The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (51 page)

Down on the beach, the solitary demon continued its stroll. Slowly, with her sword in her right hand and the talisman in her left, the steerswoman rose to her feet.

She must move closer. She did not wish to. She wished herself far away from the monster— or for it to be dead.

She forced herself to take one step over the crest of the dune— and was committed, the steep slope shifting under her feet. She half stepped, half slid down to the tide line.

The solitary demon had moved farther down the beach, walking slowly along the edge of the waves. Rowan took a parallel route, close to the dunes. Moving slightly faster than the creature, she closed the distance by increments.

When she was sixty feet away, the demon stopped; Rowan did the same, heart pounding, waiting.

The creature lifted its arms slightly. Rowan tightened her grip on her sword.

The arms waved gently, slowly, each in turn around the demon’s body.

A wild thought came to Rowan: she must move even closer, to give the demon a better look at the talisman. She could not bring herself to do it.

They stood so, some forty feet apart, for what seemed to Rowan like a very long time. Then the creature moved.

Away from Rowan, along the beach, back in the direction from which it had come.

The talisman worked.

Rowan let out one harsh breath, a breath she had not known she was holding. She breathed twice more quickly, almost long gasps.

Then she fell in behind the monster, following in its broad, flat footprints. Her teeth were clenched, stomach writhing within her like a separate living thing; she followed nevertheless. They walked the length of the beach together, sixty feet apart, then fifty.

The demon that had earlier been sitting on the sand was now gone. When Rowan’s demon passed that place, it turned left and climbed the slope of the beach, toward a group of sandy hillocks.

The steerswoman stopped. She remained in place, watching the demon as it entered a gap between two hillocks and vanished from sight.

She was alone on the black-and-gold-striped beach.

She set her sword point down in the sand, wiped her face with her sleeve, forced herself to breathe deeply, slowly, felt her calm return. She looked down at the object in her left hand.

Magic.

No change in the talisman, no visible change, no sense of force or power. Still, she had been protected.

And somewhere beyond the hillocks, still out of sight: the location Janus had marked
FOUR
.

Rowan shivered; she had left her steerswoman’s cloak at her campsite, knowing that it would be too typical and recognizable from a distance. She had assumed that Slado’s human servants were allowed some freedom of movement, and had hoped that the casual eye would take her for one of their own, idly wandering the beach.

But the casual eye, Rowan considered, might be rather alarmed at the sight of a stroller carrying a naked blade. She pulled the sword from the sand, sheathed it, and proceeded east on the beach. The talisman she kept in her hand, carrying it as naturally as possible.

She had encountered not a single soul so far. Hardly surprising, since apparently Slado’s pets were permitted to ramble about freely. Likely the people generally stayed within the precincts of the keep itself; and that explained the absence of outlying homes.

And the absence of roads. She found only one, leading up from a harbor.

It was the first human-made structure she had seen since the crypt, and a rough one at that: a breakwater, a mere double line of stone built out from the shore, with the space between filled with earth. Just east of this, the action of waves and currents had carved into the seafloor to a depth sufficient for small- and medium-sized sailing vessels. There were neither wharves nor piers, but a smaller ship would be able to draw quite close to the shore here.

No ship was present. Whatever vessel had delivered Janus and his captor had departed.

The road from the harbor was muddy, leading into the tall blue-leaf bushes that stood above the harborside. Rowan waited, leaning back against the first of the breakwater stones, watching the gap in the foliage suspiciously for some time. Just as she had decided that it was deserted, she saw motion and turned, scuttling like a crab to crouch behind a larger boulder.

Another demon. It walked a few paces toward the harbor, then stopped. Rowan could not tell what interested it; she hoped, not herself. Should it come nearer, she would stand, and display the talisman.

It came no nearer. It remained frustratingly motionless for several minutes, then returned up the road, disappearing among the blue-leaves.

It was late afternoon; Rowan must attempt at least to locate the keep before nightfall. She wished the geography were different here; she wanted a hill, with brush cover, where she could scan the land from a height, sight the keep from a distance, and observe it before approaching. But the beach gently sloped, and the dunes were not high enough for a useful overview.

She took the road.

It curved in a broad arc, with blue-leaves and tanglebrush close beside. She could not see through the brush, could not see past the curve ahead.

But she could hear; and the demon that had left the harbor was somewhere up ahead. Rowan slowed her pace to keep out of direct sound sight.

But presently she heard that the creature had stopped. To go further, she must pass it; and she knew of no other road, and one could not bushwhack through tanglebrush. Rowan unsheathed her sword, held the talisman before her, took a deep breath, and continued on.

At first she did not see the demon, even though its voice became clear, frighteningly nearby. Then she sighted it: half submerged at the far end of a pool of water just off the side of the road. Its arms were spread, drop elbowed, its fingers just above the surface. Rowan fought the impulse to back away, to escape back down the road. Instead, she paused.

Motionless, the demon was even more bizarre; without action as a cue, it no longer seemed even to be an animal. More like a strange plant, Rowan thought, a freakish four-branched tree sprouting from the water.

The motion, when it came, shocked Rowan’s senses: a single arm snapped down and then up, a wet, black, many-legged creature clutched in its fingers.

Whether crustacean or insect, she could not tell. The demon lifted it into the air within reach of the other arms, and long fingers snapped off each leg. The remaining carapace undulated in three segments. The demon pushed the creature down into its maw, the cracking and crackling audible above the humming voice, the fallen, severed legs of its prey stubbornly continuing to twitch on the stones at the water’s edge.

The steerswoman felt a twist of nausea. Even though the demons actions must be as natural as those of a mantis or a spider, they disturbed her. Inner Lands animals, and even insects, showed something in the nature of their motions and the very configuration of their bodies that told her she was kin to them. But this creature remained strange, wrong, different to the core.

The demon returned to stillness and to its hunting pose. To pass it by, the steerswoman must come within thirty feet of it. Much closer than to the demon on the beach.

Did she trust the talisman?

She did, but to what degree?

Make a virtue of necessity. Test how far the talisman would protect her.

She had an escape route; the demon had little room to maneuver. She thought that she could kill the monster, if she needed to; in fact, feeling as she did now, killing it might come as a positive relief.

She approached the pool.

It was rock-ringed, she saw now; no fine workmanship, merely enough stones roughly stacked to hold in the water that fed in from a small fresh rill and exited through a gap on the opposite side. Efficient. And kind of Slado, Rowan thought ironically, to relieve his monsters of the need to forage.

The demon was near the opposite edge of the pool. Rowan stepped up to the near edge, paused, then stepped up again, to stand atop the rough rock wall, her talisman held close in front of her body. She was perhaps twenty feet away, rising well above every other object. It was impossible not to be perceived.

The demon crunched on, indifferent or oblivious. Good.

Rowan stepped to her right, brought herself a quarter turn around the pool. Still no reaction. Another step.

The demon had finished crunching and reassumed the hunting pose, fingers above the water. Rowan waited for the splash and snatch, stepped again just as the demon again raised its prey above its missing head.

She was no further than fifteen feet from it; the demon repeated its previous actions with no variation other than the direction in which the severed legs fell.

A step . . .

The demon paused; Rowan froze.

The demon resumed eating. Rowan took one more step.

With its dinner still writhing half in its mouth, the demon freed its arms to spread them wide but not lifted to spray. The arms weaved, lifting, then falling, each in turn.

Human and monster remained for a long moment, during which time the demon’s dinner, its segmented body flexing, escaped from the creature’s mouth to fall on the rocks. There, legless, it calmly attempted to escape, inchworm fashion, bending its remaining hinge to drag its half body back toward the water.

The demon snatched it up again, lifted it to its mouth, and resumed dining, somewhat more slowly.

Her gum-soled boots silent on the rocks, Rowan took another step.

The demon rose from the water. Its voice grew louder, its arms weaved. Jaw clenched, Rowan stood her ground, ready, waiting for the lift that would precede a spray attack.

The demon paused, lowered its voice. It took one step away from her, paused again, then exited the pool.

Watching it go, Rowan passed her sleeve over her brow and was surprised when it came back soaked.

The demon continued down the road, moving at an easy pace now. Rowan paused to stretch every limb, breathe deeply— and then followed at a distance.

Another monster was somewhere near, further ahead; Rowan could hardly miss its approach, humming as it came. Then it appeared, its voice blossoming overtones as it rounded the curve ahead.

It was a smaller animal, slightly over half the first demon’s size. Its body was smoother, and its color was more uniform: a dull bluish gray, where the first demon’s was pale gray and faintly striated with brown. The two creatures approached each other, displaying no more sign of recognition than might two snakes crawling over the same rock.

The smaller creature might be an example of demon offspring. Rowan wondered what to call it: not a cub, a kit, a chick, or a whelp. She settled on “calf.”

As they were about to pass each other, the larger demon stopped and abruptly reached for the smaller; from the suddenness of the movement, Rowan assumed that she was witnessing an attack and prepared to back off if they began using their spray.

Then the two engaged in such activity as demonstrated that the smaller demon was not a calf but a male.

The act was perfunctory. Neither creature showed passion, animal heat, nor even any great interest that Rowan could detect. Coupling took place four times, once with each set of organs, after which the female thrust the male away roughly and continued down the path.

The male remained, crouched on the ground with its knees high all around, its arms tucked in a knot above its body, its fourth organ still half extended. To pass it, Rowan would need to leave the path and circle into some brush, which would give her a less convenient escape route. She waited instead.

The male had retracted its organ, and with its arms still tucked in a knot, was now engaged in flexing and bending all its knees in unison, resulting in its entire smooth, columnar body being thrust up and down, over and over, which action Rowan, inexplicably, found unbearably obscene.

She retreated down the path, stepping backward. She passed the curve, and with the male out of sight she paused, scanning and listening for the approach of other demons.

Only the great hum of the mass of demons somewhere out of sight. No single demon was near. Rowan mastered her disgust, walked cautiously past the curve again, carefully displaying the talisman.

The male demon’s actions were slowing.

Perhaps it merely suffered from cramped knees. As well it might.

And perhaps males were less sensitive, or more sensitive to Rowan’s presence. Perhaps the talisman worked differently on them. The idea ought to be tested.

Rowan moved closer, paused.

The only result was that the male ceased its flexing, which perhaps it had been intending to do of itself. Rowan experimentally took two more steps, then another, which placed her as close to it as her closest approach to the female.

The male raised itself slightly; its arms unknotted, spread, and began to weave; its voice increased in volume.

When the female had done the same before, no attack had followed. Rowan decided that the behavior represented confusion. The male was puzzled, but could not identify any threat.

The arm weaving ceased, but its body began to sway, slightly. It trudged to one side of the path, stopped, trudged to the other side, repeated the actions.