Brightness Reef u-4 Page 12

  The forbidding memory of that story filled Dwer’s heart with leaden worry.

  Spare me, please, from being asked to do as Ghahen did. I couldn’t. Not if all the sages ordered it. Not if Lark said the fate of all Jijo hung in the balance. There’s got to be a better way.

  Just where the rocky shelf seemed about to narrow down to nothing, letting the divided tracts of boo converge and obliterate the trail, a clearing abruptly opened ahead. A bowl-shaped depression, nearly a thousand meters across, with an algae-crusted lake in its center and a narrow outlet at the far end. A fringe of great-boo lined the crater’s outer rim, and spindly tufts of the tenacious plant sprouted from crevices between jagged boulders that lay tumbled across the silent mountain vale. The lake’s watery shore was outlined by a dense hedge, appearing at a distance like rank moss, from which radiated countless twisted tendrils, many of them broken stumps. Even where Dwer stood, ropy fibers could be seen half-buried in the dust, some as thick as his leg.

  The peaceful quiet was belied by an eerie sense of lifelessness. The dust lay undisturbed by footprints, only the scrape of wind and rain. From prior visits, Dwer knew why prudent creatures avoided this place. Still, after the strangling confinement of that tunnel-trail, it felt good to see sky again. Dwer had never much shared the prevailing dread of crossing open ground, even if it meant walking for a short time under the glaring sun.

  As they picked their way past the first boulders, the glaver began to mew nervously, creeping alongside Rety to keep in her shadow. The girl’s eyes roved avidly. She seemed not to notice drifting off the trail, at an angle that would skirt the fringe of the lake.

  Dwer took several long strides to catch up. “Not that way,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Why not? We’re headin’ over there, right?” She pointed to the only other gap in the outer wall of boo, where a narrow, scummy stream leaked through the valley’s outlet. “Quickest way is past the lake. Looks easier, too, except right by the shore.”

  Dwer gestured toward a relic webbery of dun strands, draping the nearby jagged boulders. “Those are-” he began.

  “I know what they are.” She made a face. “Buyur didn’t only live on the Slope, y’know, even if you wes-ties do think it’s simply the best place to be. We got mulc-spiders over the hill, too, eatin’ up old Buyur ruins.

  “Anyway, what’re you so scared of? You don’t think this one’s still alive, do you?” She kicked one of the desiccated vines, which crumbled to dust.

  Dwer controlled himself. It’s that chip on her shoulder talking. Her people must have been awful to her. Taking a breath, he replied evenly.

  “I don’t think it’s alive. I know it is. What’s more — this spider’s crazy.”

  Rety’s first reaction was to raise both eyebrows in surprised fascination. She leaned toward him and asked in a hushed voice — “Really?”

  Then she tittered, and Dwer saw she was being sarcastic. “What’s it do? Put out sticky lures full o’ berry-sugar an’ sweet gar, to snatch little girls who’re bad?”

  Taken aback, Dwer finally grunted. “I guess you could say something like that.”

  Now Rety’s eyes widened for real, brimming with curiosity. “Now this I gotta see!”

  She gave the rope at her waist a sudden yank. The formidable-looking knot fell apart, and she took off, dashing past several craggy stones. The gaily squeaking noor pursued with excited bounds.

  “Wait!” Dwer yelled futilely, knowing it useless to chase her through the boulder maze. Scrambling up a nearby talus slope of rocky debris, he managed to glimpse her ragged ponytail, bobbing as she ran toward where the rocky slabs converged in a tumbled labyrinth rimming the lake shore.

  “Rety!” he screamed into the wind. “Don’t touch the—”

  He stopped wasting breath. The same breeze that pushed the lake’s musty pungency against his face stole his words before they could reach her ears. Dwer slid back down to the trail, only to realize — damn! Even the glaver was gone!

  He finally found it half an arrowflight uphill, shambling back the way they had come, following whatever instinct sometimes drove its kind to wander doggedly east, away from comfort and protection and toward near-certain death. Growling under his breath, Dwer seized the mare’s tether and sought something, anything, to tie her to, but the nearest stand of gangly boo lay too far away. Dropping his pack, he whipped out a length of cord. “Sorry about this,” he apologized, using his hip to lever the glaver over. Ignoring her rumbling complaint, he proceeded to hobble her rear legs, where he hoped she couldn’t reach the rope with her teeth.

  “Pain, frustration — both quite tedious are.”

  “Sorry. I’ll be back soon,” he answered optimistically, and took off after the sooner child.

  Stay uphill and downwind, Dwer thought, angling to the right of her last heading. This might just be a trick to let her circle around and head for home.

  A little later, he noticed he had reflexively unlimbered his bow, cranking the string tension for short range, and had loosed the clamp securing the stubby arrows in his thigh quiver.

  What good will arrows do, if she makes the spider angry?

  Or worse, if she catches its interest?

  Toward the valley’s rim, many stones retained a semblance to their ancient role, segments of whatever Buyur structure once stood proudly on this site, but as Dwer hurried inward, all likeness to masonry vanished. Ropy strands festooned the boulders. Most appeared quite dead — gray, desiccated, and flaking. However, soon his eye caught a greenish streak here… and over there a tendril oozing slime across a stony surface, helping nature slowly erase all vestiges of former scalpel-straight smoothness.

  Finally, raising a creepy feeling down his back, Dwer glimpsed tremors of movement. A wakening of curling strands, roused from sleep by some recent disturbance.

  Rety.

  He dodged through the increasingly dense maze, leaping over some ropy barriers, sliding under others, and twice doubling back with an oath when he reached impassable dead ends. This Buyur site was nowhere near as vast as the one north and east of Dolo Village, where each local citizen dutifully took part in crews gleaning for items missed by the deconstructor spider. Dwer used to go there often, .along with Lark or Sara. That spider was more vigorous and alive than this crotchety old thing — yet far less dangerous.

  The thicket of pale cables soon grew too crowded for an adult to pass, though the girl and noor might have gone on. In frustration, Dwer whirled and slapped a rounded knob of rock.

  “Ifni sluck!” He waved his stinging hand. “Of ail the bloody damn jeekee…”

  He slung the bow over one shoulder, freeing both hands, and started scrambling up the jagged face of a boulder three times his height. It was no climb he would have chosen, given time to work out a better route, but Dwer’s racing heart urged him to hurry.

  Mini-avalanches of eroded rock spilled over his hair and down his collar, stinging with a dusty redolence of decayed time. Flaky vines and dried tendrils offered tempting handholds, which he strove to ignore. Rock was stronger, though not always as reliable as it looked.

  While his fingers traced one fine crack, he felt the outcrop under his left foot start to crumble and was forced to trust his weight to one of the nearby crisscrossing mule-cables.

  With a crackling ratchet, the vine gave but a moment’s warning before slipping. He gasped, suspending his entire weight with just his fingertips. Dwer’s torso struck the stone wall, slamming air out of his lungs.

  His flailing legs met another strand, thinner than the first, just seconds before his grip would have failed. With no other choice, Dwer used it as a springboard to pivot and launch himself leftward, landing on a slim ledge with his right foot. His hands swarmed along the almost sheer face — and at last found solid holds. Blinking away dust, he inhaled deeply till it felt safe to resume.

  The last few meters were less steep but worn slick by countless storms since the boulder had been dragged here
, then left in place by the weakening vines. Finally, he was able to get up on his knees and peer ahead, toward the nearby shore.

  What had seemed a uniform hedge, lining the lake’s perimeter, was now a thick snarl of vines, varying from man-height to several times as tall. This near the water, the cables’ gray pallor gave way to streaks of green, yellow, even bloodred. Within the tangle he glimpsed specks of yet other colors, sparkling in shafts of sunlight.

  Beyond the thorny barrier, the scummy pond seemed to possess a geometric essence, both liquid and uncannily corrugated. Some areas seemed to pulse, as if to a cryptic rhythm — or enduring anger.

  One-of-a-Kind, he thought, not really wanting to evoke the name but unable to resist. He pulled his gaze away, scanning for Rety. Don’t hurt her, One-of-a-Kind. She’s only a child.

  He didn’t want to converse with the mulc-spider. He hoped it might be dormant, as when the lake was a harmless cranny in the winter snowscape. Or perhaps it was dead, at last. The spider was surely long past due to die. A grisly hobby seemed to be all that kept this one alive.

  He shivered as a creeping sensation climbed the nape of his neck.

  {Hunter. Fellow-seeker. Lonely one. How good of you to greet me. I sensed you pass nearby some days ago, hurrying in chase. Why did you not pause to say hello?

  {Have you found what you sought?

  {Is it this “child” you speak of?

  {Is she different from other humans?

  {Is she special in some way?}

  Scanning for traces of Rety, Dwer tried to ignore the voice. He had no idea why he sometimes held conversations with a particular corrosive alpine puddle. Though psi talent wasn’t unknown among the Six, the Scrolls warned darkly against it. Anyway, most psi involved links among close kin — one reason he never told anyone about this fey channel. Imagine the nicknames, if people learned of it!

  I probably imagine it all, anyway. Must be some weird symptom of my solitary life.

  The tickling presence returned.

  {Is that still your chief image of me? As a figment of your mind? If so, why not test it? Come to me, my unowned treasure. My unique wonder! Come to the one place in the cosmos where you will always be prized!}

  Dwer grimaced, resisting the hypnotic draw of the algae patterns, still scanning amid the rocks and tangles for Rety. At least the spider hadn’t taken her yet. Or was it cruel enough to lie?

  There! .Was that a flicker to the left? Dwer peered westward, shading his eyes against the late afternoon sun. Something rustled near the coiled vines, just a dozen or so meters closer to the lake, hidden by the bulk of several stone slabs, but causing a section of hedge to quiver. Squinting, Dwer wished he hadn’t been so hasty in dropping his pack, which contained his priceless handmade ocular.

  It might be a trap, he thought.

  {Who would trap you, Special One? You suspect me? Say you don’t mean it!}

  The wind had died down a bit. Dwer cupped his hands and called, “Rety!”

  Queer echoes scattered among the rocks, to be sucked dry by pervasive moss and dust. Dwer looked around for alternatives. He could slip down to ground level and hack his way inward, using the machete sheathed at his back. But that would take forever, and how would One-of-a-Kind react to having its fingers sliced off?

  His only real option was to go over.

  Dwer backed up till his heels hung over empty space, then took a deep breath and sprang forward… one, two, three paces, and leaped — sailing over a jungle of interlacing tendrils — to land with a jarring thud atop the next slab. This one slanted steeply, so there was no time to recover. He had to scramble fast to reach a long knife-edged ridge. Standing up, he spread his arms and gingerly walked heel-and-toe, teetering for ten paces before reaching a boulder with a flatter top.

  Dwer’s nostrils filled with sour, caustic odors from the lake. More nearby tendrils throbbed with veins now, flowing acrid tinctures. He skirted puddles of bitter fluid, collecting in cavities of etched stone. When his boot scraped one pool, it left fine trails of ash and a scent of burning leather.

  The next time he took a running leap, he landed hard on hands and knees.

  “Rety?” he called, crawling to the forward edge.

  The shoreline barrier was a dense-woven knot of green, red, and yellow strands, twisted in roiling confusion. Within this contorted mass, Dwer spied objects — each nestled in its own cavity. Each sealed, embedded, within a separate crystal cocoon.

  Golden things, silvery things. Things gleaming like burnished copper or steel. Tubes, spheroids, and complex blocky forms. Things shining unnatural hues of pigment or nanodye. Some resembled items Dwer had seen dragged from Buyur sites by reclaimer teams; only those had been decomposed, worn by passing centuries. These samples of past glory looked almost new. Like bugs trapped in amber, their cocoons preserved them against the elements, against time. And each item, Dwer knew, was one of a kind.

  Not every sample was a Buyur relic. Some had once been alive. Small animals. Insectoids. Anything that strayed too close and caught the mad spider’s collecting fancy. It seemed a wonder that a being devoted to destruction — one designed to emit razing fluids — could also secrete a substance that conserved. All the more astonishing that it would want to.

  The rustling resumed, coming from his left. Dwer slithered that way, dreading to find the girl trapped and suffering. Or else some small creature he would have to put out of misery with his bow.

  He edged forward… and gasped.

  What he saw netted in the profuse tangle, just a few meters ahead, came as a complete surprise.

  At first sight it resembled a bird — a Jijoan avian — with the typical clawed stilt for a landing leg, four broad-feathered wings, and a tentacle-tail. But Dwer swiftly saw that it was no species he knew — or any genus listed on his brother’s charts. Its wings, flapping desperately against a surrounding net of sticky threads, articulated in ways Dwer thought unnatural. And they beat with a power he found suspicious in any living thing that size.

  Feathers had been ripped or burned away in several places. Within those gaps, Dwer glimpsed flashes of glistening metal.

  A machine!

  Shock made him release the screen on his thoughts, allowing the tickling voice to return.

  {Indeed, a machine. Of a type I never before owned. And see, it still operates. It lives!}

  “I see that, all right,” Dwer muttered.

  {And you don’t yet know the half of it. Is this my day, or what?}

  Dwer hated the way the mulc-spider not only slipped into his mind but somehow used what it found there to produce perfect Anglic sentences, better than Dwer could manage, since the spider never stammered or seemed at a loss for words. He found that obnoxious, coming from a being lacking a face to talk back to.

  The false bird thrashed in its snare. Along its feathered back gleamed clear, golden droplets that it fought to shake off, flicking most aside before they could harden into a shell of adamant, preserving crystal.

  What on Jijo could it be? Dwer wondered.

  {(I was hoping, now that I have you, to learn the answer.}

  Dwer wasn’t sure he liked the way One-of-a-Kind put that. Anyway, there wasn’t time to bandy words. Dwer pushed aside pity for the trapped creature. Right now he must keep Rety from becoming yet another unique specimen in the mulc-spider’s collection.

  {So, as I suspected. The small human is special!}

  Dwer quashed the voice with the best weapon he had — anger.

  Get out of my mind!

  It worked. The presence vanished, for now. Once more, Dwer lifted his head and shouted. “Rety! Where are you!”

  An answer came at once, from surprisingly close by.

  “I’m here, fool. Now be quiet, or you’ll scare it!”

  He swiveled, trying to stare in all directions at once. “Where? I don’t see—”

  “Right below you, so shut up! I’ve been followin’ this thing for weeks! Now I gotta figure how to get it outt
a there.”

  Dwer slid further left to peer into the crisscrossing network just below — and found himself staring straight into the beady black eyes of a grinning noor! Stretched out across a dormant vine as if it were a comfy roost, Mudfoot tilted his head slightly, squinting back at Dwer. Then, without warning, the noor let loose a sudden sneeze.

  Dwer rocked back, cursing and wiping his face, while Mudfoot grinned innocently, happily.

  “Quiet, you two! I think I see how to get a little closer—”

  “No, Rety. You mustn’t!” Ignoring the noor, Dwer crept back to the edge and found her at last, close to the ground, perched with a leg on either side of a giant vine, squinting through the gloomy tangle at the mysterious avian.

  “Took you long enough to catch up,” Rety commented.

  “I … had some distractions,” he replied. “Now just wait a second, will you? There’s — some things you ought to know about this — about this here mulc-spider.” He motioned at the snarled mesh surrounding them. “It’s more, well, dangerous than you realize.”

  “Hey, I been exploring webs since I was little,” she replied. “Most are dead, but we got a few big ones in the Hills, still full o’ sap and nasty stuff. I know my way around.” She swung her leg over the branch and slipped forward.

  In a panic, Dwer blurted out — “Did any of those spiders try to catch you?”

  She stopped, turned to face him again, and smirked.