All four men worshiped her. And it was obvious to everyone but her that the one called Silent entertained romantic ambitions. Lunatics. Every single one.
Something behind him yelled, "Seth Chalk! What treachery are you up to now?" and exploded in giggles.
Wearily, for the thousandth time, he replied, "Call me Bomanz. I haven't used Seth Chalk since I was a boy." He did not look around.
It had been a long, long time since he had been Seth Chalk. At least a hundred fifty years. He had no exact count. It was a year since he had escaped the thrall of a sorcery that had held him in stasis most of that time. He knew the intervening years of strife and horror—the years of the rise and growth of the Lady's empire—only by repute, after the fact.
He, Bomanz or Seth Chalk, was a living artifact from before the fact. A fool who had had no business surviving it, who wanted to use these last unexpected gift years to expiate the guilt that was his for his part in the awakening and release of the ancient evil.
These idiots were not ready to believe that, no matter that he'd damned near gotten himself killed keeping that dragon off them during the big final throat cutting in the Barrowland last winter.
Damned fools. He had done all the damage he could do in one lifetime.
The three brothers came from somewhere up forward, joined the watch. So it was not one of them who had shouted. But Bomanz knew that. Two of the three could not speak any language he understood. The third managed Forsberger so brokenly it was not worth his trouble to try.
The fool who could understand a little of Bomanz's antiquated Forsberger could not sign. Of course. So any communication not heard directly by Silent or lip-read by Darling got garbled and lost.
Only the stones communicated like regular people.
He did not like talking to rocks. There was something perverse about holding converse with rocks.
The trouble with being here was that the human beings, though lunatics, were the sanest, most believable part of the furnishings.
For the first time in his life, if he wanted to build cloud castles he had to go look down.
They had press-ganged him at that camp in the Windy Country. He was on the back of one of those fabulous monsters out of the Plain of Fear, a windwhale. The beast was a thousand feet long and nearly two hundred wide. From below it looked like a cross between a man-o'-war jellyfish and the world's biggest shark. From up top where Bomanz was, the broad flat back looked like something from an opium smoker's pipe dream. Like the imaginary forests that might grow in those vast caverns said to lie miles beneath the surface of the earth.
This forest was haunted by enough weird creatures to populate anyone's fancy nightmare. A whole zoo. And all sentient.
The windwhale was going somewhere in a hurry but was not getting there fast. There had been head winds all the way. And every so often the monster had to go down and tear up a couple hundred acres to take the edge off its hunger.
The damned thing stank like seven zoos.
A couple weird characters had singled him out for relentless harassment. One was a little rock monkey, mostly tail, no bigger than a chipmunk. It had a high, squeaky, nagging voice that made him remember his long-dead wife, though he never understood a word it said.
There was a shy centauroid creature put together backward, with the humanlike part in the rear. That part of her was disturbingly attractive. She seemed intrigued by him. He kept catching glimpses of her watching him from among the copses of uncertain organs that bewhiskered the windwhale's back.
Worst, there was a lone talking buzzard who had a smattering of Forsberger and a wiseguy mouth. Bomanz could not get away from the bird, who, if he had been human, would have hung out in taverns masquerading as the world's foremost authority, armed with an uninformed and ready opinion on every conceivable subject. His cheerful bigotry and who-cares ignorance drove the old man's temper to its limit.
Things called mantas, that looked like sable flying versions of the rays of tropical seas, symbiotes of the windwhales, with wingspans of thirty to fifty feet, were the most dramatic and numerous of his nonhuman companions. Though they looked like fish, they seemed to be mammals. They lived their whole lives on the windwhale's back. They were ill-tempered and dangerous and they bitterly resented having to share their territory with lesser life-forms. Only the will of their god contained their spite.
There were dozens more creatures equally remarkable, each more absurd than the last, but they were more shy of humans and stayed out of the way.
Discounting the mantas, the most numerous and pestiferous tribe were the talking stones.
Like most people Bomanz had heard tales of the deadly talking menhirs of the Plain of Fear. The reality seemed as gruesome as the stories. They were as shy as an avalanche and deadly pranksters. They were responsible for the Plain's deadly reputation. Near as Bomanz could tell, what everyone else considered murderous wickedness they considered practical jokery.
What could be more hilarious than a traveler who, following false directions, stumbled into a lava pit or had his mount snatched out from under him by a giant sand lion?
The stones, in the form of menhirs as much as eighteen feet tall, were the stuff of a thousand stories, hardly a one pleasant. But the seeing and hearing and having to deal with was an experience that made the stories pall—though the stones were on their best behavior now.
They were under constraint, too.
The stones had no language difficulties. Happily, many were a laconic sort. But when they did go to talking their speech was sour, acidic, caustic. The lot were verbal vandals. So how the hell come they were the ones their god had made his diplomatic corps?
It was no wonder the Plain of Fear was a wide-open madhouse. The tree god running it was a twenty-four-karat lunatic.
The stones were gray brown, mostly, without visible orifices or organs. Most were as shaggy with mosses and lichens and bugs as any normal boulder that lay around keeping its mouth shut. They intimidated the hell out of Bomanz, who liked to pretend that he was not scared of any damned thing.
There were moments when he came close to blasting them into talking gravel.
Weird damned creatures!
Every hundred miles the windwhale dropped till its belly dragged. Members of every species, including the Torque brothers, would start singing a merry "Heigh-ho!" work song and would converge on whichever menhir had made itself most obnoxious recently. Hup-hup, over the side it would go, to the accompaniment of dire threats and foul curses. Those stones that pretended to senses of humor would yodel fearfully all the way to the ground.
Damnfool crazies.
No matter how the bleeding rocks fell, they always landed upright, catlike.
The show scared the crap out of the rare peasant unlucky enough to witness it.
The stones were the Plains creatures' and tree god's communications lifeline. They spoke to one another mind to mind—though Bomanz was not about to give them credit for true sentience. No one would tell him squat, but he suspected Old Father Tree himself was running this operation—whatever this operation was—from the nether end.
One of those little things he found disconcerting was the fact that no matter how many stones went over the side, the menhir population never diminished. In fact, some of the same old stones turned up back aboard.
Goddamned insanity.
"Hey, Seth Chalk, you sour old fart, you figure out how to screw us over yet? Gawh!"
The talking buzzard had come. Bomanz replied with a gentle, tricky gesture, consisting of wrapping his hand around the bird's neck. "Just you personally, carrion breath."