Chapter Ten #2
Under the whisper of the trees and the stream, the sulky argumentative snap and hiss of the low burning fire, another sound came, the one he’d been waiting for—water shifting silkily, as something surfaced and moved in toward the shore.
He held the dream state, prevented conscious response with a further cascade of remembered images from the lovemaking of the previous night. At one point in the narrow bed, she’d mounted and rode him reversed, head thrown back, lost in herself, long hair tangled down her back…
Furtive drip-drip of water off to his right, as something came stealthily ashore…
One lower corner of his top blanket, lifted as if by a stray breeze…
Duncan, decently versed in second sight when it got this close, felt the grab at his ankle an instant before it happened. He shifted, fast.
Sudden, damp grip on his right leg. He had already tilted on his side.
His eyes snapped open, saw the grinning, dripping thing that crouched over him, the piranha fangs.
He swung one booted foot in a short arc.
Felt the kick connect with skull bone. His attacker yelped and shook itself, tried to drag him back toward the water’s edge.
Duncan kicked again, this time a hard stomp direct into the fangs and snout.
The thing shrilled, but hung on, still not willing to forgo its prey.
Duncan let it drag him, went with the motion, squirmed in close.
Narrowed yellow-glowing eyes, a cadaverous face almost human, lank black hair straggling back off the head, fanged mouth agape, aye, right, here we fucking go…
He punched hard, right cross, into the toothy lantern jaw. The skull ring, the ankh ring and the Iron Cross ring he’d hacked off a Prussian machine gunner’s corpse at Passchendaele. Sally had blessed each one for him, called them all auspicious.
More important, they were all forged hard in iron.
Greenish-white flash, a splatter like the sound of an electrical circuit shorting out.
This time, the apparition shrieked in earnest and let go his leg.
Smoke ribboned off its face, a low stench of burning flesh filled the air.
Duncan was up now, snagged one flailing arm at the elbow—more smoke coiling out as the rings on his left hand burned into the arm.
Nothing from Garner, and no time to shout or wonder why.
He punched again, repeatedly, into the thing’s face.
He was snarling himself now, a noise not much more human than those the creature made.
Splattering, splintering, flickering green-white flash—three blows, and then suddenly Garner was there, stomping on the thing’s broad, filigree-finned back, crushing it into the dirt of the beach.
It thrashed and nearly got free. Garner dropped a hard knee on its spine, showed it the business end of his over-and-under.
“Want to settle down, pond scum?” he roared. “Or should I spill thy bloody brains?”
The tone, at least, got through. The creature went abruptly still.
It slumped there in the gloom like something dumped from a trawl net—long, pallid tapering legs half again the length of a human’s, finned and fronded near the ankle of powerful clawed feet, swell at hip and thigh, the broad, muscular trunk and shoulders, twinned rows of teats, arms like a Greek wrestler, and powerful hands tipped with talons the hue of pond weed.
Call it nixie, call it grindylow, call it vatnalfr—or simply, as some of the gothic writers had it, the Mudbank Horror.
Names are for the waking world. This nightmare would not care as it dragged you down.
Duncan reeled to his feet, panting. “You fucking fell asleep?”
Garner shot him an apologetic look.
“Great!” Duncan, still panting, walking a small circle in the beach dirt, working at bringing his breathing under control. “Guess you old folk need your fucking rest.”
He flexed his right fist open and closed a couple of times, came to a halt. He stood over the quiescent grindylow, grinning fiercely with the comedown after the fight. The old trench hand-to-hand tremors. He composed himself with an effort. Switched to Skogurtal.
“Well, well,” he managed, still between breaths. “Jenny fucking Greenteeth. You really were hungry, weren’t you. Brood season, is it?”
The creature’s eyes bulged a bit as it heard the language. It squirmed under Garner’s dropped knee, twisted its head, tried to get a better look at Duncan.
“Not what you were expecting?” Duncan crouched closer, still unable to lose his comedown grin. “Tougher to get than the last chunk of man-flesh that wandered in here, was I?”
“You aren’t—you don’t…” The mere dweller husked in Skogurtal so badly accented Duncan struggled to follow the syllables. “You dream different. Awake, like them! You scent of men, but—”
“Aye. Sorry to disappoint.”
“I—you—” The grindylow averted its gaze pettishly. “Look, I have no quarrel with the Bright Folk, nor their thralls. I did not realize, I did not know you. Tell Svalenkari and Mebhuranon it was an honest mistake.”
The names detonated behind Duncan’s eyes. He covered for it, masked himself in tones of stony contempt. Had to hope that Jenny Greenteeth here would not spot the sudden new jump in pulse, the renewed uptick and thump of his just-now-calming heart.
“Honest or not,” he said impassively, “this must be paid out in blood. Will I order these waters purged? Must I bring the tangle iron and sink it here?”
“But I meant no disrespect!” The fang-distorted sibilant voice grew urgent, almost hoarse. “Please. They are but weeks old. Helpless pups.”
“Helpless or not, they must learn respect. The edicts are clear.”
Panic in the yellowish, unhuman eyes now. Duncan glanced at Garner, switched back to English. “What do you reckon?”
“Reckon to what?” Garner sour and snappish in response. “Didn’t get the half of whatever tha’re nattering about! Tha know I conner follow their gibberish the way tha do.”
Maybe it was lasting embarrassment at his sleeping lapse; maybe his heart was still pounding, too.
Or maybe it was just a flat-out case of green eye.
Like most woodsmen, Garner would have a limited smattering of Skogurtal, words and phrases gleaned and handed down locally over generations, along with the rest of the myth base and a mishmash of Forest lore.
He wouldn’t be the first to envy Duncan’s gift with the Huldu tongue.
Right now, sour and snappish would do, was in fact ideal for Duncan’s purposes. He saw the way the grindylow already quailed at the tone.
“I’m asking if we let Jenny here off with a caution. She thinks we’re changeling thralls to the Huldu, scared we’re going to dump iron junk in the mere and poison her young. It gives us leverage. I could offer to let her slide if she answers a couple of questions for us.”
“Do what tha bloody like, lad. I’m not the one she tried to eat.”
Still jittery, Duncan chuckled. He couldn’t help it. “There is that.”
The grindylow looked from one to the other of them.
They were not especially intelligent creatures, but they were cunning, and would know cunning or trickery in return.
Duncan marshaled his words carefully, playing the role the creature had imagined him into, leaning into the ornateness that Skogurtal tended toward anyway.
“In truth,” he said, “I would not wish to bother my lord Svalenkari nor the Fae queen with something so trivial as this. And tangle iron is heavy to haul. But my bondsman here is not so forgiving, and he is my elder. He’ll need persuading. What can you offer us, vatnalfr?”
The grindylow gaped at him, hope and horror oscillating in its gaze. “Offer? To mortal men? I have no Faerie gold. I do not—”
“Tales,” Duncan interjected helpfully. “My bondsman here has a great love of Forest gossip. If you could tell us something? Some morsel of knowledge we do not have, perhaps? Some local news or rumor of it? Anything concerning other thralls such as ourselves?”
It was the perfect note to strike. Cunning crept back into the yellow eyes. The creature sneered. “Afraid your mistress will find sweeter favor, are you? Is it the child you fear?”
“The child?” Duncan, elaborately casual, hoping to Christ and High Heaven that, once again, the grindylow was too rattled to notice the uptick in his pulse. “What child is this?”
“You will leave? You will not bring the tangle iron?”
Duncan nodded at Garner, who lightly touched the business end of the sawed-off Woodward to the nape of the grindylow’s neck.
Sizzling and fishy waft of scorched flesh.
The creature shrilled and thrashed under Garner’s knee.
Another nod, and Garner lifted the gun away.
Duncan crouched closer to the vatnalfr’s pain-wracked face.
“We are not negotiating here, nixie. You are trying to earn back your life. Now tell me what you know.”
“Yes, yes!” Almost a scream. “The child. The chosen child. Mebhuranon brought her out from the lands of men a hostage.”
“Hostage?” Duncan frowned. “Hostage for what?”
“I know not.” The grindylow saw the way Duncan glanced toward Garner and screamed. “No, it is the truth! I do not know! Only that she is no plaything, no simple thrall. In the Forest, they say that among the mortals, she is of noble blood. That she has high value beyond simple self.”
“Noble blood?” Duncan grabbed the grindylow’s hair—oily wet, coarser than human—redoubled his grip and yanked the face upward close to his own. “Are you lying to me? Are you spinning me some fucking yarn to save your miserable hide?”
“It is no lie. The whole Forest knows it.”
“What’s this child’s name?”
The grindylow gaped at him. “Name? I do not name mortals. How should I know?”
This last had the gritty rub of truth. The Fae grasp on detail in human affairs was muddy at the best of times, even among those who didn’t actually eat them. A creature at this level would be as incurious as the next pike in a pond.
“Then Mebhuranon?” Keep the pressure on. He held his fist in the grindylow’s face. Iron rings a searing inch away. “You tell me why a southern range Bright Folk queen would come to poach mortal children all the way up here? Has she returned south with the girl?”
“I know not—no! No! The child abides!” He lowered his fist. The grindylow sobbed.
“Mebhuranon, too. As came Svalenkari in all his glory, so came she. Some grand purpose, they say. But I know not why they stay.” Down to mumbles and grizzling now.
“I know not. It is all I know. I swear. I swear on my brood. It is all I know…”
He let go the creature’s dripping hair, shook his hand to snap the oily residue off.
Stood back up, nodded at Garner. The other man got out of his crouch, a lot more creakily.
He still held the over-and-under trained on the grindylow’s skull.
The yellowish eyes flitted between the two of them, trapped, unsure.
“Hear this,” Duncan told it slowly. “If I ever meet you on dry land again, I will send you back to the Gray. And if you speak of this, to the Bright Folk or anyone else, I will sink tangle iron into these waters sufficient to poison your brood for a hundred years to come. Now, while my favor lasts, get yourself gone.”
He kicked the creature hard in the ribs by way of emphasis.
It snarled and recoiled, thrashed coiling limbs in the dirt of the beach, bared fangs at them both, and then, like some conjuror’s sleight of hand, was abruptly gone back into the mere.
The darkened waters barely rippled to mark its passing, no trace left of what now swam in its depths.
Yes, Duncan, and a less-seasoned woodsman would have been down there, too, coiled around and bitten apart by now, and fed piecemeal to the pups.
Perhaps, he brooded, he should have killed the fucking thing after all.
“Get what tha wanted?” Garner asked.
Duncan stared somberly at the fading ripples. “I got enough for now.”