Chapter 17: Man Meets Bear on Bear Mountain

Nevianne

We had just finished loading Kogwahee into the cart. I had cast my spell and he would be healed by evening. He still hadn’t been able to walk under his own power. I was startled when Sabina screeched and fainted. I looked around wildly, expecting to see another imp, maybe a squad of them. Then I almost screeched just as loudly.

My lord Asmodeus was standing next to the cart, naked as he could be, scratching at the growth of beard that he hated. He was a smokey, transparent version of himself, looking like a ghost – not that I’ve ever actually seen a ghost in person; I never learned necromancy, and I never wanted to. The smells are nasty. “My lord sweetheart?” I asked, my voice squeaking like a mouse, just like old times. “Jack? Thou ... thou art ... dead?”

“No,” he said, his voice only at about half its normal volume, but still somehow carrying. “I’m still alive and well. I broke a finger though. That hurt like the dickens. Actually, one of the flying monkeys broke it for me. Or maybe he did it to me.”

“Where art thou?” I asked, fearing ... something. I didn’t even know what to fear. I was too scared.

“Right now, I’m flying over the country north and to the east of you,” he told me. “I’m guessing I’m maybe eighty or ninety miles to your northeast. I’m following the flying monkeys back to their base.”

“You’re flying?“ I asked, aghast. My love had once told me he was afraid of heights. Besides, the last time I had seen him, he had lacked wings.

“I’m a sparrow at the moment,” he explained. “I’ve done quite a bit of transformation this afternoon. I’m getting pretty good at it, but this flying takes an awful lot of energy. I could really go for some birdseed and a worm or two. Is everyone okay? Was anybody hurt in the skirmish?”

“Everyone’s fine,” I assured him. “They only wanted to kidnap you. Kogwahee says...”

“Who’s Kogwahee?” He had missed the events after he was abducted, of course.

“Kogwahee is your new servant,” I explained. “Nannakussi put two arrows into him. The monkey birds are transformed by the Wizard. They’re men and women, enslaved by Palégos.”

I brought him up to date on events he had missed, at the same time thinking what nice eyes he had, what I could see of them anyway. Usually I couldn’t see the world behind them.

My ghostly lord looked into the cart. Kogwahee returned his look. He tried to look calm and courageous even though his teeth were chattering. Then my lord looked at Sabina, who was sitting up on the ground where she had fallen, pale as a sheet and woozier than she usually looked. She was looking like she was about to faint all over again. She didn’t like the fact that he was transparent, not one little bit. “You don’t suppose she’s anemic, do you?” my Jack asked conversationally.

“I think she’s scared to death of you,” I remonstrated. “How can you be both here and there at the same time?”

“Probably the same way Palégos projects himself,” he guessed. “Nannakussi’s seen it all before, I’m sure. Once you get the feel for the power around you, it’s just a matter of using it for what you need. You’ve got the trick of transforming yourself. Projecting yourself is the same principle. Blæda knows how to do it, doesn’t she?”

I looked at Blæda for confirmation. She shook her head. “This is really different from what I do,” she assured me. I wasn’t surprised. My lover had invented an entirely new approach to magic.

“Regardless, try to do it. Fiddle with it, and you’ll get it. Picture Mildrith, and use the power to push yourself to be with her. So what did Kogwahee tell you?”

“He says the Wizard thinks you’re a man posing as the demon. I’m of no importance. I obviously don’t know how to conjure a real demon, since I flubbed calling you up. But he wants to know what you actually are.”

“That’s exactly what I am,” he assured me, without convincing me in the least. “I’m a fake demon.”

“But he knows you’ve got ‘tricks up your sleeve,’” I added. My sweetheart was doing things accomplished witches couldn’t do, and still he claimed to be nothing much. He also said he wasn’t much of a lover, and he lied about that too. He knew how to make me tingle all over.

“I guess I do have a few tricks,” he laughed. “I can turn myself into a sparrow. That’s a pretty neat trick. Now that I know his flying monkeys are phonies too, I’ll try and figure how to undo that spell while I’m following them. That’s if this damned hawk doesn’t eat me...”

Then he wasn’t there, leaving me to worry he’d been eaten before he found the Wizard, defeated him, and married me.

Asmodeus

The hawk was swooping toward me from about two o’clock high and I had to hustle to increase my size. Luckily I’d been practicing recently, and he veered off quickly. There was no way he was going to eat something as monstrous as a five foot sparrow. I flew a few more miles like that to make sure he didn’t come back and try again, then reverted to tiny size and decreased altitude. Shoving five feet of sparrow through the air at any speed at all was a pain; I was burning major calories. There’s a reason sparrows are small.

I could still see the flying monkeys off in the far distance despite the hawk’s distraction. I settled down to flying for the next three hours or so, keeping my eye on the monkey-faced pterodactyls. I put some speed on and slowly – and discretely – gained on them. Being three and a half inches long, including my tail feathers, I figured (correctly) that they couldn’t see me a couple miles back. The terrain under me kept getting more and more mountainous. The Poconos are beautiful from the air, maybe even more beautiful than they are from the ground, but they don’t show a lot of landmarks. The top of one tree looks a lot like the top of another.

I was really craving some birdseed by the time they started descending. Flying isn’t quite as effortless as the birdies make it look. I did a lot of gliding when I could, but I still had to beat my wings pretty regularly to gain on them. They landed on a mountain that was more prominent than those around it, within sight of a stream that I was pretty sure was the Lehigh River. The Lehigh isn’t a major body of water like the Delaware, but it’s more than just a trickle of mountain stream. They used to float coal barges down it. I’d been there before, on a mostly passionate weekend with a girl I’d met shortly after I got out of the Army. She was another fond memory that’s another story entirely. I knew a bit of the terrain. If that was the Lehigh, and I was where I thought I was, then that was Bear Mountain, where the Wizard was said to hang his pointy hat. The “Bear Place” was the former (or impending, I’not sure which) town of Mauch Chunk, now renamed Jim Thorpe. In this reality stream it was a small clearing next to the river.