Firesoul Page 12

  "Don't, Linaria," Morvius said, and his slightly darker face had taken a greenish cast. "You puke and I'll puke, and damn it, I need to get my balance back so I can kill that thing."

  "Don't bother," Sera said, and the paladin moved forward, pulling a dagger from her belt, long and thin and sharp.

  "Wait," Jiri shouted, Sera's movement snapping her out of the horror of the scene, but too late.

  Sera stepped forward, pulled back her arm, and the biloko finally saw her. Those hazy yellow eyes suddenly went sharp, shining with rage and, despite the thing's grotesque feasting, with hunger. Somehow, through the absolute fullness of its mouth and throat, it began to whistle, a bizarre, haunting tune that drove itself deep into Jiri's brain. She felt a drifting weakness sweep through her, a feeling of strangely listless desire, as if the only thing that mattered now was to move toward that music and lie down, rest...

  Jiri dug her fingernails into her palms and clenched her jaw, throwing the compulsion away.

  Sera, meanwhile, slowed not at all. The strange melody wrapped around the armored woman, but she smashed through it, her eyes gleaming like the steel of the blade in her hand. Then she punched her dagger forward, slamming it hilt-deep into the wide yellow eye of the biloko.

  The creature shuddered, a massive convulsion running down its body from the gaping jaw, through its swollen neck and belly, making its scrawny limbs flail. A gout of clear fluid splashed out around the dagger, followed by a jet of blood. The gore splashed across Sera's armor, dimming the polished metal, soaking the white tabard, marking her face, but the paladin didn't step back. She leaned forward instead, pressing her blade deeper until Jiri heard the ugly grate of its tip breaking through the back of the biloko's skull. The creature gave one last, massive jerk, its limbs stretching out, clawed fingers and toes digging furrows into the tangled roots that made up the floor of the empty tree, then relaxed.

  Sera stood still for a moment, staring down at the dead thing, then raised one booted foot. Bracing it against one of the biloko's teeth, carefully avoiding the legs of its last victim, she jerked her dagger out. She stepped back, away from the pooling blood, and wiped the weapon her tabard. "Wait?"

  Jiri stared at the woman. The dark blood splashed across her armor was running off—unable, it seemed, to cling to the metal. It dripped and fell from her tabard, too, a steady shower of gore that left the paladin standing shining, clean, except for the spots of blood that marked her face.

  I forget. Jiri watched the woman wipe those spots away with her tabard. Arguing with her, being annoyed by her, deciding how I can use her. I can't let myself forget how dangerous she is.

  "We might have questioned it."

  "We can question one of the others," Sera said. She sheathed her dagger and touched her palm to the golden sword embroidered on her tabard. "Honor this woman with a prayer that she will recognize, but do it quickly. I don't want that trail to go cold."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  An hour later, the thin trail broke out of the jungle into the sun.

  In front of them stretched a wall of grass, its base rooted in water. A curtain of green, glowing with the sunlight that spilled down from overhead, it stretched who knew how far before them, the sloppy edge of a lake or a great, slow-moving river.

  "No," Morvius said, slapping at the cloud of bugs that had whirled up from the water and now whined around them. "This is not a good idea."

  Sera didn't look at him. "Can you still track them?"

  Jiri crouched at the muddy edge, looking at the prints that sank into the thick muck, the broken stems. "Maybe. But I shouldn't." She straightened up. "Morvius is right. It's all mud and water in there, and we'll have no idea how deep. One of us, probably one of you in armor, will step in a hole and drown. Unless we get pulled under by a crocodile or bled out by giant leeches first."

  "Yep, not a good idea." Morvius yawned again. "Well, this isn't the worst wild-goose chase I've ever been on, but it's up there. Can we go back now?"

  Jiri watched Sera tap her fingers on her sword hilt, considering what she wanted. These biloko...Jiri had spent this morning following their tracks, and the knowledge that each clawed mark had been driven into the dirt partially by the weight of some swallowed victim made her gut twist. They worried her, too. Banding together like this wasn't like them. Usually, they feared each other's hunger too much to work together. Whatever was driving them to do this made them dangerous, unpredictable, like a leopard gone rabid. They had taken that village so easily, and that bothered her too, and the burning, and...

  And, and, and. Jiri shoved her braids back away from her face. She had no idea if this attack was related to the thing that had destroyed Thirty Trees. This all might be a wild whatever-it-was chase, and she might be wasting her time while that thing found another caravan, another village.

  A city.

  "I think we should." Jiri straightened up. "They could have gone anywhere in there."

  Sera glowered at the grass before her, clearly unhappy about giving up the hunt, and Jiri thought carefully about how she would argue with her if she wanted to keep going, but that argument never had time to happen.

  The spears were crude, sticks sharpened and fire-hardened, and small, but they hammered down from the trees behind them in a sudden, deadly rain. Jiri heard the clinking ring of them as they bounced off Sera's armor; the more muted clatter as they struck and fell from the overlapping metal scales of Morvius's armor; the thin, ripping sound as one tore through one of Linaria's sleeves.

  She didn't hear the one that hit her leg.

  That one she felt, not as pain at first but as a hard shove to her thigh, making her stumble and fall. The grass whipped around her, long leaves slashing across her skin, then she hit the shallow water. She saw the spear then, a branch barely stripped of its bark, the point of it buried deep in the muscle of her leg a handspan above her knee. With a grunt she slapped it, and it fell easily away, but blood flowed fast from the wound and the pain hit her, sudden and sickening.

  "You hit?" Linaria had flung herself behind the vine-covered corpse of a tree that had fallen out of the forest into the grass, pressing into the mud to keep the rotting trunk between her and their ambushers.

  "Leg," Jiri said, clamping her hand over the wound. "It's not—" Not bad, she wanted to say, and she had seen so much worse in the years she had spent helping Oza treat the villagers of Thirty Trees, but she had never been stabbed before, and she had no experience with the pain, the shock of it.

  "Watch out!" Morvius shouted. The man had dropped his pack and now crouched beside Linaria, but he was staring back at the jungle and the next wave of spears arcing down at them.

  Jiri forgot her pain and rolled, twisting in the grass to hide from the falling spears. The bone fetishes of Oza's necklace dug into her chest as she flattened herself into the mud and water, and Jiri wished desperately that she had her teacher's power to bend her shape, to become a bird and fly, a fish and swim, to be anything but stuck bleeding and hurting in this muck while the spears splashed down around her.

  "It's those bilo-things." Sera still stood in the open, but she had her shield out. "They're in the trees."

  "Really?" Morvius rolled his eyes at her. "I hadn't noticed. Why don't you invite them down?"

  "Why don't I?" Sera said and started forward, spears crashing like hail off the steel of her shield.

  In the grass and water, Jiri took her eyes off the paladin. She can distract them. Murmuring to the spirits, she laid her hands over the wound in her leg, pushing away the flies and mosquitoes that had swarmed in, attracted by the scent of blood. She felt the warm touch of the spirits' magic flowing through her as they answered her, and the pain in her leg faded to nothing. When she moved her hands she found her skin whole, marked only by a little blood and a few wriggling leeches. Ignoring them, free of the pain's distraction, she searched the trees for their attackers.

  They clung to the low branches like red monkeys, thirty of them at least, their
yellow eyes flashing, their bellies swollen from their hideous feast. They had run out of spears, except for the ones they kept in hand, so now they tried another weapon. Their mouths, too wide and crowded with teeth, opened. Thin lips pursed, and they began to whistle.

  The sound cut through the low roar of the insects that had been stirred into motion by the fight and the distant rumble of thunder. The high piping, so weird and beautiful, drilled into Jiri's head and tore at her reason. She half rose out of the cover of the long grass, ready to start stumbling forward, to go to the trees and lie down and shut her eyes and wait, wait patiently for...

  Clear and sickening, the image came to her of that woman's body being slowly drawn into the maw of the biloko Sera had killed. Nauseous and furious, Jiri snapped out of the spell that the biloko were whistling around her, not even noticing that the cloud of insects around her had pulled back, driven away by the waves of heat that crackled from her.

  Under the trees, Sera stood, glaring up at the creatures, unaffected by their song. Linaria had stood, but she hadn't moved forward, and the sorcerer's hands were clapped over her ears as she fought the magic woven into the biloko's whistled music.

  Morvius was up and moving, his eyes glassy, spear dangling uselessly from his hand.

  "Gods and crocodiles," Jiri swore. Bending, she scooped two handfuls of mud from the muck below her and charged out of the grass. She sprinted through tangles of vines and low brush, the plants bending out of her way. When she reached Morvius she dodged around him and stopped, blocking his path. Seeing her but paying no attention to her, he tried to step around, but she stepped with him and slapped him with both hands, driving a handful of mud into each of his ears.

  "Ow!" Morvius stumbled back, his spear snapping up. "What the—" he blinked at Jiri, then at the trees stretching over them, their branches heavy with biloko. "Shit. Where's that throwing spear I gave you?"

  Jiri blinked. "I must have left it by the water."

  "What?" Morvius yelled, deaf, and Jiri just shook her head.

  Over them, she could see a biloko give up on its whistling and pull back its spear. Not again, Jiri thought angrily, and flames flashed from her hand. The fire hit the biloko, wrapping around it and ruining its throw. With a high-pitched shriek it fell from the branch, the tangles of vines and moss that grew from its skin instead of hair smoking, and crunched into the ground near them. It made a croaking noise, beating at the little flames that still crept across it, until Morvius slammed Scritch into its chest.

  That crunching blow silenced the biloko—silenced them all. The mad, piping notes of their voices stopped and the air went empty, the sound of the approaching storm, the roar of insects, the squawk and chatter of birds all unable to fill the air the way that mad whistling had. In that strange hush-not-hush, pinned beneath the glaring yellow gaze of all the hanging biloko, Jiri almost missed the question.

  "You feel it too, don't you? His fire flows in us both. Like wine, like acid, like magic." On the branches above, one of the biloko shifted. Leaves wrapped its body, covering some of its crimson skin, but on its face, its hands, everywhere the red still showed, there were marks. Burns, long broken blisters that wept dark fluid. Brands that twisted into the rough approximation of symbols, marks that teased Jiri with their almost-familiarity. "He marked you. Like me." The branded biloko's lips twisted, making the words, and its voice was shrill and weird, inhuman. But the words were Jiri's language, if strangely accented. "Marked you inside. That's where he starts, at the center, then he burns out. Out, out, and you go to ash there first, ash in your center." The thing's skin began to glow, sparks dancing across the marks burned into the too-big mask of its face. "Burns your soul, wherever it is, sealed in wood or iron or flesh. He burns you!"

  The biloko's words rose and became a shriek, a clashing chain of noise that Jiri recognized as a spell. The branded biloko hurled something small at them, something that gleamed like a bright ember in the dark shadows of the trees. Jiri stared at it, time seeming to slow around her so that she could see that ember flying toward her; see Morvius trying to throw himself to the side, his curse drawn out long; see Sera trying to move, trying to get in front of her with her shield up, but not moving fast enough. Then, behind her, she heard the whisper of another spell complete.

  Linaria's spell whipped by Jiri's ear, a piece of light the color of stars, and suddenly Jiri's perception slammed back to normal and she could barely make out the rest. Red ember and white smashed into each other and burst in front of her. Two spheres blew outward, one red and gold, one white and blue. The colors rolled over each other, clashing and warring, mixing and devouring one another. Jiri felt heat, then cold, felt them both and then felt nothing but wet as fire and ice smashed together and became an explosion of water, dropping out of the air in a sudden deluge.

  Jiri slapped the water from her eyes and looked up. The biloko snarled down at her, the crude symbols branded in its skin pulsing with heat, steam rolling off them. "No," it growled. "Your magic won't take me. I won't let you seal me in that carved prison again, chained by spells, buried with that thing. Burning. Burning. I won't!" It raised its claw and hissed out the same incantation, and Jiri moved this time, sliding behind Sera's metal-wrapped back, but her eyes were on the biloko, caught by the thing she could see clutched in its other hand, the hand not hurling fire and flame at her. Linaria spoke again, and blue-white red-gold smashed through the air, deadly heat and killing cold dancing across Jiri's skin and then gone, leaving only warm water to splash down over her once more as the elements canceled each other out.

  The biloko shrieked, a shrill spike of angry noise that echoed off the trees. Jiri could see the creature, hazy through the steam, waving its thin arms, could almost see the thing it held. Then the other biloko were moving, leaping from their branches, swinging down toward the adventurers like a troop of giant-mouthed monkeys, teeth flashing and spears clutched tight.

  Jiri reached for the spirits, pulling their magic to her without thinking, calling to the same green souls that had let her slip so easily through stem and branch and vine. Asking that the boon they granted her be twisted into a curse for her enemies.

  The spirits heard, and answered.

  Vines twisted like serpents, lashing around the clawed red hands that held them, grabbing wrists and legs, spears and necks. Branches shifted, caught, and great broad leaves wrapped around falling biloko like green mockeries of the always-hungry creatures' hideous mouths. Only a handful of biloko made it through the writhing screen of clutching vegetation to land on the jungle floor.

  The second their claws hit, Morvius was moving. The fighter had been crouched, half behind a tree, but now he hurled himself out, racing into the fray. He punched his spear into the chest of one of the creatures, picking it up and shoving it back. Its whistling shriek ended in a crunch as it slammed into the trunk of a tree. Like water pouring through rocks, Morvius kept moving. He spun away from the biloko he had just pinned to the tree, using the momentum of his whole body to pull Scritch out and sweeping it in a great killing arc, the blood-colored blade tearing across the face of another biloko, biting through flesh, breaking bone, tearing out an eye.

  Only a little slower, Sera charged forward the moment she could reach her attackers. Her shining shield smashed one of the biloko's spears and crashed into the creature's face, breaking its teeth and sending it sprawling. The paladin kept moving, boots stomping across her fallen foe as she engaged another, her sword rising. Her shout of "Iomedae!" blended with the tearing-gristle crunch of her sword through the next biloko's shoulder and into its chest.

  Over their battle, bright darts tore through the air, streaking from Linaria's hands. They curved through the air like white wasps, each one finding one of the tangled biloko. Where they struck and stung, the creatures screamed, or else stopped their frantic, thrashing attempts at escape and hung limp.

  Everything was chaos and violence, pulling Jiri's attention in a thousand directions, but she forced
herself to focus, to stare up through the writhing, gnashing forms of the biloko above her and find the branded one, the one that had shrieked at her. There—no, there. She could see it, the long grass that grew behind its pointed ears brown and charred, the symbols glowing dull in its flesh. The biloko was on the run, throwing itself from branch to branch, fleeing. Shouting at Linaria, trying to get her to throw her magic at it, Jiri reached out to the spirits and—

  Wham!

  Jiri hit the ground, ribs bouncing painfully off the ridge of a raised root. She flipped herself over and saw the biloko that had fallen onto her. A chunk of vine still writhed around its leg, its end cut by the heavy blade of the machete that the hideously grinning creature held. Stolen from the village. The thought was strangely calm as the biloko raised the weapon, preparing to throw itself at her. Jiri's fear slapped out, desperate to keep the thing away, and fire leapt from her hand. The flames flew past the biloko, though, singeing the vines that covered its head but not slowing it, not stopping it, as the machete fell.

  Jiri's fire had missed, but the heat of those flames had made the biloko flinch. The cutting blade slammed down beside Jiri's ankle, digging into the dirt. She could see the thin muscles of the biloko bunch beneath its crimson skin as it jerked the machete back up, see it moving forward at her, teeth gleaming as its mouth stretched open, wider and wider. Jiri, weaponless, scrambled back. She shoved her foot into the biloko's chin, trying to keep that gaping maw away from her, and from her mouth poured a gasping prayer for help.

  The spirits answered.

  Jiri saw it flash by, a blur of green and white leaping over her. It hit the biloko and sent it sprawling, then crouched before her: a frog almost as big as Morvius. It rumbled, gold eyes watching as the biloko pushed itself up and screeched. Then its tongue flicked out. Like a great red vine it whipped around the biloko, catching it and jerking it off its feet. One pull, and the biloko was almost gone, just one clawed foot projecting from the frog's wide mouth, and the amphibian raised the long toes of its forefoot and tucked that last bit in. It blinked once, spat out the machete, and gave another low rumble.