It opened its mouth, and closed it in that disorienting holographic slow motion. Blood and saliva drooled away from the dagger-like teeth, droplets running down as it screamed challenge at them.
Was it the sound of the skeeter engines? Their aerial bulk? The grendel's eyes locked with them, as if uncertain of Robor's distance. As if it thought they might challenge it for the meat.
It screamed a scream that they couldn't hear. Then it turned, and hooked its spiked tail into the carcass. Its tail differed from pictures of the Avalon grendels, with one big, gaudy hook almost underneath, and the shattered scar where a matching hook had been.
The pig's, bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Its feet still trembled a bit. Just a twitch, now. The grendel dragged it back, down into the water.
And the moment after it sank, the recording played again at normal speed. The pig-things approached the shore; one darted in to drink; death smashed into it and tore it apart. Jessica flinched violently.
"Jesus," Aaron said. "I love those damned things."
She looked at him, and for a moment, felt something akin to jealousy. Love hadn't been too strong a word. His eyes burned. The grendels represented something... raw power, absolute single-mindedness... naked ferocity?
Some quality or gestalt that Aaron Tragon respected.
Admired.
Loved.
She had never been certain that he loved her. But she could never doubt that he loved grendels. Loved hunting and killing them, likely enough. But loved them. More, probably, than he loved anything else in the world.
How very odd to feel jealous of a monster. But Aaron can't really love grendels! I couldn't love a man who—
There was more to see: plains that sloped away from the mountains. Get a kilometer or so from running water and you saw lush vegetation and more animal life. There were creatures that looked reptilian—nothing too large, but several packs of animals that momentarily darkened the plain, then broke and ran at tile first touch of Robor's shadow.
Here, the brush thickened to jungle density. Her heart leapt. There had been virtually no exploration of the mainland forests. Almost no categorization of flora or fauna. Little mapping, save by satellite. Except for territory immediately surrounding the mining concerns, there had been precious little of anything.
And now... a lot of that was going to change.
Lunch came and went before they caught sight of their destination. It emerged from a smoky haze, mist so thick it was almost like volcanic ash. The mountain was bare and weathered, curved and hollowed, spotted here and there with patches of green until it resembled a mossy skull.
Pterodons arced gracefully through the heights: a touch of something familiar, thank God.
Jessica's hands moved by themselves, checking her rucksack, as she gazed out. This land, this whole land, was theirs for the taking...
It seemed that Aaron was reading her mind. "They don't want it," he said, shaking his head as if in amazement. His strong, sure fingers dug into her shoulders. It hurt, just a little bit.
That was like Aaron. He hurt, a little. It was difficult for him to remember just how strong he was. So strong, so smart... so sure of himself. It was no wonder that she was in love with him. His air of remoteness only increased the temptation, and the value of the prize.
The burr of the skeeter engines grew throaty. The floor vibrated beneath her feet as Robor took an eastern heading, sliding along a table of mountains. It was the warm season, and everything was green and brown and yellow-blue. Later in the year, there would be snow. Farther inland there were higher ranges, but here, barely two hundred miles from the coast, was a rich supply of ore. Robor passed over the first mining camp. Jessica wandered up to the control center, where Linda and Joe were reviewing telemetric reports from the site.
"Anything new?" she asked. She ducked her head to fit into the low-ceilinged room. She watched the computers and screens as Linda pored over them, completely absorbed.
"Ah... nothing. Everything is just fine. We'll be at the site in less than an hour. Check there first, and then we can look back and check the others."
"Any additional information?"
"Not sabotage."
"Why?" she asked, trying to keep the relief from her voice.
"The vibration signature. It's more like black powder than any of our standard blasting compounds. If somebody was going to booby-trap our mining equipment, they wouldn't use some kind of unstable low-yield compound. They'd use something concentrated, neat, reliable. That's what I'm thinking. This is just weird."
Jessica laid a hand on her shoulder. "Oh well. You'll have your chance to inspect things close up in... "
"Thirty-seven minutes," Linda said.
"Then we're over Grendel Valley. Aaron should be thrilled."
Chapter 8
THE GRENDEL GOD
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in ‘t.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Aurora Leigh
Old Grendel was hunting. She lay covered in mud under a mash of water and rotting vegetation. The river lay almost half a mile behind her, but the ground was soft. She'd burrowed her way up from the river over many days, clawing through the dirt, allowing the water to follow her. And here, so far from moving water that her prey must consider themselves safe, she waited.
One was nearby. Large enough to last for three days, becoming truly sweet only on the last day. A snouted thing with hoofs and big ears and large eyes. The snout quested about, testing.
Ah, gently, gently. If the wind shifted in the wrong direction, then Snouter would scent, and Snouter was fast enough to lead a merry chase. But not fast enough to evade Old Grendel, no, not even in these days of sluggish blood, of slow heats and rapid cooling. Old Grendel still had speed.
Old Grendel had murky memories of her youth, when she had first emerged from the water, a dim-brained beast, before a sickness caught in the high water had opened her eyes. To the degree that she was capable of such things, she felt an almost reverential awe toward those high waters. Something there made her itch, made her head hurt until she thought she would die of the pain. She could do little but wallow in her agony, unable even to hunt effectively. Even the depths of cool water helped little. But when the pain receded...
She could see differently. She didn't know how else to think it. In her youth, Old Grendel had seen the world in basic gradients of scent and taste, of need and satiation. Her life cycled: hunger forced speed, speed created heat, heat forced her back to water. But after the change, after the swelling of her head, and the pain... She'd come out of it mad with hunger, too weak to fight the lake monster, until the patterns showed her what to do. Then she was the lake monster, and there was prey everywhere, everywhere she hadn't looked. Hunting was easier. She used speed less often. Fights for territory became less bloody. She saw everything more clearly, and understood what she saw.
In those days she had been sleek, and as fast as rainfire. She was absolute death, the empress of her domain. She had given life to a hundred thousand children, and perhaps ten had survived to maturity. Those she had driven upstream to the heights, when she could. Two had tried to return, to challenge their mother on her own ground.
Those, she gutted without mercy, the killing flare in her head and in her body stronger than thought or reason, stronger by far than any rudimentary maternal instinct.
Those had been good days, and perhaps her greater intelligence was a curse. She was not what she had been, and she knew it. No longer so fast, so strong. Her wounds no longer healed as swiftly.
For any creature unaware enough to be caught within her kill radius, she was a flash of teeth and claw and pebble-textured black armor and spiked tail. Sixteen feet long and a quarter ton of instant murder.
But speed drained out of her more quickly these days, and the generated heat stayed longer. She was afraid to go as far from water as once she had.
There were advantages to the Change. A grendel ahunt is a grendel whose mind is lost to speed. There is no thought, only action. Chase and fight and kill, a race against the heat inside; get the prey to water, and feed. Years ago the sight of prey would madden her, would drive all caution away. It was sometimes so now, but not so often. She could think ahead, imagine the consequences of actions.
In sane moments she wondered if the tree-dwellers knew this. These wretched creatures would lure a desperately hungry grendel far from water. They darted high up into one of the thorn trees when the grendel blurred toward them, leaped from tree to tree when the grendel tore down the tree trunk.
Old Grendel remembered that she had almost died. The creatures had led her from one tree to another until she'd nearly cooked herself. She'd be chasing one and it was gone, and here was another, out of reach and sluggishly making for another tree, and the hunger and killing urge were so terribly strong. And another farther on—
She'd found the control to make for water before it was too late, before her internal organs roasted with the heat of her own speed. Behind her, scores of the creatures were suddenly chattering at her from every tree and tuft of grass. Long-legged and long-armed furry things made of crunchy red meat screamed their mockery. In saner memory she could see the length of their teeth... could see that they were also, in their strange way, hunting.
She'd stayed clear of the forest from then on. Years later, she had seen hunter-climbers feasting on a dead grendel who had been lured too far from water and cooked in its own heat. Not of her kind, that grendel. The naked red bones of its huge shoulders and forearms named it: it was of the kind that built dams. She chased the hunter-things away and ate the corpse of the dam builder.
There were things that hunted grendels, just as she hunted them. But what worked with a young grendel failed against Old Grendel. She had eaten hunter-climbers and found their flesh delicious; but then almost anything was delicious, even swimmers, even her own swimmers. Since the Change she was vaguely aware that while all food was good, some was better. Meat was better than plants, walkers better than swimmers, alien swimmers better than her own. It had always been so, but she hadn't known it.
Now Old Grendel was slow. Still a blur, but a slow blur, if you like.
She would wait for Snouter to get closer...
The snouter stopped, turned, looked up nervously. It made a flabby wet sneezy bray and turned again, bending almost double, and bolted into the trees.
Old Grendel was too surprised at the sound in the sky to give chase. The sound made her uneasy and reminded her of the Death Wind, but it was not the same.
It came from the south, filling the sky, shadowing the land. Red and green. Unimaginably huge fangs. Terror on a scale she had never known filled her body, her heart. It was a grendel of cosmic size. It was God. It blotted out the sun, its giant lips grinning at her, challenging her.
She tried to disappear into the mud. If this thing, this colossus wanted her territory, there would be nothing for her to do but die.
But she would fight! She had to fight! It came straight at her, looming like a mountain, moving not much quicker, and she felt the speed course through her body, preparing her for action.
The speed roared through her like a flame, and she couldn't move. She couldn't see how to reach the beast! Slow, slow, it didn't have to be a new breed of grendel. Was it challenger or meat? How to reach it? Fire roared along her veins and her mind was shutting down. That rock? No, that somewhat more distant log—
She lurched from the mud. Mud splashed across startled snouters. Instinctively she smashed one with her tail, curling it so that the creature wasn't hooked and caught. It screamed and lurched away, but Old Grendel ignored it and flashed onward. In seconds she reached the low end of a tree that had fallen across a white boulder. For another second she was clawing her way to a stop, skidding in a curve along the mud, while the snouters scattered in all directions. She reached the naked roots and blurred up the log and launched herself, and tried to take her bearings as she flew. The God of Grendels was too big to miss.
She had never seen anything so large in flight. Certainly she had no practice targeting such. She was falling below it. It was as if she'd jumped at a moon! Her claws were ready, she had one last surprise for the beast when it turned to snap her up... she'd be no more than a mouthful, but she would burn its mouth...
She smacked down into an inch of shallow water over soft mud. Impact knocked her dizzy, but she clawed for leverage and skimmed a tight curve, knees and ankles buckling, across the mud for a hundred feet, then burrowed.
She was two hundred feet from where she had been, buried snout-deep in moist dirt, motionless, with only her snorkel raised. The heat was leaking from her, the fatigue too, but too slowly. At this moment the God of Grendels could have her for a snouter. Where was it? She lifted an eye.
It was behind her. Above and behind, moving away.
It was leaving! She had driven it away! She had defended her territory—
But as, pain-filled, she crawled back to the river, the image of the hideous thing filled her mind. At some time in her long, long life, she had seen something like it before.
Much farther away. It had flown. Its markings had been different then, not a grendel at all—a black back, pale belly, enormous eyes—but it might be of the same species. It had moved the same, sounded the same. It too had been vast, larger than a whole brood of adult grendels. Bigger than a cloud. She could not begin to comprehend its meaning.