THE GREENS AND grays around and below me had become perilously hypnotic. Then a buccaneer deer fly snagged a big-ass bite just west of my Adam’s apple.
I let go the rope to take a swipe. Naturally, I missed the agile little buzzard.
Better lucky than smart, sometimes. My lifeline caught me. I stood on my head on a hundred feet of air while the guys up top lowered away. The dickheads on the stone shelf below grinned but tucked the needle in the trick bag for later.
I lack the born-again haughteur of a cat. No way could I manage a pretense of deliberate intent.
“Hold still.” One-Eye smeared something stinky on the bug bite. “That will kill any eggs.”
“Admirable caution,” I grumbled. We had yet to see the botfly horror in these parts, but the people hunting us would deploy them gleefully if they had some and could get them to bite Black Company guys exclusively.
Eight men crowded the ledge. More would follow me down. At the narrow end Rusty told Robin, “I ain’t carrying that dumbass crab catcher out’n here, he gets hisself hurt.”
Rusty was a FNG, with us only six months. He had no hope of becoming a Fucking Old Guy. He was an asshole and a bully. His type never prospers with us.
First aid complete, One-Eye faced the view.
“Sure is something. So much green.” The Rip. To the left it was a thousand feet more to the bottom. To the right, cliff collapses had choked the canyon partially, so long ago that heavy forest cloaked the fill.
One-Eye gave his filthy black hat a quarter turn, ‘To confuse the enemy,’ and said, “Something ain’t right, Croaker. I smell something gone off.”
His wizard’s sniffer was why Elmo had brought him along.
BEFORE HUMANITY BEGAN counting time, and maybe before there was any humanity to count it, something weird smacked the living shit out of this end of the world. Maybe a god swung a cosmic cleaver. Maybe some natural force acted up. Whatever, a knife-edge wound slashed the earth for seven hundred miles, across the grain, through mountains and forests, swamps and plains, often more than a thousand feet deep, never more than an eighth of a mile wide. It drained lakes and shifted rivers. Our side, the west, boasted hundreds of square miles of dense hardwood forest on rounded mountains with deep valleys between. Tough traveling. From what I could see the east side was exactly the same.
We were on the run. Bad people were after us, in no special hurry. We were nuisances. They had bigger fish in the pan, like overrunning the unconquered civilized world. They pushed just hard enough to keep us from wriggling loose.
We had been herded here, to be pinned against the Rip. We would cross only if we abandoned our wagons, animals, equipment, our crippled and sick. First, though, we had to find a way down this side, then up the other.
Rusty belonged to a faction disgruntled because the feeble and dying were sucking up resources that could be better used to keep him chubby.
Whittle said, “I gettin’ weak-kneed in the ’membrance, some, but seems like dere was you all graveyard sick jes’ las’ spring. De buzzards was roostin’ on your shoulders.” Whittle whittled while he talked. He could lure some peculiar folk art out of plain dead wood.
Robin caught Rusty’s wrist. Whittle was not just a master at finding hideous things hidden inside chunks of wood. He was a master at letting out the ugly stuff inside people.
Elmo declaimed, “Gentlemen, save it for our enemies.”
We had plenty, including several Taken.
One-Eye went into a trance, for sure smelling something not right.
I exchanged looks with Robin. The boy was Rusty’s favorite victim… and his only excuse for a friend.
Some relationships answer only to their own secret logic.
Robin showed a flash of private pain. He knew there was a pool. How long would Rusty last?
Rusty shook him off.
Whittle rose from his couch of broken granite. “First news you know, you goin’ to be blessed to fine out what pain an’ sufferin’ is all about.”
Elmo interposed himself. “That’s it. Knock it off.”
Whittle leaned around him. “First time you wink loud.” He jerked a thumb toward some crows above the far side of the gorge.
One-Eye blurted, “It’s all illusion!”
Elmo snapped, “What is?” He was on edge. If we did not find an out soon our next all-Company assembly would happen at the bottom of a shallow mass grave. The Rip left no room to run. Unless…
Elmo was convinced that the ‘unless’ was his to create.
Escape was sure to be expensive. We would take nothing but personal weapons and what we could carry or wear. It would become pure march or die.
Whisper, the Taken managing the hunters, was enjoying the cat and mouse. We had messed her up for years. But she had us now.
One-Eye, always drowning in showers of self-delusion, suddenly wanted to call shenanigans.
Elmo loomed fierce, as only a natural born first sergeant can. “Talk, runt. Straight. I’m fresh out of patience for witch-man talk-around.”
He was displacing his irritation with Rusty, but scapegoating a sorcerer can become a less than profitable exercise.
One-Eye had looked past the moment. He had seen something to make him nervous. “That woods mostly isn’t real. It’s the most persistent daylight illusion I’ve ever seen but from up close you can tell.” His old black face twisted. He was puzzled.
The troops stayed quiet. Sorcery encountered in strange country never bodes well. It is a definite conversation stopper.
One-Eye scowled at the Rip some more.
Elmo prodded, “Any day now.”
“Sometimes even sergeants need to be patient.”
Certainly not their nature but this one let a few minutes glide. Then One-Eye sighed, sagged under the weight of the world. “I’m not strong enough to see inside. We have to go look.”
Rusty barked, “We ain’t out here to go poking sticks in no hornet nests.”
Elmo glowered. “That’s exactly why we’re here, moron. The name says it. Recon. We look. We poke. We find out.”
And we might ought to get on with looking for our latest way out.
For centuries the Company has found one. Always.
This was the twentieth-something search but my first. I was ‘too valuable’ for grunt work. I had invited myself on the sneak and had stayed out of sight till it was too late for Elmo to send me back… and too late for me to admit that I had made a mistake.
The view of the Rip, though, was amazing.
Nervously, the squad helped One-Eye study the landscape. He became fixated on the Rip to our right. We stayed quiet. Nature did not. The crow posse across the way kept getting louder. The birds had a lot to debate. Closer by, buzzing insects scouted our potential as fodder.
One-Eye announced, “I’m going to mess with the old girl’s wig and makeup.”
“Meaning? Try some plain language.”
“All right. What a grouch.” He frustrated Elmo by taking time to loose a curse that crisped every bloodsucker within fifty yards. Though selfishly motivated, that did move him a few slots down the communal shit list. “All them five hundred year oaks and ashes and chestnuts, hardly any of them are real.”
Elmo cut to it. “Means somebody has something to hide. Saddle up, troops. We’re gonna take a peek.”
WE WORKED MORE sideways than down. Come mid-afternoon we busted through some thorns and found a fine place to rest, a flat, wide, descending ledge that ran in the direction we were headed.
Super genius Rusty announced, “It’s almost like a road.”
Even the parliament of crows seemed to go quiet.
One-Eye butchered the silence. “You don’t see what you don’t expect.”
It was obvious once someone said it. This was a road cut into the wall of the Rip. It had been there for ages. It showed signs of use, though not recently.
Elmo split the band. Rusty, Robin, and two others he sent upslope, to find a way back to camp. The rest of us went the other direction.