Queen of Demons (54 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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Sharina had been following the wounded hunter for … she couldn't be sure. It probably hadn't been many miles, but it had been longer, harder work than she was used to.
Unarc moved like a ghost. Only occasionally did the
hunter remember to look back to see that the girl was keeping up with him. It was a matter of fierce pride to Sharina that she always
was
there when Unarc checked.
She hadn't seen Hanno since the three of them set off this morning. She hadn't expected to. Unarc could guide the girl, while the big hunter scouted unseen for anything that lay in wait or followed them. Nonnus would have done the same.
Sharina smiled. Indeed, perhaps Nonnus was
doing
the same.
Unarc paused in a grove of elephant-ear plants and raised his knife in warning. The wicked hook caught enough light to wink like a snake's eye.
Sharina stopped in place. She opened her mouth to breathe silently, then turned her head to watch their backtrail.
Nothing. She felt no hint of danger. Thanks to Nonnus, she was sure she could trust her instincts—not that she wouldn't continue to use her conscious senses the best ways she could.
Sharina looked at Unarc, then crept to his side when he nodded her forward. The knife gestured into the tangle of mangrove roots growing out into a great river. They'd been paralleling the water for most of the day, but this was the first time Sharina had seen rather than merely heard it.
A strikingly ugly animal waddled into sight through the mangroves. It was probably the weight of an ox but it was built more along the lines of a giant hedgehog, broad and low to the ground. Horny spikes stuck out along both sides of the creature, with particularly long ones projecting from the shoulders. It was munching the last of a cycad frond as it ambled along, drawing in more of the tough vegetation with each front-to-back motion of its broad jaws.
“That's where we get the horn,” Unarc whispered. Once the bald hunter came to believe that the slaughter at the baobab tree was Sharina's doing, he'd treated her
with respect—but no longer as a source of the crippling embarrassment with which he viewed women. “And you might know, we'd run across one as fine as I've seen in seven years on Bight right now when I'm outa the horn business.”
The browser vanished into foliage on the other side of the root maze. It amazed Sharina that something so large and apparently clumsy could move unhindered through the dense mass.
She whispered, “Its armor looks—”
Ugly as tree bark
was the phrase her tongue started to form.
“—dull.”
Unarc nodded. “Likewise tortoiseshell,” he said. “You take the outer rind off and polish her up and in the sunlight you never seen anything so pretty. Which we don't do, since it'd get scratched to hell in the shipping, like enough, but you take it from me that was a first-quality critter.”
Sharina jerked around, grasping the Pewle knife's hilt. Hanno, emerging from between a pair of ginger bushes without disturbing any of the dew-dripping pink flowers, grinned in wry approval. “Good thing you got her along, Unarc,” he said. “If I'd been a Monkey, I guess you'd be dinner now unless they decided to cook you first.”
“Sister take you, Hanno!” the bald man said. “I knowed it was you all the time!”
Sharina took her hand away from the knife. She didn't know if Unarc's statement was true. Anyway, she was glad to see the big hunter again.
“There's no Monkeys up or down the river,” Hanno said, setting aside his humor. “I figure we can get to the top while there's still daylight. Sister take me if I don't think every Monkey on the island's walked this way in the past month! And no tracks going back.”
Unarc shook his bald head. “Well, something had to be happening or—”
His knife waggled in the direction of his strapped arm.
“—I wouldn't be sporting this. Let's go see what it is.”
“The top of what?” Sharina said. She didn't need her hand held, but the two hunters were so used to acting alone and with similar uncommunicative men that they didn't tell her things that she might need to know for all their sakes. The men were apt to speak in a monosyllabic code that an outsider lacked the background to break.
Hanno nodded to indicate he understood and approved of the question. Under other circumstances Sharina would have liked to throttle the hunter—but she was here by his sufferance and free because of the risks Hanno had taken in the same unthinking way that he sometimes treated her as a dim-witted girl-child.
“This whole north end of the island is volcanoes,” he said aloud. “The bay where it seems the Monkeys're headed, that's one too, only the north wall's been eat away by the sea. We're going up a cone on the side of that one, and we're going up in style where the critters won't see us coming.”
Unarc nodded solemnly and said, “The lava came up the top and made a tube when it ran down the side. The outside froze to rock and the inside run on till it hit the river and the water carried it away. I seen it happen—not here, I mean, this is old, but the other side of the island the first summer I come to Bight.”
It struck Sharina forcibly that though she thought of the hunters as unsophisticated—even by her own rural standards—they'd seen things with their own eyes that the scholars of this and former times had never dreamed of. They were savage—she'd seen proof enough of that in Hanno's collection of teeth—but they weren't savages, and they were neither of them stupid. Even before this change in the Hairy Men's conduct, the forests of Bight would have shown little mercy for fools.
“We go into the river,” Hanno said, “duck underwater to get into the tube, and then we just climb. Hope you don't mind getting a little wet.”
He grinned at the joke. A bath in the river wouldn't make Sharina any wetter than the daily rainstorms did.
Sharina grinned back. “Looks like there's enough mud in the current,” she said, “that I won't get nearly as wet as when it rains. My friend Cashel would want to plow it.”
Cashel's name gave her a pang. She'd let a wizard's false semblance lead her away from searching for her friend. What had happened to Nimet later didn't change the fact of Sharina's own faithlessness.
“You hold on to my spear while I find the entrance underwater,” Hanno said. “It's black as a yard up a pig's—”
He caught himself and cleared his throat. “Well, you can't see a thing in the water. Though come to think, why don't you hold on to my belt instead. And Unarc'll follow us.”
The bald man nodded agreement. “You can't see nothing when you're inside neither,” he said. “Not till you get most of the way up where there's holes. But it's not like you can lose your way once you get started.”
Sharina wondered what sort of creatures might lair in the utter darkness of the lava tube. She smiled faintly. Nothing nearly as terrible as Hanno and his great spear, of that she was certain.
“I'm ready,” she said aloud. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the hunter's lizardskin belt.
They stepped into the river. The unexpectedly fierce current pushed Sharina's stiffened left arm against Hanno until she could catch herself and lean backward against the flow. The hunter didn't seem to notice.
They walked twenty yards downstream at a deliberate pace. The water rose to Sharina's mid-chest and once—briefly—to her neck, but she was never in danger of going under. They passed the intruding mangroves. If Sharina had been alone she'd have picked her way hand over hand, clinging to the roots in the same fashion she'd have used a similar web on a vertical climb if it were available.
Beyond was a mass of palms whose trunks sprang three and four together from a common center, but between the mangroves and the palms was a hump of black rock to which only ferns and lesser growth clung. It climbed the slope to vanish in the taller vegetation.
“Here we go, missie,” Hanno warned. He walked deeper into the stream, then—as Sharina's head started to go under—deliberately ducked. She followed, trying to keep her feet on a slick clay bottom scoured by the current's rush.
The water seeping between Sharina's tight lips had a brackish tang. She closed her eyes, gripped the hunter's belt, and kept her other hand on the pommel of the Pewle knife for the comfort the contact gave her.
She couldn't be sure, but she thought Hanno had changed direction. The current lessened. The bottom became rock and rougher, a good surface for the feet of a girl from Barca's Hamlet.
Sharina's head broke surface again. “Lady, I thank you for Your blessings!” she said. Her shout echoed as a trembling chorus up the lava pipe in darkness.
She let go of Hanno's belt and walked up the slanting path. The slap of the tiny waves her motion stirred grew into the mutterings of a crowd. Even Sharina's breath and that of her companions swelled like the winter wind.
“Nothing keeping us here,” Hanno said. His soft leather boots squelched as he began walking. Sharina followed, and behind she heard Unarc.
The roof of the lava tube was too high for Sharina to reach with her fingers outstretched; the floor was a boulevard on which the three of them could have walked abreast if they'd chosen to do so. Sharina kept track of her companions by cues she couldn't have put precise names to. Sound was one of them, of course, though the echoes and counterechoes of her own feet would have made that alone a treacherous guide. Sometimes she thought she could feel the warmth of the hunters' bodies; and sometimes she just
knew
.
She smiled. Nonnus would have understood. She could feel his nearness in this physical darkness as she had in the spiritual darkness when she waited for death in the baobab's heart.
The way upward was no steeper than the meadows where the sheep of the borough grazed. The companions didn't speak to one another, but Sharina became aware of both the soughing of wind that blew across the open mouth of the tube and the subtle changes in pressure on her eardrums as the river swelled and sank below them.
It didn't matter that they couldn't see. “Up” was a direction as good as any their eyes could have given them. Occasionally there was a pothole where a deep-rooted tree had survived long enough that, burned to carbon and powdered by the following ages, it left its mark in the rock. Sharina learned to avoid those also, though she couldn't have told how.
She became aware of light. At first she thought it was a trick like the flashes that traced sometimes across her closed eyes. This was a gray paleness, though. Hanno's body was a powerful silhouette against it. They were nearing openings into an outer world that she'd almost forgotten.
Early in its course down the mountainside the lava had splashed over the roots of a pine. When the organic remains decayed, they left holes through the tube. Sharina might have been able to stick her arm through a hole and waggle her fingers in the outer air, but neither of the men could do even that.
Hanno got down on his belly to look through a hole just above ground level. Unarc squatted and peered through another. “As I hope for the Lady's grace!” he said. “Hanno, what're them crazy Monkeys doing down there?”
“I know what it looks like,” the other hunter muttered. Without speaking further, he got to his knees and edged sideways, gesturing Sharina to the viewport.
She rotated her belt so that the sheathed knife wasn't
between her and the rough lava surface. She was looking down on a bay some five hundred feet below. Felled timber of all sizes and descriptions covered the water's surface. Vast numbers of Hairy Men clambered over the floating debris, guided or directed by phantasms like the one leading the Hairy Men who'd attacked her and Hanno.
She couldn't guess how many of the brute men she saw. Their squirming reminded her of the day early each Heron when the termites came out of the ground in swarming profusion, preparing to fly to new homes while the crows and jays gorged themselves on the sudden bounty.
“Has there been a storm?” Sharina asked, lifting her face from the opening to meet Hanno's eyes. “To wash all those trees into the bay?”
“That's not storm-swash, missie,” Unarc said as he also straightened. “They've been felled. All of them. You see the branches but there's no root balls like a storm would've done. Besides, there's been no storm.”
Hanno nodded. “The Monkeys did it,” he said. “They—”
“Monkeys
couldn't
do that!” Unarc said. “They don't have the brains!”
“They had the brains to cut you good and mash both our boats!” Hanno said. “Things ain't the same, Unarc. The fuzzy ghosts down there talk to them. Put fear of the Gods in them, from what it seemed when they came after me!'
He grinned reminiscently. “Though not so bad as me and missie there put the fear to them later on. Such as were left.”

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