‘You can’t deny it’s interesting, Joshua.’
One elf called out, a pant-hoot cry like a chimp’s, and kicked his mount in the ribs. The six beasts trotted forward at Joshua, with guttural grunts.
‘Lobsang, your advice?’
The hogs were speeding up.
‘Lobsang—’
‘Run!’
Joshua ran, but the pigs ran faster. He had barely closed any ground on the descending airship, or the forest, when a huge body came plummeting past him. Joshua smelled dirt and blood and shit and a kind of greasy musk, and a small fist slammed into his back and sent him sprawling.
The pigs capered around him, oddly playful despite their size and bulk. Their huge random violence was terrifying. He expected to be crushed, or gored on the canine teeth embedded in the tips of their snouts. But instead the pigs kept running by him, and the humanoids, the elves, whooping and hooting, leaned over to make passes at him. Blades flashed at him — blades of stone! He cowered and rolled.
At last they pulled back, into a loose circle around him. Shaking, he got to his feet, feeling for his own weapons. He wasn’t cut, he realized, save for nicks on his face, and on his shoulder where a swipe had gone through the cloth of his coverall. But they had cut the supply pack from his chest, even pickpocketed the knife at his waist. He had been expertly stripped, leaving only the parrot on his shoulder, the processor pack on his back.
The elves were toying with him.
Now the elves stood up on the backs of their strange mounts. They weren’t like the trolls, they were much skinnier, more graceful, lithe, strong, their hairy upright bodies like those of child gymnasts. They had long tree- climbing arms, very human legs, and small heads with wizened chimp-like faces. They all seemed to be male. Some of them were sporting skinny erections.
Joshua looked for positives. ‘Well, they’re smaller than me. Five feet, maybe?’
‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Lobsang’s whisper in his headset urged. ‘They’re stronger than you. And this is their world, remember.’
The pant-hooting cries began again, and seemed to reach a crescendo. Then one of the elves kicked his animal’s ribs. The beast, its own eyes fixed on Joshua, began to stride steadily forward. The elf bared human- looking teeth and hissed.
This time they weren’t playing.
There are moments when terror is like a treacle that slows down time. Once when Joshua was a kid he had slipped over an edge at a limestone quarry, just a ten-minute bike ride from the Home, and his friends couldn’t haul him back, and he had had to hang on while they ran for help. His arms had hurt like hell. But what he remembered most of all was the tiny detail of the rock right in front of his eyes. There had been flecks of mica in it, and lichen, a miniature forest dried yellow by the sun. That little landscape had become his whole world, until somebody somewhere started yelling, and some other guy’s hands grabbed his wrists, hauled on arms that felt like they were filled with hot lead…
The elf leapt in the air, and flickered out of existence. The hog trotted on, grunting, speeding up. The realization came to Joshua, with all the clarity of a mica fleck on a sun-warmed rock, that the elf was stalking him. And it had
The hog was still coming. Joshua stood his ground. At the last second it hesitated, stumbled, veered away from him.
And the elf returned, stretching, its feet braced on the hog’s back, its hands clamped around Joshua’s neck — hands in place to throttle Joshua,
But now the elf’s strong ape hands were squeezing, and Joshua was driven to the ground, unable to breathe. He reached, but the elf’s arms were longer than his; he flailed, unable to reach the creature’s snarling face, and blackness rimmed his vision. He tried to think. His weapons, his pack, were stolen and scattered, but the parrot still sat on his shoulder. He grabbed the parrot’s frame with both hands, and shoved it in the face of the elf. Bits of glass and plastic erupted, the elf fell back screaming, and mercifully that death grip at his throat was released.
But the other elves on their hogs screamed and closed.
‘Joshua!’ A loudspeaker, booming from the air. The airship was coming down, slowly, ponderously, dangling a rope ladder.
He got to his feet, gasping for breath through a crushed throat, but a bank of elves on hogs stood between him and the ladder, and the injured elf on the ground shrieked its fury. The only gap in the circle surrounding him was the way that lead elf had come.
So he ran that way, away from the airship, but out of the circle of elves. The wrecked parrot was still attached to his coverall by cables; it dragged through the dirt behind him. The yelling elves pursued him. If he could somehow double back, or maybe reach the forest—
‘Joshua! No! Watch out for the—’
The ground suddenly gave way under him.
He fell a yard or so, and found himself in a hollow surrounded by dogs — no, like a mix of dogs and bears, he’d glimpsed this kind before, lithe canine bodies with powerful heads and muzzles like bears. Their black-furred bodies squirmed all around him, females, puppies. This was some kind of den, not a trap. But even the puppies were snapping, snarling packets of aggression. The smallest of them, it was almost cute, closed its bear-like jaws on Joshua’s leg. He kicked, trying to loosen the little creature’s grip. The other dog-bears barked and snarled, and Joshua expected them to fall on him in a moment.
But here came the elves on their swinish mounts. The adult dogs rose up out of their den in a pack, and hurled themselves at the hogs. The fight erupted in a cloud of yelps, barks, grunts, cries, pant-hoots, snapping teeth, screams of pain and sprays of blood, while the elves flashed in and out of existence, as if glimpsed under a strobe lamp.
Joshua climbed out of the den and ran away from the fight, or tried to. But that stubborn pup clung to his leg, and he was still dragging the absurd wreckage of the parrot. He glanced up. The airship was almost overhead. Joshua jumped for the rope ladder, grabbed it, and viciously kicked away the pup. The airship rose immediately.
Below, the dogs had now encircled the huge hogs, which fought back ferociously. Joshua saw one big dog- bear sink its teeth into the neck of a screaming hog, which crashed to the ground. But another hog scooped up a dog in its big tusked jaw and threw it through the air, squealing, its chest ripped open. Meanwhile the elves flickered through the carnage. Joshua saw one elf face a dog that leapt for his throat. The elf flicked away and reappeared beside the dog as it sailed through the air, spun with balletic grace, and swiped at the animal’s torso with a thin stone blade, disembowelling the dog before it hit the ground. The elves were fighting for survival, but Joshua got the impression they were fighting individually, not for each other; it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. It was every man for himself. Or would have been, if they had been men.
And the airship rose up, beyond the reach of the trees, and into the sunlight. The fight was reduced to a dusty, blood-splashed detail in a landscape across which the airship’s shadow drifted serenely. Joshua, still barely able to breathe, climbed the ladder, and spilled into the gondola.
‘You kicked a puppy,’ Lobsang said accusingly.
‘Add it to the charge sheet,’ he gasped. ‘Next time you pick a vacation site, Lobsang, think a bit more Disneyland.’ Then the darkness around his vision that had been there ever since the close encounter with the elf folded over him.
31
HE WAS PRETTY badly hurt, he learned later. Lots of minor injuries, many of which he hadn’t noticed at the time. The damage to his neck, his throat. Scratches, cuts, even a bite mark — not from the puppy at his ankle, this was the imprint of human-like teeth in his shoulder. Lobsang’s ambulant treated the cuts, dosed him with antibiotics, and fed him painkillers.
