It was the time of the Monthly Meeting. The big confab during
which nothing gets done. During which all heads yammer of pet
projects on which action cannot be taken. After six or eight hours
of which Darling closes debate by telling us what to do.
The usual charts were up. One showed where our agents believed
the Taken to be. Another showed incursions reported by the menhirs.
Both showed a lot of white, areas of Plain unknown to us. A third
chart showed the month’s change storms, a pet project of the
Lieutenant’s. He was looking for something. As always, most
were along the periphery. But there was an unusually large number,
and higher than normal percentage, in this chart’s interior.
Seasonal? A genuine shift? Who knew? We had not been watching long
enough. The menhirs will not bother explaining such trivia.
Darling took charge immediately. She signed, “The
operation in Rust had the effect I hoped. Our agents have reported
anti-imperial outbreaks almost everywhere. They have diverted some
attention from us. But the armies of the Taken keep building.
Whisper has become especially aggressive in her
incursions.”
Imperial troops entered the Plain almost every day, probing for
a response and preparing their men for the Plain’s perils.
Whisper’s operations, as always, were very professional.
Militarily, she is to be feared far more than the Limper.
Limper is a loser. That is not his fault, entirely, but the
stigma has attached itself. Winner or loser, though, he is running
the other side.
“Word came this morning that Whisper has established a
garrison a day’s march inside the boundary. She is erecting
fortifications, daring our response.”
Her strategy was apparent. Establish a network of mutually
supporting fortresses; build it slowly until it is spread out over
the Plain. She was dangerous, that woman. Especially if she sold
the idea to the Limper and got all the armies into the act.
As a strategy it goes back to the dawn of time, having been used
again and again where regular armies face partisans in wild
country. It is a patient strategy that depends on the will of the
conqueror to persevere. It works where that will exists and fails
where it does not.
Here it will work. The enemy has twenty-some years to root us
out. And feels no need to hold the Plain once done with us.
Us? Let us say, instead, Darling. The rest of us are nothing in
the equation. If Darling falls, there is no Rebellion.
“They are taking away time,” Darling signed.
“We need decades. We have to do something.”
Here it comes, I thought. She had on that look. She was going to
announce the result of much soul-searching. So I was not struck
down with astonishment when she signed, “I am sending Croaker
to recover the rest of his correspondent’s story.” News
of the letters had spread. Darling will gossip. “Goblin and
One-Eye will accompany and support him.”
“What? There ain’t no
way . . . ”
“Croaker.”
“I won’t do it. Look at me. I’m a nothing guy.
Who’s going to notice me? One old guy wandering around. The
world is full of them. But three guys? One of them black? One of
them a runt with . . . ”
Goblin and One-Eye sped me milk-curdling looks.
I snickered. My outburst put them in a tight place. Though they
wanted to go no more than I wanted them along, they now dared not
agree with me publicly. Worse, they had to agree with each other.
Ego!
But my point remained. Goblin and One-Eye are known characters.
For that matter, so am I, but as I pointed out, I’m not
physically remarkable.
Darling signed, “Danger will encourage their
cooperation.”
I fled to my last citadel. “The Lady touched me on the
desert that night I was out, Darling. She is watching for
me.”
Darling thought a moment, signed back, “That changes
nothing. We must have that last piece of story before the Taken
close in.”
She was right about that. But . . .
She signed, “You three will go. Be careful.”
Tracker followed the debate with Otto’s help. He offered,
“I’ll go. I know the north. Especially the Great
Forest. That’s where I got my name.” Behind him,
Toadkiller Dog yawned.
“Croaker?” Darling asked.
I was not yet resigned to going. So I passed it back to her.
“Up to you.”
“You could use a fighter,” she signed. “Tell
him you accept.”
I mumbled and muttered, faced Tracker. “She says you
go.”
He looked pleased.
As far as Darling was concerned, that was that. The thing was
settled. They hastened down the agenda to a report from Corder
suggesting Tanner was ripe for a raid like that on Rust.
I fussed and fumed and no one paid me any mind, except Goblin
and One-Eye, who sent me looks saying I would rue my insults.
No fooling around. We left fourteen hours later. With everything
arranged for us. Dragged out of bed soon after midnight, I quickly
found myself topside, beside the coral, watching a small windwhale
descend. A menhir yammered behind me, instructing me in the care
and stroking of the windwhale ego. I ignored him. This had come on
too swiftly. I was being shoved into the saddle before I’d
made up my mind to go. I was living behind events.
I had my weapons, my amulets, money, food. Everything I should
need. Likewise Goblin and One-Eye, who had provided themselves with
a supplementary arsenal of thaumaturgic gewgaws. The plan was to
purchase a wagon and team after the windwhale dropped us behind
enemy lines. All the junk they were bringing, I grumbled, we might
need two.
Tracker traveled light, though. Food, an array of weapons
selected from what we had on hand, and his mutt.
The windwhale rose. Night enveloped us. I felt lost. I
hadn’t gotten so much as a good-bye hug.
The windwhale went up where the air was chill and thin. To the
east, the south, and northwest I spied the glimmer of change
storms. They were becoming more common.
I guess I was getting blase about windwhale-riding. Shivering,
huddling into myself, ignoring Tracker, who was a positive
chatterbox yammering about trivia, I fell asleep. I wakened to a
shaking hand and Tracker’s face inches from mine.
“Wake up, Croaker,” he kept saying. “Wake up.
One-Eye says we got trouble.”
I rose, expecting to find Taken circling us.
We were surrounded, but by four windwhales and a score of
mantas. “Where did they come from?”
“Showed up while you were sleeping.”
“What’s the trouble?”
Tracker pointed, off what I guess you would call our starboard
bow.
Change storm. Shaping.
“Just popped out of nowhere,” Goblin said, joining
us. too nervous to remember he was mad at me. “Looks like a
bad one, too, the rate it’s growing.”
The change storm was no more than four hundred yards in diameter
now, but the pastel-lightninged fury in its heart said it would
grow swiftly and terribly. Its touch would be more than normally
dramatic. Varicolored light painted faces and windwhales bizarrely.
Our convoy shifted course. The windwhales are not as much affected
as humans, but they prefer to dodge trouble where possible. It was
clear, though, that fringes of the monster would brush us.
Even as I recognized and thought about it, the storm’s
size increased. Six hundred yards in diameter. Eight hundred.
Roiling, boiling color within what looked like black smoke.
Serpents of silent lightning snapped and snarled soundlessly around
one another.
The bottom of the change storm touched ground.
All those lightnings found their voices. And the storm expanded
even more rapidly, hurling in another direction that growth which
should have gone earthward. It was terrible with energy, this
one.
Change storms seldom came nearer than eight miles to the Hole.
They are impressive enough from that distance, when you catch only
a whiff that crackles in your hair and makes your nerves go
frazzled. In olden times, when we still served the Lady, I talked
to veterans of Whisper’s campaigns who told me of suffering
through the storms. I never wholly credited their tales.
I did so as the boundary of the storm gained on us.
One of the mantas was caught. You could see through it, its
bones white against sudden darkness. Then it changed.
Everything changed. Rocks and trees became protean. Small things
that followed and pestered us shifted
form . . .
There is a hypothesis which states that the strange species of
the Plain have appeared as a result of change storms. It has been
proposed, too, that the change storms are responsible for the Plain
itself. That each gnaws a bit more off our normal world.
The whales gave up trying to outrun the storm and plunged
earthward, below the curve of expanding storm, getting down where
the fall would be shorter if they changed into something unable to
fly. Standard procedure for anyone caught in a change storm. Stay
low and don’t move.
Whisper’s veterans spoke of lizards growing to elephant
size, of spiders becoming monstrous, of poisonous serpents
sprouting wings, of intelligent creatures going mad and trying to
murder everything about them.
I was scared.
Not too scared to observe, though. After the manta showed us its
bones it resumed its normal form, but grew. As did a second when
the boundary overtook it. Did that mean a common tendency toward
growth on a storm’s outward pulse?
The storm caught our windwhale, which was the slowest getting
down. Young it was, but conscientious about its burden. The crackle
in my hair peaked. I thought my nerves would betray me completely.
A glance at Tracker convinced me we were going to have a major case
of panic.
Goblin or One-Eye, one, decided to be a hero and stay the storm.
Might as well have ordered the sea to turn. The crash and roar of a
major sorcery vanished in the rage of the storm.
There was an instant of utter stillness when the boundary
reached me. Then a roar out of hell. The winds inside were
ferocious. I thought of nothing but getting down and hanging on.
Around me gear was flying about, changing shape as it flew. Then I
spied Goblin. And nearly threw up.
Goblin indeed. His head had swelled ten times normal size. The
rest of him looked inside out. Around him swarmed a horde of the
parasites that live on a windwhale’s back, some as big as
pigeons.
Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were worse. The mutt had become
something half as big as an elephant, fanged, possessed of the most
evil eyes I’ve ever seen. He looked at me with a starved lust
that chilled my soul. And Tracker had become something demonic,
vaguely apelike yet certainly much more. Both looked like creatures
from an artist’s or sorcerer’s nightmares.
One-Eye was the least changed. He swelled, but remained One-Eye.
Perhaps he is well-rooted in the world, being so damned old. Near
as I can tell, he is pushing a hundred fifty.
The thing that was Toadkiller Dog crept toward me with teeth
bared . . . The windwhale touched down. Impact
sent everyone tumbling. The wind screamed around us. The strange
lightning hammered earth and air. The landing area itself was in a
protean mood. Rocks crawled. Trees changed shape. The animals of
that part of the Plain were out and gamboling in revised forms,
one-time prey turning upon predator. The horror show was
illuminated by a shifting, sometimes ghastly light.
Then the vacuum at the heart of the storm enveloped us.
Everything froze in the form it had at the last instant. Nothing
moved. Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were down on the ground, thrown
there after impact. One-Eye and Goblin faced one another, in the
first phase of letting their feud go beyond its customary
gamesmanship. The other windwhales lay nearby, not visibly
affected. A manta plunged out of the color above, crashed.
That stasis lasted maybe three minutes. In the stillness sanity
returned. Then the change storm began to collapse.
The devolution of the storm was slower than its growth. But
saner, too. We suffered it for several hours. And then it was done.
And our sole casualty was the one manta that had crashed. But damn,
was it ever a shaking experience.
“Damn lucky,” I told the others, as we inventoried
our possessions. “Lucky we weren’t all
killed.”
“No luck to it, Croaker,” One-Eye replied.
“The moment these monsters saw a storm coming they headed for
safe ground. A place where there would be nothing that could kill
us. Or them.”
Goblin nodded. They were doing a lot of agreeing lately. But we
all recalled how close they had come to murder.
I asked, “What did I look like? I didn’t feel any
change, except a sort of nervous turmoil. Like being drunk,
drugged, and half-crazy all at the same time.”
“Looked like Croaker to me,” One-Eye said.
“Only twice as ugly.”
“And dull,” Goblin added. “You made the most
inspiring speech about the glories the Black Company won during the
campaign against Chew.”
I laughed. “Come on.”
“Really. You were just Croaker. Maybe those amulets are
good for something.”
Tracker was going over his weaponry. Toadkiller Dog was napping
near his feet. I pointed. One-Eye signed, “Didn’t
see.”
Goblin signed, “He grew up and got claws.”
They did not seem concerned. I decided I should not be. After
all, the whale lice were the nastiest thing after the mutt.
The windwhales remained grounded, for the sun was rising. Their
backs assumed the dun color of the earth, complete with
sage-colored patches, and we waited for the night. The mantas
nested down on the other four whales. None came near us. You get
the feeling humans make them uncomfortable.
It was the time of the Monthly Meeting. The big confab during
which nothing gets done. During which all heads yammer of pet
projects on which action cannot be taken. After six or eight hours
of which Darling closes debate by telling us what to do.
The usual charts were up. One showed where our agents believed
the Taken to be. Another showed incursions reported by the menhirs.
Both showed a lot of white, areas of Plain unknown to us. A third
chart showed the month’s change storms, a pet project of the
Lieutenant’s. He was looking for something. As always, most
were along the periphery. But there was an unusually large number,
and higher than normal percentage, in this chart’s interior.
Seasonal? A genuine shift? Who knew? We had not been watching long
enough. The menhirs will not bother explaining such trivia.
Darling took charge immediately. She signed, “The
operation in Rust had the effect I hoped. Our agents have reported
anti-imperial outbreaks almost everywhere. They have diverted some
attention from us. But the armies of the Taken keep building.
Whisper has become especially aggressive in her
incursions.”
Imperial troops entered the Plain almost every day, probing for
a response and preparing their men for the Plain’s perils.
Whisper’s operations, as always, were very professional.
Militarily, she is to be feared far more than the Limper.
Limper is a loser. That is not his fault, entirely, but the
stigma has attached itself. Winner or loser, though, he is running
the other side.
“Word came this morning that Whisper has established a
garrison a day’s march inside the boundary. She is erecting
fortifications, daring our response.”
Her strategy was apparent. Establish a network of mutually
supporting fortresses; build it slowly until it is spread out over
the Plain. She was dangerous, that woman. Especially if she sold
the idea to the Limper and got all the armies into the act.
As a strategy it goes back to the dawn of time, having been used
again and again where regular armies face partisans in wild
country. It is a patient strategy that depends on the will of the
conqueror to persevere. It works where that will exists and fails
where it does not.
Here it will work. The enemy has twenty-some years to root us
out. And feels no need to hold the Plain once done with us.
Us? Let us say, instead, Darling. The rest of us are nothing in
the equation. If Darling falls, there is no Rebellion.
“They are taking away time,” Darling signed.
“We need decades. We have to do something.”
Here it comes, I thought. She had on that look. She was going to
announce the result of much soul-searching. So I was not struck
down with astonishment when she signed, “I am sending Croaker
to recover the rest of his correspondent’s story.” News
of the letters had spread. Darling will gossip. “Goblin and
One-Eye will accompany and support him.”
“What? There ain’t no
way . . . ”
“Croaker.”
“I won’t do it. Look at me. I’m a nothing guy.
Who’s going to notice me? One old guy wandering around. The
world is full of them. But three guys? One of them black? One of
them a runt with . . . ”
Goblin and One-Eye sped me milk-curdling looks.
I snickered. My outburst put them in a tight place. Though they
wanted to go no more than I wanted them along, they now dared not
agree with me publicly. Worse, they had to agree with each other.
Ego!
But my point remained. Goblin and One-Eye are known characters.
For that matter, so am I, but as I pointed out, I’m not
physically remarkable.
Darling signed, “Danger will encourage their
cooperation.”
I fled to my last citadel. “The Lady touched me on the
desert that night I was out, Darling. She is watching for
me.”
Darling thought a moment, signed back, “That changes
nothing. We must have that last piece of story before the Taken
close in.”
She was right about that. But . . .
She signed, “You three will go. Be careful.”
Tracker followed the debate with Otto’s help. He offered,
“I’ll go. I know the north. Especially the Great
Forest. That’s where I got my name.” Behind him,
Toadkiller Dog yawned.
“Croaker?” Darling asked.
I was not yet resigned to going. So I passed it back to her.
“Up to you.”
“You could use a fighter,” she signed. “Tell
him you accept.”
I mumbled and muttered, faced Tracker. “She says you
go.”
He looked pleased.
As far as Darling was concerned, that was that. The thing was
settled. They hastened down the agenda to a report from Corder
suggesting Tanner was ripe for a raid like that on Rust.
I fussed and fumed and no one paid me any mind, except Goblin
and One-Eye, who sent me looks saying I would rue my insults.
No fooling around. We left fourteen hours later. With everything
arranged for us. Dragged out of bed soon after midnight, I quickly
found myself topside, beside the coral, watching a small windwhale
descend. A menhir yammered behind me, instructing me in the care
and stroking of the windwhale ego. I ignored him. This had come on
too swiftly. I was being shoved into the saddle before I’d
made up my mind to go. I was living behind events.
I had my weapons, my amulets, money, food. Everything I should
need. Likewise Goblin and One-Eye, who had provided themselves with
a supplementary arsenal of thaumaturgic gewgaws. The plan was to
purchase a wagon and team after the windwhale dropped us behind
enemy lines. All the junk they were bringing, I grumbled, we might
need two.
Tracker traveled light, though. Food, an array of weapons
selected from what we had on hand, and his mutt.
The windwhale rose. Night enveloped us. I felt lost. I
hadn’t gotten so much as a good-bye hug.
The windwhale went up where the air was chill and thin. To the
east, the south, and northwest I spied the glimmer of change
storms. They were becoming more common.
I guess I was getting blase about windwhale-riding. Shivering,
huddling into myself, ignoring Tracker, who was a positive
chatterbox yammering about trivia, I fell asleep. I wakened to a
shaking hand and Tracker’s face inches from mine.
“Wake up, Croaker,” he kept saying. “Wake up.
One-Eye says we got trouble.”
I rose, expecting to find Taken circling us.
We were surrounded, but by four windwhales and a score of
mantas. “Where did they come from?”
“Showed up while you were sleeping.”
“What’s the trouble?”
Tracker pointed, off what I guess you would call our starboard
bow.
Change storm. Shaping.
“Just popped out of nowhere,” Goblin said, joining
us. too nervous to remember he was mad at me. “Looks like a
bad one, too, the rate it’s growing.”
The change storm was no more than four hundred yards in diameter
now, but the pastel-lightninged fury in its heart said it would
grow swiftly and terribly. Its touch would be more than normally
dramatic. Varicolored light painted faces and windwhales bizarrely.
Our convoy shifted course. The windwhales are not as much affected
as humans, but they prefer to dodge trouble where possible. It was
clear, though, that fringes of the monster would brush us.
Even as I recognized and thought about it, the storm’s
size increased. Six hundred yards in diameter. Eight hundred.
Roiling, boiling color within what looked like black smoke.
Serpents of silent lightning snapped and snarled soundlessly around
one another.
The bottom of the change storm touched ground.
All those lightnings found their voices. And the storm expanded
even more rapidly, hurling in another direction that growth which
should have gone earthward. It was terrible with energy, this
one.
Change storms seldom came nearer than eight miles to the Hole.
They are impressive enough from that distance, when you catch only
a whiff that crackles in your hair and makes your nerves go
frazzled. In olden times, when we still served the Lady, I talked
to veterans of Whisper’s campaigns who told me of suffering
through the storms. I never wholly credited their tales.
I did so as the boundary of the storm gained on us.
One of the mantas was caught. You could see through it, its
bones white against sudden darkness. Then it changed.
Everything changed. Rocks and trees became protean. Small things
that followed and pestered us shifted
form . . .
There is a hypothesis which states that the strange species of
the Plain have appeared as a result of change storms. It has been
proposed, too, that the change storms are responsible for the Plain
itself. That each gnaws a bit more off our normal world.
The whales gave up trying to outrun the storm and plunged
earthward, below the curve of expanding storm, getting down where
the fall would be shorter if they changed into something unable to
fly. Standard procedure for anyone caught in a change storm. Stay
low and don’t move.
Whisper’s veterans spoke of lizards growing to elephant
size, of spiders becoming monstrous, of poisonous serpents
sprouting wings, of intelligent creatures going mad and trying to
murder everything about them.
I was scared.
Not too scared to observe, though. After the manta showed us its
bones it resumed its normal form, but grew. As did a second when
the boundary overtook it. Did that mean a common tendency toward
growth on a storm’s outward pulse?
The storm caught our windwhale, which was the slowest getting
down. Young it was, but conscientious about its burden. The crackle
in my hair peaked. I thought my nerves would betray me completely.
A glance at Tracker convinced me we were going to have a major case
of panic.
Goblin or One-Eye, one, decided to be a hero and stay the storm.
Might as well have ordered the sea to turn. The crash and roar of a
major sorcery vanished in the rage of the storm.
There was an instant of utter stillness when the boundary
reached me. Then a roar out of hell. The winds inside were
ferocious. I thought of nothing but getting down and hanging on.
Around me gear was flying about, changing shape as it flew. Then I
spied Goblin. And nearly threw up.
Goblin indeed. His head had swelled ten times normal size. The
rest of him looked inside out. Around him swarmed a horde of the
parasites that live on a windwhale’s back, some as big as
pigeons.
Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were worse. The mutt had become
something half as big as an elephant, fanged, possessed of the most
evil eyes I’ve ever seen. He looked at me with a starved lust
that chilled my soul. And Tracker had become something demonic,
vaguely apelike yet certainly much more. Both looked like creatures
from an artist’s or sorcerer’s nightmares.
One-Eye was the least changed. He swelled, but remained One-Eye.
Perhaps he is well-rooted in the world, being so damned old. Near
as I can tell, he is pushing a hundred fifty.
The thing that was Toadkiller Dog crept toward me with teeth
bared . . . The windwhale touched down. Impact
sent everyone tumbling. The wind screamed around us. The strange
lightning hammered earth and air. The landing area itself was in a
protean mood. Rocks crawled. Trees changed shape. The animals of
that part of the Plain were out and gamboling in revised forms,
one-time prey turning upon predator. The horror show was
illuminated by a shifting, sometimes ghastly light.
Then the vacuum at the heart of the storm enveloped us.
Everything froze in the form it had at the last instant. Nothing
moved. Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were down on the ground, thrown
there after impact. One-Eye and Goblin faced one another, in the
first phase of letting their feud go beyond its customary
gamesmanship. The other windwhales lay nearby, not visibly
affected. A manta plunged out of the color above, crashed.
That stasis lasted maybe three minutes. In the stillness sanity
returned. Then the change storm began to collapse.
The devolution of the storm was slower than its growth. But
saner, too. We suffered it for several hours. And then it was done.
And our sole casualty was the one manta that had crashed. But damn,
was it ever a shaking experience.
“Damn lucky,” I told the others, as we inventoried
our possessions. “Lucky we weren’t all
killed.”
“No luck to it, Croaker,” One-Eye replied.
“The moment these monsters saw a storm coming they headed for
safe ground. A place where there would be nothing that could kill
us. Or them.”
Goblin nodded. They were doing a lot of agreeing lately. But we
all recalled how close they had come to murder.
I asked, “What did I look like? I didn’t feel any
change, except a sort of nervous turmoil. Like being drunk,
drugged, and half-crazy all at the same time.”
“Looked like Croaker to me,” One-Eye said.
“Only twice as ugly.”
“And dull,” Goblin added. “You made the most
inspiring speech about the glories the Black Company won during the
campaign against Chew.”
I laughed. “Come on.”
“Really. You were just Croaker. Maybe those amulets are
good for something.”
Tracker was going over his weaponry. Toadkiller Dog was napping
near his feet. I pointed. One-Eye signed, “Didn’t
see.”
Goblin signed, “He grew up and got claws.”
They did not seem concerned. I decided I should not be. After
all, the whale lice were the nastiest thing after the mutt.
The windwhales remained grounded, for the sun was rising. Their
backs assumed the dun color of the earth, complete with
sage-colored patches, and we waited for the night. The mantas
nested down on the other four whales. None came near us. You get
the feeling humans make them uncomfortable.