Ilbei took Mags’ staff from her and used it to haul the harpy corpse up the draw a few paces, well out of the stream. In doing so, he rolled it over and saw something that gave him pause. “Would ya look at that,” he said. He handed the staff back to Mags and drew the knife from his belt. He used it to push at one of the rotted wings, a skeletal thing, wrapped in a filmy slime of remnant skin, and most of the feathers gone. Something silver glinted underneath.
With his boot, he held the body in place and got a better bit of leverage with his knife. Peeling the wing back like a box lid, he reached underneath with his free hand and grasped the silver object. He had to wrench it back and forth a few times, but finally yanked it out. It was a long steel crossbow bolt, a full hand-width longer than the length of his arm.
He held it aloft for Kaige and Mags to see. “Look at that. And where have ya seen one of these before?”
They both recognized the bolt immediately. “The Skewer’s skewer,” Kaige said aloud, grinning for both having known the answer and his own cleverness in describing it.
“Damn right it is. And damn strange.”
“Why strange?” the burly warrior asked. “A crossbow like the one he’s got would have the range for shooting harpies easy enough.”
“Better than most,” Ilbei agreed. “But how does a man shoot a harpy and have it end up in that there hole?” He looked up and saw that Jasper was just beginning to let himself out of the opening. “Hold up there, Jasper,” Ilbei called, shouting to be heard over the water rushing out.
Jasper looked back, and though what he said couldn’t be heard, Ilbei was sure it was some sort of complaint.
Turning to Mags, Ilbei presented the crossbow bolt as if it were a prized bit of evidence. “Now what would make a man shoot down a harpy and then go to all the trouble of squeezin it up in there? Especially a big man like the Skewer, what couldn’t get in there hisself any better than Kaige or I?”
“Maybe you’re right about that disease,” she said. “Maybe that was his plan, to run people off. If so, it worked.”
“But why?” Kaige couldn’t help but ask. He looked shaken by Mags’ suggestion, as if he’d stumbled upon an astonishing new idea, a type of danger that had never occurred to him in a life growing up on a farm. “It ain’t right to do such a thing.”
“No, it ain’t right,” Ilbei agreed.
“But wouldn’t he have known that it would wash out of there eventually?” Mags asked. “Or was it tied in place? And why not get your bolt back?” She hefted the one she held, weighing it in her hand. “These are expensive to make.”
Ilbei nodded at that. “Good point.” He raised his hand beside his mouth and shouted up at Jasper again. “Jasper, was this harpy tied to somethin in there or weighted down with rocks? Anythin to keep it in place?”
Jasper looked as irritated by the question as any human could possibly be, but he turned back and fought his way against the current again, crawling inside to consult with Meggins.
Ilbei sniffed the air, reaching for and taking the crossbow bolt back. He sniffed it. “I still smell vinegar.”
Jasper poked his head out of the hole a few moments later, clinging to the rope and trying not to get flushed out like the harpy had. “No,” he shouted down. “He said it was just stuck between two rocks.”
“How far in does the creek go?” Ilbei called back. “Is there more cave upstream or only room for the water?” He couldn’t hear the belabored sigh, but he could see the dramatic rolling of the wizard’s eyes, as if Ilbei had just asked him to dig a tunnel through the entire world.
Jasper once more vanished into the hole. When he came back, he shouted down to Ilbei again. “He says it goes back too far to see.”
Ilbei hummed deep in the back of his throat. It didn’t make sense how a harpy got in that hole. Unless it crawled in there to die after being shot, which was an unexplored possibility. But if it had, why would a harpy put itself in range of Ergo the Skewer and his spectacular crossbow anyway? They were rumored to be a savage, filthy and awful sort of creature, but they weren’t so dumb as that, and powerful as that crossbow was, harpies could fly awfully high. Everything he had ever heard about harpies said they were just as smart as humans—though that wasn’t necessarily saying much.
He wondered if maybe the Skewer had come across the harpies that picked clean those two corpses downstream, the skeletons he and his men had found their first trip up the creek. If so, he might have shot others as well. He called to Jasper again. “Are there any others up there? Any more dead harpies farther in?”
The display of indignation that followed Ilbei’s question was such that an outside observer might have thought he’d demanded Jasper cut out all his own organs and sacrifice them to the gods right there on the spot. Jasper was prudent enough to get himself back into the hole, however, lest Ilbei come and do it for him, and for a long time, there was no more sign of the soggy sorcerer—such a long time that Ilbei began to worry.
“Ya don’t suppose they run into trouble in there, do ya?” he asked Mags. “Are there any other sorts of monsters or vile critters around here that ya know of?”
“There’s the sand dragons hiding in the apple trees,” Kaige said. “Don’t forget about them.”
Mags and Ilbei turned toward him as one, their faces scrunched up in the grip of bewilderment for a time until Ilbei recalled the source of that. He hated to be the one to ruin a good joke, but he had no choice this time. Impatience required that he explain. “They was funnin ya, son. There ain’t no dragons hidin in apple trees on account of their privates or any other parts bein red. Meggins was havin a joke on ya was all.”
Kaige looked as if he couldn’t decide if he felt stupid or relieved.
The sound of the water spewing out changed for a moment, followed by another spurt of water. A second harpy body shot out with it, this one landing short of the first. It stuck for a moment to the rocks, but the resumption of the normal water flow pulled it back into the stream. It might have gone right on down, headed toward Camp Chaparral, had not Mags reacted as quickly as she did.
She ran along the creek bank, chasing it, hopping from rock to rock, as nimble as a mountain goat, until she was clear of the jumbled stones and shale that filled the head of the ravine. She leapt down into the dry grass and caught up to the harpy corpse, punching the butt of her staff into the body and pinning it to the opposite bank. She held it there until Kaige and Ilbei arrived. They realized immediately after they got it out of the creek that this harpy was different from the last. The difference drew a gasp from Mags.
“What happened to its wings?” Kaige asked.
Ilbei studied the boney stumps that jutted from the waterlogged harpy’s back, each of them protruding two hand-widths from its spine where the wings had been. He judged from the smooth, flat angles at the end of each that they’d been sawed off, done by the tools and the labor of a man. The ends were burned, apparently having been cauterized.
That set Ilbei off, and with no more than a “that’s the last twitch of it” to explain, he began barking orders. The orders ultimately led to getting him to where he could set himself to work at the edge of the hole, widening it with his pickaxe.
Perhaps it was curiosity that did it, or perhaps it was frustration, but Ilbei couldn’t let it go. The sawed-off stumps of that harpy’s wings got under his skin like a cocklebur in a cinch strap, and there wasn’t any way he was going to stop until he got it out. So it was with grim determination that he set himself to widening the hole, making Jasper levitate him up to where the water emerged so he could work. Meggins had assured him that if he could widen it by a half hand for the first quarter span, he could fit through the rest, but nobody expected him to stay at it for three hours like he did.
About two hours into the work, as the sun drooped lower and lower toward the ridgeline high above—and after it occurred to Jasper that Ilbei had no intention of stopping his furious assault on the opening—Jasper offered to cast a spell on Ilbei’s pickaxe to expedite the work. He did so mainly in hopes of seeing the work done, so that they could get back to civilization, but at least partly in sympathy for the massive efforts of the laborer himself.
With the aid of a spell called “Tooth of the Leviathan”—officially intended to preserve the sharpness of sword and axe blades during long battles—by the time darkness was full upon them, Ilbei had carved out enough room that both he and Kaige could squeeze through the narrow opening.
He came down to the fire Meggins had gotten going while he worked. Meggins was cooking a few quail he’d shot, which Ilbei noted appreciatively. He took the wineskin Mags offered him, and gulped at it for a while. The wine was cool and refreshing, as Mags had put it in the creek while Ilbei worked. “Get some torches, people,” Ilbei said after, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I mean to go on in there tonight.”
“Tonight?” Meggins asked, as Jasper and Kaige looked on with equal incredulity. “Come on, Sarge. You’ve been at that hole all afternoon, and we’ve been walking since just after dawn. None of us had a decent night’s sleep, either. Only reason we got any at all was because Jasper’s damned magic knocked us out.”
“You’re awful young to be snivelin like that,” Ilbei said. “The three of ya. And here I’m three times yer age, and Mags a woman what ain’t been trained fer marchin at all.” He winked at Mags as he said it, and she smiled. Kaige looked sheepish, then laughed, and eventually so did Meggins, though he made a show of busying himself with the quail suspended above the flames. Jasper, in usual form, managed not to share in the humor, but rather than complain, as Ilbei expected, the wizard went right into the issue that had set Ilbei’s resolve to begin.
“It doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that a wingless harpy could have gotten in there,” Jasper said. “Unless the first one we found dragged the second in behind. But that seems unlikely, don’t you think, given the diameter of the hole and the outflow of water as strong as it is? Not to mention carrying capacities. Given what we can see of the wingspan of the first one, it seems unlikely it could have lifted a second harpy’s weight in addition to its own, particularly given that the first one was female and the second male. Like many species, the males are typically larger and stronger—other than the matriarchs of course. Harpies don’t have magical buoyancy like dragons and gryphons do, so she would have relied completely on the lift provided by those wings.”
“Plus, she was shot,” Kaige pointed out.
“Right, she was.” Jasper regarded Kaige across the firelight, looking surprised and impressed. “So, given all of that, it doesn’t seem probable that she could have dragged the other in after her.”
“That’s why we’re goin in,” Ilbei said. “Only way that one got in there was someone else stuffed em both up there together. That, or they came from the inside. And seein as how you and Meggins found that cut-winged harpy two hundred paces into the mountainside, and not in the water at all, I’m thinkin it’s the second one.”
Mags shifted uncomfortably. Ilbei couldn’t tell if it was due to the rock she sat on or what she was about to say. “I’m not disagreeing with your premise, Sergeant, but I’m curious why you feel so strongly that it is necessary to go.”
“Because somethin don’t smell right around here, and I don’t have to be shat on to know I’m downwind of the latrine.”
She nodded, either appeased or unwilling to wade any further into Ilbei’s reasoning. None of them were. For a time, they satisfied themselves with carving up the birds and serving them with slices of the sour apples that Mags had softened by baking them on the stones around the fire. The only one who spoke was Jasper, who came upon a realization as he ate. “How would being shat on tell you that you were downwind of a latrine?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
The weariness and the tension broke immediately upon his inquiry, and all the rest of them began to grin, shaking their heads and marveling at how a fellow like Jasper came to be. Jasper saw it and, of course, had no idea why.
“What?” he said as he watched them. “I don’t see how that’s funny. Any number of flying creatures could fly over and move their bowels onto the sergeant. And their doing so wouldn’t have anything to do with the direction of the wind or the location of a latrine. So it’s neither funny nor an accurate analogy of anything.”
Well, that was enough to bring roaring guffaws and pouring tears, and for a time all the others could do was clutch their ribs and bellies and exchange glances of raucous sympathy for their clueless companion. Eventually, after the tears were wiped away, Meggins wrapped a one-armed hug around the flustered and blustering Jasper’s shoulders and declared him to be the “best traveling companion of all time.” So much revived were they by their merriment, in fact, that Meggins was brave enough to take another crack at getting Ilbei to relent on going into the cave that night. He was actually still laughing as he said it, no less. “So, Sarge, I suppose now that, you know, all that frustration’s worked out and we can think through it clear, can we be steady on it and call it a night? Head out in the morning?”
Fortunately for Meggins, Ilbei, too, was still laughing when he replied. “Nice try, son, but we’re goin once these here quails is gone.”
Chapter 23
S
hortly after the meal was done, the company made their way by torchlight up into the hole where Harpy Creek emerged. Even with Ilbei’s work, he and Kaige had to struggle to get through, and both of them were sputtering and choking as they did, their respective burliness combining with the bulky chest and the two panniers to nearly plug the stream as they crawled inside. Eventually, however, with patience and much profanity, they made it through—though getting inside and getting to where it was even marginally comfortable were two different things. Once through the opening, they still had to crawl on hands and knees for the first six spans until it widened enough that they could get to their feet. From there, they had to crouch and shuffle another ten spans before there was enough space to stand upright, though only barely so for Kaige.