Cautiously scout
, he reminded himself. He didn’t want to get eaten before he could warn the Cordans. But when he told them he had seen the same creature as Tacras at that end of the valley, they would have to take it seriously.

Moon pushed wearily to his feet and wrung out the front of his shirt. As he started back up the long slope of the bank, he considered the other problem: what the Cordans were going to do once they were warned.

Moon didn’t have any answers for that one. The creature would either drive them out of the valley or it wouldn’t. He knew he couldn’t take it in an open fight. But if he could think of a way to trap it... He had killed a few of the smaller major kethel that way, but they weren’t exactly the cleverest fighters; he had the feeling this thing... was different.

Moon took the long way back through the camp, which let him pass the fewest number of tents. Still thinking about traps and tactics, he came in sight of his tent and halted abruptly. The banked fire had been stirred up, and the coals were glowing. In its light he could see a figure sitting in front of the doorway. A heartbeat later he recognized Ilane, and relaxed.

He walked up to the tent, dropping down to sit next to her on the straw mat. “Sorry I woke you. I went down to the river.” That part was obvious; he was still dripping.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep.” It was too dark to read her expression, but she sounded the same as she always did. She wore a light shift, and used a fold of her skirt to lift a small kettle off the fire. “I’m making a tisane. Do you want some?”

He didn’t; the Cordans supposedly used herbs to make it but it just tasted like water reed to him. But it was habit to accept any food offered to him, just to look normal. And Ilane hardly ever cooked; he felt he owed it to Selis to encourage it when she did.

She poured the steaming water into a red-glazed ceramic pot that belonged to Selis and handed Moon a cup.

Selis poked her head out of the tent,her hair tumbled around her face. “What are you—” She saw Moon and swore, then added belatedly, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Do you want a cup of tisane?” Ilane asked, unperturbed.

“No, I want to sleep,” Selis said pointedly, and vanished back into the tent.

The tisane tasted more reedy than usual, but Moon sat and drank it with Ilane. He listened to her detail the love affairs of nearly everybody else in camp while he nodded at the right moments and mostly thought about what he was going to say to Dargan tomorrow. Though he was a little surprised to hear that Kavath was sleeping with Selis’ cousin Denira.

He didn’t remember falling asleep.

Chapter Two

M
oon didn’t so much wake up as drift slowly toward consciousness. It seemed like a dream, one of those in which he thought he was awake, trying to move his sluggish still-sleeping body, until he finally succeeded in making some jerky motion and startling himself conscious. Except he didn’t succeed.

He finally woke enough to realize he lay on his stomach, face half-buried in a thick, felted blanket that smelled like the herbs Selis used to wash everything. His throat was dry and his body ached in ways it never had before, little arcs of pain running up his spine and out through the nerves in his arms and legs. In panicked reflex he tried to shift, realizing his mistake an instant later. If he was ill now, he would be ill in his other form. And he could see daylight on the tent wall; someone might be just outside.

But nothing happened. He was still in groundling form.

Nothing. I can’t—
He tried again. Still nothing. His heart started to pound in panic. He was sick, or it was a magical trap, some lingering taint from whatever had killed the inhabitants of the sky-island.

He heard voices just outside—Selis, Dargan, some of the others, not Ilane. With an effort that made his head spin, he shoved himself up on his elbows. More pain stabbed down his spine, taking his breath away. He tried to speak, coughed, and managed to croak, “Ilane?”

Footsteps, then someone grabbed his shoulder and shoved him over. Dargan leaned over him, then recoiled, his face appalled, disgusted.

“What—” Moon gasped, confused. He knew he hadn’t shifted. Half a dozen hunters pushed into the tent, Garin, Kavath, Ildras. Someone grabbed his wrists and dragged him outside onto the packed dirt of the path. Morning light stung his eyes. People surrounded him, staring in condemnation and horror.

I’m sick and they’re going to kill me,
Moon thought, baffled. It didn’t make any sense, but he felt the answer looming over him like a club. He managed to push himself up into a sitting position. They scrambled away from him.
Oh. Oh, no.
It couldn’t be what it seemed like.
They know. They have to know.

Dargan stepped into view again. His face was hard but he wouldn’t meet Moon’s eyes. Dargan said, “The girl saw you. You’re a Fell, a demon.”

Except a club would have been quick—one brief instant of stunned agony, then nothing.“I’m not.”Moon choked on a breath and had to stop and pant for air. Ilane had done this. “I don’t know what I am.” Desperate, he tried to shift again, and felt nothing.

“The poison only works on Fell.” Dargan stepped back, signaling to someone.

Poison. Ilane had seen him shift, then gone back and readied the poison, and waited calmly for him to return.

He heard running footsteps and suddenly Selis landed on her knees beside him. Her voice low and desperate, she said, “She followed you, saw you change. She probably thought you were going to another woman, the stupid little bitch.” The others shouted at her to come away.

With everything else, Moon barely felt this shock. “You knew.”

“I followed you the first time you left at night, months ago. But you never hurt anyone and you were good to us.”Selis’face twisted in grief and anger.“She ruined everything. I just wanted my own home.”

Moon felt something wrench inside him. “Me too.”

Kavath darted forward, grabbed Selis’ arm, and dragged her to her feet. Selis twisted in his grip and punched him in the face. Moon had just enough time to be bitterly glad for it. Then the others jumped him, slamming him to the ground.

One arm was dragged up over his head, the other pinned under someone’s knee. Moon bucked and twisted, too weak to dislodge them. Someone grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, and covered his nose, cutting off his air. He bit the first hand that tried to pry at his mouth, but pressure on his jaw hinge forced it open. One of them punched him in the stomach at the right moment and his involuntary gasp drew the liquid in. Most of it went into his lungs, but they released him, shoving to their feet.

Moon rolled over, coughing and choking, trying to spit the stuff out. Then darkness fell over him like a blanket.

Moon drifted in and out. He felt himself being carried and heard a babble of confused voices, fading in the distance. The sunlight was blinding and he could only see shapes outlined against it. He heard wind moving through trees, the hum of insects, squawks from treelings, birdcalls. His throat was scratchy and painfully dry. Swallowing hurt, and there was a metallic tang in his mouth, the aftertaste of the poison. It tasted a little like Fell blood.

Whoever carried him dumped him abruptly; stony ground and dry grass came up and slapped him in the back of the head. The jolt knocked him closer to consciousness. They were in a big clearing, a rocky field surrounded by the tall, thin plume trees of the upper slopes of the valley. He rolled over to try to sit up; somebody stepped on his back, shoving him down again.

Enough of this.
Rage gave him strength and he shot out an arm, grabbed an ankle, and yanked. A heavy form hit the ground with a thump and a grunt, and the weight was off him. Moon tried to shove to his feet but only made it to his hands and knees before the world swayed erratically. He slumped to the ground, barely managing to hold himself half upright. Desperately, he tried to shift. Again, nothing happened.

A kick caught him in the stomach. He fell sideways and curled around the pain, gasping.

Someone grabbed his right arm and dragged him around, then clamped something metal and painful around his wrist. Moon opened his bleary eyes to see it was a manacle and a chain. He hadn’t even known that the Cordans had chains. They hadn’t even had enough big water kettles to go around, and they had wasted metal on chains?

Moon lay on his back in the dirt, his shirt shoved up under his armpits, pebbles digging painfully into his skin. By the sun, it was mid-morning, maybe a little later. He felt a hard jerk on the manacle, turned his head to see Garin and Vergan pounding a big metal stake into the ground. Moon took an uneven raspy breath and forced the words out: “I never did anything to you.”

Vergan faltered, but Garin shook his head and kept pounding. After a moment, Vergan started again.

Finally Vergan stepped back and Garin tugged one more time on the chain, making certain it was secure. They backed away, then hurried across the clearing. Moon saw them join more Cordans waiting under the trees, then the whole group retreated out of sight.

Still alive,
Moon reminded himself, but at the moment it was hard to muster enthusiasm for it. He shoved himself up, rolling over—and froze, staring at the back of his hand.

There was a ghost pattern of scales, his scales, on his hands, his arms. He sat up and looked down the open neck of his shirt. It was everywhere, a faint, dark outline just under the upper layer of his skin, obscured by the dusting of dark hair on his chest, his forearms. He rubbed at his hands, his arms, but couldn’t feel anything.
Oh, that’s... bizarre.
This had to be an effect of the poison. Suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin, he twitched uneasily, running hands over his face, through his hair, but everything else seemed normal.

At least now he knew why they had been so certain. They weren’t just taking Ilane’s word for it.

Ilane.
He couldn’t afford to think about her right now.
Later.
He pried at the manacle on his wrist and tugged at the chain, looking for weak spots.

The sun beat down on his head, heat radiating up from the ground. The tall plume trees and underbrush around the clearing shielded him from any cool breeze, making it hot enough to torture a real groundling. Testing each link for weakness, Moon kept one uneasy eye on the green shadows under the trees. The Cordans were still out there somewhere, watching.

The chain wasn’t well made, but it didn’t yield, even when he braced his foot against the stake and leaned his whole weight on it. He gave that up and started digging around the stake itself. The dirt was hard and packed with broken rock, and it was slow going. And he had to worry that the Cordans might decide he was too close to escape and come out to knock him in the head. Instinctively he kept trying to shift, snarling impatiently at himself when nothing happened. This poison had to wear off sometime.

If it isn’t permanent.
The thought had been hovering but articulating it was worse. It formed a cold, tight lump in his throat, threatening to choke him. He couldn’t live only as a groundling. It wasn’t what he was. He was some weird combination of both. To lose one form or the other would cripple him as surely as losing his legs.

He hadn’t even known a poison like this existed. The Cordans had been driven out of their old territory in Kiaspur by the Fell, and the elders had told stories of battles against them, but nobody had ever mentioned this poison, or the fact that they had brought it with them into exile.
But even if you’d known, you wouldn’t have thought it would do this to you,
he reminded himself grimly. He knew he wasn’t a Fell.

He wouldn’t have thought that Ilane would do this to him.

His fingers were already sore and bleeding, and the hollow in the hard ground around the stake wasn’t very deep. Moon dug up a couple of fist-sized rocks and set them aside, but those were the only weapons he had. He stood, putting his full weight on the chain again, working it back and forth. Abruptly he realized the birdsong had gone quiet. He jerked his head up and scanned the trees, pivoting slowly.

On the far side of the clearing something rustled in the undergrowth, movement deep in the shadows. Moon hissed in dismay.
And this is when it gets worse.
He dropped to the ground again and dug frantically, gritting his teeth. There wasn’t much else he could do. He had two rocks and he was still chained to this stake. This wasn’t going to be good.

A giant vargit walked out of the jungle. It wasn’t like the smaller ones down in the river valley that the Cordans hunted for food. It was a good twelve paces high at least, its beak long and sharp, its bright, greedy eyes fixed on Moon. Dark green feathers shaded to brown on its belly, and its wings were stunted, shaped almost like hooks, but it could stretch them out to snatch at prey.

Moon eased up into a crouch and picked up his first rock. He knew he could take a giant vargit—from the air, in his other form. Like this, unarmed, chained to the stake, all he could do was make sure the vargit had to work for its meal.

It cocked its head, sensing resistance, stalking toward him. Moon waited until it was barely ten paces away, then flung his first rock.

The rock bounced off its head, and the vargit jerked back with a shrill cry. But he hadn’t managed to crack its tough skull or, if he had, it just didn’t care. It crouched, its neck weaving, wings stretching as it readied itself for a lunge.

Then something big and dark struck the ground. A rush of air threw the vargit sideways and knocked Moon flat on his back.

He looked up, and up, at the creature from the sky-island.

It looked bigger from this angle, more than three times his size, but it was hard to focus on. He got an impression of sinuous movement from a long tail, spines or tentacles bristling around its head, a long narrow body standing upright, with a broad chest to support the giant wings. Then it moved, fast.

One big-clawed hand reached past Moon, caught the chain, and snapped it in half.
Run,
Moon thought in shock, scrambling to his feet to bolt away.

A blow to his back slammed him to the ground, a weight held him there. He struggled, twisting around; the creature had one clawed hand pinning him to the dirt. The other hand wrapped around the stunned vargit’s torso, gripping it securely.

From the trees, Dargan shouted, and half a dozen arrows struck the creature’s scales. It lifted the struggling vargit and tossed it toward the jungle. Moon couldn’t see where it landed but the startled screams of the Cordans and the broken crashing of underbrush were a good indication. Moon had a moment to wonder if the creature was going to throw him, too, and if he could survive it as well as the vargit evidently had. Then the hand pinning him adjusted its grip, wrapping firmly around his waist. Moon wrenched at its claws in desperation, knowing it was going to snap him in half.

Then it snatched him up off the ground and dragged him up against its chest. He felt the big muscles in its body gather, then it leapt into the air.

Moon yelled in pure, frightened reflex, muffled against the creature’s scales. Air rushed past him, cold and harsh; when he twisted his head, he could only get a view of the joins where the creature’s wings met its body. He knew they were high in the air, and it was terrifying. He had never flown except under his own power, and he had to fight down nausea.

They flew a long time, at least long enough to leave the valley, though it was hard for Moon to judge. The air was freezing. He tried to concentrate on breathing, not what was going to happen when the creature landed. Its scales were thick but overlapped smoothly, not unlike Moon’s other form. It was hard to tell how tough they were. Moon growled silently and wished for his claws.

He was shivering and nearly numb from the cold when the creature slowed, and he recognized from its change in angle that it was cupping its wings, getting ready to land. It adjusted its grip on him, and Moon twisted his head, squinting against the wind. He caught a glimpse of a square stone tower with sloping sides, perched on the edge of a river gorge. Then they dipped down toward it.

The creature landed on the tower’s broad, flat roof, and released Moon onto dirty stone flags. His shaky legs gave way and he sat down hard. It loomed over him, dark and sinuous and still hard to focus on, even this close. Moon dug his heels into the paving, scrambled away from it, and hissed in defiant reflex. It had brought him up here to tear him apart, but he wasn’t going down easy.

His vision flickered, as if the dark form was suddenly made of mist and smoke. Then it was gone and a man stood in its place, a tall, lean man with gray hair and strong features, his face lined and weathered. He was dressed in gray.