Now Old Grendel was slow. Still a blur, but a slow blur, if you like.
She would wait for Snouter to get closer...
The snouter stopped, turned, looked up nervously. It made a flabby wet sneezy bray and turned again, bending almost double, and bolted into the trees.
Old Grendel was too surprised at the sound in the sky to give chase. The sound made her uneasy and reminded her of the Death Wind, but it was not the same.
It came from the south, filling the sky, shadowing the land. Red and green. Unimaginably huge fangs. Terror on a scale she had never known filled her body, her heart. It was a grendel of cosmic size. It was God. It blotted out the sun, its giant lips grinning at her, challenging her.
She tried to disappear into the mud. If this thing, this colossus wanted her territory, there would be nothing for her to do but die.
But she would fight! She had to fight! It came straight at her, looming like a mountain, moving not much quicker, and she felt the speed course through her body, preparing her for action.
The speed roared through her like a flame, and she couldn't move. She couldn't see how to reach the beast! Slow, slow, it didn't have to be a new breed of grendel. Was it challenger or meat? How to reach it? Fire roared along her veins and her mind was shutting down. That rock? No, that somewhat more distant log—
She lurched from the mud. Mud splashed across startled snouters. Instinctively she smashed one with her tail, curling it so that the creature wasn't hooked and caught. It screamed and lurched away, but Old Grendel ignored it and flashed onward. In seconds she reached the low end of a tree that had fallen across a white boulder. For another second she was clawing her way to a stop, skidding in a curve along the mud, while the snouters scattered in all directions. She reached the naked roots and blurred up the log and launched herself, and tried to take her bearings as she flew. The God of Grendels was too big to miss.
She had never seen anything so large in flight. Certainly she had no practice targeting such. She was falling below it. It was as if she'd jumped at a moon! Her claws were ready, she had one last surprise for the beast when it turned to snap her up... she'd be no more than a mouthful, but she would burn its mouth...
She smacked down into an inch of shallow water over soft mud. Impact knocked her dizzy, but she clawed for leverage and skimmed a tight curve, knees and ankles buckling, across the mud for a hundred feet, then burrowed.
She was two hundred feet from where she had been, buried snout-deep in moist dirt, motionless, with only her snorkel raised. The heat was leaking from her, the fatigue too, but too slowly. At this moment the God of Grendels could have her for a snouter. Where was it? She lifted an eye.
It was behind her. Above and behind, moving away.
It was leaving! She had driven it away! She had defended her territory—
But as, pain-filled, she crawled back to the river, the image of the hideous thing filled her mind. At some time in her long, long life, she had seen something like it before.
Much farther away. It had flown. Its markings had been different then, not a grendel at all—a black back, pale belly, enormous eyes—but it might be of the same species. It had moved the same, sounded the same. It too had been vast, larger than a whole brood of adult grendels. Bigger than a cloud. She could not begin to comprehend its meaning.
She had done a dangerous thing. The huge-eyed nightmare was going where she could not, where no rivers ran, and where jungles and hunter-climbers did. But she'd followed a rare rainstorm uphill, and kept moving after it was gone, up the slope of a nearby mountain.
That was not long after the Change. With her new sight she'd felt that she could do anything. She had reached the peak of the mountain and placed herself above that thing, in time to see it sink down to kiss the earth.
Three smaller flying things had left it. God's swimmers? Much smaller creatures had swarmed below it. Parasites, she surmised, seeking to spread their kind. But though they showed only as dots, she could guess their size. They never went on speed for as long as she watched. Slow, stupid: not grendels, but prey.
Then she'd crawled back down to water. Never a drop of rain came to cool her. She was ravenous every step of the way, and she had never gone on speed. If she had, she would have died.
Now this, the Grendel God. If it was prey, it would feed all the grendels beneath the sky.
She'd been hungry before, she was ravenous now. New prey. New tastes.
New games to lose and win, new blood to wet her snout.
New, new, new.
If Old Grendel had been able to clarify her concept of a god, she would have prayed to it. The spawn of grendels were so small, not even a mouthful. One of those two-legged things would feed her beyond her capacity. She would bury it in the mud for a day, or two, or three, until it grew sweet. Until the water bugs came and ate its eyes into raw wet sockets, and the tissues bloated with nectar. Then she would feast.
The first tinglings of speed, urgent and warm, began to stir her. She clamped her mind down. She was already too close to being burned out. They could hunt her, this New Meat, this spawn of the Grendel God. They were slow, and clumsy, but... experience tried to warn her of danger.
All creatures make mistakes.
Hunter-climbers made mistakes. She had cracked their bones with her teeth, and savored the sweetness within.
She wiggled back toward the river, a few inches at a time. God floated toward the Cloud Mountain, where it began to descend. Where the first huge-eyed Great Flyer had descended. No rivers ran near there. Too far. Always too far, up the rocky slopes where she could go when there was enough rain, but that happened seldom.
But all things were prey to a grendel, and all things must spawn. Its spawn would come down to water. If she could not eat the great flying creature, then she would eat its spawn.
"Deadwood Pass," Jessica said. The roboticized mining camp was located on a half-mile-wide mountain pass. To the east the land fell away steeply across rocky ground to the Grendel Valley River some called the Styx four thousand feet down and five miles away. The west side of the pass was less steep, falling a thousand feet to a high desert in a mile of boulder-strewn cliff slopes. The pass was bounded by steeply rising slopes to north and south. When the First found this area ten Avalon years before, a stream had run down from the northern peak. It wasn't a large stream, but it was enough to worry the First. They had changed its course with dynamite. Where once it flowed down to the pass and then westward into the desert, now it veered to the east and fell over a series of cliffs to make spectacular waterfalls. They had installed sluice gates so that water could still be diverted to run in the old stream when Deadwood Pass was occupied.
Water meant grendels. When grendels hunted they went on speed. It made them incredibly fast, but it also generated heat. A grendel too far from water could cook itself. They had never seen a grendel more than two kilometers from water except in rainstorms.
Joe Sikes examined the area below with binoculars. "Base, this is Sikes. I have examined the pass and I confirm no change in water levels," he said formally.
"Roger, Joe Sikes," Zack's voice said. "Geographic confirms no cloud formations, no rain expected, all water levels at or below normal in all directions from Deadwood. You are cleared to approach."
"Bring her down," Sikes called. He continued to look through the binoculars, sweeping his view up and down both sides of the pass, then up and down the sharply rising peaks bounding it. "Jess, Linda, please confirm this, I see nothing." He handed the binoculars to Jessica.