“Should I fail, the matter will cease to concern me.” She shifts her guard from right to left, tries to allow her shoulders, her arms, her wrists to remain limber.
You’re becoming quite the philosopher.
“Hardly.”
The tunnel has descended steeply, which has made Angela’s progress slow, but also admitted enough sunlight to illuminate the passage. Now the ground levels, as the tunnel expands into a larger space. The cave’s walls are honeycombed by a score of openings, each the approximate width of the one she’s followed. It appears she’s arrived at a hub for the beast’s subterranean roadways. A few of the tunnels look recent, the entrances to them rough, rubble and earth scattered outside them. The remainder are considerably older, their thresholds worn smooth by years of use, the cave floor in front of them clear. Either the beast has been traveling these routes for a long time, or its family has before it.
Angela steps into the chamber. Its far side is difficult to see clearly, but there appears no trace of food, or scat, or treasure, any of the signs that she might have reached the creature’s lair. She would prefer to meet it here, where the light is adequate and the distance to the surface is relatively short. If she ventures into another tunnel, she’ll have to do so by torchlight, which will leave her one less hand for her sword, plus, there’s no guarantee of her choosing the right passage. She could spend no small amount of time roaming underground, to no effect.
When she hears the sound to her left, she’s almost happy. It comes from deep within one of the recent tunnels, a rumble and a clatter mixed with a metallic ring. With ferocious speed, it grows louder. As it does, the chamber floor vibrates underfoot. She hops back into the passage that brought her here, just as the beast crashes into view.
It brings with it a cloud of dust and dirt. She has the impression of sheets of metal, patches of dark fur. And size: the creature is at least as big as an elephant. It snorts and snuffles, wheeling around the center of the room. Angela switches her guard from left back to right.
Through the dust, she sees something like an enormous mole; although that’s like calling a shark an enormous goldfish. The thing’s forelimbs are tree trunks, capped with claws the length of her sword. Its eyes are almost comically tiny, but its snout flowers into a dozen thick, fleshy tentacles, each the length of her arm. Its hide is covered with thick, bristling fur — what is visible through the armor the creature wears. Its breast, back, and shoulders — its short legs — are covered by carefully fashioned bronze plates. Though battered and dim, the metal still bears traces of elaborate designs, looping figures and characters. No one mentioned armor, she thinks.
The appendages at the end of the beast’s nose flick through the air, drawing the rest of its blunt head after them, back and forth. They stretch toward her, and she knows she’s been found. The creature’s bulk swings in her direction. She has enough time to realize she’s in a bad position. If she’s in the tunnel when the beast charges, it will crush her. Her plan of attack momentarily forgotten, she leaps out of the passage and to the right. The creature barrels past her into the tunnel. Its bulk stoppers what light the tunnel admitted, plunging the chamber into darkness.
“I think we might have to go with the cavalry, after all,” Angela says.
Brum’s description of the beast did make it sound a bit smaller, the sword says.
Already she can hear the thing at the other end of the passage, turning around. She would very much like to run someplace, anyplace, but there is no place to go. Any of the other tunnels will have the same disadvantage as the one she just escaped. Nor is she fast enough to outrun the creature in the open cavern. She raises the sword directly overhead, shifting her weight onto her back leg.
When the beast erupts from the passage, spilling light into the chamber, she lunges forward on her left leg, slashing down and to the right, in the strike Magda called the Tiger’s Claw. She feels the tip of the sword slow for a fraction of a second, long enough for her to know it’s met resistance, before she sees red on the blade. The creature shrieks, spinning toward her, the tentacles that cap its snout thrashing. It rocks back on its haunches, readying another charge.
Before it moves, Angela does, the sword out to her right. The beast hesitates, which allows her to close the distance between them. By the time it registers her threat and starts to retreat, she’s swept the sword up in a chop. The Heron’s Wing severs one of the appendages flailing at the end of its nose.
Its last expression of pain was loud, but this one leaves her deafened, ears ringing. She ignores this, focused on attacking the rest of the tentacles, clearly a weakness. Her swings open wounds in half a dozen of them, spattering blood onto the cave floor. Screaming, the creature rises on its hind legs in a kind of crouch, lifting its wounded snout out of range and placing her within reach of its forelimbs and their great claws. The beast pendulums its left paw at her. She hops back, but has to use the sword to block attacks, first from the right, then from the returning left. The strength in the blows shudders the sword in her hands, threatens to knock it from her grasp.
She wants to retreat, move to a safer distance. Instead she slides closer, stabbing at the creature’s forelimbs with the Scorpion’s Sting. The beast yanks them away, straightening almost to standing, exposing the stretch of belly below its armored breast. She drives her sword in on the left and with a single smooth motion slices it across and out on the right. Blood vents over her as the beast’s belly falls open, spilling the mass of its guts onto the cave floor in a bloody mess. She hops back, loses her footing in a puddle of blood, and is unable to avoid the paw rushing at her.
The impact flings her across the chamber. She thinks she might miss the wall, land in the tunnel beside it. She doesn’t.
Dreams, Magda warned her, are no less perilous than waking life. The powers that hold sway over existence are at home in the shifting landscapes that sleep offers access to; indeed, there are some who contend that the powers are more comfortable in an environment that mimics their own mercurial natures. Not to mention, the dreamlands are host to a bestiary whose entries are as fearsome as anything Angela might expect to meet while awake. For these reasons, it was important to go into sleep armed, and to remain so for the duration of her stay. This part of her training Angela found surprisingly easy. Magda said this was because she was already halfway to dreaming, especially when she ought to be focused on her lessons, but Angela thought the old woman was impressed with her. A few minutes’ meditation, sometimes less, and she entered sleep, sword in hand. At first she equipped herself with the blade Magda kept on display in the hall, over the fireplace. When she obtained her own sword, she brought that. Within her dreams, Deus ex Machina has always felt surprisingly solid, which may be due to the fact that she was given it in a dream.
She has it with her now, in the fragmented world into which her collision with the cave wall has plunged her. The sword is silent, but it usually is on this side of waking. She is standing at the edge of King Brum’s field of joyweed, surveying the devastation that has been visited upon it, the fencing knocked down, the plants torn up and trampled, the watering tank and the system of pipes leading to and from it smashed. Although the scene is lit as if by the sun, the sky is dark, clouded with stars. At the center of the ruined field, a tall woman wearing crimson robes considers a younger version of Angela. The woman’s skin is the same as the sky overhead, as if she were a piece of it taken form. Stars flicker within her, a shooting star flares across her cheek. Her voice is pleasant, but it is cold, cold as a winter’s night. “What would you have of me?” she says.