“Dak, we should explain to them why we need their help,” said Veela.
“Yes, of course,” said Dak, and returned his attention to Chert and the Jaw. “You see, in light of the fact that some of your fellow tribesmen took refuge in the cave system—”
But Veela interrupted him: “Dak, just let me explain it, please. Your translator doesn’t make any sense, it’ll only confuse them.”
Dak looked at her. She met his gaze. After a moment he said, “Very well. If you think that’s necessary.”
Veela explained to the guys that they thought some of the People who’d escaped into the caves might still be there. Or they might have been zombified. If they were simply still in the caves, though, Veela would like to have Chert and the Jaw there to help her communicate with them. (She also nearly told them that, unlike hers and Dak’s, their brains were mute to the zombies, but that was too complicated to explain right now.) Maybe the survivors would know where in the cave complex the zombies were, if there were any, and could guide Veela and Dak to them. Dak was certain that his two drones would be able to handle that, but Veela preferred some sort of Plan B.
Once she’d finished explaining, she said angrily to Dak, “Now that we’ve asked them to risk their lives for us, surely you agree that we have to take the gags off so they can answer.”
“Naturally,” said Dak, “now that it’s necessary to let them speak.”
Veela removed Chert’s and the Jaw’s gags. “Sorry, I am for these,” she said grimly, not caring that her apology was translated back for Dak, more or less recognizably.
Once the gags were off, Chert and the Jaw moved their mouth muscles and worked their tongues, trying to expel the alien sensations of the strange new material.
Veela gave them a moment before pressing them: “Help, will you give?”
Chert remained silent. The Jaw glared first at Dak, then at Veela. He said, “You need my help? I have one condition.”
Veela didn’t know the word “condition,” and the translator was no aid. It took some back-and-forth before she figured out what it meant. Once she had, she said, “Condition, is what?”
“Give me and my father spears,” said the Jaw, “and let me kill him.”
Veela blinked, not sure she’d heard right. She looked at Chert.
His eyes were red and wet. He glared at the Jaw, then turned his gaze away. “Give him a spear and let him do what he likes,” he muttered. “I’ll not defend myself.”
For some reason Veela didn’t understand, that made the Jaw all the more furious. She didn’t get it that the Jaw interpreted Chert’s refusal as meaning that Chert didn’t think the Jaw was worthy of the People’s right to fight for his father’s place in the circle, and that he’d rather die than dignify his halfbreed spawn’s upstart pretensions.
“Well,” said Dak. “One member of this little clan may serve just as effectively as two. And the older one has tried to kill you. He could well prove a pure liability. Perhaps letting him die wouldn’t be such a bad idea, particularly if it insures the younger one’s gratitude and loyalty. It’s their culture, after all—it’s not our job to understand it.”
Though there was no love lost between herself and Chert, Veela was glad the translator rendered Dak’s musings as gobbledygook that the man couldn’t possibly understand. Still, she forced herself to seriously consider the Jaw’s demand. It would do no good to try to import her exact ethical code back into this alien world where no human had yet figured out how to so much as sow a field. This was a bloody place, maybe she should get busy adapting to it.
She looked again at Chert. His fierce red eyes still stared straight ahead.
“No,” Veela said to Dak, and then in the People’s tongue to the Jaw, “No.” He glared at her, then dropped his eyes. To Dak, she said, “He doesn’t want to do that as badly as he thinks he does.”
Dak shrugged. “If you say so. You’re the expert on these fellows, I suppose.”
Veela placed a hand on the Jaw’s bound forearm, hoping it was a consoling touch. She leaned in close to him, and murmured, “You help. No condition. It is right, and you must, so you help.”
Q
uarry refused to leave the cave and wait outdoors. Gash-Eye considered resting before going back to the chamber of unkillables, for the girl’s sake. But the sooner they destroyed the unkillables (assuming they could), the sooner she could get the child out in the fresh air. So they crept their way back.
First she prepared a handle for their lamp. When the unkillable’s head had almost dimmed to black, when there was only just barely enough green glow to locate its mouth by, Gash-Eye fed it the brain of a lizard she’d caught. She and Quarry ate the rest of the lizard’s raw body. Once the head was dimly glowing again, Gash-Eye attached it to one of the sticks of firewood by sharpening it to a stake and then driving the stick through the neck. She took another sharpened stick as a weapon.
They kept the unkillable head covered most of the way back to the chamber of trapped unkillables. Gash-Eye didn’t want to risk Spear, his minions, and their captives spotting her before she could spot them. She felt her way along the wall, naked and shivering, desperate necessity adding force to her memory and helping her retrace her steps. Along the way she caught another lizard and wrung its neck.
As they neared the crevice by which one entered the chamber of trapped unkillables, they moved more cautiously. There were definitely still unkillables in the chamber—she heard them shuffling. Empty-headed corpses of Spear’s friends plugged the crevice leading into the room—without using the lamp she made sure the corpses were there by probing for them with her fingers. The unkillables must be too stupid to simply pull the corpses out of the entryway. Gash-Eye imagined them wandering around, bumping their faces into the wall and slowly turning to shuffle the other way. Who knew how long they might keep doing that? Even a rat would figure out that it should drag aside something that prevented its escape. Not being able to understand that was the kind of stupidity one expected from an insect. But Gash-Eye had a hunch that the unkillables were indeed closer to insects than they were to rats.
She remembered the fugitive noises she’d heard and her near-certainty that there was at least one other unkillable wandering the caves, besides those stuck in this chamber. Killing all of them, the way she’d promised Quarry, would mean finding that one as well. Nothing to do about that right now, though.
It hadn’t been long since the corpses blocking the entrance to the side chamber had been killed, or beheaded in the case of the unkillable who’d provided her lamp, so they wouldn’t be stiff yet, and it should be relatively easy to shove them out of the way, once she was ready.
She squeezed Quarry’s hand in the dark, and ran her palm over the girl’s hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m going to need to use your skins for this.”
“Oh. Yes, all right,” said Quarry. Everything she said now came from across a feverish distance. “It’s your turn, anyway.” Apparently she thought that Gash-Eye was simply asking for her turn to protect herself from the chill with the only skin they had left to wear, now that they were using one to transport the head. Quarry shrugged the garment off.
“I’ll give it back to you soon.”
“No, you should wear it for a while.” But Gash-Eye could feel that Quarry’s trembling had already grown more violent, and she could hear the girl’s teeth chatter. When she took the unkillable head out of the bearskin and bundled it in Quarry’s thinner one, she caught an instant’s glimpse of Quarry by its dim light. She looked very sick.
Once Gash-Eye had re-wrapped the head in the thinner skin, she wrapped Quarry’s original bearskin around herself. The delicious feeling of being a little less cold distracted her a moment from the danger and horror, though the pleasure made her feel guilty, since it came from depriving Quarry of the skin.
Gash-Eye held the lizard’s head in her palm. She took a breath and tossed the head over the bodies and into the chamber, aiming for where it sounded like one of the unkillables was shuffling. The lizard had been dead only a little while, hopefully its brain was still fresh enough.
There was a plopping sound as the lizard’s head hit something other than stone, and then the sound of it falling to the rock floor. Gash-Eye was certain that she’d gotten lucky, and that the head had actually hit one of the unkillables directly. The quality of the shuffling of one of them changed—it moved rapidly, as if it were frantically looking for something. A few seconds later, a very dim glow emanated through the crevice.
Gash-Eye slammed herself through the opening, shoving the bodies through as she went, hoping their movement might distract and confuse the unkillables. It did—the nearest one, a black and starving creature, threw itself upon one of the empty-skulled corpses. What with the bearskin making her thicker, Gash-Eye thought for a sickening moment she was going to get stuck in the passageway, an easy meal. But she pushed herself through, as she did so bringing her whole weight down upon the sharpened firewood in her hand, penetrating the skull of the unkillable at her feet that was clawing at the corpses.
She was no hunter, and had never had the chance to hone her accuracy or prowess. But Quarry would soon die if she failed, and that knowledge sharpened her reflexes and intensified her concentration until nothing existed but the task of destroying the unkillables.
She nearly lost her balance as she jammed the stick into the crouching unkillable’s brain, but turned her tumble into a low dodge, as one of the other creatures rushed at her, attracted to her motion. She retreated to the far side of the chamber, away from the crevice, so that the unkillables would be less likely to stumble upon the passageway during the struggle.
There were now two black unkillables and the dimly glowing one, which for the moment remained squatting, obsessively hunting on the floor for more brains, still so fixated on its last morsel of food and where it had been found, that it seemed not yet to have noticed the huge piece of food that had come crashing into its lair.
The two still-starving ones saw her, though, and lunged, jaws snapping. She dodged them, holding the bearskin out in front of her to make her silhouette bigger and twirling it. She didn’t expect the bearskin to protect her from the bites of these living hungry unkillables the way it did from those of the sluggish severed head—their jaws could snap through skulls, after all. She mainly hoped it would serve as a visual distraction.
It worked—the two unkillables went snapping at opposite ends of the skin. Gash-Eye whipped the bearskin off herself and threw it over the head of one of them. It flailed around, blinded, unable to get the heavy fur off itself. She aimed the sharpened ichor-stained firewood at the other unkillable and jabbed at its head as if with a spear.
But she missed. It came barreling at her face, jaws snapping and arms snatching. Gash-Eye had no time to step out of the way or feint to one side; all she could do was jump back and feel herself tumble as her balance gave.
The fall nearly knocked all the air out of her, but she kept her head raised and managed to avoid banging it on the rock floor. The ravenous unkillable was coming down on top of her. By incredible luck there was a stone under her right hand. Under normal circumstances it would have been a bit too big for her to handle easily; now, she slammed it with all her strength into the unkillable’s temple.
The blow would have killed any other creature. It did at least knock the unkillable off her and over to the side. She doubted it could feel stunned, exactly, but it was looking around into the darkness on the far side of her as if it hadn’t been able to keep track of its own motion, and wasn’t sure where it was now relative to her. If she’d had two stones she could have clapped them together upon its head; instead she pushed the left cheek of its head down onto the stone floor and wrenched its right shoulder up, pinning the other shoulder against the floor with her knee, hearing bones and ligaments snap and crackle. She’d hoped to wrench the torso away from the head so that the head would come off, but it stayed attached and the thing still bucked and struggled beneath her.
These few seconds of fighting had finally roused the glowing green unkillable from its single-minded survey of the last place it had found food. It sprang to its feet, head twitching back and forth between Gash-Eye and the other unkillable, still struggling blindly to get out from under the bearskin. There wasn’t time while the unkillable decided which source of motion to attack for Gash-Eye to go retrieve her sharpened stick. She got up and, trying not to think of the risk of its teeth and venom coming into contact with her feet, jumped up and brought her naked calloused heels down as hard as she could on the head of the mangled unkillable she’d been fighting on the floor. It popped underneath her, and rotted spongy skull and lukewarm curdled brain sprayed through the room.
The green unkillable chose her as its target and sprang at her. She would have been defenseless, except her feet slipped in the slick mess that had been the black unkillable’s head and she went flying onto her back again even as the green monster went gnashing overhead. It bounced off the rock wall.
Gash-Eye forced herself back up. She grabbed the bearskin-covered unkillable and swung it in between her and the lunging green one—they collided and ran into her, nearly knocking her down again. The unkillables snapped at each other. Gash-Eye knew she had only a brief moment before they each realized the thing they were snapping at lacked a living brain, and turned their attention back to hunting her. She got behind the green unkillable and, as it snapped at the one in the bearskin, used its momentum to drive its crown into the rock wall beyond. Its skull cracked open, but the brain beneath was undamaged enough that it still writhed. Keeping herself behind it as it spun around madly, Gash-Eye grabbed her sharpened stick from the floor and drove it down in between two cracked plates of skull, into a patch of exposed brain. She worried that might not be enough damage to stop it. It was, though; the creature crumpled at her feet.