A whimper caught his ear.
Not five feet away he saw the glowing eyes of an infant manta. When the windwhale fragment began to stabilize he crawled thither. "They forget you, little fellow? Come on out here."
The kit hissed and spat and tried to use its lightning. It could generated no more than a spark. Bomanz dragged it out into the moonlight. "You are a tiny one, aren't you? No wonder they missed you." The kit was no bigger than a half-grown cat. It could not be more than a month old. Bomanz cradled the infant in the crook of his left arm. It ceased struggling almost immediately. It seemed content to be held.
The old wizard resumed his journey.
The windwhale had become as stable as it could. Bomanz eased nearer the side. He looked down just in time to see the other half hit ground.
Silent and Darling joined him. As always their faces were emotionless masks, one dusky, one pale. Silent stared down at the earth. Darling seemed more interested in the baby manta. Bomanz said, "Under two thousand feet now. but that's still a long way to fall. And there's still that to concern us."
That meant the small fires still burning back where the rear half had broken away. One of those could reach another gas bladder any minute.
"We should get as far forward as we can and hope for the best." He tried to sound more hopeful than he felt.
Silent nodded.
Bomanz looked around. The monastery was burning merrily, fired by the fire-eater. So that had worked, some. But when he listened the right way he could sense a knot of rage and pain seething amidst the flames.
The Limper had survived again.
And his scheme had worked some, too.
XXVII
I had a hard time believing it. Raven had given up. His hip must have hurt a lot more than he wanted to admit.
He had not moved since he had gone down, and hadn't said nothing since his body beat down his will. I think he was ashamed.
I really wished the son of a bitch would figure out that he didn't have to be a superman. I wasn't going to make him stop being my buddy because he was human.
I was as wiped out as he was but I could not lay down and die. That show up around the monastery was getting flashier all the time. In fact, some of the fireworks was headed our way. That made me too nervous to crap out, though even my toenails were tired.
Another blast. A rose of fire bloomed in the sky. A big hunk of something started falling, spinning off smaller hunks of fire.
I realized what I was seeing.
"Raven, you better get your ass up and look at this mother."
He grunted but he didn't do it.
"It's a windwhale, asshole. Out of the Plain of Fear. What do you think of that?" I saw a couple get wiped during the big bloodletting up to the Barrowland.
"So it seems."
Mr. Ambition had rolled over. His voice was cool but his face was fishbelly white, like he'd stepped around a corner and bumped noses with Old Man Death.
"So how come it's here?" Then I shut up. I'd imagined up a reason.
"Not for me, kid. Who on the Plain would know where to look for me? Who would care?"
"Then… ?"
"It's the battle of the Barrowland, still going on. It's the tree god head-to-head with whatever I felt breaking loose up there."
Light flashed. Fire busted out of one end of the part of the windwhale that was still up. "That thing isn't going to stay up there much longer. Should we go see if we can do something?"
He didn't say anything for at least a minute. He looked up at the humpbacked hills like he was thinking maybe he had enough left to go catch Croaker after all. He couldn't be more than five, ten miles away, could he? Then he levered himself to his feet, wincing, obviously favoring his bad hip. I didn't ask. I knew he'd claim it was just the chill air and cold ground.
He told me, "Better get the horses. I'll drag our stuff together."
Big job you took on yourself there, old buddy, since we basically just dropped in our tracks when we couldn't go anymore.
Since he didn't have much to do he mostly just stood there watching that flying disaster cross the sky. He looked like he was being asked to mount the gallows and put the noose around his own neck. ,
"I've been thinking, Case," Raven said as we came down off the knee of the most northerly of those goofy humped hills, headed northeast, chasing that drifting windwhale fragment.
"Brooding is the word I would have picked, old buddy. And you been at it since the day they finally put the Dominator down. Looks like that explosion a while back was the last one."
The fragment was drifting on a course that would intercept ours. A few fires flickered on one end. It was turning end for end slowly but had stopped its fall.
"Maybe. But you say something definite like that, the gods will stick it to you. Let's just hope it clears the woods. Be rough landing in there." "What were you thinking?"
"About you and me, Croaker and his gang, the Lady, Silent, Darling. About all the things we had in common but still couldn't get along."
"I didn't see all that much you had hi common. Not once you got past having the same enemies."
"Neither did I for a long time. And none of them saw it, either. Else we all might have tried a little harder." I tried to look like I gave a shit at three in the morning. "Basically we're all lonely, unhappy people looking for our place, Case. Loners who'd really rather not be but don't know how. When we get to the door that would let us in—or out—we can't figure out how to work the latch string."
I'll be damned. That was about as open-up-and-expose-what's-inside a remark as I ever got out of him. Filled with longing and conviction. Well shave my head and call me Baldy. I been right up here beside him since a couple years ago. You don't see the changes going on in people when you're standing up close.
This wasn't the Raven I'd first met, before his ego and misadventure had gotten his soul trapped among the shadow evils of the Barrowland, before its cleansing. He had returned from the prison of the heart dramatically altered. Hell, he wasn't even the same man who had spent all his time drunk on his ass in Oar, neither.
I had kind of mixed feelings. I'd admired and liked and gotten along pretty good with the old Raven. Maybe I would again once he got through his transition. I did not know what to say to him, though I was sure he wanted a response. His knack for befuddling me never changed. "So did you figure out how to work it?"
"I have an unsettling premonition, Case. I'm almost paralyzed by a dread that I'm about to find out if I've learned anything." He stared at that piece of windwhale.
I checked it, guessed it was about two miles away and five hundred feet up. The breeze was bringing it to us.
"We going to chase it back into the hills if it carries that far?"
"You tell me, Case. This was your idea." He paused to whisper to his horse. The animals were not excited about hiking around at night either. Even if they didn't have to carry anybody.
Flame mushroomed out of the windwhale. Before the roar of the explosion reached us, I said, "We're not going to have to worry about climbing any hills."
The windwhale came down fast, turning end for end. When it was about two hundred feet off the ground some chunks fell off and it stopped coming down so fast. I had a pretty good idea where it would hit. We hurried toward the spot.
Then what was left nosed down, sped up, and hit the ground about a mile away. It bounced back into the air, maybe a hundred feet high. It kept coming, straight at us now.