Six Moon Dance Part 27

"But ... if all that happened hundreds of years ago. How come ... how come you're still here?"

"We don't die," said Ashes, staring at the sky. "Way we figure it, critters that come from that pond, we can get killed-like that trader ship killed some of us, but we don't just die."

"We? You mean us, too?"

Ashes shrugged. "I don't know. You had a regular woman as a mother. Maybe it only works if you've been in the pond. Maybe it doesn't work for sons, or daughters. We don't know. We want to find out."

Bane raised his voice. "So what are we-, huh? Some kinda experiment? You gonna see if you can kill us?"

Ashes shrugged again. "You're my sons. For now. And when you go down there, you're their kinfolk. For now. So long as you don't do anything or say anything stupid."

"Like what?" demanded Bane "Like anything but 'yes sir' and 'no sir' and 'kind of you to say so sir,' " Ashes growled.

The boys got wordlessly back on their horses and rode along the edge of the caldera until they reached a break in the rimwall, a path leading down. Ashes's lead horse took to the trail as though he knew it well, and after a moment's hesitation, the others followed. Clouds settled and they rode for a time in glowing, clinging mist. Clouds rose and they found themselves almost at the bottom, the lakes away to their right, glittering with moon trails.

Something tall, ma.s.sive, and darker than the sky reared into being at the edge of the trail. Though the horses took no notice at first, both Bane and Dyre started in fright, pulling up on the reins, causing their mounts to rear. At this, there came a t.i.tter from between the stones at the side of the path where something poured out of one declivity into another.

"Hush," said Ashes, "it's only Bone and Boneless." He glanced upward toward the slow clap, clap of leathern wings. In a moment the winged one dropped onto the trail beside him, eyes glowing, sharp fangs glittering. A lean, gray-furred body leaned toward the boys, almost hungrily.

"Ashes and Thunder," the thing said from a fanged mouth. "Welcome home. You brought me dinner?"

"They're not for your dinner, Webwings." Ashes nodded. "These're my boys. This here's Bane, that's Dyre."

Barely able to speak, the brothers managed jerky nods in the newcomer's direction. He stared at them for a time with glowing eyes, then grasped Ashes's arm and swung himself onto the horse behind him, wings falling to either side of the mount, the ragged tips trailing along the ground. When Ashes clucked the horse into a trot, Bane and Dyre did likewise, though reluctantly. Having seen this little, they were not eager to see more. The trail led toward cook fires that burned on hearths of stone in what seemed to be a permanent encampment, a sprawling community of stone-and-wattle shacks, of roofless enclosures, of pits and holes, all set well apart, with firewood piled nearby, and everything concealed from above by copses of large trees.

Ashes drew up at the edge of the encampment. His winged acquaintance slipped off the horse and walked away behind a high earthen wall. Bane and Dyre shared a glance between themselves and at their father who watched the wall, waiting. From behind that concealment a huge, bony hook slashed down, flailing in a forceful arc that slammed it into the shivering soil, fragments of sod flying. Then came another hook at the end of a stout cable or a thick rope, flailing down, piercing deep. The cables tightened; there was a sound like a gasp or grunt, not quite organic, and a monstrous mound of flesh tugged itself into view, something like an elephantine caterpillar, a thing the size of a large carriage or small river boat, though longer than that, for it kept coming as the huge grapples at its front were set again and again so the body could heave itself forward. The immense, immobile weight hauling along the ground, accompanied by a barrage of grunts and gargles, thrust up the earth at either side, leaving a groove like a ditch.

Terrible as the thing was, it was not the size or the sound that horrified the boys so much as the sight of the almost human face between the hooks, a face with wide, s...o...b..ry lips and a hole for a nose and eyes that peered from deep pits of gray, granular flesh under a ruff of large, oval scales, like those Bane had seen along the way.

The horses jittered as the thing came nearer: hook, heave, hump, hook, heave, hump, gargling and spewing, stopping at last a hook's length away.

"Crawly, I'd like you to meet my boys," said Ashes, rather too loudly.

The thing wheezed in a breathless, bubbling voice, straining against the buried hooks. The cables had elbows, even a kind of wrists, being otherwise twisted sinew. Closer to, Bane could see that the hooks were hands that had become enlarged with the fingers fused into sharply angled, bone-tipped grapples.

"So here's the offspring," wheezed the monster. "Well, well. Very human-looking, aren't they? How do you do, young sprouts. Doing well, are you?"

"Say yessir, when someone speaks to you," snarled Ashes, striking Bane on the back.

"Yessir," bleated Bane and Dyre, as with one voice.

The creature grinned and drooled, raising the large, oval scales around its neck into a hideous ruff. Greenish goo oozed from between the erected scales, emitting a greatly amplified wave of the family stink.

Webwings came around the side of his monstrous friend, smiling maliciously at Bane and Dyre. "Not what you expected, eh, boys?"

Bane swallowed, trying to moisten a dry mouth. "Didn't ... didn't expect anything." In the light of the fire he could see what looked like spiders moving about on the creature's wings, spinning back and forth, thread by thread, repairing the holes and tatters. When the spiders had finished, they scuttled into holes in what would have been armpits if Webwings had had arms. Bane felt an irresistible urge to scratch under his own arms, and only a glare from his father held him motionless. Dyre was not so fortunate. He scratched and was thunked across the back of the head for it.

"This is Strike," said Ashes, turning to the other side, where someone else had approached without their notice, a creature k.n.o.bbed and heavy at the top, thin as a rail below, bearing a long bony beak like a curved pike, with opaque b.l.o.o.d.y beads of eyes peering from either side. It had arms like boneless vines twisting at its sides, and it tottered on clublike legs as it struggled to hold its great bony haft aloft.

And behind it came something tentacled and horned, moving on a carpet of fibers, and behind that came something squatty with a mouth like a furnace. "Mosslegs," said Ashes. "And Gobblemaw. Say howdy."

"How do you do, sirs," said Bane, shaking his brother with one hand. "Tell the sirs how do you do, brother."

Dyre managed a nod and a gush of wordless air.

There was also Foot (a tiny person with one huge extremity that flexed endlessly upon a separate patch of soil), and, each on its own plot, Ear (a tiny person with huge ear that quivered), and Tongue (a tiny person with huge tongue that wagged). There was Belly, too, wide as a swamp, legs and arms flung out like those on a skin rug, with a wide mouth at one end where some many-handed being called Shoveler was busy pushing the carca.s.s of a very dead goat into it.

All had faces, though some were very small. Not all had mouths and tongues capable of speech. All had arms and legs, though some were rudimentary. Not all had means of locomotion. Among the speaking and walking were a dozen or so who appeared mankindly enough to pa.s.s in a crowd, creatures with names like Blade and Shatter and Brigand, Machinist and Mooly, and some of the mankindly ones wore clothes as Ashes did, though more were clad in thick hair or bristles or scales or feathers, or had skin that was warty or horned or embossed or folded. No two were enough alike to mistake one for the other, not even the manlike ones.

Soon Bane and Dyre were at the center of a gathering, a score of creatures all talking at once, producing a windy gibberish that babbled on until the one called Shatter thrust through the mob and drowned them out with a stentorian cry: "Good-looking girls there, Ash. So these're the daughters, eh?"

Ashes's lips thinned, his jaw tightened. "So, what you got, Shatter? You got some girls hid we don't know about?"

Bane shut his eyes, reminded of Dutter's farm, where the animals had made similar noises and the supernume farmhands had joshed at him in similar phrases, until they had learned not to. He had never suffered insults without retaliation. Here, the life around him was itself an insult, past retaliation, and the inability to voice or display his outrage left him feeling weak, as though from loss of blood. He would feel better later, he told himself, and then he would do whatever he had to do, and when he did it, this mockery, yes, mockery would be remembered, for Ashes had no right to do ... whatever it was he had done.

"Boys're bettern nothin', I suppose!" Shatter brayed.

"That's right, Shat. Can't blame a man for trying."

The one called Mooly bent himself in laughter. "No, we can't blame old Ash for tryin'! Or us for watchin' him try!"

The gathering split asunder. Ashes rode out of it, the boys staying close behind him as he pointed his horse toward a shack under a towering tree at the far side of the camp. There they turned the horses into a corral made of dead branches with bits of vine twisted around them, and while Ashes busied himself with unsaddling the mounts, the boys went inside. There was little in the way of furniture. A table and a chair. A low dirt mound cushioned with boughs and sheepskins to make a couch or sleeping place. They settled themselves on this, leaning forward toward the coals of the fire, piling on a stick or two as though this tending of the fire were necessary and demanding, choosing an appearance of gravity rather than acknowledge to one another the depth of their confusion and disappointment. They had not sorted out how they felt, certainly they had not sorted out what, if anything, they would do about how they felt.

When Ashes came in, they were still bent beside the fire, side by side, cross-legged and silent.

He regarded them narrowly. "Well?"

The first thing they needed, so Bane had decided, was information. "What'd you bring us here for?"

"You're family," said Ashes, hanging his jacket on a peg set into a tent pole. "You'll want to be in on family business."

"Don't exactly see it that way," said Bane, carefully expressionless. "Don't see much great future here. Not exactly what you promised. No reason to have killed her her, if this was all we did it for."

"No women here," Dyre added in sulky explanation. "No s.e.x machines. No hot baths. No ma.s.sage. I had a look at what they was roasting on the fires, walking over here, and it's not food, it's garbage. You promised us good stuff, all kinds of good stuff."

"You had your good stuff with Marool," said Ashes. "I promised you good things while you were with her, boys. I said, you get yourselves educated at House Genevois, and I'll situate you at Mantelby Mansion. Well, you got situated there, one way or t'other, and you got good stuff, too, don't say you didn't."

"A few days," grated Bane. "And why her? Why not somebody we didn't have to kill? Somebody we coulda stayed with?"

Ashes said angrily, "I told you why, boy. She needed killing and she's the only one couldn't smell you. That job's over and that future's gone a begging. You don't want the good life any more than the rest of us do, but before we get it, first we got to clear the way! So, you've done the first part and killed one that needed killing."

"We killed her cause you told us to!"

"Well, I'm your daddy. I got that right."

"I been wanting to ask you, how come she couldn't smell us?" asked Bane, eyes narrow.

"Dingle. She used it when she was a girl. Ruined her sense of smell."

"Well, then, we'll find us some other women used Dingle. She couldn'ta been the only one."

Ashes sat down in the only chair the tent afforded, a folding affair of rawhide and curved sticks. "Well, not the only one, no, but women who use Dingle are mostly the ones too ugly to dowry for. Or they're sterile. Or they're crazy. Or all three. Once in a great while there's one like Marool, but it's rare."

"There was our mama," said Bane, watching his father narrowly. "Could she smell you?"

Ashes was momentarily silent. "Well, no. But her and Marool were the only ones I ever found."

"But it just happened Marool was the one stole us away from you?"

"Right," said Ashes, busying himself with his bootlaces. "We all three knew each other, me and Marool and your mama. And Marool was jealous of your mama having my babies. So, when your mama died, she stole you away. And she was goin' to have a daughter for me, but she didn't. But I found you, so it all turned out all right."

"Maybe," muttered Bane. "Maybe it did."

"So what's the family business?" asked Dyre.

"Why, boys, this whole world is our family business! It belongs to us! We was here first, and we're going to take it back!" Ashes lay back in the chair and stared at his sons through the smoke of the fire. "We're going to take it back, kill off all the timrats, kill off all the settler men, all those g'family men. We'll keep the women. Some of them, anyhow. Whichever ones we can fix like we did Marool. We're going to build a race of giants!"

"Is this all of you?" Bane asked, gesturing to indicate the camp. "All that's left?"

Ashes stared into the fire. "No. There's others. Bigger. Meaner. Sometimes they come to the edge of the light and we talk. They're with us."

"How come they don't live here?"

Ashes made a peculiar face, a kind of chewing, as though trying to swallow something that wouldn't go down. "They ... they got changed in the pond. Really changed. They're too big for camp, for one thing, and there's nothing ... nothing much we can talk to them about now. They're like ... only set on one thing." He got up, started to speak, then thought better of whatever he'd been going to say. "Later," he admonished. "We'll get into all that stuff later."

Bane shook his head, showing his teeth. He wasn't going to let go. "So, how come you've waited all this time? It'd a been easier when there wasn't so many settlers, wouldn't it? It'd a been easier when they just first arrived. You shoulda done it then, killed the men, took the women, got your own daughters, like you planned. I mean, those, out there, they say you planned daughters, right?"

"We wanted daughters, sure, but I told you we couldn't do it back then!" snarled Ashes. "We tried that. Grabbed a few girls outa their houses, took 'em back in the hills, did 'em there. We'd just get half done with 'em, and they'd die! They'd turn blue, try to breathe, then they'd die. I told you, it's the smell of that pond! Like it smothered 'em. Took us a long time to figure out how to get around that. Mooly figured out about Dingle. You get on Dingle, it builds up a kind of ... resistance to the smell. Dingle grows easy, but back then it only grew far back in the hills. We had to bring it near the cities, plant it there so we could get plenty of it, easy. Then we had to teach people to use it, Wasters and rebels and like that.

"But you get a woman on Dingle, she'll abort, sure as anything. So, then Mooly had to find some other drug to counteract that effect. That took a long time, boys. That took a long, long time. We tried this and we tried that, over the years. Got to be legendary, we did, for stealing women, but we kept at it.

"So we did that, all of it, nice and slow, and we've got you. You're the proof that it works. When we take over, we'll take our time, do it right...."

"How you going to do that? Take over?"

Ashes leaned back in his chair, staring at the fire, looking at the boys, then past them, then back at the boys again. "Well, there's a time coming. We can feel it. Kind of like a call in the bones. The mountains are gonna blow! Then the cities'll fall, boys. Cities'll fall. People, they'll be out, running around in the streets. We'll be there, waiting. There's hot springs here and there, we'll fill them with Dingle. Kill this one, take that one and drop her in a Dingle pot, kill this one, take that one to the Dingle, slow and easy. These folks, they got nothing like an army. Nothing like police. Just those Haggers, here, there, ever-where. But Crawly, he's as good as a fortress. Webwings, he's our lookout. Ear, he can hear a moth drop a day's march away. Tongue, he can taste blood in the air. We'll manage."

"When you gonna do it?" asked Dyre.

Ashes looked out the one small window at the sky, pointed westward where four of the moons made a cl.u.s.ter low along the hills, with another one trailing close. "Soon, boy. My bones say soon. They're all gathering. Real soon."

"And when we take it over, everything, then we get what you promised, huh?" Bane asked.

"Then you get what was promised you and I get what was promised me, and we all get everything we want. And more."

46.

The Second Expedition Sets Out.

Onsofruct and D'Jevier, together with five st.u.r.dy Haggers, waited for Madame outside the gates of Mantelby Mansion rather early on fiveday morning. They heard the carriage wheels approaching from down the hill, then saw the equipage as it rounded the nearest curve and came quickly toward them. Madame was not alone. She was accompanied by one veiled man without c.o.c.kade and a family man known to the Hags by the c.o.c.kade as Calvy g'Valdet. He leapt from the carriage and bowed deeply.

"Revered Hag," he said. "It seems the Hags and the Men of Business are similarly motivated."

"How did you find out about this, Family Man?" demanded Onsofruct, with a glare in Madame's direction.

"Do not blame Madame," said Calvy. "The steward here is Bin g'Kiffle's son."

"Of course," murmured D'Jevier. "We should have remembered that."

"There was a special meeting of the ECMOB, and after a good bit of talk that achieved nothing, they decided to send me to represent the Men of Business."

"Why you, g'Valdet?" asked Onsofruct. "Are you now in good odor with your colleagues?"

"No, Ma'am," he said. "Slab g'Tupoar nominated me. He said that Myrphee was too fat, Sym was too small, Slab himself was too lazy. Estif's wife wouldn't let him, and Bin b.i.t.c.hes about everything. He said he didn't much like me, but I got things done. And here I am."

"Well, if your intention is to find out what happened to the Questioner, your interest is no less justified than ours, though I am surprised at the company you keep."

"I have known Calvy for many years," said Madame. "In my opinion, we need him and my well-trusted Simon to a.s.sist us in this exploration."

Onsofruct said stiffly, "If you think it wise, we will not obstruct you. I suggest, however, that the Family Man and Simon replace two of our Haggers rather than increasing our total number."

"Is the number important?" asked Calvy.

"Not if you are both excellent swimmers," remarked D'Jevier, rather frostily. "Since Timmys are no doubt involved in this disappearance, we have cast about in memory and fable and find many references to subterranean waters-at least rivers, perhaps even lakes. We are carrying an inflatable boat that holds a maximum of eight."

Calvy laughed. "I hadn't thought of that! By all means, let us replace two of your Haggers."

There was a momentary hesitation among them, an unspoken acknowledgment that they had not agreed upon a leader for their expedition.

Onsofruct ran her fingers down the seams of her unaccustomed trousers and said, "Madame? D'Jevier and I have seldom been outside the Panhagion since we were children. Do you have experience of this kind of thing? If so, we would be pleased to follow you."

Madame was herself dressed appropriately for the occasion in heavy trousers and shirt, with stout boots on her feet. She regarded the Hags with some diffidence, saying, "I can't claim to expertise, though a small group of friends and I have gone on lengthy cave hikes during the summers, exploring some of the badlands west of Naibah. I may have picked up some useful skills. I know that Simon and Calvy have had similar experience."

D'Jevier nodded. "You are better equipped than we. How do you suggest that we proceed?"

Madame smiled. "By handling a question that arose during our trip here. Calvy and Simon have pointed out that it will be difficult for them to be useful if they keep their veils."

"We are unlikely to be able to see through them underground," said Calvy, making an apologetic gesture toward the Hags.

D'Jevier replied, "I have no objection to your removing your veils while on this expedition. It would be foolish to handicap you out of mere custom; Onsofruct and I have quite dependable self-control, and we promise not to a.s.sault you s.e.xually."

Madame merely smiled at this.