Page 111 of Swordheart
Halla looked around the clearing. Tall oaks and shaggy-barked hickories murmured in the breeze. The road continued on ahead, but the trees were empty of sky-swimmers. She could tell because they were further along into autumn than the others they had seen and many had bare branches, while others blazed copper and orange and gold.
There was space enough to turn the wagon around, ironically. She didn’t think it would be an issue. She would have abandoned a dozen wagons to never walk through that tunnel again.
The wagon wheels started up. Halla bit down on her knuckles.
The ox emerged from the hollow way and then, very slowly, the sky-swimmer’s body began to rise. Halla watched, paralyzed, as Brindle lifted it up on the end of the ox goad.
Will it wake up? It’s got to wake up. It’ll wake up and then it’ll wake the others and then they’ll come for us…
The roof cleared the beast by inches. Brindle hung from the side of the wagon, hitching himself along one handed, keeping the ox goad lifted. Sarkis lay flat across the wagon seat. The edges of the swimmer rippled, less like water and more like a horse’s hide when a fly walked on it. It squirmed restlessly and then… then…
The wagon creaked free. Brindle clung to the back of the wagon, panting like a frightened dog. The ox, seeing grass ahead and having no driver to stop it, dropped its head and began chewing meditatively.
“Brindle, that was amazing!” whispered Halla.
The gnole gave her a fanged smile. “Didn’t feel amazing,” he said. He stamped his feet and rubbed the fur of his arms against the grain, shivering.
“I suggest we don’t linger,” said Sarkis. “I don’t want to be anywhere near these things when they start to wake up.”
There was no argument. Brindle wiped the end of the ox goad in the grass repeatedly to clean it, then grimaced and took out a knife. He whittled the end down to clean wood with a few rapid strokes. “Don’t like that stuff,” he said. “Don’t want it touching an ox.”
They climbed back up. Brindle tapped the clean goad on the ox’s flank and the beast walked forward, reluctantly abandoning the grass.
They made forward progress for perhaps half an hour, while the trees changed color around them.
“Sweet blessed Rat, it’s narrowing again,” said Zale disgustedly. “Are we doomed to drive through hollow ways forever?”
“The branches up ahead are completely bare,” said Halla. “Maybe we’re getting back to normal hills. Or at least normal winter.”
Skreek…skreek…skreek…
The branches were indeed bare. They formed a familiar lattice overhead.
“I could get to hate this place,” said Sarkis, to no one in particular.
Brindle suddenly sat up straight, sniffing. He looked puzzled.
“Great god, now what? More of them?”
The gnole shook his head. “No. Smells… familiar.”
“What?”
Brindle shrugged.
They made a few more wagonlengths of progress and the treesbegan to open up. Halla looked off to their left and saw a small pond, the surface frozen in slushy ridges, and a pile of branches.
“You’vegotto be shitting me,” she said.
Possibly because she never swore, the other three gave her the attention this deserved.
“Sarkis,” she said, pointing, “will you go look and tell me if that’s where I think it is?”
He followed the line of her finger to the branches and said something in his own language that didn’t sound like anything anyone would want to translate.
“You don’t have to get down,” said Zale, twisting their braid around their hand. “I can see a hand from here. Unless people are stuffing dead bodies into identical ponds all over the woods…”
“The Hills turned us around,” said Halla. “They let us go.”
