Web of Defeat Page 5

  Whale looked at the destruction of his packing and very nearly lost his temper. "Now you tell me!"

  "I mean it."

  The empty room seemed filled with echoes, lined with shadows, stalked by the ghosts of those who had gone before and hadn't bothered to leave.

  "Whale," Gideon said, "if these people didn't like you as mayor, they would have found some way to show their displeasure long before now. They would have tossed you out on your ear before you could have even worked up a good scream." He put a hand on the man's shoulder. "But they remember that you were here before Wamchu threw you out. They trust you. Believe it or not, they really do."

  Whale lowered his head, and nodded. "What you are saying is that I should remain behind, guarding your back, as it were, and try to keep these good people from panicking."

  Gideon smiled as they walked slowly toward the door.

  "Just because I'm gone doesn't mean Wamchu is going to leave Rayn alone, you know that. It needs protection. And if one of us has to go, then the other has to stay."

  The old man brightened a little. "Can I go?"

  "Do you want to?"

  "Are you kidding? I could get killed!"

  Gideon had hoped for a bit more protest, a little less enthusiasm for the splitting of their forces, and definitely less pointed prognostications of the trip's outcome.

  At the door he turned to shake the man's hand, and squinted when he saw a faint smile, and a fainter gleam in his eyes.

  "Whale?"

  "Yes?"

  "You didn't plan this, did you?"

  "Certainly not. I do not collaborate with Wamchu, and I am vaguely insulted that you imply it."

  "I'm not talking about Wamchu. I'm talking about your not intending to go along from the very beginning."

  Whale shrugged off his pack and handed it over, telling him that there was no time for discussion, that some of the things inside would be known to him and others would not. He would have to learn as he went.

  "Whale—"

  "Win one for the Gipper," the mayor said, and closed the door in his face.

  "The Gipper?" Gideon said. And he knocked on the door, then pounded on it, until Whale pulled it open. "The Gipper?"

  The man shrugged. "It's a fish, right?"

  Gideon closed the door and walked into the square, where he found Jimm standing beside the lorra, his own pack ungainly not through size or weight but through a certain sagginess that indicated a vast capacity not now filled with much of anything. Horrn grinned when he saw his benefactor and saluted him with his broken sword.

  "Can we go now, huh?"

  Then Finlay strode confidently out of the darkness, his own pack straining with its contents yet seeming to place no burden upon his brawny shoulders and arms, though his legs were slightly bowed, a condition he affected as a natural part of his rolling gait.

  Tuesday flew with a delighted cry to the blacksmith's shoulder and settled there, nuzzling his hair and whispering canard nothings into his ear.

  Gideon explained then why Whale would be staying behind, feeling considerably less confident than he hoped he sounded.

  There was a long silence before Jimm sheathed his battered weapon and touched the lorra's neck. "Well, are we going or what?"

  Gideon laid a palm against his shirt pocket, feeling therein the smooth folds of Ivy's letter. Whale had promised that an explanation would be sent to the Upper Ground so that she would not think Gideon had totally ignored her, but he was not entirely still at heart. Not only did he miss her, but he also was fully aware of what she would do to him if her temper ignited and she decided that a duck was not, in the long run, worth spurning her carefully considered advances.

  "We go," he said quietly.

  Through unusually darkened streets whose cobbles sent the echoes of their passing mournfully into the wind; past dark shops and darker houses whose silent invitations to give up their foolhardy and probably fruitless task were extraordinarily tempting; past a band of furtive footpads who sought to waylay them before their journey had even begun, but who were forestalled by a snort and a look from Red and the bone-chilling cry of an enraged duck ringing in their ears; through the gap in the city walls, the gap that had once promised peace and security by virtue of the fact that it held no gate to keep its citizens in or its visitors out; into the rolling fields which in daylight were verdant and lush and which at night held no terror for those who traveled them, unless they were obligated to count the dangers.

  And along the northern road whose shoulders were lined with small shacks and huts belonging to those merchants and small-time entrepreneurs who required the freedom of the open air as opposed to the walls of the city, who spread their goods on cloth and table in front of their abodes to entice the caravans to do their business here rather than there, who needed a back door that led to forest and stream in case those caravans were stupid enough to stop.

  They climbed a hill, and looked back.

  Rayn spread darkly behind them, the fields surrounding it like a vast sea of dark grass.

  And yet another hour passed before they came upon a crossroads.

  The main highway led to the north, to the steep, virtually perpendicular foothills of the great mountains upon whose world-sized plateau lay the Upper Ground.

  To their left, the road eventually disappeared into a vast and fearsome forest, which Gideon had previously explored in his herculean efforts to maintain his sanity, his life, and the love of a good woman.

  They eyed these choices with a sighing that could be heard above the gentle breeze wafting down from the moon. Those places, for all their dangers, for all their trials, for all their shuddering memories, were at least known to them.

  But the road to their right, leading down the eastern slope of the hill and across a plain that stretched ominously to the horizon, was unmapped. What dangers it held, they did not know. What pleasures and surprises they might discover, they did not know. What would happen to them once they set feet irrevocably upon that dusty trail, they did not know. Whether any or all of them, in whole or in part, would return once their task was done—assuming they would be able to complete it in the first place, which was, in itself, yet another unknown—they did not know.

  But it was the way they had to travel.

  It was the way their destiny pointed.

  "You know," Tuesday said, "I kind of like being a duck."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The first two days' travel was fairly uneventful, aside from the minor earth tremors that awakened them each morning and a band of roving Moglar raiders who paced them at a distance of two miles until they decided Red wasn't as tasty as he looked. At any other time, Gideon would have been discouraged by these troubles; now, however, he used them to remind his companions that Wamchu was not a man to take any sort of defeat with aplomb, dignity, and all that; more than likely, he was preparing a new and ingeniously subtle tactic that would bode considerably more than simple ill for them all unless, he doubly cautioned, the guy just showed up and killed them.

  Though Botham was not terribly impressed by the speech, and Horrn seemed singularly unnerved for a man who made his living preying on the nerves of others, they nevertheless maintained a steady watch of the sky, checked carefully each traveler who passed them, and were suspicious of anything that did not look as if it were absolutely normal. This continuous vigilance took its toll. The strain of impending potential doom watered the seed of imaginative paranoia. Jimm, determined to prove his worth as a member of the band, began assaulting standing boulders on the off chance they might be one of the wives in disguise, and the blacksmith made it a point to stuff Tuesday in his sack whenever he did not like the looks of a merchant or trader approaching them from one of the many side roads.

  Gideon alone was able to maintain temper and perspective since he was too busy interviewing the increasingly infrequent farmers they met in order to discover the exact nature of the plague that afflicted their crops.

  As best
he could determine, something had gotten into the soil that had reduced its fertility to a level that permitted only subsistence food to grow; as a consequence, there was little or nothing left over to feed the mouths of Rayn and her sister cities, none of which Gideon had ever seen though he was assured by the others that they did indeed exist. Such assurance was not comforting. It only meant there were hundreds, perhaps even and god forbid, thousands, of people out there whom he had never seen and had never met and had never even dreamed of who were, consciously or not, depending upon him and his quest to prevent their children, pets, and spouses from starving. It placed an enormous amount of pressure on his already burdened shoulders, and his temper finally eroded.

  Then, on the morning of the fourth day—the third day being as uneventful as the first two, only more so because there weren't any farmers left and the earthquakes had stopped—he noticed that the horizon was beginning to show signs of higher elevations and forestland. The road headed directly for them. From his pack he pulled a packet which he opened in order to better study the map and instructions Whale had included. He held the map up, squinted over its top, squinted at the squiggles that were supposed to mean something, and decided that their goal lay in a southeasterly direction, in a valley just to the east of Hykrol Peak.

  He asked Jimm if he knew of the place, and the thief nodded enthusiastically.

  "How high is this peak?" he asked from Red's back.

  Jimm closed one eye and thought a moment. "Very high."

  "Great, and we have to climb it," he muttered.

  "We do?"

  "Well, sure. How else are we going to get to the other side? Go around it?"

  Jimm tugged at an ear. "I thought it might be easier that way. Of course, I've never met a hero before, and maybe you don't do things the easy way." He tugged the ear again. "Do you?"

  "You mean, we can go around it?"

  Jimm nodded, albeit a bit doubtfully.

  Gideon, who was tired of watching the man's spiky pate bob up and down, slid off Red's back and sent the lorra on ahead to scout for the night's camp. It would have been quicker had Tuesday volunteered, but when he had first suggested it, Finlay vetoed the idea, claiming that she was not equipped for such dangerous missions.

  Tuesday had sighed.

  Gideon wondered if being a duck had so affected his sister's senses that she was now so captivated by the man's admittedly spectacular brawn that she neglected to see that his brain had atrophied somewhere around the age of fifteen. Which was not a terribly bad age to be, all things considered, since it seemed to have forged a fierce and unrelenting loyalty toward the object of his affection; on the other hand, it forced Gideon to keep his comments to himself whenever the blacksmith did something stupid, since that same loyalty did not extend to his true love's only living relative.

  "Jimm," he said then, "why don't we just go around it?"

  Jimm shrugged. He was not used to being asked his opinion, and the pressure it produced turned his sallow cheeks a healthy and glowing pink. "I don't know. What do you think?"

  "I don't know. That's why I'm asking you."

  The pink turned red. "Oh. Well. We could, I guess. But then again, maybe we shouldn't. I mean, if you like to climb, we could go over the top, and if you don't, we could go around the bottom." He grinned at his assessment. "Of course, I'm only a poor little thief, so what do I know anyway?"

  You know how long you're going to live if you keep it up? Gideon thought.

  "Jimm," he said, "do you know any reason why we should not take the easy way—that is, go around?"

  Jimm frowned fiercely. "I don't know. Hardship?"

  "I don't know. That's why I'm asking you."

  "Right. Well... there are hardships."

  "What kinds of hardships?"

  They walked on in silence for several yards while Jimm forced himself to think again.

  "We could be poisoned by a footh."

  "I've seen them. No problem."

  "We could be attacked by ekklers."

  "As long as we're in the forest, that's no problem either."

  "We could be ambushed by ants."

  "I was, once, and I think I remember how to take care of them."

  "No kidding? Could you teach me?"

  Gideon stared at him. "You're joking."

  The thief sagged a little. "Well, I don't get much chance to fight ants in the city, you know."

  Another dozen yards passed beneath their soles.

  "There be dragons."

  Gideon stopped.

  "Actually," Horrn said cheerily, "I think they're kind of fun, in a way. They have a lousy reputation, but the one time I saw one, he had the funniest little—" The thief looked back, saw Gideon standing in the middle of the road, and frowned. "Aren't you coming?"

  "You said dragons."

  Jimm closed one eye; this was going to be more difficult than he'd thought. "Yes. Sure, I did. I think. Did I?"

  Gideon felt his limbs growing heavy. "Big dragons, little dragons, what?"

  "Yes."

  Gideon turned around, but Botham and the duck were too far back to offer support. In fact, they were busy sharing a fistful of fresh grass the blacksmith had plucked from alongside the road. Tuesday, he heard faintly, was trying to explain the taste of steak, and Botham could not understand why anyone, especially a bird, would want to eat a tree.

  He looked to Horrn. "Fire?"

  The thief nodded enthusiastically.

  "Scales and claws and wings and things?"

  "Oh, yeah!"

  "Nobody told me about that," he accused.

  Jimm winced at his distress, beckoned him on, and when he finally moved again, said, "Maybe I was wrong."

  "Do you know a dragon when you see one?" Gideon asked glumly.

  "Well... yes. Sort of."

  He decided against further clarification, and instead asked the young man if he really made his living as a thief. Somehow, he didn't think Horrn could steal a breath of fresh air.

  Jimm's expression, on the other hand, spoke of high insult and bruised feelings. "I can climb anything," he said without boasting, "open anything, do mazes with my eyes closed, and take the best of any man who opposes me." And with that, he unsheathed his sword and neatly put an arrogant blade of grass out of its misery.

  "I believe you!" Gideon said.

  But Horrn was quick to see the way he looked at the thief's weapon. "You're wondering why this is the way it is, right?"

  "No," Gideon said.

  "I attacked a door."

  Gideon studied the map.

  "It was dark. I thought it was the owner coming home. I wanted to scare him."

  "Did he live?"

  Horrn laughed lustily. "Took that sucker right off its hinges, I did. Never felt a thing."

  Tuesday, Gideon thought, you're gonna pay for this.

  As the day limped on, he watched the horizon break more clearly into hills and great numbers of trees. By the middle of the following afternoon, he was beginning to wish he were going the other way.

  The trees were not just trees, but a broad band of forestland that stretched north to south without a break that he could see, and behind them the hills were definitely making noises about growing into mountains.

  On the sixth day he squinted for more precise vision when he saw one hill that was absolutely a mountain, its peak split in two at the top; the one on the left was smoking—great plumes of roiling black that reached into the clouds hovering above the mountain—clouds, he noticed by sunset, that were not clouds at all but the smoke itself, caught by the winds above the surface and flattened into cloud-like formations that looked suspiciously like the mounds of dark grey dirt one finds on freshly covered graves. He did not care for the symbols; nor did he care for the fact that his mind had created that symbol and wouldn't let it go.

  Jimm saw where he was looking and smiled. "Isn't that something, Gideon?" His arm gestured grandly. "Have you ever seen anything like it in your life? It's rea
lly amazing. Of course, it does look a little unpleasant from here, but when you're faced with something you're not used to, anything can look like something else if you work hard enough at it. At least, I think it does, though I could be wrong."

  "Jimm," he said, "that is a volcano."

  Horrn nodded.

  Gideon watched the peak for several minutes before he took a deep breath. "And the dragons you mentioned are at the base of that volcano."

  Horrn gave him a reluctant nod, second point well taken.

  "So we have a great choice, right?" he said bitterly. "Either we climb that volcano and risk it exploding on us and frying us in rivers of molten lava, or we go around it and risk the dragons frying us for lunch."

  "Well, if you want to put it that way..."

  Gideon snarled and lengthened his stride, leaving Jimm and the others behind as he pointed to the Peak, pointed at the forest, and told himself that what he ought to do now is turn right around before the little creep thought of something else to brighten his goddamn day.

  He reread the notes Whale had prepared for him, checked the map for the hundredth time, and sighed when he found no mention of the dangers it appeared he would be facing.

  "Damn," he said softly.

  It was always like this, and he hated it. A man started out to do the decent thing, and even the best-intentioned people ended up throwing ridiculous obstacles in his way. Like forgetting to mention dragons and volcanoes and god only knows what the hell else. It occurred to him to question the thief about the second peak, which did not seem to be smoking though its ragged top suggested that it too was of volcanic origin. He didn't. He decided he did not want to know what was up there. Probably some kind of incredibly ferocious beast that had a liking for idiots out hunting for a giant whose niece was reputed to be marvellously friendly and the prime ingredient for changing a duck into a woman.

  All in all, he thought, it was much easier sitting around in a volatile tent being bored.

  He stalked up a rise, his arms swinging stiffly at his sides, and didn't bother to stop again on the way down. It would be too much trouble. It would permit Horrn to catch up, and then he would be obligated to tie the thief's spiked hair together. So what if there was a river ahead, with Red waiting patiently on its western bank? So what if the river seemed to be at least two hundred yards across, with no bridge in sight and none of the shallow fords he'd come to expect from his previous journeys? So what if there was evidence of large aquatic things swimming around in it, one of which Red seemed to have caught and dragged onto the grass, its quills gleaming in the dying sun, its porcine snout prickly with beige, horn-like protrusions, its tail forked and slapping the ground with such force that deep ruts were formed wherever it landed?