"Put me down! I burned my hand, not my feet!" Behind Khyte's forced smile, his teeth gritted at the indignity of being manhandled by the Tree-Woman.
"You mewled like a brainless Kiuvathi calf."
"Put me down, or learn how the headless feel!"
"Your Queen is rubbing off on you. Except she toppled my whole self, and you're satisfied with the stem."
"It's funny," said Khyte. "When we met, Inglefras insisted that I didn't understand dryads. What I thought was arrogance was only a dogmatic reading of my character. Like truth, character is immutable. While people become more or less moral, kind, charitable, or murderous, they don't change at heart. Breeding, instruction, and experience discipline only behavior, not the undying desires of your innermost being. If your birth put a past self behind you, you're lucky. In a life measured in days, you've become one of the most self-assured people I know. If you take after your mother a little, so much the better. Loving our parents is the bedrock of this world."
"You wouldn't be so disinterested if you knew my purely inherited prejudices against your animal body. If I forgot my bequeath of memories, I might look on you or Elani with clear eyes, or grieve for Kuruk without the gloomy preconception that the human way of dying without passing on your being is neither a deserved nor just end, that no matter how long ago he resigned himself to this fate, he left this world with unfinished business, unproven plans, aborted strategies, and half-formed thoughts."
"We Drydanans do pass on our being, Tree-Woman. Our shadows are our ancestors, and they shadow us, whether into battle or to dinner."
"What do they remember?"
"If the dead remember anything, they communicate nothing."
"Then your dead are selfish even in death, refusing to contribute a single article of knowledge to your purposes."
"Better our selfish dead than yours that share too much," said Khyte. "To inherit memories would be to live life in a cage, never to think one's own thoughts."
"I think you understand dryads very well, Khyte. It is hard to hear my own mind above the whispers when these roaring memories outnumber my thoughts. Do I live, or only live again, as an echo-life or a mirror-life?"
"At least you can think that. My Queen never questions. Or if she does, she keeps them quiet and only opens her mouth on the answers."
Though Leitara averted her eyes, she could not help glancing sidelong at Khyte. Were these flattering comparisons to his wife only flirtation, did he mean to follow through on this adulterous banter, or was this some cunning game the human played? Humans' proliferating desires made them unpredictable. Though Khyte had little motive to pursue her, he did, or pretended he did, nonetheless. He crossed the Abyss to prove it, whether to himself or to Leitara.
The ashy smoke of Cuvaernei had fluttered along the chill, hollowing current of Elani's breezy spells, so that their every breath was refreshing but acrid.When they stopped to shake fruit from a grove, then fry the thin slivers of the tree-rodent Khyte slew left-handed, the conflagration advanced like an enraged army, its flaming spouts peaked with smoky columns, and the topple of crackling trunks audible miles away in the Juntawni foothills.
"That's a lot of smoke," said Khyte.
"Where there's smoke, there's fire," said Elani in a jovial tone.
Leitara pointed. "What about that plume of smoke?" A dusty cloud shuddered in the trees, rustling and snapping back branches.
"If that's a flame, it's a human one," said Khyte.
"What do you mean?"
"That's not smoke, it's dust. If the trees weren't a tangled overgrowth, I'd guess a stampede, so right now I'm thinking horseless warriors, massed so thick their many boots raised that cloud."
"They must be running," agreed Elani.
"So should we," said Leitara. "Whatever their purpose, so many runners can't bode well for us."
"Follow me." Khyte dashed off the road into a copse of trees, dodging low branches and jumping snarled roots as they ascended the foothills.While Khyte was long familiar with Mount Juntawni, he winced from the pain of his burned hand, and Leitara climbed handily like a rugged tree that took root in that slope. Though Elani was young and strong, she still identified with the weakness of age, and flailed at the rise for a few minutes before halting ten feet from where she started.
"What's wrong with you, wood-witch?" shouted Khyte. "You're as big as I am."
"You're more of a woman, Drydanan, so we have a lot in common." Elani snickered, but looked woefully at the steep ascent.
"If you can't climb those gentle crags, you'll never make it up that." Khyte pointed to the sheer rocky flank of Mount Juntawni. While the jagged surface had many protrusions and promontories, it was so vertical that the peaks were hidden by the shadow of this massive bulwark.
"Of course I will. I'll cheat." With a look that married frustration and condescension, the long, leggy witch poured herself into brown feathers, and a wren flitted up the mountainside with a chaotic flutter, like a falling leaf in reverse.
Khyte sneered, then scrambled to the next foothold, where he glanced back at his tribefolk. "That's my old swordsmaster, only he's added a spear, bow, and arrows to his arsenal. The others are also dressed for war. There's my father...and my mother! Why would she come? Our womenfolk do not wage war."
"She knows you're here," offered Leitara.
"Who told her?" The puzzlement knitted Khyte's brows. "And if they're here for me, why are they outfitted for battle?"
"My experience of humans thus far is that they're moved by desire, like the Cuvaernians, or by revenge, like the Inamu. Are your people any different?
"No," admitted Khyte. "That sums up my people so nicely that I could sort our recent history into those two columns."
"Then they're up to no good. Either they want one of us, or they want to kill one of us. Neither option sounds particularly pleasant."
"You're making my tribe out to be a bunch of cutthroat savages. Mind you, you're not wrong, but it's disheartening to see you break them down so well without coming over for dinner."
"We have another problem." Khyte looked up at Elani, who flitted ledge to ledge.
"She's the least of our problems."
"Drydanan archers hit smaller targets at greater distances."
"Their eyes are on us."
"And maybe on the wood-witch."
"It doesn't matter what we must do, when we can only climb up, climb down, jump, or take root."
Khyte nodded, then scampered up at such a rapid clip that Leitara, despite her Tree-Woman advantages in climbing, was hard pressed to keep up. At times he leaped one ledge to another, extending his landing leg to such an extreme that she realized he must have perfect memory of this mountain in order to trust his limbs to the gulf between platforms. Leitara eschewed this zig-zag mode of ascent, and shimmied up hand over hand, planting her toes in such tiny niches that Khyte glanced her way several times.
"You're a vine," he said. "Why have I never seen this on the Dryad World?"
"Just as you conceal your tribe's worst habits, dryads are not eager to discuss their primitive beginnings."
"My tribe's worst habit is persistence. They're gaining on us."
"In armor?" Leitara grasped an outcrop, kicked a leg up to straddle it, then knelt on the promontory's edge to look down at the climbers. Though weighted by armor and weapons, they never once slowed their ascent, and by raw perseverence, used the ascent to cut the distance between themselves and their quarry.
"If Elani's important to you, we should hear what they want from us."
"We don't have time, Khyte. We must take our chances."
"As eerie as it is to see mother, father, teacher and employer in unified pursuit, they're not Inglefras. Though vindictive, my wife has a dryad's patience. If my wife is counting the seconds until your extermination, Leitara, she sees your death as so everpresent that its certainty quenches her thirst for vengeance, and she is pleased to wait. Whether we join or avoid them, we can make as much time as we want."
"That's where you're wrong. There's an oasis drifting towards Hravak."
"Drifting? Is that what's in the storms?"
"Yes. I saw it Baugn-back and in miniature through a contraption in Elani's workshop, who's convinced that it's not only your world's destruction, but a weapon dispatched by my people or the giants."
"Destroy my world? Can we stop it?"
"Should we not ask if we should?"
"You hate us that much?"
"Leaving that matter to the side for the moment, let us assume that, short of total destruction, some humans survive. Weeding is required when cultivating a garden; why not when civilizing a world? Think not of love and hate, or good and evil, but of what is best for all. To be fair, if I did not myself feel more for being less, I might say otherwise."
"Have you never felt less for being more? Perhaps it is a human feeling. When I look down at less victorious lives, I cannot help pitying those who have only attempted less from feeling undermined by the envy of their peers, not for fear of failing or lack of talent or genius. The levelling instinct, which tends toward appeasing the average and fitting in with the norm--in your words, what is best for all--shows contempt not only for one's self, but for all of humanity. A just god would populate universes with the withheld contributions of undermined geniuses."
"I agree that gifts differ. Moreover, what of the Cuvaernei? Not only do they not have the spark of the Inamu, the two peoples are as unlike as kiuvathi and Tree-Women. Do we measure humans and beasts by the same standard? Does the virtue of a spider tally in the human world? Spiders do nothing but build webs and forage for their offspring, and we think nothing of destroying their work. Should not the verminous Cuvaerneians, who do not have the merit of a spider, also be uprooted?"
"With this heavy-handed judgment, are you any better than the Cuvaernians, and their cofera and codura?"
As Leitara reflected on this, Khyte continued. "Have you no empathy for their codura, these wild women of Cuvaernei?"
"They deserve to be free. Even teeming things deserve to be free, though their pale lives slink into forgetfulness like the vermin crawling under a stone."
"Who's the ghoul prying under the stone? Are these pale lives anyone's business but their own? Moreover, the Human World is disorganized--we are no threat to anyone but ourselves!"
Leitara took a step back when Khyte took to gesturing wildly with clawing hands to underscore his point. "Remember, this was not my idea. In fact, your anger is so misdirected that I will refrain from indicating your prying ghoul, though it is patently obvious. Perhaps as insurance, or to give incentive for the survivors to organize and become suitable future allies. Perhaps in retribution for some slight you made against her, who knows. As a centuries-old despot lives by vanity, do not be surprised if she's motivated by a spiteful grudge, or an insecurity which seeks to blight your tribal home."
"Why do you say such things, Tree-Woman?"
"Why should I not? As much as your world dismays me, I do not love Inglefras."
"I do. You say these things because you are attracted to me."
Letaira laughed. "That is more ridiculous than you know, meat man."
"Meat man?"
"You took me by surprise. It is a slur from when humans and goblins first traveled to Hravak. Though we initially thought you repellent, when you became captivating and curious we stopped using that term. While I stopped thinking it in my active mind, when I see a human, I think "meat man," before I can stop myself."
"So that's the way it is."
"It is. I could never be attracted to you, Khyte. While I could pretend if necessary, you are my murderer's folly, not my own. Even if our banter was sincere, our desire would have no future as I flower for seven years at best unless Sarin Gelf teaches me to outlive my ephemerality, and your world faces extinction."
"If you prove this, Tree-Woman, you will at least gain an ally, and in thwarting this planet-killing missile, we will provide Hravak the point of unity our enemies seek."
"While I do not doubt the motivation of humans, whether to slay, live, mate, or build their dens, like all animals, their interest only grows so far before dying. Whether your projected human unity finds oblivion in death, forgetfulness, or apathy, it is a foregone conclusion. That said, your tribe is nearly upon us."
As their conversation heated to a simmer, the Drydanans continued their stubborn ascent until less than a hundred feet away, when Khyte and Leitara renewed their hurtling up the cliff by the respective virtues of animal and vegetal muscle. Sometimes Khyte's arms worked so furiously that his legs seemed to dangle, barely scraping the slope, and other times, he leaned into the incline and sprinted upwards, his fingertips only grazing the stones.
Until that moment, Leitara believed animal bodies were machines--brutish engines with furnace appetites consuming food for locomotion. Even meat men were only a shade better, for though they mastered their metabolism, it slaved half their lives to eating and sleeping. Though Tree-Women lived seven years at best, in their near-independence from sleep and food, they crammed in twice the life of a human in that same span. But when she glimpsed in Khyte the beauty of his animal energy, that moment of recognition was engraved as a permanent fixture in her hall of memory.
"Do you see that?"
"You mean the setting Abyss-light?"
"Not that far up. Look to the outcrops."
Though darkness was falling, Leitara dimly saw nimble silhouettes surge over the outcrops. "More Drydanans?"
"No. Hurry!" When Khyte buckled down and hastened his ascent, Leitara was barely able to match his pace, not from exhaustion, but her rising curiosity about the shadows stirring on the promontories.
On a wide ledge sloping steeply upwards, they gazed at the lowest outcrop, from which jutted teeming Baugn, wheezing as they crowded each other excitedly, some rearing back and flailing black, columnar legs to shove others haplessly into downdrafts, in which they swooped back to their swarming perch.
Leitara and Khyte clambered on the outcrop with trepidation and inched toward the shuddering horde. The eight-eyed rings of Baugn eyes were opened wide atop necks taut with expectation. While their anxieties were clouded by the proximity of their fellow beasts, their attentions were focused not on the Abyss, but a little lower, on the oasis glimmering in the crackling clouds as it drooped in its violent orbit. Above the green planetoid, the darkening sky was thick with gliding Baugn.
"Where's Elani?"
"The wood-witch should have waited."
"No. If she headed for the Baugn, she's wise. Those Baugn won't willingly stay agitated for long. They're loath to be crowded, and only heeding a strange compulsion to wait."
"Perhaps they fear this roost will be pulverized by the oasis."
Elani sat on the outcrop, leaning against a rocky spur in the shadow of the mountain. "And their chaotic instincts can't reroute their constant migration. Do they?"
"What?"
"Migrate."
"Either they fly by instinct or at random," said Khyte. "There can be no middle ground."
"What if we're walking on the middle ground?"
"This promontory?"
"No—speaking, thinking. What if the Baugn aren't so different, and following what they think are reasonable paths?"
"Though I'm glad you think more highly of humankind than our friend, comparing us to Baugn honors us and taints the noble world beasts. Human reasoning is usually anything but reasonable, and only rationalization of our basest desires, while the instincts we condemn serve a higher purpose. Rationalization is degenerate, and instinct is evolved."
"A philosopher," snickered Elani, "pouring fire on the flammable spirit of inquiry. I meant only that they have personalities."
"You mean they're people?" asked Leitara. "All of them?"
"How would I know? It's just a thought, and a human one at that."
"I believe it." A smoldering warmth floated on the dark, new voice. "Since people are cows, it stands to reason some livestock could lay claim to a reversal of that transformation."
As Khyte turned his head, he drew his sword with his burned hand, winced at the effort, then passed it to the other hand.
"There you are. I've looked forward to this chat. You can't plant a pit full of heads and back away from that noble calling." The massive speaker seemed broader than he was tall, an effect pronounced by the melon-shaped rotundity protruding from his bouldery muscles, and accented by the breastplate hammered over the bulge and polished until it shone, mirroring the far-off flicker of the crackling storms cradling the looming oasis. The man's paunch was so stretched by gluttony that if he had a navel, it was surely distorted and eaten by that jutting gargoyle.
"Lord Ryggion." Though Khyte smiled, his matter-of-fact tone did not betray happiness, but a grim ambivalence toward this speaker. His eyes flicked to the Drydanan warriors crowding the mountain side of the outcrop. "If you had come any other day, you could not have expected to saddle so many riders."
Leitara whispered to Elani, "don't shape change. They're expert archers."
Elani nodded, then half-turned her head to conceal a whisper. "Let's choose our steeds before their staredown strands us here."
"We are not flying today," said Lord Ryggion. "Nor are you, lad."
"Father." Khyte bowed his head. "Mother." When another rank of warriors joined the Drydanans blocking them from the cliff face, an older pair shouldered through the warriors to stand behind Ryggion, and though they nodded in recognition of Khyte, neither spoke a word.
"You should feel honored, Khyte. There was never such a welcome in our tribe,
that a lord should storm over the land to shower one ingrate with a boon."
"There was no need, Lord Ryggion," said Khyte. "I want no share in your kindness."
"You would not only refuse my outstretched hand, but scorn the gift? Why didn't you cut off that elf's head, Khyte." Though Ryggion's voice descended into gloom, his smile sharpened, and his eyes seemed to prick them where they stood. "Don't be so rude to your doting parents. Won't you introduce your friends?"
"While we exchange pleasantries, the Baugn will fly."
"That means nothing, Khyte. We're descending to our own nests."
"Fly, if you want to live," said Elani.
"Do my ears hear correctly? Did this woman speak unbidden?"
"Pay her no mind, Lord Ryggion. She knows not your ways."
"Your ways too, lad."
"My ways are now so many," said Khyte, "that I would need a map to read them all, if I wasn't happily lost in the journey. But my Lord, the Wood-Witch speaks true."
Leitara kicked him.
"What did you call her?"
"The nickname she inherited from the Cuvaernians for her curious studies in a woodland laboratory. Such as the magical glass by which she observed that." Khyte pointed to the lightning-haloed island buoyed by storm clouds.
"You said Wood-Witch," the Drydanan lord insisted stubbornly. "I don't treat with witches."
"I know, Lord Ryggion. You don't treat with witches, elves, goblins, dryads, or even thoughts of other Worlds, even when this grassy shard cleaves our skies."
"When you speak for your master, young Khyte, you're bound to get things wrong--I would very much like to treat with your Tree-Woman."
"Would you? Then I misspoke twice, not only of your interest in Leitara, but about Elani, who is no witch. I would have called her by name except we are on such familiar terms that we use each others' nicknames."
"What do they call you?" rumbled Lord Ryggion.
Though Khyte furrowed his brow, he nonetheless twisted his moue into a macabre semblance of a smile. "Meat Man."
Lord Ryggion snorted, then turned to face the Tree-Woman. "Leitara, might I indulge your company for a space?"
"You wish me to speak? What of your taboos?"
"Our taboos concern this world. How could they apply to you? Moreover, I invited you to speak, gentle creature."
Khyte laughed uproariously. "You do not know her yet."
Leitara said, "I would consent to your request, but not here."
"My thoughts exactly. We will continue in Drydana."
"Forgive me for being opaque. I meant here in the broader sense, as I am uncomfortable conversing anywhere on Hravak."
Lord Ryggion's face clouded with a rancorous rage. "You slight me."
"I'm being sincere. Your world is not only doomed, it's so doomed that we couldn't make lunch plans without risk of impending annihilation."
Ryggion's eyes contracted into tiny arrow-points, which he darted at the Tree-Woman."Khyte, do you believe her drivel?"
But when some Baugn flapped and fluttered, brushing off the beasts crowding them in flitting into the warm skies, it left gaps, increasing the remnant's wing room, and allowing a larger fold to vault from the outcrop. For fear of being abandoned by the acceleration of this instinctual exodus, Leitara lunged for the third volley of world beasts. As she gripped the graying fur of an ancient Baugn, Elani fell beside her on its broad back, which bucked once as it ascended in a serpentine unfurling of its sinuous limbs and black-furred wings, then darted toward the Abyss.