Hunted (34 page)

40

RACING THE BALROG

“Why did you do it?” Festina asked Gashwan. “Why did you help Samantha with everything? You’re too smart to think she’d be grateful—it’s a wonder Sam didn’t kill you as soon as she’d gone through her transformation.”

“She would have tried,” Gashwan agreed. “But I ran off to join Queen Temperance a few days before the job was done. My assistants finished the process. I doubt if they’ve been seen since.”

“Then why?” Festina asked again. “Why help a ruthless murderer?”

“Because it was
interesting
,” Gashwan said, as if that should have been obvious. “A pretty little challenge. And because I owed Alexander York a favor.”

“What favor?” I asked.

She pointed to her nose: the old ugly scar running the length of her snout. “He gave me this.”

Festina stared. “Alexander York hurt you? Damaged your face?”

Gashwan shook her head. “Alexander York helped me, with something no Mandasar would have done. He got human surgeons to destroy my sense of smell.”

She reached up with a wrinkled hand and stroked the scar affectionately. “They weren’t very skilled at dealing with Mandasars, but they got the job done. It’s trickier than you’d think—not just excising the olfactory nerves, but creating enough scar tissue inside the nostrils that the membranes can’t absorb odor molecules.”

“But why?” Festina asked.

‘To be free,” Gashwan said. “Free of control by queens. Free of being terrified by warriors. Free of getting my moods altered by anyone who walked by. I got my brain into a state I liked, then cut the cords so no one could change me.”

“That’s why you could betray Verity,” I muttered.

“Why I was
valuable
to Verity,” Gashwan corrected. “Other doctors told the queen what she wanted to hear; I told the truth. Mostly. The same with Temperance—she appreciated me because I couldn’t be swayed like other people around her. I’m the reason Temperance survived the war as long as she did. Smart objective advice. And now that Temperance is gone, I’m the one in charge, aren’t I? Because my brain isn’t muddled by every whiff of sweat drifting on the breeze. I’ve become my own queen.”

Festina looked at me; I caught her gaze but said nothing. Like it or not, Mandasar society depended on communication smells: conveying emotions, providing feedback, tuning folks in to each other. Humans do the same with tone of voice and body language. Rejecting all that, Gashwan had become a sort of sociopath, untouched by the people around her. Disconnected.

Which is why she could go along with Dad and Sam, when their plan would lead Troyen into war. Gashwan thought it was
interesting
—a pretty little challenge.

If she wasn’t crazy before her nose got hacked up, she sure was now.

“Hey, kids,” Tobit’s voice sounded in my ear, “you want a status report?”

“You’re on the roof?” Festina asked.

“More like an open parapet walk…though Mandasar architecture doesn’t conform much to the medieval European school. A true parapet needs some nice machicolations running alongside—”

“Phylar,” Festina interrupted, “shut up and talk to me.”

“Sure thing, your admiral-hide.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “The bad guys have sent us four Larries: three outside the walls and one inside. They aren’t firing at the moment—just hovering and scaring the crap out of everybody. The guards are taking potshots at them, but arrows bounce right off.”

“What about Kaisho?” Festina asked. “Any sign of her?”

“You’ve lost Kaisho?”

“Kaisho lost herself.”

“Isn’t
that
disquieting.” Tobit went silent a moment, then came back on. “I don’t have a good view, but the moss up front might be glowing brighter. Could just be my imagination.”

“No, it’s probably some fresh hell coming our way.” Festina sighed. “Anything else?”

‘The Black Army has broken through the defense perimeter, and the palace guards are falling back to the next canal. Looks like an orderly retreat. I suppose they’ll form up again and kill a few more Black Shoulders at each canal they come to. It ain’t going to hold the enemy off forever, but they’re buying us time to pull off our brilliant plan. We do have a brilliant plan, right, Admiral?”

“Sure,” Festina answered. “I’ll wave my hands and pixies will teleport the bad guys into the heart of the sun.”

“Oh good,” Tobit said, “I was afraid it would be something impractical.”

“I could go to the battle lines,” I offered. “Make some royal pheromone and see what happens.”

“What happens,” Festina said, “is you get shot by guys in gas masks.” She turned to Gashwan. “I don’t suppose you’ve been saving a tac nuke for a rainy day.”

“That rainy day came and went,” Gashwan replied…and even she had the decency to sound subdued. “The first weeks of the war weren’t pretty, human—the Fasskister Swarm didn’t take out every missile silo in time. Unshummin survived because all the queens wanted to keep the palace intact…no bombing the pretty silver throne. Other cities weren’t so lucky. They say Fortitude’s old stronghold in Therol still glows in the dark. As for Queen Clemency in Koshav…”

We never got to hear about Queen Clemency. Gashwan was interrupted by Dade screaming over the radio. “Admiral, Admiral! There’s a Sperm-tail on the horizon!”

“My God,” Festina said. “Maybe Prope
does
have a conscience. Have you turned on our anchor?”

“Affirmative, Admiral,” Dade answered. “But the tail isn’t coming to us. It’s just quivering in place—its tip is dangling into one of the canals.”

“Tug-of-war, Tobit!” Festina shouted. “You know the drill.” To the rest of us, she snapped, “The roof. Run!”

Gashwan opened her mouth to say something…but we were already racing for the up-ramp. I looked back just before I disappeared into the stairwell; she was staring straight at me with a hint of sorrow on her face.

Gashwan. My creator. Maybe even my mother—if I had Mandasar DNA in me, Gashwan must have got it from somewhere. But I never slowed down to wave good-bye. I didn’t like her any better than I liked the rest of my family.

“Tug-of-war what?” Zeeleepull demanded as we raced up the slow-sloping ramp to the next floor. My heart was pounding. Even the placid workers were gabbling excitedly amongst themselves.

“If the tail won’t come to our anchor,” Festina told him, “that means there’s another anchor somewhere in the city. Pulling hard in a different direction.”

“Samantha might have an anchor,” I said. “She probably kept all kinds of navy stuff.”

“My thought exactly,” Festina agreed. “She let us land, but doesn’t want us getting away. Now she’s trying to steal the tail from us.”

“So what are you going to do?” Counselor asked.

“Boost our anchor’s power by feeding it juice from other sources: a Bumbler, or a tightsuit’s battery pack.”

Counselor panted, “Won’t the bad queen increase her anchor’s power too?”

“That’s what makes tug-of-wars interesting,” Festina said. “Now less talk, more speed.”

The ramp took us up to the palace’s main gallery: a big wide hall like a spine running the length of the building. In Verity’s time, the gallery had been lined with memorials to Troyen’s medical achievements—paintings of famous doctors, first editions of medical books, and even (I’m not kidding) labeled dissections of all four Mandasar castes including crazy old Queen Spontaneity encased in clear plexi.

Now, all I could see was a hot red glow fifty paces in front of us, like staring into an open furnace…the Balrog, clotted on floor, walls, and ceiling. Thick as carpet, stretching off hundreds of meters, all the way to the front nose of the palace.

“Holy shit,” Festina whispered. “We don’t have to go through that, do we?”

“No,” I answered, pointing. “There’s our way to the roof.”

The door we wanted lay in the opposite wall of the gallery, maybe halfway between us and the glowing moss. Cautiously I led the group forward, keeping my eyes on the stone floor to make sure I wouldn’t step on stray spores that had drifted ahead of the main body. The gallery was unnaturally quiet with the moss’s muffling effect—it absorbed noise like crushed velvet laid over every surface. The pressure of sheer silence pushed against my eardrums, muting the sounds of our footsteps. I found myself holding my breath…but that wasn’t enough to keep from smelling the reek of buttered toast filling the air.

“Teelu
,” Counselor whispered, tiptoeing at my heels, “I am very very scared.”

“Who isn’t?” I whispered back. “But remember, Tobit and the others must have come this way too. Nothing happened to them.”

“Explorers are just normal humans,” Counselor replied.

“You are special,
Teelu.
What was it the moss woman said? The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up.”

I winced. In the past few weeks I’d figured out two basic facts about the Balrog:

1. The moss got a kick out of scaring the pants off lesser species.

2. It preferred waiting to pounce till someone spoke a good straight line…like, “We should be safe now,” or, “I don’t think it knows we’re here,” or, “The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up.”

Um.

The gallery’s silence was broken by a ripping sound, starting at the far end of the palace and racing our way. The moss on the walls and ceiling came sloughing off in great flat sheets, peeling from the stone and falling to the floor. Like mounds of snow sliding off trees, the moss slopped onto the ground, building up higher and higher…until it reached some critical mass and began to spill forward.

Rolling heaps of scarlet fuzz tumbled toward us with all the surging unstoppability of an avalanche.

“Run!” Festina shouted. As if we needed to be told.

I sprinted the last few steps to the doorway and threw myself inside, flattening against the wall of the stairwell. Outside, the moss had started to make a skittering scratchy sound—alien spores tripping over each other as they flowed after us. I waved the others to pass me and hightail it for the roof; but Festina planted herself against the wall opposite me, clutching the lantern in her gloved hand. She had the air of a woman who intended to make sure everyone else was safe before she headed up herself.

Zeeleepull seemed to have the same idea: stopping with Festina and me just inside the stairwell, all of us playing the hero, no one wanting to make a break for it till the others were safely on their way. Then Counselor gave her warrior-mate a tremendous shove that practically knocked him off his feet, forcing him to stagger a few steps up the ramp in spite of himself. She barreled forward and shoved him again: no delicacy at all, just whomp, like a small brown bulldozer plowing into an obstacle she was determined to move. One more shove and Zeeleepull accepted the inevitable—he ran, Counselor ran, Hib & Nib & Pib ran, with Festina and me racing close on their heels.

I had just reached the first landing when the stairwell behind me flushed bright with a crimson glow. The Balrog was coming up too.

Nothing to see in the stairwell but Festina’s lantern and the bloom of Balrog creeping up behind us. The moss didn’t move nearly so fast on the ramp as it did on a level floor—the upslope slowed it to a baby’s crawl. We’d have no trouble staying ahead in the short run, but the long-term picture didn’t look so rosy. There was no way out of this stairwell but the parapet on the roof; and there was no way off that parapet but a bunch of ramps at the front of the building, where the Balrog was already in total control.

Oh well—at least the moss meant we had an alternative to getting killed by my sister.

The ramp went through half a dozen switchbacks, till I could no longer see crimson glimmering up from below. I could still smell buttered toast, strong and clear…but I could also catch a whiff of fresh night wind breezing down from the roof’s open air. It carried the scent of human sweat, and gusts of ozone too—the fragrance of lightning. Whatever the Explorers were doing, it used a lot of electricity.

By the time I topped the last ramp, the roof was getting crowded, what with five Mandasars and the same number of humans, three wearing big bulgy tightsuits. Once upon a time, the parapet had run along the whole west side of the palace…but some kind of explosion had blown out a big chunk of stone, leaving a gap of ten meters between us and the next intact section of walkway. The good news was the missing hunk of masonry made it hard for Balrog to migrate from the front of the palace back to us; the bad news was we were squeezed onto a patch of roof no more than three Zeeleepulls long. Lucky for us, the parapet was three Zeeleepulls wide too: you needed that much for bull-sized warriors to get past each other when they were marching sentry on the ramparts.

Even if we’d had more space, I doubt we would have used it—everyone was too busy crowding around Tobit, Dade, and Plebon to see what they were doing. They’d planted our remaining anchor atop the stomach-high wall that edged both sides of the parapet. Standing on either side of the box were two Bumblers, ours and Plebon’s, with back panels pried off to reveal tidy bundles of wires. Neat connections had already been spliced between those wires and some handy electrode knobs jutting out from the base of the anchor machine. The equipment was clearly built to make such rewiring easy; it made me wonder how often Explorers got into tug-of-wars, if navy engineers designed everything for exactly this situation.

But no design is perfect—the Explorers needed more power than just the two Bumblers. Both Tobit and Dade had the fronts of their tightsuits sliced open, cut very delicately by some kind of knife. The incisions were only deep enough to slit off the top layer of fabric, revealing the snarl of circuitry that ran the various functions of the suit: radios, temperature control, all that. Someone had yanked a finger-thick cable out of each suit’s belly and connected the cables to the anchor box too…making it look like each man had a length of intestine pulled out of his gut and hooked up to the anchor. Tobit and Dade stood side by side in front of the parapet wall like guys at adjacent urinals, not looking at each other, occasionally giving self-conscious glances down at the cables that were pumping power into the little black box.