The Monsters of Stephen Enchanter (24 page)

“Look at us—look over here!—have you seen this one?—oops, don’t fall, Enchan—” Robin’s Children’s voices cut off and they ceased all movement.  Stephen experimentally jogged forward, and not a single one tried to trip him.

“Ooh—did you feel that?” several of the Children whispered, and they came alive again, exchanging hushed comments and making one or two lazy moves under Stephen’s feet.  Stephen hurriedly returned to his earlier, sluggish pace.  “Did he feel that?—We feel lots, in the ground—but what to do—trip her too!—No, let her pass—no!—trip her?  Do we dare?  Ought we?”

“It will be more fun if you do,” Stephen said hopefully.

“There is that—good point—he’s right—the Enchanter’s right—dreadfully rude, she is—but would Robin like it?”

“Robin would never let an insult pass,” Stephen said, but not one of Robin’s Children answered—they had fallen silent a second time.

She had arrived.  Stephen gripped his walking stick in both hands and turned to face her.

She was magnificent.  In shape and expression she might have been a house cat, but no house cat ever stood two-and-a-half feet at the shoulder and six feet from nose to tail.  Her coat was tawny, her eyes pale and gleaming, her tail twitching.  She lay in a shrub at the top of the hill, watching Stephen.

Mountain lion. 

Stephen had only seen a mountain lion once before, when he was a small child.  For years it had been killing livestock around his town.  But then one day it dragged off a child—a girl Stephen vaguely knew.  They said it must have been crazed from hunger, but Stephen knew that wasn’t true.  He had been there, although he hadn’t told anyone.  They had been playing a little too far from home, and had spotted the mountain lion.  She had gone up to the mountain lion, saying she was going to pet it.  She had never believed that any animal would hurt her.

Stephen had seen her remains when they had brought them back. 

After the mountain lion had been killed, they had stuffed and mounted it, and used it to teach the children what to do if they ever saw one: pretend to be large and ferocious.  All cats were cowards, they were told, and if they could convince the mountain lion they could injure it, it wouldn’t attack.

Somehow, Stephen didn’t think that’d work on a creature of Robin’s Woods.

The mountain lion knew he had seen her.  She rose to her feet and slunk gracefully downward.  Her movements were sure and steady, and she did not zigzag to lessen the slope, as Stephen had.

Stephen planted his feet shoulder-width apart and waited for her.  He wished he were a battle-wizard and could use the stick to shoot fire at her.  As it was, the stick was only a sturdy length of wood.

That would have to do.

And besides, he told himself, he’d rather die an enchanter than a battle-wizard.  Wizardry was, on the whole, a lowly and unworthy branch of magic.

Slowly, so as not to alarm the mountain lion, Stephen reversed his grip on the walking stick and raised it to his shoulder, ready to swing.

The mountain lion paused and angled her head toward the movement.  She was still some fifty feet away, but she crouched and sprang, faster and farther than Stephen would have believed possible.

At the last moment, Robin’s Children clustered and danced beneath her feet, knocking her off-course.  She twisted midair, correcting her trajectory, and—

THWACK.

Stephen’s walking stick smacked the mountain lion solidly across her shoulder, dashing her down the slope.  The stick fell from his stinging hands and he gasped for air.

The mountain lion climbed to her feet.  She held her right foreleg gingerly, but stood her ground and snarled.

He was not going to win this fight.

The mountain lion bounded forward, powerful legs springing, propelling her forward, covering ten feet with every step . . . and not moving forward one inch.  The ground beneath her had become a roiling mass of Robin’s Children, all of them, the rest of the slope laid bare.

Now was his chance!

Stephen found his walking stick and ran at her, swinging, bashing her legs, her flank, her face.  He swung until the stick broke, and then speared her with its broken ends.  She lunged at him, claws extended, but Robin’s Children made sure she couldn’t reach him but never made him stumble.  She yowled until Stephen’s ears hurt, but she could do no more; she could barely manage to stay upright.

Beneath her feet, Robin’s Children giggled uncontrollably, and rammed themselves against her, bruising her legs, bloodying the pads of her paws, running her against Stephen’s makeshift spears and—when they had had enough—throwing her down the slope.

Stephen discarded the walking stick fragments for his knife.  He ran down and leapt on the wounded mountain lion, stabbing her in the chest and neck, stabbing her until long after the light of life had faded from her eyes and the twitches that wracked her body were caused by the force of his arm as he forced the knife in again and again.

When Stephen returned to his senses, he found himself kneeling by her corpse, in the field at the bottom of the slop.  Above him, Robin’s Children were murmuring among themselves, a discomforted sort of murmur, not at all like their earlier cheerfulness.  They were as clean and shiny as any rocks could be, not a smear of blood anywhere.

Oh, right.  That was because it was all around him.  And on him.  He smelled awful.

Stephen stumbled to his feet, dully realizing his hand was cramping and numb on the hilt of his knife.  He wiped the knife in the snow and replaced it in his robes.

“Thank you for your help,” he told Robin’s Children.

“Help—no—no—we didn’t help you—not against her—don’t you tell Robin we did!”

“I won’t.”

“Go away, Enchanter!—Go away and don’t come back—(you’re welcome, by the way)—we don’t know you—hurry, before he arrives!”

Stephen turned back to the remains of the mountain lion.  It was no longer magnificent, and he found he didn’t want any part of it—no trophies.  Not even its teeth.  He wanted to forget it, and the way it laid there, limp, broken.

But there was no call to be wasting decent enchanting material, so he cut out the jaw and stuffed it in his largest pocket before continuing on through the field.

The path was flat and easy, and as Stephen walked, life returned to his eyes and muscles.  His feet picked up the old pace of walking, and his hands scooped snow into balls and threw it.  After a while, he found a broken branch on the ground that would serve as a new walking stick.  He walked, and let his mind think of nothing.

The trees on the far side of the field were gnarled and close.  They soon cut off the best of the sunlight.  The way had shrunk to a deer path, and undergrowth snagged at his sleeves.  He was leaving a trail of blood and broken twigs for Robin to follow. 

After a while, it began to snow.

It would.

Stephen wiped a hand over his face.  When he withdrew it, he found the ground had plunged away from under his feet.

No.

What?

Ah.  He was standing on a plank over a pit.  The rank smell of rotting meat rose to his nostrils and the wind fluttered his robes.

Very, very carefully, Stephen stepped backward onto solid ground.

Then he spotted the sign.  There words were carved into the wood in the same handwriting that Stephen had seen in the notebooks of poetry in Robin’s cabin.  They read, unhelpfully,

Robin’s Bowl

This wasn’t the third bridge, then.  There went that hope.

But really, what kind of deranged psychopath took the days and weeks necessary to dig an enormous hole in the middle of the woods and fill it with who knows what that was causing that awful smell of—

Rotting meat.

It occurred to Stephen that not even Robin could have dug Robin’s Bowl on his own.  He would have needed a team of men, maybe multiple teams, all of them working around the clock for days.  When they had finished, Robin would have needed a way to dispose of them—and what better way than to push their bodies down into the pit?

Except . . . except this pit looked like it had been around for years.  The bodies wouldn’t still be rotting.  More importantly, it was cold, freezing cold.  The cold would have preserved the bodies; he wouldn’t be able to smell them even if they were fresh.  No; there was something else going on here.

It didn’t matter.  Stephen wasn’t going down there; he was going across.  The path continued on the far side of the pit.

The plank was solidly hewn and a good eight inches across.  Stephen had crossed streams on logs and balanced atop fences.  Admittedly, none of those had been balanced over a deep dark pit containing horrors in a booby-trapped woods run by a madman, but that was no reason to panic.

Stephen held his new walking stick at either end for balance and, without looking down, crossed the pit.

The plank didn’t creak.  He made it across safely.

Stephen breathed a sigh of relief, walked forward, and hit a wall.

No; not a wall.  Stephen shook himself off, gingerly felt his nose, and stood.  He had been on the path, and there was nothing in front of him.  The path wound off between two trees.

Stephen gingerly reached out a hand and felt bark beneath his glove. 

An invisible tree?  There were stranger things in the world.  He moved his hands over the tree, searching for a way past.  Another tree, equally invisible, grew flush with the first.  And a third.  And a fourth.  The invisible trees grew in a semi-circle, each ending at the pit; there was no way through.

Stephen gripped one of the invisible trees and tried to pull himself up it, but there were no low branches, no places to grip—and he did not dare remove his gloves.

But there had to be a way through!  Robin had said there was.  Robin had said to follow the path, that the path was the only way through the woods.

Robin was a liar.

But Letitia had said the same thing and yes, she was a witch, but was it likely she and Robin were working together?  Was it likely they had somehow come up with the same story?

No.  There must be another way.

Stephen returned to the plank.  It was where he had left it, and a gentle prod proved it to be as solid as ever.  Stephen stepped onto the plank, and immediately warm air rose around him, whipping his robes, casting snow into his eyes.  Wind whistled about his ears, and Stephen realized that the sudden change in weather was not magic, but physics.  When he had crossed the first time, it had only begun snowing, and there was little wind.  This time, the freezing wind and snow clashed with the increasing waves of heat from below to cause . . . confusion.

He could still pass, if he were careful.

Stephen threw his walking stick to the far side of the pit, got on his stomach and crawled across.

The plank felt much longer this way.  He could not help but see the darkness of the pit far beneath him, could not help but think how very far he could fall.  Worst, the stench rose in increasing waves, nauseating, pervasive, inescapable.  Then, just to cap it all, he could feel waves of magic-depressing coldness radiating from pure iron.  The iron was close, practically under his hands.

Under his hands?  Not in the pit, surely.  Stephen peered down, but that way was only blackness.  And the iron wasn’t quite underneath him, it was also a little ahead.  He squinted through the snow, and made out the telltale smoothness of iron.  It was in bar form, hugging the wall.

A ladder rung.