Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

on her hips. “You weren’t complaining when I was naked before. You know, for like the last hundred miles?”

Rin danced on the spot, gesturing wildly at Karalti, the sky, and herself. “You had a saddle on! And you were a dragon! Dragons can’t be naked! They’ve got, like, scales!”

“You know my cloaca doesn’t just go away when I’m not polymorphed, right?” Karalti let out a saurian huff of frustration. “And why do you even care?! Mercurions don’t even HAVE-”

“Okay, I am interrupting tonight’s genital debate for a special televised meeting, entitled ‘What On Earth Are We Going to Do About All This Jungle?’” I jerked my head toward the tree line.

Suri snickered. “All three of us girls are gonna go bushwhacking. Isn’t that right, Rin?”

“Oh my god.” Rin put her face back in her hands.

Cackling, Suri pulled one of her axes off her belt and started for the edge of the jungle. “C’mon, Karalti. It’s time to go and shave Mother Nature!”

“Yeah! Let’s go!” Karalti—not completely understanding the mammalian innuendo—trotted after her.

I looked back to Rin, who was finally daring to look up at me between her fingers. “Don’t suppose Hopper and Lovelace have machete attachments, do they?”

Rin sighed. “They have garden shears. Let me set them up.”

Chapter 40

A couple of months ago, I was pretty sure my least favorite biome in Archemi was the Endlar. I was mistaken. It was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent the Slithering Jungle of Meewhome.

Suri, with her awesome Stamina, made it just under four miles in her heavy armor. Rin, Karalti and I didn’t even make it to two. It was about thirty degrees centigrade, or 86 F, with 100% humidity, and a walk that should have taken us a couple of hours instead took us almost the entire day. If the terrain had been as flat as the Endlar, we’d have been alright—but Meewhome wasn’t only oppressively tropical, it was mountainous. There was mud. There was fog. There were bugs of every conceivable shape, size and texture. There were small spiders. There were giant spiders. And as we got within a mile of the Dragon Gate, there was desolation. A very familiar gray, lifeless, frozen patch of desolation.

“No fucking way.” We stepped out of a patch of virgin forest into an unnatural frozen wasteland. The bracken and smaller trees had shriveled into upright twigs, while the larger trees were brown, the bark spongy and rotten to touch. The rich, earthy scent of the forest had faded, leaving a pungent odor hanging in the air, a smell that always made me think of a rundown gym or an old ice-skating rink. The most surreal thing was the clear delineation between the dying jungle and the living jungle: there was an actual line, a limit which bisected the dead from the living. Some plants that were on that invisible line were nothing but brown slime on one side, but fresh and green on the other.

“An Ix’tamo? Here?” Rin gripped my arm as she pushed ahead, looking around the clearing in despair. “No way. It can’t be Ashur, can it?”

“Never say never.” I stepped forward, cautious of falling branches or toppling trees. “I mean… dead things assaulting the walls. Ix’tamo sucking the life out of the land…”

“We don’t know for sure that’s what’s causing this.” Suri kept her hand on her sword hilt as she surveyed the damage. “Those Dragon Gates have all kinds of artificed machinery imbedded in the ground. For all we know, Devana’s Gate is malfunctioning somehow.”

“Yeah. Keep an eye out for patrols.” I flinched as something cracked overhead, jumping on reflex. A bough of rotting wood smashed into the ground where I’d been standing. “And try not to get brained.”

We picked our way to the center of the devastation, searching for evidence. After ten minutes of walking, we found it: A great big divot in the ground with piles of earth excavated to either side, and crumpled corpses strewn around it. They were all Meewfolk, and they looked like they’d been dead a long time. Their ears and fur had rotted away, leaving nothing but bare skulls. They were resting immobile near the excavation site, shovels still clutched in their fleshless hands.

“That looks Ix’tamo sized to me,” Rin said. “Guys. I hate to say it… but I really think Ashur is here.”

“Looks to me like they sunk it into the ground, sucked a bunch of mana out, then pulled it up to transport it somewhere.” Suri walked up to one of the dead Meewfolk and kicked the stiff corpse before taking a big step back.

“Yeah. Like a big battery.” Rin held her hand out and murmured a soft magical incantation. Her spellglove flared, and then the depression began to glow a soft blue-violet color—as did several dozen footprints, crushed into the mud. “There… I think we’re onto something.”

Suri made a sound of disgust. “The Demon, in fuckin’ Meewhome. Just what we need.”

“If he’s here, all that means is we get to finish what we started in Myszno.” I concentrated for a moment, seeing if I was able to sense the vampire in the same way I could sense the Bond between me and Karalti. No luck. “We don’t know for sure, yet. Let’s keep moving, before something lurches out to try and kill us.”

The trail to the Dragon Gate became more defined as we cut through the Ix’tamo’s starburst of destruction. The first hint we were on the right track were the statues. Ancient, worn smooth by time, they were still recognizable as Meewfolk by their tall, lean, feline shapes. Some were so overgrown with vines that they looked like they were wearing ghillie suits. Others were bare, missing arms or heads. We bushwhacked our way up the crumbling remains of stone steps embedded into the hill and came to what might have been the foundations of