She brushed the slick walls painlessly, slid upward, slowing as the bottle’s neck narrowed and her body made firmer contact with the glass.
Finally she stuck, arms reaching upward, feet kicking furiously. No! she shouted soundlessly. She fought to get higher, clawing at the glass. Her wings were tearing, and this did hurt her, terribly, but she ignored the pain and struggled on. She moved a tiny bit, then a bit more. She had a sudden horrible sensation that the black tunnel was about to squeeze shut and crush her life away. She made a last muscle-tearing spasmodic effort.
And pulled herself to the top of the bottle, where she clung to the lip, and looked out across the starry wastes. Her wings were bloody tatters of agony, the stars were cold meaningless fires, impossibly far away.
She was terrified, but it was an oddly joyful terror, and at that moment she didn’t want to wake up.
Ruiz sat motionless for the remainder of the night, submerged in his thoughts, giving only a small part of his attention to the silent forest. He could see little hope for their survival, unless the highway they would reach tomorrow was a busy one, traveled by beings of remarkable confidence or naivete. Who else would stop to help them?
When Corean arrived, she would no doubt be equipped with mechanical sniffers, or some sort of trailing beast — these were standard tools used by all successful slavers. Depending on the efficiency of Corean’s sniffers, she would catch up to them tomorrow afternoon or the next morning — if Ruiz failed to find swift transportation away from the area.
Ruiz looked up through the canopy, saw bright stars, and the gleam of the Shard orbital platforms. Had it rained, as it had earlier promised to, the sniffers would have been slowed.
He worried at the problem, but could find no purchase on its slippery shell. He might attempt an ambush; he had the splinter gun. But Corean would doubtless be armed with heavier weapons. If her Mocrassar bondwarrior had finished its molt and was with Corean, confronting the slaver was hopeless, even if she were foolish enough to engage him at close range.
No, everything depended on finding transportation, which was to say everything depended on luck. This intransigent reality made him grind his teeth in frustration. He had always been lucky, but he had always been careful to put no faith in luck.
Never to need luck: that was the secret of being lucky. Now he needed it.
When gray light began to seep through the treetops, a few big raindrops fell, plopping into the leafy forest floor. Then they stopped.
Chapter 4
Ruiz hurried the others through the morning’s necessities: breakfast, packing, stretching sore muscles. Dolmaero seemed somewhat refreshed by his slumber, but he went up to Ruiz and spoke in mildly truculent tones. “Why did you not call me for my watch?”
“I wasn’t sleepy,” Ruiz answered. “Why should we both suffer.”
“Well, next time, call me. I can do my part.”
“I know,” Ruiz said, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper. “In fact, I have a job for you today. I’ll ask you to keep a close eye on Flomel. Nisa will watch him too, but she may not be strong enough to stop him if he takes a notion to do something foolish.”
Dolmaero nodded. “As you say. It’s odd. There was a time when the troupe was everything to me… and despite Flomel’s unpleasant aspects, I thought him a great man. He was such a wonderful conjuror.” Dolmaero sighed. “But times change, and now I see that I was a fool.”
“No, no. You weren’t a fool, Guildmaster — you were like everyone else, doing the best you could with what you knew.”
“Perhaps… kind of you to say so, anyway.” Dolmaero returned to his packing.
The path was broader and smoother now, and they made good time. For a while Ruiz treated himself to the pleasure of walking hand in hand with Nisa, following the others. He felt a bit silly, like an overage schoolboy, but Nisa apparently saw nothing undignified in such affectionate gestures. Her hand clasped his tightly; occasionally she turned her lovely face up to him and gave him a smile.
By midmorning, they began to pass evidence of recent use: plastic food wrappers, discarded articles of clothing, small heaps of charcoal where fires had been built. Ruiz forced himself into a higher level of alertness. He released Nisa’s hand, called a halt.
“We’ll have to be more careful now,” he told the others. “I’m going to run ahead and see if the way is clear. You follow at a slower pace. If you hear or see something you don’t understand or that seems dangerous — or if you meet with anyone — get off the path and hide in the forest.”
Ruiz looked at Flomel, saw the sly expression he wore. “Above all, don’t let Flomel get away.” He took the leash out, fastened it to Flomel’s neck, and gave the other end to Dolmaero. “And if he attempts to cry out or otherwise attract attention, kill him as quickly and quietly as possible. Can you manage that?”
Dolmaero nodded, face somber. He fingered the dagger he carried in his sash. “You may rely on me, Ruiz Aw.”
Flomel’s expression wavered between outrage and disbelief, but he said nothing.
Ruiz bent and brushed his lips against Nisa’s and whispered in her ear so that only she could hear. “Watch them all.”
Then he ran away down the path.
When he was several hundred meters ahead, he slowed to a more cautious pace. The forest was unchanged, though the path had become a broad promenade, paved with ochre bricks.
He began to pass stone benches with fancifully carved legs and backs, and it occurred to him that the path functioned as someone’s picnic ground. But he met no picnickers, though he hoped earnestly to — preferably picnickers with a high-speed airboat, armored and bristling with weaponry. He laughed at himself. He might as well wish for his picnickers to also be too abysmally stupid to use any of the security technology such a vessel would carry.
No, what he needed was picnickers with, say, five motorized bicycles.
The path looped through the woods in graceful sweeps, and Ruiz would have cut across, had the undergrowth not been so dense. Because of the path’s curvature, he could see only a short distance ahead. There was an unidentifiable change in the air, and a feeling of imminence touched him. He began to think that the highway junction must be near, and he became even more cautious, keeping to the shadiest side of the path, alert for any sign that he was not alone.
Ruiz came around the last curve and discovered that his hoped-for “highway” was actually a canal.
The path terminated in a sunny clearing, in which stood an elevated landing built of shiny pink granite, over which rose a decorative gateway — two columns in the form of attenuated weasels, supporting an arched lintel carved in the likeness of two winged reptiles, toothy snouts kissing in the center. Here and there striped poles rose above the landing, still carrying ragged scraps of faded cloth, apparently left from a time when the landing had been covered with a festive canopy.
The immediate impression was of long disuse, and Ruiz’s heart sank.
He approached the landing slowly, still alert, but with a growing sense of futility. The scattering of recent trash on the path had raised his hopes, but the landing’s air of abandonment had dampened them.
He climbed the steps and went across the landing to the canal. The canal itself seemed to be in perfect repair. It had two narrow channels, separated by a strip of monocrete. The still black water had an unpleasant oily quality, but no debris blocked the channels — hopeful evidence that the canal was still in occasional use. He looked to the left. The canal cut south through the trees in a perfectly straight line, and though the branches formed a tunnel over the canal, none of them hung low enough to impede the progress of a barge. It appeared they were trimmed on a regular schedule.