Already I’m getting blase about all those weird critters. They kind of rattled me at first, but we been here eight days now. If I ignore what they look like I knew stranger guys in the Guards.
What I can’t figure is why we’re sitting around. From what I hear there’s only a few guys holed up in that monastery. With what we got we ought to be able to take the Limper even in top condition. But Darling is the high lord field marshal here. She says we wait.
She gets her orders from Old Father Tree. Must be he’s happy so long as the Limper is buttoned up in a sack where he can’t cause nobody no grief.
Raven said, “I misjudged her. She’s not just sitting on her hands.”
“Eh? What?” I wanted to go to sleep. So suddenly he wanted to talk.
“Darling isn’t just sitting here. There’s a dozen kinds of these Plain creatures so small you don’t notice them or so much like something you’re used to seeing you don’t pay any attention. She’s got those sneaking in and out of there all the time. She knows every breath they take. She’s got somebody on every one of them all the time. The manias and centaurs and rock dropping are all for show. If the order comes down, the real main attack will be carried out by the little creatures. They won’t know what hit them in there. She’s a genius. I’m proud of that girl.”
When it came to sneaky petey I figured she had some pretty good teachers, bunking around with the Black Company all them years. I told him, “Why don’t you go tell her she’s a genius, you’re proud of her, you still love her, will she forgive you for being such a butt way back when? And let me get some sleep.”
He didn’t go see Darling. But he did get pissed at me and left me alone.
Not that that did much good for long.
What nobody knew but maybe Silent-since Darling can’t hear and she can’t lip-read the stones because they got no mouths-was that she already had the go-ahead from the boss tree. She was just waiting for the right hour to give the signal.
Naturally she timed it for when I just got sound asleep.
Things were quiet in the basement where the Limper was hiding out. There was one armed guard, one shaman overseeing, one monk keeping the clay moist, and two more making a leg for Toadkiller Dog.
The earth shook. A windwhale had hit the building with an extra big stone. Everybody moved to protect the claywork.
A dozen Plain creatures exploded out of cracks and shadows. Little missiles flew. Little blades flashed. The fastest creatures climbed all over the soldier and the shaman. They let the monks escape. Once the soldier and witch doctor went down the creatures began defacing the claywork.
It was the same elsewhere. None of the Limper’s men survived.
That monster Toadkiller Dog came flying out of the monastery and landed smack in the middle of a gang centaurs. Blades flashed. Javelins flew. So did bodies. Then the monster broke loose.
Manias swarmed overhead so thick they kept running into each other. The thunder of their lightnings made a drumroll.
The monster got to the barrier of talking menhirs and walking trees. He jumped over that, too. His fur smoldered and his flanks were pincushioned with darts. The walking trees tried to grab hold of him. His strength was too violent for them.
He kept right on coming, straight at us.
Menhirs popped into his way, stalling and tripping him. Mantas tried to cook him. Centaurs galloped with him, pelting him with javelins and dashing in to try to hamstring him. Me and Raven and the Torque boys all put three or four arrows apiece into him. He never seemed to notice. He just kept on coming, howling like all the wolves in the world at once.
“Go for its eyes!” Raven yelled. “Go for its eyes!”
Right, old buddy. Sharpshoot when I’m shaking so bad I figure if I live through this one I’m going to be cleaning the brown out of my drawers for a month.
The monster was only about forty feet away when Silent said hello by smacking it in the face with a bushel of snakes, snakes that hung on and tried to crawl into its ears and mouth and nostrils.
The snakes never slowed it down but they did take its mind off whatever it had planned for us. It just plowed through.
I went flying ass over appetite. As I sailed through the air I saw Darling step in, as cool as if she was in a kitchen slicing bread, and take a cut with a two-handed sword I wouldn’t have figured a woman could lift. She was a little high. She hit ribs instead of opening the thing’s belly.
I hit ground and spent the next couple minutes doing an astronomical survey of a couple hundred newly hatched constellations.
A savage rain shower soaked me and brought me out of it and to my feet, where I realized that I hadn’t been rained on after all. A windwhale had passed over, dumping a little ballast to slow its fall as it came down after Toadkiller Dog.
The monster was still headed west. Right behind it was a shimmery something that looked like an elephant with a nest of tentacles for a head. Bomanz’s contribution to the cause.
That was the last minute when anything made sense.
The talking stones went berserk, started popping all around. Walking trees jumped up and down. Centaurs ran in circles. Everything that could talk started yelling at everything else. The windwhales went to booming and started dropping like they meant to commit suicide by smashing into the ground. The scarred-up menhir was jabbering at Silent in a lingo I didn’t get and Silent was practically doing a combination flamenco and sword dance trying to tell Darling what the rock was saying.
I stumbled over to Raven and said, “Old buddy, this looks like a good time to duck out of the party. Before the keepers come to drag them all back to the asylum.”
He was watching Silent. He said, “Hush.” And a minute later, “The tree god has called the whole thing off. Something’s happened up north. He wants everybody to drop everything and head for home.”
I looked around. Two windwhales were on the ground already. Critters were piling aboard. The only talking stone around anywhere was the one hanging out with Silent. “There goes our whaleback ride to catch your buddy Croaker.”
XXXI
The young tree in the Barrowland had been in a coma since the fire, intelligence damped down while its hurts healed. But there came a day when externals finally registered. There was a bustle and fuss in the Barrowland such as had not been seen since the great battle that had taken place there.
Curious, and compelled by the mandate of his father, the tree dragged himself out of his fugue, though he was far from completely healed.
The Barrowland was crawling with soldiers of the shadowed western empire. He sensed the foci of power that had to be their commanders. They were going over every inch of the surrounding ground.
Why?
Then the memories came. Not in a flood, thankfully. In snippets and dribbles. In reasonable temporal order. The thing that came to dig, the horror it uncovered. The death that had come out of the forest and fallen upon the town. The fire... The fire... The fire...
The soldiers went rigid with fear and awe and fled in terror as the lightning crackled among the branches of the tree. Their captains came out and gaped at the fierce blue light washing the Barrowland.
The tree concentrated its entire intellect upon its immediate forebear and finally, after so many weeks, passed the news of its great failure.
XXXII
