When Inglefras had suggested they travel by Baugn, Khyte had snorted, rolled over, and overslept until afternoon. He had no time for a three day nostalgia journey, given the many things he could cram into a day, not only his many amusements, but the rich food he consumed in a kind of daily itinerary: frosted kiuvathi milk, a rich concoction crafted by sorcery which had begun as an acquired taste, but had shifted from tolerance to a sweet savor that was the high point of his day; the strange crops of berries, drupes, pomes, and nuts, a motley variety of zesty flesh, smacking with refreshing juice, the tang of citrus, or a piquant crunch, all harvested more for him than hospitality city tourists; and, daintily sweet wines, or beer headed with golden, syrupy foam, distilled by special order for his invigoration.
"Thank you for coming," said the willowy elf.
Too sluggish to sit up and too slow for words, Khyte felt as if his bones had become a soggy substance, weighted down not just by the fat that had bulked his mighty frame, and not only by the vast feast he had inhaled before deigning to accompany his proud wife on the expedition she believed the final flower of her career.
Not that his dryad wife would ever die in his lifetime. While this seed body would become a husk, and he would soothe her final hours as it went to seed, he would shed less tears, having now twice held the thread-like filaments of his dying, unraveling wife as they fed the roots of her Tree-Mother, leaving the dust of the dead Tree-Woman to blow away into the wind. While he knew it was not the end, it still felt like a final request, and grief rippled over him as her beloved face crumpled into nothingness, more formless dust that would undermine his memory of her life. How many times before his love for Inglefras would buckle, burn, and disintigrate?
Love was not the shower of light the Drydanan poets sang it was, but a pulsing shadow, which like a careful heartbeat shepherds its flocking blood, would one day make an end, whether his blood cooled from slaughter or peace.
If he had allowed himself to become fat, it felt instead like his body was sulking, caching his sullen, pent-up feelings--all set ablaze by the sight of his old friend. How often had he need of Frellyx before now.
Even the sight of the Baugn had not stirred him so deeply. And the midnight blue beasts were a nasty, noisome sight, not only frothing like rabid beasts, but their eyes frothed as well, so that the blinded Baugn lumbered woozily around their emerald meadows, all feeling for mating and life's continuation blotted out by the vile disease blighting their frames, cracking their skins, and splotching their wings.
But while he had ridden many Baugn, he only ever had a handful of friends, being born an alien to his tribe. If he stood out in a crowd, his cream white skin also contrasted so sharply with the coppery Drydanans, that he had never had a friend like Frellyx, whose skills were unsurpassable, until Khyte made the elf's swordcraft his own, having fused Iulf's lessons with Alfyrian finesse into an unbeatable, unemulable art. On first meeting, Khyte would beat Frellyx at swordplay only two out of three times, but in mere months, those odds became always.
As Khyte's mind drifted back to the conference at hand, his ears buzzed with Frellyx's droning, and an irritating, indifferent manner that told him at once how much his friend had changed. Once Frellyx would have addressed every spark, every faraway look, in those listening, but now Frellyx's focus had fallen inward, caressing every word with a velvety stroke that sounded like gloating. "They don't come from another place." His tones were calm, despite the outrageous content of what he was about to say. "They come from this place. To be precise, they come from the past of this place. Before the oases of the Abyss were shattered into planetoids, they were a world."
"They." When Huiln leveled a harsh and furrowed stare, as if he could drill through the elf, Khyte saw there was no love lost in the goblin, either. "Just to be clear, you mean the Ebotu."
Frellyx tilted his head and clapped his hands under his chin. "I would be omitting much if I said simply, 'yes.'"
"If you haven't told the whole story, get on with it," growled Eurilda. When she had come shoulder to shoulder with Khyte, he had not recoiled. Despite his misgivings for the sorceress, and her vile misdeeds, a cool and soothing attraction still drew her to himself, as if part of him was still lost in her indefinable personality. And for some reason, it no longer bothered him not to know what was real about Eurilda. Whatever her true form, and whatever varying shape she filled in his memories, the Eurilda he knew and remembered was real. Perhaps it was from watching the extinction of two Inglefrases that had waited on him hand and foot, and dreading the living and dying series of Tree-Women to come, that had made him disenchanted not only by beauty, but by mere reality. If she touched herself up here and there, who did not invent themselves in the Abyss? If her true height and pallor were monstrous, her true feelings had launched her into a persistent torment no mere narcissist would choose, when she might take pleasure from any overpowered or deluded source. With a command of not only strength but illusion, why would she desire Khyte?
Moreover, when Eurilda brushed against Khyte, the part of him that grew bitter with the passing of each of the dryad's mortal shades had gladdened at the flinch on Inglefras's face. When this mirth flowered into a grin, her dark look smoldered, and he backed against Eurilda as if they had never stopped being bosom friends.
"Not having witnessed the entire millenia-spanning story, I can only speculate. Perhaps it began just after the Spider-God stole our worlds. Perhaps it was a thousand years later. But it seems clear that the original inhabitants of this place, these fragments of a sixth world, are also the current inhabitants."
As the import of what Frellyx said settled, Khyte snickered. As the others exchanged puzzled glances, Khyte suppressed his intuition of Frellyx's meaning under a stifled laugh.
If it was true, Khyte had had a long, fruitful relationship with the Ebotu. Accustomed to feel gratitude to, and a weird kinship with, the useful beasts they had become, he felt this affinity brace against his hatred for the Ebotu.
"He's not joking?" Khyte shrugged his shoulders and allowed himself a mirthful snort, which not only summed up the indifference which the once fast friends now showed each other, as well as the ridiculousness of Frellyx's proposed idea.
Huiln shook his head with a wry, skeptical smile. "I think he is. You almost had me there for a minute."
"Is it so hard to accept, when you believe our worlds stolen from a prior universe? Is it so hard to deduce not only that a sixth world fragmented into these drifting oases, but that its inhabitants metamorphosed into bodies more suitable for living in the Abyss?"
"Into Baugn?" Kuilea shouted it.
"I suspected as much." Eurilda shrugged, and lifted her head so high in this arrogant claim that Khyte rolled his eyes, until they darted toward Inglefras, where her unbelieving stare locked with his, spilling over into a sarcastic smile they shared for a moment.
"You're unbelievable," snorted Kuilea. "Why is she here? No one trusts her!"
"It's not a matter of trust," said Frellyx evenly, "or you would not be here. It is a matter not only of life and death, but of existence and nonexistence. If we stand here and do nothing, our worlds could vanish into nothingness. As for the giantess, you need not trust her when her master's geas compels her obedience. While she has no conscience, Otoka's enchanted leash simulates one so sufficiently that you can, for now, put your life in her hands."
"Never," said Inglefras. "Not in this universe or any other." As Khye looked at her, he realized he had stopped believing she was Inglefras. Inglefras was now the one coming next, not this wilting flower, whose fine, crisp outline only simulated health, and whose bright colors had started to shrivel and crinkle around the edge. He looked forward to meeting the next Inglefras. What would she be like? They were all a little different--he already missed how this one cooked with gusto, while the last one not only craved learning weapons, but had the deluded hope she could one day match, in her five years or so of life, Khyte's mastery of the art. To her credit, she had come close, once disarming Khyte with an angry thrust, and once knocking him on his back with a proud sweep of his legs.
"As she's to be your traveling companion, you had best make peace." Frellyx smirked. "Considering your personal history will not yet have been, which, at a past re-decided moment, could easily become will never have been, why not start with a fresh slate? I'm sure both of you appreciate the underlying philosophy."
"Traveling companion? Re-decided moment? Will never have been?" Huiln pulled his helmet off with one hand and ran his head through his stubbled, greasy scalp with the other. "When I call you insane, I'm not just referring to the Alfyrian state of mind. This isn't joining two buildings by the window pane, or uniting parallel foundations by a perspectival trick. This is madness out of scale to any dimension you pretend your damned eyes or wicked mind can lay claim to, Frellyx."
"You've been to Alfyria, goblin." Frellyx wrinkled his nose in disdain and closed his eyes, as if in disbelief. "As you've seen that our world is no trick, your denial of our modes of seeing and being are no longer amusing. I tell you now there are higher beings to whom even history is an illusion, and these beings craft time as they see fit, tying distant moments together not only by a vast web of synchronicity, but weaving these connections into a higher order that seems acausal to our eyes."
"As if Lyspera would give us a lift into the past." Kuilea's eyebrows knit together, but her nostrils flared under wide and incredulous eyes. Khyte could tell: the goblins believed. Not only was Kuilea obviouslt intoxicated by the idea of time travel, but his other faithless friend, her brother,
only pretended scornful disbelief as a haggling trick. What was Huiln after?.
"Hold for a moment," Khyte rumbled. As they turned to him, he furrowed his brow, hoping to draw not only his eyebrows, but the tall tales and insinuations into a single thread even he might spin, or draw it tighter and tighter until it frayed, and he could go back to his warm bed, his dainties and delicacies, and his next Inglefras, already dreaming of him in her seed. This was no bragging ego boost,
as he knew from experience that each new seedling would hatch fresh and chattering, as if it had not only known, but worshipped Khyte all lifelong.
"Pardon me. said Frellyx thinly, when the pause had grown awkward and cumbersome as Khyte's thoughts dwelled on his wife's next avatar. "Did I mishear? You must have meant 'hold for a minute.'"
"It's been longer than that," sighed Huiln. "So long, the suspense died ages ago. I can't wait any longer, not even to hear our dryad king's point of view."
"I'm no dryad king," growled Khyte, "and your tones do not befit allies, whether past, current, or future. I hope all three are true, given you were once my friends. But it is Frellyx's attitude which most concerns me, for having collaborated in the war for the Abyss, and portending to be our guide to the past, his sarcasm calls into question his truth not only in the present moment, but for all time."
"Is this what you would have us hear? Your rancor towards me?"
Khyte scowled. "Why are we here? Even if we stand on a fragment of the Ebotu's ancient birthplace, we are not yet where you want us to be. How do you propose to take us through time?"
Frellyx's eyebrows arched over his ugly titter. "Your tiny minds. They must be slaved to the truth to see it." He glared at Eurilda. "Forgive me. I fear that slight touched you as well, given your thralldom to Otoka." He sneered. "If he never lets you grow up, you will always look up to your master. But can you at least see our way forward?"
"The Doorways, of course."
"Explain. Not for my sake, but for our dim friends."
"We pretend they were always there, because it fits the truth we want to believe. We think them ancient artifacts because of how they are dressed, not understanding that the crumbling stone is an aftershock of extruding through time. Of containing all that instantaneous duration, crushed between eons past and the present age, in one glowing moment."
"Yes, it isn't that they have decayed so much that they are decay, projected through the ages collapsing centuries in an enfolding of instaneity and eternity."
"What do you mean they weren't always there?" grumbled Huiln, even as realization simmered in his scowling eyes. "Do you mean they're not a discovery, but an intrusion on our time? That before the Ebotu sent them, they weren't there, despite the signs of advanced age?"
"It isn't hard to grasp, goblin. While the now of their activating moment stands in the past, that spark burned through thousands of years in one transfixing instant. In the past, they spark to life; through the centuries, they have existed; in the present, they crumble. It looks and ages just like anything else extended in time, regardless of whether it was or wasn't there a moment ago. "
"That's impossible. If it's not bad science, it's bad philosophy. The past has no effect on the future."
"It's all so many cobwebs." With a weary wave of his hand, Frellyx swept aside Huiln's reasonable objections. "Past, present and future are not unbreakable pillars supporting the whole of reality, but ephemeral membranes as skinny as our meager conceptions that mirror the paltry sliver the unintelligent think of as reality." He sighed. "Call it only experience. Your reality will be a stumbling block for our enterprise."
"You might as well say it all happens at once!" shouted Kuilea.
"Very good," said Frellyx. "If not quite true, it shows you have a head for this."
"Prove it," said Khyte.
Frellyx smiled a drowsy, catlike smile. "Even after going there and coming back, it will remain a theory. Will that suffice?"
"Prove it to me, Frellyx. The Five Worlds can go on as they are."
"That's fine for him," said Huiln. "But why should we care? Because Baugn are dying?"
"Ultimately, all Baugn will die. If my theory is correct, the Ebotu brought this disease from the past."
When Eurilda cackled, the others looked at her, aside from Frellyx, who aimed his eyes heavenward as if he could not be bothered to spare her a glance. "They're slaughtering their descendants."
"They have diverged too much to think of it as genocide of their own kind," said Frellyx, "but I concede your point, Eurilda."
"It would be a shame to lose the Baugn. But they're hardly necessary." But a doubtful expression filled Kuilea's face as she turned to Khyte. "What? What's that look?"
"While we could dispense with their traveling services now," Huiln interjected, "the Five Worlds were shaped by their constant migration, as much plant life we think native to our worlds came from seeds lodged in Baugn fur. While we must save the Baugn, our conundrum is this: to preserve our current worlds intact, their ancestors must be vanquished, for even if they had noble designs for our time, in emigrating to the here and now, they will never have evolved into Baugn."
"Really?" Frellyx simpered, "I hadn't thought of that."
"Don't fall into his word traps, Huiln," rumbled Khyte. "Not only did Frellyx already say it isn't that simple, but even I can see that any causes and effects we see, being ourselves products of accumulated time, must be far from right."
"What's the alternative?" Huiln looked less annoyed than amused. "You mean we might take a jaunt back in time, kill the Baugn's ancestors, and find them still waiting here when we get back?"
"While I mean everything I say," sighed Khyte, "all I see are flapping lips. If you meant to do anything, Frellyx, do it now. Save me from tiresome elves and goblins."
"While we're far from then, we're already here." Speaking a word, and brushing his hand side to side, Frellyx issued an enchanted breeze which swept aside leaves and twigs and parted long grasses, revealing what at first seemed a pool sparking from tiny ripples. While its stony frame had cracked and toppled, and lay in four large fragments, the blue gyre of this fallen Doorway still scintillated and twirled, drawn tighter like a web.
"Fascinating," said Huiln. "The effects of time are clearly visible, but if I stepped into the past, and crushed it with a sledgehammer, the Doorway would vanish, like the flickering shadow of a candle dying in its own wax. I understand what happens to the thing, but what about its aging? If entropy wasn't acting on this for a thousand years, what was it acting upon?"
"Before he waxes eloquent on whether or not it will fall, can we take steps to shut him up?" Eurilda seethed.
"Me?" said Huiln. "I don't know why you haven't jumped in. Perhaps love really binds you to that old wizard."
"What do you mean?"
"What is a geas, or any compulsion, but forced causality? Step through, and you break the link."
No sooner had Huiln said it, than, with an ear to ear grin, Eurilda bolted for the fallen Doorway, plunging into its blue gyre.
"Stop!" the gaunt elf screeched too late, but as the blue fire furled up, the giantess vanished in its sparking fumes and silvery gray flares. When Frellyx turned on Huiln, his eyes wide and livid with rage, the goblin seized the lapels of the elf's cloak and dragged him down to face level.
The goblin's thin smile stretched into a diabolical grin. "Whatever you were about to shout to the hills you can say to my face."
When Frellyx clapped his hands under the goblin's chin, the deafening clangor blasted Huiln screeching into Kuilea. Khyte's hands went to his ears, but when the ringing stopped, he lowered his hands, unclenched his eyes, and saw that everyone else had taken a few steps back from the sorcerer,
aside from Huiln, who had dropped to his knees and ground the heels of his palms into his ears.
"Why did you choose us, Frellyx?" asked Khyte. "If we quicken violence in you so readily, why choose us?"
The elf looked at him with a nonplussed expression. "Should we not wait on the goblin before discussing what concerns him?"
"It isn't like we're jumping into the past sight unseen. Answer my question."
"Are you not great heroes? The best your races have to offer?"
"Ten years ago I might have agreed, if only out of bluster and camraderie, but now that sounds like wishful thinking."
"When wishful thinking bears no fruit, it is only nostalgia. It's not too late to lead your better life, Khyte."
"I might take you up on that, Frellyx. Only one thought holds me back."
"Yes?"
"Why are you doing this? It's unlike you."
"If it is uncharacteristic for me to care what befalls the Five Worlds, or even the world currently under my feet, I have schemed far too long for time traveling interlopers to lob in, exercise the power of afterthought, and claim my victories."
"How will we get back, having ensured they can't make the trip?" Kuilea eyed Frellx so suspiciously that she certainly had formed her own conclusions; once they had served his purposes as muscle, Frellyx would care less if he stranded them in the past.
"A valid concern." Frellyx nodded in such sage agreement that Khyte wanted to punch his face. "Here's another--what will we do when they come in force? How will we fare against beings capable of constructing the Doorways?"
Khyte laughed. "The Ebotu I met weren't capable of stringing thoughts together, let alone building this network of portals."
"Neither have they inspired me with any regard for their intelligence. And yet, the fact remains." He tipped one hand toward the smoldering gray gyre. "While we no longer have time to speculate, with your lover thrown into the past, these may only be a minion race."
"More likely a caste system," muttered Huiln.
"If we allow that castes are subraces, I fail to see the distinction."
"Are you sure you're not a giant?" grumbled Huiln.
"None of us are so bold as a giant," said Kuilea, "as she is there, and we are yet here. While I doubt we should go, and I do not trust him, it seems we must, if only to gather intelligence on the Ebotu."
"How pessimistic," said Frellyx.
"Surely us five cannot defeat an empire as vast as their ancient network of Doorways suggests."
"I wasn't arguing the point, only thinking how glad I was to have two goblins along, to bring down our spirits to a tolerable prudence."
Huiln roared, "as if! Goblins know how to live!"
"You barely know how to see."
"What of the other senses? I'll match you sense for sense. Have you tasted elven food? It's not possible, because elves have no taste! Pfaugh!"
"Ooh! That stench!" When Kuilea waved a hand under her nose, the others hooted and hollered, and while an elf's face cannot so easily redden, their feelings being hidden, egglike, in their mind, so far from the fringe of their instincts, Khyte could tell by subtler signs, such as the abrupt inhalation which made the tall elf seem even more erect, if not more upright, seeing that he leaned as far back as a rearing beast of war. Khyte watched his old friend's hands warily, ready to match blade for blade. Had living with the giants changed Frellyx? Surely he would not be so so foolhardy as to draw his weapon here.
While Kuilea did not know Frellyx, she did know Khyte, and seeing his wary eyes bear down on Frellyx, and his flexing fingers near his weapon, she smiled and laughed. "I didn't mean elvish food. Don't you smell that?"
It must have crept up on them, mused Khyte. Until she pointed it out, he hadn't noticed the elusive stench, which increased its taint every moment until it soaked the air they breathed, like putrifying carrion, or the foul panting of a hound that had fed on it.
As Khyte inched nearer the Doorway, the stench increased. Having covered his nose and mouth with his sleeve, his shout was muffled: "something comes through."
The first hairy leg issued from the blue gyre with an arcing spark, then six more flashed up, dragging a sleek, white-haired beast above the glinting portal. When the golden beak embedded in its belly nabbed Khyte, in a heartbeat, it hoisted him so high his eyes blurred and his pulse hammered.
Flicking two arrows from her bow, Kuilea's spot-on aim pierced two vaguely eye-shaped spots on its head, just part of a constellation of dark dots speckling a head so obscured by hair that it looked like its fur not only grew through, but followed the pattern. When it surged through them, it blasted back Frellyx and Huiln, then swayed side to side to dislodge Eurilda, who had shrunk to a small, cat-like creature, and clawed its way up a hairy leg so ferociously that it flinched and dropped Khyte, who a half-second later, had hurtled onto its back in one muscular pounce.
While Khyte had the power for this leap, a power assisted by the lightness of Xulcia, the Night Land, he still thought of himself as lighter and fitter than he was, and he was nearly too substantial for this maneuver, as his unwieldy bulk nearly tipped him over its other side. Halting this downward plunge by wringing his hands in its thick, ropy mane--each bolt of the tight-wound hair nearly the width of his wrist--he pulled back, applying a grunting, unrelenting force until the creature staggered, then crashed in the tall, snapping grasses.
As Huiln and Frellyx stepped forward with blades drawn, Khyte stepped down from the shuddering beast, waved them off with one hand, and gently tugged and tugged with the other until it laid down on its side. "Shh! It's a tame beast."
"Why is it so familiar?" asked Kuilea.
"Look closer." If Huiln was not stopped cold by fear, he nonetheless approached with an ashen face, stopped a good fifteen feet away, then bowed his head inch by inch as his condescending tone dropped to a whisper. "Closer still."
"Oh." Kuilea retched a little as she backed into Huiln. "It's like a monstrous Baugn."
"What?" snickered Eurilda. "It's nothing of the sort. The symmetry is all wrong. This is some abomination of the past, perhaps a creation of the Ebotu."
"While all things aspire toward perfection, even the best instincts and intentions have false starts or nearsighted vision." Frellyx eyed her with a snide, sidelong look. "Who's to say whether this beast isn't some offshoot of the Baugn, now long extinct? Perhaps, as you suggest, bred and tamed to serve the purposes of the Ebotu."
"At least one thing he says is true," said Khyte. "Unlike the Baugn, this is a tame beast."
"How can you tell, Khyte?" asked Huiln.
"Nature, like fortune, favors the bold lines of the beautiful; any brute this ugly had a guiding hand."
"Then they know we're here," said Eurilda. "Although dead and gone for centuries, they see us now, even then, and the ages shift underfoot as we stand here talking about it."
"Where's the rider?" asked Huiln.
"Maybe it's like a war hound."
"So easily subdued?"
"Easy?" Khyte rolled his eyes. "I'd like to see you do it."
"Let me guess--you want us to follow it through, to wherever it came from?"
"We could ride it. A beast may love its master's scent, but the weight of a rider drives it more. It will be hard pressed to turn on us so long as we ride it."
Having wrangled the white-furred, lopsided creature back to its clawed feet, Khyte mounted behind its long, sinuous neck, then reached down a hand to Kuilea. When she snorted and climbed up herself, he extended it to Eurilda, who only rolled her eyes and clambered atop its back, mounting just behind Khyte. Inglefras accepted his outstetched hand with a cold, demure smile, like two ice cubes fused together.
When Frellyx and Huiln had mounted, Khyte steered the beast by trial and error, and seeing that the beast liked to skitter along diagonals, sent it slantwise until they tumbled through the Doorway.
Unlike his first Doorway journey, this ancient gateway pulled the cold and clammy moment
until his skin felt not only flushed and chilled--his hairs standing so rigid atop goosepimples it was as if they tiptoed on eggshells--but stretched thin, his throbbing pulse so prolonged that it seemed his next heartbeat would never hammer, and his held breath became a protracted agony, not from needing to breathe, but from the suspense of holding it in, until he squirmed with the pent-up expectation that this void should receive his exhalation, despite there being neither space nor time to contain even a single breath. In that trapped moment, Khyte felt like an insect, but worse, for even a fly in amber or a moth in a cocoon does not know the dark eternity enfolding it. Better a body in a grave than this unending emptiness; better death than this deadness.
Then the inrush of air, the flash of gyring gray twirling him from the beast's back to flail at wind, find a staggered footing, and stumble headlong through gigantic fronds laden with cones fragrant of bitter mint, until he fell to his knees, crunching grass and grinding pebbles.
Rising to his feet, Khyte drew back by slow backwards steps and brushed through the strange, surrounding groves of tripartite trees--each trunk diverging sharply into slanting, jutting canopies jangly with serrated, scoop-shaped leaves and a violet, pendulous, pepper-shaped fruit as long as a boot--to find the others likewise shaken from the beast's back, in a jumble of bush, branch, elf, goblin, and---where was the giant? Where was Eurilda?
They were tangled not far from the grisly white Baugn-beast, which had pitched forward and jarred its massive eight-eyed head on the hard soil where unknown letters burned a circle around the Doorway, now no longer ancient stone, but smooth and unbowed by age.
What stood beside it was stranger; at once familiar and out of place, recognition slashed this figure from the blurry backdrop, still whirling from the shock of his woozy arrival, and brought it so distinct into the foreground that he could not see anything else, not think of anything else, but this unexpected person. If his focus had so crystallized this figure in his dazed eyesight that only it was clear and distinct in a whirling jungle of shadows, he could distinguish nothing about them but their familiarity.
If he knew this being better than any other, having known them so many ways, not only in deals made between patron and agent, but in intimate moments, and secrets shared under two different names, this suspended moment of anguish was even worse than his stretched instant in the Doorway,
being unable to categorize this figure with the most basic facts: male or female; singular or plural; loathed or beloved? His confused thoughts couldn't decide on a pronoun, as this being had been, and was now, at once he, she, and they. After all, there were now two of them in sight. A hundred years or more of living under two different identities and histories had made the one stirring under the weight of two groggy goblins the Pretender Queen of the Dryad World, while the other, flanking the Doorway, was an entirely different individual. Not that this other was an Inglefras; that would have made this moment only slightly surprising, as his wife was prone to subterfuge and double-dealing; no, this interloper, who had somehow slipped through the centuries before they did, was Sarin Gelf.
A Sarin Gelf. Unlike Sarin himself, or his counterpart Garin, this younger Sarin was so androgynous as to seem sexless, an indeterminacy of gender which rendered them no less beautiful,
and no less dangerous, being firm with vegetal muscle. Not that this Sarin would need to lift a finger,
given the muscle at their back: dozens of people armed with spears, no less deadly sharp for their primitive construction from wood and stone. Humans from the look of them, although what skin--utterly naked skin, aside from loincloths and the extraordinarily long hair that, in dangling here, there, and everywhere, didn't obscure so much as call attention to their nude attributes--wasn't obscured by deep-dyed tattoes, was so smeared in bright green, blue, and violet warpaint that they looked like garish fertility statues. Many of the chanting, ranting, painted humans were visibly aroused: the women with fattened aureoles and the men with lengthened, protruding members.
"Sarin," Khyte called. "Well met."
"We were never well met, and hence never well acquainted--and, it goes without saying, never good friends." Sarin Gelf's face became placid. "All of which is only speculation from this ancient perspective."
"You mean it hasn't happened yet."
"Why contradict your personal history? There's no disputing your past happened, when here you are. However, from where we stand now, our stony past is the future's clay. To our ancestors, we're at best nothing but possibilities."
"Well said," said Huiln. "What are your possibilities, I wonder?"
"You mean my intentions? That depends. Are you here for a visit? I'm happy to entertain. In fact, I'd like to extend your visit for as long as possible. Or are you here to meddle in my story?"
"Your story?"
"Did you think you were the hero of the piece, Khyte?" Sarin's face drew into a scornful arrow, a pent-up, wrinkled nose and brow that looked like it might pierce Khyte, cobra quick. "In the first place, you were my pawn; in the second place, you were Otoka's unwitting minion; and in the third place, you were Eurilda's dupe." Here the dryad made a show of glancing around at those in attendance. "Hasn't everyone here had a hand in manipulating you, old friend? Even with Frellyx, you were less the protege you thought you were, and more of a jester; good reflexes and swordcraft have never made you less of a fool. We've all had a hand in shaping this..." With a contemptuous look, he waved from Khyte's chubby head down to his corpulent middle. "...this majestic idiot, who fell in love with a seed."
"Not me," grumbled Kuilea.
"What?" Silence grew, and his condescending, magnanimous smile broadened as he beckoned to Kuilea. "Please explain."
"I never forced my brother into anything." With a black smile, and a flaring twist of her upper lip that made her face even uglier, Kuilea's hand fluttered even faster than the arrows that darted toward Sarin Gelf, one gouging his vegetal eyeball deep, and the other planting bright blue feathers in his neck, not that this spontaneous efflorescence of arrow was as colorful or decorous as the blossoms adorning the dying dryad seed.
As Sarin collapsed, he shuddered, wilted, then shriveled, dissolving into floral fibers, petals, and its blue robe, an efflorescence which had grown around him, marking Sarin as a royal dryad, and even these heaped cast-offs soon dissolved into a thick, pollen-like dust.
Khyte was now numb to the death of dryads. On Ielnarona, they planted, flowered, seeded, wilted, and died so fast, that he had become desensitized to their entire life cycle. They were simply faces in a living history. Even those dryads he considered close friends he did not allow so close as to feel their demise as something shriveling in his own soul. As his shadow was already stuffed with dead ancestors, he had no room to cram in a bouquet of dead dryads.
But he still half-thought of Sarin as human, having known him not as an iconoclast dryad, but a sometime employer, a patron who sent him on quests founded not only in aimless rumor but lucrative fact.
While Sarin had made enough mistakes that Khyte sneered whenever he saw him, he had also made Khyte enough money that the very same sight of the old fence lightened his step and put a twinkle in his eye. Although Sarin had set himself up as their adversary in this strange land, and had to die, Khyte had such mixed feelings about it that it colored his thoughts on dryads. The death of a dryad had not so affected him since the death of his first Inglefras, and while he didn't break down sobbing like he did then, he snatched Kuilea's bow, scowled, and tossed it into the bushes.
Then the garishly painted tribe swarmed so fast, they were like a colorful spray, leaving brightly dyed handprints of green, turquoise and violet. Huiln and Kuilea's arms were bound to a long staff and yoked together. Inglefras and Frellyx they treated with especial scorn, binding their limbs tightly and hoisting them aloft like trophy pigs, but Khyte they treated with special care, only prodding him ahead with their spears. If they knew who he was, they should have been better warned, he thought.
Eurilda, however, they worshiped. Having knelt then prostrated, so that their foreheads brushed the grass, they repeated the same gibberish over and over, begging her to lead.
"Have you been here before?" said Khyte.
"Of course not, you idiot. My only deja vu was when Kuilea shot that old crone, as I've crushed more than a few Inglefrases."
"Then they mean to do you honor. We won't get anywhere unless you play along."
Eurilda shrugged her shoulders, crooked her finger to the waiting tribe, and. grudgingly stepped into the lead, where she proceeded cautiously until they thumped the ground. When she turned with a scowling glare, they impassively pointed out the right direction.
"Not the same," grumbled Inglefras as she writhed on the long pole.
"Do you mean Sarin? Not liking either of you, It's all the same to me, but his whole claim to being was that he wasn't you," said Huiln.
"Always arguing," seethed Eurilda. "If I concede that you know more than me, will you grant me the pleasure of holding your tongue for the rest of our acquaintance?"
"Giok klikgu vol portu. Galir klikgu vol sanis."
"I know your stupid language, and I've reluctantly read Luenara. 'The premise of rudeness is noise. The answer of rudeness is silence.'"
Kuilea grunted. "Your literal translation is too prosaic. I would render it, "rudeness begins in noise and dies in silence."
"That's quite a liberty," said Eurilda. "Changing 'answer' to 'die.'"
"Not as much of a liberty as rewriting a poem as prose."
"Don't get me wrong, goblin. I'm not complaining, just enjoying that liberty you mentioned." As they trekked through the wind-blown tripod trees, billowing tumbleweed with wire-sharp branches buffeted, scratched, and scraped them until their captors took pity, and unraveled the bobbing, tangled weeds with a hook-like snag of their crooked spearpoints.
This eerie, alien duel of painted primitives versus thorny spheres continued as they crossed the clearing into the fringe of a gigantic forest, each tree a vaulting titan with huge boughs wider than the tallest trees of Hravak. Where the boles were sheared or snapped by storms, age, or the absurd weight these branches reached, thousands of rings radiated to a thick core, white as clouds. While they could stoop under the lowest branches, the blowing tumbleweeds glanced off the massive trunks to lodge in roots or grasses until only a stubborn few bounded in their wake.
Eurilda stepped toward the sound of a rushing stream, only to be tapped on the shoulder by the butt of a hook-axe. Livid, she turned on their bowed, impassive faces, kneeling in one obeisant, painted mass, then took a gingerly step back, backing into a cool tree trunk so papery that it dotted her robes with twisted scraps and crumbled away on her hands, which had grasped its bark by reflex.
When the painted warriors darted up, Khyte saw, too late, the sacrilege Eurilda had unwittingly committed, and as he dropped to a crouch, taking up a fallen splinter longer, thicker, and stouter than any Drydanan sword--two swung their hook-axes, hooking the shoulders of Eurilda's robe, and dragging her far from the tree.
As always, the transformation was too staggering to be shocking, not only draining all thought of action in the dizzy spin of fear, but flooding any impulsive reaction with the sudden, overpowering expanse of her awful presence, as the giantess swelled to her true shape, overshadowed the painted mass to deeper, darker hues, and bellowed, sweeping five aside with the brush of a hand that snapped both hook-axes and their bony wielders like a pile of crackling kindling.
Despite mushrooming to her true, monstrous self, what quieted Khyte was the brush of the enormous branches looming above, which descended in a way much too subtle and directed to be anything but willed action, and the face that shivered in the bark, awakened by the death groans of painted savages. Green, glassy eyes peered cruelly through knotty holes.
"Eurilda, no!" No one budged in the frozen moment, as if his yell hadn't pierced the fearful silence.
When one branch settled before Eurilda, walling her off from the tattooed tribe, the ground shuddered, but it was the other branch that made Khyte shudder, as it dipped ever so gently, brushing Eurilda's shoulder. Eurilda turned to behold it, then cringed in a backward creep, fearing what was before her more than the hook-axes.
For before them was rooted another tree; while modest compared to the titanic trees of these ancient groves, it would have been magnificent on any other world, especially given what flowered high above on its tapering stalk: the face of Sarin Gelf.