12 #2
“He can’t do it himself,” Ingold said. “The way his muscles work, and as hard as the stuff is, it would take him centuries to drill through by hand. And dynamite would hurt the wholeness.” Ingold put a thoughtful finger to his lips.
“Of course, he was using a plain steel bit. It’s very possible that with one of the new diamond bits, we could—”
“No!” Denton snapped. “ Absolutely not. Isn’t one enough?”
“He isn’t one, though,” Ingold said, “he’s part of a group and he’s been cut off from it. It’s like bringing a bee back to the hive.”
“Yes, by opening the door to a swarm of bees!”
He and Ingold stared at each other, neither backing down. I shuffled a half step back, not wanting to get in the middle of the competing glares. Angus gave me an I-see-what-you’re-doing look, cleared his throat, and said, “We don’t have to decide right now. Let’s have some dinner, shall we?”
I looked around, startled, and realized that dusk was already lurking in the corners of the cavern. “That’s a good idea!” I said, with false heartiness. “I’m famished.”
We ate in silence. Kent presented Fragment with a cup of chicken broth, which Fragment accepted, writing THANK YOU on his slate. I imagined all sorts of horrible ways he might eat the stuff, but he simply drank it out of the cup, although he never seemed to swallow.
As soon as he was finished, Denton put his dishes down and stalked out of the mine. I was nearly done, so I said, “My turn,” and went after him.
He hadn’t gone far, just out of sight of the entrance.
He glanced over at me and I waited to see if he was going to tell me to go away.
I don’t think he knew either. Hope dies hard at the best of times, and Denton’s hope had died harder than most. Eventually he sighed, took a slug from a small silver flask, and told me to pull up a rock.
We sat in silence for a while, while the insects buzzed and rattled in the trees.
Denton took out a cigarette and patted himself for a light.
I pulled out my lighter and flicked my wrist to snap it open and light the flame in one motion.
(If you do it right, it looks very suave.
I used to practice it for hours as a teenager, in hopes of impressing girls.) (Look, girls were more easily impressed in those days. Shut up.)
“I hate this,” Denton said. “I hate this so much.”
I stretched out a hand and he pressed the flask into it. It was bourbon, which I don’t much care for, but we weren’t drinking for aesthetic appreciation. I downed a slug and passed it back.
“Do you remember what it was like, coming home after the war?” Denton asked unexpectedly.
“Of course.”
He took another sip from the flask. “Home is where you’re supposed to be safe. But if something like that could happen, then how could any of us be safe anywhere?”
I grunted. It hadn’t been quite like that for me, but I understood it. Meanwhile, the whippoorwill had started up and was caroling monotonously somewhere out in the darkness.
“But I got over that, you know? It took some time, but I stopped expecting someone to burst through the door and demand that I operate right now . I could come home and close the door and just ... be there.”
I grunted again. I don’t have many social skills, but I can tell when someone is spilling their guts and I should keep my mouth shut and let it happen.
“And then, after Usher’s lake ...” He gestured vaguely eastward with the flask, presumably toward the site of our shared horror. “I kept thinking that if creatures like that existed, no one could ever be safe anywhere again. Anyone could turn out to be one of them.”
“Yeah.”
“It was like I couldn’t go home. I kept waiting for the door to open and something horrible to come through.
” His laugh was soft and humorless. “It wasn’t until Ingold convinced me that something like the tarn wouldn’t happen twice—that we’d killed it and it was really over —that I was able to feel safe again.
” He pressed the metal of the flask against his forehead, perhaps to cool it.
“And now it’s happening again. Except that my dearest friend is on the side of the monster this time. I feel like I’m going mad.”
“You’re not,” I said. “This is all ...” I tried to find a word and failed miserably. Denton nodded, though. Maybe we’d come to a place where there were no words in English or Gallacian to describe what was happening to us.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” He stared at nothing for a little while.
“Am I ever going to be able to go home again?”
I knew he wasn’t talking about Boston. I didn’t have an answer. I realized that I hadn’t heard the whippoorwill for some time.
I was trying to think of something that I could say that would give Denton a small slice of strength, enough to get through the next little bit of hell, when we heard the horses screaming.
***
The sound of a horse in panic will bring a former cavalry officer to their feet if they’re dead asleep, dead drunk, or just plain dead. Being none of those things, I was tearing across the hillside to where we’d picketed the horses before the echoes of the first scream had died away.
I was the first one on the scene, but since I’d neglected to bring a light, all I saw was a dim, confused jumble of plunging horses.
Angus was second, and he’d had the wit to grab a lantern.
The light bounced as he ran, briefly illuminating glimpses of long legs and eyes rolling frantic white—and a great dark shape clinging to the back of the nearest, something huge, with long clawed arms sunk into the screaming horse’s sides.
Angus and I fired at the same moment. One of us hit.
(Probably Angus. My shot went high, I’m sure, since the last thing I wanted to do was hit the horse.) The shape jerked, clung for a moment longer, then retreated off the far side.
I say retreated because it wasn’t a fall.
I could almost see it decide that this wasn’t worth it and choose to leave.
I gave chase for a dozen steps, then stopped, confounded by the darkness and the shadows of the trees.
“It got away,” I said unnecessarily, returning. “But it’s injured. We should see blood in the morning, maybe we can track it.”
Angus grunted. He was already trying to soothe the creature’s victim, who was not inclined to be soothed. Kent joined us a moment later, and between the three of us, we managed to quiet the horses, although they were still skittish and jumped at every movement. (I felt much the same way.)
“Was it a bear?” Denton wanted to know.
“It didn’t look like the bears we have in Gallacia, but yours are small and black, aren’t they? So maybe?” I shrugged helplessly. I hadn’t seen any details at all, not even the gleam of eyes. “It was a damned strange thing, anyway.”
The mare—my mare, as it turned out—was not badly hurt.
She had two long slashes raked across her ribs on either side, but it looked as if the creature had only just secured a grip before we ran it off.
Denton and Angus did what they could, and Kent made plans to take her back to the livery stable in the morning so that she could get better care than we could offer out here.
In all the excitement, we’d almost forgotten Fragment. Or at least, I had. It wasn’t until I was preparing for bed that I heard Ingold and Denton arguing in low voices.
“Fragment was with me the whole time.”
“ That bit of him was. You said yourself there might be more.”
“I asked him. He said he could barely feed as much of himself as there was. He’s almost completely hollow inside, did you know that?”
“And you believed what he said?”
“Denton, he’d have no reason to—”
“That we know of.”
I pulled the blanket over my head to drown them out.
In the morning, even though we scoured the hillside, there was no trace of blood to be found.