Mountain Magic Part 67

Old Nathan felt the calm of a decision made for him, in the clearest possible manner. Warn't right, but warn't my choice neither.

"Let him go, Chance Ransden," he said. "I'm comin' to ye, since thet's what ye think thet ye want."

Old Nathan stepped forward. The portal and the forest behind him vanished, leaving him alone on a lava plain with Chance Ransden.

The sky was pale and yellowish. The air was bitterly cold, with a tang of brimstone.

Chance Ransden stood arm's-length distant, grinning like a neck-chained monkey. He backed slightly away when the cunning man appeared before him. Bullets had puckered Ransden's flesh in a dozen different places, and a long pink scar snaked up the right side of his rib cage where a knife had just failed to let out his evil life; but he looked a fine, muscular specimen of a man for all that.

If he was still a man. If he had ever been a man.

"Cull, he made me a good dog, Ridgeway," Chance said. "You'll make me a better one."

The cunning man tested the surface with the toes of his right foot. The plain on which he stood was formed by ropes of lava spilling out to cool in arcs across the axis of the advance. Individual ropes lay one against the next in a series of six-foot hillocks, with sharp valleys between ready to break the ankle of an incautious man.

There was no animal life visible anywhere on the plain, and no vegetation save scales of lichen-white and gray and rusty orange-which slowly powdered even raw stone. Plumes of vapor marked cabin-sized potholes where rock bubbled, and the wind occasionally burned instead of cutting with cold.

"What I'll make you, Chance Ransden," the cunning man said softly, "is glad t' git off t' whar ye belong."

"You thunk I was afeerd uv ye, back t' thet world, didn't ye, Nathan?" Chance said. "Waal, I'm another guess chap thin ye took me fer."

Old Nathan stepped across the V-shaped trench between his hillock and the one on which Ransden stood.

Ransden hopped back. He raised his hand in the air. "Ye say ye're the Divil's master, old man?" he asked.

Old Nathan stared at the image of the younger, stronger man. "Aye," he said.

Chance snapped his fingers.

The rim of a fuming pothole ten yards behind Ransden began to move. Minerals deposited by steam shivered away in blue-green and saffron patches. Something was coming to life, the way the first rains cause toads to break free of the capsule of hardened slime in which they have survived summer and drought.

"Waal, Ridgeway," said Chance Ransden. "I say I'm the Divil's sarvint. Let's see who's the wiser uv us, shall we?"

The thing from the rock coc.o.o.n was gray and looked somewhat like an ape. It would have been taller than most men if it walked upright; instead it shambled forward in a crouch, occasionally touching down the knuckles of a slablike hand. Its upper canines were the size of a man's thumbs, and each finger bore predatory claws.

"Thar's nowhere t' run, old man!" Chance cackled. "Ye kin run till h.e.l.l freezes over, en ye still cain't git away!"

The creature shambling forward was no ape nor any other living thing. The eye sockets beneath its deep brows were pools of lambent flame.

There were fears in the heart of every man. Chance Ransden's soul stood as naked as those of his son and the cunning man, but his master had offered him an ally. . . .

"I'm too old t' run, Ransden," Old Nathan said. He reached into the air. "B'sides, I warn't niver airy good at it."

His fingers crooked and- -closed on the hard angles of his knife. There when he needed it, and he hadn't been sure.

But he was sure he would not have run. He'd known since the day the bullet struck and pa.s.sed on at King's Mountain that there was nowhere to run from the worst fears, the true fears. . . .

The backspring clicked with a.s.surance as Old Nathan opened the main blade. There was a faint sheen of oil on the steel.

Ransden looked startled and backed again. For the first time he may have realized that there was content to the cunning man's boast to be the Devil's master.

But steel wouldn't win this fight, any more than Bully Ransden's strength had done.

"C'mon thin, durn ye," Old Nathan muttered, to himself rather than to the ape hulking toward him. He stepped over a trough in the rock, then stretched his long shanks in a leap to close with the creature.

The ape lifted onto its hind legs to meet the attack, but the cunning man was already within the sweep of the long arms before they could grasp him. He held the knife with the cutting edge up. The creature's hide plucked at the point before giving way. Its breath reeked with an unexpectedly chemical foulness, like that of stale urine.

Old Nathan started to rip upward against the resistance of the gray skin and the belts of muscles beneath it. The ape bit into the top of his skull with a pain like nothing the cunning man had ever before experienced.

He was on his back. The creature was twenty feet away, patting at the gash in its belly and roaring like the fall of a giant tree. There was blood on its fangs, speckling the froth bubbling across the broad lips.

Old Nathan couldn't see out of one eye and his hands were empty. He sat up and only then realized how much his shoulders hurt. The ape's claws had raked furrows across him before the creature flung the cunning man away.

He wiped his left eye with the back of his hand, then blinked. That cleared enough blood from the eyesocket that his vision, though dim, was binocular again. He needed the depth perception of two eyes. . . .

The jackknife, slimed with a greenish fluid that was not blood, lay beside his right hand. The ichor crusted and turned black where it touched the silver set into one bone scale.

Old Nathan picked up the knife. The tacky ichor would give him a better grip. Despite dazzling flashes of pain, he got to his feet before the monster started toward him again.

The ape bellowed and spread both arms. There was blood on the creature's foreclaws also. Old Nathan stumbled when he tried to leap forward. That worked to his advantage, because his opponent's great hands clapped together above the cunning man so that he was free to stab home again within an inch of the first wound.

This time the sound the ape made was more a scream than a bellow. It drove its clawed fingers into Old Nathan's sides like the tines of a flesh fork lifting meat to the fire. The cunning man shouted hoa.r.s.ely, but he used the twisting power of the ape's own arms to tear the blade through rib cartilage that would have daunted mere human strength.

The creature flung Old Nathan over its head. For a moment the cunning man twisted in a kaleidoscope of yellow sky and gray stone, picked out occasionally by the sight of one of his own flailing limbs.

He hit the lava on his left side. His hip and hand took the initial impact, but his head struck also.

Old Nathan lay on the rock. He saw two apes turn toward him, but one image was only a faint ghost.

The flap of skin torn from his forehead had almost bled his right eye closed again.

The creature's mouth was open. The cunning man could not hear the sounds directly, but he felt the lava tremble beneath him.

He sat up. The tear in the ape's belly was the size of a man's head. Coils of intestine dangled from the opening, and the fur of the creature's groin and upper thighs was matted by sour green ichor.

The ape lowered its forelimbs and knuckled toward its opponent.

Old Nathan found the knife beside him. The main blade had broken off at the bolsters when it struck the lava. He tried to open the smaller blade and found that his left hand had no feeling or movement.

The cunning man's vision cleared, though it remained two dimensional. He could hear the monster roar.

He gripped the jigged bone scales of the knife in his teeth and snicked out the smaller blade with his right thumb. When Old Nathan took the knife from his mouth, the taste of the monster's body fluids remained on his lips, but that could not be allowed to matter any more than the pain did.

The tiny blade winked in the jaundiced light. Old Nathan had honed its edge too fine to make a weapon, but it would serve until it broke.

"C'mon, thin," he whispered as he tried to lurch to his feet. His left leg would not support him. He fell back.

C'mon, ye ole fool. . . .

Old Nathan began to crawl forward on his hands and knees. The crystalline surface of the lava was bright with blood that leaked through his abraded skin.

The ape rose onto its hind legs again. It was trying to stuff loops of gut back into its belly, but each handful squeezed additional coils out of the knife-cut opening.

" . . . whar ye b'long," Old Nathan whispered through the slime coating his lips. He had no peripheral vision. He could see nothing but the figure of the ape standing gray against the lighter gray background of a fumarole, and the edges of even that image were blurred and drawing inward.

"C'mon . . ."

The ape turned away.

"No!" screamed Chance Ransden from where he stood behind the monster. "Ye da.s.sn't leave-"

The ape shambled on in its new direction. Chance leaped away.

Old Nathan transferred the knife to his teeth again. He needed his right hand to drag himself forward.

White light pulsed at the center of his field of view.

Chance Ransden turned to run, then screamed as the ape caught him in the crook of one hairy arm. The creature stumbled over its trailing intestines. It took two further steps, then looked over its shoulder toward the cunning man.

The ape and Chance Ransden, howling like a stuck pig, plunged into the heart of a pothole crater. Mud so hot that it glowed plopped up, then sank again beneath a curtain of its own steam.

"C'mon . . ." a voice whispered in Old Nathan's mind as he lost consciousness.

Old Nathan woke up. He could hear the straw filling of a mattress rustle beneath him when he turned his head.

There was a quilt over him as well. Ellie Ransden sat in a chair beside the bed made up on the floor in lieu of a proper frame. It was morning. . . .

But not the same morning. Beside the bed was a pot with a sc.r.a.p of tow burnt at the bottom of it. Ellie had melted lard into the container, then floated a wick in it as a makeshift candle by which to watch the cunning man's face while he slept.

Old Nathan tried to sit up. Ellie knelt beside the bed with a little cry and helped to support his shoulders.

His hands were bigger than they should have been, and the hairs along his arms were blond. He had awakened in Bully Ransden's body, as he knew he would do-if he awakened.

"Sarah took the-old man back t' the homeplace," Ellie said. "He'll be right ez rain, she says."

"Gal, gal . . ." Old Nathan said. "I-"

He stood up in a rush. Ellie scrambled, flicking the bedding out of the way so that it would not tangle the cunning man's feet.

Sparrows quarreled on the window's outer ledge. Their chirping was only noise, as devoid of meaning to him as it was empty of music. Nathan Ridgeway was no longer a wizard- And no longer an old man.

Ellie Ransden put her arms around him. Her touch helped to support Old Nathan while he got his legs under him again, but it was offered with unexpected warmth. "Child, listen," Old Nathan said. "I ain't yer Cull. He changed place with me."

"Hush, now," Ellie murmured. "You jest hold stiddy till ye've got yer strength agin."

Old Nathan looked down at the supple, muscular arm that was part of his body. "Warn't right what I did," he whispered. "But Bully begged fer it . . . en' I warn't goin' t' leave Chance Ransden loose in the world no longer."

Chance Ransden loose, or Chance Ransden's master.

Old Nathan wore the dungarees and homespun shirt with which Bully Ransden had fled the cabin the morning before, and a pair of Ransden's boots stood upright at the foot of the bed. He detached himself from the girl and began to draw on one of the boots.

"Sarah said she'd keep yer animals, ye needn't worry," Ellie said. "She said she knew how ye fussed yerse'f about thim all."

Old Nathan looked at the young woman. Ellie had plaited her hair into a loose braid. Now she coiled it onto the top of her head, out of the way. Sarah Ransden knew more thin he'd thought airy soul did uv his bus'ness.

He hunched himself into the other boot. His head hurt as though someone were splitting it with the back side of an axe, but the easy, fluid way in which his young joints moved was a wonder and delight to him.

"What is. .h.i.t thet ye intend, sir?" Ellie asked from where she stood between the cunning man and the door.

Old Nathan snorted. "With the repetation thet Bully, pardon me, thet Cullen hed aforetimes, en' the word thet's going on about him these last months whin his pappy rid him-I figger I'd hev to be plumb loco t' stay hereabouts, wearing the shape thet I do now."

Memories flooded in on him the way a freshet bursts a dam of ice during the spring thaw. His body began to shake uncontrollably with recollections of what had been and what might have been.

"Might be," he said softly, "thet I should hev gone off after King's Mountain, 'stid uv settlin' back here en'

fixin' a fence round me, near enough."

Ellie gripped his hands firmly. "Take me along," she said.

"I ain't Cull Ransden!" Old Nathan shouted as he drew himself away. What he wanted to do . . .

"I know who you are," Ellie said. She stepped close but did not touch him. "I know ye treated me decent whin others, they didn't. D'ye think I kin stay hereabouts, sir? Or thet I want to?"

Old Nathan turned away. There was a rifle on the pegs over the fireboard; his own. His mule gave its familiar bra.s.sy whinny from the shed, though there was no certain meaning in the sound.

Sarah Ransden en' her son 'ud be set up right purty, what with the two farms- Or three, ifen Ellie wint off with the man who wore her husband's shape.

"I ain't special t' the beasts no more," he said musingly. "Reckon hit's better I try my possibles t' git along with men now, anyways."

He looked at the young woman. "I reckon if I warn't all et up with bitterness whin I come back from King's Mountain," he added, "I might hev thunk a man could be ez good a frind thin a cat. A man er a woman."

"I packed a budget," Ellie said. "Hit seemed t' me thet ye'd feel thet way whin ye come around."

She looked out the window. The sun was already high in the sky. "We kin wait till ye're stronger . . . ?"

she said.

"Sooner we're away, the better," Old Nathan replied. The pain in his head was pa.s.sing as he moved; and for the rest of his body-he hadn't felt so good in fifty years. . . .

Ellie handed him a sheepskin coat, cracked at the seams but warm enough to serve until his youthful strength earned him better. Soon- He frowned, then took Ellie by both shoulders and held her until she met his eyes. "Thar's no more magic, girl," he said. "I'm a man en no more. I want ye t' understand thet."

She hefted the bundle of household essentials she had prepared. "Thet's what I wish fer," she said. "A man as treats me decint."

They walked outside into bright brilliant sunlight reflecting from the snow. Old Nathan left the cabin door open. Sarah could deal with the place whenever she chose; Sarah Ransden and the son who now kept her company. . . .