And now she felt cold and weird, and her bones were stretching her skin taut, and her mind was making patterns.
Way down there in silver-blue light: her own patch of water and land, with too little food for herself or her spawn. Probably the lake monster had already cleaned them out. Only one thing had been desirable about that place. There she could taste the lake monster in the water, and gain some sense of where she was.
Closer: the lake to her left, and on her right the pebbly mud, and the tangled wood where her sister had turned to fog at a speed-enhanced run.
Closer yet: more pebbly mud and horsemanes behind, and one huge old horsemane very near the water. The lake monster spent most of her time in the water offshore, but when the woods were wet they could shield her too. Grendel spawn could turn to grendels anywhere in the lake, and their surprise could be brief and intense when the lake monster burst from the trees.
Here: she could see muddy river and know the food beneath. The river would bring bottom feeders. She could eat now... and the lake monster would taste her anywhere in the lake, and know she was here. If she had seen patterns then, she would not have come here.
But she saw another pattern now.
The grendel bore her hunger. She watched the woods and the water. Of prey she saw no sign, and no sign of the lake monster. The silver spear of light failed to rise, but the strangeness of her world did not go away.
And so a day passed, and a night.
At midmorning of the following day, the grendel began to walk toward one great horsemane isolated on the mud.
No sign of the lake monster.
At a moment that was nothing but guesswork, the grendel began to run.
This was the first puzzle she had ever solved, and she had no faith in it at all. She ran, but she was not on speed. When a wave moved where no wave should be, terror and vindication surged and then she was on speed. She was skating on slick mud, her legs a blur, homing on the one isolated tree in a plume of mud and gravel.
The lake monster came out of the water, screamed challenge, and was on speed.
The grendel veered right and dug in. She'd pass the tree on the right. If the lake monster came straight at her, hit her broadside, she would be torn, smashed, dead. She could see, feel her own death in the pattern! But a notch more speed changed that, pulled her ahead, and now the lake monster would hit the tree.
The lake monster saw it. Veered left. She'd strike the grendel after she passed the tree.
Hah! The grendel veered left. She missed the tree by a toenail's width, just behind the lake monster's spiked tail. The lake monster was turning in a spew of gravel and dust, but falling behind for all that.
It slowed her for only a moment. She had been eating while sickness melted the flesh from her daughter.
There was dust blowing out of the tangle forest as the grendel swept past them, burning inside, her enemy far too close behind her. But the lake monster swept through the dust, and the dust followed her like a comet tail.
Enough! The grendel veered out over the water. She could run on water if she ran fast enough, but the speed was broiling her from inside. She looked back once, and saw what she had hoped for. She ducked, and smashed into the water, and sank, cooling.
She lifted her snorkel. Then, cautiously, her eyes.
The lake monster was a comet of dust running straight at her across the water.
If the lake monster dived now she'd be free of the fog and the heat within, but the grendel would have her. The lake monster didn't dive. Probably she never thought of it. When she stopped, she was invisible in a restless dark cloud.
The cloud drifted away. Red bones sank through water. The grendel gnawed at them, and was still hungry. Hungry and triumphant. Now she would hunt the shoreline where the lake monster no longer ruled.
PART 1
ICE ON THEIR MINDS
Youth holds no society with grief.
EURIPIDES
Chapter 1
THE RETURN
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL, The Silver Stallion
"What in the hell is that?"
Jessica Weyland heard the words without recognizing the voice. It originated just outside the stone walls of the Hold's guest bathroom, where she was scrubbing her cheeks with ice-cold water piped from the Amazon Creek.
The bath was part of the Hold's guest suite, attached to a guest bedroom that had been hers before she built her own place at Surf's Up. Toshiro Tanaka, her previous evening's entertainment, still sprawled unconscious across the bed. Sleep-cycle incompatibility prevented them from having anything but an occasional fling. Too bad. Like many a musician, he had such good hands...
"Frozen bat turds! Will you look at it?"
Jessica ran toward the living room before thinking about what she'd heard. Her long, deeply tanned and muscular legs ate the distance between bedrooms and living room in their nine long strides. Her mind flew faster than her feet. Kids paying us back for last night? Gotcha? No. They'd be pretending horror, not astonished curiosity. No, this is something else.
Jessica was tall and blue-eyed, as Nordic as a glacier, with shoulder-length blond hair, high cheekbones, and a large, cool mouth. She moved like the athletic animal she was. The muscles in her calves bounced with every long stride. She was unself-consciously naked: there had been no time to grab a towel.
Her father, Cadmann Weyland, Colonel Cadmann Weyland, had built the Hold as a fortress against monsters even before he understood the grendel threat. The others called him paranoid and worse, even accusing him of faking a threat as part of a power grab, even a military takeover of the colony. He left them then, and built his home on a high ledge, digging into the side of Mucking Great Mountain. Most of it was underground: cool in Avalon's winters, and warm in her summers. Light slanted in through the Hold's louvered ceiling. The living room was Paradise.
A green-tiled channel grooved the middle of the living room. The glacial Amazon ran through that, right through the living room, a foot deep and four feet wide. It had once been deeper and narrower there, but Jessica didn't remember that. It was another of those facts she had been told, and which she believed in the same way that she believed there was a solar system with a yellower star and a planet named Earth.
A gently sloped tile shelf ran along part of the stream. The rest was fenced off by a hedge that grew along the edge of the running water. The hedge was composed of plants from both Camelot Island and the far reaches of Avalon, so that the room was as much aborted and botanical garden as living space.
Fully half those weirdly shaped plants had thorns and spines. They weren't really cactus, but resembled cactus more than they did any other kind of Terran plant. Avalon plant life needed protection. Any defenseless life form was instant grendel chow. Some plants had other protection: the violet-petaled beauties with acid resin, tiny deep blue fruiting bulbs with astonishingly active poison, carnivorous lilies that could turn a frog-sized creature to a husk in forty-eight hours. The garden grew more lethal over the years as the children of Cadmann Weyland's Hold grew more able to cope with them. The plants came from everywhere—Camelot Island's highlands, offshore islands, even the mainland, all brought here to line the stream—and despite the garden's lethality it was beautiful.
From her earliest days Jessica thought the Hold was the most wonderful place in the world. At present Cadmann, Mary Ann, and Sylvia were in the southern thorn forests hunting specimens. The Hold and Cadmann's Bluff itself were Jessica's and Justin's for the next day and a half. A safe place despite the garden. A perfect place to begin the initiation of the Grendel Scouts. Later they would be taken to the mainland for their real coming-of-age. There were neither serpents nor scorpions in this paradise.