Emissaries from the Dead

He did the same with his hind limbs, one after the other, each time at the same glacial pace, each time demonstrating hiccups of reluctance in what otherwise looked like an inexorable advance.

His pace was matched by his fellow Brachiators. They were all advancing on me.

Some were already removing the detached claws threaded into their fur.

I closed my eyes, imagining how much it would hurt to have those claws driven through my wrists and ankles, persuading myself that this was in fact my fate, struggling to summon fear of the torments about to fall upon me.

I finished the count to thirty and then, living dangerously, started at zero again.

One, two…

I still heard them coming.

Fifteen, sixteen…

The rumble of their approach was enough to make my body shake.

Twenty-one, twenty-two…

I expected a furry hand to close around my wrist at any moment.

Twenty-five, twenty-six…

I couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten here yet.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight…

I could feel them all around me, their hot breath already warming my skin.

Thirty.

I opened my eyes.

They had advanced at varying speeds, reflecting the variation in their ages and physical conditions. A burly, many-scarred specimen with gray streaks in its coat had overtaken the somewhat slower Friend to Half-Ghosts and might be upon me minutes ahead of its brother.

There was no doubt what they intended to do to me.

Given a chance, they would gather around on all sides, seize my arms and my legs with a strength natural to any creatures who never knew respite from the need to hold on. One or two would take each arm. One or two would take each leg. They would hold my merely human limbs in place, not out of malice but out of simple animal awareness that the passage into Life always causes great pain and might lead weaker creatures into convulsions. They might even speak a few comforting words.

And then they would drive the claws through my wrists and ankles.

They understood that this might kill me. It had, after all, killed Warmuth. But they would still see it as an act of kindness.

By their lights it would be the ultimate act of friendship.

The Brachs were still minutes away, their charge as interminable as it was inexorable.

I made my voice very naive and very small. “What are you doing?”

“We are giving you what you have asked for,” Friend to Half-Ghosts said.

Would Cynthia have looked around herself and seen sudden menace in a population now converging on her from all sides? Would she have wondered if she’d said the right thing, or instead offended them in some way? Or would she have been proud beyond measure that she had succeeded beyond all measure whereas all of her mocking, unfriendly co-workers had failed?

The gray Brachiator was almost upon me. There was no reason to believe its catalogue of facial expressions carried the same spectrum of meanings as the nearest human equivalents, but that little half-smile at worse seemed kind, compassionate, even holy.

The claw it drew back for a strike was cracked with age and stained with the blood of Brachs fallen in battle.

If I stayed here it would know my blood as well.

So I sprung all my lines but one and plunged, spread-eagled, toward the clouds.

I gasped, felt terror and panic fill my veins with liquid ice, called myself a thousand resentful names, wondered if crucifixion at the hands of the Brachiators would have been all that bad an alternative to falling, angrily told myself I was being stupid, and screamed.

Then I gasped again as a jolt pulled my spine taut and flung me upward, back toward the Uppergrowth, and the Brachiators gathered around my home of the night before.

The cord attached to my chest harness was too elastic. I was going to bounce too high and give the Brachiators a chance to grab me on the rebound.

It was a stupid thing to be afraid of. No cord is that elastic. And the Brachs could not see what my body was doing. Their gazes were fixed on the Uppergrowth, not on anything taking place below them.

I still came so close to their assembled backs that I could read their respective histories in the scars cross- hatching their flesh.

For a moment I heard thunder.

Then I fell again, the urge to scream not quite as overpowering this time.

When the cord drew taut I was left whirling at its lowest point, the cloudscape and Uppergrowth reduced to kaleidoscopic whirs.

I hadn’t registered making fists, but when I unclenched them now, my palms tingled from freed circulation. Which struck me as stupid. Panic’s no good as a survival mechanism if it’s so clueless it thinks you can punch a deadly drop into submission.

The spinning of the circle of clouds, down below, slowed to a stop, then changed direction as my line uncoiled. Clockwise this time. No less disorienting, but at least a change.

No point in panicking, then. So I tapped my throat-mike. “Oscin? Skye? I have what I need. I’m ready for a pickup.”

Silence.

I tapped my mike again. “Oscin? Skye?”

They came in, brusque and out-of-synch. “I read you, Andrea. I’m also a little busy.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m under attack.”

I had heard an explosion, but had been too busy fighting back my own fear that I’d been unable to register the sound as anything but One One One’s constant ambient thunder. Now I realized it had been louder, and closer, than any of the storms had been. “From who?”

“Please be quiet, Andrea. This is hard work even for two heads.”

I spun at the end of my line, searching the open air for signs of a skimmer under attack. For a long, terrifying moment I found nothing: there was simply too much sky, too many clouds, too many distant specks journeying toward their own unknown destinations. Then more muffled thunder arrived from somewhere to my immediate right, and I spun again, tracking the sound.

I saw a gray speck that could only be the skimmer drawing a line across the sky, a mere thousand meters below, and a bright object too small to be a vehicle following close behind. A bright red flower bloomed between them before vanishing: an airburst of some kind. The purple afterimage was just beginning to fade when the sound reached me: a muffled, comical pop that sounded more like a failed attempt at an explosion than the real thing. Even as I watched, the skimmer seemed to wobble, then spin, before beginning a steep dive.

“No!” I shouted.

Oscin spoke alone, his voice calm but harried. “Please, Andrea. If we really think we’re about to die, we’ll be sure to let you know.”

The skimmer faded from sight long before it reached the clouds, the blurring effects of the intervening atmosphere camouflaging its exact position against the roiling storms. Even the explosions became harder to see. When one blinding retort lit up the sky, I was so certain the skimmer had gone up that I actually screamed.

I felt a tug on my back.

Looking up, I saw something else happening. The Brachiators had reached my line and gathered around it. Friend to Half-Ghosts was probing it with his claws, as he struggled to puzzle out its meaning. They had to be a little confused. After all, their perspectives were fixed; they just saw the line itself, and how it was anchored. They couldn’t look down and see vulnerable little me, bobbing like a trinket at the end of a string. And even if they could they probably couldn’t pull me up. Their muscles were built for clinging, not lifting.