The House of Yeel (8 page)

“Help us,” it said, holding
its arm out toward Jymoor.

“Yeel! Do you see?”

“Most noteworthy! You have the power to
transmute stone into living material! Jymoor, I had no idea you
possessed this advanced science! I beg of you that we share notes
at once on this subject. Such a rapid and efficient process, too, I
simply—”

“Help us, please,” the newly animated maiden
urged again. “Whatever manner of beings you are, please let us
go.”

“Yeel, I didn’t do this. I
don’t know what happened. But we must help her. What’s your name?”
Jymoor asked the woman.

“I’m Sword Master Kasil.
Beware. The serpent-mage Slevander lives in this grove, he’ll trap
you. He’ll enslave you as he’s done to me.”

“Master Kasil! I’ve…I’ve
heard of you!” Jymoor stammered.

“Ah, of course, a classic
mistake,” Yeel interrupted. “I assumed cause and effect, but in
fact it was a coincidence. Will I ever learn? There are certain
principles which must guide and discipline discovery, and I admit
extreme embarrassment at making such a foolish error. I withdraw my
demands.”

“Yeel, think no more of it, please, but what
about Master Kasil? Can you help her?”

“Well, she seems fine, although this talent
of turning from stone into flesh is quite disconcerting. Miss, are
you in good health? You mentioned being trapped? Are there even now
invisible restraints which—”

“You must understand, I can
only speak for a short while. I cannot leave this place. Beware of
the creature with—”

Kasil’s urgings were cut
short. She looked down toward her feet. Jymoor saw a wavering
grayness welling up from the ground. She gasped. Kasil gave a sad
sigh as the phenomenon consumed her.

Once again she appeared as a cold statue of
smooth stone. Strips of lichen rested at her feet where they had
been dislodged, the only remaining sign of her temporary return to
life.

“This is horrible! She’s
imprisoned here. We must aid her…I wonder why she said, ‘whatever
manner of beings you are’?”

Yeel fidgeted for a moment
and then shrugged. “She hasn’t met us before, so naturally
she…didn’t make any assumptions. Uh, or perhaps that is the
traditional greeting construct where she comes from.”

Jymoor sensed Yeel’s
dismissive mood and decided to concentrate on more pressing
matters. But she remembered how Yeel had referred to “her race” as
if he didn’t share her humanity. Did he simply mean her
people?

“You must prepare to destroy
this awful monster that’s done this thing, my lords. Together, two
such as you are can do anything!”

“We’ve only heard one side
of the story, my friend,” Yeel said. “Perhaps this Slevander fellow
had his reasons. If he even exists. We must keep an open mind.
Nevertheless, it would be prudent, yes advisable, to ready
ourselves…”

Yeel fished through his
reagents pack with one hand while grasping his shiny three-armed
flail with the other. Jymoor saw Yeel twist in a disturbing way.
For a moment his movements seemed to defy human skeletal
restrictions. Jymoor blinked and looked more carefully…the odd man
did only have two arms, right? Of course he did.

Jymoor shook her head to clear it.

“What magic do you have to protect us?”
pleaded Jymoor, turning her gaze from the wizard and scanning the
nearby garden.

“I have a formula which
promotes movement,” Yeel said. “Perhaps that would be appropriate,
considering that the theoretical threat at this moment is being
turned into a sessile pseudostatue. And then of course, there is my
malinthander and the knight’s sword.” Yeel shook his flail
emphatically as he mentioned it.

“Sometimes the greatest of
dangers can be avoided through the judicious application of blunt
trauma. I wonder how it is that the biped remains standing even
though she is now incapable of the constant adjustments that your
kind makes to remain upright.”

“My kind?” Jymoor asked.

“Well, yes, that is to say,
um, mortals. Nonwizards.”

Yeel produced three small packets and handed
one to Jymoor and another to Avorn.

“Here’s the compound,” he
said. “It should be easy to break open.”

Jymoor took the small
packet. She ripped one corner of the container and lifted it toward
her mouth, pinching her nose shut.

“Halt! Desist! Clamp your mandible, Jymoor!
Whatever is it that you are preparing to do with the bioruminate
pace catalyst?”

“I don’t swallow it? Is it
medicine, a potion mix?”

“Swallow it? Oh my no. Rub
it on yourself. Wait. You haven’t eaten any floridius root today,
have you?”

“Any what?”

“Flori—oh, no, of course you
haven’t. It’s fatal to humans. A poor question on my part. But you
can never be too careful. Well, perhaps one could be too careful
but I meant—”

“Yeel, the task at hand,” Avorn interrupted,
pouring the powder out into his hand and rubbing it onto his
face.

“Yes. You must be on the watch for this
Slevander, whoever or whatever he is,” Jymoor said. She began to
rub the substance on her exposed skin.

“Very well then. A game of
cat and mouse is upon us,” Yeel said. “It occurs to me that perhaps
we should not be talking. The noise might attract this foe, and we
would lose any edge of surprise that we potentially have. In fact,
if we continue to speak out loud, Slevander might hear us and
attack while we are locked in conversation, catching
us
by surprise and
dispatching us before we are even aware that we are under attack!
Why it could even be this very conversation about the possibility
itself!”

Avorn stared at Yeel in
irritation. “Then don’t speak!”

Jymoor winced, afraid that
the knight’s harshness might anger Yeel. She had never seen the
mighty wizard become enraged before, but the very thought filled
her with dread. There were stories…

“Very well then, let’s all
be quiet,” whispered Jymoor. She looked all around, checking for
any anomalies.

Yeel pointed forward. Avorn turned and walked
onward, deeper into the forest littered with statues. Jymoor
followed, spotting the eerie shapes more and more frequently as
they moved on. Jymoor saw stone scouts, footmen, and knights. Some
of the statues seemed to be sharply defined and out in the open,
but others looked weather worn. A few were partially hidden beneath
heavy vines or other foliage.

They emerged from the trees and Jymoor caught
her breath. A vast garden stretched before them. As she took in the
sight she realized that the place had been long neglected. Even
though beds of flowers and walls of shrubs grew in full color and
health, the lines that delineated the various areas of the place
had started to blur.

To the left Jymoor saw the statue of a
warrior frozen with his spear ready to cast. The figure stood on
the edge of a swath of overgrown grasses.

“This Slevander has defeated a lot of
people,” Jymoor muttered.

The group walked along the
soft grass strip, watching the statues as they passed. Other than
the soft rustling of plants in the breeze, Jymoor couldn’t see
anything moving. They passed several more stone victims. Jymoor saw
a petrified man in a robe, bowing low as if in worship.

They came to a circular clearing in the
flowers, with a ring of six or seven statues arrayed along its
perimeter. Suddenly Jymoor noticed a giant black reptile head
peering at them from a bed of flowering plants. The eyes held the
vertical black slit pupils of a venomous serpent. The jaws of the
creature looked wide enough to engulf a man.

“Beware! I see it!” Jymoor yelped. Yeel and
Avorn spun to look at her, so Jymoor just pointed. The other two
turned and saw the thing as it reared up on strong, black coils to
regard them from above like a giant cobra.

The twisting ebony serpent locked its eyes
onto Jymoor and it spat forth a long acid syllable.

“Yaaaaaag.”

The word struck Jymoor like a wave. She felt
her skin crackle and harden. For a moment she felt despair. Had she
become a statue? Then the attack passed and she exhaled
spasmodically, twitching in fear.

Avorn charged toward the
monster, sword held high. He slashed and then thrust at the trunk
of the serpent but it retreated out of range. The knight advanced
again, but the serpent’s tail whipped around and struck him in the
leg. The Crescent Knight faltered beneath the onslaught, falling to
one side. His assailant bunched up over him and opened its jaws as
if to consume the knight.

Jymoor could hardly bear to watch. She
loathed her helplessness, but she carried no weapons. She hugged
the stone next to her. How could she help?

The stone shifted and she realized she had
disturbed another denizen of the awful garden.

“Your friends may prevail,”
a rough voice came from above. Jymoor looked up at the being she
had awakened, a stout woodsman with a red beard and axe in hand.
Then Jymoor looked back to where the knight had fallen. A huge
red-scaled thing towered next to the serpent and the knight. Jymoor
struggled with the appearance of something so large seemingly from
thin air. Spines erupted from most of its back. The monster had two
long front legs with three enormous claws extending half the height
of a man. It supported itself on three broad back legs and a long,
muscular tail covered in more thorny extensions. Its thick,
muscular neck flattened into a wide head that was mostly mouth,
like a giant toothed clam. Jymoor couldn’t see any eyes on the
creature but that didn’t comfort her in the slightest.

“Where did that come from?”
she cried. “Where’s Yeel?”

“Take my axe,” the burly man-statue said, and
handed Jymoor the weapon. Jymoor grabbed the weapon with one hand
without removing her gaze from the towering beast that had appeared
to battle Slevander.

“What can I—” Jymoor
stammered, but then she saw that the man next to her had already
returned to an inanimate state. The huge tail of the red monster
swept toward Jymoor, a giant scaly juggernaut covered in sharp
spines.

Jymoor scrabbled back to avoid being crushed
by the tail. Her foot caught in a vine, and she fell back with a
shriek into darkness.

***

Yeel swung his malinthander
again and bellowed in the manner of a beast. Slevander dodged out
of the way with uncanny agility. The serpent retreated, fooled by
Yeel’s new disguise. He had planted the suggestion of a terrible
foe into the minds of all those around him, in order to gain the
initiative in the combat.

He projected the concept of
the malinthander as being the huge paw of the monster he had
become. His natural height aided the illusion, since he already
stood taller than humans from foot to highest tentacle. He swept it
toward Slevander again, just to keep the serpent at bay.

The pace catalyst that Yeel
had employed to immunize himself and his Companions had met with
some measure of success; even though Slevander had tried to reduce
them to statues, he still moved and fought.

In order to keep from giving
his opponent time to think, Yeel wailed again and lumbered forward.
He sent tentacles ahead, transmitting the concept of the huge beast
seeking its prey with its long, clawed hands.

Once again the creature slid away, keeping
most of its body under the heavy growth of a patch of beautiful
plants. Yeel worried about keeping track of the head and those
dangerous fangs. But the mouth might be as dangerous from the
spells it could utter as the poison it might impart.

The head appeared on Yeel’s
left flank, curling around the leg of a petrified human. It feinted
forward, testing Yeel’s defenses. Yeel bellowed and charged
sluggishly. He realized he didn’t have long. The snake mage would
be more confident with his next attack.

The alchemist’s other
tentacles had not been idle. Yeel produced a vivid blue sphere with
a small hole drilled into it and a thin shaft of reddish metal. He
slid the cylinder into the sphere and fused it shut, setting into
motion an inevitable reaction that would serve to obliterate the
sphere and anything near it.

Yeel had only seconds to act. The reaction
took place even as he stood trying to calculate a likely future
location of the black serpent. He hurled the sphere with one
tentacle while swinging his malinthander in the other direction
with another. He thought the sphere felt warm just as it left his
hand. Or had it been his imagination?

The serpent darted away
predictably, sending its sinuous body sliding directly over the
sphere. Yeel reversed direction, attempting to make some distance.
A muffled boom sent bloody, scaly body parts raining down
throughout the garden. A fragment of bone struck Yeel in the trunk,
sending a white-hot bolt of pain hurtling along his nerves. He
tried to put the injury out of his mind.

Would the death of Slevander
result in the freeing of his victims? Yeel eagerly looked toward
the closest statue. As he watched, the person returned to flesh and
bone. It was a man in chain wielding a long halberd.

The man at arms took one step forward, a
smile forming on his face as he realized his change of state. Then
he saw Yeel.

The man screamed and ran.

Chapter 7: Aftermath

Jymoor found herself lying on cold stone in
near darkness.