tripped when something moved that should not have. That isn’t the same thing at all.”
The stone stood silent for a moment. “Perhaps not. Nevertheless, we are upon the thing. In hours, or a day or two, as the winds decide, the battle will be joined. Your fate may be determined.”
Bomanz snorted. “A rock with a sense for the dramatic. It’s absurd. You really expect me to fight that thing?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s what I think it is...”
“It is the thing called the Limper. And the thing known as Toadkiller Dog. Both are handicapped.”
Bomanz sneered and snorted. “I’d call being without a body something more than a handicap.”
“It is not weak, this thing. That smoke rises from a city still burning three days after its departure. It has become the disciple of death. Killing and destruction are all it knows. The tree has decreed that it be stopped.”
“Right. Why? And why us?”
“Why? Because if it continues amok its course will someday bring it to the Plain. Why us? Because there is no one else. All who had any great power were consumed in the struggle in the Barrowland except thee and we. And, most of all, we do it because the god has commanded it.”
Bomanz muttered and grumbled under his breath.
“Prepare yourself, wizard. The hour comes. If you are innocent in our eyes you must be guilty in his.”
Of course. There could be no ground in the middle. Not for him. He did not have the strength to hold it. Never had had, if the truth be known, though he had deluded himself in the years of his quest for knowledge about those who had been enchained by the ancients.
Did he know remorse for the horror brought on by his rumblings? Some. Not as much as he thought he should. He told himself that because of his intercession at the penultimate moment, his self-sacrifice, the outbreak of darkness had been far gentler than it could have been. Without him the night might have lasted forever.
The old man ambled away from the stone, rapt in his own thoughts. He did not notice the stone turning jerkily, keeping its scarred face toward him. The menhirs never moved while being watched by human eyes. How they knew they were being watched no one knew.
Bomanz’s meander took him to the aft end of the windwhale. Small rustlings accompanied him. Chaperons. If he noticed he ignored them. They had been with him always.
He settled upon a soft, unprotesting lump of whale flesh about chair height. It made comfortable sitting. But he knew he would not be staying long. The windwhale was especially fetid here.
For the hundredth time he contemplated escape. All he had to do was jump and use a levitator spell to soften his fall. That was well within his competence. But not within the compass of his courage.
His fear of heights was not totally debilitating. Should he fall, he would retain enough self-possession to save himself. But there was no way he could bring himself to take the plunge voluntarily.
Resigned, he looked back the way he had come. Home, such as it was and had been, lay a thousand miles away. Maybe a lot farther. They were passing over lands of which he had never heard, where all who saw it marveled at the great shape in the sky and had no idea what it was.
There was no guarantee he would step into friendly lands if he did go over the side. In fact, the terrain below looked actively hostile.
Hell with it. He had gotten himself into this. He would ride it out.
“Hunh!”
He was an old man but his eyes were plenty sharp.
The high, clean air allowed him to see a long way. And up north, at the edge of discernment when he looked at them a fraction of a point off directly, were two dots at an altitude even higher than that of the windwhale. To be visible at all at that distance they had to be the size of windwhales.
Bomanz snorted.
This monster was the vanguard of a parade.
He chuckled then. There were rustles nearby, the natives disturbed by his amusement. He chuckled again and rose. This time he strolled the length of the windwhale before he alighted again, as far forward as he dared go.
The smoke was much nearer. It rose higher than the windwhale. He saw hints of the fires that fed the column, which had begun to develop a bend in its trunk down lower. Grim. Maybe the rock was right. Something had to be done.
This was the dozenth such city, though the first they had come to still in its death throes. The progress of the insanity was an arrow pointing due south, a craziness that could make sense only to the crazy himself.
The windwhale began rumbling with internal flatulences. The horizon tilted, rose. Mantas piped and squealed behind Bomanz. He got a death grip on his seat.
The monster was headed down.
Why? It was not time to drop a menhir. It was not feeding time.
Mantas hurtled past in pairs and squadrons, spade-headed darts spreading across the sky, headed toward the city and its coronet of circling carrion birds.
“There is a good wind running a mile below us, wizard.” Bomanz glanced back. His scar-faced stone friend. “If it holds we will overtake the destroyer shortly after nightfall. You have only that long to prepare.”
Bomanz glanced around again. The stone was gone. But he was not alone. Darling and Silent had come to stare at the stricken city. The dark man’s face was impassive but Darling’s was a study in empathetic agony. That touched the soft-headed, softhearted side of the old man. He faced her, said, “We will put an end to the pain, child.” He spoke carefully so she could read his lips.
She looked at Silent. Silent looked at her. Their fingers flew in the speech of the deaf. Bomanz caught part of the exchange. He was not pleased.
They were discussing him and Silent’s remarks were not complimentary.
Bomanz cursed and spat. That bastard had it in for him for no damned reason.
The manias decimated the carrion birds, used the up-draft from the fires to soar high, then returned to the windwhale carrying a feast for their young. They settled down to nap.
But there was no real relaxation for anyone. The windwhale had dropped till it was only half a mile high. It passed the city, scudding along at twenty miles an hour. Soon the monster had to climb back into less vigorous air so as not to catch up before nightfall.
The scar-face stone returned when Bomanz was not looking. When he did notice it, he said, “I feel it now, rock. It reeks of corruption. And I still have no idea what I could do to hurt it.”
“Worry not. There is a new decree from the god. You are not to reveal yourself except in extreme circumstance.
Our attack will be exploratory, experimental, and admonitory only.”
“What the hell? Why? Go for the kill, I say. Hit him with everything the one time he don’t know we’re coming. We’ll never get a better shot.”
“The god has spoken.”
Bomanz argued. The god won.
The windwhale began shedding altitude at dusk. Soon after nightfall Bomanz spied the campfires of an army ahead. A pair of mantas took to the air to scout. They returned, reported whatever they reported. The windwhale slanted down toward the encampment, cutting a course that would rip through its heart.
Mantas poured off the windwhale’s back, scrambled around and over one another in a search for updrafts.
Bomanz felt the old terror moving closer. It was restless but did not seem alert.
The ground came up and up. Bomanz clung to his seat and awaited certain impact, now unconcerned by the insult inplicit in the fact that a dozen menhirs had moved into position around him and Darling, and her thugs were spread out ready for trouble.
The windwhale leveled out. Campfires slid out of sight beneath it. The screaming down there was almost inaudible because of the creak and rumble and intervening bulk of the giant of the sky. Bomanz felt the shock of the old evil, caught completely unprepared. It went into a pure black rage.
Just as it began to respond mantas swooped in from every direction. They cut the heart out of the night with the glare of the lightnings they discharged from the store in their flesh. Bolts stabbed around by the hundred,
