Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (74 page)

By the time he was done speaking, I could barely make out the words, because his incisors had grown like the fangs of a saber-toothed tiger.

He must have removed all the vertebrae of his neck at the same time, and replaced his neck cartilage with some sort of elastic membrane, because all of a sudden his head shot forward like a snapping cannonball, with a neck longer than a giraffe’s and powerful as the body of an anaconda behind it.

Rahab tried to bite me on the neck, but his jaws, even though he had strengthened them like the jaws of a bulldog, could not penetrate my mail coif. I smelled the venom that pumped from his fangs, and heard the hiss of acid dripping from his tongue. But I also felt the ripple of chain links across my neck and shoulders, as the cunning metal armor moved more mass into that area, so my neck armor grew thicker.

I had been trained not to look an opponent in the eye during the fight, but to use my peripheral vision and watch his hands. It was good for me at that moment that I did as I was trained, because I did not strike at the exposed four-yard-long neck—the obvious target—or at his right hand which held his truncheon. He started to swing, but it was a fake-out, because he passed the truncheon to a tentacle or tail he had been growing out of his back, sneakily out of my line of sight. This third arm came darting out suddenly from over his shoulder, snatched up the truncheon, and struck.

I parried the blow and chopped the third arm off at the wrist. The truncheon hit the ground instead of hitting my helmet, and the white bone of the truncheon’s head turned into a black blood, which splattered across the marble, hissing and wriggling. That goo would have been all over my face, digging into my eyes and up my nose if I had taken the head-feint. I could feel the black substance, the hate of it, with my spidey-senses.

Meanwhile, the saber-toothed tiger fangs had gotten caught in the links of my chain coif, or, rather, my smart armor had tightened on them. During the moment it took Rahab to eject his fangs, leaving them twitching at my neck like digger wasps, still injecting poison into me, I reversed my grip on my sword and slashed it through his neck. Halfway.

Chopping off a man’s head is harder than it sounds. Even with no bones in the way, it is tough. Go to your local butcher’s chop, get a hunk of raw meat nine inches across, hang it from a hook so that it yields to the blow, and see if you can cut all the way through it with a big knife or a cleaver. Try it.

So, it took me two strokes. It was still a good strike. The head dropped. When it bounced, I punted it across the room, screaming curses. I mean it was screaming, the skull-football. Penny was screaming too; in fact, all the girls were screaming.

I was the only one who wasn't screaming because I was too busy keeping my eyes on the target, Rahab’s body, headless or not. And I saw his prehensile hair part, and I saw where he had grown an eye like the eye of Nakasu, right where his right nipple used to be. I did a jump-lunge and put the point of my sword right into it. He elongated his left hand and raked me with the bear-claws he had grown there, and out of his severed neck-hole came a jointed monstrosity like a scorpion’s tail, the bulb swollen with poison. The yard-long neck-tail lashed at me and tried to stab me. He must have prepared the poisonous sting inside his neck while he was talking, his ‘Plan B’ in case I managed to decapitate him.

I jumped back, parrying left and right. Claws scraped off my armor, and I cut his arm to the bone, and maybe broke it with the force of the blow, but he scuttled back and shook his arm back into working shape. It clicked and was whole.

But I was in control. Now he was the one reacting to my attack, he had lost the initiative. Fights aren't like the movies, where first one guy is winning, then the other guy. In real life, they're more like a snowball on top of a mountain peak. Once it starts rolling down one side, it seldom reverses course. He lashed out at me again and again, but he had to remove the bones from any limb he made stretchy enough to reach me and I had three feet of steel between us, plus another three feet of arm. That meant he had to double the length of his limbs just to touch me. It made him slower and easier to counter, plus the lack of bone made it that much easier to sever those outstretched limbs.

Blade whirling and stabbing, feet shuffling, I drove him across the room, chopping bits from him.

I ran at him, blade high, feinted low as if intending to cut his legs out from under him, but then I brought my blade up and drove it into his left breast, piercing his one remaining eye. He reeled back, blinded, and then I chopped his legs out from under him. First his right leg, then his right.

Down he fell. I stabbed through his midsection and a strange thing happened. With a jerk, all the severed limbs and heads and wormy bloodstains we had slopped across the room jumped back into place. I mean his head came back to his neck like it was pulled on an invisible string, and so did the arms and legs I’d amputated.

It should have scared the dickens out of me, but since my adrenaline was already pumping, and I was already screaming my head off with battle-rage, and was already sweating like a pig (fighting monsters is hard work) the additional adrenaline, screaming, and sweating caused by fear was lost in the general background noise. If you hear soldiers or firemen talk about being too busy to feel scared, I guess this is what they mean.

I jumped back, bellowing swear words, drew a shaky breath, and resumed the Heaven-and-Earth stance, weight on the rear foot, blade erect. The blood on the blade was now streaming back into Rahab's body, flying through the air like scarlet sleet driven by a horizontal wind.

And then he was back to normal, dressed in nothing but his long hair, with the jutting jaw and lowering brow ridges of a Neanderthal. The bone of his own forearm had gone back into his arm.

Rahab laughed. “I take your measure. You fall short.”

I panted, “I won that round and you know it!”

“You know nothing, you. Look! You gasp! You wheeze! You tire! Boy knows not how to put fatigue from his blood. Rahab, me, I do not tire and tear. I send away the fatigue with a thought. Now we start again and you learn what it is to fight a man, boy. No more breathing for you.”

Then his chest opened like the doors of a bureau, and he ripped two sharp ribs from it, taking one in either hand. He shrugged, and his arms thickened and grew a layer of integument like rhinoceros hide, then the hide darkened, and he grew a layer of bone atop that.

His eyes drew backward into his skull, so that he was looking at me through two little tubes of bone, and he thickened the bones of his face and flattened his nose, so that his skull became a helmet.

“Again!” he growled. “We go again!”

“Neither of us can kill the other,” I said. I was still breathing heavily, really wishing I knew his trick for wishing weariness away.

“But I can give you pain. Much pain.” He grinned.

His mouth began to stretch and his teeth elongated into fangs. The rib-bones in his hands quivered, straightened, and grew and grew until he held two spears. They were four feet long, and the tips began dripping poison.

There went my reach advantage.

He threw the first rib like a javelin. I turned sidewise to it, presenting a minimal target, and swatted it aside with my blade, keeping my eyes on him. He had twisted his legs backward, so they looked like the legs of an Abarimon. I don’t see how there could be any advantage to speed or agility to have your knees and feet turned wrongway-round but somehow he lunged forward at breathtaking speed, like a panther springing.

I feinted high and struck low, slashing out his belly. He raised his truncheon to block my high blow, and gagged in shock as his entrails came slithering out like a red apron. Rahab had simply never learned swordsmanship. What need did he have for the art?

But he had arts of his own. The rib-bone spear which had flown past me, had come to life and somehow snagged my rear leg from the floor. My mail jerkin only came to knee length, so the spear wrapped my lower leg like a snake, and, like a snake, reared back and struck. Only a little bit of venom was pumped into my flesh—but enough so that my leg simultaneously felt numb and on fire, and I lost control of it. The muscles spasmed like a frog’s leg being touched by an electrical jolt.

I hopped, slid, fell, and the fight should have been over right then and there. But Rahab was screaming and clutching at his bleeding guts, and he fell too. As he dropped, the snakelike bone wrapping my ankle turned into a black liquid and jumped—literally leaped across the air—back into the breast of Rahab. He still had the Abarimon feet when I gut-slashed him, but as he toppled and fell, his feet were normal again. And so was his face. The elaborate bony armored plates protecting his eyes and skull turned black and wriggled and got reabsorbed into his skull.

“
Grant that I may praise thee, O sacred Virgin; give me strength against thine enemies!
” I said solemnly and I felt a cool serenity flow through my limbs, washing the poison away. Sensation returned to my feet, and I jumped to them.

By that time Rahab was also back on his feet, standing in a crouch, his Neanderthal face growling and ugly, his eyes two dark little ponds of hate.

“So, pain disrupts your Mr. Stretchy trick, I see.” I assumed my stance again, weight on my rear leg, and weapon pointed, blade side up, toward his eyes. “And we cannot get rid of pain.”

“No,” he grunted, his vicious grimace looking oddly like a grin. “No escape from pain. Not for us. Not ever.”

“How come all the Undying don’t wear armor?”

He hooted. “Armor that is made of dead metal? All flesh is ours to command. Armor would but impede us, foolish boy.”

“Foolish
man
, if you don’t mind.”

He didn't respond, but drew in his breath and began to expand. Not just a few inches either. He swelled up until he was at least twelve feet tall.

Nor did he swell in proportion. He grew stouter and thicker faster than he grew taller, so his legs and feet turned into elephant legs more like those of Nakasu.

I lunged and slashed at his stomach, groin, jumped back, lunged again, and impaled his chest. The tip of Dancing Maiden scraped against a rib-bone with an ugly noise. It left a shallow cut, and drew blood, but did not penetrate. His whole chest area was now a solid mass of bone. From the way his flesh rippled, I could see he had closed his ribcage like Venetian blinds snapped shut.

He was thirteen feet tall. Then fourteen.

He grew a single horn from the center of his brow, and let it swell to a yard in length before ripping it free. Little tatters of his flesh dripped and oozed on the surface of the horn, emitting acrid smells. The horn flattened, becoming like a long-handled ax or pike.

And now he was fifteen feet tall.

I lunged and cut at his leg, hoping that all this was just puffing up for show. Rahab could not be pulling extra mass into existence from nowhere, could he? The laws of nature would not allow that! He
must
be losing density to gain so much volume! He must! The conservation of mass was a law!

I was expecting it to be like slicing your brother’s birthday cake in half with your practice sword in retaliation for him bisecting all your birthday balloons, including the one with a glow-in-the-dark mouse on it, with his. In other words, I was expecting no resistance, a feeling of immense satisfaction, and maybe getting my butt kicked a moment later.

Nope. My sword cut into rhino-hide and dense muscle, then struck bone and rebounded. The wound puckered and sprayed blood at me, and made a sardonic spitting noise before zipping itself back shut as easily as a Ziploc bag. It was if I'd never struck him at all.

I silently cursed him. It looked as if I could not injure him painfully enough to snap him back to his true form.

Apparently the conservation of mass is more like a suggestion rather than a law.

Rahab laughed. His laughter was like a gush of a wind from hell, full of cruelty and power.

I turned and ran.

It was a gamble, I admit. I risked everything. If Rahab merely took the opportunity to turn and throw his poisonous blood and body parts at Penny and the other girls trapped in the chamber, all was lost. But I was gambling that he would think that I was like him, and held all living things in hatred and contempt.

To make sure he followed me, I threw four shuriken from my father’s belt (which I was wearing outside the hauberk, remember) into the conveniently large face, belly and groin of the giant. So he followed me, not pausing to slay the harem slaves. It is not like they were going anywhere.

I also zigged and zagged as I ran, a skill I learned as a child running from older brothers with longer legs than mine. The pike of horn smote to my left and right, cracking the marble floor and spraying blood-red gushes of venom as it struck.

It is not easy running, in forty pounds of chainmail, from a giant who can cover ten feet at a stride. But there is a story about a poker player, Amarillo Slim, luring a chump into a sucker bet that he could outrun a horse in the hundred-yard dash, and winning the bet by having the track set up as two fifty-yard dashes connected by a hairpin turn. The animal with the larger mass could not decelerate, turn, and accelerate as quickly as the animal with the smaller mass. This is also why jackrabbits sometimes outrun wolves. And like those rabbits, I used my ears. The thunder of Rahab’s footfalls, which were shaking the whole darn floor, and the slight change in rhythm, told me when his blows were about to fall, and I would break left or right. Once and twice and thrice he swung and missed.

Perhaps you recall the colonnade where visitors could lounge and look into the harem, a long wall of windows covered with blue glass bars. I ran toward them. I reversed course at the last minute, not caring if I were hit or not, and lashed out at the elephant legs of the monstrous Rahab behind me. It was a shallow blow to the back of his knee, but he bled gallons, and the floor was marble, and his body was as massive as an elephant’s, moving at the speed of a cavalry charge.