The Deavys (3 page)

Then they were gone, as the cat sneeze scattered the dust in all directions.

Sitting himself down, Pithfwid licked one paw and began to groom himself. “Very nice, Simwan. What better to fight dust with than a household broom?”

“Not quite a household broom.” Letting go of the handle, Simwan watched as the seriously strained sweeper settled itself, a little unsteadily, against the supportive shelving. “One of
Mr.
Gemimmel's
brooms.” Turning, he examined the empty shelf anew. “What do you think? Is it safe now?”

“Let me check.” Rising from the ground, N/Ice elevated until she was hovering at eye level with the shelf. “Looks clean. Sparkling clean, in fact.”

Simwan was disappointed. “That means no clues. Or if there were any, they've gone with the sneeze.”

“Not necessarily. Let me have a look.” Gathering himself, Pithfwid cleared the distance in a single effortless jump and began prowling the length and breadth of the shelf between the two ancient amphorae.

Simwan felt a hand on his arm. It was Rose, backed by Amber and N/Ice.

“You're usually a pain in the behind, Simwan, but for a big brother, you can be pretty cool sometimes.”

“Yeah,” agreed Amber. “I wouldn't have thought of a broom.”

“That's not surprising,” sniffed N/Ice, “since you usually act without thinking.”

“Oh so?” Amber turned on her sister. “I didn't see
you
coming up with any suitable enchantments!”

“Yeah,” added Rose pugnaciously. “In fact, we almost didn't
see
you at all!”

While his sisters fell to arguing loudly among themselves and Mr. Gemimmel tried his futile best to calm them, Simwan watched as Pithfwid paced back and forth, back and forth along the length of the shelf, looking for—what? As it developed, the cat wasn't using his eyes as much as he was his other senses. Cat senses.

When he finally halted, it was as sharply as if he had been struck by another homicidal dust bunny. But in this instance, he had only come up hard against a revelation.

“I smell a rat.”

“We
all
smell a rat, Pithfwid,” commented Mr. Gemimmel patiently.

The cat turned to his humans. “No, I mean literally. A real rat.
Rattus rattus
, only more so.
Mucho
more so.”

Simwan found himself eyeing the nearby shelves uneasily, searching for tiny, beady, reflective rodent eyes. The girls edged a little closer to each other. Having certain magical powers and abilities didn't mean one was not afraid of anything. On the contrary, it was just that kind of special knowledge that made one afraid of more things, because there were more things to be afraid
of
.

“What do you mean, ‘more so'?” Simwan asked the cat.

Pithfwid replied while actively sniffing the floor around the base of the shelving that had held the Truth. “I mean I smell not your ordinary rat. This is something special. Something uniquely foul. Nasty rat. Rat it out, I say.” He drew back his head sharply, raised a paw, and sniffed again of a certain spot. “There's a scent here that was spilled by no ordinary rodent. Not by a cricket's whiskers, no.” He looked up again, first at Simwan, then over at the wide-eyed girls. “I think it may be the spoor of the Crub.”

Simwan swallowed hard and the girls set to talking animatedly among themselves. Even Mr. Gemimmel looked concerned. Simwan had heard of the Crub. Just like he'd heard about the Demon King, Agraloth, the Scimitar of Sarakined, and a host of other significantly unpleasant deities that budding sorcerers and sorceresses were required to know about.

Of all the creatures that plagued mankind, fantastical and phantasmagorical, earthy and Ord, none was more common, more potentially dangerous, more intelligent, or more relentless than the rat. And of all the world's rats the king, the emperor, the worst of them all, was the Crub. Though few had seen him (or at least lived to tell of the encounter), he was thought to be the smartest, cleverest, wisest, and most heartless of all his kind. Which raised the obvious question.

What would the Crub want with the Truth?

Nothing good, Simwan knew. Nothing good at all. He thought of their mother, Melinda Mae, who was so closely bound to the Truth, and a lump formed in his throat. Now more than ever, it was clear that they had to get it back—and quickly.

Lowering his head and his paw once more, Pithfwid sniffed at a tiny lump of dust that was still intact. But this time he didn't sneeze. Instead, he leaped back, let out a sharp-voiced yowl of surprise, and bottled his tail.

Something was emerging from the dust.

It got big fast. A writhing torso sprouted arms and legs. A head emerged from lissome shoulders. The body was clad in a clinging gown of what looked like spun silver, and an argent disc balanced atop a head crowned with long black hair. Dark eyes blazed with outraged realization.

“
You!
” the figure declaimed. One arm rose and an index finger pointed first at the cat, who was backing away, and then at each of them in turn. “How dare you insult the fount of wisdom and fertility to whom I have often prayed! How dare you threaten him and his works!”

“Time to go, I think.” With that, Pithfwid was off and running. Though his natural inclination was to try to talk things out, Simwan saw the wisdom of the cat's reaction and took to his heels. The girls and Mr. Gemimmel were right behind him.

And the glowing, flaring apparition was right behind
them
, pursuing them around shelves and down increasingly bright corridors. “Die, die, all of you! For your insults, you deserve to be slain where you stand!” From the silver disc atop her head, bolts of fiery white light reached for the fleeing figures. One made contact with Pithfwid's tail, sending him racing past the humans, smoke trailing from the tip of that appendage where the lightning had struck.

As they ran, the Deavy children tried to think of a proper spell with which to counteract the pursuing harridan. But it's hard to think when you're running for your life, pursued by a person as deadly as she is beautiful. Surprisingly, Mr. Gemimmel kept up with his much younger companions, muttering to himself all the while.

“Dear me—have to quash this
now
—will be Hell to pay if she gets out on the street.” Like an electronic grocery store scanner, his eyes flicked over every shelf and every container they raced past, identifying the contents, searching for something specific.

They were halfway back to the front of the store when he suddenly skidded to a halt, grabbed a small, thick glass bottle off a shelf, and pulled the stopper. Not even bothering to utter a supporting hex, he turned to confront the shrieking, threatening, oncoming wraith. Simwan and the girls slowed and gathered behind him while Pithfwid took shelter among the larger boxes.

“Die, DIE!” the creature howled, lifting one arm to strike directly at the elderly apothecary.

“I think not,” he responded primly. Drawing back his own arm, he flung the contents of the bottle in her direction.

The powder struck the specter square in the midsection. She halted immediately, gazing down at herself in puzzlement. To Simwan, tossing nothing but a little powder seemed a particularly ineffectual gesture on the pharmacist's part.

Straightening, the apparition raised her arm anew, once more preparing to strike. Then a strange expression came over her beautiful but tormented face. Her eyes bulged slightly. She coughed: lightly at first, then harder, doubling forward as the hacking fit overcame her. In fact, she doubled over so hard that her head went all the way into her belly. And kept going until she was no longer doubled over on herself, but tripled over, then quadrupled over. And then, with a brief pop and a modest flash of light, she was gone, having disappeared right inside herself.

“That,” declared Mr. Gemimmel firmly, his lower lip curling up over the upper, “is how you deal with an infection. Biowarfare, indeed!” Turning, he resumed walking toward the front of his store. “Even the conjured should know better than to mess with a druggist.”

The girls were still discussing what they had just witnessed when Simwan moved close enough to their host to ask, “An infection, you say?”

Mr. Gemimmel nodded somberly. “Like the carnivorous dust bunny, a thing deliberately planted by the thief, this Crub creature, to deal with anyone who might try to trace its evil deed.”

“So what did you throw at it?” Peering back over his shoulder, Simwan tried to remember if he had seen a label on the bottle full of powder. “Antibiotics?”

“Not this time. The infection was site-specific. I had to use antinilotics, since the infection took the form of a vengeful Egyptian deity.”

Overhearing this, the girls interrupted their conversation. “Which deity?” Amber inquired with evident interest.

“Well now.” Mr. Gemimmel smiled as they approached the outskirts of the pharmacy storage area and the front of his store. “Based on the evidence that most discerning feline Pithfwid discovered, who else would you expect but the goddess Rat-taui?”

Pithfwid nodded agreement. “This little episode should give you some idea of what we're up against, children.” Simwan bristled at being called a child, but said nothing. It did no good to argue with Pithfwid anyway. The cat continued. “The Crub is the end-all of every rat that ever spread a plague or stole the last portion of a starving man's food or bit a baby on the toe. It's big and mean and hateful: a bundle of pure evil wrapped in brown bristles and tipped with teeth at one end and an obscenely naked tail at the other. It's the master of rat magic as well as rat knowledge, and it controls entirely too much of both.” Whiskers quivered. “We're going to have to be lucky as well as smart to catch it.”

“We don't need to catch it,” Rose argued. “We just need to get the Truth back from it.”

“I'm afraid those goals will wind up being one and the same,” Pithfwid told her resignedly. “Remember your mother. There's no time to lose.”

By the time they reached the pharmacy counter, the number of customers in the store had multiplied, what with only the two clerks to handle all the business. After making good on his promise, Mr. Gemimmel plunged in to help his employees deal with the customer backlog. That left cat and kids to walk out the front door and return to their bikes, which were waiting for their owners right where they had been left.

“So, what do we do now?” Rose looked at Amber. Amber squinted hard enough to see N/Ice, who wasn't quite all there. N/Ice reached out to her brother, made a face when her hand passed cleanly through his arm, and shut her eyes tight until she had reconstituted enough of herself to grab him firmly.

“Yes, big brother. What do we do now?”

Simwan looked up South Harrison. It was getting dark. They couldn't do anything else until tomorrow, and he said as much. “I think we ought to let Pithfwid sniff a circle around the outside of Mr. Gemimmel's store.” He smiled down at the cat. “You smelled the Crub inside the pharmacy. Think you can smell it outside as well?”

“If it left any kind of trail, I'll find it.” Pithfwid leaped up into the basket that was attached to the handlebars of Simwan's bike. “Since all rats leave trails, the Crub ought to leave one ten times as distinctive. And as you know, cats also have a nose for the Truth. But it's getting dark, and I'm hungry, and we should be at our most awake and alert when we attempt this.”

“You don't think it's still around here, do you?” Rose found herself peering anxiously up and down the street. “The Crub, I mean.”

“Anything is possible.” Resting his front paws on the side of the basket, Pithfwid stood up and pointed. “It came here looking for the Truth, and when it found it, it stole it away. It's taken it off somewhere, no doubt to do something disagreeable with it, so we've got to try to pick up its trail as soon as we can. But not until tomorrow. Dust bunnies and a vengeful goddess of the Nile are enough to deal with in one afternoon. I'm starving. Let's get moving. Don't you want to get home before dark? Or do you want to wait around and see if the Crub left anything else behind to confront those who might be foolish enough to try following him?”

III

They said nothing to their parents of the confrontation in the drugstore, nor of what they had learned. Upon hearing such, Mr. and Mrs. Deavy would most likely have forbidden their children to pursue so serious a matter any further. Which, of course, was exactly what Simwan and the coubet intended to do. So they ate dinner quietly, and worked on their homework afterward. For Simwan, that meant digging into Early European History, Algebra, and Intermediate Malfeasance; for the girls, American Government, Seventh-Level Spelling (of the word kind), Fourth-Adept Spelling (of the hex kind), and Beginning Potions II, the latter involving learning the recipe for baking cookies that included both chocolate and brimstone chips. Before going to bed, they were allowed two hours of television, video games, Internet, and consensual thaumaturgy. The evening proceeded normally, and their parents suspected nothing.

The next morning, they waited for Martin to go off to work and Melinda Mae to head for town hall, where she was working with a group of local activist Ords to organize protests to try to stop the development. Simwan noticed with concern that she was moving much more slowly than usual. Once they had the house to themselves (thank goodness for their school district's special October break), the Deavy progeny were on their bikes and racing furiously for town once more.

Unsurprisingly, it was Pithfwid who picked up the trail outside the drugstore. Not only was his sense of smell more acute than theirs, he could go nosing about drain pipes and cracks in the sidewalk and the tops of weeds without drawing attention to himself. Every time Simwan or one of the girls wanted to do the same, they had to keep a lookout for passersby. Clearsight was a small town, and word would spread quickly if someone saw Amber, for example, down on all fours and with her pert nose shoved into a clump of broomweed.

Whiskers wrinkling in disgust, the cat pointed one paw due east from the back of the building. “The beast went thataway.”

“You're sure?” Rose asked as her siblings gathered around.

The cat nodded. “The spoor is unmistakable, and still strong. It can't be anything else. Nothing normal would linger this long.” The paw bobbed. “Due east, it headed.”

“Can you tell if it had the Truth with it?” Amber had her head back and was sniffing the air for herself. Yes, there it was: a faint but definite stink, not unlike the stench that had come from the Deavy garbage disposal when Melinda Mae had put some bad eggs down it one morning and had forgotten to turn it on, leaving them to fester there for an entire day.

Eyes agleam with expectation, Pithfwid shook his head brusquely. “No, I can't. Now, if the Crub was packing lies instead of the Truth, it would be different. It would smell like those sessions the developers keep holding at the town hall.” Turning, he trotted to Simwan's bicycle and jumped effortlessly into the basket that adorned its handlebars. “The smell will last a long time, but it won't last forever.”

Poplar Street gave way to Lincoln Lane, and then to Ainsworth. This narrow, one-lane road dead-ended at the top of a short drop-off. From there the scent trail led downward into the dense woods that surrounded Clearsight.

“We'll have to leave our bikes here,” Simwan declared as he dismounted. While his mountain bike could handle the slope, there was no telling where the trail led, and it would be better to position their transportation where it could be found quickly and easily than risk breaking an axle or throwing a chain somewhere deep in the forest. With Pithfwid in the lead, they clambered down the embankment. It wasn't steep, but the covering of fallen leaves made it hard to see the rocks beneath.

“Keep an eye out,” he warned his sisters. “It's possible the Crub booby-trapped its trail like it did the shelf in Mr. Gemimmel's store.”

“I don't think so.” Pithfwid glanced back. “From the way its odor is starting to skip forward, I think it must have accelerated when it got to this point. Maybe as much as twenty miles an hour.”

“Pretty fast, for a rat.” Rose ducked beneath an overhanging branch.

Pithfwid could reach that kind of speed, but his humans could not, so he was forced to moderate his pace. Occasionally, N/Ice would go ethereal and dart on ahead, the leaf carpet parting beneath her with the speed of her passing, but each time she was compelled to return and rejoin her siblings. When she wanted to, she could travel faster than any of them, but there was no point in doing so. Without the cat's discerning sense of smell as a guide, she could get lost.

Two hours later they were deep in the forest. The mist had lifted, to be replaced by scudding clouds around which the sun occasionally peeped as if spying on them. If they kept going this way, Simwan knew, in another hour or so they would hit State Highway 32 He wondered if the Crub's scent would persist on concrete, or if someone even as sensitive as Pithfwid would lose track of it among the swirling fumes of diesel and gasoline. He asked the cat as much.

“It's possible.” Contemplating the prospect, Pithfwid slowed. “The Crub stinks, but so do cars and trucks.” He looked around, gazing into the stands of high trees. “Before we hit the highway, it wouldn't hurt to make sure we're on the right track. I'm almost sure that we are, but it's possible the Crub could have laid down a false scent trail and then doubled back, just in case anyone tried to track it by smell.”

“That's a good idea. I'll see if I can scare up some locals,” Rose responded.

“Don't you mean ‘scare away'?” N/Ice couldn't resist sniding.

Her sister made a face. “Be nice, girl, or I'll pull your ectoplasmic self inside out.” Turning, she faced away from her brother and sisters, cupped her hands to her mouth, and began to cry. Not a sad cry, or a lonely cry, but more of an inviting one.

No hawks responded, however, nor any eagles, nor circling falcons or dozing owls. After a few tries, she reluctantly conceded their absence. “Not hunting time, I guess. Or else everybody's asleep, or just nesting.”

Amber stepped forward. “If your birds aren't around, then their prey ought to be.” Kneeling and pulling up the sleeves of her sweater, she pursed her lips and began muttering much softer sounds. Some of them were actually below the range of human hearing—but not Deavy hearing.

For a moment they thought Amber's efforts would prove as unproductive as had those of her sister. Then Simwan heard the first of several slight, barely audible, skittering noises. The gorgeously colored dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor like bits of weathered bronze began to shift and crackle in places, disturbed not by wind but by things moving beneath them. More and more movement accompanied the persistent rustling. Like a collapsing ring, the motion centered on the sweater-clad children, until it finally revealed itself in the form of dozens of small figures who emerged in unison from beneath the leaf litter.

They were mostly brown, though some flaunted patches of black or white on chest, belly, or tail. There were field mice, and dormice, and pack rats, and voles. They gathered themselves in a neat semi-circle facing the visiting humans, preening their nervous whiskers, twitching their tiny noses, eyes like matched black pearls considering one another with as much interest as they did those who had summoned them. Simwan dropped into a crouch, the better to be nearer eye level with them, and said nothing. Amber had called them forth, and Amber would know best how to talk to them. Amid all the soft squeaking and chirping, Pithfwid resolutely remained where he was. He could not, however, keep his tail from switching back and forth at the sight of the assembled, and when no one was looking he would raise a paw to swiftly and surreptitiously wipe a curl of drool away from the corner of his mouth.

Amber greeted them. “Thanks for answering, people of the forest floor.”

One mouse, slightly larger than the others, stepped forward and stood up on its hind legs, whiskers quivering as it regarded the much bigger human.

“When one who knows how to whisper the right whispers emphatically, we always come. What is it you need?”

“Someone has stolen the Truth from Mr. Gemimmel's drugstore. We need to get it back before it can be used to work mischief. We're pretty sure it was taken by a relative of yours, and that it was brought this way.”

“The Crub,” Simwan put in, so that there could be no misunderstanding.

Mention of that name caused a commotion among the assembled, though since it was a congregation of small rodents it was a very quiet commotion. Some of those who had responded whirled and fled in terror, disappearing among the leaf litter and the roots of the silently watching trees. But a few—bold, determined, or both—remained.

“We have nothing to do with the Crub. It and its followers cast all our kind in a bad light,” the stout mouse exclaimed forcefully.

“Did you see it come this way?” Amber asked. “We're following its scent trail.”

At this, a dozen of those in attendance promptly dropped their own sensitive nostrils to the ground, and not for long. “So that's the source of the awfulness we've been smelling around here,” the rodent spokesman muttered. “Now it makes sense. No fakery in this, then. It's the Crub itself for sure.” One tiny paw rose and pointed. Eastward again, Simwan observed. It was reassuring to know that Pithfwid had been following the right track all along.

“Not a diversion?” he inquired, just to be sure.

The mouse speaker shook his head vigorously, small round ears quivering. “Not a chance, man. The stink is too strong.” The paw swung around accusingly toward the shape of a large yellow and purple cat who was struggling hard to feign indifference to the gathering. “And tell your friend to stop looking at me like that. This is a called conference whispered by you, and I won't have him looking at me and thinking of mouse mousse.”

“Pithfwid!” Putting his hands on his hips, Simwan glared over at the cat. “They're trying to help us.”

“Sorry.” With great dignity, the cat turned so that his back was to the semicircle of concerned rodents. “I can't help it. Sometimes instinct trumps intelligence.”

One thing the mice couldn't tell them was how far ahead the Crub might be. Given how fast it was moving, they were unlikely to catch up to it until it reached its intended destination. As he strode through the woods, Simwan wondered where that might be. Where would something as vile and conniving as the Crub choose to hole up? Tarrentville? Maybe as far away as Lordsburg? He supposed it all depended on just what the Crub intended to do with the Truth, now that it had it. He checked his watch. If they didn't catch up to their quarry by one or two o'clock, he and his sisters would have to turn around and head back. Otherwise they wouldn't get home until well after dark.

On the other hand, if they managed to make it as far as the highway, they would know exactly where to pick up the trail again tomorrow morning. They could mark the spot, and wouldn't have to spend half a day traipsing through the woods in search of it.

But they never got to the highway. Long before they could even hear the first hornetlike whiz of passing vehicles, they found themselves confronting a thoroughfare of a different sort. It brought them to an abrupt halt.

Though he carefully sniffed of both sides of the singing, swiftly running stream, Pithfwid couldn't pick up the Crub's trail on the other side. It was as if the thieving rodent had deliberately and thoroughly and cleverly washed himself clean of scent in the cold, fast-moving water.

“Or maybe he swam downstream and then came back out,” Rose ventured. At her suggestion, they all found themselves looking in that direction, to where the water wended its way noisily and deliberately through the flanking trees.

“He could have gone upstream, too,” Simwan pointed out. “Swimming where he could and walking on the rocks where the current was too strong. Not only is there no way of telling how far he might have gone before he came back out onto dry land, we can't even tell which way he went.”

Rubbing up against Simwan's right leg, a presently puce Pithfwid growled in frustration. “No question about it—the reek stops at the creek.”

“If he crossed the stream, maybe a stream-dweller noticed his passing,” N/Ice pointed out. She immediately crouched and began inspecting the moist earth that rimmed the stream. Bending low, her sisters commenced examining the slick rocks that lay both in the water and onshore. Opting for a higher vantage point, Simwan chose to search while standing upright, with the sharp-eyed Pithfwid riding on his shoulder. It was important to look from as many different angles as possible, because you never knew where the sun was going to strike. And if you didn't look at just the right place at exactly the right moment where the sun happened to be hitting, you could look right at a skippl and never see it. Which is what most people, and all Ords, invariably did.

This is because skippls look just like the sparkles of light that sunlight makes on water. Gaze at the rippling surface of a lake, his dad had told Simwan and his sisters during one summer outing, and you'll see dozens, hundreds, of golden flashes of light on the water. Reflections of the sun that will make you squint your eyes and squeeze out tears. The one reflection that doesn't do that is a skippl. They're closely related to the gneechees, Martin went on to explain, which are the creatures you think you see out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn your head to look straight at them, they're gone.

“Hey!” Letting out a shout of recognition, Pithfwid rose up on Simwan's shoulder and pointed. His cry brought the searching sisters running in their direction.

Simwan stood by the side of a small cascade, staring at the smooth rocks that formed the upper ledge. The waterfall was no taller than he was, but among the numerous glints of light that filled the falling, he thought he could just make out several half-foot-high columns of sparkle that didn't appear to conform to the rest. They were moving more slowly, persisted longer, traveled in a slightly different direction, and if you looked really, really hard, you could make out what appeared to be arms and legs fringed with lissome, transparent fins.