He let a corner dip into the river.
It wasn’t dissolving. Good. But the upper corner in his fingers was as cold, instantly, as the river washing past his legs.
He submerged himself. Rubbed himself with moss, climbed out fast, dried himself fast. Running had kept him warm in the wind and rain, but he wasn’t running now. There was a poncho in his pack, and the firestarter.
Vala’s cloth was like a pipe for heat and cold. What would happen—“Whisper, what if I put a corner of Valavirgillin’s cloth in a fire? Would it burn? Would it be too hot to hold?”
There was nowhere Whisper might be on this bare mud.
His own mind told him he’d be crazy to build a fire. Hominids used fire. Vampires, no matter how stupid, would learn to seek fire. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.
He toweled his face, and pulled the towel away in time to see six vampires running at him across the mud.
They didn’t sing. They didn’t posture, didn’t implore with their bodies. They came fast. Tegger snatched up his sword.
A sword didn’t frighten them. They were pacing each other; spreading out a little, attacking as a pack. Tegger ran to the left and slashed, slashed. Two fell back with haphazard wounds, enough to put them out, Tegger thought, but he was too busy to look. The other four had him encircled.
He half rested, turning in a step-stop motion, his sword held vertical, reversing himself, reversing. He and his friends had played this game with sticks when they were children. Their elders had fought Grass Giants this way.
Two wounded were crawling away, uphill toward the shadow. The remaining three men and one woman circled him.
He hadn’t known—none of the vampire hunters had known—that when vampires outnumbered their prey six to one, they didn’t bother with lures or song or even scent. They just attacked.
He must reach the cruisers, if he lived. Tell them. Even if he must face Warvia again. Warvia.
The vampires didn’t seem to be in any hurry. No reason why they should be. More were trickling down from the Shadow Nest. More yet would be returning from the lands beyond the mountains. Darkness was falling.
“Whisper!” he screamed. “Hide me!”
Nothing. The rain had stopped. He was on a wide mud flat. This time there really was no place for a wayspirit to hide.
The scent. It wasn’t strong, but it was getting into his head and it wasn’t coming out. He remembered the other vampire, remembered killing her, killing her for not being Warvia. His mind was going, and there was no reason why he should wait.
And the woman spread her arms for him, imploring.
Tegger jumped backward, turning, sword swinging. Yes! The men were coming at his back, converging while she held his mind prisoner. His blade swiped across their eyes—he missed the second clean—came back and stabbed economically into that one’s throat. He jabbed back blindly at where the woman should be. She slammed into him with his sword through her to the hilt, knocking him off balance, her teeth slashing at his biceps. He curled her away one-handed. He could hear himself screaming.
One man was crawling backward, leaving his life’s blood behind. One seemed blinded. The third brushed blood from his eyes and saw Tegger as Tegger reached for him. Then Tegger’s hands were on his throat and Tegger’s weight was driving him into the mud.
The rest was a fog. The man gripped Tegger’s shoulders and tried to pull Tegger close to his teeth. Tegger shook him like a rat while he strangled him. The woman had almost reached the river when Tegger reached her and took back his sword. He stepped too close to one who should have been dead, felt teeth close in his ankle, stabbed down and kept walking. The blinded one came toward him, sniffing. Tegger took three swings with a blade dulled as blunt as a club, before the head came off. He could hear himself snuffling like a sick herdbeast.
In the shifting fog he could see shapes moving down from the Shadow Nest.
The pack, don’t forget the backpack. Good. Where now?
“Whisper! Hide me!”
Whisper spoke, but not in a whisper. “Run toward me!” The voice was a whipcrack command with just a trace of speech impediment, coming from far downstream, straight toward the Shadow Nest.
Tegger ran. He was a hundred paces along when the voice spoke again, much closer now. “Out into the river!”
Tegger veered left, into the water, toward the voice of Whisper. Was there something out there? In the rain and the dark was a shadow on the fog, a shadow too big to be solid. And a strip of darkness … an island?
Vampires couldn’t swim, or the Water Folk would have known it. Tegger was a plains dweller; he had never tried to swim.
It was ankle deep, knee deep … Pause a moment to get his pack on his back. No kilt. He’d left it. Sword: into the sheath on his back. He’d need his arms to swim, if hominids swam like Rooballabl, if Reds could swim at all. And he ran on. Knee deep, knee deep … and out.
“Here,” said Whisper, from far away. “Go to the downstream end.”
He’d crossed thirty paces of knee-deep river to reach a shallow bulge of dark mud that did not really deserve the name of island. Vampires were piling up on shore. One, then another, stepped into the water and came toward him.
Downstream he went, running over mud, beneath a shadow too big to be anything but fog patterns. Wondering if vampires could fight while water impeded their feet. This might really be the best place for a final stand.
He did not shy from dying. I killed a vampire woman for not being Warvia, he’d told himself. But when he killed the six, it felt like he was killing Warvia over and over, killing her for what she’d done in the night, and he gloried in it.
If he killed more vampires, he would lose Warvia even in his mind.
As his feet pounded across the mud, the monstrous shadow shifted. It was too rigid. Was solid, suddenly, and alongside him. He lashed out at it with his sword, and whacked something. He rapped it with his fist.
Not a fog pattern. It was flaky and a bit springy, like layers of hammered metal.
He’d seen this thing from much farther away. It was a tilted plate with square corners, obtrusively artificial, fifteen paces by fifteen paces if half of it was under the mud. It stood out of the mud at an angle of forty degrees. The mud had piled up against it.
There were notches along the rim, big enough to attach cables. A thick post stuck up from the center. At one of the visible corners was what looked like a pulley. If there had been a cable, it was gone.
The highest corner bulged.
(Whisper was silent. Whisper spoke rarely. It might be Whisper expected him to work things out on his own, Tegger thought. But why?)
There was no smell of vampires here.
At the fall of the cities, hundreds of falans ago, vehicles were said to have rained out of the sky. Most of those were gone, buried or corroded out of existence. Sometimes you could find the shell of a floating car, and curved sheets of stuff as transparent as water, usually broken: windows. Sometimes something bigger.
Like a big plate for carrying cargoes too big to fit into a car.
The fog concealed, revealed. The plate’s highest corner bulged like soap bubbles stuck together—faceted—and as with soap bubbles, you could see in. One facet was crazed as if crawlerwebs covered it. Others were clear.
When Tegger tried to climb, the plate was too smooth and too slippery with rain and mud.
He’d better do something. He didn’t doubt he had outrun this latest wave of vampires, but even wading, they’d catch up. Tegger backed up several paces, then ran at the plate.
Halfway up he ran out of momentum. He dropped, arms and legs spread wide. The mud didn’t reach this high. It wasn’t metal, or it was covered metaclass="underline" a gritty surface, offering traction even under a rain slick. He crawled.