He put it out of his mind, or tried to.
Suddenly he realized that Wu Julee was gone.
He sat up with a start and looked around. There was a large indentation in the grass where she had been, and some divots kicked up where she had gotten up, but no sign of her.
He looked around, noting several things about the landscape.
For one thing, they had been fairly lucky. Although the area around was a grassy hill, it sloped down into dank, swampy wetlands not far away. There were odd buildings, like mushrooms, scattered about near the swamp and through it, but no sign of any real activity. He looked back at the border. It was a snowy forest scene that greeted him, but the storm had passed and the sky was quickly becoming as blue there as it was overhead. He walked over to the border, got some snow, and rubbed his face with the cold stuff.
Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he turned back to look for Wu Julee. He spotted her at last, coming back toward him at full gallop.
He turned and packed the towels away in the pack, removing from the clothing pouch a bundle of black cloth. He unfolded it and looked at it. He had had it made in another hex, awfully nonhuman, but it had seemed right when he had tried it on.
The pants fitted, and his feet slipped into shoe-shaped bottoms with fairly tough, leathery soles on the outside. The material was of the stretchy type, and it seemed to adhere to him like a second skin, as did the pullover shirt. He had two of the latter, and chose the one with no sleeves over the other, which had formfitting gloves.
It works, he thought to himself, and fairly comfortable, too. But it’s so form-fitting and so thin I still feel naked. Oh, well, at least it’ll keep the sun out.
He wished for sunglasses, not for the first time. But the first group he had hit who made them were the Dillians, and the smallest was a bit too large for him.
Wu Julee came up to him at that point, looking excited.
“Nathan!” she called, “I’ve been out exploring and you’ll never guess what’s over the next hill!”
“The Emerald City,” he retorted, even though he knew that expression would draw a blank look. In fact, it went right past her.
“No! It’s a road! A paved road! And it has cars on it!”
He looked puzzled. “Cars? This close to the border? What kind of cars?”
“Electric ones, I think,” she replied. “They don’t go all that fast, and there aren’t many of them, but there they are. There’s a little parking lot up by the border. The Dillian roadhouse is a hundred meters or so farther on!”
“So we did miss it in the storm and got off the track!” he said. “They must supply the roadhouse with various things, and use the roadhouse as a business base. Funny you never heard of them.”
“I’ve been uplake all my time here,” she reminded him. “The only others I ever heard about were the mountain people, and I never saw any of them.”
“Well, what do these people look like?” he asked curiously. “We’ll have to travel through most of their hex.”
“They’re the strangest—well, you’ll have to see. Let’s get going!”
He strapped the pack on her and climbed aboard. She seemed particularly happy and eager and, well, alive this morning, he thought.
They moved along at a fast clip, and the old pains came back almost immediately, although he was getting to the point where he was going up when she was and down when she did. It helped a little, but not much.
They cleared the top of the hill in about five minutes, and he saw immediately what she meant. A half dozen vehicles were parked in a little paved area near the border. They were mostly open, except for one with a roof of canvas or something like it. None of them had seats, and, from the looks of the one with the top, their drivers were very tall and drove by a two-lever combination. The road was wide enough for one car to pass another, and it had a white line painted down the center of the black surface.
She stopped near the lot. “Look!” she said. “Now you’ll see what I mean by weird people!”
And she was most definitely right, Brazil decided. The last time he had seen anything remotely resembling it was on a long-ago, month-long bender.
Imagine an elephant’s head, floppy ears and all, but no tusks, with not one but two trunks growing from its face, each about a meter long and ending in four stubby, jointless fingers grouped around the nostril opening. Mount the head on a body that looked too thin to support such a head, armless and terminating in two short, squat, legs and flat feet that made the walker look as if he were slightly turning from side to side as he walked. Now paint the whole creature a fiery red, and imagine it wearing green canvas dungarees.
Nathan Brazil and Wu Julee didn’t have to imagine it. That was exactly what was walking at a slow pace toward them.
“Oh, wow!” was all he could manage. “I see just what you mean.”
The creature spotted them and raised its trunks, which seemed to grow out of the same point between and just below the eyes, in a greeting. “Well, hello!” it boomed in Dillian in a voice that sounded like an injured foghorn. “Better weather on this side of the line, hey?”
“You can say that again,” Brazil responded. “We almost got caught in the storm and missed the roadhouse. Spent the night over in the field, there.”
“Heading out, then?” the Slongornian asked pleasantly. “Going to tour our lovely country? Good time of year for it. Always summer here.”
“Just passing through,” replied Brazil casually. “We’re on our way to Czill.”
The friendly creature frowned, which gave it an even more comical aspect that was hard to ignore. “Bad business, that. Read about it last night.”
“I know,” Nathan replied seriously. “One of the victims—the Czillian—was a friend of mine. Ours,” he quickly corrected, and Wu Julee smiled.
“Why don’t you go into the roadhouse, have breakfast, and try to bum a ride through?” the creature suggested helpfully. “All of these trucks’ll be going back empty, and you can probably hitchhike most of the way. Save time and sore feet.”
“Thanks, we’ll try it,” Brazil called after the Slongornian as that worthy climbed into the covered truck and started backing it out, controlling the steering with a trunk on each lever. The truck made a whirring noise but little else, and sped off down the road at a pretty good clip.
“You know, I bet he’s doing fifty flat out,” he said to Wu Julee as the truck disappeared from view. “Maybe we can move faster and easier than we figured.”
They walked over the border to the incongruously snow-clad roadhouse. The cold hit them at once, Wu Julee being unclad except for the pack, and his clothing not much more than protection from the sun. They ran to the roadhouse, and she was inside almost a minute ahead of him.
Five Slongornians stood at a counter shoving what appeared to be hay down their throats with their trunks. One drained a mug of warm liquid somewhat like tea and then squirted it into its mouth. The innkeeper was a middle-aged female Dillian who looked older than her years. Two young male centaurs were sorting boxes in the back, apparently arranging the deliveries the Slongornians had made.
And there was one other.
It’s a giant, man-sized bat! Brazil thought, and that is what it did look like. It was taller than he was by a little bit, and had a ratty head and body with blood-red eyes; its sharp teeth were chewing on a huge loaf of sweetbread. Its arms were slightly outstretched and they melded into the leathery wings, the bones extended to form the structural support for the wings. It had long, humanoid legs, though, with a standard knee covered in wiry black hair like gorillas’ legs, and ending in two feet that looked more like large human hands, the backs covered with fur. The thing was obviously double- or triple-jointed in the legs, since it was balanced on one with no apparent effort while holding the loaf in the other, the leg brought up level with the mouth.