The Elves of Cintra

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

YOU HAVE ONE CHANCE," Helen Rice told him, then quickly added, "And we don't move the children anywhere until we have complete control of the bridge and I am convinced it's safe to do so."

None of which surprised him. It was what he would have insisted on if a stranger was proposing to take the Ghosts across a bridge guarded by armed militia. Hawk hadn't thought for one minute that it would be otherwise.

His immediate concerns were much larger. He didn't know yet how he was going to get control of the bridge. He didn't know how he was going to disperse the men guarding it. He only knew that he was meant to try.

"I'll bring enough people to hold the bridge against a counterattack if you can find a way for us to take it over," she continued. "Enough to hold it until the rest are able to break camp and bring the children across."

He nodded his agreement in silence. His commitment to what he was about to attempt was strong, but his fears were huge, as well. He understood the reality of his situation. He was acting on faith and on instinct. It was hard to tell which he was relying on more. If either failed him, he was probably going to die. He didn't give any indica–tion of this as he smiled reassuringly at Tessa, seeing his own fear mir–rored tenfold in her eyes. He felt small and inadequate. He felt almost foolish.

But there was a voice inside urging him on, telling him to believe, to accept that this was something he could do. The voice was his own and that of the old man in the gardens and his mother's, as well. It was a single voice that shifted in pitch and tone, but never in strength.

You can do this, it insisted.

Helen Rice called back those she had been talking to when the guard had brought Hawk to her and told them what she intended. There was grumbling and more than a few objections, but she overrode them all. She told one of the men, a big fellow with a shock of red hair whom she called Riff, to gather two dozen of their best to take to the bridge. He nodded without argument and left to do as she asked.

Fifteen minutes later, they were marching down the riverbank toward the bridge. The day had turned darker still, the clouds thicken–ing and the air dampening as the promise of a fresh storm grew stronger. The wind had picked up and was blowing dust and debris everywhere, and it forced the company to walk with their heads bowed and their eyes all but shut. Hawk walked with Tessa and Cheney in the forefront of the company next to Helen Rice. His thoughts were of other times and places, of how he had walked the streets of Pioneer Square with the Ghosts not so long ago, carrying prods and viper–pricks, living in the ruins of their elders, street kids trying to stay alive. How fast it had all changed. Everyone from that time save Tessa and Cheney was either dead or lost. He couldn't even be sure he would see the other Ghosts again, although he believed in his heart that he would. But he knew that if he did, he would see them and they him as a different person–as this new creature, this mix of boy and gypsy morph, of flesh and blood and magic, and it would not be the same.

It would not ever be the same.

"What are you going to do?" Tessa whispered to him.

He shook his head. How could he respond when he didn't know the answer? And yet, he almost did. He could feel the tingle of the finger bones against his body where they nestled in his pocket, a clear indica–tion that something was happening. He could sense the transformation even as it happened, a shift from what was familiar to something en–tirely new and different, something that lacked any recognizable frame of reference. It was an awakening of a force that had lain dormant inside him–for how long, he couldn't say. Perhaps only since his visit to the gardens of the King of the Silver River. Perhaps all his life. But it was there, and it was real, and it was growing by the second.

He tried to identify what it was. At first, he couldn't. Then all at once he understood. It was in the way his senses were responding to his surroundings. He could smell the earth, dark and green and mysterious, a well of living things forming a chain of life that stretched as far as his mind could conceive. The smell was of each of them, and he could sort them through and identify them in a way he had never been able to do before. He could put names to them; he could visualize their shapes and uses.

But that was only the beginning. He could taste the wind. He could savor it as if it were food placed in his mouth. He could taste the ele–ments of the storm as they roiled and surged through the clouds over–head, metallic and rough. Thunder and lightning, distant to the point of being barely discernible, were sharp and raw against his palate. Electric–ity jumped off his skin in invisible sparks, small jolts that he could feel connecting to the tingling of his mother's finger bones, as if they shared a commonality, an origin. He could hear things, too. Things that no one made of flesh and blood should have been able to hear. The whine of limbs caught in the rush of the wind, straining to keep from breaking. The whisper of grasses complaining of the same. The rattle of bark. None of it close enough to be seen, all of it so distant that the sounds should have been undetectable. Yet he could hear.

More baffling, he could hear the groan of the earth herself from deep inside where none of what was happening on the surface had any bearing. Plates shifted and a molten core bubbled and spit, and the heat rose to mix with the cool, causing expansion and contraction, forming and re–forming, the birth of new life and the death of old. He could almost reach out and touch what he could smell and hear and taste and feel, as if his arms extended to the lines of power that ringed the earth and were joined with them.

He knew all this without having been schooled even in the possibilities. He knew from his own transformation, from the way he recog–nized how he was different, how he had been remade in his visit to the gardens of the old man.

He reached down and touched Cheney between his big shoulders, and the dog lifted his head in response. The gray eyes shifted to settle on him, and for just an instant Hawk believed that the wolfish dog un–derstood what was happening.

He looked ahead to the bridge itself, a huge ugly span of girders and struts, the paint long since peeled and stripped away, the bare metal be–neath rusted and scarred by weather and time. It had the look of some–thing that might rise up from its sleep and attack in the manner of a giant insect. The comparison chilled him, recalling the centipede and the terrible struggle the Ghosts had survived in their Pioneer Square home. He stared at the bridge and willed it not to move.

"Better get ready," Helen Rice said sharply, disrupting his thinking.

They had reached the steps that climbed to the bridgehead. Al–ready the militia guards were forming up across the mouth, taking note of the size of the group approaching. No warning had been given yet, so Helen took her company of men and women up the steps in a line, warning them to stay ready, but to keep their weapons lowered. Hawk walked right behind her as she led the way, his stomach churning, his heart beating fast.

What was he going to do? He didn't have a plan. He didn't even have a weapon. He was woefully unprepared.

As they reached the flat that approached the bridge, Helen's com–pany spread out to either side, stopping where she told them to, still fifty feet from the nearest barricades and soldiers. The men on the bridge had all come forward to the near end, weapons held ready, eyes shifting nervously as they waited to discover what was happening. Atop the bridge spans, more soldiers crouched in metal crow's nests. There was a tank of some sort at the far end, and a pair of spray can–nons set to either side of the gates warding the bridge entrance.

Too many weapons and men to do this without serious damage to both sides, thought Hawk. He glanced at Tessa, who gave him a brave smile.

"What are you going to do now?" Helen Rice asked him quietly.

He stood where he was for a moment, letting his emotions settle and his scattered thoughts come together. He waited until he was calm inside, until he could measure his heartbeat and feel the steady pulsing of the finger bones against his thigh. He waited until he could sense their response to his thinking–until he could gauge whether they would slow or quicken. He waited until he could feel something of that pulse seep into him, join with him, and become more than an external presence.

He waited to discover what he should do to fulfill his need. He waited for guidance and understanding, for this strange co–joining with the external world to reveal its purpose.

"Hawk," Tessa whispered, an unmistakable urgency in her voice.

He walked forward alone, not directly toward the militia and the bar–ricades, but toward a ragged clump of scrub, stunted trees, and withered vines growing bravely to one side of the approach. He was responding to the voice, but acting on instinct, as well. His course of action was de–cided, but its intended result still remained vague and uncertain. He could feel the eyes of both armed camps on him, could almost hear what both were thinking. He wondered at the stupidity of the militia holding the bridge, playing with matches while the rest of the world was already afire. What did they think they were going to gain by trying to collect a fee–whatever its nature–from those seeking to cross the river? What was the point of such an undertaking in a world like this?

He knelt amid the scrub and trees and vines, running his fingers over dried–out grasses and leaves.

The world at his fingertips, waiting to be reborn; the thought came to him unbidden. Life waiting to be quickened.

I know what to do, he realized suddenly.

He took the withered plants in his hands, closing his fingers gently but firmly, taking care not to crush their brittle stalks. He held them as he would a child's fingers, reaching down into their roots by strength of will alone. He could feel them stir, coming awake from the deep dormancy into which they had lapsed. They took their nourishment, fresh and new, from him, from the magic that he fed them, come to him from a source still unknown, one that might have its origins either in his mother's finger bones or in his own life force. But it came from the earth, as well, from the elements that were intrinsic to her soil and rock and metal and molten core.

Come awake, he urged the plants he held in his fingers. Come awake for me.

That he might be able to do this was at once astonishing and exhil–arating. That he could command magic of any sort was the fulfillment of the promise made to him by Logan Tom in the revealing of his ori–gins and the delivery of his mother's finger bones. He had not dared to think it possible–yet he had known, too, that it must be if he was to do what he had been given.

His whole being was attuned to and connected with the earth upon which he stood and to the plants that rooted within, and in that instant he was changed forever. No longer a boy, a street kid only, he was a creature of magic, too, a gypsy morph come into being, its potential re–alized.

The result was instantaneous. Vines and brush and grasses erupted from the earth at both ends of the bridgehead, exploding all around the barricades and weapons and the men who staffed them. They shot out of the earth as if starved, as if reaching skyward for the sunlight, for the air, for the rain, for whatever they were lacking in their dormancy. But their emergence was his doing alone, and they were obedient to his command. They fell upon the barricades and the defenders, upon metal and human alike, enfolding them in ropes of green that wrapped about like cables to make them all fast.

The militia never had a chance. They never even managed a single pull on their triggers. The handguns were ripped from their fingers, and the tanks and cannons were throttled in place. The men themselves were bound as if by ropes, the greenery first making them fast and then climbing the entire bridge, wrapping about the metal spans and struts, about everything that formed the body of the structure until nothing remained visible. In the end, there was only the bushy, dripping green of plant life extending end–to–end, the whole of the bridge and its barricades and its defenders become part of a vast jungle. The entire swal–lowing took only minutes and left the onlookers standing with Tessa and Cheney staring in shocked silence.

"Oh, my God!" whispered Helen Rice softly, speaking for them all.

IT TOOK THE CAREGIVERS the remainder of the day to decamp and move the children across the bridge to a new site that Helen and her advisers had chosen, one that Hawk instinctively felt was easier to de–fend. After releasing the entrapped militia, they set them free on the south side of the bridge and assumed control of the barricades leading to the new camp.

By nightfall, everyone was pretty much resettled and the move across the river complete.

"I don't know how you did that," Helen told Hawk later when they were sitting alone, close to where Tessa had gone to work helping the children. "But it's proof enough for me that you are who you say."

She shook her head. "No one I've ever heard of could do what you did. Not even Angel Perez."

Hawk didn't know what to say. He was still coming to terms with it himself He could not understand yet how he had managed to generate such rapid growth from a few withered plant and grass ends, a talent so new to him that it seemed as if it must belong to someone else. He could not even decide how he had known what to do.

"The children will be safer on this side," he said. "But you may have to defend the bridge."

"If we stay here, I know we will," she said. "You were right about the pursuit. Already an army is coming up the coast. We had hoped Angel would be back before it reached us. Now I don't know." She looked off into the twilight, as if she might find her friend there. "How long before we leave? You sound as if it might not be right away."

He nodded. "It won't. We can't leave until I find my family and bring them here. They are somewhere north, coming to meet me. I should be back with them in less than a week."

"You're leaving?" she asked.

"Not for long. But you have to hold the bridge until then. You have to protect the children. If others come this way, take them in, as well." He paused, and then added, "Angel would want that."

He didn't know if she would or wouldn't, didn't know the first thing about Angel Perez besides what he had heard from Helen Rice, but he thought that mention of her would help strengthen the other's resolve.

Helen sat silently for a moment, her slight form hunched, her head bent. "I am so tired," she said.

Then she rose, smiled at him momentarily, and walked away. Hawk watched her go. He was already making his departure plans. He waited until the camp began to go to sleep, then found Tessa and told her he was leaving to find the Ghosts. He watched a mix of fear and uncer–tainty flood her amber eyes and tighten the smooth skin of her dark face.

"You don't have to come with me," he said. "You can wait for me here, if you want."

Tessa laughed. "I could do lots of things if I wanted to. But none of them are things I want to do without you."

"I'm sorry about everything that's happened–the compound, your mother and father, all of it. I wish it hadn't."

"I'm sorry about what's happened, too. But mostly I'm sorry for you. It must be very scary, all of this … though it isn't so out of keep–ing with who you are."

He smiled. "I wish I could feel that way. It all seems so weird." He hesitated. "You're coming with me?"

"What do you think?"

"I want you to come. Maybe we can talk about what's happened while we walk. I think I need to do that. I think it will help make it more real."

She took his hands in her own. "Then we'd better get started."

They gathered a few supplies in backpacks and with Cheney lead–ing the way set out west, following the river as it wound through a chain of mountains that flanked it on both sides.

By midnight, they were ten miles away.

FINDO GASK stalked the darkness, a gray ghost on a shadowy night, the sky heavily overcast and empty of light, and the woods through which he passed deep–layered with gloom. Behind him, the camp of the once–men slumbered, their grunts and snores mingling with the whimpers and moans of the slaves they had taken on their march north from LA. Their journey had been a fast one, coming overland afoot and by flatbed truck, each travel day spanning sixteen to eighteen hours. There had been little time for delay once the gypsy morph had resurfaced, and less time still now that it had revealed itself a second time. It appeared stronger this time, its magic more potent and sweeping, and it was making no effort to mask what it was doing.

Which was more than the demon could have hoped and dreamed for, and it knew it could not afford to let this chance slip through its fin–gers.

Still, the source of the magic was a long way north, several hundred miles farther on at least, and this second using had not originated from the same place as the first. That meant that the morph was on the move, which meant that it had decided on a destination or a goal. Findo Gask could not know its purpose, but there was no mistaking the need to reach it before that purpose could be fulfilled. The morph was the demon's most dangerous threat, the one servant of the Word who might undo everything the demon had spent so much time achieving.

It still rankled Findo Gask that he had let the morph get free of him all those years ago when it had been within his grasp. Somehow, Nest Freemark had tricked him. He sensed it instinctively, knew that she had bonded with this Faerie creature and kept it safe from him. His victory over John Ross–or any of the other Knights of the Word he had dis–patched over the years–felt hollow and insufficient. Nothing less than the death of the gypsy morph would satisfy him now.

Nothing less would ever give him peace.

It was a goal he expected to achieve. John Ross and Nest Freemark and all the rest of the magic wielders from that time were dead and gone, even that big copper–skinned war vet. Only he remained. The gypsy morph, whatever its form, was alone and isolated from its own kind, and was also, perhaps, unwitting of its danger. If he could just manage to reach it before it was warned …

Or, he amended, if another could reach it in his place, one even more lethal and relentless than he was …

He left the thought hanging as he moved into the deepest part of the forest, the part where sunlight never reached, and stopped at the edge of a pond. The pond was choked with water grasses and reeds and coated with a thick layer of scum, its waters fouled in the culmination of the destruction of the environment years earlier. What had once been clear and clean was now murky and polluted. Nothing that lived here was what it had started out as. Everything had evolved. The bite of the smallest insects would sicken a human. Even the air and water and plants were poisonous.

But Findo Gask walked with impunity, picking his way without fear through the things that could kill humans. Nothing came near him–not the snakes or spiders or biting insects or creatures for which there were no names. Nothing came near because nothing was as dangerous or as venom–filled as he was. The denizens of the dark woods recog–nized one of their own, and they stayed clear.

Except for one.

It rose out of the pond's mire like a leviathan surfacing from the deep ocean, the waters bubbling and heaving about it as it lifted clear, the gases escaping in spurts and burst bubbles, their stench filling the fouled air with fresh odors. Findo Gask knew it was hiding but would sense his approach and reveal itself because that was its nature. He stood safely distant and watched it emerge, the scum and dead grasses clinging to its broad back and hunched shoulders in damp patches. He watched, and he marveled at the monstrosity of its demon form.

The Klee was like nothing else he had ever encountered. Its head was a conical plate of bone flattened and dented as if struck repeatedly by a heavy mallet. Its features were submerged in the leathery tissue beneath its brow, stunted and difficult to discern save for its small, wicked green eyes. Its long, heavy arms were fringed with hair and ridged with muscle, its hands crooked and gnarled, its tree–trunk legs thick and bowed, all of it encrusted with a mix of scale and hair and debris. When it stood clear of the mud and water, it towered over him, dwarfed him with its mass, and gave him momentary pause despite what he knew about it.

Delloreen hated the Klee, calling it an animal and disdaining it as an unthinking monster that knew nothing but killing. She wasn't wrong, but she missed the point. It was because the Klee was all this that Findo Gask found it useful.

Once, it had been a man, a long time ago before he had encoun–tered it in the ruins of a town amid so many dead that he could scarcely believe a single creature had killed them all. Once, it had been human. What had changed it was anybody's guess. The Klee never talked. It barely listened, and it listened mostly to Findo Gask.

The huge demon slogged out of the quicksand and mud to stand close to him, bent forward expectantly. It knew he had come for a rea–son, and he knew that the reason involved what it craved most.

"I want you to find somebody for me," Findo Gask said. "A Faerie creature, but it will have another form. I will give you a sense of what it will feel like, and you will be able to unmask it from that."

The Klee shifted from one foot to the other, a slow ponderous movement that signaled its understanding. From somewhere deep within its chest, a strange wheezing sound rumbled.

Findo Gask smiled. That was the Klee's expression of satisfaction. He reached out and touched the demon boldly on the chest with one finger. "Find this Faerie creature, and when you do, kill it," he said.