Chapter 16

Their conversation that night in the cave broke down the barriers that Porter felt separated them. The next morning was fresh and alive with the scents of autumn in the air. Entire trees, their branches, and piles of debris lay everywhere but the game trail was still discernable. They rode with the same deliberation yet finding companionship much easier to share. Porter felt more at ease with his choice to flee for the first time in many days.

Gilly still treated Porter like a lover in private but on the trail, there was little privacy. In front of Alin she maintained a public façade that he had grown to dislike. She had to be in charge, she had to have control of the conversation, the map, and the itinerary of the day. She would rely on Alin’s expertise for wilderness travel, but Porter had nothing to offer except the instincts of a wastecat. Kanji, who loved the opportunity to hunt in virgin woods, was not always reliable either. During the day, Porter often found himself preferring the company of the cat to the superior manner of his lover.

In contrast, Alin had a wicked sense of humor. He could turn any conversation into a repartee of wit and cynicism. Despite Porter’s wariness of Alin’s past, he found himself drawn into conversation time and again. He was surprised to hear himself laughing.

There was a time when the old Pyotr would sit daily in the employee’s cafeteria, sullenly poking his way through the mundane slop that never lived up to the hype on the daily menu. He would find himself sitting with the slovenly, the slow, or the just plain ugly, while around him swirled gossip and wit of all sorts. People passing his table would say ‘hello’ but all of them continued walking to other, more appealing seats. When he laughed back then, it had sounded hollow and false.

Alin opened up to Porter, conversing with him as Porter had seen him talking with Gilly many times. They covered many topics of politics and hunting, of geography and the Waste. Porter learned about the wines of Anshar, the subtleties of different regions of masa root, and the flavors of nella, roasted, salted, and stewed. Gilly had her own opinions on the subjects, especially politics and the court of the palace in Timisoara. Alin knew the gossip of Sky House like an old hag. He even delivered the devilish details in a creepy, old lady voice that added to the mirth.

Apparently, having Blue Hand added zest to one’s primitive predilections. If one was not caught in a compromising position with the wrong partner, then another was openly soliciting to try a similar compromising act. No one seemed to be quiet either when urges brought couples or more together. It seemed that Porter’s teacher, Zane, and his second wife were notoriously vocal and indiscriminate about where the mood would strike them. Porter roared even as he blushed at the escapades.

In the quiet moments, he was not sure what to make of the unstated past between Alin and Gilly, but she said little and reassured him every evening with words and touches. Porter had no doubts that Gilly kept his demons of insecurity and paranoia at bay. Despite the alien-ness of the woods and the weird calls from the hidden depths of the trees, he had not lapsed into his old habits of counting and consigning. At the brightest moments of the day, he wondered if he had overcome his old bad habits.

Alin could duel with a sword; his father had been in the army. He taught Porter how to fire pinpoints of Blue and enveloping wraps that blinded a foe or tripped the unwary when sword skill was not enough. Fane had never mentioned such devious devices. After several more of Alin’s tricks with Blue, Porter deduced that as much as Fane had taught him, the old man had withheld even more. In the last weeks he could imagine a reason for holding back but not any time prior to his research efforts. Why then did the Elder withhold?

Ten days later they chanced upon a minor miracle of nature. Unable to move further east, the four turned north through a clear pass and dropped down into a deep valley where the late autumn winds had never been able to penetrate. The pass widened as they descended and the walls of two ridges rose up on either side of them. As they reached the valley floor, a long thin meadow of summer flowers followed the left side of the trail as the path stayed close to the right side of the hidden paradise. Zoyanestra, the droves of insects that had pestered Porter when he tried to pick flowers back at Sky House, swarmed over their colorful territory. The buzzing of their wings and the clicks of their mandibles filled the air, echoing off the narrow slopes.

Alin led them into this wonderland with Gilly behind him. Porter had the pack hamox tethered to his own mount and rode behind them. The trail was narrow and with no room on the right and the zoyanestra on the left, Kanji brought up the rear none too happily. Obvious landslides had dumped boulders and rocks alongside the trail, leaving Alin to guide them slowly to avoid bruising a hamox hoof.

Their fatigue was undeniable. Their bones ached and their bodies stank from many days of riding. The lack of any sign of human habitation or even a passing of a hunting party had lulled them into a sense of complacency as they wandered into this isolated little patch of paradise.

Porter’s Blue began to tingle as they walked further into the valley; Kanji felt it as well. Buried so deeply in the northern wilderness, he assumed that the power was reacting to the zoyanestra, whose fierce hive minded attacks he learned about only after he stole their flowers. His imagination had given him a bloody picture of that scenario, which he tried to shake.

Kanji started making hissing sounds behind the last hamox and Porter turned to watch her fidget and test the air again and again. Porter’s own sense of alarm was rising as he heard the pitch of the zoyanestra change with agitation.

Porter was turning forward to call out a warning when a skin crawling hiss tore through the air followed by a scream of pure terror, Alin’s voice. A reptilian creature with powerful legs and an open maw was springing from the rocks on their right. Its skin was a mottled mask of grey and brown ridges with a wide mouth lined with yellow, dagger-like teeth. A short stubby tail, also ridged with spines, stuck straight out from its back. The living nightmare latched its jaws around Alin’s torso and its weight threw the man sideways from his hamox.

Zoranestra went into a fever pitch. Porter raised his hand to fire the Blue when the whistle of arrows filled the air, breaking his concentration. To his horror, he watched an arrow strike Gilly in the shoulder, and she lost her balance. Kanji screamed in rage and launched herself somewhere outside of Porter’s vision.

Blue filled his eyeballs, even as he heard arrows fly by him. His world became Blue and the zoyanestra as their fear and anger seized his head and melded into his own terror.

“IN THE BOULDERS,” he screamed into the Blue in his head. “THEY IN THE BOULDERS.”

An arrow found his thigh and he added his own scream to the zoyanestra in his head. Outside his head Kanji gave her battle cry again. Porter felt his world spinning out of control but his hand grasped the horn of the saddle.

As his sight eased back from the Blue towards daylight, Porter heard new, human screams filling the air, voices he did not recognize. When he could see fully, the field to his left was empty and the zoyanestra were in a frenzy ahead of him in the rocks on his right. The new screams came from there.

A man jumped up from behind a boulder to run, only to be smothered in another swarm of zoyanestra that found him. The man tried to swat the insects with his flailing hands but after a few futile waves, he pitched forward on top of the rock. He stopped screaming. Blood oozed out of ten thousand bites and soaked the stone beneath him with thin rivulets of red.

Kanji gave a cry of victory. The reptile lay dead between her jaws. Alin, what was left of Alin, lay under their feet.

“Gilly!” Porter cried out as he leapt from his hamox. An excruciating pain lanced through his leg and he fell against his fear-soaked mount. He did not fall all the way down though. Porter limped over to the woman, dragging his leg, and saw that she was moaning quietly on the ground, an arrow embedded in her right shoulder. She was not unconscious yet.

Porter slapped Kanji with a thick tendril of Blue, ordering her to investigate their attackers and to stand guard. She dropped her kill, wrinkled her nose at him with high-minded disgust, and slunk only as close as the still agitated zoyanestra would allow. Porter watched for a moment.

“Gilly,” Porter called out softly to her, as he sat next to her lying on his good leg. “Gilly, what do I do here? You’ve got to help me.”

Gilly moaned again but forced her eyes open, “It burns, Porter.”

The tears in her eyes caused his eyes to well up, too. He took a breath to calm himself, “Gilly, you’re a healer; tell me what to do.”

“Get the arrow out first. Clean the wound. Then you have to knit the broken vessels and capillaries back together and reconnect any severed nerves, before you seal the skin,” she said between gasps of pain.

Porter was at a loss. “How do I knit and seal?”

“Use your Blue, use your Blue.” She fainted.

Porter lurched back to his feet and reached up to her trail pack. He untied it and pulled the baggage down to the ground. He sunk back down. His own pain was getting worse every time he moved his leg. Throwing off his sword, bow and quiver, he dug into her bag for a knife. It was not there. He looked around frantically for a knife as his panic rose.