The Companions

  I rose, careful to make no sound, crouching low as I went to the ledge and looked down. There at the center of the pave, staring at the erect crystal and the surrounding trees were a company of…lizards? Alligators? No. Of course not. Derac! Erect, but with sizable tails they used as props when they stood, as balances when they moved at any speed. Knobby-skinned. Jaws protruding under sizable snouts. A forehead of clustered eyes, three horns sprouting below them. Fangs, yes, their glitter visible even from this distance. They were also heavily armed and armored. I couldn’t tell whether the armor was natural or manufactured, but the weapons were large and complicated-looking.

  I crept back, put my hand over Gavi’s mouth, and shook her slightly. She came awake without a sound, her face crumpling at the odor. “Wha?” she started to ask, but I muffled her as I whispered into her ear. She rose, and the two of us woke Ornel and Sybil.

  “We should get out of here,” Ornel whispered, when he had had a look below.

  I shook my head at him, putting my lips near his ear. “We don’t know how many there are, or where they are. We’re probably safer here than we would be trying to get away.”

  Gavi nodded in agreement. “We should be very quiet,” she murmured.

  “Where are the dogs?” asked Sybil. “Where’s Gixit?”

  “Gixit was with Scramble,” I said. “I imagine the smell woke the dogs, and they’ve all gone into the forest. It would be natural for them to do that. Probably Gixit is still with them.”

  We stretched out on the ledge, pillowing our chins on our arms to keep watch on what went on below. More Derac came down from the northern rim of the bowl, and more yet. After I had counted two hundred and there was no diminution of the flow, I gave up the count.

  “Where were they headed?” Gavi whispered.

  “Gainor thought they’d come to the installation east of the lake. He was wrong.”

  “A thousand of our people are coming here,” Gavi persisted. “They need to be warned. I’m in armor. I can go…”

  “No,” I said. “Gavi, there’s been a huge buildup of the Derac forces. They’re probably scattered all through the forest along the lake, maybe on both sides. You don’t know where your people are. Won’t they have scouts out?”

  She shrugged, her hands struggling with one another. “I don’t know. Why would they…”

  “I can go,” said the small grove of trees that stood beside us on the ledge. It looked so natural there that I had quite forgotten what it was. The willog!

  “These toothy ones will not even pay attention to me,” it said, “and I have friends in the area.”

  “Please don’t talk,” I said. “Or sing. Or hum.”

  “You don’t want me to have any fun,” it said in an accusing voice.

  “I don’t want you to be chopped up for firewood,” I said. “Those lizards are carrying axes, among other things.”

  “I was making joke,” said the willog, in a slightly offended tone. “Of course I see they have axes. My eyesight is marvelous, fabulous, spectacular…ah, that is almost pun! My sight is better than yours. I have human eyes, also mouse eyes, crab eyes, some bird eyes. Oh, how wonderful to have eyes!”

  At the threat of its becoming rapturous once more, I shushed it with a final: “Please, don’t attract attention, or we may all end up dead.”

  One of its eyes zoomed toward my cheek, fluttered lashes against it in a butterfly kiss, then retreated as the willog trundled away through the stones. I dug my link out of my pack and attempted to reach Gainor. Though I keyed the link several times, I couldn’t get through. Ornel was watching me, nodding as though he had foreseen the problem I was having. “The radiation from down there,” he said. “It may foul up any attempts at communication.”

  “It has to be biological,” I complained. “Not electromagnetic.”

  “You’re assuming the two are exclusive,” he said. “It could be biological and electromagnetic. We’ve encountered a good many such. There’s a kind of fish on Thorgov III that…”

  “Not now,” said Sybil. “It doesn’t matter what the effect is, we can’t link outside, and linking outside is the only way we have to get some help.”

  “They’ll leave,” said Ornel. “If we just stay quiet and don’t attract their attention.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “The people from Day and Night Mountains are approaching from the south and north. No matter which direction the Derac go off in, they’re likely to encounter one or the other. That’s why the willog went northward, to warn the Night Mountain people.”

  “Since the Derac came from the north, the southern way is probably clear,” Gavi said. “I’ll go that way.”

  She stood up and reached for her helmet, readying to go, when we all heard a scrabbling from the rocky slope we had ascended earlier. Gavi disappeared into a crack between two stones, the rest of us followed suit, along with our packs and sleeping mats. We had built no fire, so there was nothing to say we had been here, if whoever…

  Whoever was the Derac. Some ten or a dozen of them, filtering in through the cracks in the rim wall, going to the edge to stare down and bellow at their fellows in the battleground. I wished I had one of Paul’s lingui-putes. I would have loved to know what they were saying to one another. About half the group went back the way they had come, but six of them stayed where they were, poised at the rim, occasionally turning to left and right to look out over the forest north and south, as though they had been posted as sentinels.

  My narrow crevice had no escape route. It made a nicely angled bend, one large enough to hide me completely, but there was no opening through the rock behind me, and I was too close to the Derac to get out without their seeing me. Peeking around the corner, at the stones opposite me, I saw Ornel slide out of concealment and fade back into a large crack toward the west. A little later, I saw a suspiciously crablike creature move in the same direction. That left Sybil and me. If Ornel got far enough away, he could link ESC on the plateau. If Gavi got away, she could warn the people coming from the south. All Sybil and I had to do was stay put, if I could keep my mind on that fact instead of the confused swirl it was in at the moment!

  Scramble hadn’t wakened me, hadn’t warned me! None of the dogs had warned any of us! I had rather depended on them to do that. Being deserted by Ornel and Gavi left me feeling angry and insecure, but Scramble’s leaving me was like being wounded! I would never have thought she could do that. Not if she had a choice. Well, she couldn’t abandon me, so she’d had no choice. She’d been lured away somewhere, somehow. Probably by Behemoth. When we came, I’d thought we were in this together, that we were agreed on what our aims were, and all of us were hoping for the same ends. Perhaps that had only been my assumption. Behemoth had never said in so many words that he approved of our plans. And he had never said he would not make plans of his own…

  I reminded myself that the puppies were safe. Clare would know what to do for them. Probably the dogs were safe as well, and they knew where the floater was if they needed to get to the plateau. Adam could fly it if he decided to stop being a dog. Unless, for some reason, Behemoth wouldn’t let him stop being a dog.

  The faint moonlight faded to the west. The blue glow from the moss below was also fading. Along the eastern horizon, a pale greenish line widened like a window being opened. Dawn wasn’t far off. I thought it probable that when daylight came, the Derac would continue on their way south, then Sybil and I could escape.

  It wasn’t to happen. Voices came clearly through the quiet air, people, talking, singing, making a racket. At first I thought it was only from the north I heard them, but it was soon evident that the sound was coming from both directions. The sentinels at the ledge stood up, peering in both directions, then looked down as they made wide arm gestures. Evidently they received silent instructions in return, for they dropped among the stones, weapons at the ready. Now, for a moment at least, they could not see me, and I slipped out of the crack and back among the stones tow
ard the slope. Sybil saw me go by and came after me, a bit wild-eyed, but quietly enough that they did not hear us. We got as far as the back edge of the rim rock, where the downward slope began, when all hell broke loose behind us. Weapons began firing, people were yelling, the Derac were roaring and coughing, and we stepped out onto the hill to confront half a dozen more Derac coming up the hill at a dead run, jaws agape and slavering.

  I have no idea what made me put my hand in my pocket. I didn’t consciously reach for anything. I had no picture in my mind. My hand just went there, closed around the vial of STOP that I have carried for years, thumbed up the cover, and as the Derac reached us, stretched out my right arm and spun to the left, throwing an arc of the stuff outward in their faces.

  They were moving so fast that they ran over us, carrying us down with them. Some of the stuff got from them onto Sybil. They were choking, she was choking, the thrashing body on top of me was beating me this way and that as it struggled to breathe. I managed to turn half on my side and flip the vial over. Sybil’s face was not far from me, under another Derac body. The antidote is a spray, luckily, and it reached her agonized face. She breathed in, then began gasping, little, tortured gasps. I sprayed her again, this time murmuring, “Play dead, Sybil. Lie quiet and play dead!”

  I didn’t realize the Derac we’d left up on the ledge were joining their kin, but they were on top of us in moments. I shut my eyes and played dead, the vial shoved under my body. The dead Derac on top of me was heaved up, then dropped. Through slitted eyelids I saw the one on top of Sybil also heaved up, then dropped. A burst of babble came from the uphill contingent as I was heaved over a leathery shoulder and carried off, able to see only briefly that Sybil remained where she was. Then my carrier went so quickly around a stone that my head swung against it with a mind-stopping thonk, and that was the last I knew for some time.

  When I came to, more or less, I was lying in the middle of the saucer, to the south of the column and not far from it. The sky was light, but the sun had not yet risen. I didn’t move. There were a dozen or so other bodies around me, most of them in crab armor. One of them might have been Gavi, but I couldn’t see the faces. The Derac, such of them as I could see, lay at the rim of the saucer with tails stretched behind them and weapons pointed outward, a fringe almost as fractally regular as the trees above them. I moved my head very, very slowly, to see if there was a guard nearby. Not that it made any difference. The cordon of Derac at the rim was quite sufficient to keep me from going anywhere. Seeing no one on guard duty, I crept to the closest body and put my fingers to the neck of it, pushing them under the beetle helmet. No pulse. I tried again, and again, finally finding one faint pulse among them. So. Perhaps we were considered dead and had been laid aside for supper.

  I turned over slowly, looking upward along the cliff to the ledge we had been occupying. It was a considerable distance, and I couldn’t make out any details. I swiveled my eyes toward a faint sound and confronted the monocular lens of an ESC surveillance fish. ESC might be watching, but more likely the output from this fish was merely being recorded to be scanned at some later time. I made the ESC “help” signal that Gainor had taught me years ago, and the thing came down, near my face. “Emergency,” I said. “Top priority. Get this entire scene to Gainor Brandt.” It lifted, did a complete turn, recording everything around the rim, then zoomed off toward the north.

  When it left, I was lying on my back, looking almost straight up at the top of the pillar, where the “key” was, by then close enough to be seen clearly. As I had thought, it was sizable and shaped more like a medallion than a key, a medallion bearing a symbol or picture that was startlingly familiar to me, though it took a moment to figure out where I had seen it before. Fuzzy thoughts came and went, my mind dealing them out like a hand of cards. This one? No? Then this one?

  It finally came to me: I’d seen this same glyph among Matty’s notes for Lipkin Symphony no. 7, third movement, “The Ancient Wall.” A heavy, square outline with rounded corners. Inside that, a stylized image of a Martian and his dog, a dog that looked a lot like Behemoth. The resemblance was in the way the head and ears were held, the angle of the tail, the shape of the muzzle, the comparative size of the two figures. Though greatly foreshortened by the angle I was seeing it from, it was perfectly recognizable in both senses: as a copy of a Martian glyph and as Behemoth himself.

  I was stewing away at some web of correlation, something to do with Zhaar technology having been used on the dogs and the trainers, and the Zhaar seals in the Martian cavern, and the translations that Matty had paid for…I couldn’t make it all add up to anything. “Fanciful impressions allowed to take precedence in the absence of hard evidence.” That was what Gainor would call it, but then, I’d had a bang on the head, and it hurt abominably. One or several Derac bellowed into the surrounding forest, receiving no answer. Why were they just lying there?

  I fixed my eyes on their tails and tried to count one quarter of the circle. I started over about five times, but eventually counted 150, more or less. Which meant there were six hundred or so all the way around. Which meant…the Derac were outnumbered! They hadn’t known about a thousand warriors from each Mountain. They’d come to take out a few people at the ESC installation and only forty-seven at PPI. They’d managed to kill a few scouts from one Mountain or the other, before the full armies arrived and what? Surrounded them? It certainly looked like it.

  A faint whine. The fish was back. It zoomed down near me once more, and I heard a scratchy voice say, “Play dead, Jewel. We’ll be there shortly.” Gainor, probably. I let my eyes almost close and concentrated on the headache. Sometimes I could make pain go away just by thinking my way to its source, which in this case was at one side of the back of my head where it and the rock had briefly collided.

  I was looking sideways at nothing through slitted lids when I noticed a change in the fringe of trees around the rim. They had been symmetrical before, but now each tree was lopsided, as if it had lowered its right side. Which it had done! Each tree was lowering several branches from among the foliage above, lengthy, ropy extensions, with no foliage, like whips. The tips of them came down, and down, alongside each Derac, then…where? All at once, the branches drew tight, snapped upward, and there were the Derac, every blessed one of them suspended by his neck.

  The trees hadn’t been just trees! They’d been willogs! Walking Sunshine had said it had “friends” in the area. Even so, the lizards weren’t easy to kill. Their huge, muscular tails thrashed wildly, whipping at the tree trunks. Their clawed arms and legs raked the bark until it shredded. Other whip-thin branches snaked out and caught arms and legs, to hold them fast. Here and there, bodies went limp as a roar of human voices came from beyond the rim, and in a moment there were human figures among the trees, a full circle of them around the battleground, many of them busy stabbing at the pendant bodies of the Derac. One of them, in full crab armor, without hesitation started a run down into the saucer. Gavi, no doubt. And where were the others? Where were the dogs?

  Dreamily, I noticed that the northern group of warriors carried flags of black bearing a green moon. The southern group carried yellow flags with green trees. Both groups wore small flags of the same colors on their helmets, and they intermixed and moved quite amicably together as they finished off the Derac and came down into the battleground, some of them paying more attention to the surroundings than to anything else. First-time warriors, I thought. Those who hadn’t seen the battleground before.

  The forerunner had been Gavi. She reached me, took off her helmet, and knelt beside me. “Are you being badly hurt?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

  “I got a bash on the head,” I answered. “I’m not dying, but my head hurts.”

  She felt of my head, reacting when I winced. She found a small jar in her pack and applied its contents to the bruise and under my nose. “Be lying here and letting it work,” she said. “Our people are bringing our dead down now.”

  “Yo
u weren’t in time to warn them?”

  She avoided my gaze. “I was being not quite quick enough. The lizards were ambushing the tribe of Burrow when I arrived. Chief Badnor Belthos and several of his close kin were being killed.” She looked upward, all innocence.

  “You were…fortuitously delayed,” I said.

  “Only a little,” she admitted. “Badnor was not being a good man.”

  “He’s the one who harassed you when you were little?”

  “That one, yes. At any rate, now he will be going into Splendor.”

  “They’ll open the gate now?” I struggled to sit up. “Before the battle?”

  “There will be no battle. Enough have already died. It is not necessary to battle and be killing each other if someone else is doing the killing already.”

  She left me sitting there and went among the bodies lying around me, checking to see who was dead and who alive. I noticed for the first time that they included both Day and Night Mountain warriors. Several were alive, and she treated them, with one thing or another. Though I’d already come to respect Gavi’s skill, I was still amazed at how quickly the pain went away, taking the dizziness with it. Soon I was able to sit up and watch the warriors filing down into the saucer, bearing their dead on hastily contrived litters. After adding the twenty or so already beside the pillar, there were more than fifty of them.

  The system seemed well understood by the participants on both sides. When all the bodies had been laid at the foot of the pillar, six Night Mountain warriors came down the slope carrying a tall ladder. Since it would have been completely mossened and rotted if left long in the moss, I assumed that either they had brought it with them or their scouts had built it anew when they had finished laying out the trail. The ladder was erected at the south face of the pillar by a committee of warriors who paid considerable attention to the distance from the pillar to the foot of the ladder, evidently a matter of significance.