Shifting

Thirty-Two

We made it about as far as the fallen barn with the dead trees standing guard around it before my breath potion began to run out. It started as an odd tickle in my chest, which rapidly changed into a wild burning. It was a horrible sensation, worse than just drowning, because I already had drown, sometime ago when I’d sucked in that first lungful of murky water. I scrambled wildly, digging in my pockets. I never dropped the lantern, however, I never even considered it. I strained to hold it with my left hand while my right searched for the last potion frantically.

For one horrible moment I was sure that I’d lost it along the way. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fool as to just shove the very breath of life into an open-topped coat pocket, and then proceeded to battle a dozen horrors and trust to luck I wouldn’t lose anything. Then I found it.

I used my teeth to tear open the rubber stopper that topped the bottle and sucked out the contents. It’s hard to drink something underwater while you are drowning and suddenly becoming increasingly aware that your lungs are already full of water, but somehow I managed to get most of it down. I almost puked, but fought it down savagely. I had to hold on to every drop.

Over the next minute or so the world almost went black. I just stood there, on the muddy bottom of the lake, head bent, waiting for death or life, not knowing which would occur first.

I held up the lantern still, never did the thought of letting it go cross my mind. It warmed my hand now rather than burned it. Strangely, it felt less heavy, rather than more, as I died. I had to wonder, vaguely, as my mind faded toward oblivion, if it had become lighter or I had become stronger. I felt there, in my hand, a new, strange, twisting sensation that I could not identify. At that point, I believe I lost consciousness, at least for a moment.

The Captain was poking my cheek and lifting my chin when my eyes snapped open. He recoiled and I grinned at him. “I live,” I burbled. I found I still stood, and the lantern was still warming my left hand, feeling lighter than ever.

We came up onto the shoreline and I shivered in the cold night winds. Nothing makes a man quite as cold as sopping wet clothes and stiff wind. The only warmth I had was from the lantern, and I clutched at it, hugging it to my chest.

“Can you breathe?” asked the Captain, looking at me strangely.

I shook my head, and sicked up a great gout of water. It was only the beginning. It was a while before I could choke and cough wretchedly, I had to build up to that. First, I simply fountained lake water. The only thing that helped, besides the warmth of the lantern in my hand, was that I still didn’t really need to breathe. I’ve heard you can drown in a teaspoon of water, but I must have unloaded a half-gallon or more onto the sands before I was done.

The Captain waited until I was simply trembling and gasping, and then asked, “Put that thing down, would you?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” he asked quietly.

I stopped, I didn’t know why not, but I didn’t want to do it.

“I think you are going to have to,” he said.

I felt a flash of anger, my lip twitched up in a snarl, but I quieted when I followed his pointing finger.

The things on the beach had finally noticed us, and they were humping in our direction. There was a pretty big pack of them.

“Put down that stone and get out your sword, boy,” he hissed, “They’ll take that thing back to the witch if they beat us, you know.”

I realized he was right and I put the lantern down on the sands in a spot that looked soft and was devoid of rocks that might mar the polished surfaces. I threw my soaking coat over it, mostly to get rid of the cumbersome garment, but partly to hide it. The dripping coat didn’t completely cover it, and beams of colored light still shined out onto the beach in trickles and shafts. I wiped spittle from my face and lowered my head determinedly. We walked confidently down the beach to meet the pack of shambling things.

There were two of us, this time, and we were mentally prepared and methodical. The fight went on for perhaps two full minutes. It took several more to fully dismember the flopping corpses.

When it was over, we were both winded, but relatively unharmed. They had come at us strung out, in ones or twos, and we had cut them down as they reached us. We had started the fight with our pistols empty of bullets and full of water, so we had stuck to blades, he to his combat knife and me my saber.

“What the hell?” he said to me, staring, when we had finished.

I followed his gaze, and sickness waved over me again. He was gazing and pointing to my left hand. It looked very different. It was gray now, the skin had changed to the color of a bloated corpse. I looked at leathery fingers with black claws like thick pencil graphite where my nails should have been. There were only three fingers.

I yanked up my sleeve to see how far the horror had gone. It ended at my wrist where it turned back into normal, slightly hairy skin. I flexed the hand and it clutched at the air in accordance with my thoughts. To me, it looked like the claw of a predatory reptile. Perhaps that of a dinosaur.

I looked at the Captain and blinked. My face worked but I couldn’t speak for a second. I knew, right then, what had happened to Doctor Wilton. I knew how she had felt to discover her hoof.

“It must have been the lantern,” I croaked out.

He nodded grimly.

I staggered back toward the spot on the beach where we had left it. I was glad, even after everything, to see that it was still there and still safe. I was glad too, that I’d only been holding it with one hand when I’d been weak, when my body had been shutting down and dying. It had made its move then, and had shifted me.

We headed up the beach, weary. The Captain trudged beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned on me for support, as if exhausted. He was a friend, and I suspected nothing.

But my changed hand knew the truth. It gripped his wrist even as his knife rose to pierce my breast. I looked at him and the look of dark determination on his face changed to surprise. He looked at the claw on his wrist and then, finally, for the first time since I’d met him, I saw fear in his face. I shoved him away, and my new hand seemed strong because it left purpling bruises where it had touched him.

I shoved him backwards, but he was trained for such things and twisted and rode the force of my movement. I was pulled off-balance by his judo move and I lost my grip on his knife hand. He sprang away from me and I did the same. We both lifted our weapons and circled. Sand spit out from our shuffling feet.

“Again you sneak up on me,” I told him. I was angry, but scared. He was so much more trained than I was. I’d fought and learned things, but I had no military training to back it up. It was one thing to fight a mindless monster that came at you while you hacked at it. Fighting a man who had made a lifelong study of combat was quite another.

“I moved on that witch not you,” he said, “but I can’t save you Gannon, I know that now. No more than I could save Wilton, or that thing at the bottom of the lake.”

I lunged at him and my sword flared up like a torch swept about in the air. It made no sound, but flared and brightened eagerly.

He dodged with expert precision and slid his dagger under my blade, but could not reach me. He barely managed to get his shoulder out of the way before the tip skewered him. He recovered quickly and so did I. We went back to circling. I hesitated to attack again. It might be just what he wanted.

“I wondered if it would come down to this,” I spat at him, “you and I deciding who would tell the tale to the others, deciding who was the changeling and who the hero after the other was buried in a shallow hole.”

“I’ve never planned to murder you,” he said.

“But you killed my mother, didn’t you?” I demanded, and I saw the surprise in his eyes. For just a second, he stopped tracking my blade tip and instead glanced up at my face. That was the opening I needed. Instead of lunging, I went in slashing this time in wide arcs. Slashing is much harder to dodge than thrusting, and so he moved to block me instead. His long knife and my longer sword clashed and rang. He gave ground, and I kept up the attack, advancing, hoping he would stumble while shuffling backward in the sands.

He tried to gain the initiative, making a few counterthrusts to back me off, but I kept coming and with his shorter weapon he couldn’t stop me without exposing himself. I pressed the attack and our chests heaved.

Overhead the stars twinkled and the lantern that lay on the sands beneath my coat shot out occasional rays of light. The colored beams fluttered over the scene and intermittently illuminated our feet and spurts of kicked-up sand. My blade shined green, then red, and then back to blue-white again as the shifting rays touched it.

The Captain’s right boot slid back and located a piece of driftwood. He stumbled and went to one knee. I hammered down three blows and he caught them all with his knife hilt. He was good and very fast, I had to admit. Perhaps, with more even weapons he could have beaten me. But he was down now and I tasted victory.

Then the driftwood he’d stumbled over came up and smashed me in the face. I was shocked, but I knew that knife would be following the driftwood, so I used the hilt of my weapon to bash blindly down. I cracked the steel counterweight at the bottom of the hilt into his skull. It made a satisfying thump.

Both blinded by pain and nearing exhaustion, we disengaged and climbed to our feet again. Breathing hard, we went back to circling. He had the piece of driftwood in his hand now; it was about the size and weight of a fireplace log.

“How long have you known about your mom?” he asked between ragged breaths.

“The Hag told me.”

“For what it’s worth kid, I didn’t-” he paused to breathe. “I didn’t murder your mom. She had changed. I killed a changeling, that’s all.”

“I’ll kill you for it, all the same,” I said and attacked again.

He blocked with the driftwood and the dagger and I had an even harder time getting through. Then he came at me, reversing the tempo. I had no idea how to stop two whirling weapons, a club and a knife, I only knew how to stop another sword, and so I retreated, parrying as I went. I counterattacked with stop thrusts to keep him honest, but he kept moving in on me, catching my blade, beating it out of the way, and trying to get in close for a finishing move.

I realized I needed to do something fast, so I feinted, and then tried a move I’d learned from our fencing instructor. It was quite illegal in the fine sport of fencing, but the duelists of centuries past weren’t above such a thing. It was risky, so I waited until he was in mid-step and wasn’t ready to make a good counterattack.

I lunged and stabbed at his foot. I received a crack on the shoulder from his block of wood for my troubles, but was gladdened to see my saber come back out of his boot darkened by blood.

He howled and his breath blew through a line of clenched teeth. He made a staggering attack and I skipped away easily. He switched stances, putting his injured foot behind him.

“I’ve beaten you,” I said.

He ignored me, and advanced, favoring his foot. I hopped back.

“I’ll I’ve got to do is wait it out, that foot is already getting stiff. Soon, you’ll start to tire and slow down.”

“Shut up.”

I exulted. I was getting to him.

“Only one of us is leaving this beach and it won’t be you,” I said.

He stopped chasing me then, and stood up straight. He grinned, and I didn’t like the feral cast to his face. He hefted his knife and reversed it with a casual flip of his wrist. He now held it in a throwing position.

My face fell. I recalled his legendary throwing ability. He had even done a few exhibitions at the county fair. I backed away a few paces.

“You’ve only got one throw,” I reminded him.

“That’s all I’ll need, boy,” he responded confidently.

I felt a wave of frustration. “You started this. You were going to knife me while we stood there together, after everything we’ve been through down there, after I went down there to save your worthless hide.”

He shook his head. It was his turn to be exasperated. “You aren’t Gannon anymore, boy. Look at your hand. Look at that crazy magic rock you dragged out of the bottom of the lake like you were mothering an egg. You’re carrying a magic sword you got from hell-knows-where and that Hag, that thing, whatever, had you in her spell, and don’t try to say she didn’t.”

“A good enough reason to kill me?”

“What would you have done if I’d gone crazy over a magic chunk of glass and had grown a hand like a dead man’s claw?”

I chewed my lip. “And my mother?”

“It wasn’t your mother. She had turned.”

We stood there glaring at each other for perhaps another minute.

“Make your move, boy,” he growled.

“I need to think,” I said. “Truce for now?”

He thought about it, “Truce,” he said.

I backed away and left him with the lantern on the beach. Somehow, when it was covered, I didn’t care about it that much anymore.