Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (30 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I opened my eyes carefully and looked up at the ground; at the green, green grass and the occasional patches of sand and mud, spinning lazily above me. Trees, growing from their leafy limbs down below, all the way up to their winding roots, far up in the sky, whirled past in a circle. My left leg, or as much of it as I could feel—and something about that fact struck me as odd, but I was not sure exactly how, at the moment—dangled out beside me. My right leg, in a similar state of numbness, save for a strange, tugging sensation, extended straight down toward the blue, blue sky, far below.

I dwelt on all of this sensory input, considered it carefully, and concluded one thing: I was about to be sick.

Squeezing my eyes tightly shut again, I waited, and the wave of nausea passed, mercifully, without becoming productive. I breathed in and out, slowly and deliberately. Something nagged at me. Something was wrong, beyond an upset stomach. The world—something about the world was not right. But what?

Carefully I eased one eye open, peeking out, afraid the sickness would hit me again. This time I found myself staring into another eye, all sparkly with a thousand different colors. Recoiling momentarily, I calmed myself when I realized that I knew that eye. There was only one—or, rather, two—of them in the entire universe.

“Alaria?” I whispered through lips I realized were as numb as my legs.

“Mrgghhhh.”

Not the reaction I was hoping for. I closed my eyes again, struggling to think, to kick my mostly dead brain into gear. Blue ground. Green sky. Gravity… wrong!

Upside down. I was upside down. But why? The nausea returned, but I forced it away through sheer force of will. My mind was working now, after a fashion, and I focused on the situation with all my determination.

Hanging. I was hanging upside down, and so was Alaria. And even more than that: we had been… drugged?

Back through memories I pushed, striving to remember… But it was like walking through molasses. I had to jump all the way back to a time I somehow knew was a good bit earlier, when Alaria had first joined us and we had set off for… for Arendal’s sanctum.

We.

We?

I opened my eyes again, watching the world spin around me slowly, until Alaria’s own spinning, upside-down form passed by. And then: trees, trees, trees… Alaria again.

Who was missing? Someone…

Evelyn!

But where…

“Alaria.”

I said her name louder, but this time she made not even another gurgling sound. Her mouth hung open, seemingly lifeless.

“Alaria!”

“So. Awake. Good.”

The words were twisted, bitten off, and oddly pronounced; they sounded as though they were spoken with vocal cords not meant to carry speech. They came from somewhere above me—below me—wherever. From the ground, off to one side. I waited patiently till my slow spin pointed me in that direction, and I leaned up as best I could, striving to see who had spoken. Soon enough, I saw, and my memories received another jolt, and things became clearer.

A tall, extremely thin being stood at the edge of the clearing we occupied. His skin, brown mottled with green here and there, resembled tree bark in texture. His bare feet splayed out at the ends like roots. A long, narrow nose dominated his smallish face, along with two beady red eyes. He wore no clothes. As I looked at him, and as he became aware I was looking at him, he hopped back and forth from one foot to the other.

“Yassili,” I said.

Possibly the most reclusive of us all, Yassili claimed dominion over the plant kingdom, and generally despised interaction with anything that did not sprout from the soil. Rarely had I encountered him in all the years past, but still I knew him. He was one of us, yet not one of us, and I had never made the slightest effort to recruit him or even get to know him. And now here he was, in the—flesh? Fiber? Chlorophyll? —and I had cause to regret that earlier neglect.

“You… are enjoying… view… of my forest, yes?” he asked in his maddening, halting way. “Unique per-perspective… you have now… I think.”

Ignoring him, I sought the hum of the Power flowing through me. It was not there. Had the Fountain been shut off again? No, somehow I knew it had not; I could feel, just below the surface, the usual buzzing of the Fountain’s energies radiating outward through all the planes. It was still there; I simply could not access it.

Drugs. It had to be drugs. Somehow, Yassili had drugged me; apparently, he had done the same to Alaria. As she swept past again, I could see the thick vines that bound her, wrapped tightly around most of her body, suspending her about ten feet above the ground from their connections high up in the trees. I could feel them around me, too, though one of my legs dangled free.

Yassili’s upside-down form approached us slowly, circling warily about the clearing in which we hung. One long, wiry arm, knobby and branchlike, folded out and prodded at Alaria, producing a delirious moan from her. He greeted the sound with a broad, repulsive, toothy grin. His hair, ratty and dangling like moss from one side of his head, shook back and forth as he trotted around to me and repeated the poking, prodding procedure.

I glared at him, searching my contorted thoughts for the right approach, still not feeling completely myself or entirely confident in my potential actions.

“You… disappoint… me,” he said then, his face somehow even more hideous upside-down. “You… are… prince… of lies. Master…of deception. And yet…” He grinned again, even wider. “…And yet Yassili capture you… so easy.” He dragged the next-to-last syllable out to the point that I wanted to punch him, and would have, had my arms not been bound tightly to my side by ropelike vines. I became aware at that moment, of course, that my nose itched terribly. What a surprise.

Shaking my head in a vain attempt to clear it further, I focused my attention on him as he continued to circle about us. I needed to buy time until I could regain my wits, perhaps give Alaria a chance to wake up, too, and generally figure out some sort of strategy for dealing with this annoying, walking foliage.

“What is it you want, Yassili?” I asked, as politely as I could manage.

“Hah. From you? Nothing.”

He wagged a bony, sticklike finger at me.

“From the others, though…”

The grin again.

“I… will… negotiate… with… Baranak…”

He snorted a bizarre sort of laugh.

“And then we… shall… see!”

“You have to be kidding me,” I said, as much to myself as to him. After everything I had survived to this point, the walking houseplant of the gods was going to turn me in?

I started to say something else to him, possibly antagonistic, probably insulting, when I felt the drug seeping into my system again. Yassili had not approached any closer; it had to be the vines. The same vines that held us secure and dangled us from the trees also administered some sort of sedative. My thoughts were swimming again, blurred and fuzzy as rational thought slipped slowly, steadily away…

Smoke. The sudden, pungent smell of smoke pierced through the veil clouding over my mind, and revived me somewhat. I definitely smelled something, somewhere, burning.

Yassili must have smelled it, too, for at that moment he leaped back from Alaria and me and whirled around in a circle, his face contorting with rage and fear, frantically dancing from one foot to the other, looking, looking…

From out of the underbrush across the clearing charged a figure in black. I fought against the sedative and stared, trying to make out who or what it was. One of the Dark Men? Here? Had things just gone from very, very bad to exponentially worse?

But no, it was not a Dark Man—or, at least, like no Dark Man I had yet encountered. This person, though clad in black, sported a short, bobbed blonde hairdo. I blinked, fighting against the returning mental haze, recognizing who it was.

“Evvvlnnn…”

She did not pause to acknowledge my slurred reaction. She simply rushed forward, brandishing something in her right hand.

As Yassili saw her coming and moved to face her, the vines and bushes all around the clearing sprang to life, crowding in toward him protectively, moving to interpose themselves between him and his attacker.

Evelyn raised her hand, which I could see now held… a gun? Yes, a pistol. She fired; it made a soft, popping sound. Yassili stumbled forward and fell, tumbling over the grass and dirt.

“Staaaaaa… baaaackkk…” was all I could manage by way of warning to her, but she advanced anyway, the weapon still pointed at Yassili.

Sure enough, he started to rise again, indecipherable words sounding from his twisted throat. He made it to his knees, reaching out for her, before she fired the weapon again. Pop. He fell, and this time he did not move.

Instantly the vines holding Alaria and myself released their grip, and we fell. Fortunately, the thick grass cushioned our impact somewhat, as we had virtually no control over our muscles. The vines over our heads now dangled limp and lifeless; the attacking plants around the perimeter collapsed back into their normal, vegetative state.

Managing to roll over onto my back, I raised my head somewhat and looked around. Alaria was awake now, but barely able to move. She lay nearby, both hands pressed to her eyes. Evelyn stood over me, a big smile on her face, her duffle bag slung over one shoulder, one of my pistols gripped in her hand. She indicated the gun: “This seemed like a good time to try it out,” she said.

I found I could smile back.

“Yes—I think it was a good decision,” I said, my words only slightly slurred.

I tried to stand, failed, and sat back on the ground, barely sitting up. Pins and needles assailed my extremities.

“Yassili… attacked us?”

It was Alaria, finding her voice again. I nodded, then said, “Yes,” when I realized she still had not uncovered her eyes.

“I do not recall that,” she said. “What happened?”

“I’m… not sure, myself,” I replied.

“He jumped us as we were passing through this clearing,” Evelyn said. “He hit both of you with something big and solid—I didn’t see exactly what. In the confusion, I managed to slip into the bushes.”

“Good work,” I said, and Alaria, somewhat reluctantly, echoed me.

Evelyn gazed down at me, looking quite pleased with herself.

“We must have been out for a little while,” I said then. “What kept you?”

She scowled at me, then patted the bag that hung from her shoulder. “I got separated from the guns when we were attacked. Something grabbed them away before I knew what was happening.” She shrugged. “Afterward, the green guy never seemed to pay me any attention—he was totally absorbed in you two—so I went looking for them. Found them, finally. But then two very animated fern trees wanted to play ‘keep-away’ with the bag.”

I nodded. It sounded no more fantastical than just about anything else I had experienced recently.

“So, how did you get it back from them?”

She smiled and patted a small bulging pocket on the hip of the black flight suit she wore—the one she had borrowed from my ship’s stores.

“Fortunately, you keep an emergency kit in your suits, and it included an igniter.” The smile became a grin. “You would be surprised how accommodating a giant, killer plant can become when you set fire to it.”

I laughed, and so did Alaria. I glanced over at the flame-haired goddess, and saw that she was regarding Evelyn with newfound respect—which, for Alaria, in relation to mortals, basically meant with any respect at all.