Daeman looked around. The campfires were low, pitiful things—mere burning moss or lichen and a few twigs, nothing more. The brightest thing on the dark rock was the Setebos egg still glowing milkily in his rucksack.
“Has it come to this?” Daeman asked, speaking to himself.
“I guess it has,” said Greogi, sliding off the sonie and staggering slightly. The man was obviously in some state beyond exhaustion. “It’s full dark now. The voynix will be coming up the sides any minute.”
Part 3
41
Harman fell through darkness with Ariel for what seemed an impossible length of time.
When they landed, it wasn’t with a fatal crash at the base of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but with a soft thump on a jungle floor covered with centuries’ buildup of leaves and other humus.
For a stunned second Harman couldn’t believe that he wasn’t dead, but then he stumbled to his feet, shoved the small Ariel figure away—though Ariel had already danced out of range—and then stood, blinking in the darkness.
Darkness. It had been daytime at the Golden Gate. He was… somewhere else. Wherever the somewhere else might be, besides on the dark side of the planet, Harman knew that it was in deep jungle. The night smelled of richness and rot, the thick, humid air clung to his skin like a soaked blanket, Harman’s shirt immediately soaked through and lay limp against him, and all around in the seemingly impenetrable night came the buzz of insects and the rustle of fronds, palms, undergrowth, insects, small creatures and large. Letting his eyes adapt, his hands raised into fists, hoping that Ariel would come back into striking range, Harman craned his head back and saw the hint of starlight between tiny gaps in foliage far, far above.
In another minute, he could see the pale, almost spectral, genderless figure of Ariel glowing slightly ten feet or so from him across the jungle floor.
“Take me back,” growled Harman.
“Take thee back where?”
“To the Bridge. Or to Ardis. But do it now.”
“I cannot.” The genderless voice was maddening, insulting.
“You will,” growled Harman. “You will right now. However you got me here, undo it, take me back. Now.”
“Or what consequence ensues?” asked the glowing figure in the jungle dark. Ariel’s voice sounded mildly amused.
“Or I’ll kill you,” Harman said flatly. He realized that he meant it. He would strangle this green-white flop of a thing, choke the life out of it, and spit on the corpse. And then you’ll be left lost in an unknown jungle warned the last sensible part of Harman’s mind. He ignored it.
“Oh, my,” said Ariel, feigning terror, “I shall be pinched to death.”
Harman leaped, arms extended. The little figure—not much more than four feet tall—caught him in midleap and threw him thirty feet through ripping fronds and tearing vines into the jungle.
It took Harman a minute or two to get his breath back and another minute to get to his knees. He realized at once that if Ariel had done that to him elsewhere—say, on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu where they’d been a minute before—it would have broken his back. Now he stood again on deep humus, willed his vision to see through the encroaching darkness, and shoved and tore his way back through vines and thick vegetation to the small clearing where Ariel waited.
The sprite was no longer alone.
“O look,” Ariel said in happy, conversational tones, “here is more of us!”
Harman paused. He could see better now by the starlight filtering down into this little clearing in the jungle and what he saw made him stare.
There were at least fifty or sixty other shapes in the clearing and under the trees and amidst the ferns and vines beyond. They were not human, but neither were they voynix or calibani or any other bipedal form that Harman had seen in his ninety-nine years and nine months of life. These humanoid shapes were like rough sketches of people—short, not much taller than little Ariel, and, like Ariel, with transparent skin and organs floating in greenish liquid. But where Ariel had lips, cheeks, a nose, and the eyes of a young man or woman, with physical features and muscles one associated with the human body, these short, green forms had neither mouths nor human eyes—they looked back at Harman in the starlight from black dots in their faces that could have been lumps of coal—and from their boneless-looking frames to their three-fingered hands, the forms seemed to lack all identity.
“I don’t believe you’ve met my fellow ministers,” Ariel said softly, gesturing with a feminine turn of hand toward the mob of shapes in the shadows. “Instruments to this lower world, they were belched up before your kind was born. They have different names—his Prosperousness doth fain to call them this and that, as takes his pleasure—but they are more like me than not, descended from chlorophyll and the motes set there in the forest to measure it in time before post-humans. They are the zeks—helpers and workers and prisoners all, and who of us is not all these things?”
Harman stared at the greenish shapes. They stared unblinking back.
“Seize him,” lisped Ariel.
Four of the zeks came forward—they moved with a smooth grace that Harman wouldn’t have expected from such gingerbread shapes—and before he could run or fight, two of them seized him with three-fingered grips of iron. The third zek leaned in close, unbreathing, until its featureless chest touched the tunic above Harman’s chest, and the fourth seized Harman’s hand—just as Ariel had seized Hannah’s only a short while before—and thrust it through the yielding green-skin membrane of the third zek’s chest. Harman felt the soft heart-organ in his hand, almost coming to him like a pet, and then the unspoken words echoed in his brain—do not irritate ariel he will kill you on a whim. come with us and make no effort to resist. it is to your benefit and to your lady’s ada’s to come with us now.
“How do you know about Ada?” Harman shouted aloud.
come
That was the last word transmitted through Harman’s pulsing hand into his aching skull before his hand was wrenched free, the zek’s soft heart still in it, shriveling, dying, and then the zek itself pitched over backward, falling silently to the jungle floor, there to shrivel and desiccate and die. Ariel and the other zeks ignored the corpse of the communicator as Ariel turned and led the way down the slightest of trails along the dark jungle floor.
The zeks on either side of Harman still clung to his arm, but lightly now, and Harman made no effort to resist, only to keep up as the line of forms moved through the dark wood.
Harman’s mind was racing faster than his feet as he stumbled to keep up through the dark jungle. At times, when the foliage overhead was too thick, he couldn’t see anything—not even his legs or feet beneath him in the near absolute darkness—so he let the zeks guide him as if he were blind and concentrated on thinking. He knew that if he was ever going to see Ada and Ardis Hall again, he’d have to be a lot smarter in the coming hours than he’d been in the last many months.
First question—where was he? It had been a stormy morning when he’d been at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but it felt very late here in this jungle. He tried to remember his self-taught geography, but the maps and spheres blurred in his mind now—words like Asia and Europe meaning almost nothing. But the darkness here suggested that Ariel hadn’t just whisked him to some jungle on the same southern continent that held the Bridge. He couldn’t walk back to Machu Picchu and Hannah and Petyr and the sonie.