The New Plan
There was no sign of the rock throwing gorgons from that morning when they returned to the quarry. Runt resisted the urge to go back to the cart and see how many stones were flicked off the edge.
“Either they have finished making bricks and are back in the tunnels,” he figured, “or they’re still out there. Regardless of which it is, they’re not here, and I can’t wait forever.”
Speed was the key, this time. Runt climbed onto his pup’s shoulders and they sprinted across the quarry, heading for the port road. They made it nearly two thirds of the way across before he heard the scrape and groan of the cave opening. They skidded to a stop behind a pile of rubble. Runt dismounted and watched as gorgons poured out the tunnel.
“There must be easily a hundred or more of them,” Runt thought, “and they’re different somehow.”
The difference, he decided, was the way they walked. The gorgons he saw that morning had slouched, dragged their feet, and lazed about. These gorgons marched with purpose in single file. Runt probably could have sped on safely. The monsters barely turned their heads or twisted their long, pointed ears. They just marched. The other difference was in their eyes. Runt was certain the gorgons he saw that morning did not have eyes glowing with a yellow fire. From this distance it was like watching a line of fireflies trailing into the scrub.
Runt hesitated for a second more. He wanted to learn about these creatures. Men from the city called them slaves. Were they? Could they be helped? And why did they tear down the fey-trees? These questions and more he would have asked of them. He was sure, though, that if he appeared they would simply throw rocks at him like they had at Stripes.
He watched them leave before climbing onto Stripes once more. “Let’s go boy!” he whispered and gripped his pup’s fur tightly. They were quickly swallowed by the darkness.
The ocean end of the port road was deserted after nightfall. If anyone was on the road it would be at the city end and, even then, they would simply be the people returning home late. Almost no one stayed out after dark in Demon’s Land. Runt and Stripes galloped on.
On his right, across the wasteland of burned and broken scrub, he could make out the giant fey-tree against the night sky. Runt hopped down and they began walking together, picking their way among the tree stumps. At first, they appeared to have been chopped by axes. Further in, though, the stumps were more roughly splintered and broken. There were gouges in logs and snapped branches and even, occasionally, a tree had simply been pushed over roots and all.
The ground slowly fell away on this south side of the road. They soon reached the edge of the scrub and plunged in, and down. It was more difficult to travel, here. There were boulders, real boulders this time, not sleeping mammoths, and loose gravel, and crevasses in the rock. The ground continued to slope away and now, here and there, were muddy pools, and fallen trees with bizarre fungi growing along their trunks.
The chorus of frog calls out here became a cacophony. The air was thick with the noise, but also heavy with moisture. The forest closed in on all sides. The trees were thicker and draped in vines. In places the ground became a bog and several times he and Stripes were forced to backtrack to find a way around. They pushed on though, and, finally, made it to the clearing and the giant fey-tree. Except, it wasn’t the sort of open space Runt expected.
The fey-tree didn’t just dominate the area, it overwhelmed. It intimidated. Half the sky was blotted out by its looming canopy. Its trunk must have been fifty yards around. Like all fey-trees, its roots stretched out in all directions across the ground as far as the canopy reached overhead. The tree itself sat on a round hill.
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The hill was surrounded by a lake.
The entire clearing, in fact, was a lake. Runt stood at the edge of it. This area was bigger than usual for a fey-tree and almost entirely under water. In the stillness of the night the lake reflected the stars, and the trunk, and the broad canopy, making the enormous image of this tree doubly vast as it shimmered across the water’s surface. Other things, too, made this tree remarkable. For one, tiny lights flickered here and there up and across the trunk and branches. Runt thought again of fireflies but, this time, the lights didn’t move, and they were all sorts of colours, not just yellow. A type of glow worm, then, sitting on the bark? The only way to find out was to get closer.
The other remarkable thing about this tree was the noise. Once, when Runt was younger, a pair of laughing kingfishers made a nest in the hollow of a tree near the kennels. Pretty soon there were four baby birds poking their heads above the gap and, as the chicks grew, they joined their parents in the branches above. The noise that these birds made! One kingfisher would begin its peculiar song, starting with a chuckle that gradually built into raucous laughter. Then, the others would join in until the entire tree shook with cackles and hoots. Runt could still picture the morning they stopped laughing. Tyron, hungover and murderous, cast rock after rock at the tree until only a few lonely feathers remained. The boss was deadly with a rock. All the dogs knew it, and Runt did, too.
That noise, though, of six kingfishers competing for the title of “most annoying laugh” was only a fraction of the chaos Runt heard, now. He heard singing, and laughing, and whooping, and chanting. It almost sounded like speech, but Runt couldn’t make out what was said. It was too fast, too chaotic. Every now and then, though, he could have sworn a word or two echoed across the lake from out the babble of noise.
The night was calm, but the tree moved to-and-fro as if buffeted by unseen winds. No part of the canopy was still. If someone stood next to Runt at that moment and told him a hundred children were up that tree, swinging from branches, chasing, dancing, leaping and climbing, he would have believed them. Except there was no one to tell him that. And he could see the creatures were not children.
For starters, no child he ever saw could fly.
Now that he was close enough, Runt could tell they were not birds. They flitted in and out of the tree in swooping glides. Some of the creatures whizzed overhead into the scrub. Others flew back from the scrub and crashed into the canopy before disappearing within. They were fast enough to be a blur, but Runt made some observations after long study.
They were furry, not feathered. He didn’t think birds could be furry. They didn’t have wings, either. Not really. Instead, there was a kind of skin stretched between their arms and legs. They didn’t fly as much as glide, with those arms stretched wide and the skin taut, until they reached the next tree branch. They also had a fluffy long tail and furry, pointed ears. All in all, they looked a little bit like a flying cat.
“Surely these are the harpies Greybeard warned me about.” Runt whispered to Stripes. “Witches, he called them. Witches that will suck my blood and steal my soul. Neither sounds much fun. And yet, I would dearly love to watch these creatures from up close.”
Runt stared across the water doubtfully. It was impossible to judge the water’s depth by eye, and even a shallow swamp was deep for a person of his height. Despite this he was determined to get across. He unslung the spear from his back and dipped it into the lake to test the depth. He couldn’t feel the bottom of the lake, even when lying down with water up to his shoulder.
“So it’s really deep, then,” he muttered, “which doesn’t make sense. Shallow muddy puddles and bog all the way here and then, out of nowhere, a lake deeper than I can reach.”
The giant trunk, the tiny pinpricks of light sparkling, the harpies swooping and whooping – Runt had to get closer. So he did a thing that was, in hindsight, really dumb.
To be fair, Runt was young, and naïve, and had never been near water deeper than a puddle in his life. He knew what swimming was but, up until now, never really thought of it as something he would need to do.
“How hard can it be?” he shrugged and stepped into the water. He sank immediately. Seconds later Runt was back on land, on his hands and knees, coughing up a lungful of water.
“Thanks boy,” he spluttered, “I owe you one.” Stripes gently let Runt’s collar go, sat back, cocked his head, and frowned.
Runt looked across the lake. The secrets of the tree would have to remain a mystery for now. The harpies, on the other hand, didn’t just stay in this one tree. He knew of other places they visited where he could get very close to them, indeed.
“Well, maybe we could try Plan B?” he said, coughing again, before leading his pup back up the slope, back to the road, and over into the Wilds beyond.