We had no other attacks during the remainder of the night, and when we arrived at what passed for daylight in this dead forest I found Nemmy had survived the passage of time.
“Tougher than I look, I guess,” he muttered. “Don’t know why you guys were all so worried, I just got the wind knocked out of me.” He grinned lopsidedly when he said this, but his good nature didn’t disguise the nature of his wounds. He was still bleeding, and his coughing resulted in a stained kerchief.
Horace and Kineta were still tending him, so I pulled Lotonna aside for a moment.
“I’ve seen my share of wounded in the past, and cured my fair share of them when I had the ability. Some worse than him.”
He looked slowly back to the small huddle of them. “I know what you’re going to say, and I have thought about it as well.”
“Then we go back, we take him to town. We have no choice.”
“That is not what I was going to suggest.”
“But he’ll die without shelter. I guarantee it.”
The minotaur brought his gaze back to me. “Yes, he will. But that’s not what this is about. You all will go on, I will carry him back to Shady Hollow, then rejoin you.”
“I think they’d go for that even less than just letting him die here.”
He smiled, the large canines showing through. “Which of us is best off navigating this maze than I? Which of us belongs here as a resident more than I do?”
I was inclined to agree with those points, but they didn’t necessarily make his entire premise correct. “I don’t think they’ll go for a simple ‘you go back and then find us’ approach.”
“We shall see. He weighs no more than a pup, and though my people walk hours after birth, our cows carry the young for a great deal of time when traveling. I can do no less.” He motioned I should follow, and we walked back to rejoin the two humans tending the injured Halfwise.
“I’ve been listening,” Kineta said without looking up. “No. Out of the question.”
“But Kineta,” Lotonna reached out his hand to her. “We can rig my pack with leg holes, he can ride there easily.”
“No, you won’t go alone. One wrong step and both of you are lost.” She cast her eyes up at him seriously. “You’ll take Horace, we split up.”
He stood up. “Explain, please,” he said.
“If anyone can evade pursit, it is I and Azrael. Between us we are capable of avoiding most hazards, and I can always port us out. You, traveling alone, are vulnerable. Like it or not. You can mutually cover each other while making the trip back, and his abilities as a tracker will help you re-find us.”
He contemplated these statements for a little wihle.
“And,” she went on, “even if the villagers dealt with you fairly before, alone they might not be so inclined to treat you well, and by extension, Nemmy.”
That clinched it for him. He nodded agreement. “All right. Then we do this your way.”
She smiled, the first time I’d seen her do in a long while. “As well you should.”
Lotonna grunted, and turned to get his pack from the ground. He upturned it, spilling everything on the ground. “Please take from that what you can carry, I will get a new pack in town.”
I extracted a large sack from my Haversack. “Whatever you don’t take, we can put in here and you can take it back when we rejoin.” I started shuffling his gear into the sack while he cut a hole in the bottom of either side of his backpack. I also produced a blanket which I handed him. “For padding,” I added.
He accepted it and did the best he could to fashion a cradle of sorts in the backpack, then put it on. He then sat on the ground and leaned forward.
“No time like the present,” I said. “Just like a little child’s saddle.”
“Shut it, Az” Nemmy mumbled from behind me. “Just get me in the damned thing.”
With Horace and I on either side, and Kineta making sure everything cleared and sat right, Nemmy slid into the makeshift carrier, legs hanging out each side. Lotonna stood, and Horace with him, shouldering his own pack.
“He really does look like an overgrown infant,” Horace grinned.
“Grrr,” the tiny man mumbled from his half-concealed position behind the minotaur. “Up yours, sticks.”
Lotonna chuffed a few times. “Don’t make me laugh too hard, it may hurt the baby.” As soon as he said this, a small hand reached out of the pack and clubbed him on the ear. He didn’t budge.
“Are you ready?” He asked Horace. The man nodded.
“We’ll leave a trail as best we can,” I offered.
“And we’ll return to you as soon as we are sure he’ll be cared for.” Horace said.
The two of them then ducked away, leaving sight quickly in the direction we came from.
I started gathering up everything from Lotonna’s pack,
“Alone at last,” I said, half-joking, while I slid thesackfull of gear into the satchel. “Have you forgiven me yet?”
“I suppose,” she replied. “But Az, your asking me to stay behind, that hurts me. Even if we weren’t so close, we’re still friends, and friends help each other. We expect to. When you told me you didn’t want my help, it felt like you were saying you didn’t want me around.”
“You saw what happened last night, that thing could have killed us all. I don’t want to see you hurt like Nemmy, Kineta.” I paused to look up at her. “I don’t know what I’d do if something like that happened to you.”
“Hopefully, you’d kill whatever was doing it to me, you dullard.” She threw a stick at me – gently. I caught it and dropped it beside me. “What do you think I’d feel like if you went on alone and never came back, huh? Ever think of that?”
I had to admit that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, and said as much.
“Oh gods, you men are so flippingly stupid sometimes,” she burst out in frustration. “Always worried about everyone else because of how you’d feel, but you never really consider the feelings of others around you.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” I pointed out.
“I know, it’s my way. Now finish that and let’s get moving.” She had been getting Nemmy’s stuff together. I did as she told me, sliding the last of Lotonna’s gear into the Haversack.
I stood up, and kicked dirt over the embers of the fire. “Okay, I’m ready.”
We set out, hopefully in the right direction.
* * *
It was two days before we found the river. A swollen, pustulent flow of brown and yellow water, with something large and mobile shifting beneath the diseased currents. I loaned my boots to Kineta for a moment, and with a running start she crossed the width of the channel without harm, flitting a good twenty feet over the scabbed surface. Once she was safely across, I stepped through a rift to appear beside her. She gave me a dour look while she handed me back the boots.
“You could at least make it look difficult, you know.” She thrust the boots at me, forcing the breath from my lungs.
“How else would I keep a reputation as the greatest magician there ever was, dearie?” I gave her a deeply exaggerated grin and a half-bow.
“I’m really curious…” she said, picking up a stick from the ground.
“NononoWait!” I tried to stop her, but too late, she’d thrown the stick out over the river already.
I watched with horror – and I have to admit a certain level of curiosity – as the thing spun end around, twirling through the air before settling slowly to splash on the surface.
The river exploded. Something truly massive – perhaps as large as Rithzalgor was tall – churned the water into a sewage-laden froth, throwing gobbets of stagnant water and scabrous foam sailing across the landscape. I ducked a particularly large glob and grabbed Kineta’s hand to run.
But not before I saw the thing rise up out of the river before us. If you were to cut the toes off a giant foot and mount eyes in their sockets, that was the head that snaked up out of the disgusting porridge. It hung from a neck jointed so wrongly that it made me feel sick just to look at it swaying there. Beneath the head, another pair of tentacles rose, each sporting what I had to assume was a mouth, a serrated “v” lined with ridgelike teeth and dripping with brown goo. It made a noise like a dying elephant.
It began to move towards us, far more rapidly than I would have liked, tens of other unadorned tentacles whipping at the surface of the water.
“RunohRunohpleaseJustRUN!” I pulled Kineta’s arm practically from it’s socket I moved so fast. My boots still in my other hand, I felt the hard, dead wood of the trees beneath my feet cutting into the flesh.
A little pain now versus dead shortly later? I know which end of that equation I’m standing on.
Kineta, to her credit, didn’t look back once. Her only response to my urging was: “Oh my, yes!” She ran as quickly as I did – her slippers at least offered some protection from the rough wood beneath us.
After perhaps five minutes of running, my lungs were burning from the exertion and my feet were flaring in pain. I signaled to Kineta that we should stop. We slowed down, and drew up, and both of us listened. Nothing arose over the sound of our ragged breathing. Then again, I’ve never been the best at listening for things.
“Oh goodness, your feet!” She exclaimed after a moment. I looked down, and saw beneath my feet the ground was stained, red and glistening. The pain was there, but not as dire as it surely looked.
“It doesn’t hurt that much,” I said, sitting down on a root and looking at the bottoms of my feet. My right had a deep gash across the heel, but the left was where the real damage was. The front half looked like hamburger, at least four large splinters and who knows how many smaller ones embedded in the raw flesh. “Then again, I have a high pain tolerance,” I finished.
“We have to tend those. Now.” She snapped her fingers and pointed as if such royal gestures were purely second nature to her. “Stay seated.”
I withdrew my first-aid kit from my pack while she extracted a few things of her own. I poured some raw alcohol over both, and took a long, thin knife out to start digging out the splinters. She came at me with a large jug of some white powder.
“Roll over,” she said.
“Honey, that might be your way, but it isn’t mine,” I said with a laugh.
“Cute, now let’s be serious. Roll over, can’t put this on the bottoms of your feet if they’re facing down.”
“Did you use this stuff on Nemmy?”
“Yeah, and it probably saved his life. Now roll and shut up for a few. Maybe find something to bite down on,” this last as an afterthought.
“Bite down on? What are you talking abOWWW CRAP THAT HURT!” She’d grabbed my right foot by the ankle and sprinkled some of the powder on the gash there. I could feel it sizzling, acidic, eating the flesh away. When I looked, though, my foot was still there.
“Az, spine up a bit. You people used to rule the world, you know?” She grinned at my discomfort. Vicious woman.
“Recognizing the value of pain is the first step to defeating it,” I responded. She grabbed the other foot.
“Good, because this is going to hurt a lot more,” and with that, she dug out a splinter about the size of my arm. In spite of the pain, I bit back my commentary.
“I have to say, Az, you know how to show a girl a nice time. What was that thing back there?”
“Don’t know, but if the trees hold giant demonic spiders, and there’s something moving under a river that ugly, it’s probably both unhealthy and strong.” I thought about it for a moment. “I can’t even begin to know what to call that. I don’t even know if it was a mutant form of something else, or what.”
If she agreed, I couldn’t tell. I just beat my head sideways against the tree roots I was leaning on while she did her best to amputate my foot. Eventually she finished, and wrapped it up ina clean cloth bandage.
“Try that, can you get a boot on it?” She was watching me carefully. I stood gingerly on my complaining feet. They didn’t appreciate that at all, and it let me know in no uncertain terms.
“I can probably get my boots on them, but walking is not going to be fun.” I thought about it for a while. “I guess I can rift my way around, we’re not moving fast through these trees anyway. That’ll reduce the steps I have to take.”
She was fishing around in her side-satchel. “Yeah, hold on. Got it.” She pulled out a small flask. “Take a little swig off that.”
She passed it to me. I took a smell of it and almost passed out. “Holy…what’s in that?”
“Didn’t tell you to sniff it, told you to drink some.” She eyed me crossly.
I did as she ordered. It tasted like the dirt from a coffin, mixed with horse urine. Neither of which I’ve tasted, I should add. But if I did, I imagine that’d be it.
As it went down, my guts felt as though they were on fire…for about two seconds. Then they went numb. Then my fingers went numb, and my tongue, and finally the pain in my feet fell away, receding into some inner distance so that I could tell they hurt, but the pain was so far away that I could ignore it without too much trouble.
Of course, if something ripped off my tail at the root I probably wouldn’t know it, either.
“Waz in dat shtuff?” I marveled at my sudden lack of language skills.
“Little of this, little of that,” she said. “Are you coherent?”
“Dong mum,” I said.
“Hmm. Yeah. Well, let’s go.” She stashed the flask. “You better rift along the way, take fewer steps like you said. Just don’t leave me alone, or I’ll incinerate you.”
Turns out that I was right. I actually covered more ground faster by rifting, covering ten, then twenty feet at a shot. I even eventually stretched my placements right and was reliably getting thirty feet at a hit, which I was somewhat proud of. Kineta kept up well, scrambling over the tree roots and between boles without any trouble.
After an amount of time that I didn’t really track well – courtesy of Kineta’s little anesthetic – the light began dimming, and we set up camp. This time I picked a spot between two trees, one fallen against the other. If for no other reason than to reduce the number of directions we could be attacked from, it gave me comfort to have a makeshift roof over our heads.
I was a little surprised to find the night pass uneventfully for us. Well, uneventfully meaning we weren’t interrupted from the outside. I was interrupted about six hours into the evening by the wearing-off of the numb-juice, and I really had little appreciation for sleep after that.
The following morning, Kineta dosed me up again, and we set out, more slowly this time. She was almost out of bandages, as was I, and we wanted to avoid possibly forcing me to need another.
About mid-day, Horace and Lotonna caught up with us. I was quite surprised they were so fast, and expressed it. Both were panting heavily, and wet with perspiration.
Lotonna looked guiltily at us. “I got hungry. Ate Nemmy.” He laughed at my dubious expression.
Horace laughed as well. “No, we ran.”
Kineta looked startled. “You ran?”
Lotonna nodded. “We already knew the way, and didn’t want you two getting too far ahead of us, so we ran.”
Horace sat himself down for a moment. “And now that we’ve caught up with you, if you don’t mind we’d like to rest. For about a week. What the hell is wrong with your feet, by the way?” He motioned at my bulging boots.
We told him. Well, Kineta told him, because all I could manage to get out to start with was “We god dafed adda bibbah,” and he went straight to Kineta after that.
Resting sounded fine to me, and Kineta being the only fresh one among us decided better to park it rather than listen to the three of us bitch about the journey. So we got settled, and waited things out while Horace and Lotonna and I got a little more shut-eye.
When I woke up, it was night, and I was probably a few hours away from Kineta’s happy juice to wear off. Lotonna was shaking me gently. “Your turn, Azrael. Watch time.” I nodded and drank some water, wincing at the bitterness of it. Something wasn’t quite right about the way the water tasted, but I couldn’t say what. Might well have been the remnants of the horse-pee potion Kineta was foisting off on me.
I scanned around in the darkness, and saw nothing had really changed. In spite of the chill, we had no fire – we’d all agreed it was a bit too risky given the critter it had called down on us last time. Well, we were assuming there was some relationship between our fire and the attack, and there was no point in taking unnecessary risks.
The trees hadn’t changed since I went to sleep. The darkness was – well, it was dark. Lotonna had used a small stone he kept with an enchantment of light on it to see, which he wrapped up as soon as he sat down and leaned back.
While I sat there, looking around, I had a really strange feeling – not like being watched, per se, but like being sought after. It lasted about an hour, I suppose, like an itch under my left ear. I kept finding myself scratching there absent-mindedly with the tip of my tail, trying to come to grips with whatever strangeness was pulling at me.
Before long light began to seep back into the forest, and my view of the trees showed them not as a total blackness but instead as a set of deep, charcoal grays. As I was about to rise, the itch turned into a pressure, as if someone were leaning in and pressing their hand to my ear. A moment later, a voice spoke in my head:
“Fellbane now in Al’Veydra. There’s trouble here. Come fastest. You are needed now. Feywild gone insane, bleeding through. Respond now to this message. J’Tiel.”
I recognized the sending for what it was, and replied vocally to the spell. “On my way from Deadweld. Timing uncertain. Days or weeks. See you soon.”
Lotonna apparently wasn’t asleep, and heard me. “What was that you said?”
“News. We’re going the wrong way.”
* * *
We made best time back to Shady Hollow, fortunately remaining unmolested during the trip. I couldn’t help feel we were leaving something behind, something terrible, but given what was ahead, one extra hurdle to leap before then was a welcome change.
Once in the Hollow though, a new challenge arose – Nemmy was still off his feet. In the end, it was decided that Lion’s Lunge would follow me to Al’Veydra when he was mobile, and that I would go on ahead via a portal gate that Kineta would prepare for me. We said our farewells, and I made sure she had components and a good copy of the sigil set.
But when I arrived, Al’Veydra was not the same as it had been.
