The Shadow and Night (36 page)

“Beware the weathering in the Made Worlds,” grunted Vero as he looked up at the crags above them, but there was no humor in his voice.

Increasingly as they climbed on, Merral became conscious of how his legs and back ached, how his lungs hurt, how he wanted to stop, and how water—he had ceased to care whether it was rain or sweat—was running down his back and chilling him. And when he looked down and back he saw, through the veil of rain and mist and cloud, a dizzying drop through green lines of trees and sheer rock ramparts to the braided, tarnished-silver line of the river.

Slowly though, they made progress, and finally, after nearly three hours of climbing up the sill, Vero nudged Merral. “Not far now,” he gasped. “We are at the level of the gorge.”

Merral looked to his right to see that they had indeed reached the sharp notch through which the river tumbled urgently. He breathed a silent phrase of thanks, and a few minutes later, they pulled themselves over a final rock level. There, below the wet and drooping branches of the fir trees, they could see that the ground fell away gently northward and that several hundred meters ahead of them lay the still black waters of Daggart Lake with dense pine forests clustered around it. To the left the ground rose up steeply through more trees to a steep-sided, flat-topped summit.

Weary, heedless of the rain, Merral slumped down flat on the wet mossy ground. He had to lie down, he had to rest, and he had to adjust his backpack.

Vero tapped him gently on the shoulder. “No! Don't lie down. You are too vulnerable. Sit!”

In a sudden surge of emotion, Merral felt certain that Vero was going mad and a wave of anger rose in him.
I have had
enough
of this crazy sentinel lunacy.

He was about to say something when he looked up at Vero's mud-stained face and saw his mouth drop open and his eyes widen.

Suddenly, Vero was on all fours, cringing low on the ground.

“Stay down!” he hissed in a fierce, urgent tone.

Merral, still lying flat, pressed himself against the ground.

“S–slowly,” Vero whispered, a hint of a stutter in his words, “look behind you.”

Merral rolled over and stared toward the lake.

Along the water's edge, dark tall figures were moving.

For a second
figures
and
moving
were the only words that came to him because his eyes could not make sense of what he saw. The figures were large, walked on two feet, and had an upright stance, but they were not—and he knew it instantly—human. It was not just that they were a dark brownish black in color and were covered in hair, but that they had the wrong proportions, the wrong posture, and the wrong motion. Their arms seemed to reach well below the waist, there was an odd stooping character to their stance, and they had a peculiar loping gait that no human legs could ever have imitated. There was an oddity too about their heads that, at this distance, he could recognize but not define.

Merral realized with a sharp thrill of horror that these were definitely not men. But then neither were they apes; not only was the shape wrong, but there was a purposefulness, a sense of mission in their motion that he had never seen in an ape.

“Vero,” he heard himself whisper, “what
are
they?”

He saw that the figures were moving toward the sides of the gorge overlooking where the river began its plunge over Carson's Sill. “I–I wish I knew,” Vero answered in numbed tones. “I know less now than I did. But if I do not know what they are, I can guess what they are after. . . .”

He stared at Merral. “They are after us.”

13

M
erral gaped at the creatures again, oddly aware that his throat was dry. The creatures were big, nearly half as high again as a big man, and they appeared to have powerful muscles. It was all too easy to imagine one stamping on a dog and hurling it effortlessly high into a tree. Suddenly Merral became conscious of his heart pounding in his chest, his skin tingling, and his stomach twisting on itself. The deep fear that he had sensed existed last night now seemed very close.
I am really afraid,
he realized.

“T–time to get out, Merral,” Vero whispered in shaken tones. Merral found a strange comfort in the fact that his friend was also very scared.

“Yes, a good idea. I have a reluctance to try and dialogue. How many do you think there are?”

“Six at least. The source of the hair you found. . . .”

Merral rolled away and looked to their left. He forced himself to ignore the thudding in his chest and to reason out what to do next.

“We must plan, Vero,” he said, surprised by how level his voice sounded. “We cannot be picked up here easily by any plane or rotorcraft—there is too much vegetation. And we are too near those things for my liking.”

Vero, still staring down to the lake, just nodded.

Merral looked up through the trees. “We must climb again, I am afraid. See how this hill is flat topped?”

“Yes. . . . They are dropping into the gorge.”

Merral looked round to see the last of the creatures lowering itself over the rocks with a disturbingly human motion of the forearms.

“Yes, but we must move. They will find out shortly that we are gone and will trace our route.”

Vero looked up at the summit, his face bizarrely transfigured by the mud. “It's another few hundred meters up. It's steep at the top. Can we climb it?”

“I hope so. I can see a crack of some sort. I think we call for a rescue pickup as soon as we can get up there. We'd better go.”

They set off and Merral led the way, trying to avoid making any noise and vigilantly looking ahead between the trees. He was aware of Vero following closely behind him. They wound their way up through the firs, and soon the view of the lake disappeared behind the wet foliage. With the initial shock now waning, Merral asked himself,
Do they have a sense of smell? How far can they see? Could they track us up this way?
Mindful of his fear, conscious of tired limbs and of the soft rain wetting his face, Merral forced himself onward.

Ahead through the trees, he could see two house-size blocks of pitted, charcoal black lava that had come to rest after rolling down the hill. In between the great rocks, Merral could now see properly up to the top of the hill. The cloud was slowly lifting, and he could make out a steep, bare slope of broken rubble capped by a slablike expanse of rock. In the thick lava unit that formed the top of the hill, there was a dark, slitlike fracture in which small trees grew. Merral motioned Vero to stop, noticing that on his tired face the rain was running down and mingling with the mud.
I must look like that.

“Look, that's the way, Vero,” he said as he carefully looked up the hill. “Through this gap in the rocks, up to the crevasse, and then on to the summit plateau.”

“I can see. But what if the top is occupied?” Vero's voice was urgent.

For a brief moment, a spasm of despair ran through Merral's mind. “No,” he answered after a moment's evaluation of the possibility, “I think it's unlikely. It's bare rock. They like cover.”

“So we believe,” Vero answered stiffly. “But anyway, we have little choice.”

“I'm tempted to call in a rescue now. What do you think?”

Vero thought. “Not yet,” he said, pulling off his backpack and taking out his water bottle. “I must have a drink. I don't want to use a signal here. On the chance they can locate us on it. Besides, if the top is occupied, we may want to retreat back to somewhere else.” He hurriedly swallowed some water.

Merral flung his own pack off his back, pulled out his own bottle, and took two hasty mouthfuls. “Fine, but let's keep moving. They may have realized by now that we aren't coming up through the gorge.”

“Yes.” Vero slung the pack on one shoulder and started to walk ahead.

Merral replaced his own bottle in his backpack and put it back on his shoulders. He was about to follow Vero when he stopped. Somewhere there was a noise: a faint scrabbling that made his spine shiver. Merral looked around, conscious of the darkness under the firs about him. A dozen paces ahead Vero was starting to wind his way between the high, overhanging dark rocks.

There was another noise.

Something dropped down from the top of the rocks. Something that, in the fraction of the second before it struck the ground, appeared to Merral to be like a child wrapped in shiny brown rags.

“Look out!”

Vero turned as the shape fell toward him and stepped back awkwardly. The creature landed lightly on all fours ahead of him and sprang upright.

Now the shape became clear to Merral, as if the image had just focused. It was a small creature, smaller than Vero, with squat brown legs, long arms, and hands that seemed to swing and thrust as it hopped strangely forward. Despite the small size, there was an air of menace and aggression about it.

Merral began to run toward Vero. As he did, he saw the creature suddenly bound forward with a surprising speed, holding its hands out in front as if they were weapons. Vero sidestepped clumsily, swinging his backpack off his shoulder at the brown thing. The pack struck the creature on the chest with a thud and it staggered back, flailing its arms and displaying oddly flattened hands. As Merral bounded forward, he realized that he had no strategy.

With a wild chirring noise, the creature flung the pack aside and sprung to its feet with a bounce. It began to advance on Vero, who had moved back against the side of the left-hand rock. There, realizing that he was unable to retreat farther, he reached for his bush knife. As he pulled it out, the creature leapt at him. A polished brown arm flicked out and, even as the blade extended, the knife was swept clean out of Vero's hand. It whistled overhead and rattled down against the rocks. Vero yelped and snatched his hand back. From the creature came a strange, high-pitched hissing noise.

Suddenly the creature seemed to recognize Merral's approach. It swiveled its head and looked at him with small eyes as black as shadows. Merral, coming to a halt just in front of it, could see that the head was small, vaguely reptilian in its profile, and covered with brown, waxy plates. It was like nothing he had seen or imagined.

With a fast but somehow ungainly shuffle, the creature turned round to face him, its legs clattering woodenly against the stones, its arms opening wide. Merral was oddly aware of details: the rain dribbling down the carapace, a yellow scratch on a chest plate, the black, lidless, deep-set eyes with a ring of plates around them.

The strange and terrible thought that he had to fight it came into Merral's mind. Reality seemed to have fled. Merral fumbled for the bush knife, his hand closing tight on the handle, his wet fingers reaching for the release button. With a sharp click the gray blade extended. He held it out and moved toward the thing. As if recognizing danger, the creature raised its strange arms high.

Now, as they faced each other, Merral saw the creature properly for the first time. Yet he felt that even now he saw it only as series of impressions of separate parts, as if its unfamiliarity made it impossible to see as a whole. He was struck by the polished-wood appearance of the creature and the massive segmented platelike sheets over the front of the chest that fused into a single hard vertical ridge along the abdomen. What made the most impression on him, though, was not the grotesque physical appearance, but the sense of malignant intelligence in the recessed, tar black, resinous eyes. What he faced was not simply an animal.

The hands moved slowly, and Merral saw that there were three fingers vaguely like those of a man and then a thumb and forefinger whose matching flat inner sections made a pair of blades with serrated edges like a pair of wire cutters. As he watched, the creature seemed to flick them open and shut almost as if to demonstrate them. It came to Merral as a cold fact that the gape was quite wide enough to take off an ankle or a wrist. Various deep, hissing noises came from the wide horizontal slit of the mouth, and Merral wondered if there was a language in them.

As the thing inched closer, making an odd clicking noise as its plates rubbed together, Merral waved the dull metal blade uncertainly in front of him. He saw new details: the swollen and armored joints of limbs that approximated elbows and knees and the clawlike feet that pivoted oddly at the ankles.

“
Lord,
” he prayed aloud, “I don't know what to do.”

The creature took another rolling step forward, its body swaying slightly from side to side. Then it lowered itself down on bended leg joints.

It sprang.

Merral leaped aside, swinging the blade out as he jumped. The blade struck a plate on the creature's arm and, with a dull clatter, bounced off. Merral landed awkwardly on the wet grass and slid into a half crouch. In a strange hopping motion, the thing was bearing upon him.
I must not get knocked down.
With his left hand he found the edge of a rock and pushed himself upright. As he did, the creature lunged again.