48

“Worse things waiting.” When I was a lad, that was the inevitable response of the old folks if you complained about anything. “You got it easy, young man. They’s worse things waiting.”

They knew what they were talking about, too.

I hung on. I kept my eyes closed tight while we fell. My mount banged the air feebly with spasming wings. It screamed a horsey scream, only about fifteen times as loud as a normal ground-bound beast might have.

Just the way I always wanted to go, at the age of four hundred and eight. Riding a waking nightmare.

“They finally got me,” I muttered. I took even tighter hold of the creature’s mane. This one damned horse was going with me.

Another horse shrieked from far above. Sounded like it was coming closer fast. I cracked one eye to see how far we had fallen. “Oh, shit!”

I should have known better.

My mount didn’t like the prognosis either. He got serious about the flapping and flopping and got his hooves right side down and his wings floundering around in the right direction.

The cherub came whirring out of the night, hummed around and around, just hanging out like he enjoyed watching things fall. He chuckled a lot. Then he held up suddenly, staring, aghast. “Oh, no! That blows everything.”

I looked around, spied a half-dozen tower-tall, transparent, and obviously pissed-off figures striding toward TunFaire. None of them were Shayir or Godoroth.

Neither did I think they belonged to the Board, whose controls had failed so abominably. It looked like some of the really big guys had decided to forgo normal business—making guys sacrifice their firstborn or sneaking up on virgins disguised as critters—while they attended to some emergency heavenly housekeeping.

Fourteen shot toward me, grabbed hold, scrambled up under my blanket. I grumbled, “It’s getting a little crowded in here.” That distracted me from the screaming I wanted to do.

The damned horse got it all together. It beat hell out of the air with its monster wings. To no avail. We had too much downward momentum. Whambomy! We hit. We shot on down through about half a mile of tree branches. Lucky us, they slowed us down. Lucky us, none of them were big enough to stop us cold. Lucky us, when we hit water I only went in up to my ears.

We surfaced. The horse whooped and hooted and gasped after its lost breath. The Goddamn Parrot wriggled its head out of my clothes again, began a wet and lonely soliloquy filled with every cussword the Dead Man could recall from about fifty languages.

Old Chuckles has been around a long time.

The cherub came out and hovered. He agreed with the bird.

It was all my fault.

Same as it ever was.

Personally, I was too busy being glad I was still in one piece to give either one of them a hard time. But good ideas for later did occur to me.

“Where the hell are we?”

Fourteen snapped, “In a freaking swamp, moron.”

That wasn’t exactly hard to miss. There were mosquitoes out there big enough to carry off small pets. Otherwise, though, it was your typically wimpy Karentine swamp. If you overlooked a few poisonous bugs and snakes, it would be completely safe. Nothing like the swamps we endured down in the islands, where we faced snakes as long as anchor chains and the alligators who survived by eating them.

I found myself not feeling at all awful—for a guy who had just missed falling to his death and had missed drowning only by inches.

That horse had one ounce of brains. He didn’t try to fly out of there. As soon as he got his breath back, he let out a couple of forlorn neighs. He seemed surprised when they were answered from above. Fourteen buzzed upward, rattling and clattering and cussing his way through the branches. In minutes he was back, a fresh, competition-class banger in his mouth. “This way.” My mount headed out. He was not inclined to hear suggestions or commentary from me.

The beast pulled in his wings completely. He proceeded as straight horse and regained his strength quickly. The cherub led us to solid ground fast. Minutes later, we left the trees. The horse broke into a trot that graduated to a canter and then a vigorous gallop. This continued for a while, the horse not growing winded but not getting off the ground either. We went over hill and dale and farm while Cat and her mount cruised overhead. Our course tended southwest. Time seemed to take the night off. Before long we left the farmlands.

I checked the moon. For sure, it hadn’t traveled nearly as far as it should have. We were on elf hill time. And covering a lot of ground. Already we were in territory that remained unsettled because people were too superstitious to live there.

A sudden vague glow limned some hills up ahead. It made them look like they were standing in a circle, looking down at something they had surrounded. “Oh boy.” It just got worse. I poked the Goddamn Parrot.

That gaudy chicken dia not respond—except to bite my finger. Evidently we were beyond the Dead Man’s range. At last. With the Goddamn Parrot, mercifully, left with little command of his vocal apparatus.

Great. Once again I was getting a lesson in watching out what I wished for because my wishes might come true.

Those hills had to be the Bohdan Zhibak. That name translates into modern Karentine as “The Haunted Circle.” Over the ages a lot of really awful things are supposed to have happened there. And tonight, it seemed, the tabled Fires of Doom were ablaze inside the Circle. Fourteen didn’t want to get any closer. He was not shy about telling everyone about it.