“No more. Learned my lesson, or thought I did.” Gorbel’s muddy, brown eyes were as veined with green as his leg, the whites all but gone. “Look.”
Against a tree leaned a man, a Merikit judging by his braids, but that was no red cap that he wore.
“ ‘Prime pelts on some of them,’ ” Jame quoted, feeling her stomach contract.
“First time I saw Fash take a trophy. Last time I hunted with him.”
Stag, sow, and man dissolved into afternoon shadow. Gorbel blinked. The green clouding his eyes faded leaving only flecks. He stumbled and almost fell, swearing fretfully like a tired child.
Something dark flitted from behind one tree to another. It could be a trick of the eyes, but Jame still had the sense of being watched. Where in Perimal’s name was that lodge?
She fished the imu medallion out of her pocket and spoke to its blind face. “If you want us, Earth Wife, here we are. Enough games!”
With the next step, she pitched forward on her face, a three-foot drop into deep grass with barely time to break her fall. Behind her were the low eaves of a half-sunken house. Its upper walls were lined with gap-mouthed imus, its doorposts and lintel with serpentine forms carved in high relief. Worn steps led down to the door.
“I told you she was around,” said Gorbel, still snorting with laughter at her fall. He limped down the steps, forced open the rasping door and bellowed, “Wood Witch! Company, with a present.”
The next moment, as he stepped inside, there came the sound of another fall, followed by a spate of heartfelt curses.
Jame descended the stair and waited at the bottom for her eyes to adjust—not, surprisingly, to the lodge’s usual gloom but to a golden, melting light that cast no shadows and distorted all distances.
The map spread out before her, with Gorbel sprawling across its eastern margin. Earth and stone ridges indicated mountains; furrows, rivers. The hollow that had betrayed the Caineron must be the Eastern Sea. Strangely, there was nothing west of the Central Lands except for tentative scratches. Also, some areas were either blank or had small, leather sacks sitting on them. The Earth Wife seemed to be packing up her map—why, Jame had no idea. She winced as Gorbel scrabbled to his feet, defacing large tracts of the Ben-ar Confederation. At least he had fallen short of Tai-tastigon, or there might have been real trouble.
Then the emptiness of the room struck her. The last time she had been here, in the middle of a volcanic eruption, it had been packed wall to wall with creatures taking refuge from the hot ashfall without. This time there was only one, grazing by a side wall that wasn’t quite there. Chumley whisked his blond tail and cocked an ear at Jame. Then he smelled the apple still in her pocket and ambled over to investigate. While he munched it, she stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. Here at least was a horse that didn’t frighten her, despite his size. Already huge, the chestnut gelding seemed to have grown even larger since she had given him to the Earth Wife during the eruption. Presents of all sizes and shapes stimulated Mother Ragga—luckily since at the time she had been rendered to skin, bone, and a great deal of molten fat by her sudden descent from the eruption in a lava bomb.
But where was she now?
Feet padded rapidly on earth, growing nearer. So did the sound of wheezing breath.
The northern wall wasn’t there either, only hints of it melting back into shadows. Out of it trotted Mother Ragga.
Everything about her dumpy figure flopped or jiggled. As a hat, clamped in place with one pudgy hand, she wore the laterally split head of a doe. Its skin cape covered her shoulders and its hooves, still attached, clattered at her heels. Underneath, over massive swaying breasts, she wore an assortment of hides both rough and smooth, predator and prey. Withered vines wreathed her wattled throat and ample waist. Burrs and green berries tumbled in her wake. On she came, panting, a tattered harvest unto herself, somehow sere and lacking.
“Present,” she wheezed, thrusting out a dirty hand. “Gimme!”
When Gorbel gave her the twin-globed quartz, she crowed with delight. “The Commandant’s baubles! Taken or given?”
“He said that I could have them . . . it.”
“Any man who says that has at least a pair in reserve. A slippery bastard, that boy, but he never did lack balls.”
She stepped carefully onto the map, clucking with disapproval at the damage caused by Gorbel’s fall, “Bet they never had an earthquake there before,” and placed the quartz near the northern wall between two rock ridges, beside a twisting, deep furrow. Jame realized with a start that that was Tentir’s location.
“Mother Ragga, what are you up to?”
The Earth Wife chuckled. “Find out if you can, clever puss.” Amusement changed abruptly to a scowl. “What are you doing here anyway? You should be up in the hills.”
“You know I’m not welcome there. Your Favorite or not, Chingetai would probably kill me.”
“Chingely is a fool. Just the same . . . ”
“Will you two stop nattering?” Gorbel balanced on one foot, sounding like a petulant child but also sweating in genuine distress. “You’ve got your balls . . . er . . . baubles . . . er . . . ”
“Bottom?” suggested Jame.
“Seat! The Commandant’s Seat! Now help me, dammit!”
“You picked a fine time to barge in, as if I weren’t busy enough today. What’s more, the time when I could really have used this bauble has passed, although I still might find it useful. Oh yes.” She peered into the rock’s crystalline depths. “Such sights yet to see . . . but you’ve also lapsed, haven’t you? You got this infection trying to take a trophy, a young rathorn no less, just to prove that you could. What, did you want to impress Daddy?”
“He laughed at me for failing.”
“He would. And if you’d succeeded, he would have been angry because the kill wasn’t his.”
“D’you think I don’t know that?”
“Huh. A sweet family you’ve got, young Caineron, for all that you’re one of the better sort. Just the same, are you sure you wouldn’t rather be a tree? Nice, long, quiet lives they have, and with golden willow in your blood you could even go for the occasional stroll.”
“Get. It. Out!”
“Oh, all right, all right. Some people don’t know a blessing when it bites them in the baubles. Sit you down.”
Gorbel groped for the outline of a chair by the fireplace and gingerly sat in it. At his touch, after an alarming tendency to melt, it took on substance.
Jame knelt, gripped his bucket of a boot, and pulled. Part of it ripped away, then more, eaten by the acid-tipped rootlets within. Gorbel’s foot was scarcely recognizable, swathed as it was in a tangled mass of white threads. Freed, they unraveled into a thrashing, serpentine node, each thread like a blind mouth. One of them struck at Jame’s hand, causing her to draw it back with a sharp hiss. Acid had eaten a hole in her glove, and this had been her last intact pair, dammit.
Mother Ragga threw a rope over the rafters, then whipped its end around the flailing roots.
“Help me!” she said to Jame.
As both of their weights came to bear, Gorbel’s foot jerked up. Both he and the chair crashed over backward.
“Again,” said the Earth Wife.
They hauled, and the mass of fibers inched out of Gorbel’s flesh. He made a sound like a kettle coming to a boil and kicked the air with his other foot
“And again.”
Suddenly, it came free, dumping them both on the floor. Jame looked up at the extracted, writhing fibrous growth, red-tinged down most of its length with the Caineron’s blood. Mother Ragga seized and shook it. “Behave! Here’s a nice tub of earth. Make yourself at home.”