Heights of the Depths (2 page)

A creature drops from overhead. It emits a hellacious screech. Without looking he swings the machete and gets lucky, beheading the pale skinned monstrosity. Its head falls directly in his path, its lips drawn back in a frozen sneer exposing twin vampi
ric fangs. Its body flops around for a few seconds, clawing at the air, and then lies still. By the time it ceases thrashing about, the colonel is already gone.

He hears the sounds of his pursuers growing. They’re getting closer, and they are making no eff
ort to hide their progress. They do not care if he hears them or not. That is how confident they are in their eventual triumph.

And they are converging. The sounds are not just from behind him now, but from all around. They are cutting him off, using a pi
ncer movement. It seems like a good deal of effort for one man. He should, he supposes, feel honored to some degree.

He does not. All he feels is anger. Anger and impotence.

He trips over an outstretched root, scrambles to his feet, keeps going, and bursts
out into a clearing. There is a small rise up ahead. High ground. Go for the high ground, he thinks desperately as he sprints toward it.

He is halfway to the rise when his pursuers emerge, running, from the forest. Two Minotaurs, another Mandraque, two m
ore of the vampires who are sprinting on their feet and knuckles. They converge upon him and he scrambles up the rise, hoping to lose them, knowing that he is doomed to failure. The magnitude of his failure is evident when he reaches the top of the rise on
ly to see more of them coming from the other direction. “Get him!” shout the Minotaurs, which surprises him because he had been unaware that any of them speak English. Obviously they learn quickly, or at least the Minotaurs do.

The
colonel braces himself, drawing his arm back, trying to see all around him at once, his head whipping back and forth. They know they have him now. They slow their approach, none of them interested in making a precipitous rush, because the machete is blood
stained and they recognize that it is the blood of their fellows upon it.

Then slowly, carefully, they advance, with a combination of snarling and hissing and spitting and stray words of English that are doubtless hurled at him as epithets. And as they dra
w near, he holds his machete high in the air and bellows at the top of his lungs:

“Get off my damned world!”

And then he leaps upon them.

the outskirts of feruel

Karsen Foux had absolutely no
idea what his destination was going to be, or how he was going to reach it. All he knew was that he was getting there as quickly as he could.

The Laocoon had never quite been the tracker his mother was. Zerena Foux, the leader of their hodgepodge clan of Bottom Feeders, had always had the true nose in the family. Many had been the time when she would stop the jumpcar dead, hop out and land deftly on her cloven feet, and sniff the air with endless patience. She would turn in a slow circle, as if she were listening to what the gentle winds of the Damned World had to tell her. Her nostrils would flare a bit, and then she would turn to her fellows and inform them in what direction a battle had just occurred and where dead bodies were lying, ripe for the picking. She had never been wrong, even though in some instances the site had been miles away.

Karsen came to the conclusion, however, that it wasn’t that his olfactory prowess was so much less than his mother’s. Instead it was simply the fact that he had never needed to employ his own abilities. Mother had always been there to take charge. Since Karsen had struck out on his own, leaving his fellow Bottom Feeders behind, he was in the unusual position of having to rely on himself for everything. On the one hand it was daunting. On the other hand it was exhilarating, even liberating.

He was on his own. Really, truly, at last, on his own.

It had not been an easy endeavor initially. When he had departed the jumpcar, his fur-covered legs had been quivering. He wasn’t certain if his mother or any of the others noticed. He certainly hoped they did not. At a moment in his life where he was trying to appear as strong as possible, he was appalled by the idea of seeming weak even in the slightest. He steadied his jangling nerves, however, gripping tightly the strap of the supplies-filled sack he had slung over his shoulder. A second strap, crisscrossing his bare chest, kept the war hammer that he had taken from a dead Mandraque fixed solidly on his back.

He remembered the look on his mother’s face when he had made it clear that he was really going to depart their oddball tribe. That was what the group of them had become, even though—aside from he and his mother—no two of them were of the same race. An aged Mandraque named Rafe Kestor who, even on his best days, scarcely seemed capable of stringing thoughts together; Gant, a perpetually depressed shapeshifting pile of ooze who purported to have once been a member of that eldritch race called the Phey; and Mingo Minkopolis, member of a race called the Minosaur, whose formidable intellect seemed at odds with his massively powerful build. They had been as close to a family as Karsen and his mother, Zerena, had ever known.

And he had left them. For a Mort. He could almost hear Zerena’s voice dripping with contempt. A godsdamned Mort.

Karsen stopped.

He’d been walking through grass, but it had been thinning over the last few miles and now it was gone completely. Instead a field of mostly rock stretched out before him. It was going to be harder on his hooves, certainly, which were already showing signs of wear and tear. But that was secondary to the fact that his quarry was going to be that much harder to track. Draquons left a distinct trail when they were moving through grassy plains and such. Everything from the bend of the blades to the faint smell of sulfur that accompanied them all acted as easy indicators. Everything became far more problematic on a rocky surface.

But Karsen didn’t see any other choice.

He got down on his hands and knees. His legs were protected by the thick, matted fur that thoroughly covered him. His hands were scraped up in places where the rocks were a bit jagged, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t live with.

Karsen lowered his face to the rocks and started sniffing around. As long minutes passed, he fought to keep down his fear. He wasn’t picking up anything.

The image of Jepp’s terrified face was etched in his mind. The Travelers had shown up out of nowhere, their long black cloaks flapping and their faces eternally hidden beneath their hoods. Astride their draquons, they had plucked the frightened young woman from within their midst. Karsen had been barely conscious when the attack had occurred, having been flattened by a punch to the head by his perpetually dyspeptic mother. When the Travelers had first arrived, credit Zerena with at least attempting to provide some manner of resistance. She hadn’t realized that they had been coming after Jepp; she was just trying to defend herself and her tribe. Had she realized that their target was the single human among them, she likely would have stood aside and told them to do with her whatever they wanted.

Karsen had barely had enough strength to lift his head when Jepp was carried away, his eyes narrow slits rather than open. Nevertheless he saw Jepp reaching toward him, screaming, trying to escape the firm grip of the Traveler who had ensnared her. Her screams seemed to echo in the still air long after she was gone.

As he continued his attempts to track her across the rocky surface, he remembered his mother raging at him, “That girl has done something to you!” as he prepared to take his leave of them. It hadn’t been his first choice. He would have far preferred the Bottom Feeders to come with him. The task he had set himself was indeed daunting and he could have used his long-time allies along with him, watching his back.

But that had never been an option. His mother was too intransigent, too disapproving of Jepp and too determined to keep her clan as free from trouble as possible, even if it meant allowing her only son to head off into the wilderness on his own.

That girl has done something to you!

The damning thing was, he knew his mother was right. He knew perfectly well that Jepp had done something. And it wasn’t even a matter of his not caring. He had, instead, embraced it.

So caught up was he in his musings that he almost missed it. But then his head snapped back and he retraced his steps a few feet.

There was a chip off a small section of stone, such as might have been left by a passing creature. The draquons had extremely hard feet, judging by the thunderous sound they made as they galloped across the land and their fabled imperviousness to injury of any sort. It was possible that the passing draquons had caused it to chip away.

And there. A second piece, also broken off. He held the chip closely to his nostrils. The faint but distinctive acrid aroma of a draquon wafted from it.

He continued to move a few yards more, and then his incredibly sharp eyes perceived a thin strand of hair lying on the ground. He picked it up delicately and he didn’t even have to take a whiff of it to know that the black strand had fallen from Jepp’s head.

Jepp and her abductors had come a long way by this point. Was she still struggling in their grasp? Was she screaming for help? Her throat would be raw and she’d probably have no voice left. But the mental image of her writhing in their grasp, trying to break free and not even coming close, drove him on.

He began to run again, convinced that he was moving in the right direction. His hooves beat a steady tattoo on the rocks as he sped across the barren plains, spurred on by the hope that he might somehow catch a glimpse of them. That was all he would need, a glimpse. And when he saw them, then pure adrenaline would enable him to overtake them.

And then…

Then what, you idiot?

It was his mother’s voice, sounding in his head. The disdain, the contempt for him was so realistic that she might well have been right beside him, rather than riding along like an unwanted passenger in his imagination.

Then what are you going to do? Zerena’s voice persisted. You’re going to fight a group of Travelers? Travelers, the good right arm of the Overseer here on the Damned World? You’re going to challenge them with that hammer on your back? How stupid are you? Or, more to the point, how stupid has that girl made you? The absolute worst thing that could happen to you is that you in fact catch up with them. Because you will, in your dementia, stand up to them and try to fight them. I attempted that, only because I thought they were attacking, and they brushed me aside as if I was nothing. So can you imagine what they will do to you if you actually try to pick a fight with them? No. No, I don’t think you are imagining it, because if you were, you’d realize that you have no business doing something so monumentally stupid. They will kill you, Karsen. They will kill you and whatever is left of you will be food for carrion eaters, and I will never see you again.

And he thought grimly, Good. That would probably be for the best.

It was at that moment that he realized he had lost the scent again.

He fought down panic once more as he methodically began to check around some more.

The shadows lengthened as the sun moved relentlessly across the sky, underscoring the passage of time, and still Karsen could find nothing.

Finally he backtracked, trying to pick up the scent yet again. Still nothing. It was as if they had vanished off the face of the planet.

Had they, in fact, done so? These were, after all, Travelers that he was trying to track down. The full extent of their powers was unknown. Could they have simply disappeared into some sort of hole in reality?

Or perhaps they had boarded a vehicle that had gone off in a completely different direction.

Or perhaps they had gone straight up…

He looked skyward, scanning the heavens. It was possible. He had never beheld a Zeffer at anything more than a great distance, but he knew they existed and knew what they were capable of. And even the Zeffers, or at least as they were commanded by their masters, the Serabim, would be as obliged to follow the dictates and demands of the Travelers as anyone else. So if the Travelers had issued commands—by what means they would convey their desires to the high flying Zeffers, Karsen could not even guess—then the Zeffers might well have airlifted them from their current path. Why? Had they detected Karsen’s following them? No. No, that made no sense. If they wanted to discourage pursuit, they would likely have just turned back upon him and attempted to run their draquons right over him. The act of going airborne, courtesy of the Zeffers, would simply have meant that they were attempting to reach someplace that the draquons couldn’t take them. Some high mountainous point, perhaps, or maybe over the vast ocean.

Karsen didn’t even realize his legs were buckling until suddenly he was on the ground. A long, ululating scream ripped from his throat and he pounded the ground in impotent fury with his fists.

It couldn’t end like this. It simply could not. What the hell kind of quest was this, to come up so miserably short? What was he supposed to do now? Return to the Bottom Feeders as a complete failure? After he had set off with such high-flown words and certainty that nothing in the world would stop him from finding Jepp and rescuing her from her captors? There was no question in his mind that they would welcome him back, but he would feel small, diminished. Puny and pathetic.

He lost track of how long he expended energy in the pointless pursuit of venting his frustration. Eventually, though, he flopped on his back, gasping for air, his throat raw from bellowing his fury. Karsen was relieved that his mother couldn’t see him now. She would chortle at his relative helplessness and the absurdity of his predicament.

Karsen stared up at the blue-tinged skies. Thick clouds were crawling across them, not threatening with rain but covering the skies nevertheless. Then, for a moment, some of the clouds parted, and a stream of sunlight filtered through. In Karsen’s imagination, it was as if one of the gods was staring down from on high, the light issuing not from the sun but from the deity’s own orb.

He had never been much for praying. Karsen was reasonably certain that as far as the gods were concerned, everyone down there was on his or her or its own.

Yet now, frustrated, hungry, thirsty, and convinced that short of divine intervention, he would never see Jepp again…Karsen prayed.

“Gods,” he whispered to the nameless deities. “Gods, please, if you’re listening: Help me. Help me, because I…I need her. I’d love to tell you that this is all about her, and saving her from the Travelers, and rescuing her, but it’s not just that. It’s about how she makes me feel when I’m with her. It’s about having some sort of purpose in life instead of just being this…this creature who shows up on battlefields after it’s all over and picks up valuables and supplies and trinkets. When I’m with her…when I see how she looks at me, and looks up to me, and sees me with such love as no one else in my entire life does…she makes me happy to be alive. I’ve never felt that way, and I don’t want to go back to feeling the way I did before she showed up. Because I never realized before what a pointless and empty existence that’s been. So please, I’m begging you, gods on high, please…no matter how many cycles around the sun it may take, I will wait. I will wait however long you require, even if it seems endless, I—”

He heard a low moan from a short distance away.

Karsen sat up, confused and distracted by the noise. He knew instantly that it wasn’t Jepp; it was a male voice for starters. A Traveler? Possible, but not likely. Even if somehow a Traveler had been injured in some manner, they always rode in groups and would never leave one of their own behind.

There was a short cluster of rocks about three hundred feet away. It was a scattering of boulders that looked as if someone had dropped them from the sky in a random manner. The moaning was originating from behind them.

Slowly Karsen got to his feet, dusting off his legs. His instinct was to call out to whoever was obviously in some form of pain. Something made him restrain himself, though. It was nothing more than his normal caution, honed from many years of trying to make himself unnoticed by bigger, stronger members of the Banished (as the Twelve Races collectively referred to themselves)

His situation with Jepp was certainly not forgotten, but he was intrigued by the timing of hearing someone in distress just when he was in the midst of praying for divine intervention. The gods were renowned for moving in ways that were not only mysterious but also downright incomprehensible. As unlikely as it seemed, perhaps there was some chance that whoever he was hearing now, might somehow be sent as an avatar of the gods as a means of aiding him in his quest.