Black Sander smiled and shook his head. “He is a traitor and nothing more. My reasons, and those of an employer, were I to have one, are none of your business. Yet. But I had hoped to arrange some, shall we say, mutual harvesting. I’d planned to start with this one, since he has managed to fall through the NTA cracks from the start.” He looked down at Annison again and shook his head. “But it seems you people have beaten me to it. Honestly, you’ve rather ruined him for my purposes anyway.”
“Yes, I am sorry about that. Curiosity makes people do crazy things, you know? Especially when specimens are in such short supply. But we’ve gone to great lengths to keep him alive, as you can see?”
Black Sander laughed. “Indeed.” He pulled the handheld laser from his belt, which caused El Segador to take a step back.
“I thought we were being civil here,” El Segador said, lifting his hands higher still.
Black Sander smiled again, though his eyes held a predatory gleam. “I believe we may well be. For you see, from where I stand, where my employer stands, objects like this are in far shorter supply than chaps like him.” He lifted the weapon slightly, then tipped his head in the direction of Annison lying there, a sequence of movements like tipping scales.
El Segador’s eyes glinted too. “It’s interesting that you say that,” he said. “Because we have the exact opposite problem here.”
Both men were laughing as Black Sander put his knife and his new laser away.
Chapter 44
P
ernie streaked across the ridgeline, balanced easily atop Knot’s smooth, slightly rounded back. She rode with her knees slightly bent to absorb the undulations that ran through his body in waves whenever his sinuous length scrambled over some stone or stump or mound. She did it reflexively now, and she did it at full speed. Her hair blew behind her, and her loose silk tunic snapped in the wind of his motion as they scuttled along faster than any horse could run. She ran because today was the day she needed to get away. Tomorrow would be a whole year on String. Tomorrow they were going to make her fight the orc. So today, she had to leave.
She didn’t dare turn her head back, for she knew Djoveeve was following her; she’d seen the shift in the mana when the old woman had turned from her jaguar form to that of a flying squirrel. Pernie was much better at noting the shifts now, and she could see them with the least dip into the mana stream. Doing so was not quite so easy as spotting sugar shrimp, but she’d learned to trust her instincts when it came to deciding what was a pattern shift and what was merely a natural eddy, drift, or roil. And so, knowing full well that Djoveeve was chasing her through the underbrush, Pernie had directed Knot up a ridgeline. In places, it was as sharp as a razor’s edge, so narrow that Knot had to scramble along the sides. Pernie shifted easily and hooked her heels over the edges of his shell, her back parallel to the stone rushing by. The shift came to her as naturally as if she’d been born with the insect beneath her instead of her own feet.
But the veteran assassin wasn’t thrown off her tail just yet, not so easily as by a run along a narrow ridge. No, the downside of Pernie’s plan was that she was highly visible up there. It was true Djoveeve’s cat form wouldn’t work on the cliff, but the squirrel form would get her high enough to jump to the trees once Pernie was down to the canopy.
She nudged Knot down the cliff face then, straight down, requiring that she slide all the way to his rounded rump and stand upon that, leaning into the rock face, which whistled past her so closely that she could not have put her hand between her shoulder and the rock. There was only room for one of her feet to stand upon him when he went perpendicular in that way, so she stood on one and held the other out for balance. She tapped the cliff from time to time with the butt of her spear as well, leaning on it like a rudder, using it to compensate for the shifts Knot made as he went down, S-curving around cracks or brambles or sometimes predators, any of which could come upon them suddenly when traveling at such meteoric speed.
They plunged toward the canopy so fast it felt like free fall. Every second counted. Pernie knew that Djoveeve would struggle to find her once she got beneath the leaves, if she could just get far enough ahead. She was gaining time now. And the squirrel form would take time to glide down too, even be subject to air currents along the way.
Soon they were down far enough that they came level with the canopy, something of a shoreline where the uppermost foliage pressed against the cliff. The moment they were in the shadows of it, Pernie teleported both herself and Knot some fifteen paces away, across an open space between the cliff face and a long kapok bough that thrust even deeper into the sea of leaves. They shot along its length until it narrowed and began to bend beneath their weight. She spied the dangling length of a vine some twenty spans away, the long, sturdy variety preferred by the spider-apes.
She stabbed the end of her spear out in front of Knot, who recoiled from the unexpected sight, curling back on himself as he tried to stop. Pernie dropped to her bottom and slid along his back with the momentum she still had, right up the curve of his recoil. She wrapped her legs around his middle as she hit the upturned part, and she gripped him tightly just before she teleported them both to the vine.
Knot, in terror, curled up into a ball, wrapping himself around her feet and shins. She could feel all his legs twitching like so many spiny bristles of a brush.
She grabbed the vine as they reappeared, and they fell together toward the jungle floor, plunging in free fall for five full seconds before the vine began to draw tight. Pernie knew she likely would lose her grip when she and Knot hit the length of it, so she began the teleport spell again, right as the jolt of the fall tore her hands loose from the vine. She spoke the last word with the precision she learned from jumping off cliffs, and in that barest blink of time, she put them back on the vine again.
They swung so low she had to curl up her knees, pulling the rounded mass of Knot up against her belly as tightly as she could. He was heavy, and her toes clipped the fronds of several squat and bulbous palms.
In a long and graceful arc, so long and graceful that it would have appeared to an observer that it was quite slow despite the wind-whistling velocity, they swung across seventy spans of jungle floor and then back up again. At the top of the swing, Pernie let go of the vine, just as upward momentum waned. They hung there for a moment, for the barest time feeling as if released by gravity, then Pernie nudged Knot with a gentle telepathic threat, which had him opening by the time they began to descend, falling toward the next limb, this one a long, sturdy bridge provided by another of the massive kapok trees.
Knot landed softly, the strength of his little feet always amazing to her, and she came down without the least shock or jolt. In that same motion, they were shooting toward the tree trunk, and then down they went, around and around, spiraling their way down its fluted altitude in a winding trek that took them barely a minute to complete. Once again they were darting through the brush, silently but for the rare slap of leaf clusters that Pernie could neither duck nor leap.
Pernie blinked, looking into the mana again, careful not to touch it or stir it herself, merely looking, flitting in and out of that place as Djoveeve had taught her to do. It was the only way to win a fight with an elf, the old assassin had said, and Pernie had finally begun to believe. Watching the mana in this way was difficult, though, for it was like seeing in both positive and negative space, like watching lightning and trying to recognize both the shape of the lightning’s forks and the shapes formed by the darkness those blinding flashes outlined. Lose one, and you lose the other. Then you see nothing. Djoveeve had told her most humans couldn’t do it even if they tried. None could focus on two things at once—by now she’d heard that time and time again—but some, a few, could effectively alternate between, and Pernie was coming along just fine.
And so it was that she saw the shift in the mana again, barely, Djoveeve somewhere far at her back. She cast a scent illusion, the smell of herself and Knot, and she sent it spinning up a tree like an olfactory fireball. She set another upon a cluster of seedpods that were floating down a stream. For a time she wove back and forth doing the same sort of thing everywhere, perhaps a full five minutes, and with the speed of her insect mount, she covered a great deal of space.
When she was satisfied with her misdirection, she masked herself and her roly-poly ride in total silence. She covered their smells and then shrouded them in invisibility, then set out to the north, bent on getting herself that horned manatee.
Three weeks had passed since her injury, and Djoveeve had been tailing her ever since. The woman made no secret about why, and must have repeated fifty times that Pernie not mess with the sargosaganti. Djoveeve said it was because they were dangerous. Seawind, who had been something of a nag on that topic too, said the same. He explained over and over that they could not be tamed. But when Pernie asked if he had ever tried, he’d had to admit that he never had.
“Why not?” she’d asked.
“Because they are not to be trifled with.”
“But why?” she’d pressed.
“Because they are dangerous. And because they do not wish to be tamed.”
“How do you know? Have you ever asked one before?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know they don’t want to be?”
“Because it is known. They are wild things. They are peaceful and timid and, as you have seen, able to pin you to the beach easily and instantly.”
“But that still doesn’t mean they don’t want to be tamed. Not if you never talked to one before. And Kettle says that everyone is different, so even if one says they don’t like people, other ones might feel differently.”
At which point Seawind had turned his head slightly to the side, something of a bow in deference to Djoveeve, and said, “This is where you must deal with your own species.” Then he left the cave.
But Pernie didn’t care what they said. She knew she could do it, and now she needed to. She’d tamed Knot, and she was fairly sure she’d just completely escaped the current Sava’an’Lansom for the first time since she’d started trying. She looked into the mana and saw nothing at all that didn’t appear as it should. There were a pair of garrote spiders making webs across a spider-ape corridor high above, but that was all. Djoveeve was nowhere to be found.
Soon enough, Pernie found herself once more atop the cliff that looked down upon the favored beach of the sargosaganti. She stepped off of Knot and crawled to the edge, peering down through the grasses toward the beach.
There they were again, all of them, a whole herd of fat black-and-green sausages reclining in the late afternoon sun, only partially filtered through a thin haze that was common in the autumn months here.
The titanic mass of the alpha male stretched out on the beach like a fifty-span seawall of fat and flesh, the blotches of his rough hide appearing as if some painter had thrown a fit. Leaving her invisibility and other illusions in place, she stood and gripped her spear, once again point down, ready to strike. The big one was closer this time, and she thought she might be able to make it all the way onto its back if she got a running start. So she did.
She took several steps back, then ran full speed and threw herself off the cliff. She was going to be close with this teleport.
The rocks grew and grew in her vision as she fell. She watched patiently as she plunged downward, the wind whistling in her ears.
She spoke the words, the largest of the jagged black rocks only a half-hand’s width from her face, and then there she was in the middle of its back, the king of the manatees, her spear already plunging into its skin.
She blinked her eyes, looking into the mana, and saw it whirl only a half instant before the creature teleported itself away. She had just begun to drop toward the beach in its absence when she spoke her own spell, nearly as quickly as the sargosagantis had done, and once again she stood upon it, gripping her spear where it dug into its flesh. She fluttered her vision back and forth between sunlight and mana sight, watching the titanic beast gathering mana again. As it did, she drove down with all her weight upon her spear, pushing it even deeper into the blubbery hide. The great sargosagantis jumped across an incoming wave, ten paces out to sea.
Pernie was nearly underwater before she could speak the words again, and once more she was on its back.
It blinked away again.
She chased it, and again she drove down on her spear. She twisted the shaft with her hands, trying to drill down through its thick, fatty flesh. Her spear was already a third of its length in.
She watched back and forth in and out of the mana as she worked, her breathing coming quickly now. She saw the mana move and jammed down on the spear, wanting to hurt it, and still it got away.
Saltwater splashed into her mouth as she uttered the last word of her teleport, and again she set to work on the spear.
It jumped.
She followed. The spear was into the giant sargosagantis more than half the shaft’s length now.
The creature jumped again. She echoed the cast, this time pounding on the butt of her spear, hammering at it with her palm until what protruded from the sea beast’s fat bulk barely reached her knee. She saw it draw mana again, and she knew she would be too late. She leapt into the air anticipating its teleport.