Page 60 of Into the West

In all this time, the air had been hot and still, and not so much as a leaf on the ground had moved. The only activity going on in this place was the ever-flitting dragonflies.

But now . . . the branches all around the oblivious boar moved, slowly uncoiling, untwisting.

And the forest woke up.

A rush of pure anger, like a scream of raw emotion into their minds, ripped through the place, anger so palpable it hit not only Kordas, but the old man, his dog, and Arial. The old man clapped both hands to his temples. The dog dropped to the ground a moment and whimpered. Kordas felt—

—exactly what he had felt on that day, when the mother of the imprisoned baby Earth Elemental had sensed that the protections hiding it from her were gone, and had come roaring up out of the bowels of the earth to free her child and take revenge on its captors. Hate and rage, like breathing in a deep breath directly from a raging furnace.

Whatever was in the river reacted violently. The last half of the barge string was thrown upward, almost free of the water. In midair, Kordas could see the old man grasping for any kind of purchase, and Rose reaching for him.

The uprights flew up into the air, pitching base first toward the river. From the previous barge, sawmill blades, chains, logjacks, and hooks rained down onto them, along with a shower of bolts and pipes from disintegrated crates. Sawblades embedded themselves into the uprights.

Just above the old man and Rose.

Rose caught the man’s nearest wrist and hooked the axe into a falling upright, creating a short shower of sparks against the rain of hardware, catching no small part of it herself. The upright provided an instant of cover for the old man.

Then, groaning and snapping, it all fell into the river.

Rose swung the old man toward the shore, where he rebounded off of Arial’s ribs and Kordas’s right leg. Arial staggered aside, as if newborn. Exhaustion, compounded by the enervation of fear, would likely soon claim her.

In the chaos of the river, Rose was nowhere to be seen. There was hate, knives, water, mud, pieces of hull, horrible sounds of destruction and primal combat, but no valiant Doll.

The old man crumpled up, and Howler closed the distance to his side in his own desperate burst of speed. The dog reached him and, despite its own panting, licked at him as if dog saliva was a healing salve. It could be said that in this case, it truly was. The old man expressed a moment of rapturous joy, clasping the dog’s head to himself, then murmured something to him and got to his feet, though not steadily by any means.

Totally stunned for the moment from taking in and processing far too much, Kordas couldn’t even move to bring up his crossbow and shoot the damned boar. It was all so fast, it made him feel slow. And he hated it. He hated that he couldn’t reason this out. He hated that he hated.

But Arial saved him. She gave an involuntary buck and kick. Not enough to throw him, but enough to break the spell the forest had put on him.

Just as one of the Red Forest’s branches steadily reached toward him.

With a squeal, she danced out of the way, getting him out of reach of those branches with a turn and a leap worthy of an expert dancer. The old man and Howler scrambled for distance.

A dozen bizarrely flexible branches lashed out like whips at the oblivious boar, who only realized too late that it was in danger.

The branches whipped around each of the boar’s legs, and around its neck.

The tree seized the boar, hauling it up into the air as it squealed in mingled terror and agony. One narrow branch ripped off an ear, and all the branches tightened, splaying the pig out in midair among the branches of the canopy. More branches whipped out to seize the boar, and those round things on the branches seemed to attach themselves to the pig’s skin somehow, preventing it from kicking free.

The hideous squeals jolted Kordas into action, and he shot the stupid beast through the heart to end its suffering. Just as well, because the next thing that got ripped off was a leg, in an uncanny echo of one of the Emperor’s favorite sentences for a criminal, being pulled to pieces by five horses.

The screams stopped when the boar died, but the trees were just getting started. Kordas watched in horror as the limb that had ripped off the ear stuffed the bloody morsel in one of those “mouths.” Two more limbs tore long bloody swaths of muscle and skin off the body, and stuffed them in other “mouths.” And more of the trees moved, reaching toward the bloody mess that had been a pig, trying to get a bit for themselves.

Something else made a momentary dome of water in the river. With the explosive sound of storm-driven ocean surf slapping a mountainside, it burst upward. Arcs of deep riverbed mud flew as high as any two barges were long. The air shook.

That was more water-weight than all the barges in the string could even displace. What could heave so much water, so quickly? What could do that?

Whatever was in the water lunged forward three—steps?—to the shore, and it was—

Kordas couldn’t completely comprehend what he was seeing. Well past a barge-length tall, it was like a water spider—made of water spiders—made of more water spiders—and all made of black and yellow knives. Each leg was striped in ocher and black, and each stripe was a cluster of legs, all too horribly long, with bright yellow stripes, and each of them had more legs and more black knifelike spikes. Mud and river water poured off of its back and legs, no doubt how it had stayed disguised while every vessel of the flotilla had passed over it. The taps and scrapes on the hulls this whole time had been . . . it. Them. The thing, its body easily the size of a barge itself, seemed to split into three narrower versions of itself side by side, each dashing into the Red Forest to attack the trees’ branches. Where one leg struck, the smaller clusters—only man-sized—tore off branches.

No, wait—they weren’t only branches now. There were also something more. Like boneless limbs.

That’s what we were missing. That’s how it gets even worse.

The yellow-and-black blurs advanced and retreated. Stabbing attacks by the water-monsters seemed to strobe, so quickly did they dart in and leap back. And when every writhing limb-lash came their way—and before long there were hundreds—the water-monsters slashed the limbs, sectioned them, and devoured them.

And each set of knife-spiders has its own mouth. Right. Or, maybe it’s a colony of thousands, and it’ll turn into a whole wave of death-knife-spiders next. That’d be just perfect.