Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals (3 page)

She had to fight her way through a thorny thicket, and when she burst through it, she tumbled down a steep embankment and landed with a splash in a stream. When she rolled to a stop, she sat up, one eye twitching and the corner of her mouth curling into a snarl, intent on being in a mood. But no sooner had she blinked the water from her eyes than she found herself nose to horn with a giant rhino, which stared back at her with its tiny little eyes and huffed a hot, wet breath at her, coating her with slime. This made her forget about moodiness. She squealed and scrambled back, the sweet smell of chewed grass in her nostrils and a greenish film slicking her face.

Sidling up the creek, she slowly worked her way farther and farther upstream until she found a place where the trees grew too close together for the rhino to pursue—or at least she hoped they did. With heart pounding, she inched a little closer to the trees, then, finding a burst of courage, she took her eyes off the rhino and charged once more into the verdant maze of the jungle all around.

As she ran, she listened for sounds of the rhino’s pursuit as much as she listened for any sound of the hunting elves. Preoccupied as she was, it was only by purest reflex that she was able to duck beneath the spear-thrust of the giant mantis that tried to stab her through.

She saw the blur of movement, yellow like maple leaves in the fall, a blur against the green and yellow of flowering vines. She sensed the movement more than she really saw it in the way one sees normal things, and with that gift of reflex with which natural athletes are blessed, she managed to tumble aside and roll under one of the arcing roots of an enormous rosewood tree.

The mantis jabbed at her again. She slipped back under another protective arc, the whole of the root like a great wooden serpent rising in and out of the soil in waves. Her assailant stabbed once more. Splinters of wet wood flew. Pernie dove back the other way.

This time, the mantis’ spiked limb thrust itself a hand’s width deep into the hardwood flesh of the tree root, allowing Pernie to roll to her feet. She spun round and got her first good glimpse of her attacker: an insect twice as tall as she was, working to yank itself free, having struck so violently its spiked forelimb was stuck in the root. It jerked at its caught extremity, scrambling with the five that remained free for purchase to brace itself. Its spindly legs articulated like fingers made of sticks, and its angled feet thumped on the mossy jungle floor. It turned its head toward her, facing her, its huge eyes staring down at her, emotionless and watching. They gleamed wetly in the filtered morning light, each eye shaped like an inverted tear bubbling out of its triangular head. Its mandibles opened slowly, just once, then closed, giving the impression of its having licked its lips. It looked back to its work, yanking at the trapped spear tip of its forelimb.

Pernie knew better than to wait and see how long that extrication took, and without another thought, she was off and running yet again. She sprinted for all her skinny little legs were worth, her little heart pounding in her chest as she stretched every stride to its fullest. Perhaps at this pace she would catch the elves soon.

She burst out of a thick stand of trees and ran up a short incline, coming upon a wide patch of ferns. They were big ones, bright green and nearly as tall as her waist, with delicate leaves all intertwined, transparent together like a vast silk screen. The gentle rise and fall of them all had the effect of a green mist clinging to the ground.

She searched for sign of the elves, but found none. She risked a glance back over her shoulder to see if the mantis was closing in, but the jungle was so dense and so dripping with vines and ivy that she couldn’t see more than a few paces into it, the rest an impenetrable mass of unchecked growth.

Still, she heard something back there, something slapping leaves and snapping limbs. So she ran on. It didn’t matter whether it was the rhino or the insect.

She ran through the ferns and found as she did that they threw up clouds of strange yellow dust. It got in her eyes and blurred them some, but it didn’t sting. It tasted sweet, like citrus in honeyed tea. She kept on as best she could, but she startled something living beneath the ferns, something big, which ran heavily across her feet, a cascading passage of many, many pointy feet. She caught a glimpse of something greenish gray and then traced its path by the rustling of the ferns, headed off in a direction to her left. Whatever it was, it moved with astonishing speed. She was glad that whatever it was, it was running from her rather than after her. She was certain she could not have gotten away.

She shuddered, but pressed on in her chase, running once more through the ferns, stirring up the powdery fluff. Twice more, something brushed against her legs, and twice more, she saw it—or them—run off and disappear beneath the cloud of ferns. The fourth time it happened, she tripped over it and fell, crashing into the ferns and landing face first in the powder beneath the misty fronds.

She found herself in another world of sorts, a jungle canopy in miniature, one that existed beneath the larger one. The ground was covered by a layer of the yellow dust, soft like crushed chalk. She looked around in the filtered light and saw that there were creatures everywhere, long, flat creatures that seemed to hug the ground with what had to be at least a hundred long, slender legs. They reminded her of the centipedes back home, only these were much larger than those by far. A pair of them skittered closer to her as she lay there, and she dared not move.

They watched her through eyes that waved atop antenna-like appendages that sprouted from their heads. As they drew near, she could see that their bodies were segmented, and from the dull sheen of their gray-and-mottled-pink backs, she thought they might be covered with some kind of shell. They emitted a twittering sound from mouths that were tiny compared to the rest of their bodies, almost absurdly so, barely as big as an apple seed, yet meant to feed a creature nearly as long as Pernie was tall and more than three hand spans wide.

Pernie noted it and counted herself fortunate, for it seemed unlikely that such creatures would eat meat, at least not meat as large as Pernie. However, she wasn’t completely comfortable yet, given the way they were looking at her. Others were coming too, the chorus of their vocalizations coming in response to the first two.

Pernie looked out across the micro-jungle she’d fallen into and realized that she was being surrounded by the strange creatures, or at least nearly so, and she had to throw off the natural curiosity that had left her there staring as she was.

She climbed to her feet and found that she was somewhat dizzy. She blinked to clear her eyes.

One of the creatures touched her leg.

With a shriek, she sprinted for the trees again, but found that she was having trouble seeing where she ran. Twice she ran straight into giant tree trunks, and a third time she tripped over a fallen limb and went sprawling into a patch of mud. The hundred-legged creatures were everywhere.

She staggered down a steep embankment, trying to grasp limbs, vines, or trunks for balance as she stumbled along. Every time she touched one, there were the soft touches of those many legs upon her heels, the chattering twitter in her ears.

Glancing around, she spotted a rock nearby, small enough to lift, but big enough to use against one of these strange … bugs?

She went to it and bent to pick it up, and as she did, one of the creatures rushed at her and ran right up her back. It was heavier than she thought, and its weight bore her to the ground.

She blinked, trying to see through her blurry eyes as the ground came up at her. She could feel all its legs moving upon her skin like so many staccato heartbeats as the creature skittered around. It stayed on top of her as she rolled, scrambling in place like the woodsmen did back home when they rode the logs down the river toward Leekant. No matter how she rolled to get out from under it, it stayed right on top of her.

She stopped rolling and, with a thrust of her arms, pushed it off, at least twenty of its pointy legs all waggling to hold onto her hands and wrists.

She had to fight to break it loose, screaming and jerking and kicking at it until she was finally free. She ran back and picked up her rock. The creature was already there waiting for her. She smashed its head in with the rock.

Two more were behind her, one once again crawling up her back. The second one began climbing up the front of her legs, but she bashed it off with the rock as well, denting in two segments of its shell.

She tried to shake off the one on her back, but it was too well placed, its gripping legs too efficient at holding on.

She scanned around her everywhere, looking for something else she could use.

She saw there was another stream a few hundred spans away. She wondered if the creatures knew how to swim. They were awfully heavy—but then, so were horses, and Pernie knew they swam just fine. But perhaps the creatures couldn’t hold their breath. Pernie could, and she could hold it for a good long time. She’d been practicing all her life.

She threw down her rock and ran through the haze of her increasingly cloudy vision. She ran toward the gurgle of the water flowing over stone. The creature came around to her front, entangling her arms and covering her face. The second one, apparently not dead despite the bashed-in body plates, caught right back up to her with ease and entangled itself in her feet. Once again she sprawled face first to the ground. The creature covering her face adroitly scrambled around her, logger-like, and managed to be on her back by the time she hit. She screamed as the second one also clambered aboard, and she soon realized the weight of them both was too great for her to stand.

The first one slid around her ribs as she got to her hands and knees and once again put itself right in her face. She saw the small mouth open right before her eye, only a vague black spot in the thickening goo that was her sight. Something was coming out of it, something short and sharp, but hollow at the tip.

She screamed again and found a spasm of strength and rage. She teleported herself into the creek, some twenty paces away. She didn’t do it on purpose. She couldn’t even say how she’d done it, but it happened just like it had those times before, back at Calico Castle—like when she’d somehow teleported onto that orc’s back as it was attacking Altin; like when she’d teleported out of harm’s way in the fight upon the knoll as the orcs laid siege to their home; and like she’d done when she suddenly found herself teleported inside of Tytamon’s tower, all alone with the orcs just down the stairs from her. It was her magic manifesting, nascent power, uncontrolled.

But, uncontrolled as it might be, it worked. She was out of their grips, but not out of danger, for the two creatures were there immediately, right at the edge of the stream. They’d run the distance almost as fast as she’d teleported, but perhaps this time it wasn’t fast enough. They darted back and forth along the water’s edge, but they didn’t come in.

Soon it was clear that they couldn’t swim, or at least that they weren’t so inclined.

Pernie grinned, relieved, even jubilant with the sudden victory, the magic victory. Master Altin would be proud when he found out.

But the creatures weren’t going away either. Worse, one of them ran upstream, streaking off at a speed nearly impossible to see, and then, a few moments later, it came back again on the other bank, cutting off her escape. On land, she was surrounded.

She weighed her options. Obviously she didn’t want to go upstream, for there was something up there that had allowed one of the bugs to cross. That meant she could either stay where she was and wait for them to go away, or head downstream and hope for better luck.

She stared off in the direction of the current, trying to see what might lie ahead, but the creek vanished—like everything else had today—into the green knots of the jungle. It occurred to her she was never going to find the elves.

Downstream seemed the only option that didn’t involve waiting helplessly, and who knew what the hundred-legged bugs were going to do. They were obviously communicating with one another, so there was no telling how many more were on their way. Which meant it was time to get moving.

She lifted her feet and began to swim with the gentle current, her efforts and the flow moving her along at a pretty good clip. The creatures ran right alongside her.

She hoped maybe they would run off when they got into the thicker part of the jungle, but they did not. They kept up with perfect ease, each of them running up and over obstacles. At one point, the one on Pernie’s right had to run off into the distance to get round the curve of stone that slowly rose up and became at first a sheer cliff and then a slick overhang for a time. But it came back when Pernie swam farther along. It ran right down the rock face once the overhang became simply vertical again, like a spider on a wall, and when the wall of stone diminished and became low, moss-covered bank again, it scrambled along as if nothing inconvenient had happened to it at all.

The creatures stayed with her for the better part of what she gauged to be an hour, until finally the little stream meandered its way into a large pool, gently tumbling down a short slide of rocks, over which Pernie slid before being dumped into the pool. She saw that three other streams all joined here, and it was with some hope that she looked back to see if her many-legged assailants were finally going to be thwarted by this watery impasse.

Sure enough, both of them were atop the slope of stone, neither willing to get their feet wet apparently, and both staring down at her, waving their eyes on those long, sinuous eyestalks, and emitting their strange twittering. She wondered what they were saying to one another as they looked down. She hoped they would remember not to mess with her again.