Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (40 page)

Empty. The place was saturated by the man’s foul smell, but he was nowhere to be seen. Gribardsun knew the stench from his meeting with the smuggler’s group in the forest. He remembered the one who had called him “chief.”

It was a very distinctive smell. Not hard to track at all.

After leaving the main building, Gribardsun—
Peri,
he thought.
Peri. I must keep this name fresh on my mind and stop thinking of myself as Gribardsun or even John. I must believe that I am Peri, the last of the Guaranys
—Peri melted with the night shadows and became invisible to the civilized men.

After a while, in complete silence, the trail led him to the powder deposit. Peri climbed to the roof of the closest hut, and watched.

Loredano’s men were taking the powder kegs and putting them on a group of horses that waited, silently, near the door. There was a smell of fresh blood in the air.

“There’s a tunnel hidden in here, all right,” said a voice, nothing more than a whisper, coming from the shadows between the two huts, the one with the powder and the one with the guns. “The old man was smart in concealing it. The door is almost seamless. If it wasn’t for the map...”

“The old man must have known you would take the map from Álvaro’s body,” interjected another voice. “How come he didn’t place any extra security around here?”

“Who said he didn’t?” Now it was Loredano talking. Peri recognized both the tone and the bad breath. “He used the best two guards money could buy. My money, that is.”

“Your gold bought only one of us.” A new voice.

“Your colleague preferred a price paid in steel. It’s all the same for me.”

The laughter was subdued, but cruel. For Peri, it explained the aroma of recently shed blood. He now had a decision to make: it would be easy to fall among the bandits, surprise them, kill some, demoralize the others, and have the thing done.

But he was also curious. What map were they talking about? Dom Antônio had told him that he believed that Loredano had killed Álvaro out of envy and sheer malevolence. Those might very well be real motives, but now it seemed there were other motivations the old man had kept to himself.

And, of course, Peri wanted to explore the entrails of the mountain. If he sounded the alarm now, it was possible that Dom Antônio would act to preserve whatever secret he thought worth preserving and to deny him the opportunity.

So, he decided to keep quiet for the time being.

The tunnel was tall, broad and irregular, a natural fissure in the rock. It had slanted walls, with a narrow ledge near the top. Peri was able to follow Loredano’s men and horses by silently climbing and then crawling on this ledge. It was almost like crawling in a ventilator shaft, something he had done a few times before.

It was also short, ending abruptly behind a screen of trees and bushes, in a patch of forest that hugged the mountainside. There they took a trail among the trees. Peri jumped to the canopy and followed them from there.

After thirty minutes trailing those clumsy men, Peri surmised their intention. They were taking the powder to Álvaro’s silver mine—he recalled Cecilia saying something about her fiancé being a silver entrepreneur, and the mention of a “map” made sense in this light—probably to blow another vein.

It didn’t take long for Peri to notice that, as stupid as all white people were when trying to negotiate the jungle, map or no map, they were as lost as blind birds in a death trap. He noticed the jaguar following them as soon as they went into the foliage, but saw that the animal was pregnant and decided to let fate take its course. He wouldn’t help one side or the other and when it attacked the last of Loredano’s men—a fat, slow one, who smelled of molasses—Peri felt nothing but admiration for the fast and lethal feline. The man died without a sound, his neck broken as a result of a precise slap, the powder keg lost in the jungle.

When Loredano called for the dead man and, after some confusion, decided to turn around and try to find him, the maneuver sealed their destiny. They would never be able to return to their original path, walking in circles and making more and more noise, alerting all the beasts nearby.

It will be a miracle if they survive this night,
thought Peri, forgetting that, as his own life bore witness, miracles sometimes happen. That was one of those unlikely moments. The party—without any help from its pursuer—found another path in the woods, one that led them into another cave. A more dangerous, deadlier hole in the mountain. It wasn’t a miracle after all, just another bad joke from that treacherous God of the Beasts.

* * *

The two things Peri noticed as soon as he managed to get down from the trees and enter the second cave were the sound of flowing water—a stretch of the Paquequer river ran inside this hole, which meant they were somewhere above the Europeans’ fortress—and the warmth of the stone walls.

The heat in the walls meant energy. And energy meant...

Again, there was an inward slanting of the walls, giving the tunnel the appearance of a prolonged triangle. There was also a ledge close to the ceiling, convenient for crawling. This cave, he deduced, must be part of the same system as the one behind the castle. It was highly probable that the whole mountain was interconnected by a labyrinth of tunnels.

He quickly remembered all he knew about natural fission reactors. There ought to be the right isotopes of uranium, the proper mass, and a neutron-slowing medium. The slowing was necessary to regulate the reaction. If not, the neutrons issued by the naturally radioactive element would be moving too fast to be assimilated into other atomic nuclei, forcing them to decay and to issue more neutrons, and so on.

The slowing medium usually took the form of water. So, the presence of the river checked. There was also the question of criticality: if a too-large mass of radioactive material is brought together, it may cause a sudden blue glow and a lethal spike of radiation and heat. If the critical mass is formed too quickly, it may result in an explosion—an atomic blast.

The first atomic bombs used conventional explosives to fire a radioactive bullet against a radioactive target. When the target was hit, there was a critical mass instantly assembled, and then,
boom
.

This fact gave Peri some mixed feelings about the powder kegs the smugglers were carrying. He decided that it would be better to get closer to the smugglers, so he would be at hand to intervene if they tried something really stupid.

The tunnel was quite dark. The men in front were carrying torches; those behind, with the gunpowder, had no light source with them, and just followed the reddish glow ahead. Peri surmised that if he stayed ten to twelve steps behind the hindermost man, he’d be virtually invisible in the darkness.

In silence, he climbed down from the ledge. There were a few thick stalagmites the time traveler might use for extra cover, but he was convinced that it would not be necessary.

He was wrong.

Things started happening quickly.

The river flowed down the middle of the corridor, and when his eyes were properly adjusted, Peri noticed that there was a thin blue glow in the waters. He supposed that it might be caused by Cherenkov radiation, a byproduct of the nuclear reactions taking place there, or perhaps a sign of the presence of trace amounts of the same kind of blue-glowing magnetic mineral the Aymorés used. He recalled that the mutant jaguar had the selfsame glow in its eye membranes. If the thing was being assimilated into the bodies of animals adapted to life near the reactor, he surmised it might offer some real protection. Evolution, after all, may be blind, but it is also economic and supremely efficient.

So, he kept an eye on the river, deciding to rub his whole body with any blue-glowing sand he might find. Taking survival lessons from animals was almost second nature with him. His attention, however, was divided, thus explaining the extra second it took for him to register the long, thick shadow slithering under the water’s surface.

There was a violent splash about twenty meters ahead, followed by an eruption of screaming, cursing, and shots, and the whole group was surging back in his direction.

He had time to jump on and behind a stalagmite, but too late noticed that the cover was less than perfect.

“There!” one ofthe smugglers cried. “Another glowing beast!”

Shots came in his direction. The rate of fire was lousy—muskets and pistols—but it only took one hit to do a lot of damage. And now they were all crowded around the kegs.

Glowing,
Peri mused, as he felled two of his assailants with a couple of well-placed arrows.
How am I glowing?

“It’s a giant monkey!” another screamed. “Its tail is bright!”

Now Peri understood; his fluorescent lamp had betrayed him. He’d made one so it would light up in the presence of intense radiation. It was in his bag. If the bag had been punctured, it might explain the “bright tail.”

One arrow found its home through the eye of a gunman. Another one pierced the right arm of the man at his left. The rest of the group just fled, running blindly and forgetting all about big blue beasts dangling from the ceiling.

“It’s not a monkey! Monkeys don’t shoot arrows!”

He recognized the voice: Loredano, the bearded leader.

“It’s just a fucking lousy Indian!” If the goal was to bolster the morale of his men, it didn’t work. Soon, even Loredano’s voice vanished.

Gribardsun grabbed the last one to run, but the roar that echoed behind them made the time traveler forget the man. By the sound, this noise came from something very different from all the animals he had seen before.

A few torches had been left behind, scattered on the floor. These puddles of yellow light, combined with the blue hue emanating from the water, did as little to assuage the darkness as the white glow of the lamp that he finally took from his bag and raised as a lantern. The lights, however, only seemed to accentuate the shadows.

Now he felt a trembling of the ground; there were waves on the river. The beast emerged suddenly from the water, almost as if pushed from behind, and paused, standing head and shoulders taller than a black bear, in front of the two men. It was the biggest ugliest son of a bitch Gribardsun had ever encountered. Its fiery, flashing eyeballs didn’t actually seem to see, but were rolled up like the eyes of a blind animal. The creature’s claws flailed out, ripping chunks from the walls and the ground. Its fur seemed thick and sharp, as if small razors were growing from the end of each strand of fur. Snarling and undulating his bulbous head, moving back and forth along the ceiling, knocking stalactites, it moved its body violently to shake the river from its chinking fur, sending out a wave of blue river water and showering the men with a glittering mud.

Gribardsun let his inner beast take control of his body and acted without thinking. Two jumps took him away from the first attack, and placed him far from the claws. For his next move, he grabbed his knife and pressed his legs against the wall, creating the necessary tension to propel himself, bouncing like a rubber ball, under the legs of the creature. As he rolled under the animal’s hindquarters, he raised the blade, forcing it against the soft flesh of the beast’s underbelly. Blood and guts spilled all over the place.

The wound was deep, but the animal became more ferocious as the scent of blood reached its sensitive nose. Turning its huge body around with far more speed than Gribardsun considered it capable of, the monster dog howled and, with a twist of its giant forepaw, caught Gribardsun on the side, marking his torso with four red cuts.

Snarling in pain and fury, Gribardsun jumped on the same paw that had wounded him and, climbing the limb faster than the creature could react, got to its neck, opening it from chin to breast, stopping at the breastbone with a loud crack. The large jaw snapped three times, searching for Gribardsun and missing, but the claws of the free paw opened four more bloody scratches, now on his back.

Gribardsun didn’t let go and pressed the knife against bone till the last breath of the hideous beast. Then, after its final shudder, Gribardsun pressed his foot over the carcass and howled as if he were a big cat claiming its prey. Blood and blue dust merged, forming rivulets that covered his bruises, and it felt good.

Then, the whole world came down on his head.

A great explosion sent Gribardsun reeling into the river as the ceiling fell. Even in a state of semi-consciousness, the reflexes conditioned by a thousand previous adventures made him hold his breath before submerging. He rolled in the water, the gentle flux made violent by the sudden impact of the heavy stones and stalactites. The vicious speed probably saved the time traveler’s life, since the creatures that might’ve been attracted by his bleeding wounds were themselves caught by the violence of the current.

In a sudden movement, the wild waters made him break the surface for some seconds, allowing him to fill his lungs with a welcoming breath. Fighting to keep his head above the ferocious river, he became aware of a white-yellow light some distance ahead. The rest of the dizziness then left him. It was the light of dawn or early morning, he knew, which meant that the cave ended somewhere ahead. Could it be possible that he was rushing toward a high waterfall?

He searched for something to grab on to. Then he saw a rock outcrop, in the form of a crescent moon, which marked the mouth of the fall. Gribardsun struggled against the current to reduce his speed as he approached it.

The time traveler grabbed the rock with his remaining strength as the rushing water tried to yank him out. For a moment he thought his arms would be disjointed at the shoulders, but then all he had to support was his own weight and the bag was yet dangling from his shoulder.

Gasping for air, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the rock crescent. He was battered, cut, bleeding, bruised. His aches had aches. He concluded that the laggard smuggler, upon hearing the awful victory scream Gribardsun had let loose, had decided that he’d rather be blown to pieces than be eaten alive by the beast responsible for the beastly cry, and had thrust the flaming head of a torch into one of the barrels.