Chapter-1-4

⁠—⁠—⁠— IV ⁠—⁠—⁠—

“Ahhhh!”

From opposite sides of the valley, Guin and the Raku heard Istavan’s terrified cry, yet they could do nothing to help him.

“Gods! Mos! Jarn! Anybody!”

The rope had been strong, but after bearing the weight of forty Sem, its worn fibers were too weak to support Istavan. He was almost within sight of the valley’s far side when it unraveled and snapped.

Tangled in the net, the mercenary dropped straight down toward the horrible sea of yidoh in the valley below. Rather than fight for his life to the very last moment, he screamed, screwed his eyes shut, and covered his face with both hands, as though by doing so he could avoid confronting death.

It was a short fall, though to him it felt like eternity. Legs wrapped around the rope that was no longer there, he tumbled down through the murk, until he finally landed.

He screamed and curled himself into a ball, though he knew this would not help him once he was seized by the yidoh, whose touch would quickly dissolve any living tissue. Yet the pale, luminescent, jelly-like creatures did not grasp him; his helpless body was not engulfed; the terrifying death did not come.

Istavan slowly opened his eyes and peered out between his fingers into the horrid night. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled his hands away from his face and sat up.

“Unbelievable,” he croaked, his mind reeling with surprise. “By the shining hair of Irana who watches over me! This is…”

Unharmed save for a few bruises he had gotten from the fall, and without a single yidoh attempting to consume him, Istavan struggled out of the net and stood up on the soft ground of the valley.

He opened his black eyes wide, straining to see through the darkness around him. The nearest yidoh had already slithered far from where he stood. “Well I’ll be… They’re moving! They moved!” shouted the incredulous mercenary. Then he started laughing hysterically. “By the blue pot of Aeris from which the moonlight spills! By the fever brought by Torto, the god of lovers, what luck, what luck! No—not that I expected any different! Why, I’m Istavan Spellsword, I am! Luckiest man in the world! No stray arrow of misfortune will ever hit me!”

And lucky he was, for the yidoh had begun to flow out of the narrow valley the moment he had begun his crossing. Had the fell hive set out even a twist later, the Crimson Mercenary would surely have fallen squarely in their midst.

Like a night tide, they were now surging down the narrow canyon along which Guin’s band of warriors had come, oozing back towards the low wildlands of Nospherus. When Salai and the other Sem had fallen, some primal instinct had been triggered in the shapeless monsters that prompted their primitive instinct to seek more food. As a single mass, tads long, it seemed, they were gliding away to the southwest. Like an amorphous larva newly hatched from its egg, the hungry swarm had blindly made its way away from Istavan and the Sem.

The mercenary looked around again and noticed that he was still too close to the retreating yidoh to warrant much celebration. He swiftly scooped up his fallen sword and made haste to get out of range of any strays. His eyes fell on something left lying on the valley floor in the yidoh’s wake—a small pile of bones. Doubtless they belonged to Salai, who had died that the rest of them might cross the valley.

Istavan shivered. The remains were hardly recognizable as such. It looked much as Istavan assumed the victim of a giant jungle snake might look if you cut open the snake’s belly a few days after it had made its catch. The yidoh suffocated their victims with their huge, formless mass, then crushed and digested them until only piteous lumps of twisted skeletons remained. Istavan looked at the whitened bones and a tingle ran up his spine. It could have been me…

“Well, no sense thinking about that,” the mercenary muttered, “I didn’t end up as yidoh fodder, and by the white gossamer of Aeris I’ll keep on living, thank you very much.” He shook the visions of grisly death out of his head like a dog coming out of the water, then leapt over the few rocks and boulders that lay scattered on the ground between him and where the Raku were waiting in a worried huddle.

“Lo, my furry friends! I made it! Don’t look as though you’ve seen a ghost. It’s me!” the mercenary announced, unconcerned that they could not understand his words nor he their reply.

Indeed the Raku, their eyes wide and round, paid him little attention.

“Riyaad!”

“Riyaad! Enee, reek, rahnee!”

“Riyaad…”

The Sem fretted in their high voices, peering back through the darkness of the valley.

Istavan wrinkled his brow and looked back the way he had just come. “Guin?”

A sudden realization came to him. That’s right—Guin’s still on the other side! And damn if those yidoh weren’t heading his way! He looked around frantically for some way to bring his friend to safety, but the erstwhile bridge lay in a ragged tangle on the ground, leaving Guin stranded on the wrong side of the valley.

Istavan peered through the gloom toward the mouth of the narrow canyon, wracking his brains. For a moment, a strangely pained look stole across his haggard face, but he shook it off and spat on the ground. “Ah, no need to get all excited. He’s fine. My monkey friends, Guin is fine! Why, if all the yidoh in the world attacked him, he’d still pull through! Anyway,” Istavan paused to wet his lips and continued, “shouldn’t we be getting along? We don’t have time to just stand around here, do we? We have to get to your little village. We’ll just start walking slowly and Guin will catch up.”

But the Raku didn’t understand what he was saying, and besides, no one was paying him any attention at all. In fact, all of the Sem warriors were still pointing out into the darkness toward the other side of the valley, and talking animatedly in the high-pitched voices of theirs.

It seemed to Istavan that they were debating whether or not they should go back into the valley in order to save their Riyaad, back into the very place they had just crossed with so much difficulty and death. Already the leopard-headed warrior was more of a god to them than a man, and it occurred to Istavan that they might just be willing to give up their own lives in an attempt to save his. Siba in particular sounded quite vehement. He waved the single remaining torch in his hand and chittered passionately, perhaps rallying the entire band to charge into the valley and burn a path through the yidoh to Guin.

“Hey, hey, bad idea!” yelled Istavan. “You can’t seriously be thinking of burning the yidoh out of there. Why do you think we went through that whole mummers’ act to get over them in the first place? If we lit a fire big enough to drive them off, the blaze would have the whole Mongauli host upon us in a flash. Look, I’m telling you, Guin will manage. He has to!”

The Raku seemed unconvinced, if indeed they understood him at all. Forty pairs of angry eyes, in fact, glared now at the Valachian mercenary.

“H-Hey, now, no need to look at me like that,” he stuttered, blanching and taking a step backwards, when suddenly one of the Raku screamed.

“Alphetto!”

The tiny warriors’ eyes bulged with fear, and they hurriedly scattered in all directions but one, back into the valley.

Istavan turned and saw what had caused the Raku to run, and he was stuck to the spot, petrified with fear, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He could not tear his eyes off the nightmarish thing striding slowly toward him.

A shape like that of a great sea monster out of some horrible myth was rising from the yidoh, parting them in two. It was like a mass of yidoh in human form, with its arms outstretched. And it was coming directly toward Istavan.

“G…Guin?!” Istavan yelled and ran towards the human form, then stopped, unsure of what to do. If he moved any closer to the yidoh, they’d be on him for sure.

It was indeed Guin who had come inexorably up out of the sea of yidoh. Every inch of his mighty form—even his leopard-masked head—was covered by yidoh, so that it was impossible to see any of his features, but Istavan did not doubt it was Guin. Lunging suddenly, the yidoh-Guin reached out and snatched the torch from Siba, who alone out of the Raku had stood by Istavan instead of running off. The little Sem yelped and jumped back, while Guin turned the torch and thrust it at his own head!

His body, still covered with yidoh, now erupted into a ball of flame.

“Yaaah! Guin!” Istavan yelled.

The figure in flames twisted and scraped at its sides as though in great pain, then dropped to the ground and began rolling about furiously. The flames went out as fast as they had spread.

“What in Doal’s name…” The mercenary stood, mouth agape, unable to speak a word more. The Raku, too, watched dumbstruck, forgetting to do anything but stare.

Guin—or the figure they believed was Guin—lay there on its side, and for a while did not move. The blackened remains of yidoh were plastered all over the giant frame, smoldering in the cool night air.

Istavan swallowed and found his voice at last. “Guin… Guin! You… didn’t burn yourself to death, did you?” He smiled uneasily, and his voice trembled.

Then the crumpled form twitched, and the head lifted ever so slightly off the ground.

“No,” came the familiar growl, only thicker than usual, “I am not dead.”

“Guin!”

Only then did the fear that had held Istavan and the Raku frozen in place finally release its grip. All at once they gathered around him to see how badly he had been burned.

“I am fine, give me space to stand,” the leopard warrior grumbled, his voice becoming clearer by the moment. Suddenly, his hand went to his face and pulled off the blackened shell that covered it.

Istavan and all the Raku gasped as one. Guin’s round leopard head was unharmed, his golden whiskered visage barely singed by the heat of the fire. Guin chuckled. “I’m lucky the flames died when they did. I thought I was going to suffocate. Luckier still that Siba thought to stand there with his torch like that. It was the only thing I could see through the yidoh covering my eyeslits.” The warrior’s yellow eyes blinked and shone, and he cast down the husk in his hands.

It was a piece of the black Gohran armor that Istavan had taken off before crossing the valley. Guin had worn the chest-plate over his mask, and with that as his shield, charged straight through the yidoh!

Istavan whistled and shook his head, amazed. “By the many miracles of Janos, are you a man of flesh and blood? To charge headlong through the yidoh like that, then set fire to your own head!”

“I had planned to do that from the start—and I dare say, my journey went smoother than yours, Crimson Mercenary!” Guin gave one of his characteristic howls of laughter as he worked busily to remove the rest of the armor and blackened yidoh remains from his body. Istavan stared at him, and snorted.

As soon as Istavan had started out across the valley in the netting basket, Guin had hastened to gather up what slabs of crystal remained. These he had tied to his torso with leftover bowstrings and cords from the horses’ bridles. This makeshift armor, together with Istavan’s greaves and gauntlets, had protected his bare flesh from the yidoh’s powerful digestive juices, and with the chestplate fixed over his head so that he could see through its fastening-slots, he had made his way across the valley.

“That was a little too close,” Guin admitted after he had finished discarding the last piece of armor. “I need some wine.”

He lifted the wineskin that was put into his outstretched hand and drank deeply. “Those yidoh were stronger than I imagined. I had to tense every muscle just to keep from being crushed, and I knew that if they knocked my feet out from under me I was done for. I took the last torch and burned a path before my feet for most of the way, but I dropped it… I took a deep breath and charged for the last thirty motad or so. Five paces more of those things, and I would have run out of breath, or lost my footing.”

“You’re a bigger fool than I thought, Guin! I don’t care how strong you are or how long you can hold your breath. Your standing here alive is nothing but the most incredible, unbelievable piece of bleeding luck I’ve ever seen!”

Guin laughed. “I knew from the beginning that our rope would not support my weight. So you see, I had enough time to consider how to protect myself for a race through the valley.”

“By Mos’ grassy whiskers!” whispered Istavan. His black, sparkling eyes were filled with a look of wonderment that had never truly graced them before, and although he would never have admitted it, his eyes also betrayed a profound relief at seeing Guin standing before him again, safe.

“Though I can’t say I made it unscathed,” the leopard-headed warrior noted, “this is no worse than a few Marches bug bites.” Guin sat and examined his body carefully. Here and there, blisters were rising on his hands, feet, and chest; and on his sides where the yidoh had pressed with bone-crushing force, the crystals had shattered and their points had driven into his flesh. Guin let Siba and the other Raku place com-presses over his wounds, and he stretched and rubbed his stiff neck and shoulders.

“Those horses deserved better,” he said, looking over the dark void of the valley from which the shining luminescent sea of yidoh had disappeared without a trace. “I set them free, but I fear the yidoh have caught and eaten them. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with getting myself ready for the crossing, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to die.”

“Aw, Guin, what difference does that make? Haven’t you and I gotten through?” remarked Istavan, a little vexed with the leopard-man. A short distance away, the Sem had built a small fire, cutting a little globe of warmth out of the cold Nospherus night. Istavan gazed at it plunged in thought; and in the firelight, his black eyes shone almost chillingly with their customary shrewd gleam, as if to balance out the warmth that had recently filled them. How could he have guessed, when he first heard Guin’s raspy voice through the prison wall back in Stafolos Keep, that only days later he would be here, in the hills of Nospherus, watching thirty monkey-men huddled around a campfire, and nearby, several more tending to the wounds of a warrior with the head of a giant leopard? The mercenary surveyed the scene and sighed impatiently.

“Better the horses than us,” he reprised. “We almost died back there.”

“But we did not. We lived—most of us, at least,” Guin observed. As much as he would have liked to honor the dead, they had no time to build a cairn for the brave Salai and the other fallen Raku. Guin lightly brushed off the simian hands that tended him, and stood and said to the Sem warriors, “Very well, let us get going. We did not have much time to begin with, and the troubles we had in crossing this valley used up much of what was left. We should have sent a few ahead of us to the village as soon as they reached this side.”

“I have done this, Riyaad,” Siba informed him proudly. “A party from the village should be on its way to meet us.”

“Ah, splendid! Good thinking, Siba,” rumbled Guin. “Now we too must set out. It cannot be much farther.”

Beaming, the little warrior nodded. “Yes, Riyaad, we need only cross one more valley and the Raku village will be before us.”

The Sem quickly made ready to resume their journey. Some scurried to gather up what remained of their supplies, others kicked dirt on the fire until it was smothered.

Istavan walked up to Guin. “Let’s hope those yidoh see fit to head all the way down the hill and eat up the Mongauli army for us, eh?” He said this in a roguish tone, but his eyes were cold and deadly serious.

The band of warriors ran through the darkness.

Faced with the peril of the yidoh, they had almost forgotten the greater danger that threatened all of their people. Now, once more, the Mongauli host loomed in their minds and spurred their feet onwards, making them ignore their fatigue.

Siba pushed himself to run faster to catch up with Guin, who was in the lead, loping like a giant tawny tiger leading a pack of agile hunting dogs.

“Riyaad,” the Raku said, his voice filled with concern. “The dark one—is he truly a hero?”

“You mean Istavan?”

“The dark one is not like Riyaad. He screams like a woman, and he talks too much, I think. He wanted to leave you behind, on the other side of the yidoh, even though we could never have crossed the valley without you! The dark one is your friend, so we welcome him… but is he truly a hero?”

Guin laughed out loud, drawing glances from the Sem in tow. “He is fine the way he is, Siba, though you may not understand why,” the leopard-man responded between chuckles. “Not all heroes are the same. Some are like Istavan. Yes, he is an uncommon hero!”

Siba seemed unconvinced.

“Guin, cut the monkey talk and look over there, that’s got to be the greeting party!” yelled Istavan, blissfully unaware that he had been a subject of debate. Catching up with Guin, he pointed down the sloping path.

There, near the bottom of the valley, they could see the winking lights of watch fires wavering in the night winds. Nearer at hand was a group of small figures waiting alertly with torches held high. Guin’s band had arrived at the village of the Raku.