CHAPTER 13
RIGHT ABOUT THE TIME the Learned Edmund was losing his potato, Caliban and Brenner finally exhausted their mutual recriminations and looked around for something else to do.
They were hog-tied on a dirt floor, inside an earthen lodge that looked like it was built by a magpie with ambition.
The wattle-and-daub walls were studded with junk: bits of straw, feathers, small stones that might have been a mosaic if there had been more of them, snake skins, bright glass and colored string.
Nets with glass fishing weights hung from the ceiling, illuminated by the flicker of a fire near the entrance.
There were also bones. Some were individual bones and some were whole articulated skeletons, from a number of small, unfortunate animals.
Brenner and Caliban were in the middle of a sunken circular area. Wooden posts rose to waist height around them, holding back the rest of the floor. Their captors had taken their weapons and, for some odd reason, their shoes.
“You know,” said Brenner, for approximately the fiftieth time, “none of this would have happened if you hadn’t been—”
“Shut up, Brenner,” said Caliban, who was learning why that was Slate’s favorite phrase.
“I’m just saying.”
“You were trying to kill me!”
“…I was only gonna cut you a little.”
After they’d been netted, their captors had shoved gags of splintered bark in the men’s mouths, tied their hands, picked them up, and begun to run through the forest. They were inhumanly fast, which made sense because they hadn’t been human.
Flattened against the bottom of his net, all Caliban had been able to see was a sickening lurch of landscape going by. If he craned his neck, he saw…legs.
Green legs, with fine swirls of brown hair on the calves, ending in large, cleft hooves.
That did not fill him with confidence.
When they had finally been dumped out onto the ground, he looked up into a circle of a dozen faces, none of which were human and all of which were green.
They looked like deer, mostly. They had long-muzzled faces and broad, flaring nostrils. The spacing of their eyes was wide and unsettling, but the eyes held a deep and uncanny intelligence. Mobile ears flicked back and forth at every sound.
The males were broad-chested and had antlers. Two of them carried Caliban between them as if he weighed nothing. The females were slenderer, with shallow breasts and patterns of dark green scars circling their eyes. Both sexes wore necklaces, armbands, and loincloths. All carried spears.
They did not look friendly.
A spear came in and prodded Brenner, who had managed to work his gag out. He cursed the spear-holder in no uncertain terms.
The deer-creatures spoke to each other in high-pitched voices, like bird calls. Even the deep-chested stag-men had shrill, lilting voices. It didn’t make them sound any friendlier.
Another spear poke, this time directed at Caliban.
He gritted his teeth.
The spear poked again, more insistently.
Pride had always been his besetting sin. Damn if he was going to scream in front of Brenner, after that little scene at the river.
The spear got in a solid jab. It didn’t penetrate the chainmail, but there was going to be a bruise under there in the morning.
Assuming we live so long.
One of the stag men reached down, grabbed his hair, and dragged his neck back. One blunt-fingered hand made an unmistakable gesture across the knight’s throat. The spear lifted.
Caliban didn’t break, but his demon did.
“Nghaa! Ha, ha, ngha’aa, halikaliha!”
The deer jerked back as one, with squealing gasps.
“That was either brilliant or incredibly stupid,” said Brenner.
“I don’t think it was brilliant,” Caliban muttered.
The deer gabbled to each other, with many hand gestures. One approached and checked the ropes.
Then the deer left them face down in the center of the floor. Caliban heard the woosh of hides being moved aside, the thump of hooves…then nothing.
After a while they had an argument. Actually, they had the same argument, in about three variations, about who was to blame for their current predicament. It was somewhat cathartic, but at the end of it, both men were still tied up and Caliban had sand in his mouth.
About an hour after that, the music started.
“What’s that?”
“Music.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Outside.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Finally, we agree on something.”
It wasn’t painful to listen to, it wasn’t bad, it was just…uncomfortable. It got in your head and started pushing things around. Every time the music skipped a beat, Caliban felt his stomach lurch.
His demon didn’t like it at all. Whenever the pipes rose to a crescendo, the muttering voice became a shriek, as if it was trying to drown out the noise.
What sort of noise can bother a corpse?
Brenner fell silent. Caliban worked his legs against the ropes, not because he had any hope of getting out—he didn’t—but because his feet were falling asleep. They’d tied him well, and he didn’t have Slate’s reckless disregard for joints.
“Can you get out of the ropes?” he asked the assassin.
Brenner pushed against the ropes and got a bit farther than Caliban had, but not enough to make a difference. “No. I’ve been trying.”
“Hmm.”
“I really, really want a cigarette.”
“I really, really don’t care.”
They lapsed into silence again. Caliban’s cheek was going numb from being plastered against the dirt, and he wiggled around until he could turn his head. Unfortunately, this meant he was looking at Brenner.
Dreaming God, if you still have any scrap of kindness for your servant, please don’t let him be my last sight on this earth.
“What do you think they are?” asked Brenner.
“What?”
“The things that captured us.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re rune.”
“Rune?”
“Forest people. What you get when dryads mate with stag men for a few hundred generations, or something like that. I’m not really sure.
” He’d seen them in illuminated manuscripts, but never in real life.
Up until a few hours ago, he hadn’t thought they existed anywhere but a monk’s feverish imagination.
“Look about right for that.”
“Yeah.”
It was strange, but he hadn’t remembered reading that rune were anything but shy and harmless creatures. Apparently the monks had left the bit about kidnapping out.
“They seem very angry about something.”
“That they do.”
“Looks like this is their village.”
“Does it?” Caliban wondered if he could gnaw through Brenner’s ropes, or vice versa. It seemed unlikely.
“There was a whole circle of these little dirt huts. They must dig a hole and then build the walls up around it.”
“Oh. You’ve got better eyes than I do. Or they were holding you right-side up.”
“Mm.”
“Don’t suppose you saw a way out?”
“No.”
Having thus exhausted the conversational possibilities, they lay there. Caliban wiggled his fingers. They burned as the blood flowed back into them.
He wondered what Slate would say if she were here, and was extremely glad she wasn’t.
Assuming she doesn’t take it in her head to come after us…
no. She wants to live now, and chasing after mad deer people isn’t a good start on that.
And after that charming little display on your part, I doubt she’d walk across the street to save you, let alone stage a daring rescue on a village full of demented deer people.
Thank the Dreaming God. We’re going to die, but at least she and Edmund will get away.
Hopefully.
It was a tiny, mean emotion, entirely unworthy of a paladin, but he was glad that Brenner was here with him.
“Caliban?” said Brenner, in a rather different voice than anything Caliban had heard him use before.
“Yes?”
“I think I’m losing my mind.”
“What, only now?”
“Look up around us and tell me if you see what I see.”
Caliban opened his eyes.
Rats—and pieces of rats—were lining the edge of the sunken circle.
He craned his neck as far as he could, given his position, and they went all the way around, rank on rank.
They were shuffling, one step at a time, in time to the throbbing drums. When they crossed in front of the fire, tiny headless shadows danced across Caliban’s face.
The drum skipped a beat. The whole line of rats stumbled pitifully, and then the beat picked up again, and they fell back into the dance.
“Dancing rats. Some of them with no heads,” said Caliban.
“Oh, thank god. You see it too.”
“It’s very disturbing.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
“I wonder if they’re going to eat us.”
“Always an optimist, our paladin.”
“Shut up, Brenner.”
The dance was distressingly hypnotic. Caliban watched it until his eyes burned and he had to look away.
What could call them here? There can’t be this many rats in the village—there have to be hundreds of them—and you can’t tell me that a rat with no head walked here under its own power!
Step…step…step…lurch…step…
It might have been the demon riding his senses, or all the years in the service of another sort of power entirely, but Caliban could feel some kind of force to their dance, something rising off the tiny, wretched bodies.
If it was magic, it was no kind he understood, and yet there was definitely something there.
I’m not imagining things. The demon feels it too.
Every time the drum paused, it clenched like a fist.
Nghaaaaaakalikalaakkalaakngggaaaaah!
Shut up, demon. I don’t think we want to be noticed right now.
Ngha ngha…
Step…lurch…step…step…
The power was driving the dance, but the dance was feeding the power. Caliban didn’t know how much energy it took to make a dead rat dance—it didn’t come up much at the temple—but all those bodies dancing together were doing something.
Like water through a mill wheel. Somehow they’re getting more out than they’re putting in.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Caliban, however, took the view that when something impossible was going on, it was best to deal with it as you found it, and not stand around claiming it wasn’t happening.
Brenner jackknifed against his ropes. “Can’t you do something?”
“Like what?”