Page 42 of Swordheart #1

Either the fire kept it away, or the slimy creature warned off its fellows. They heard no more alarm calls from the squirrel-beasts, and they were on their way at dawn, not even bothering with breakfast.

A little before noon, they saw what Sarkis had narrowly avoided.

A gaunt deer came out of the trees onto the roadway. It didn’t seem to see them. It moved slowly, not so much limping as picking each leg up like a bag of stones and dropping it again.

“Whoa,” said Brindle, but the ox had already stopped.

A clear coat of jelly-like slime clung to its back and head, over an inch thick. The deer’s eyes, wide and rolling, stared out from under the glaze. Ribs heaved under the coating as it breathed.

“Oh sweet Rat,” breathed Zale. “It’s got one of those things on it.”

They watched the deer stumble across the road. If it was even aware of them, it gave no sign.

Brindle reached under the wagon seat and took out the crossbow. The sound of the string being cranked back was very loud, but the deer’s ears were glued flat against its neck. The ox blew nervously.

The gnole sighted down the crossbow. The three humans sat in utter silence, watching.

No one moved to stop him. Halla’s only thought, through the blind, screaming horror of it all, was that the poor beast should be put out of its misery as fast as possible, and she was glad that Brindle knew how to do it.

The bolt took the deer in the side, just behind the shoulder. The deer staggered sideways, fell, and did not rise again.

They waited.

The slime shuddered and pulled away from the damp hide. A long moment passed, then the oily sky-swimmer rose off the deer’s body and flew ponderously to the trees. It draped itself over a branch, almost like a wet towel put out to dry.

And then it hung there, swaying slightly in the breeze, doing nothing.

“Do we keep going?” asked Sarkis.

“Got to get a deer off the roadway, sword-man.”

Sarkis nodded and jumped down from the wagon. He went to the back of the wagon and came back a moment later carrying a sheet.

“The last of my sheets,” said Zale, a bit sadly.

“I’m not touching that thing bare-handed.”

“No, nor do I begrudge it to you. This journey has simply been very hard on bedding.”

Sarkis dragged the deer’s carcass off the road, grimacing. He looked at the sheet in his hands, then tossed it over the dead animal like a burial shroud.

“It wasn’t going to live much longer anyway,” he said, swinging back up onto the wagon. “It had sores all over its belly. Very odd sores.”

“Odd how?” asked Zale.

Sarkis gave them a level look. “Have you ever seen a lamprey?”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

“There was really no chance that it wouldn’t be horrible, priest.”

“A gnole really doesn’t like these Hills.”

“A human isn’t too thrilled with them, either,” Halla assured him.

“Humans can’t smell, but a fish-lady isn’t completely hopeless.” Halla decided that was a compliment, probably.

Brindle tapped the ox’s flank with the goad and clucked his tongue. The ox ambled forward, while three sets of eyes stayed fixed on the sky-swimmer.

It did not move, except to sway slightly in the wind. None of them made the mistake of thinking it was dead.

“Maybe they’re only really active at night,” murmured Zale. “Like bats.”

“Perhaps it fed all it could on the deer and it’s digesting,” said Halla.

Zale and Sarkis stared at her. Halla said, “What? Haven’t you ever watched a snake eat something?

They lay around afterward and don’t do anything.

” And when they continued to stare at her: “Look, we had a big black rat snake on the farm and one time she got into the henhouse and ate six eggs and I had to pick her up and move her because she was just going to sleep it off in the henhouse otherwise. She had six big lumps in her from the eggs.”

“Farms are far more alarming places than I realized,” said Zale.

“You should see when it’s time to slaughter the chickens.”

“I pray you, do not tell me about the running around with the head cut off. I am aware that they do that, and I would like to not think about it ever again.”

“See, I just kill humans,” said Sarkis. “And once I kill them, they don’t run around or anything. That’s civilized.”

“A gnole hates to interrupt a human’s very important conversation, but there are more things,” said Brindle acidly. “In the trees.”

All three humans fell silent.

The trees were indeed full of… things.

They hung from branches like glass banners, strangely innocuous. The breeze moved the leaves and the sky-swimmers, with the same mindless motion. They looked so much like glass that Halla expected them to make a chiming noise in the wind, but they did not.

There were dozens, possibly even hundreds. They lined the road for forty yards ahead. The roadway was still sunken here, like the hollow way, though only about a foot high on either side of the roadbed.

That foot might as well have been a thousand miles high. They could not turn around without abandoning the wagon.

“What do we do?” whispered Halla.

Zale shook their head. “I don’t know.”

“Forward,” said Sarkis finally. “They aren’t moving. If they start to move, get in the wagon and… ah…” He looked at the ox. “Brindle…”

“A gnole isn’t stupid, sword-man. A gnole will make sure an ox doesn’t end up like a deer. That’s all.”

“Do you think the wagon will keep them out?”

“I don’t know.”

They inched forward down the roadway. Halla had long since stopped noticing the sound of the wagon wheels, but now they seemed incredibly loud, every rattle like a boulder falling down a hillside.

“Cousin didn’t warn a gnole about this, ” muttered Brindle.

“The Hills are very large. There are probably things in it that no human or gnole has ever seen.”

“Or lived to tell about,” said Sarkis.

“You are a constant ray of sunshine.”

Sarkis grunted.

They passed a dead rabbit by the side of the wagon road. It was mostly rags of fur and rib cage. One of the things lay over the top of it, like a thick glaze of ice on bone.

Halla twisted in the wagon seat to look behind them. She could not shake the feeling that the sky-swimmers were going to rise up as soon as she was no longer facing them and that she would turn and see a hundred panes of glass hanging in the air behind the wagon.

The sunlight warped a little as it passed through the sky- swimmers, focusing just a little, as if through a pane of glass. It left irregular spots of light on the road. When one of those lights passed over the back of Halla’s hand, she moved it, feeling ill.

Look at me not screaming, she thought dreamily. I am not screaming at all. I am not curled into a ball and crying. I am being very calm.

Skreek … skreek … skreek … The wheels creaked forward. The trees looked as if they had been caught in a sudden ice storm, with sheets of ice hanging from every branch.

We’re going to die. We are going to die a horrible and stupid death and Cousin Alver will get the house and my nieces will make bad marriages because they don’t have any money and probably one will end up with a man who spends two minutes in bed with her every fortnight, staring at the wall.

And Zale will die and Brindle will die and Sarkis will lay in a sword covered in monsters and no one will find him for a thousand years and even the scholars at the library won’t be able to find the Weeping Lands again.

I’m going to die without ever telling Sarkis that I … what?

I want him? I love him?

Do I love him?

Halla had always found it easy to love. Love was a patient, exasperated emotion, and she knew it well.

She had had so many relatives and she had loved them all, except possibly Alver.

She loved Zale and Brindle and even slow Prettyfoot the ox because you could not help but love people who had lived through such stupid, terrible things with you.

What she felt for Sarkis was something wildly different, as if a branch had been grafted on a familiar tree and had grown a bizarre and unexpected fruit.

It would be incredibly stupid to turn to him right now and tell him that I was hopelessly in love with him.

The hollow way was growing together over the top of the road again. The sky-swimmers lay thick on the branches, the sunlight dancing off their bodies in a lovely, deadly shimmer.

It won’t be any less stupid if you shout that as you’re getting engulfed in predatory slime.

Do you really want to make the last seconds of your life unspeakably awkward?

Well, given that it’s me, if the last seconds of my life aren’t unspeakably awkward, I’m probably doing something wrong …

Skreek … skreek … skreek …

One of the creatures moved in the trees, a slow, languid stretch, like a pane of glass rolling over in its sleep. All four of them stared at it, while the ox walked stolidly onward.

Skreek … skreek … skreek …

“They’re thinning out,” whispered Zale.

Brindle pointed.

The hollow way opened up again a few dozen yards ahead, but one of the swimmers hung partway down over the opening. It was tall enough for a human to pass under, but not the wagon.

Sarkis looked at Brindle. Brindle tapped the goad and nodded.

“Go through,” he whispered, helping Halla and Zale down. “Brindle, do you wish me to do it?”

“No, sword-man. An ox is a gnole’s responsibility.”

Sarkis scooted next to the gnole on the seat, clearly ready to throw himself over Brindle if the creature reacted.

Halla and Zale walked single file beneath the sky-swimmer.

Halla’s heart was pounding so loudly that she thought she might faint.

Viewed from the side, it was about two inches thick, and she could see soft variations in color, which might have been organs or markings or the gods only knew what.

Every pebble under her foot seemed the size of her fist, ready to roll and pitch her forward, face-first, into the creature.

She bent nearly double going under it, ready to crawl on her belly if it would keep the awful thing away.

Sunlight blazed on her face as she stepped free of the hollow way. Halla nearly went to her knees.

She and Zale collapsed against each other, staggering out of the shadows of the hollow. It was impossible to say who was holding the other one up, just that neither of them seemed able to stand alone. Halla could feel the priest’s body shaking, but that was fine because she was, too.

“I must write this all down,” whispered Zale forlornly. “I must write it down and tell the bishop that no one is to ever go into the Vagrant Hills, never ever…”

Halla looked around the clearing. Tall oaks and shaggy-barked hickories murmured in the breeze.

The road continued on ahead, but the trees were empty of sky-swimmers.

She could tell because they were further along into autumn than the others they had seen and many had bare branches, while others blazed copper and orange and gold.

There was space enough to turn the wagon around, ironically. She didn’t think it would be an issue. She would have abandoned a dozen wagons to never walk through that tunnel again.

The wagon wheels started up. Halla bit down on her knuckles.

The ox emerged from the hollow way and then, very slowly, the sky-swimmer’s body began to rise. Halla watched, paralyzed, as Brindle lifted it up on the end of the ox goad.

Will it wake up? It’s got to wake up. It’ll wake up and then it’ll wake the others and then they’ll come for us …

The roof cleared the beast by inches. Brindle hung from the side of the wagon, hitching himself along one handed, keeping the ox goad lifted.

Sarkis lay flat across the wagon seat. The edges of the swimmer rippled, less like water and more like a horse’s hide when a fly walked on it.

It squirmed restlessly and then… then…

The wagon creaked free. Brindle clung to the back of the wagon, panting like a frightened dog. The ox, seeing grass ahead and having no driver to stop it, dropped its head and began chewing meditatively.

“Brindle, that was amazing!” whispered Halla.

The gnole gave her a fanged smile. “Didn’t feel amazing,” he said. He stamped his feet and rubbed the fur of his arms against the grain, shivering.

“I suggest we don’t linger,” said Sarkis. “I don’t want to be anywhere near these things when they start to wake up.”

There was no argument. Brindle wiped the end of the ox goad in the grass repeatedly to clean it, then grimaced and took out a knife. He whittled the end down to clean wood with a few rapid strokes. “Don’t like that stuff,” he said. “Don’t want it touching an ox.”

They climbed back up. Brindle tapped the clean goad on the ox’s flank and the beast walked forward, reluctantly abandoning the grass.

They made forward progress for perhaps half an hour, while the trees changed color around them.

“Sweet blessed Rat, it’s narrowing again,” said Zale disgustedly. “Are we doomed to drive through hollow ways forever?”

“The branches up ahead are completely bare,” said Halla. “Maybe we’re getting back to normal hills. Or at least normal winter.”

Skreek … skreek … skreek …

The branches were indeed bare. They formed a familiar lattice overhead.

“I could get to hate this place,” said Sarkis, to no one in particular.

Brindle suddenly sat up straight, sniffing. He looked puzzled.

“Great god, now what? More of them?”

The gnole shook his head. “No. Smells… familiar.”

“What?”

Brindle shrugged.

They made a few more wagonlengths of progress and the trees began to open up. Halla looked off to their left and saw a small pond, the surface frozen in slushy ridges, and a pile of branches.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” she said.

Possibly because she never swore, the other three gave her the attention this deserved.

“Sarkis,” she said, pointing, “will you go look and tell me if that’s where I think it is?”

He followed the line of her finger to the branches and said something in his own language that didn’t sound like anything anyone would want to translate.

“You don’t have to get down,” said Zale, twisting their braid around their hand. “I can see a hand from here. Unless people are stuffing dead bodies into identical ponds all over the woods…”

“The Hills turned us around,” said Halla. “They let us go.”

“A gnole will believe it when a gnole sees it,” muttered Brindle.

Twenty minutes later, he believed it. The ox ducked its head under an overgrown set of branches, and they emerged onto the road to Amalcross.