A Thief in the Night

chapter Twenty-two

There was still plenty of daylight left, so the companions loaded up their gear and got on their horses. Mörget and Croy were old hands at riding, of course, and Cythera knew how it was done. Slag needed some help getting on his pony but once on its back he seemed stable enough. They all had to wait while Malden tried to mount his jennet. He was nimble enough to jump up into the saddle, but once seated he found himself too far off the ground and started to grow dizzy and had to climb back down. It was ridiculous. How many times had he hung from finger grips off the spire of the Ladychapel in Ness, a hundred feet above the cobblestones? Yet the way the horse refused to stand still gave him vertigo. Mörget offered to strap him in with leather lashings, as was sometimes done for invalids and the very ill who nonetheless had to ride. Malden refused. He would do this. He had to. He could not turn around now. Half the country was after his blood—not to mention Prestwicke.

Eventually he managed to keep his seat and hold the reins as he was shown. The jennet had already proved herself a patient beast, and now she started walking with no compulsion, following the other horses. It was just like Croy had said, she did all the work. Malden clutched to the cantle of his saddle and tried to not fall off.

There were no roads, nor even any trails through the forest. No one lived there—the place was as deserted by human industry as the farmlands had been full of it. The riders had to pick their way around thick copses of gnarled trees and boulders overgrown with bright green moss. Croy led the way. He had an uncanny knack for knowing where the best route could be found. The others followed in single file. Slag rode his colt just in front of Malden, but the dwarf seemed as poor a horseman as the thief, because the colt kept stepping off the chosen path, its short legs finding better purchase elsewhere as they climbed over a fallen log or down into a defile. Then Malden’s horse would follow the colt, and everyone would have to stop while all the horses were brought back in line.

It made for slow going. Malden had plenty of time to listen to the sounds of the forest, which constantly startled him in a way that the shouts of soldiers or the crash of thunder never could. Each bird sang with a song he’d never heard, every frog’s croak was the roar of some massive beast. At least the endless maze of trees felt enough like the walls of a city’s houses that he did not feel so exposed, as he had out in the fields of wheat.

Yet so preoccupied with the sounds of the forest was he that he did not notice in time when his jennet decided it had found a better path and led him deep into a stand of trees. He suddenly looked up and realized he could not see Slag ahead of him.

He was lost.

Well, the others couldn’t be too far away, he decided. He shouted “Halloo!” and called Croy by name, and pulled up on the reins as he’d been shown to make the jennet stop. The horse, which clearly had decided she knew better than her rider, kept plodding onward, picking her way through a rank of ferns tall enough to brush Malden’s knees.

“No, no, I said stop,” Malden told the horse. There was a proper word to use, wasn’t there? He’d heard drovers in the city use it, to command their teams. “Whoa,” he said, and the jennet stopped instantly.

Malden didn’t. He wasn’t braced for the halt, and though he managed not to be thrown, he was pitched forward across the jennet’s neck and one foot came loose from its stirrup. Clutching hard to the horse’s mane, he cursed himself and tried to get back into the saddle.

That was when Malden heard the buzzing.

He froze, every sense tuned to that strange noise.

It had not sounded friendly.

Morning light streamed down through the trees, dancing around the shimmering leaves to dapple patches of undergrowth with sudden, blazing color. The wind that shook the branches never let up, and carried no sound but its own rising and falling susurration. Malden turned around as far as he could in the saddle to see what was behind him. Nothing but rocks and trees and briars.

“Did you hear that?” Malden asked the horse.

She had. Her ears stood straight up and she pawed nervously at the ground. From her demeanor he could guess her feelings: she very much wanted to run away, but her rider had given the command to halt.

“That’s the problem with having a foolish master,” Malden sympathized. “Perhaps I should take your counsel.” He wore no spurs, but when he touched his heels to the jennet’s flanks, she walked forward readily. Malden craned his neck to peer around him, looking for the source of the buzzing noise, and—

It came again, even louder, very close now. He nearly jumped off the horse’s back so he could go running and screaming through the woods. But no. Surely he was safer on horseback. He reached down to touch the hilt of his bodkin. Then cursed himself as he remembered he had Acidtongue tied up behind the saddle. Surely the magic sword was the match for anything short of a fire-breathing dragon.

To his left, something crashed through the foliage. Malden wheeled around to that side and the jennet did likewise, snorting in panic.

The thing that came out of the woods was as big as a cow, and it gleamed with iridescent colors when the sunlight struck its back. Two stunted, cloudy eyes stood on either side of a curved black beak, below which spiky mandibles clicked together. The beast’s massive oblong body stood supported on six slender legs that bent in all the wrong directions. Coarse black fur covered those legs, though the rest of the animal was smooth and covered in plates of armor.

The thing reared up and snapped at the jennet with its compound jaw.

Malden reached back to grab the hilt of Acidtongue and slapped the jennet’s rump instead, because he could not see what he was doing. He couldn’t take his eyes off the monster that bore down on him.

The horse, perhaps thinking her master had finally come to his senses, did a very horselike thing and bolted. Unfortunately Malden was leaning backward at that precise moment to reach the sword. He had to slip his feet out of the stirrups to get it.

The horse went forward. The thief went backward, head over ankles. He crashed to the leaf-strewn forest floor with a thump that took his wind.

The jennet disappeared between two thickets of trees. The monster ran forward, barreling right for Malden’s prostrate form. Malden grabbed for the bodkin at his belt and brought it around in a wild arc, slashing at the thing’s face.

The creature took a nimble step back, avoiding Malden’s swing. Its jaws clacked together and Malden pulled his hand back. Carefully, he got to his feet. The monster tried to circle around behind him, so he turned with it. It lunged forward—he jabbed, and struck, but the point of his bodkin only scored the leathery hide on its beak.

Malden recovered and started another swing, intending to cut at its eyes. Surely they must be a weak point in its armor, he thought. He must strike true to catch such tiny targets. Yet as he leaned forward into the stab, the monster’s carapace split open, two pieces of its shell peeling back as long glassy wings burst free and buzzed savagely.

Malden danced backward as it jumped up into the air and smashed into him. He was knocked back, his heel caught on a rotten log and he fell, his bodkin flashing wildly before him as the monster bore down on him from above. He threw up his free arm to fend it off, and the mandibles grabbed at the sleeve of his jerkin.

“No!” he shouted, certain it would snap the bones of his arm like so many twigs. The weight of the creature fell on him and he was enveloped in its strange reek, an acrid stench like nothing he’d ever smelled before. The mandibles closed on his arm and he yelped in anticipation.

Yet the pain did not come. The thing gummed at his sleeve, and Malden realized it did not have any teeth. It could grasp him, and drool on him, but it lacked the equipment to actually bite him.

It buzzed angrily and its skinny legs batted at his face, the hairs there feathery soft. It tried to crush him under its massive bulk, but it proved surprisingly light for something so large.

If it wanted to kill him, it was going to have to sit on him until he starved to death. Malden almost laughed as he understood. This was no monster bent on devouring travelers who strayed into its forest. It was some leaf-eating insect, grown overlarge, yes, but as harmless as a pill bug. It must have attacked him only in desperation. Had he stumbled across its nest? Was it protecting its young?

Then he heard shouts and the crashing clamor of horses running through the forest. Suddenly his companions were all around him, and he called to them that he was all right, that it was nothing.

Apparently Croy didn’t hear him. Ghostcutter came up high and flashed down, slicing the insect’s head from where it seamlessly joined its thorax.

Stinking yellow blood poured down over Malden’s face in great gouts. He choked and spluttered as some of the foul stuff got in his mouth. That was the worst injury he’d taken from the animal.

“You didn’t need to do that,” he said as Croy helped him up to his feet.

“I just saved your life,” the knight insisted. He looked perplexed.

“No, no, it was harmless—look—it doesn’t even have any teeth.”

Croy picked up the severed head of the beast and poked inside its mouth with a finger. “I thought you were in peril,” he said. “You were down on the ground and that thing was on top of you.”

Malden wiped at his face and chest. The yellow slime had positively ruined his clothing. It stank of the animal’s alien odor and clung to his fingers like thick mucus. “Gah,” he said. “I need to find a stream so I can wash this off.”

“There’s one just up ahead,” Cythera told him. “We were trying to ford it when we realized you were missing. Then when your horse rejoined us, missing her rider, we knew to come look for you.” She frowned and looked away. “Mörget—what are you doing?”

The barbarian had his axe out and was cheerily butchering the giant insect. “Slag says we can roast this for dinner. It’ll be good to have fresh meat.”

“I think I might be sick,” Malden said.

The dwarf, still sitting his pony, just shrugged. “More for the rest of us, then. Though I’ll tell you, you’re missing out on a f*cking delicacy. I haven’t had a good giant cave beetle steak since I left my country. You can get it in Ness, dried and salted like jerky, but it’s just not the same.”

Croy looked incredulous. “You’ve seen such a beast before?”

“Oh, aye,” Slag told him. “There’s some mines in the dwarven kingdom just crawling with the things. Normally they live underground. What this one’s doing up here in this blasted daylight, I can’t say. Must have climbed up out of a crack in the rocks and got lost. They’re sodding stupid like that.”

Malden studied the eyes of the dead beast. “Out of its element,” he said, thinking perhaps that explained its aggression. A humble creature, a harmless feeder on fungus and subterranean plant matter, suddenly lost in a world of painfully bright light full of strangely soft but dangerous monsters. He could not help but feel sorry for it.

“Wait,” Croy said. “If it’s a denizen of caves, by nature—does that mean what I think it must?”

“Aye,” Slag told him. “It could only have come from one place. This means the Vincularium must be right around the next f*cking bend.”