They ran onward, past the western shoulder of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. The great moon-clock in its face seemed almost to be watching them, but Rokhlenu dismissed the idea impatiently as it occurred to him.
It looked almost as if the plains north of Dhaarnaiarnon's foothills were on fire. There was a sullen brooding redness there that shifted and shiftednot quickly enough for fire, not steady enough.
Rokhlenu almost turned back, then. There was something odd about this. The air around them was furnace hot. No one would have reported this as an attack of werebears. It was beginning to look like a trap. Certainly he wanted to go back and have a long conversation with his fellow member of the Innermost Pack, the scent-addicted Naaleiyaleiu.
In the end he decided to go onward. This, whatever it was, might have something to do with the freakish weather bedeviling the city. It might be a cause of the weather; it might be an effect. But this near to the city, it certainly represented a danger. He was now the First Singer of Wuruyaaria. He led his fighters on.
Rather than head straight onto the plain where the red shifting mystery lay, he climbed the last foothill to the north to reconnoiter. His fighters followed him up.
From the ridge at the top of the hill he looked down on the plain and the monstrous thing it contained.
It was like a bug, he decided-a helgrammite or many-legger, grown to incredible length. It sprawled from east to west without any obvious ending. It was coal black in color, but around the edges of its carapace it glowed with sullen red light.
Perhaps it was more like a plant than an insect. It seemed to be sinking roots deep into the ground, all along its length that he could see. And it had more than one branch.
"Chieftain," said Runhuiulanhu urgently, gesturing behind them. "Look!"
Rokhlenu looked and disliked what he saw. Two branches of the thing, whatever it was, were closing around the hill they stood on.
"Who's fastest?" he snapped. "Lekkativengu and who else?"
"Taakhyteiu," said Runhuiulanhu, and there was general agreement.
"Lekkativengu. Taakhyteiu. As soon as I'm done talking, you get out of here. Get back and tell Wuinlendhono and Yaarirruuiu what you saw hereand no one else. Go."
The two werewolves fled down the southern slope toward the closing gap.
"You three: go with Runhuiulanhu. You three: come with me. Runhuiulanhu: each of us will take one branch. If it's a beast, we can fight it. If we can't kill it, we can at least keep it from killing our messengers. If we survive, so much the better. Get me?"
"Got you, Chief." Runhuiulanhu and his crew ran down to attack the branch curling around the hill from the west. Rokhlenu and his crew took the eastern branch.
Two of Rokhlenu's werewolves jumped straight at the nearest point of the eastern branch with reckless courage, one at a rootlike leg, the other at a lateral plate. They didn't seem to slow its progress at all, but they hung on for a moment or two, screaming. Then Trumpeter's dim moonlight could not heal them anymore and they burst into flame and died.
"God bite this damned thing!" Rokhlenu swore. He could hardly bear to close with it, the heat was so fierce; the boiling glass in Morlock's cave was nothing compared to it. He seized a poison-tipped spear and darted in close, slashing at one of the rootlike legs. A blue glowing mist emerged: what the beast used for blood, he supposed. Immediately rootlike tendrils reached out toward the blue glowing scar: to heal it, he guessed. He darted back in to widen the wound. The spear shattered in his hands, scattering red shards of molten metal. He jumped back, burned and cut by the hot metal, poisoned by its venom. He could feel it spreading in his veins from the wound.
He glanced over to see his last remaining comrade had been pierced through the eye by a metal fragment. He was as dead as if he had been stabbed with silver.
Silver. Rokhlenu remembered the dreadful weapon he carried. He drew it from the shoulder sling and stabbed the beast with it in the side, stabbing fiercely but without hope. He hated the thing, and he hated silver, and he wanted to use one hate to hurt the other.
And it did. The silver-cored glass spear shattered from the heat of the beast, but his slashing desperate cut opened up a long blue wound in the beast's side.
Nor was that all. Again, rootlike tendrils reached toward the wound. But so did several legs. They sank deep into the beast's own side. It was not trying to heal itself. Somehow, it was feeding on itself-struggling to consume the blue glowing fog that lay within itself. And he had slowed its progress, as it turned on itself.
Turned on itself. That was it. He could not defeat the thing, but it could and would defeat itself, if it could be wounded deeply enough.
He wondered if the messengers had gotten away. He looked up to see Lekkativengu standing alone and indecisive in the red-tinged moonlightbut beyond the closing ring of the beast's branches.
"Get out!" he screamed. "Get back! Runhuiulanhu, use the silver spear! Then get away!"
He did not see Runhuiulanhu, and wasn't even sure he was still alive. But Rokhlenu realized that he himself was already dead. If he could give his fighters a chance to get away, he owed them that.
He raised his hands toward dim uncaring Trumpeter and summoned the night shape upon himself.
When he arose as a wolf, shaking off his harness and tunic, time had passed. The narrow blue wound he had opened in the beast was nearly blocked by the beast's own hungry tentacles.
Rokhlenu leapt at the furnace-hot blast of the beast …and found the blue fog seeping from the beast was strangely cool. He planted his teeth on one of the ragged edges of the wound and pulled with all his strength. If he could kill it, or lure it into killing itself, his death might not be for nothing. It might save his beloved from dying the same way.
That was his last thought. There were no others. In a way, there never had been, none that mattered.
Chapter Thirty: Makers Meet
Morlock fell into the pit, and shadows spun around him as he fell. He thought at first they were birds, but when one passed without pain through his ghostly hand he realized they were impulse clouds.
Conditions were hostile in the extreme, and he had, perhaps, moments before his fall killed him. But he forced his mind into the discipline of vision. The world of matter fell away, and he was surrounded by clouds of intention and desire, bereft of any will to wield them.
Morlock wielded them. He wrapped the impulse clouds around him like a cloak, slowing his fall.
Time and the perception of time are altered in the experience of visionary rapture. Morlock had no idea how long he fell. He simply became aware, at some point, that he had struck the ground with some force. Not enough to kill him, he guessed, since his awareness was still anchored by his body.
With his Sight in its current decrepit state, it was even harder for him to dismiss a vision than to summon one. Slowly, deliberately, he rewove the ragged threads of his conscious awareness. As he became more and more aware of physical pain, he knew he was getting closer to escape from the vision that had saved his life.
He finally opened his eyes. The world was coal black, edged with burning red. Even without being in rapture, he could feel the swarms of impulse clouds surrounding him. If they had been water, he would have been drowning in them.
He sat up slowly. His body ached a bit, but all the parts that were still there still worked. Tyrfing was still strapped to his shoulder. If someone had tried to kill him, they had failed. He took his time about getting to his feet: there was no hurry, since no one seemed to be trying to kill him at the moment.