One Foot in the Fade, page 23
“True,” I said. “But without the car, we don’t have anything that raises too many questions. We’re just travelers on a journey to…” I couldn’t think of any other city nearby that made sense.
Theo shook his head.
“Out here without horses or an automobile, there won’t be any other destinations that sound believable.”
Khay nodded. The choice to avoid the inn was winning out, but with wet supplies and an empty stomach, I was drawn to the idea of having a proper meal by the fire before we committed ourselves to the woods.
I looked down, thinking, and the sun glistened off the silver badge pinned to my jacket.
“I think I have an angle.”
I rang the bell, and the door was opened by a silver-haired woman with suspicious eyes, white pupils, and deep laugh-lines on her tanned cheeks.
“Hello,” I said. “We’re representatives of The Bridge: a group of community-minded individuals who have charged ourselves with guiding the world back to the magical existence we’ve left behind. Is your kitchen open?”
40
The Harpy House
The silver-haired woman looked from me to Theo to Khay, and her eyes squinted in distrust.
“You’re not going to try and sell me anything, are you?”
“No, ma’am. We’re in need of food and fresh water, and we have the bronze to pay for it.”
The tip of her tongue ran from one side of her lips to the other as she gave us a final examination.
“All right. Come in and take a seat.”
The interior was log-cabin walls with tiny windows, low ceilings, plenty of old photos on the walls, and lanternlight coming from every corner. We were led into a room with four tables and took our seats at the largest. There was only one other patron: a weathered Ogre with a wide-brimmed hat and dusty trousers. His bloodshot eyes looked us over as we entered, then fell back to the barely touched bowl of stew in front of him.
“What’s on the menu?” I asked.
“Beef,” said the innkeeper.
“Any vegetables?”
“Beans.”
“Two servings of beef and a bowl of beans, please.”
Theodor raised a hand.
“Is there any meat in these beans?”
“Nope. Just bacon.” Theodor nodded slowly, as if he’d assumed as much. “We got some bread too, if that interests you.”
“Please.”
She squeezed through the tables, out of the room, and we heard her shout the order to the cook.
“Excuse me.” The Ogre on the far table took off his hat and turned to us. There was an awkwardness to his expressions that spoke of a man who was used to spending time on his own, trying his best to adopt the perceived manners of an unfamiliar world. “Have you seen my son? He went missing several weeks ago. Traveling these parts.”
He handed Theodor a small photograph with crumpled edges, and we all leaned over to look at it. It was a picture of an adolescent Ogre with narrow tusks, icy blue eyes, and a short-cropped mohawk. He was shirtless and laughing, with a silver chain necklace that had a skull pendant at the end.
“I’m sorry,” said Khay. “We’ve only just arrived ourselves.”
He nodded, took back the photo, and used the edge of his fist to flatten it against the table while his stew went cold.
“Look.” Khay pointed to a framed black-and-white photo behind my head. It was larger than the others, faded and yellowing, and pictured two women standing in front of a carriage with no wheels. Instead, there were sails on either side, stretched over wings that stuck out like the paddles of a rowing boat. Along the side of the carriage, there was a pattern I’d seen somewhere before, though couldn’t place it. Khay stood up to get a closer look and pointed to a black shape in the top-right corner. “That’s it. Incava.”
The patterned carriage was on the top of a hill. Behind the two women and the vehicle, you could see the looming black shape of the castle, like a nightmarish beast creeping up on the unsuspecting subjects. Most of it was lost out of frame, but the smooth black walls seemed to grow out of the rock like the base of a mighty tree, spreading its roots and splitting the earth. The only give-away that it wasn’t an organic structure were the ornate windows cut into the stone at equal intervals.
“I was quite the looker, wasn’t I?” The innkeeper dropped water and glasses on the table and smiled at the photo with a nostalgic look in her eye. “That was when I first arrived from Rakanesh. Youngest pilot to cross the continent.”
Once she mentioned it, her resemblance to one of the women in the photo was unmistakable.
“Rakanesh?” I repeated. “You piloted their flying machines?”
The pattern on the flying carriage was the same as on the Rods of Rakanesh: the metal batons that the mask-maker had used to flip my inner-ears in his workshop.
“That’s right. Penny and I spent ten years doing supply runs in and out of Incava.”
I hoped that the pregnant silence – as Theo, Khay and I traded knowing looks – wasn’t noticed by the host. She’d lived in Incava, and was a potential well of inside knowledge, but what would she think if we revealed our plans?
“Who’s Penny?” I asked, to move the conversation on before she got suspicious.
“Only the best darn cook in Archetellos!” The voice came through the door, along with a big, feathered body wearing a thick, knitted coat. “You kids better be hungry.”
It took some squeezing for Penny to fit through the door, though most of her bulk was feathers. They stuck out of her sleeves, around taloned hands that held a tray carrying two steaming bowls of stew and a plate of buttered beans and bacon.
“Penny flew solo,” explained the other woman. “Mail and money, mostly. I moved people and supplies.”
“Yeah, back when my wings were working and my waist was half the size. I didn’t need any clunky contraption like Betty and her skymobile, neither.” She dropped the food on the table and gave Betty a kiss on the cheek. “I’m only teasing you, my love.”
“You’re just angry you never beat my round-trip record!” the Mage called out, as the Harpy took her tray from the room. “They were wild days back then. Mad times. Look at the cheek on that young one’s face.” She pointed to the black-and-white version of herself. “Whole world beneath her feet.”
“When did you leave?” asked Khay.
“Five, six years ago. The men went mad after the Coda. Didn’t want to learn how to take care of themselves. I couldn’t handle it anymore. The whining. The stink! Penny and I came out here instead. It’s not much, but it’s better than that dark shithole.”
“Not much?” said Penny with faux hurt as she reentered with a loaf of bread and a pot of bright red jam. “You never ate so good, even when you were flying anywhere you wanted. You should be counting your blessings, girl.”
We were the ones who needed to count our blessings. We had a better source of Incava information than any of Eileen’s books. The stew was darn good as well.
“What was it like? Living there before the Coda,” I asked, as Betty sliced a piece of bread for each of us, including herself.
“Depraved.” She wiped jam from her chin and smiled like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “And glorious. After the madness of the Fifth War, they stopped thinking about expansion or combat. They just fortified their defenses and got to living life. They ran the city so well that nobody had to work, other than those flights in and out to trade goods. We read and danced and got drunk and fat. It was quite the time.”
She closed her eyes and revisited some part of those glory days before Theo pulled her back to reality.
“How did you have goods to trade if nobody worked?”
“Ah, well—” She was interrupted by a rumbling sound that got louder and louder until the cutlery was dancing on the table. “One moment.”
When the rumbling stopped, we heard Betty open the front door and call out, “Hello, gentlemen! Here for lunch, are we?”
I couldn’t hear their response, only the sounds of car doors closing.
“We should get out of here,” said Theo.
“Too late now,” replied Khay. She was right. Betty came back in, leading two tall men to the table beside us.
“Busy today!” she exclaimed, before taking their orders.
One of the men hadn’t taken his eyes off us since he entered the room. He was my height, in a black suit that he’d clearly been wearing for a while. His eyes were red and his hair was all kicked up on one side, like he’d just woken up from a nap. The other, a bald man with a mustache and cleft chin, was wearing sweaty coveralls and was much more concerned with the food on offer than our trio.
“Two beef, two beans, coming right up. Won’t be a moment.”
The suited man didn’t even wait for her to leave the room.
“Who are you?”
Theodor and Khay looked to me, but Betty spoke first.
“They’re from The Bridge. Off to find some magic or something, aren’t you?”
The suited man squinted at us. Betty toddled out, and the man in coveralls watched her go.
“Where are you from?” came the next question. Keeping my eyes on the man, I addressed my table.
“Friends, fill our canteens and see if Betty and Penny have a container we can buy. I’ll be out shortly.”
Theo and Khay rose.
“Wait,” said the suited man. He lifted his hand from the table and moved it towards the inside of his jacket, but my pistol was out before it got there.
“Hands back down before I spoil that lovely suit,” I said. He obeyed.
Theo and Khay continued their exit, and I listened as they made their request and Betty responded enthusiastically.
“What do you want?” asked the suited man. The other looked perplexed, but not at all afraid.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want to know who you are or where you’re from or what you’re up to. I don’t want anything from you, because I don’t want to give you any reason to follow us or think about us once we leave. We’re travelers, nothing more.”
He made a big show of not believing me.
“Then why all the melodrama?”
“Because you were asking a lot of questions – in fact, I’m not convinced you’re capable of saying a sentence that isn’t one – and you look like a guy who gets angry when he doesn’t get answers.” He sneered, suggesting that I was correct and that he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. “I don’t want to give you any answers. I’d love to give you a few slaps, or a hairbrush, or find out where you’re headed and what your deal is, but I don’t want to spend the next week looking over my shoulder or waste my day digging two shallow graves; yours wouldn’t be much trouble but your buddy’s would take all afternoon.”
“You really believe we won’t follow you?”
I shrugged. “Do what you want. Maybe I want you to follow me. Maybe I want an excuse to extract a few thoughts from your head and teeth from your mouth, but you look like an important guy. You’ve been driving through the night, trying to meet some deadline or make good time, so you won’t wanna throw all that away to chase down three grubby hikers for no reason.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Look at that. A statement. I knew you had it in you.”
“I—”
“HEAVENS!”
Penny stopped in the doorway with her overflowing tray.
“Sorry, ma’am. I was just about to be on my way.”
She stepped back and I squeezed past, my pistol pointing at the suited man’s heart the whole time.
I stepped outside into the line of Theo’s crossbow.
“What the hell was that?” he asked. “Do you know them?”
“I know when someone’s going to draw on me. Just wanted to get in first.” I let him know what I’d told them. He didn’t appear to approve, but he didn’t admonish me either. “You check out their wheels?”
“Yeah.”
“Learn anything?”
“It’s a car. I can’t tell them apart.”
It was a simple model. Not as nice as either of the ones owned by Larry’s family. More like the ones that Niles’s goons liked to drive. If there were things to learn from it, I left them unlearned. We had grander discoveries ahead of us. “Where’s Khay?”
Theo took me out the back, where Betty was filling a large flagon from the well.
“You better not be making any trouble in my home,” she chided, equal parts joke and threat.
“Avoiding it, if we can.”
“Where you lot off to?”
I pointed to the edge of the forest. Vine-covered trees stopped in a sharp line at the back of the property.
“In there. We ready?” Theo and Khay both nodded. “Then let’s go.”
41
A Walk in the Woods
The soundscape changed in a second. The southern wind that had been a constant on our travels was swallowed by the canopy, leaving a hushed vacuum. It was so still that every cracked twig or dry leaf beneath our boots became an obnoxious disturbance of the peace.
The trees were hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years old, and if the ground had ever been cleared by fire, it hadn’t happened for an age. There were no paths here, not even those bashed into existence by the hooves of horses, Centaurs and Unicorns. You couldn’t see the ground, just the impossibly thick trunks of trees that grew at all angles from the decaying corpses of the ones who’d come before them.
“Have you trekked these woods before?” I asked Theodor.
“I crossed them the other way, at a diagonal. I’ve never walked this direction, but I have a sense of the landscape and I believe we can reach the other side within a week.”
There would be no respite till we reached the other side. No passing vehicles to hail or roadside taverns to rest our feet. We would live in the shade of those ancient trees until we made it to Incava, if we made it there at all. The forest appeared to be impenetrable, but, from what I knew of Theodor, I was curious to see how he would tackle the labyrinthine mess that lay before us.
“Step where I step,” he said, and used a twisted branch to pull himself up onto a horizontal tree. I followed Theodor and Khay followed me. Only a few steps later, my foot slipped. I grabbed a branch for support, but it snapped under my weight and I tumbled off the tree into a bed of mulch that swallowed me up as if I’d plunged into a bubble bath.
I scrambled to my feet, frantically slapping debris from my body and shaking it out of my shirt. It was mostly leaves and bark, but there were enough bugs and spiders crawling through the undergrowth for me to shiver and squeal at every scratch against my skin.
“I told you to step where I step,” chided Theodor.
“I did!”
“No, you stepped here.” Theodor pointed to a clump of green moss. “I stepped here.” He pointed to a slightly lighter clump of green moss right beside it. “Which is why you slipped. Come on.”
He pulled me back up and we continued along the mighty trunk, then across a ridge of flat rocks. We went between two lines of trees whose roots created an elevated path that kept us out of the undergrowth but threatened to snap an ankle if we lost focus.
The birdsong started slowly. It seemed that they’d quieted down when we entered the woods, then had waited to get a sense of us before starting up again. When they did, their voices erupted like an excited party of sports fans in the final minute of a game, screaming and screeching in an endless wall of sound.
As we walked, my ear tuned in to the individual calls coming from all around us: chirps, trills, rasps, wheezes and peeps. Some seemed to be repeated from one bird to the next, down the line, in an ongoing call-and-response that traveled from one end of the forest to the other.
Theodor raised his hand.
Khay and I stopped. Theo looked around, searching over our heads, then in the gaps between the roots that made up our path.
With a hand signal that told us to stay back, he stepped forward, eyes scanning on both sides, below us and up above.
He froze, eyes staring straight up. He stayed that way for a while, took a careful step back, turned, and held out his hand in the shape of a pistol. I took the machine from its holster and handed it over. He raised it above his head, tilted one way, the other, and fired.
The birds shook the forest with their wings as they scattered. I couldn’t see where the bullet had struck – it all just looked like a mass of leaves and branches – until I heard a scraping sound. A loop of green scales dropped down from the canopy, kept sliding, and then—
THUMP! A giant serpent landed in front of us, writhing around and twisting itself up in a knot that looked a lot like Eileen’s hair.
Theodor shoved the smoking gun back in my hands so he could draw the largest of his knives, then launched himself onto the snake. I expected him to start madly hacking at it, but he took his time, searching, with the tip of the blade always pointed at the knotted mass, until the body of the beast unwound, and its terrifying face emerged: mouth open and ready to strike.
Theodor moved swiftly, stabbing his dagger into the pale neck of the snake, just below its maw, then twisting and dragging the blade towards him. The knife sliced through the scales and sent blue blood gushing onto his arms.
Theodor jumped back as the snake continued to twist itself up, tightening into a ball. It was the reaction of a dying nervous system, and no longer anything for us to be worried about. Theodor used the thick leaves of a nearby fern to clean his knife and his hands. Khay and I watched in wonder.
“How did you know it was there?” she asked.
“The birds,” he replied, as if it was obvious. They were still screeching and flying in circles around us, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d been able to distinguish one voice from the next, let alone interpret their meaning.
“How can you understand them?” I asked.
“Same as anything. It takes time. Warning sounds, contact calls, mating songs. You get to know them all after a while. Their language isn’t like ours. As in, you don’t hear specific words, but after enough time in the woods it starts to make sense. Same as the tracks and the smells and the lines of the trees. They all tell a story.”
