As the Ephremian Zalgyne departed bearing Loren, Vieno retracted into fox form and scampered branch to stone to shrub. Her manic chitters caused pigeons to shift branches and bugs to flit into a thickly pestilent cloud, as if even their dim intelligences were too frightened to alight near the frenzied fox.
After an hour-long tantrum, she slinked in the derelict rowboat and slept until morning, when she woke very disgruntled under the glaring sun and rolled in the shade of the bow to snooze, fitfully, until noon. Having slaughtered two pigeons for breakfast and three more for the fun of it, she curled in the recess of two cumbersome tree roots, closed her eyes, and delved into Seeing.
The Zalgyne flew over a mottled grey and brown landscape. By the treeless dunes, she knew it for the Sargan Vos. Although she bent her will to pierce the buzzing brass grasshopper, that metallic skin repelled her efforts to lay her inward eye upon Loren.
She had hoped to turn Loren's Seeing down the path of power, the better to seat her daughter in some high position. While most Seers knitted a future from serene choices that tended towards peace and love, to Vieno it was as just and natural to force her appetites and aggression on the coming world, or even to merge the conflicts of others into war, and scavenge her own rewards. Who would blame her for using her two eyes to step over a rock; who would cry 'go to your fate, and stub your toe?' Similarly, was it not natural to use her inward eye to turn matters to her own good? Why should she work and work, plan and scheme, to bring ALL ends to serve the greater good? From Vieno's perspective, the greater good was a bully, like all things impressed with their own greatness, and it was courageous of herself to persist in asserting her own good, small as it was.
But the greater good already had Loren by the nape and planned to drag her all over Alsantia to serve those do-gooders in Ephremia. Vieno could See it already, as if it was past and present, not an ironclad future. Although—there was still a chance. It meant going into the Sargan Vos, the Garden of Delight, that was dissolved into debris and despair by the Ashflowers. For some reason, Seeing was skewed in the Sargan Vos, and could not be trusted there; when Seeing worked at all, it was perverse and deceiving, maliciously misinterpreting futures by chopping them into grotesque mirror images, shodding them in clown shoes, then leading their Seers into destruction, if not outright death.
Vieno hated the Sargan Vos; the distortion of her inward eye not only impaired a crucial sense, it tainted her with enervating debility. Still, Loren must be helped. The worst thing about Alsantia was that those who styled themselves Good or Evil were quick to enchain people to their ideologies. If Vieno wished to enchain Loren, it was to give her daughter a better future, just as she had spared Loren the truth of their relationship the better to reunite her to her true power, her inward eye, spanning not only Earth and Alsantia, but many worlds. Alsantian and Earth interests were only a drop in the bucket compared to the unspeakable riches that could be plundered from infinite realities.
For most of the journey, she loped in transitional form, which married not only a human stride to her lupine speed and senses, but furred hands, for climbing, moving downed branches, and hunting. Now scenting a wren down a creek bank, she engulfed it in her paws and pressed a claw to its throat.
"Did a Zalgyne fly through here?"
When the bird twitched its feet and flurried against Vieno's furred fingers, the Elderlich snapped her teeth in front of the wren's beak. "Not only do I know a talking wren by sight, nothing smells more delicious."
"Yeyyesss!" it peeped. "It soared south, over the mardras trees. Let me go!"
"I don't think so," purred Vieno. "While a Zalgyne isn't too big for me to bring down, you're the right kind of mouthful."
"Please! My chicks are hungry!"
"I'm sorry to hear that," leered Vieno. "Where are they? I'll take away their hunger."
"You'll kill my chicks!"
"I only mean to bring them their mama. I hope they like the taste of wren." Vieno cackled.
The wren squirmed. "There are geese farther down the creek. Silent geese!"
"You know what they say about a bird in the hand..." Vieno snickered.
"I hope I stick in your throat!" weeped the wren, and from that point babbled in plaintive birdsong, as if in the moment of death she forgot the dignity of intelligence. Vieno waited out the exquisitely mournful melody before wringing the wren's neck, then cracked her bones to feast on her beating heart.
"Thank you for being delicious," Vieno cackled to the mangled carcass. "I needed that. You don't even know." She howled. "I guess you really don't." Vieno spat feathers and bones as she made short work of her meal. Then her hunger melted to a solemn expression. "If your spirit still lingers, wren, know that I'm not sorry, but very grateful. Without a good meal now and then, I'm not myself."
Following the wren's directions, Vieno crossed brooks, thickets, and copses of trees as a fox, then several wide human roads as a human, greeting the passersby while indulging, not for the first time, a quiet thought about how the chubby city dwellers tasted. While they were revolting, a gourmand must be willing to sample new fares as they are served, and if she was given the opportunity, she would fall to human flesh with a gory gusto derived more from gourmet curiosity than hunger.
Plunging into the Luskveld, that mighty forest that covered southern and western Alsantia, and cradled the expanding Sargan Vos, she felt that so-called Garden of Delight sparking towards her Seeing, so that her glimpses of the future were now distorted, and gradually sliding into chaos. If the future had a face, it was grimacing, and that downcast expression was about to turn topsy-turvy into insanity.
With profound disquiet, Vieno turned her inward eye inside out, creating a blind buttonhole she could better ignore as she reversed the order of her vision. Usually, the future was her foreground, and the present moment barely noticed, like something in the corner of her eye, as she gratified herself moment to moment by her power of petty prophecy. Now she moved forward a second at a time, like the Unseeing, and she didn't know how they made it through the day without suffering accident or starvation, or losing the will to live. How could one live without the constant tantalization of succulent futures? By relaxing her Seeing, Vieno no doubt missed plump and tantalizing prey—not only mice and squirrels, but turtles, which she adored—and though she scrounged up a few more dotty birds, she arrived at the fringe of the Sargan Vos with a raging hunger.
In a few steps, everything changed: not only the jungly crush of grass and profuse overgrowth, and leaping over roots and along branches, but the scent of wildflowers, ferns, and orchids, were abruptly cut away by the mulch spread by the depredations of Ashflowers. Their far-ranging hunger cleaved the trees on the fringe in half rather than shambling around them, as if they heeded a perimeter around their own garden of delight.
While the fringe had the freshest, most varied mulch, and its larger clumps were splotched with mold, mildew, and moss, as she padded over the matted chips of wood, earth, and stone, the ground grew less uneven, until a desert of debris was ruffled by gusting winds into constantly shifting dunes and valleys.
While the new generation had forgotten the reason for the stone intermixed in the mulch, Vieno had lived in Serapha, the village that once marked the dead center of the Sargan Vos, having settled near an artifact called the Well of Life. This crystalline cave, filled nearly to capacity with an even more jewel-like water, the Seraphans enlarged, walled in with stone, then installed baths, cisterns, fountains, and troughs for animals, believing they could hoard its special properties and distribute its natural beauties.
Believing themselves drawn to a higher calling, the Seraphans forbade the eating of flesh, then decreed that all animals, whether on two legs or four, were permitted the baths, the fountain, and the troughs. Naturally, this led to the outrage and indignation of the Seraphan talking animals, who resented being grouped with the nonsentient, and resisted all dialogue about the deep-seated prejudice toward the nonspeaking which this edict revealed. The talking animals had stricter rules for sapience than the humans, whose less evolved simian cousins lived far from Serapha.
While this was not the arrogance that created the Ashflowers, there was no shortage of arrogance in Serapha, and one day the Ashflowers devoured the hallowed city and defecated the stone of their false fountain, as well as their city walls, houses, and statues, along with the trees, shrubs, and other edifices of nature. And this was why the matted mulch of the Sargan Vos was strewn not only with earth and wood, but also stone.
These bleak badlands might be peaceful, were its hot shadows not maddened by hunger and thirst. As Vieno followed the meandering path through the rising, swelling, and descending dunes, so her mind wandered, for the Sargan Vos was no fertile ground for thought, though cunning grew in abundance. And Vieno was abundantly cunning, cunning enough to walk on blades of grass without bending them, and even the harsh, grinding soil of the Sargan Vos may as well have been sleek marble flagstones to her paws, at times slinking so silently and lightly that she unnerved herself, and began to talk to herself--not about her fears, for she had none, but about Loren's future. Though her consciousness roamed to Loren and back, she was not pulled by a mother's heart-strings, but by thoughts of rising her own ambition by Loren's raw magical gifts.
The Ashflowers were such thorough consumers that the Sargan Vos would be a uniform desert of shredded woods and minced city, were it not for dauntless winds gusting at the arboreal graveyard with more ferocity than the gluttonous plants. As she scampered along shifting debris, blustering air currents blew the detritus in a rising wave under her feet, depositing her thirty feet higher on a diminishing, descending shudder of chipped wood and earth. When the next blast threatened to toss her for yards, she grew into human form, buttoned down her ragged robes, and pushed into the wind.
Now as she scampered along the shifting debris, the blustering currents of air blew the detritus in a rising wave under her feet, depositing her thirty feet higher than she was before on a diminishing and descending shudder of chipped wood and earth. When the next blast of wind threatened to toss her for yards, she grew into her human form, buttoned down her ragged Elderlich robes, and pushed forward into the wind.
As a sputtering, buzzing, and cracking rattled high above, she risked a glance, lost her balance, and slid pell-mell down the rushing slope of debris to land on a settling heap, staring up at the descending Zalgyne.
As she spat a mouthful of wood fibers and raised herself to her knees and elbows, a second Zalgyne hammered into the mulch a quarter mile ahead, and its tremor sent the chips shivering and quivering as far as she could see.
When her surrounding chips were caught up in the vibration, and swarmed into a massive upswell, hoisting both her and a towering hill up from the earth, she laid back and watched. While her bed was now precarious, it was also a high vantage point, and might settle as gently as it rose.
Although she couldn't distinguish their faces, she knew the cut and color of an Animalyte vestment, no matter how tattered and faded, at any distance, and guessed she had found her offspring, another runt she had schooled, and a petite creature that would serve as delicious prey if she could crack its troublesome Ephremian armor.
While it was gauche to consume sentients, and Suvani had forbidden her Sworn Beasts from eating humans, Vieno had already added talking delicacies to her acquired tastes, and what was one more taboo? Why not cross that last dietary line and complete the set?
While the Ephremian Zalgyne came to a rough landing, it glided through the mulch intact, dragging a light furrow until it came to rest, but the Queen's Zalgyneclashed with a dune, showering wood, stone, and smoldering shrapnel, then disgorged flame from its shredded, smoking tail, until finally, passengers in Alsantian colors hurtled from the wreckage, including one gigantic figure, whose small but significant impact rippled through the chipped soil.
As this gigantic leader--surely an ogre, being head and shoulders taller--led the Alsantian soldiers from the smoking crash toward the other Zalgyne, raging flames and fumes billowed over the desert, igniting fiery patches here and there, and soon bringing the entire region under a blistering shadow that drove mice, gophers, and birds away in swarms.
While Vieno hungered, and was tempted to hunt the tasty refugees, the irritaing fumes agitated her thirst, and more than anything, she wanted clear of the burning clouds. Once she was, however, a thought of Loren burned brighter than the fire.
Plunging into the smoke, Vieno banished all thought of herself, even when her throat itched and her eyes crackled from the acrid smoke venting from the crunched Zalgyne. Although shrinking to a fox brought her under the roiling, smoldering clouds, she was half-blind from hot, wet tears, and rasping on painful, scratchy coughs until she scampered upwind. When her blurry vision began to clear, she trotted even faster, as her quarries' tracks were now subsiding into the settling fragments of the Sargan Vos.
As she crested a windblown dune, it dissolved into the spiraling airflow, and the ebbing mulch cut off her next glimpse of the crash survivors, then lowered her below the level of the horizon. As a pit bottomed out underneath her, she slid into her fox feet and dog paddled the escaping chips until the next wave, a dune that endured longer, collecting the town and forest shavings in a heap that thrust her to a clear, but diminishing, perspective on a dustup between the Alsantians, the Ephremians, and the Ashflower.
One thing was certain: the giant Alsantian was indeed a musclebound ogress, who exploded from the fibrous torso of an Ashflower, which then pursued the ogress toward the other Zalgyne. Vieno was enthralled by the savage grandeur of the unfolding fracas: the Ephremian parried, ricocheted from the ogrish sword, then tumbled into a backwards cartwheel born not from agility, but the limpness of instant unconsciousness, while the equal and opposite reaction of the behemoth landed her on the dune under Vieno, so that both were swallowed by the engulfing dispersal of the fibrous heap.
When the punchdrunk warriors recovered, their brief melee produced another violent recoil in the petite Ephremian, but not the ogress, who resisted the enchanted backlash by straining her tightened thews, until her skin purpled, then whitened behind the purple, so that she looked ready to pop and disgorge her ogrish skeleton like pus from a monstrous pimple.
When the Ephremian stayed down, the ogress sneered at the two girls. Vieno's eyes flashed on Loren, and she tiptoed near, until the ogress raised her sword to smite Berangere.
Having thought Berangere a know it all and too much of a good influence on her daughter, Vieno dropped into a brooding crouch, then smothered her chortle when the girl was blasted back, screamed, and dropped the sword.
Loren growled as her human guise melted, a liquid change seeming to spurt straight to the ogress's neck, where the pouncing white-starred fox scampered a few inches ahead of the monster's grasping hand, nipping, pawing, and thrashing her orange tail into its eyes.
Vieno froze. What was Loren thinking? What could she do? She would never make the mistake of challenging a full-grown ogre. As the Elderlich writhed under the burden of her powerlessness, and her offspring's inevitable death, the other Alsantians shifted into half-human, half-wolf hybrids, and added their snarling weight to the teetering ogress, who dropped her sword, howled, and danced a pained and hilarious jig while smacking and shaking away werewolves. When the Ephremian tottered to her feet, the ogress backpedaled until it was clear she would not be pursued, then turned and walked away.
Vieno's gaze lingered on the fox, admiring the white speckled orange fur, the lucid and limpid eyes, and the fluidity of youth, more like one who admired their craftsmanship than like a loving parent looked on their offspring, and she tore her eyes away reluctantly to follow the ogress.
She trotted not three paces before she saw the mouse, and he was squirming in her mouth before the sight registered, proving once again that instinct was superior to sense, common, good, non-, or otherwise. The vermin's quivering mouth jutted from Vieno's clenched jaws, then warbled, "please don't kill me, mighty Elderlich!"
While Vieno was neither merciful nor warm-hearted, she was susceptible to flattery, and moreover, more curious than the proverbial cat. When she spat the shivering clump of matted fur, it still bore the light impress of Vieno's teeth, for she had not yet bitten or chewed, the better to savor her prey's fearful squirming as the appetizing prelude to the mouthful. "Tell me more," she said.
"Thank you, mighty Elderlich! You are wise, good, and beautiful..."
"That will do. How do you know me for an Elderlich?"
The mouse paused. While its body became deathly still, its eyes and whiskers shivered.
"More specifically, how does an Alsantian know of the goings on in an Earth church?"
"Mighty Elderlich," began the mouse. "Do you know why mice pay no tolls or tariffs?"
"Should I care? I'm no human."
"By scurrying the byways and causeways through nooks, cracks, and crevices, mice crawl where the highest lords and mightiest beasts cannot go. Mice taste the food on Suvani's table, and exact our own tax from every estate in Alsantia. Is it so strange if mice know crannies by which we feast on the fat trash lands of Earth?"
"You've been to Earth?" said Vieno. Her tone was skeptical but admiring, but her tongue still tasted fur, and she did not like his chances, whether to return to his haunts on Earth, or repeat the tale to his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or any other generations ready to be born. Mice were not truly living, but a vast carpet of vermin; she could eat as many as she liked, and mice would still cover Alsantia, Earth, and every other world.
"Yes!" the mouse shouted, a little too eagerly. "Would you care to hear the tale?"
Vieno snickered. "How generous of you, to offer your last moments for the sake of my cultured palette. Or should I say miserly, given that you're stingy with these final breaths, which you would parlay into hours of extra life, then scurry through another crack of opportunity."
"I deserve that," fawned the mouse. "Yes, mighty Elderlich, I'm the miser, and you're the bighearted, liberal fox lord."
"Lady," corrected Vieno.
"But you'll hear the tale?"
"No," said Vieno. "Not yet. We're adding another spectator to your audience."
"Oh, gracious and benevolent Elderlich!"
"Save the flattery for your prologue." Having snatched up the mouse, Vieno loped after the ogress, whose heavy tracks took longer to fill, and were still gaping in the mulch, so that the fox's uneven path dipped down, scurried up, and occasionally leaped where the deep gouge of ogre feet had cloven a rift that must be bounded.
By way of this lurching skitter, the fox scurried until she stumbled, stumbled until she slid, and slid until she was scooped up by the ogress, who brought Vieno up to her mammoth eyeball, so that there could be no disputing which was greater; not the ogress and the fox, for that was an indisputable contest--no, the contenders here were the fox and the eyeball, which also outclassed the diminutive fox, like a shiny, gelatinous cannonball, and not unlike a crystal ball to boot, for Vieno saw herself reflected not only in the black pupils but in the vitreous white.
"Hello, you," said the ogress.
"Hello," wheezed the fox, who was so squeezed in the mighty grasp that the mouse might have been smashed like a blueberry if Vieno had not seized it in her right hand, which flailed outside the confines of the tightening ogrish fingers.
"Cat got your tongue?" The leering ogress dropped Vieno so roughly that she took another spill a few feet down the subsiding heap.
"I'm a fox," she said sullenly.
"Ogres are born once, but idiots are born every day," said the ogress.
"What was that?" snapped Vieno.
"An ogrish proverb that seemed appropriate."
"Can't we be civil? I was coming to see you, you know."
"Were you? Why? If I don't know a fox from a cat, you can't think I'm wise."
"I thought you might want help," said Vieno. "What happened? You look like you've been to the underworld and back."
The ogress's eyes flared into such a sharp slit that there was little doubt her interest lay in suppressing the true picture of events, that she was upchucked by an Ashflower, then bested by opponents massing somewhat less than her gargantuan weight.
"Why tell you, when I might eat you both?"
"If you mean to reclaim your lost prize, four eyes are better than one."
"Six!" peeped the mouse.
"Oh yes," said Vieno. "I also have an amusement to share."
"What prize? What amusement?"
"While I would never lie to you, I have been less than honest," said Vieno, "as I watched what unfolded between you and the Ephremians." The fox was struck by the uncomfortable resemblance between the mouse's toadying to her, and hers to the ogress.
"Fine," grumbled the ogress. "Then what amusement?"
When Vieno held up the mouse, the ogress scoffed. "That's more booger than appetizer. Tell me why I shouldn't devour such disappointing vermin, and before you ask, yes, I'm grouping you with the rodent."
"You mistake me," said Vieno. "While I'm willing to share, this morsel has a mouthful of his own to disgorge before his final journey through our bowels; in short, he has a tale to tell."
"This should be good." The ogress leaned back into the shifting, fibrous desert as if it was the most comfortable pillow nature could provide.
Vieno lay the mouse down, then squatted beside him with such a saintly attitude of patience that the mouse might have taken it not as the prelude of the pounce that would bring it into her gullet in lieu of a curtain call, but as the expectancy proper for an audience.
"As you hear the tale," said the mouse, "remember how the mighty have fallen."
"The mighty?" laughed Vieno.
"You never knew me as I was," said the mouse.
"This is a fantasy then," sniggered the fox.
"If you will," sighed the mouse. "If I told you I might have ruled over Alsantia, you would not believe me?"
"You? Queen Suvani?" Vieno laughed until she could not breathe; so hard, that the mouse might have escaped if that was its sole objective. When the mouse lingered, the fox fell into a cool reserve, for it was now clear that it craved something more than its verminous life. She must watch this scheming rodent. What was its game?
"Of course not," said the mouse, "although she disposed of me, and now rules in my place. Her own uncle!"
"You're the regent," said the ogress with a grim chuckle. "Prove it."
"Let me pull out my papers," said the mouse, feigning to poke and prod his fur for pockets. "As you can see, the Queen not only deposed me, she unmanned me, then tossed me into a giant cage welded in the shape of a scratching post. This cage towered higher even than you"--here, it swept a paw toward the ogress--"and contained a village of mice."
"Why'd she do it?" grunted the ogress.
"I was grooming Vemulus to wear the crown. While Suvani was my first choice, she proved too bloodthirsty and powerhungry to be worthy of the throne. While those are excellent qualities in my underlings..."
"You? Underlings?" yapped the fox.
"Even after so long, I am unfamiliar with this accursed shape. Being accustomed to influence and power, I speak as I once was." When the mouse's countenance dipped into a rueful, regal frown, Vieno almost believed him. Almost. "As Suvani was more interested in wielding power than holding it, I believed her coronation would be followed by an usurpation or an assassination. With Vemulus looking more and more like the scion of Alsantia, I promoted him, so that he need not put his sister out of the way to attain his rightful position."
"There is an easy way to ascertain the truth of what you say," said Vieno.
"Do you know an enchanter?" The mouse's eyes were so limpid with hope that Vieno couldn't help a snicker.
"I dabble," said Vieno, "and being more than a little obsessed with shapeshifting, have bent my studies to mastering that art." Dropping into the schoolmaster manner long rehearsed for her daily performance as an Elderlich, she added, "you do know that shape changing was first mastered by talking animals?"
"Yes, but not that shape changing others was so common. If it is," said the mouse with an exaggerated expression of fretfulness, "then why is Alsantia not an animal kingdom, its humans turned into flies, toads...or mice?" Here he turned his paws toward himself.
"While the trick is rare, some choose to pass it on, and others to learn it."
"Then..." The ellipsis lingered meaningfully until it sputtered to life in the mouse's stammer. "Th-th-then y-you cuh-could turn me back!"
"I could. But why would I do that?"
"You would be rewarded," said the mouse, his stutter once again smoothed by a regal persuasion. "Gold, silver, jewels, delicacies, high position--whatever you craved would be yours."
"Only if you're restored to your rightful place. The only way you'd reward me now is if Suvani ransomed you for the purposes of disposing of you again, this time for good. And you would be easier to ransom as a mouse, which I could cage and carry to my rendezvous with the queen."
"For good!" squealed the mouse. "What of the good? Helping me is the right thing to do!"
"Which you thought of by accident, only after what I said reminded you of it. With bribery foremost in your mind, and the thought of good deeds buried, you may indeed be the regent." While she would never have thought the Queen so stupid, it did seem more and more likely that Suvani shape changed the regent to ascend to the throne before she came of age. It fit the facts, for Suvani was coronated before her majority. Moreover, who would beg to be restored to their rightful form, unless they were shape changed? As the spell would not work on a creature in their natural form, pleading this would only be a temporary measure unless there was a true form to reveal.
"Don't do it." The ogress shook her head.
"Don't do what?"
"This thing he wants you to do."
"In truth, I haven't decided to do it yet."
"Yes you have." The ogress's face was a flat and expressionless void that brooked no denial, so Vieno did not attempt it. While she had already all but decided to satisfy her curiosity about the mouse, Vieno was such a creature of contradictions that she took the ogress's forbidding for a compulsion to follow through without further ado.
Foxes move in flicks and flurries, so when Vieno bustled forward, the mouse flinched, and scampered a yard before her paw smacked his tail; while a swat like this would ordinarily pin him to the ground, and have him chewing at his own tail, if he could stomach it, the chipped soil of the Sargan Vos eroded under her claws, and the mouse broke free, then stopped, turned, and looked up with sad brown eyes.
"Are you going to kill me, or change me?"
"Maybe both," said Vieno. "But since I can't eat you first, and change you later, we'll do it the other way around." The fox's tail lengthened into an enormous golden plume, swirled in an arcane gesture, levelled as if about to discharge a potent ray, then simply tapped the rodent on the shoulder.
While the transformation was a nearly instantaneous unraveling of the grey mouse, the swat was so fast that it seemed to precede it, though that was a logical impossibility, for how could the ginger cat scratch Vieno before he was disentangled from the enchantment? It happened so fast that Vieno fell backwards into a crouch, still looking for the Regent, then the mouse, before wondering who this ginger cat was, why he had the effrontery to attack a fox a few inches longer in the shadow of an ogress a thousand times his weight, and where did he come from, anyway?
Then she saw the white star on his forehead. "Oji!" For answer, the prince showed her his rump, scratched her with his hindclaws, then sprang away, scattering the matted fibers of the Sargan Vos.
As Vieno lay reeling, blood thickening her fur, she had a sudden craving for the mouse, and her head bobbed around savagely, hoping to whet her wrath upon the pitiful creature, before loud and obnoxious laughter cooled her appetite to a cold rage.
When she realized the ogress was laughing at her, her scattered wits connected abruptly with the facts: the Steward was a ruse, and Oji was the mouse. No doubt Suvani shape changed him as he said, but the rest was a lie.
"Every day," snickered the ogress. "Every day."
"Are you going to help?"
"Help you?" scoffed the ogress. "You can barely help yourself. Your tail was handed to you by a cat. A housecat, for that matter."
"That was no housecat," growled the fox. "That was Prince Oji."
"Prince? I met him, and his name's not Oji."
"The prince of the animals."
"Oh, that prince," said the ogress. "There hasn't been a prince of the animals since I was a girl."
"Surely not that long ago," said Vieno.
"That was a catty thing to say." The ogress broke into a guffaw.
"Look, your Queen wants him. Does that matter to you?"
"While I don't care much for Suvani, there's no self-respect without work ethic. If my paycheck wants the cat, my paycheck will eat the cat, I suppose."
Vieno cocked her head as she regarded this peculiar creature. "Then you'll follow?"
"Follow you? Not on your life."
"Then you know the Sargan Vos."
"I've never been here."
"I have," said Vieno. "I lived here before the Ashflowers. Though there's not much left, I've visited twice since the catastrophe."
"Cat-astrophe." The ogress choked on her own laugh. "That's funny, fox."
After her best approximation of a self-deprecating laugh, Vieno said, "I suppose I can be witty at times. Let's be quick. Cats are not known for being slow animals."
As they roved the Sargan Vos, the smoke scent abated, but without plant, village, or slope to break the winds, they whistled and sliced the shivering mulch, and as clouds white and grey scudded above, the fibrous stretches and dunes of the Garden of Delight scudded below, and its few creeping insects were flicked by the gusts, so that they had two modes of locomotion, scuttling and random buffeting. Only the monstrous Ashflowers could be said to stalk the Sargan Vos, their blind hunger seeking out all life, all motion, and all difference for annihilation. What did they feed on, Vieno wondered, now that life had fallen into the landscape?
They journeyed until the moons' gleam lit the fibrous filaments of the desert floor with a glitter. While Vieno had enjoyed this breathtaking sight in previous passages through the Sargan Vos, now it was dimmed by frustration, not only with Loren and Oji, but the ogress, Jezera, who picked their campsite not by discussion, but by the expedient method of lumbering to a stop, kicking off her boots, and rebutting the fox's complaints with snores. While the spongy mulch was pillows and duvets to the slumbering heap, it was harsh and thorny for the fox, who only found a restful spot by scratching the topmost layer into shreds.
The second day was much like the first, with their journey strained and silent, their camp made abruptly at Jezera's whim, and the fox excavating chips for a softer bed. As the second night was colder, and the exposed earth chilled, and only slowly warmed by her numb underbelly, she was awake when the Zalgynes sawed back and forth under the twin moons, which sent their dim reflections to join the scouring aircraft in sweeping over the glittering threads of the Sargan Vos.
"Jezera." When the ogress did not budge, Vieno snapped her name, then snarled it. When the monster remained as still as stone, the fox walked up and down the gigantic face, letting her claws peek out of their sheaths, so the ogress would know it was no dream.
When Vieno slipped away from Jezera's reaching, lumbering hands, the ogress groped and mashed her own roaring face. The fox was thirty feet away before she called, "aren't you coming?"
"Fox." The voice was sullen and drowsy. "Help me up."
"I don't think so," said Vieno. "There's no time for your shenanigans. Don't you see the Zalgynes?"
"I can't see my own hands. Am I still asleep?"
"Don't you hear the Zalgynes?"
"I hear voices."
"Maybe you are asleep."
"Girl voices," said the ogress.
Vieno's furry ears perked up. "Where?" she hissed.
"What do you mean, where? In my ears, I guess."
"Get up, ogre. Take us to them."
"To the Zalgynes?"
"To the girls! Oji might be there."
Jezera lurched up, staggered a few steps, and straightened into a proper ogrish lumber, before turning to glance at Vieno. "Truth be told, I don't know where I'm going. Maybe it was a dream."
"Those Zalgynes know left from right. They're looking for something."
"You mean someone. Unless they're seeking mulch, in which case they've won a lot of it."
"...tomorrow...or next week. You don't know when..." The voices effervesced as if from thin air. As the skies were clear, and the winds brisk, it was uncertain how far the voices carried, and Vieno was reluctant to use Seeing to probe the dead, deceiving zone of the Sargan Vos.
"I think it's this way." The ogress broke into a half-trot around a particularly loose dune raining threads of wood and stone chips from its disintegrating peak.
"...Zalgyne...Ashflower, Loren!"
"You want us to surrender! To this evil queen?"
"No, Loren. We have to get on the right Zalgyne." Inverting their usual huddle, Berangere leaned on Loren, who in turn leaned into the dune. Neither their Ephremian protector nor the werewolves were anywhere to be seen.
Vieno raised her voice to a theatrical pitch so the children would be certain to hear. "That might be difficult with one arm broken, and the other lacking the hand that had the effrontery to touch my daughter."
"Loren," Berangere's hushed whisper was crisp to fox ears. "It's your mother." While the troublemaker's arm hung in a makeshift sling, her critical glower was unimpaired.
"She's not." Loren's growl was fox-like. "You're NOT my MOTHER!" Her shout was so barking mad that tiny tears spurted from the corners of her eyes, and she drew 'not' and 'mother' out so far that she bottomed out in a sawing gasp louder than the buzz of the Zalgynes.
"You did it, Loren." Vieno inflected this with her contemptuous and snide annoyance at her daughter's hyperventilation, and no trace of motherly pride. "You did SO much. Not only did you get this far, but you changed shape."
When Jezera howled, thrashed wildly, and sagged to her knees, Vieno turned with a start to see the Ephremian had stabbed the ogress through the soft flesh at the back of her knee. In Vieno's obsession, and the ogre's own amused torpor, the warrior had snuck
behind them, and now backpedaled to stand at bay, her sword en garde. "Run!" shouted the diminutive Ephremian, as the ogress struggled to limp to her feet, failed, then settled for crawling painfully, but quickly, like a broken crab. The girls' startled, broken sprint carried them around the dune and out of sight.
When Jezera scowled and curled into a crouch, Vieno knew the ogress intended a cannonball lunge, powered by nothing but biceps and elbow grease, but the canny and agile Ephremian darted nimbly in and out of Jezera's range.
"Why wait? Go after them, fox."
"As if I would stay," sneered Vieno. "You're worse than useless, Jezera. I lingered in the hope of watching you die." Although her words were lofty with bravado, as ogre eyes contracted to a murderous glare, Vieno's slunk along the chilled soil, her scurry fueled by fear.
While the girls had a head start, four paws were faster than four feet, and she soon glimpsed them from the dissolving ledge of a subsiding promontory.
Under the shining moons, a third moon gleamed from the tattered ground of the Sargan Vos. This hole in the world poured golden light back into the sky, illuminating the clearing as bright as day. Having neared the rim of the gate, Loren and Berangere stooped to its edge, shielded their eyes from the glare, and peered.
"Loren!" As Vieno leaped from the shredded outcrop edge, a squirming weight pounced on her back, throwing her off balance, and she tumbled to the mulch, where
one outstretched paw took the jumbled, wracking jolt of both bodies. The harsh snap was a numbing shock, but when the pain surged, that astonishment melted into a howl.
The ginger cat scampered off her splayed body, then turned, his snarl squeezed thin by her teary vision. If Oji had something to say, it was forgotten when Loren took Berangere's shoulder and dropped through the gate. As he darted after them, his paws scattered chips into Vieno's face, and her agonized weeping was choked by eyefuls of dust and a mouthful of mulch.
When Vieno came to much later, the girls were gone, but the gate still streamed into the night. Whether the Ephremian or Jezera still lived, either the survivor had not found her, spared her, or thought leaving her would be a crueler punishment than anything they might devise.
Was it seconds, minutes, hours, or days? Her leg was still twisted at its unnatural angle, as she was no werewolf that healed by the consequence of its cursed, constantly shifting, skin and bone. In her state, wizardry might make things worse, and it was better to remain a fox. But there was one thing she might do.
While she might be run over by a car, or euthanized by animal control, if Earth lay on the other side of that gate, her chances were better there than in the badlands of the Sargan Vos, or anywhere there might be a roving, vengeful ogre. When her three-legged crawl was agonizing and tedious, she thought more than once of biting off her broken limb, for she would move easier without dead weight. She resisted the instinct, then turned a deaf ear to the pain, so that she could lope a little faster.
When Vieno reached the edge, nothing but golden light gazed back from its depths. As she passed out for the second time, she fell forward into its golden eye.