Unmoving and silent in the middle of the deserted street, they stared at the phantasm. Despite its lack of a countenance, it conveyed the unmistakable impression of staring back. Ehomba leaned over slightly to whisper to the swaying, shaky enigma who called himself Knucker.
“Okay, you know everything. What is that?”
Lachrymose eyes fought to focus on the forbidding specter. As before, the drunkard did not hesitate. “A vohwn. Having no face of its own, it envies those that do.” He tapped the side of his nose with his middle finger. “Be careful: It will try to take yours.”
Simna drew his sword. “Well, he can’t have this one. I need it.” Behind him, Ahlitah tensed and hunted for an opening.
Pulling the sky-metal blade from the scabbard on his back, Ehomba closed ranks with his friend. “And I mine. Mirhanja would still recognize me if I returned home without a face, but how would she look deep into my eyes if they were taken away?” He held his sword out in front of him, the moonlight glinting off the sharply angled etchings in the singular steel.
The vohwn looked at the double display of sharp-edged weaponry, though what it looked with no one could say, and laughed from the vacancy where its mouth might have been had it enjoyed a mouth. It was a sly suspiration, a sound that played beguilingly around the outer ear without ever really intruding, yet they heard it anyway, a laugh that froze only random drops of blood within their veins.
A phantasmal hand, skeletal and blue, reached toward them. Simna ducked. Ehomba held his ground and swung. The sky-metal sword moaned as it cleaved air and wrist. Like an emancipated moth, the severed hand of the vohwn went drifting off into the night, possessed of a life of its own. The specter cried out elegiacally and drew back its arm. As the empty face stared down into the severed wrist, it promptly grew another hand.
The herdsman hissed at the swaying, unsteady Knucker. “How do we get around it?”
“Well,” the drunk responded thoughtfully, “you could make a break to your left and cross the street, but then you’d run into the borboressbs.”
Glancing in the indicated direction, Ehomba and Simna saw a dark slit of an alley give birth to a dozen or so pony-sized homunculi. They had cloven hooves and walked with a permanent crouch. Bright red skin was subdued somewhat by the feeble moonlight. Goatlike tails switched back and forth and bristle-black hair covered their bodies in isolated, unwholesome patches. Their faces were blunt and plump, distorted by mouths full of sharp snaggle teeth that ran from ear to ear. When they gaped, it looked as if their skulls were split horizontally in half. Each had a single horn of varying length growing from the center of its forehead, and they were armed with curving, scythelike short swords fashioned of metal as bloodred as their exposed flesh.
They had been gabbling in an unknown tongue until they caught sight of the travelers. Now their unfathomable discourse was transmuted into an ominous muttering as they turned toward Ehomba and his companions. The presence of the towering vohwn did nothing to dissuade their advance.
Knucker spat something lumpy and brown onto the street and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Beware the borboressbs. They like to pluck out a man’s veins while he’s still alive and slurp them down for a snack.”
Ehomba tried to count the advancing freaks while keeping a watchful eye on the vohwn. It was still busy regrowing its hand, and had not moved from its position in the middle of the street.
“What about the other way?”
Knucker squinted and struggled to focus. “Well, you might have done that a minute or so ago, but it’s too late now.” He nodded to no one in particular. “Grenks.”
Slithering down the sidewalk came a trio of four-legged blobs that blocked the way from street to structure with a splotchy mass of pulsating pustulance. They looked like animals that had been fashioned from tied-together balloons. Big as buffalo, they loped along on barrellike legs that bounced them lightly off the ground. They had no feet and no hands. Everything about them was rounded and pulpy. Behind them they left triple trails of ichorous lump-filled slime whose stench reached the travelers even from a distance. It lay where it dripped for long moments before evaporating.
The repulsive, malformed heads were all pop eyes and gaping mouths, the latter limned with greasy, saclike lips. They had no teeth, but from the depths of those revolting maws a single tentacle-like tongue writhed and coiled like a snake carefully examining the world from the depths of its lair. Possessed of a sincere single-minded stupidity, they humped forward indifferent to the presence of the advancing borboressbs and the immovable shade of the vohwn.
“Use your magic!” Confronted by so many numerous and disparate horrors, Simna drew as close as possible to his tall friend as he could without compromising the arc of their weapons. “Call down the wind from the stars!”
“You think it is so easy?” Ehomba gripped his blade firmly. “Such things take time and are not always responsive. Drawing a sword is simple; persuading it to do anything besides cut and slice is not.” He was already starting to retreat. “I am trying.”
“Hoy, you have to try harder. No, try faster.”
“Be quiet and let me concentrate!”
Ahlitah leaped forward, his thunderous snarl echoing off the surrounding structures. The size and presence of the big cat caused the borboressbs to begin to spread out so as to encircle the travelers. Perhaps because it had no face with which to look upon the litah, the vohwn was not intimidated. And the comical carnivorous masses of the grenks came sliming on, oblivious to everything before them.
As they retreated, Ehomba grabbed the stuporous Knucker by the shoulder and pulled him along. Either unaware of or indifferent to the danger confronting them, the besotted little wreck of a man tottered unresistingly backwards in the herdsman’s firm grasp.
“What should we do?” The tall southerner gave the drunk a good shaking. “Tell us what to do. How do we get away from these foulnesses?”
Turning bleary eyes to the herdsman, Knucker replied in quavering tones. “You can’t. The borboressbs are too agile, the vohwn will be wherever you see, and the grenks never give up until they’ve been sated. Fight one and the others will fall on you from behind. You’re outnumbered, stranger. You’re dead.” He coughed weakly.
“He doesn’t know everything,” Simna declared grimly. “We’re not dead yet.”
“You need help,” the frail drunk mumbled.
“Hoy, you don’t have to be all-knowing to see that. I have a feeling we can’t expect much from these happy, civilized Phanese.” Simna scanned the surrounding buildings. A few lights gleamed behind shuttered windows, but none had been flung open to allow the inhabitants to observe what was taking place in the quiet street outside their homes. In the morning, no doubt, a jolly and competent cleaning crew would scrub the pavement clean of any loitering unpleasantness. Children would run hoops and chase each other across bloodstains that would fade with soap and rain and time, and no one would hazard a breach of etiquette by troubling to inquire what had happened.
Its hand regrown, the vohwn moaned and drifted forward. The nearest borboressbs gave it a wide berth. Too ignorant and persistent to recognize a possible danger to themselves and anxious for prey, the grenks oozed closer.
A wisp of cold wind sparked from the tip of the sky-metal blade.
“Hurry up!” Simna eyed the borboressbs nearest him. Four more had already scuttled behind him and were beginning to close in, holding their curved weapons above their loathsome heads like egg teeth extracted from some Ur-snake.
Reaching up and around, Knucker the Knower wrapped fingers sticky with phlegm and puke around the carved figurine that hung from the cord around Ehomba’s neck, and yanked. Startled, the herdsman responded angrily.
“Give that back! It will not buy you more than a drink or two.”
“Give it back?” Holding it up to his eyes, the little man struggled with difficulty to concentrate on the graven image he had purloined. “Sure, I’ll give it back. Here.” Drawing back his arm, he somehow managed a shaky throw.
The figurine soared past Ehomba’s outstretched fingers to land in front of a pair of borboressbs. It bounced a couple of times before rolling to a halt. One of the cloven-footed abnormalities gave it a passing glance, then stepped on it, grinding it into the pavement. A repellent snaggle-toothed grin split the repulsive face from side to side.
It vanished as the borboressb rose straight up into the air, did a complete head-over-hoof flip, and landed hard on its back. It lay stunned and unmoving.
In place of the carving stood a tall, erect figure limned in pale white flame. Its statuesque shape barely blurred by a coil of tight-fitting crimson and brown fabric, it carried a shield of mastodon hide in one hand and a slim wooden club in the other. The club was thickly studded with the three-sided thorns of the pyre bush. In all his life Ehomba had never seen a pyre bush. It was a part of Naumkib lore, more legend than shrub. But he recognized the thorns instantly, from the tales he had been told as a child. Mirhanja had never seen a pyre bush either, but she could describe one in detail to Daki and Nelecha while reciting bedtime stories. Any Naumkib mother knew what a pyre bush looked like, even if she had never seen one herself.
Momentarily startled, the angry borboressbs turned to confront the intruder in their midst. Two sliced viciously with the scythe-swords they carried. The blows glanced harmlessly off the shield of the new apparition. Swinging the club, it struck the nearest borboressb on one shoulder. Instantly, flames engulfed the horrid creature as fire exploded from its arm. Wailing wildly, it raced away up the street, trailing flame and smoke.
Two more borboressbs jumped the figure. One fell flopping to the pavement, its neck broken by a swinging blow from the edge of the shield. The other caught the tip of the club in its mouth. For a second its eyes grew wide. Then its head exploded in a ball of flame. Gathering themselves, the rest of the enraged aberrations prepared to attack the club-wielding shape simultaneously.
Their coordinated assault was disrupted by the ferocious black mass that landed in their midst. Emitting a ground-shaking roar, Ahlitah sent one borboressb flying with a single swipe of one huge paw. An instant later, it bit off the head of a second.
Seeing their chance, Ehomba and Simna rushed the grenks. Repeated blows from their weapons sliced away huge chunks of quivering, jellylike flesh without halting the creatures’ progress. They had no bones and, for all the two furiously flailing men could tell, no blood and no nervous systems. A tentacle-tongue lashed around Simna’s sword arm, only to be severed by a downward stroke of the herdsman’s blade. The amputated organ lay coiling and writhing on the ground like a worm driven to the surface by a heavy downpour.
Hewing and hacking methodically and without pause, they reduced the trio of obstinate but sluggish grenks to tremulous heaps of coagulated muck that littered the street and sidewalk. Even then, individual lumps of legless tissue tried to hump and slime their way in the travelers’ direction.
Having sent the remaining borboressbs fleeing, some with scorched tails and burned limbs and with the raging Ahlitah in literally hot pursuit, the phantasm that had issued from the figurine turned its attention to the looming shade of the vohwn. The incorporeal specter twisted and coiled itself around the new arrival, encircling it with its own ghostly corpus. The faceless perversion began to contract, tightening its own self securely about the figure.
Undaunted, the tall newcomer swung the club lightly but firmly. A pair of pyre thorns made contact with the constricting miasma. An expression of uncertainty, a surprised moan, emanated from the spiraling vohwn. With a soft, empyreal hiss, it saw itself sucked up by the thorns, until only a last wisp of noxious vapor remained to show where it had once writhed. Wetting two fingers by touching them to its lips, the figure reached down and pinched the final bit of vohwn out of existence. A single last, sharp hiss marked its ultimate passing.
Covered in loose lumps of quivering, gelatinous grenk and breathing hard, Ehomba and Simna turned to face the tall, lithe figure that had emerged from the shards of the herdsman’s petite carving. Holding firmly to shield and club, it came slowly toward them. Devoid of external assistance and support, Knucker the Knower’s legs finally gave out. His bony butt landed hard on the pavement. There he sat, hunched over, rocking back and forth and mumbling to himself, staring down at nothing in particular.
Still edged in pale white flame, the figure halted before the two panting men. And smiled. Ehomba hesitated, uncertain, staring hard, reluctant to trust the interpretation his brain insisted on applying to the information his eyes were conveying.
“Fhastal?”
“Hello, Etjole Ehomba.” And the magnificent smile widened.
It was Fhastal. But not the wise, wrinkled, hobbling old woman he had known since he was a child. Standing before him was a figure of towering feminine power, unforced sensuality, and burgeoning knowledge. Simna looked on in admiring silence.
“I do not understand,” the herdsman said simply.
Placing one end of her shield on the ground, Fhastal leaned the club up against it and rested her folded hands atop both. “The little figure of me was carved not when I was a child or when I was as you know me, Etjole, but when I was like this. So when the seal was broken, I came to you not as I am, but as I was.” She chuckled softly. “Was I not something uncommon when I was young?”
“By Gospoed’s galloping gonads, I’ll vouch for that!” Despite Ehomba’s frown of disapproval, the swordsman made not even a veiled attempt to lower his gaze.
Without knowing quite why, the herdsman found himself twitching uncomfortably beneath her white-flamed, uncompromising gaze. Yet it was the same look, only slightly moderated by venerable age, that he had seen in her eyes on the day he had set off from the village. But that was Fhastal: spry, learned, and occasionally coarse, still as fond as anyone of a crude joke or good laugh despite her crippled physique and enfeebled senses.
There was nothing of frailty or failing about the body that stood straight and lithe before him now. But the white flame in which she was circumscribed was growing dimmer even as she spoke.
She glanced briefly down at herself. “Yes, this part of me is withering. From here on I can only be with you in heart and spirit, Etjole Ehomba. A comforting memory at best. Would that it could be otherwise.” Raising her arms up and to the sides, she executed a leonine stretch. Observing the swordsman’s reaction, Ehomba feared the smaller man’s heart would fail him.
“You saved us,” he professed simply.
Picking up shield and club, she advanced until she was standing within inches of him. The pale flame that emanated from her body exuded no heat. Her kiss, however, was as full of fire as the pyre thorns.
“Ah, Etjole!” she husked as she stepped back from him. “What a most excellent man you have grown up to be, and what a lucky woman is Mirhanja.” Her expression turned serious. “You have a long ways still to travel.”
He nodded. “I have been told twice now that if I continue on I will be killed. What can you tell me?”
The exquisite face shifted from side to side. “Nothing, Etjole Ehomba. I can tell you nothing. I am the Fhastal of my youth, and that young woman fought hard to learn what was around her. I had neither the time nor the ability to look ahead. Even now, that is a gift that is denied to me.” Turning slightly, she gestured in the direction of the cringing, rocking figure. Having returned from its slaughter, the black litah stood watch over the helpless human shape. “Why not ask him? He knows everything.”
Simna made a rude noise. “Knucker the drunker? He knows a lot, I’ll give him that much. But everything? Not even the greatest of wizards knows everything. And that disgusting little snot’s no wizard.”
“No, he isn’t,” Fhastal the younger agreed. “But I think it barely possible that he may very well know everything, just as he says. The trouble is, knowing everything does not make one perfect. And just as he is no wizard, neither is he perfect.” The last vestiges of flickering white flame had nearly vanished from her body, for the first time isolating her supple, graceful form sharply against the frame of night.
Reaching up to his neck, Ehomba grasped the torn strip of cord from which the figurine had hung. It had been with him ever since he had left the land of the Naumkib, a small, cool companion against his bare skin, a familiar weight to remind him of home. Now it was gone.
“I will miss you, Fhastal. Until I return home.”
“I hope I’ll still be alive by the time you get back. I would like to learn how this turns out for you.”
“You should have told me about the carving’s power.” He spoke in a tone that was chiding but also affectionate.
“I did, Etjole Ehomba, I did!” She was laughing at him now, and for a brief moment the all-encompassing white flame seemed to dance higher, like a live thing summoned fleetingly back to life. “Did I not tell you when last we spoke that you were speaking to the image and that the figurine was the real me? That by your wearing it I would be able to travel with you?”
Now it was his turn to smile as he remembered, fondly. “So you did, Fhastal. I listened to your words but did not hear.”
She wagged a finger at him and the simple gesture caused him to experience a start of recognition. When chiding children and their elders alike, as she did frequently and every day, aged Fhastal, real Fhastal, the chuckling, easygoing old Fhastal of the village, wagged her finger in exactly the same way.
“You see clearly and far, Etjole Ehomba, but there are times when you need to listen better!”
“I will remember,” he assured her solemnly, speaking as an unruly child would to a doting parent.
“See that you do.”
Simna stepped boldly forward. “Hoy, don’t I rate a farewell kiss as well?”
The tall figure gazed speculatively down at the eager swordsman. “I think not, friend of Etjole’s. You are too quick with the hands that wield that fine sword and, modest maid that I am, I have only enchantment and fire to protect me.” Reaching out, she playfully tousled his hair. “Perhaps in another life.” With those words, the last of the ethereal enveloping flame flickered out.
“Fhastal, wait!” Ehomba stepped forward, into the space where she had been. No pale efflorescence, no lingering glow, marked her final passage. There was only a faint warmth in the air, a smell of natural perfume, and the teasing tail end of a dissipating, girlish laugh.
“For us.” There in the dark and deserted street far from home he stood and murmured to the sky. “She gave the last of her youth to save us. It was embodied in that figurine that she gave me for protection.” Turning, he confronted Simna. The swordsman was still staring at the space the beauteous phantasm had vacated, savoring an already dwindling memory. “She could have enjoyed those moments in the company of old friends back in the village, or among those equal to her in experience and learning. But she gave it to us.”
“Hoy, and a wondrous thing to behold it was,” Simna readily agreed. “Knowledge and fighting ability and a sense of humor all in one woman. Not to mention those—”
Ehomba cut him off. “Show some respect, Simna.”
“I would love to, bruther. Hoy, would I give a month of my life to show that woman some respect!”
“That was a vision of her as a youth. Nowadays she is old, and wrinkled, and bent.”
The swordsman nodded somberly. “But still beautiful, I’d wager.”
“Yes. Still beautiful.” Taking a deep breath, he turned toward Ahlitah and the big cat’s mewling, unhealthy charge. “She told us to ask questions of Knucker. We should follow her advice.”
“Hoy.” Simna walked alongside his friend. “Just so long as we keep in mind that no matter how much he knows, he doesn’t know everything.” The swordsman sniffed. “I don’t care what she said. Nobody knows everything. Especially a broken-down ruin of a human being like that.”
While a disgusted Simna stood nearby and the litah preened blood and bits of dismembered gut from his fur, Ehomba crouched before the gently swaying form of the man they had rescued from the close. A firm push from one finger would have been enough to knock Knucker over.
“How are you doing, my friend?”
The rocking stopped. Bloodshot eyes looked up and blinked like broken shutters. “Fine, fine! Why shouldn’t I be?”
Ehomba glanced up at his companions. Ahlitah was ignoring everything while he concentrated on matters of individual feline hygiene. Simna snorted derisively and turned away. The herdsman looked back at the pathetic figure cowering before him.
“You did not see what happened?”
Knucker made an effort to peer around the kneeling form of the tall southerner. The effort would have caused him to keel over had not Ehomba reached out to steady him.
“Something’s happened?” Wispy brows drew together. “Who are you, anyway? And why are you standing out here at night in the middle of the street?” He blinked again. “Why am I out here at night in the middle of the street?”
“We found you lying moaning in a close.” Ehomba was gentle and patient. “It was after midnight and so we ...”
Fear snapped Knucker’s eyes wide open. “After midnight?” Looking around wildly, he tried to rise and failed, having to rely on Ehomba’s strong arm to steady him once again. “We’ve got to get off the street, find shelter! The—”
“We know, we know.” The herdsman shifted his supportive hand from the little man’s waist to his upper arm. “I think it will be all right for a while, and there is a boardinghouse close by. Come.” Rising, he helped Knucker erect.
“You don’t understand,” the drunkard was babbling apprehensively. “After midnight, there are things abroad in Phan. Bad things. They come out of the darkness and—”
Ignoring the coating of filth that helped to keep the man warm, Ehomba put a steadying arm around the scrawny back. “But we do understand, friend Knucker. We do understand. Thanks to you.”
“To me?” Total confusion washed over the grimy, unshaven face. “What did I do? Who are you people?” As Ehomba gently shepherded him toward the unwinking, welcoming light of the boardinghouse and Ahlitah and Simna fanned out to either side to keep watch for trouble, they made their way up the empty but bloodied avenue. “And what am I doing out at night in the middle of the street?”
Off to Ehomba’s right, Simna scanned the shadows for signs of potential trouble. But the side streets and alleyways were as quiet as they were dark, innocent in the light of his patrolling vision. As he strode purposefully forward, he shook his head and chuckled harshly. “Knows everything. Sure he does. Sure. Giliwitil knows he doesn’t even know where he is!”