As Brian read the news, the path jounced once. He didn’t take much notice of it.
“Notice boards like this are how the country people get their messages,” Gwynyfer explained. “It’s rather charming and rustic.” She pointed through the tangle. “And there’s an old family cemetery.”
Far off were suspended the corpses of dead elves. They had been baked into shells of dough. Spells or prayers were written on their bodies in icing. They had hung there for years and the dough was cracked. Shoulders and legs of blackened, mummified bodies showed through.
“It’s sweet,” said Gwynyfer. “You don’t normally see a graveyard like that anymore.”
The road shuddered again. Brian looked along its length. Other strands around them were quivering. He didn’t like it. He clutched the reins of his beast.
“We turn here,” said Gwynyfer, checking her map. “That way.”
Gregory shouted a warning.
Brian turned and looked.
Some vast, gigantic mite was descending from a drooping cable above them. Its legs were many, jagged and jointed as lightning. Each ended in a needle it plunged into the fronds of the Wildwood to hold itself up. It hurtled toward the three kids and their steeds.
Brian fumbled with his saddlebags, reaching for his Norumbegan musket, which hung from two straps. He twisted around in the saddle, furiously working at the buckles.
“Come on!” Gregory shouted to his own beast, whacking his heels into its sides. “Run! Run, you idiot!” Gregory took his goad and walloped it. The steed picked up a gentle canter. Gregory jolted along in the saddle, hollering, “No, run!”
Then Gregory’s great, seven-legged thombulant stopped in its tracks. Gregory’s shoulders snapped forward. He almost fell off. The thombulant stumbled, then jumped, as if it had kicked up its back legs.
Gregory looked back.
His steed hadn’t jumped; one of the giant mite’s needle-sharp feet had plunged into the thombulant’s back. A muddy, blue line shot up the jointed leg toward the monster — the thombulant’s blood. The mite was sucking the life out of the poor beast.
Gregory screamed. The mite was dragging him and his collapsing steed closer to the edge of the path.
The boy scrambled to hold on to the pommel of his saddle. He felt his steed, dying of blood loss, lifted in the air.
With a final yelp — strangely quiet and short — he fell.
Brian saw Gregory’s dead thombulant drop off the cable and rebound on loops and arcs far below, dwindling. He saw also that Gregory had fallen out of the saddle first — luckily — and had dropped onto the path. The blond boy lay on his back, stunned, his arms twitching, his mouth open, the wind knocked out of him.
By now, Brian had his musket out. He pointed it at the monster’s body and gathered his thoughts together to say the Cantrip of Activation — the magical trigger word that would fire the gun.
But it was hard to think with his steed bucking beneath him, panicked, releasing steam from fluttering vents.
The giant mite did not seem interested in him. It now moved with mechanical swiftness toward Gwynyfer and her frantic thomb.
Brian barked the Cantrip of Activation, and the gun fired.
He saw a blast of light spray across the monster’s thick, lumpy hide. He’d hit it square in the middle of its huge, hulking body.
But it made no difference. The skin was too thick.
The monster fastened itself to the nearest strands for purchase and darted two legs toward Gwynyfer’s riding beast. She screeched at it and swung her goad, knocking one of the needle-like arms back.
Brian fired again.
And once again, it didn’t make any difference whatsoever.
The monster shot its jointed arms out once more and this time pierced the flesh of Gwynyfer’s steed with two of its syringe claws. It began to suck blood. The blue line of liquid shot up its arms.
Another brown, needled arm slashed down — and this time, it shot right at Gwynyfer, tearing her red riding coat. Then it reared back and prepared to shoot forward one last time.
Brian was in a panic. His gun was useless, Gregory was lying helplessly on the ground, unable to speak — and now Gwynyfer was about to be drained of her blood.
Then he had an idea. He aimed again, only this time higher. He thought of the Cantrip of Activation and fired.
One of the giant mite’s thin, zigzag legs blasted apart at a joint. The monster quivered.
Brian fired again and again at the legs that held the thing suspended in air.
The monster swayed crazily now, trying to retract its syringe legs from its prey to fasten them on another strand.
Brian blew another leg off.
The mite was running out of legs to hold itself up.
Gwynyfer, once more in a perfect riding pose, shouted to her thombulant, “Go on, then!” Her steed charged forward, freeing itself from the needles.
Brian blasted apart another leg — and at this, the giant mite slewed to the side, tried to plunge a remaining needle into a stalk — failed — and fell.
It slapped briefly against the path, and the path shuddered a little. The monster kept falling.
They heard the metallic reports of the thing banging against fibers below.
Brian took a deep breath. He rode his steed over to the edge of the path and looked down. The shadowy tangle still wobbled where the monster had fallen.
Gregory was standing up, looking pale and shaken. Gwynyfer reined in her steed. “Lovely, Bri-Bri!” she exclaimed. She did not seem shaken in the least. “Gregory, you poor thing. Look at you, all dismounted.”
Gregory couldn’t speak immediately. He kept looking around, fixing his eyes on the quivering fibers.
“I can’t believe I didn’t fall off the path,” he said, stunned. “It was a mistake. I didn’t mean to get out of the saddle. I was trying to stay on, but then it, uh …”
“Well, bravo to you for your lack of skill and coordination.” Gwynyfer tapped her goad playfully against the hide of her recovering steed. “You know what’s just the biggest crying shame? That you’ll have to walk from now on. Walking’s bad for the knees.”
Gregory looked at her in bewilderment. Then he realized that she was flirting, and started to smile. “Unless I could catch a ride from some lovely lady.”
“Losers, weepers.”
Regardless, Gregory started to clamber up the side of her steed.
She urged it to skip forward. It took a quick step. Gregory fell, hitting the path hard.
“Uff!” he exclaimed. He looked up at her in surprise.
She said, “I fancy more back-and-forth between us. More ‘Please, Gwynyfer, please, ha-ha-ha.’ And us smiling darlingly at each other and the musical ringing of my clear, bell-like laugh rippling through the aorta.”
“Sorry,” said Gregory. “I forgot about the musical ringing of your clear, bell-like laugh.”
“Rippling. So you did.”
Brian waited.
He still held the musket. He watched for the mite to return from below.
That particular mite did not return. The next day, they saw another one far above them, and it began to scuttle down, but Brian was ready this time, and just a few warning shots frightened it off.
They were deep, deep in the Wildwood. They were no longer on a path made of even a couple of strands tied together. They now tramped along a single strand. It bobbed continually. Brian hated the motion. He gripped his reins and his goad tightly.
Gregory rode behind Gwynyfer. They kept poking each other and laughing. Brian couldn’t hear much of what they said. It was mainly about her childhood in the Globular Colon.
Shortly before noon, they came to the far side of the Wildwood. They saw the wall of the Dry Heart, bristling with the bases of fronds as thick as skyscrapers.
There among the trunks hung a hut. It had many roofs, all of them shingled, and several bridges that led to out-buildings hanging on the pinky-gray flesh of the wall. A fe
w of the smaller fronds — still large as tree trunks — grew right through the hut, curling out of holes in the walls. None of the windows matched.
“There it is,” said Gwynyfer as they approached. “At least according to the Empress. Her brother’s hermit hut.” A final time, she checked the envelope with the directions on it. Then she lightly tossed it away. Brian watched it waft over the side of the path and flutter downward, rocking back and forth on breezes.
He hoped that throwing it out hadn’t been a mistake.
As they got closer to the hut, they heard something creaking. The sound was lazy and rhythmic. Brian gently pulled the reins toward him. His thombulant slowed.
A man rocked in a chair on the front porch. He sat quietly, watching them. Around him were things that might have been giant slugs or chickens — balls of feather with long, wet necks or tails sticking out of each end. Several of them hung from the woodwork on the porch, sleeping.
The man did not move while he watched the kids approach, even when they held up their hands to greet him.
In human terms, the archbishop Thomas Darlmore looked to be about sixty-five. He was handsome and tired and severe. His head was as gaunt as a thermos. His cheeks had deep channels in them. His hair was buzz cut and stuck straight up, gray and metallic. He wore a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater and khakis that were splattered with paint. He had a book in one hand.
The chicken lumps played at his feet.
Gwynyfer called up to him, “The Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of His Grace Cheveral Gwarnmore, Duke of the Globular Colon, greets the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Thomas Darlmore, Archbishop of Norumbega, and requests audience and asylum, bearing greetings from his fond and devoted sister, the Empress of the Innards.”
Brian waited anxiously for the old man to reply. The formal language of the Imperial Court made Brian jumpy. He couldn’t understand half of it, even though it was magically translated.
The man stared down at them. Finally, he said, in a hoarse voice, “No archbishop here.” He lifted a chicken thing off his shoe. “Defrocked.”
Gwynyfer bowed her head, smiled radiantly at him, and began again. “The Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of His Grace Cheveral Gwarnmore, Duke of the Globular Colon, greets Mr. Thomas Darlmore, beloved brother of our Sublime Highness Elspeth Fendritch, Empress of the Innards, and regrets that so many are Mr. Darlmore’s glories that Miss Gwarnmore does not know by which title to address him, any more than she might choose one beam of the sun’s radiance above the rest that fall so plenteously upon the —”
“Honey,” grated the man in the rocking chair, “you’ve never seen the sun once. And I’ll never see it again.” He sighed and closed his book, leaving his finger in the page. “Listen, kids, we’re way down at the plug-end of the heart here. Nothing to do but fly-fish in the bloodstream. I haven’t worn socks in seventy-three years. So forget ‘Your Radiant Lordship.’ Drop the verbs in the sixth-person-disembodied formal. Clear?”
Gwynyfer was clearly unhappy about being interrupted. She said, “If Mr. Darlmore will be so good as to indicate which title best suits him, he will cease to discompose his devoted supplicant.”
The ex-archbishop said, “I’m Tom. You’re Gwyn. And they’re human?” He pointed vaguely at Brian and Gregory.
“You got it, sir,” said Gregory cheerfully. “Brian Thatz over there, and I’m Gregory Stoffle.”
Thomas Darlmore nodded. He got up and laid his book on the railing. He looked askance at its cloth cover a while, then he called down, “You say my sister’s Empress?”
Gwynyfer confirmed it.
Darlmore nodded, thinking this over. “What about Rands?” he asked. “He dead?”
Gwynyfer said, “With delight, Miss Gwarnmore reports that Randall Fendritch, beloved husband of the Empress, is alive and flourishes.”
“And my nephew? Last I heard, they’d made him Emperor so Elspeth and Rands could go off, improve their golf swings.”
The kids didn’t really know how to answer this one politely. They each waited for someone else to say something until Gregory finally blurted out, “Your nephew exploded. It turned out he was a bomb.”
Thomas Darlmore heard this and threw up his hands, as if to say, Of course, of course. He squinted down at the kids. “Some Thusser doctor involved? Something similar, once before, back in the reign of Nimrod. Some Thusser shamans got their hands on the Empress. All the heirs were spirals or piles of dust. A fistful of glass rods.”
“We’re sorry about your nephew, Mr. Darlmore,” said Brian.
Darlmore didn’t answer. For a long time, he stared off into the Wildwood.
Looking carefully at the ex-archbishop, Brian suddenly caught a glimpse in him of the young man they’d seen a year before in visions and time-slips back in Old Norumbega. They’d seen him dashing through the forest, hunting with the Emperor and Empress. They’d seen him sitting on a pleasure barge on a black, underground lake with all the Court around him, watching an aquatic ballet. They’d seen him dressed in silk brocade robes and a pointed hat sewn with cloth of gold.
And now he stood in his paint-splattered pants, staring out into a jungle of growths that stoppered up a big, dead heart.
Brian said, “Sir, we’re … we’re very glad to meet you. We’ve come a long way to talk to you.”
Darlmore looked at the boy but didn’t speak.
Brian continued. “We, um, we heard you left the Court because they wouldn’t take anything seriously. Like the Thusser Hordes. Well, we’re here because the Hordes have broken the rules of the Game and have taken over Old Norumbega and they’re …”
Darlmore waited, but Brian was too nervous to continue. The man’s stare was hard and blue and intense.
The hermit shooed chicken slugs away from a trap-door, opened it, and dropped a rope ladder through. He clambered down to help the kids dismount.
“You’ll want to park your thombs.” He gestured with his head over toward an outbuilding that was strapped to the strand. “There’s feed in there. You should —” He sniffed. He walked closer to Gwynyfer’s thombulant and drew in a series of sharp breaths.
Gwynyfer was clearly repelled by the hermit sniffing her steed.
Darlmore asked, “What’s this? Doesn’t smell like thombs.”
“You mean Brian?” said Gregory. “Oh, sometimes we give him breath mints. But no dice.”
Darlmore shot Gregory an irritable look. “Your steed, Gwyn,” he said.
“The Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarn —”
“You have something on your steed. It’s been painted with something.”
Gregory said, “I don’t smell anything weird.”
“How well do you know the smell of thombulants?” The hermit made his way along the flank of the beast, placing his hands on its hide, leaning close to it, taking in its awful scent. “It’s been painted with an attractor. You get attacked by anything on the way here? Cardiac mites or anything?”
“Yeah!” said Gregory. “One almost killed me!”
Gwynyfer said graciously, “Bri-Bri there was the hero of the hour. He offed it.”
Darlmore sniffed the other thombulant. “See, completely different. This one hasn’t been painted.”
“Huh?” said Gregory. “Been painted how?”
Darlmore asked him, “Were you riding one of these things, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Yours was probably slathered up with attractor, too.”
Gwynyfer asked, “What is sir talking about?”
“Where’d you stay last night?”
“We camped,” said Brian. “Right on one of the strands.”
“Night before?”
“An inn,” said Gregory.
“You watch your beasts all night?”
“Of course not,” said Gwynyfer. “The stableboy did.”
“The stableboy didn’t,” said Darlmore.
“The stableboy should have.”
Brian pressed him, “Wh
at do you mean? What’s an attractor?”
The hermit said, “I mean: Someone tried to kill you.”
The hermit made them a kind of lifeless pancake — one huge, flat, pasty flapjack in a frying pan as big as a wagon wheel. Apparently, he ate simply.
“Later, we’ll fish for dinner,” he said. He jerked a few chains to adjust the height of the frying pan over the fire in the center of the room.
He looked at the kids. “So who’d want to kill you?” He squinted at each one of them in turn, then asked Gwynyfer, “Anyone with a gripe against your father? I knew him, by the way. Is there anyone who’d inherit your title? If you died?”
Gregory said, “Whoa, whoa! So tell us what you’re thinking.”
Darlmore explained, “Someone sabotaged your caravan. Someone painted your thombs with an attractor — the juice they use out here to draw the mites when they’re hunting them. In the Wildwood, people hunt the mites for food. Mites love the smell of the attractor juice. They scuttle down out of their nests and try to grab whatever’s painted with it. Then, normally, the hunt closes in.” He yanked a chain and the black pan slammed upward. The pancake whirled up floppily toward the chimney-hole, flipped, and slapped back down. Darlmore turned to the kids again. “But in your case, someone was trying to get the mites to come kill you.”
Brian thought carefully, then wondered aloud, “So you think they were only trying to get Gwynyfer?”
“And probably your pal Greg here. Place bets they buttered up his thomb, too.”
Gwynyfer patted Brian’s hand and said sweetly, “It must be nice for once not to be the one people are trying to kill.”
They ate the pancake. It was tough and dry.
“Sorry,” said the hermit. “The lunch.” He looked at Gwynyfer. “You want a napkin to spit it into?”