The Hundred: Fall of the Wents (8 page)

“Where?” said Tully hoarsely. He hadn’t eaten since that morning at Hen-Hen’s and felt desperately, painfully hungry.

“Just this way,” said Aarvord. “Can you walk?”

Tully realized later, much later, that Aarvord hadn’t sounded like his normal self at all. The normal Aarvord would have brought him a steaming platter of food, would have extended one of his many marvelous appendages to help heal his bruises or stitch up his wounds, and would not have asked him to walk to get his own meal. But Tully was so hungry that he didn’t notice any of this oddness. He pulled himself awkwardly to a sitting and then a standing position, feeling the bee inside his ear buzz frantically. It crawled out and down his neck, and up along the sleeve of his robe. Tully watched it go, mesmerized. This thing that had been half-dead had been brought back to life by his own heat and energy. It was a good thing, what he had done. He felt dizzy. The bee settled on his hand and fanned its wings, as if it was celebrating its return to warmth and life.

“Are you all right, friend?” asked Tully, not sure if the little creature could even understand the universal language.

“Hurry,” shouted Aarvord impatiently. “The food!”

“No need to shout so,” said Copernicus. “Who knows who lives here?”

Tully and Copernicus followed Aarvord down a passageway, lit by flickering torches in wall sconces. Fangor bounced along behind them, keeping up a wary chatter: “Sumpfin not right. Smells funny. Smells like Shrikes and snakes,” and so on. Copernicus hissed at him to be quiet.

The walls were of a strange, clear stone polished so fine that they could see their reflections in it. Tully thought that he looked like a ghost in the wall’s reflection. He reached out to touch the image and pulled his hand back; the walls were icy cold. But they were evidently made of sterner stuff than ice, for they did not melt under the heat of the torches.

The passageway opened out into a long chamber, the walls made of the same icy stone. There, as Aarvord had promised, was a marvelous feast laid out upon a long, stone table. Tully gasped aloud. There were foods here that had been made by Wents! No one else could fashion such intricate and perfect breads and cakes. Pitchers of golden lemon-water were at both ends of the table with huge glass goblets from which to drink. There were also cheeses and fruits, piled high in glass bowls. There were no meats—most creatures shunned it, and Tully and his friends were no exception. Bonedogs, Tithys Roaches, and other lowly creatures feasted on meat, but since most creatures were sentient it was considered an unspeakable thing to do. Things that were known to be stupid, such as Dull Bees, did not count—Aarvord ate them without remorse.

“It’s fantastic, eh?” said Aarvord. “A feast made for us.”

“But,” said Copernicus, slithering up a table leg and sniffing at a platter of bread, “Surely it wasn’t made for us? And whoever it was made for must be coming soon to eat it.”

“And why does it look like Wents made it?” asked Tully. “Are there Wents here?”

“That I can’t tell. But whoever put this food out is a civilized creature,” said Aarvord. “If you’re worried, don’t eat.”

No one was willing to go this far. They could see no real argument, so they all began to eat. Fangor gnawed a small tunnel deep into a Went-cake. Copernicus slithered down the length of the table, biting small samples of this and that. Tully bit deeply into a plum and felt the juice run sticky down his jaw. It tasted magnificent; he had never had anything so delicious.

The only one of the group that did not eat was the bee. It stayed on Tully’s hand, twitching and waggling its wings in a disconcerted manner. Tully didn’t think much of the bee’s lack of appetite; after all, bees sipped nectar, and there were no flowers here. But no, that wasn’t true—just as he had the thought, his eye fell on a small glass vase in the very center of the table. It was filled with a handful of wan, faded pansies, which were the only things in the room that seemed devoid of interest. No wonder he had not noticed them before. He stepped forward to bring the bee to the flowers, but as he bent close to them the bee scrambled back up his arm, as if afraid. Tully bent closer until his nose was level with the flowers. They had no scent at all.

Then he thought he heard a barely audible whirring noise and a click, and the black pattern within the flowers shrunk and expanded like winking eyes. A shock ran through him. He felt that something intelligent had not just viewed him, but had recorded what it saw. Or what they saw.

“Aarvord,” said Tully, quietly, but when he turned he saw that his friend was no longer in the room with them. He had vanished. Copernicus looked up with a scrap of fruit dangling from his jaws.

“The flowers,” said Tully, backing away. The bee was now buzzing frantically in his ear. Tully realized, a bit late, that the bee had likely been trying to speak to him with its waggling movements. He just had not understood its language. It had sense, after all.

But it was too late. Before they could move, cracks parted in the ceiling and thin, green tendrils snaked down and wrapped around them with whipping, sinuous movements. As one vine twined around his arm with a ferocious tightness Tully noticed that it was covered with beautiful purple blossoms. In the center of each was a malevolent eye.

Copernicus was hoisted high by another vine and he twisted in an effort to free himself. It looked like another snake had wrapped him in a loving embrace. Where Copernicus ended and the vine began was difficult to tell. The snake, stunned, dropped the fruit from his mouth and it fell to the table.

The bee, meanwhile, had left Tully and was buzzing free about the room, chased by snaking and hungry vines, which failed to trap it. It flew out the open doorway and disappeared. Tully watched it go with glee, but a sinking feeling as well. The bee—and they—had no allies. It would not be able to do much good seeking help in this snowy wasteland. And where was Aarvord?

Fangor, while tiny, had not fared so well. He eluded the vines for a time, but then one of the blossoms opened its purple maw and simply swallowed him whole. Tully heard a squeal of outrage, and then nothing. While Fangor was an annoying companion, he was one of them. Tully hoped fervently that the plants were not carnivorous.

The question of where Aarvord was was answered readily enough. In a matter of moments, he was marched into the room, flanked by two squat and ugly Shrikes. Aarvord’s head hung low, and Tully knew at once that he had betrayed them. But why? The vines tightened around Tully’s limbs as if sensing his anger.

One of the Shrikes spoke: “So, you think to eat our food for free?”

Its voice spoke of all the nightmares Tully had ever had and, more fearfully, those he had never had. Nightmares were the Shrikes’ specialty. They had a unique way of entering one’s dreams. Their voices were hard to listen to: a clacking, scraping sound—like nails jogged across metal. Tully flinched just to hear it, and one of the vines smacked him across the face as if to say, “Answer, prisoner!”

“No,” he answered. “We thought it was a gift.”

The Shrikes laughed in an ugly way.

“We offer no gifts,” one said. “Only temptations and traps.”

“Evidently,” said Copernicus, dangling in midair. “Although we met one of your kind recently who was a good deal gentler than you is.”

Aarvord picked his head up suddenly, as if he were going to correct the snake’s grammar, but then dropped it again. His shame was palpable.

“Why, Aarvord?” asked Tully.

Aarvord looked up again, and two fat tears hung from his goggle eyes.

“Justice,” he said simply.

Tully looked at him, not understanding. “Justice for what?”

“They said they would let her go,” said Aarvord, and then Tully remembered that Aarvord had a sister of that name.

“Your sister?” he asked. “But—” And his voice dropped off. This sister, of whom Aarvord had never spoken before yesterday, was important enough to abandon them all to the Shrikes?

“Let’s move,” said the Shrike who was squatter and uglier, if such a distinction could be made. He gestured, and the plants unsnaked and released their hold. Copernicus dropped to the table with a rubbery thump. The seemingly carnivorous plant opened its jaws and belched up Fangor, who bounced out on the table. A Shrike immediately plucked him up, shrieking, and popped him into a glass bottle, promptly screwing a lid on it.

“Fools,” Copernicus hissed instantly, and shot down the table leg and into the passageway as quick as water.

The Shrikes simply laughed, an awful sound of
haw haw haw
that was even worse than their speech. “We never wanted that one, anyway,” said the squat one. “We wanted you. Now, start walking.” The Shrike poked Tully in the back and he started forward. Tully turned back to look at Aarvord, but the Grout would not meet his eye. Fangor even looked out through his glass prison with great, accusing eyes.

“I don’t believe you did this,” said Tully. “You knew that there were Shrikes here, and you did not warn us to escape? You brought us to this room instead? To eat their food?”

“I know,” said Aarvord, staring at the floor. “But there is no escape. And now at least you have eaten.” Then he lifted his head and looked Tully full in the eye. “That is a gift, like other gifts,” he said pointedly.

As Tully was whisked away down a dark hallway, he wondered which gift Aarvord could mean. The last thing he saw was the whipping vines retreating into the ceiling. He also saw, coiled in the shadows and invisible to all but himself, the dark form of Copernicus. The snake was perfectly silent as they passed, but once the Shrikes has turned a corner, he moved quickly, snug to the wall, to follow them.

Aarvord had not seen Justice for many years, but she looked the same—only a great deal thinner. The fat that had been the toast of many a Grout in her younger years had melted away, leaving her ribs exposed and her beloved, froggy face gaunt. But she was still a beauty.

“You’ve made a terrible mistake,” she told her brother. “They won’t let me go, and they won’t let you go either. The Shrikes are not to be trusted. Have you forgotten this?”

“We met a Shrike,” said Aarvord. “He seemed different. And they gave me their word.”

“A Shrike’s word is as useless as a fresh fall of snow in this place,” said Justice. “Just more of the same cold nothingness. No doubt they bewitched you with their shrieking, and to your ears it sounded like sweet entreaties. They are evil things.”

Aarvord could not remember how it had taken place. One moment he was barraged by the clacking horror of a horde of Shrikes, and the next they had come to seem kind and generous. “We will help you,” they whispered, “If you will only do a small thing for us.” It had seemed quite reasonable at the time. But Aarvord could not remember clearly. It was like a dream.

The two Grouts were in a small, stone room with a door barred by a thick piece of iron from the outside, and contained nothing that Aarvord could manipulate with his various tools. The stone was resistant to anything he tried on it. The room was cold and lit only by a small globe in the ceiling that emitted a dull and wan light.

Since Aarvord had been thrust into the room with his sister, time had seemed to stand still. He could not tell if he’d been there hours or minutes, only that the room seemed to grow colder the longer he stayed there. She had told him her story. The story must have taken some time to tell, but Aarvord was disoriented and wracked with guilt. It all seemed unreal. And he found he barely knew his elder sister who had been the subject of many family discussions and grief. Even his memory of her appearance was built on family paintings.

The Shrikes had always been known to take unwary slaves—those who would be most useful to them. A Fantastic Grout was highly prized because of its ability to create and use tools, and Justice was no exception. She had been taken one night when she was but a girl. Aarvord was a small and rambunctious Grout at the time, and he had distracted their parents to the extent that they didn’t realize Justice was gone until it was too late. Curfew was imposed in those days because enemies had been rampant in the city. But Justice had broken curfew because of a
young Grout named Forgish who wanted to meet her by the Windermere and, with her, view the stars and the annual meteor shower that happened every year in late summer. It was a new moon and the night was very dark. The stars were brilliant and meteors fled toward the earth in streams of light and were extinguished. Justice could see the lights reflected in the water of the mere.

Justice waited by the edge of the Windermere, and heard the plash of oars in the dark. Someone was out there in a small boat. Was it Forgish? She stepped down to the water and peered into the blackness. She heard him call out her name: “Justice. It’s me.”

But when the boat beached, Justice was taken by rough paws and pulled into the craft. She could see now the small forms of many Shrikes, and they bound her roughly and pushed her to the bottom of the boat. There, also a prisoner, was Forgish. He looked at her, but could say nothing. He had betrayed her, having no other choice. The Shrikes had forced him into service.

Justice and Forgish were taken by boat, and then cart—drawn by strong Veldstack in the slavery of the Shrikes—and then to another undersea boat bearing north. There were many other prisoners aboard the boat, most of them Grouts, but also a few miserable Ells and Efts and other creatures. Along the way, Justice and Forgish had barely spoken. Justice did manage to ask him, holding back her fury, where he thought they might be headed and to what purpose. Forgish said that he didn’t know. Another Grout who was near them had collapsed in terror, saying they were all certain to be killed. But others said that they were much too valuable to be wasted. All of them were young and strong, and they believed they had been taken for a purpose.

Once the boats had reached the cold northern lands, Justice and Forgish had been quickly separated. She had not seen him since that day. Her group of Grouts had been herded into a dark warehouse where they were lined up and each tagged on the ear with an identification ticket. (At this, Justice fingered the tag that still dangled from her ear like an absurd little earring, and winced at the memory.)

Justice had ideas of what the other prisoners were asked to do, but she had little contact with others outside her group. She knew by word of mouth that some had been forced to build undersea craft, flying machines, and sledges that whisked the Shrikes over the heavy snows. There was an entire industry here based on the talents of the Fantastic Grouts.

As for her group, they were sent to a large rock—balanced on a ledge in the middle of an ocean bay—in the bitter cold. They were told that they must use any tools at their disposal to break it apart. Given nothing, the Fantastic Grouts had tried to make do with saws and chippers that they fashioned from their own bodies. They hardened the bones in their hands and pawed at the rock in an attempt to open a crack. Some grew horns and plunged their own heads at the rock. Despite their efforts, the most they could achieve was some small rock shards and dust. A pile of smaller rocks that lay around the large one on the ledge had been taken back to the Shrike stronghold, and various experiments were done to make those break apart as well. All attempts failed. The stone was made of something that resisted time and water and wind.

This did not please the Shrikes, who demanded—in their strident, awful voices—that the rocks be cleaved in two, and they threatened the Grouts with terrible dreams while they slept in a drafty warehouse after dark. The dreams were indeed dreadful, but no worse than the day-to-day lives that the Grouts already led.

“But to what purpose?” asked Aarvord at this point. “Why break this rock apart?” He recalled the prophecy that had been spoken to them on the plain of Bellerol:
When the rock is split asunder.

Justice didn’t know. No rock had ever been broken.

“All I remember,” she said, “was how important to them it was. They were being driven by something else. There was another master, but one that we never saw. I could tell that the Shrikes were afraid of disappointing this master who drove on their anger and vengefulness against us when we failed.”

After some time, the Shrikes brought heavy, golden tools to them—tools that seemed to gleam of magic and mystery in the cold northern light. But these tools failed as well. Day after day, the Grouts struggled to please their captors. Some did not make it, said Justice, shaking her head. The cold was too much for them. After a failed uprising, during which a team of ten Grouts had attempted to turn the tools into weapons against the Shrikes, more had disappeared. Those she had befriended were long gone. It was only through a stroke of luck that she was still here at all.

One day, while slashing at the rock with a flat blade and taking some comfort from the sparks that flew with each blow, Justice had noticed that, when tilted at a precise angle to the setting sun, the blade seemed to reveal some strange words. She realized that it was in a language she had known as a baby: the singsong mother tongue of the Grouts that was used only inside the home, but which was generally forgotten as one ventured out into the world. Female Grouts alone used it with their young; it had been a dying tradition. The way of the world now was to speak the one universal language so as to make commerce with all creatures. Some Grouts had been taught to pass on the language. Justice was one of these, and the author of the sword was another.

The words were poorly spelled, but Justice could understand it. Whoever had made this beautiful tool was another Grout, a female, no doubt a prisoner somewhere near. The words read: “Take heart. Their leader is weak. We are ready at dawn after the next full moon.”

“I don’t remember this language,” interrupted Aarvord.

“You were a male child,” said Justice, with sympathy. “It was spoken only to me.”

Aarvord felt the old stirrings of jealousy. His sister had always been best beloved and now it seemed she had secrets she had never shared with him. Indeed, she had been a beautiful young creature, and winsome, but her perfect fatness was gone. She was quite possibly ill, he noticed for the first time, and ill in mind as well as in body. Aarvord’s jealousy shrank back inside him.

“So what then?” he asked.

“I passed on the word,” said Justice. “I used the secret language to do so. Those around me took heart. The females shared the news with the males. We were very careful.”

She coughed: a dry, brittle sound that echoed in the small cell. Aarvord waited as she caught her breath.

“Someone betrayed us,” said Justice. “Or so we think. The dawn after the new moon came, and we waited for our messenger to come to us and give us direction. But no one ever came. On the next day, the Shrikes gathered us together and told us we had failed. They seemed very nervous. We were told we were no longer useful. They looked us over and picked out the few that they would keep as slaves. I was chosen. Little did they know that I had been instrumental in planning the rebellion. The rest they…they took away.”

“For what?” demanded Aarvord.

“They would find out how we worked,” said Justice. “How and why we are tool bearers. They wanted to—take us apart. Like machines.”

Aarvord could not speak. What she had said was horrible.

“Perhaps to improve upon us,” continued Justice bitterly. “And do better than we could at breaking the infernal rocks.” She paused. “But,” she added proudly, “no Grout gave up a single secret. They all died honorably. And from it the Shrikes have learned nothing. Nothing at all, I am sure.”

“So if they won’t free us. You and me, I mean,” said Aarvord gruffly, staring down at the floor. “Why do they want me?”

“I can’t tell,” said Justice. “But I do know that they forced your betrayal of your friends for no purpose other than to torment and divide you. Perhaps to throw fear into the young Eft. The Shrikes didn’t need
you
to imprison your friends. I could have told you that, if I’d had the chance. All useless. Wasted.” And here Justice gave that raspy, barking cough again, which sounded like a laugh.

Aarvord felt more miserable than he had ever felt. He had succeeded in alienating and angering his friends, and for what? Justice was still a prisoner. He was a prisoner, too. Would Tully and Copernicus ever forgive him? Even little Fangor hated him, now. But he had tried. Justice was his only true family. He had had to try.

Later, when Aarvord had run out of things to tell Justice about what things were like back in the city, and how their aunts and uncles and cousins were doing, and how their parents had passed away peacefully (one spring after another, on the very same date), he tried to sleep. As soon as he had drifted away, the clacking, stammering voices of the Shrikes began to invade his dreams.

“On your feet!” shrieked a voice.

Aarvord stood obediently, unused to being a prisoner. Justice merely lay there sleeping, as if she were no longer afraid of the Shrikes and what they could do to her. He wondered that she did not even wince at their terrible, strident voices.

“You have outlasted your purpose,” said the Shrike. “You must come with us.”

Aarvord was uncaged and led away. As he followed his captors down the long, dark hallway, he had the unsettling feeling of being unsure of whether this was a dream or not. He knew of what Shrikes were capable: It was exactly this confusion. And the dreams they spun could seem to last for days. He turned back to look for Justice, but she had already disappeared in the gloom.

*

While Aarvord was roiling in his own misery, Copernicus was driven on by anger. He whipped down the hallway silently, hissing under his breath in as tiny a voice as he could muster. “Bite thossse ssshrikes in their sssleep!” he cursed, and he thought of biting his old friend Aarvord, too. Aarvord who was friend no more and could not be forgiven. But why, thought Copernicus, did Aarvord lead them into a trap that need never have been sprung? The Shrikes could just as easily have taken them while they slept and recovered from their fall through the snow. Why use Aarvord for their foul purposes? It made no sense. The more Copernicus pondered it, the more his anger was replaced by a cold determination.

Snakes such as Copernicus were easy to anger, but just as quick to drop a grudge and to have hot emotions cool precipitously. They were logical creatures by nature. Copernicus’ inherent logic told him that the Aarvord he knew would never betray them, not for anything. Aarvord had been tricked and used. If Aarvord was meant to seem like an enemy, it was because the Shrikes wanted him to be. The group, divided, could not defeat the enemy if they were caught in their own anger and hatred. That was it. Copernicus felt burned by this knowledge, yet cleansed. Aarvord had been his friend for a very long time, and he could not let that go so easily. Snakes were loyal, and Copernicus was no exception.

He had been born the eighth in a litter of snakes—the smallest, the runt. Unlike Ells, Efts, and Wents, snakes had two parents only. To them, the Trilings were an inescapable oddity of nature, as much as plants that spawned young without any parents at all. Trilings were a mystery that intrigued the scientists and baffled the others.