Coming in 2014!
Pool
PROLOGUE
The Kuluzo Mountains in eastern Alaska have always been a dangerous place, but the low buckle of rock the white men called Mount Isaac was more dangerous, not because of the ice which cloaked its more impressive brothers in the Kuluzos, or the quakes that rocked so many of the mountains in that land, but because it was also a bad place. The Naiaksit Indians who made their homes in the dry forests at its feet called it “Chuatok”—the Hunger—and told tales of the restless and angry spirits who roamed there, of Wendigo whose wild song could make a man desire to feed on the flesh of other men, of the monstrous sons of Trickster who knew no welcome in heaven or on Earth. The whites came in their quest for gold, penetrating the wild places by the thousands in a mere handspan of years. They left a grave behind at the end of every day, but still they came and it was said of them by more than one mouth that no place was so haunted that the white men would not try to cut a pass through it or set a town atop it…but no pass was ever made across relatively small Mount Isaac, where no Indian guide of any tribe would go and no white scout ever returned. Chuatok hungered. Chuatok fed.
Nevertheless, in 1897, gold was found in that same Alaskan wilderness where Wendigo howled, and from that day, the white man inevitably came. Towns grew up fast even in dangerous places, around Mount Isaac at first, and finally, tentatively, atop it. Men vanished, but then, in such places when keeping only the untamed company of other impoverished and desperate fools, men will. Their lives were unremarkable. Their deaths were quiet.
Until Hodel in the summer of 1898.
The Hodel Mining Company boasted a great profit in that largely luckless year of the Klondike Rush, but then, the Hodel Mining Company did not dig for gold. Oh, they took it where they found it, and they did find it now and then, but the company’s interest lay in other minerals—“Industry minerals,” as the mine’s founder was so oft to say, with great emphasis and satisfaction on the first word—and, of course, in acquiring its discouraged and impoverished labor force as cheaply as possible. In the eight months since the mine’s opening, great quantities of lead and zinc had been pulled from the deep rock and shipped away down the rough road on the three-week trek to the railroad, as well as a few modest tons of silver and several crates of cinnabar (Hodel always accompanied those shipments himself, eschewing the luxury compartments aboard the train which he usually favored to sit, smoking and glowering, atop the crate containing the valuable ‘red mercury’). There were no Naiaksit left by then to warn them not to dig, and it is doubtful anyone would have listened if there had been. It takes terrible things to make a desperate man take warning, and Alaska in 1898 was filled with desperate men.
It began slowly, a mere trickle before the flood. Lone-wolf miners who had for years come in as regular as the rains to trade a tobacco-pouch of gold dust for a bath, a bottle, a box of bullets and one of Handsome Jack’s two-penny whores did not come in. The flint-eyed strangers suspected by many of claim-jumping and murder, vanished next, but no great loss. Some of the men working the Hodel Company’s mine came up muttering to each other about noises they could not have heard down in the deepest shafts, described by some as “that clicking, ear-picking sound that bats make right up close”, or “a heavy, slithery sound, with claws”, or just, “breathing, real quiet, allus coming from behind-like”. Hodel did his best to put a stop to that noise, but when Miss Molly Slipper, highest-paid whore in camp at ten cents a throw, took herself out the door on a drunk and never came back, men started to leave. Only one or two at first, the soft-handed sort no one was particularly surprised to see the back end of in this wilderness, but then it was Calico Pike, working the deep end of the unfinished Shaft Six, who took his pick and a handcart down the Number Nine tunnel, let out a bellow, a curse and then a scream, and was gone by the time the other men in the morning crew took the necessary ten running steps to round the tunnel’s sharp turn. There was a new hole in the back wall where he’d been cutting, a cold breeze that blew out of it, three dollar-sized drops of blood just below it, and a sound receding into the black—that clicking, scraping, heavily-breathing, impossible sound.
A lot of men left then, and one of them was Handsome Jack Hodel, son and scion of Richard Hodel, founder of the Hodel Mining Company and owner of the Hodel Mine, the Hodel General Store, the Hodel Claim Registry, and the Hodel Traveller’s Rest (who proudly advertised beds, baths, and spirits, but not the women that brought in most of their trade). He left after listening to his father rant at his foremen for three and one-half hours about how there was nothing in those tunnels, nothing dragging burly miners away, and nothing for God’s sake eating them and gnawing on their mother-loving bones, so take these Christing things out right now and bury them before some superstitious damned fool sees them! He left, and he took as much as he could fit into a set of saddlebags with him, including $4700 in bills, $2200 in silver, all the cinnabar he could pocket, and the deed to Hodel itself, which was not really stealing, since he was his father’s only son, so far as anyone knew, and a man had an obligation to look after his inheritance.
Richard Hodel, a man who had never been accused of an overabundance of fatherly feeling, would almost certainly have hunted down his son and heir (and strung him up from the nearest tree, after putting a few holes in his gullet and a few boots to his bones, like as not), but he never had the chance. Every man who had not crept quietly away from Hodel before sundown that night (well before Handsome Jack’s escape had been noticed) was dead before sunup the next day. The work of claim-jumpers, said some, seeing overturned chairs, bloodsign, and the pitably light scores of human fingernails scratching across the hotel’s wooden floors. Bears, said others, because for all of that, there were no bodies to be found and buried. The Indians said nothing at all, but thought, perhaps, of restless spirits, Wendigo, and Trickster’s half-born abominations.
Either way, it was over and done, and so after the investigation (and the emptying of the mineral shed where everything Handsome Jack had not taken lay untouched by the murderous, claim-jumping bears of Alaska), all shafts leading into the mines were boarded over (the cage shafts, anyway, and whatever vent shafts the investigators stumbled across in their investigations), and Hodel was abandoned until the company decided what it wanted to do with the land. There was not much room for mystery as long as there was still gold in the mountains, but there was no gold on Mount Isaac and so the men were content to bury the truth of the Disaster with the mine and move on.
The Disaster had nothing to do with bears or monsters. In truth, it could not be said to have much to do with men either, as men reckon themselves.
But they were men once. Not a hundred years ago, or even a thousand, but at the very roots of mankind’s emergence. They were men when men lived in caves, made fire with stones, and still lived in fear of the world they would one day subjugate and master. They were men then, but the men came out of the caves. These went deeper inside. Both changed. And in 1898, when they met again, Hodel’s mining camp vanished. But it could be said that the people of Hodel remained, the new people, content to stay in their new home once the threat of other, of not-same, had been overcome and peace returned to their simple lives.
For they were peaceful, really. Not in the same way as humans now reckon peace, no more than they could be reckoned men, but in their own way, and it was peaceful enough. Men disappeared on the mountain from time to time—men who had no business being up there in the first place, men who were not much mourned or long missed—but there were no more Hodel Disasters. Gradually, some very ordinary murders and vanishings took its place. The gold gave out in the mountains. The mining companies collapsed and the towns built on their names were forgotten. If Handsome Jack had waited another hour and fifteen minutes before sneaking away on his father’s horse, or if he’d just left the deed behind and stolen one more bag of silver instead, Hodel might have been just another ghost town haunting the high unknown wilds of the Cascades, and things would have been different. Or if Jack had not been quite so quick to settle down with the first rich widow taken in by his good looks and frontier charm, or if a thousand things, culminating in if the wooden barrier capping the old Number Two pipe-shaft had never collapsed.
It had been a hundred and twenty years, almost to the very day, but the high, dry climate of the eastern face of Mount Isaac had preserved much. Quite a lot of debris had fallen in over that cap over the years, and countless animals had crossed over it without worry, but upon that unremembered anniversary, whatever restless and angry spirits dwelled in that hungry place surely guided the feet of William White, who had hunted the dry forest and panned its streams some fifty-odd years and who feared no man and no rotten timber. With one dry, dusty snap, Big Bill dropped one hundred six feet past rusted pulleys and mummified fibers of rope that had once hauled lead by the cage-load from the same mountain where he panned for gold. He actually landed pretty well, which was paradoxically unfortunate. He shattered his rifle, as well as most of the bones in the lower half of his body and lay alternately screaming for help and laughing at his own stupidity, watching his horrifically non-lethal wounds worsen and drinking what he had left of his day’s allotment of homebrew until the shock wore off. The rain that kept him chilled and helped his broken limbs to rot away kept him alive ten agonizing days more, and then he died. Forty days after that, give or take, a descendant of the creatures who had broken into the Hodel Company Mine from deeper parts unknown (a descendant, in fact, of the very one who had pulled Calico Pike to his unpleasant doom) followed the smell to this newly-opened portal and squinted up into the wet sky.
His name was Pool, a name which was meant to evoke the dark, deep waters that seemed so still but which teemed with unseen life. They were calling him Pool even when he was still a child and it was not an endearing name, for he’d had those dark, ungraspable thoughts even then and it unnerved the others. It unnerved them now too, but they accepted him better. He had become leader, a role that had always been and always would be needed in spite of their unchanging and essentially peaceful lives.
He had become leader, although no one could say exactly when or how. He had begun easing into the role even before the old leader’s death, so that when Bent Thumb did finally go to the Pit, no one questioned Pool’s right to take him there, not even Edges, who, as the biggest and strongest of them, would surely have been the one to assume leadership if Pool and his strange way of thinking had never come along.
The clan was smaller now than that which had first come to Hodel in the spring of 1898, but that was to be expected. It is an easy thing to die in a new place, particularly when there are monsters in your dark, safe tunnels, easiest of all to become frightened and flee back to the distant clan you left behind. But in the end, the mine had been boarded up, the camp abandoned, and with the memories of the monsters growing dim, the clan tentatively rooted themselves in this new soil and began to grow.
And they grew well. The tunnels were huge and relatively dry—any one of them could stand and walk upon their feet through any tunnel as far as it bored through the rock—but best of all, they were easy. The floors, walls, and even the ceilings were all flat, which was not only kind to hands and feet, but helped to catch sounds and bounce them back to waiting ears. The topmost tunnels where were the largest, but the clan rarely ventured there. True, it was where meat fell and where the air was freshest, but it was also coldest and damp and often filled with biting beams of Upworld’s light. The lowest tunnels, by comparison, had succumbed ages ago to the lack of a pump and yearly runoff into the nearby lake, and had almost entirely flooded out. Many new holes had opened under the water, and now fish and frogs and sometimes meaty things swam freely into the mine, so there was always something to eat even when no meat fell into the shafts.
They lived for the most part in the mid-levels of the mine, where the temperature stayed cooled year-round but never so cold that water turned hard. There were a few vent shafts here, if one traveled far enough, but most of the clan stayed close to the old track line, the great crossways of the Hodel mine, their hub of community. It was a good place, a strong place, nearly sixty feet by forty and adjoined by two other rooms half that impressive size. In 1898, the rough dome of the chamber was thirty-seven feet above the floor, but now it was scarcely half that and the many criss-crossing rails that had once brought Richard Hodel a half-ton of galena each day had been long buried under layers of animal hides. There was room enough for all of them in this place and they all used it, not only to sleep, but to hold whatever objects occupied their fleeting interests.
In 1898, the mine had been nearly a settlement in its own right; now its many chambers provided treasure to the many generations of the clan who had usurped it. Even if much of this stuff had been ultimately covered by the steady growth of rotting furs, much yet remained—old carts, picks, winches and pullies, rust-frozen links of chain, all tumbled together in a great heap at one end of the track line—and occasionally some forgotten piece would be unearthed and marveled at once more. Boredom was unknown to the clan. Even the most familiar passageway could bring something new at any time and anyway, familiarity was reassuring. To change, to evolve, was no great ambition of their kind. Even Pool, who enjoyed his distractions in ways few of his clan could understand, wanted nothing more than to come home to his particular piece of the sleeping place and bed down among those he knew, hear their same speech and feel their same touches, knowing that tomorrow would pass just as yesterday had.
There were nearly forty of them now, and another coming, if White Belly’s swelling stomach meant a baby and not belly-bloat or worms or some other trouble. Pool was fairly certain it would be the baby. White Belly was good at growing them, if not so good at rearing them, and in all of his memories, she had either the round swell of her stomach out before her or a baby keening for her slack breast. Pool thought it was a baby, and more importantly, Edges, who slept his angry, muttering sleep at White Belly’s side, also seemed to think it was a baby and would not let anyone else close enough either to feed her or give the concerning bulge a testing slap.
Pool actually could count. Not as high as forty, but to five easily, to ten with difficulty, and with time and effort as far as twenty. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive understanding of his clan; he knew at a glance who was there and who missing, just as he could look at meat and know at once how many it would feed and how well. Numbers he found difficult (and most of his people found them impossible), but many mouths and small fish he understood very well.
Still, it was not the leader’s responsibility to feed others. That Pool had made it his responsibility upon occasion might have been an indication of his essential strangeness or perhaps nobility (which was itself a strangeness), but then, his motives were frequently suspect. Pool had often fed Flicker, for example, simply because he knew she was far too quick to grab when the soft root of a man’s body turned hard and insistent. That Flicker had been caught now and then only made her that much quicker and more wary around the men in the small clan, and yet, with the steady offering of food over enough days, Pool had managed, quietly and without fighting, to feed her from his hand first and then to mount her and finally to coax her into the crossways to sleep beside him so that he could mount her without the bother of having to find her first.
It was the same reason, essentially, that Edges fed White Belly, not because she was difficult to ease onto her back, but because she would do so for anyone, at any time, for any reason. An unexpected hiss or sudden movement would send her rolling over to expose that soft, white belly (and strangely bloodless woman-wound that made a man’s root so demanding), and send Edges into a howling, slapping rage if he happened to be near enough to see it. The paradox was, that in order to make sure White Belly did not take food from other men (or let them rub their roots in her while she ate it), Edges alone fed her, which meant that he had to leave her in order to find food, which meant that he often returned to find Splinter or Broken Tooth huffing hurriedly away on top of her. There had been blood over it already, and that someone might be killed was a definite possibility, but it wasn’t a leader’s responsibility to stop that. Maybe he would have made it his responsibility if Pool wanted White Belly for himself, but he didn’t.
Pool wanted Echo.
They had been children together—he had some hazy memory of her as a suckling, but was not quite old enough to remember her being born—but they were not close. Echo wasn’t close to anyone. She was clan in that she was the same as them, and was known to have been born to Fur and so was unquestionably accepted, but she had not come to the crossways where the others slept, choosing instead to flit through the tunnels, untouchable. She was a flash of white in the darkness, the splash of a leaping foot in water, the drift of familiar scent in an empty passage. She was Echo, the sound of something that is no longer there.
But she was beautiful, healthy and strong, and more, she was clever, far too clever to be caught even by the quickest lunge or the fattest and most tempting frog. Pool had tamed Flicker to his side with food and patience, but not Echo. Never Echo. He had tried to woo her several times with fire, and thought for a time he had been making some progress; the little red flame had proved as mesmerizing to her as to any of the others, and he could draw her in close enough to see by its light, but at his first movement, at even the gentlest purr, she was gone.
But she was clever, and sometimes Pool found her little caches of brush which she dragged from the light places to dry in the tunnels, and smudgy ashes of fires he knew he hadn’t made, the burnt branches and charred bones of her own curious experiments. Seeing these things encouraged him, made him think that catching her was possible if the right lure were found. Fire interested her, and Pool thought that interest was the right lure. He just had to find something better than fire. That he knew of nothing better gnawed at him, but he did know that there were no mysteries in the crossways, so he went on foraging treks like this one, partly for food, partly to keep aware of any threat or danger in his domain, and partly (the largest part, in fact) to look for something that just might interest Echo.
Now Pool crouched in the rain, slapping himself where the fat drops fell until it registered that this was water, only water. It fell sometimes in other places. Now it was falling here, where it had never fallen before, and there was light above him, which had never shown light before, and these were things that needed thinking about.
The corpse earned none of his attention. Bloated and blackened by early rot, it had been at once identified and disregarded. Not as a dead man, but as a dead something—spoiled meat unfit for eating. Something that would need to be dealt with, in other words, but not a man. It was too different for Pool’s eyes to see as a person, so it was just a thing, not-same.
Looking at the two together, the forty-day corpse and the living man, it was not immediately clear which looked the most human. Their shapes shared enough—two arms, two legs, five fingers to each hand, two eyes that looked curiously out from a thinking mind—but no one would have ever believed they were looking at a man if they had glimpsed Pool at a distance in the dark. Uncounted eons breeding in the deep tunnels under the earth had worked its changes, seen and unseen.
Although he could and sometimes did go upon two legs, he was more apt to prowl about on his belly, his powerful fingers and grasping toes made to pull him through narrow channels and over uneven stone as swiftly as a snake. The body that perched now, guardedly, just beyond the shine of daylight had been carved for this life, bred for it in the blind treachery of the hollow earth; he was small, more than a head shorter than Big Bill had been in life and half the old man’s weight, but every sinewy muscle held a terrible reserve of strength. His skin, pale as pearl and entirely hairless, stretched tight over this deceptively small, powerful frame, showing clearly each coiling muscle as he picked his way across the newly-fallen debris, pausing at every new hand-hold and foot-step to sniff at a shard of rotted wood or rifle barrel. The rain slicked over his naked flesh, but he felt little of it, little of the high mountain cold. Nature had compensated for his kind’s scarcity of body fat with thick skin and a circulatory system that could keep him quite comfortable at temperatures near freezing, although the Hodel mine rarely saw such a need. So the impression overall was perhaps cadaverous, but still essentially human. It was only when one looked at the creature’s face that one realized how widely his kind had diverged.
It was not an evil face, but neither was it, even at an idle glance, at all human. His brow was round and somewhat backwards-slanted into his high, domed skull, proportionately overlarge to human eyes. Likewise, the front of his face seemed to bulge, as with too many teeth, although this slight snout was more to accommodate his millions of smell receptors and the spongy mass just above his mostly-defunct eyes which caught the soundwaves bouncing back from any exploratory clicks he might send out. But he did have more teeth than a human, and with the exception of four molars, they were all long, sharp, carnivore’s teeth. When he showed them, it was not a smile. His eyes were huge, sunken sockets that gave him an oddly fetal, imploring appearance as he looked around, but these looks were as deceptive as his wiry frame. What might be seen as plaintive and helpless was in fact an expression of hostile intent: I see you, those wide-open eyes meant to say, as the slightly-pursed and trembling lips were actually a warning, proof that he was primed for a nasty bite.
But no one was here to see his fierceness, and soon his strange features relaxed.
Pool cupped his pale, broad hands and drank the water that slowly filled them. He held each sip in his mouth a long time before swallowing. He thought.
Not-same as the water that came from below, he decided at last. But same enough. He cupped his hands again, ignoring the shit-and-sour-meat smell that permeated this hole, and drank again, more naturally. He was not thirsty, but the taste of this not-same water intrigued him. He drank it a lot when it fell in the other light places. He had begun to think, in that eerie way that none of the others understood, that the different taste was not in this not-same water, but in the real water. That the difference was (and this was exactly the sort of thinking that so unnerved the others that long before they had made him their leader, they had frequently contemplated killing him) not in water at all, but something in the rock that cupped the water, as Pool’s hands cupped it now and Pool’s own taste lingered in his mouth. It was something in the fish and the frogs that lived in the water, something in the green scum and pale fungus that came with it. It was something…
…but it was not-same.
Pool looked down at the corpse, the high slits of what had once been human nostrils flaring wide as he sniffed it. He didn’t need to sniff it. He could see it was too far gone for eating and he wasn’t hungry anyway. He had caught two lizards in the tunnels before catching this scent and coming here. Big lizards, as long as his whole hand, as wide as two whole fingers. He had eaten them both (although he had stopped briefly to consider taking one of them back to Flicker, who had shared his sleeping place off and on ever since he had become leader, and then stopped even longer to consider taking it to Echo, who shared no one’s sleeping place and probably never would, much to Pool’s quiet and distracted frustration), but he had cooked one of them first, because fire still needed much experimenting.
Fire was a new thing to all this particular clan, what could be called the Hodel clan, although it was not entirely new to the people as a whole. It had been discovered and rediscovered countless times since their severing from the line of what would become modern man, and it had come back to the Hodel clan now, after perhaps two hundred years, because Edges had found a pick deep in one of the tunnels and had been trying to use what seemed like a very sturdy if ungainly tool to make a far more practical one, and when the ancient pick-head hit his rock, there had been sparks. Edges, disgusted beyond all expressing, had flung the pick violently away (and then gone spitting into the dark to find it and bash it even more violently into the wall several times before throwing it away for good), but Pool had picked it up again. Pool could not knap a proper stone (and did not see the need, seeing as how Edges could make anything he wanted for him), but with patience and much trial, he found he could make a spark. And that sparks could eat certain things, certain dry things, and become fire, which was warm and gave a gentle red light and so was useful. It also seemed to Pool that fire made things dry faster, although he wasn’t sure yet just how this worked, since if you put too much wet on the fire, it hissed out and turned to smoke. Also, fire hurt if you tried to touch it, or even if you only touched the places it had been sitting, and sometimes fire came back after it had gone, so it always bore thinking about and testing.
So Pool made a fire and put one of the lizards he had caught inside, because both lizards were wet and he wanted to see, with both lizards in front of him, if one dried faster. It did, but that was not all it did. The lizard in the fire came out not-same as the lizard which had not been in the fire. The skin had all turned black, which Pool had half-expected, since that was what happened to most things he put inside fire, but inside the skin was the most interesting thing. The blood had all gone away and the meat itself had turned all strange: a different taste, a different texture, a different everything. Not-same in every sense. And yet, he knew it was same, because he’d had two lizards and here was one and here was the other, and they were same and not-same at the same time!
More fires were called for, but then, this smell, the death-smell, bothered him and Pool supposed he really ought to take it to the Pit. Other animals might come to eat it still, and fall in like they fell in the other light places, and be good to eat if someone found it soon enough, but bugs would come first, bugs that bit and bugs that burrowed, and more death might come after. Pool wasn’t sure of the connection, but he was sure there was one, and this was knowledge of which his people had been certain from the Beginning Time. You could not leave a corpse to rot. He was leader. He was responsible. He ate his lizards and gathered the meat by its loose, stinking skin and dragged it away to the Pit.
And then, because Pool was Pool, he came back. He did this partly to check and see if he had gotten all the meat, because sometimes bits fell off if the meat was really bad. This wasn’t one of those times, but he discovered to his interest that the meat had left something behind, even if it wasn’t skin or bones.
There were, of course, pieces of Big Bill’s shattered rifle, but these were entirely beneath Pool’s notice. He saw only slivers of wood and chips of stone, no different than any of the other dead branches that fell into the tunnels or the other chunks of rock that occasionally broke away from the rest. Big Bill’s shoes were here as well—he’d cut them off when his feet had first started to swell and his adrenaline had still been high enough to allow him to do it without realizing just how badly it hurt him—but Pool hadn’t noticed them yet. What captured his considerable interest was instead the shiny silver flask that had held the dying man’s sippin’ likker from his fifteenth birthday on.
He picked it up and when he did, water dribbled out of the narrow mouth in a stream that became a puddle at Pool’s feet, fascinating while it lasted. He touched it and it was smooth, smooth as baby-skin, but hard, like rock or bone. He held it up to the grey shine of the up-world, only to flinch back when a brighter patch of light unexpectedly splashed up onto the walls. Pool rattled out a warning to this invader, snatching back his new prize, and the light at once vanished. He looked for it cursorily, even standing at his full height to send a series of short, threatening snaps up the shaft where he assumed, logically enough for him, it must have gone, and then settled back on his haunches to investigate what he considered the greater mystery.
The flask sloshed in his hands when he moved it. Its weight shifted. When he turned it fully upside-down, more water trickled out. Pool caught a few drops thoughtfully in one palm and then, with remarkable intuitiveness for one of his kind, found one of the deeper puddles around him and pressed the flask to the ground.
Water burbled up inside it. He could see the ripples of movement, feel the change in weight when he lifted the flask again. Slowly, he poured it out into the puddle, then filled it again and poured it out once more. Again. Again. On his not-quite human face, a fairly-human expression of deep and pensive stillness grew.
This was useful. This was very useful.
There were no natural predators in the tunnels where his people lived (had always lived, to their way of thinking; Upworld was a big, bright nothing from which fell meat and branches and sometimes water, but not even Pool had yet considered that anything lived there). There had always been enough for Pool’s small clan to eat, and while very occasionally they might kill each other (in fits of rage, like the kind that sometimes took hold of Edges, or out of a certain confused resentment, of the sort which had compelled White Belly, the young female who shared Edges’ sleeping place, to pile furs over each of her previous infants when they would not stop crying and not take them off again until after the infants were very quiet and very, very still), it was not unusual for them to live a long time. Death came to them in the form of bloat-belly, the infrequent fall, the inexplicable and sudden collapse (as old Bent Thumb had done, with time enough for just one gasping rattle, one spastic grab at his own arm, and then he was just meat), and most of all, the fever.
The fever came in many forms, and every form was terrible. Fever might touch one of them and linger for days and days, or it might rip through all of them and be gone again almost at once. It could kill a man or let him live, chill his blood, take his sight or his hearing, gnaw his guts or his bones, or simply leave and do nothing at all. If it touched a child, that child died so often that sometimes the grieving mother went ahead and carried the limp and shivering body to the Pit and pitched it in as soon as the fever was identified. Flicker would have done that—twice—when little Glow caught the fever, had Pool not stopped her.
It was the sort of thing that made the others nervous, him stopping her. Bent Thumb never would have. Yes, he was leader, but Flicker was Glow’s mother. Pool had seen her born, yes, and many was the day he had spent crouched around that squirming, squeaking infant and nuzzling at her soft, round head, but that didn’t mean anything. All the same, when he’d seen Flicker take a dragging grip on little Glow’s unresisting ankles, he had not only leapt in front of her, but had slapped both hands down on the thick furs between them over and over until Flicker retreated and allowed Pool to crawl over the small girl’s body and press his own close.
He remembered that, and he remembered feeling that hot, dry flesh like a dead coal on his belly, and the agony of indecision that had gripped him every time before he had to leave her, to race down to the pool that had given him his name and suck up a mouthful of water to take back and dribble between her slack, chapped lips, expecting every time to come back and find her gone and Flicker at the mouth of the Pit. He never had, and Glow had recovered, but with this thing, this useful thing, he might have stayed with her the whole time, and fed the thirst that ravaged her wasted frame without ever leaving her side. Of course, Glow was much bigger now, not so reliant upon her mother, and perhaps in no great danger should the fever ever return, but there would be other fevers. This was a useful thing.
Pool, still deep in thought, brought the flask close to his face to watch the water well right up to the dark hole and out of it. The smell of Big Bill’s homebrew, diluted these past days, blew back at him, and he recoiled with a snort. His air blew across the mouth of the flask.
It made a sound.
Pool briefly succumbed to his ancestral instincts, dropping the flask at once and bashing at it with his fist. He darted back to the tunnel and looked back, poised atop his toes for flight, head low to the ground, hissing.
The flask lay open in the rain, somewhat dented, still shining.
After several long, motionless moments, Pool crept back, hand over hand. He stared the thing down, hissed twice, bashed it again, and finally, suspiciously, drew himself up to hunkers again and picked it up.
It was cool in his hands, unresisting. Not a person. Not even an animal. Just a thing.
Pool thought for a very long time.
Slowly, he brought it to his face again and deliberately snorted.
Nothing.
He shook it. Water sloshed and splashed inside. He snorted again, louder, then tried a chuff, a rattle, a whole series of snaps and grunts, and finally, a hoot.
The flask remained silent.
Edges was not the only one who could be overcome by temper. Pool yanked back his arm to throw it.
It made the sound again.
Pool stopped his arm at the apex of its swing and craned his neck around to look at it. He sat up a little straighter and swung his arm again.
The flask made its low groaning song at him.
Rain fell.
Pool thought.
He brought the stinking thing right to his lips and did not snort or hoot or chuff. He softly, silently, blew. Not into it. Across it.
The flask moaned.
All at once, the potential of the strange thing changed. Gone were thoughts of fevers and thirst and memories of little Glow’s body burning beneath his. He thought instead of Echo. Because this was very, very interesting.
It was difficult to find her, but Echo seemed to spend much of her time around the light places and there weren’t many of those. Pool found her while it was still light, and he stayed well back in the tunnels for a time, admiring her. She was beautiful, lean and young and strong. The light from Upworld made her skin gleam, as white in these tunnels as the fish that swam through the dark water that had given him his name. He watched her cup her hands for falling water and felt his groin tighten.
He made no sound, but she must have caught his scent because she stiffened suddenly and looked his way, sending out three clicks and one long rattle when those clicks sent back his shape. She dropped, slapping loudly at the wet ground and showing all her teeth, which were youth-sharp and as white as her flawless skin.
Pool realized all at once that he’d actually trapped her. The walls of the shaft that opened to Upworld were too steep and smooth to climb and there was no way out except to go past him—a tight, dangerous squeeze. He had her now. She was fast, but one lunge would have her.
Very slowly, very carefully, Pool eased a few steps closer to her and let the light from above fall on him. She hissed, spat, leapt scrabbling at the high walls, fell back onto the wet ground and spat again.
Pool ducked his head and softly purred as Echo paced before him, her hands and feet light and quick as they moved in the close opening. He watched, but from the corner of his eye. He did not stare, made no gestures, said no words, and gradually, gradually, her step slowed. She didn’t stop, but slowing was an encouragement.
Pool brought out the flask and placed it before him. Echo spat at it and at him and began to pace again, slapping her hands in frustration at the enclosing walls. Pool watched, purred, waited, and when she again began to slow, he brought the flask to his mouth and blew.
Echo did stop walking then, her eyes locked wide upon the strange, shiny object as it made its moaning song. Pool chuffed contentedly, soothingly, and blew again, then set the flask down and pushed it toward her.
Echo looked at it and at him. Her smooth brow crinkled.
“Pool,” said Pool.
She rattled again, but it seemed uncertain to his ears. Heartened, he hunkered low. She sprang up. He rolled onto his side to look a little less predatory and able to leap, and she began to pace again, her eyes coming back to the flask again and again.
“See Pool,” said Pool. His root was very hard.
She spat.
“Pool sees Echo.”
She grunted, started to pace, then just as suddenly sat and scowled at him and at the flask.
“White Echo,” said Pool. He nudged the flask. “Light Echo. Echo shining.”
Her eyes rolled a little. She paced. “Go,” she said, in a tight, angry voice. “White Echo bites. Light Echo kills. Echo shining…” She didn’t seem to know how to finish that one. “Go now!”
Words were extremely encouraging. Pool thought. Then he rolled all the way over, arching his back so fully that most of his weight was painfully balanced atop his head in a gesture of female submission so exaggerated it was almost unrecognizable. “Echo!” he said, really groaning it, slapping for good measure at his exposed belly.
It was a joke, from a species of man that had no real concept of humor, but Echo was just as strange in her own way as Pool was, and Echo got it.
They couldn’t laugh, but she hooted once, and then relaxed back onto her haunches and hooted again, capping her teeth with her lips for a few clicks, a belated and much resigned greeting.
“White Echo,” said Pool, rolling back onto his side.
“Light Echo,” she agreed, in what might have been a wry tone if they had any understanding of sarcasm. She looked at the flask and then at his hard root. She snorted and crouched low, hiding her belly from sight and ready to jump at the first opportunity. “Echo sees shining thing.”
Not, ‘Echo sees Pool,’ but definitely progress. Lying in the tunnel mouth as if the rough, wet stone were his own cozy sleeping place, Pool picked up the flask and blew across it, pursing his lips to make the sound especially strong. He put it down, gave it a careless shove toward her, and lay that way, his arm outstretched, his hand open and fingers lightly curled, watching her.
She didn’t touch it right away. She could still see the insistent jut of his root and knew what it meant to her, but the lure of the flask was irresistible. She came for it eventually, rattling at herself in a soft, disgusted manner even as she crept up and reached for it.
Pool could have jumped then. He didn’t need a good jump either. A hard lunge and a quick snatch would have been enough. He lay quiet and did not move, purring at every slow breath.
In the moment before her fingers touched the flask’s silver sides, she looked at him again. Her gaze was calm and dark with understanding. Then she crinkled her nose at him and picked up the flask.
She was clever, and it took her far less time than it had taken him to figure out how to make it sing. She retreated to the shaft and sat in full light to play with it, and perhaps she was unaware of how beautiful she looked there, how clean and perfect, but then again, perhaps she wasn’t. Her eyes had a way of coming back to him as he lay and watched her and her eyes were filled with thoughts.
He could have leapt for her at any time. When she found that the flask could catch the Upworld light and splash it bodilessly around the walls, her fascination was such that he could have stood boldly upon two legs and thrown himself at her, but he did not. He lay, feeling neither the damp rainwater puddling up around him nor the rough stone beneath him; all his power to perceive sensation had focused for the moment in his swelled and throbbing man-root. Pool purred and was patient.
“Hot meat,” said Echo at last, which was the greatest expression of satisfaction any of them knew. She looked at him and crinkled her nose. “Echo sees Pool.”
He rolled onto his back and balanced on his head again, softly yowling. His man-root pointed straight up, quivering. He rolled back onto his side and looked at her.
She put the flask down and came toward him, brushing her knuckles once across his outstretched palm before she settled practically at his side and within easy, immediate reach. Her scent was like light in his mind. The sound of her scratchy, awkward purrs (she didn’t seem to know quite how to make them) seemed to catch in his ears and linger. Like echoes.
How long that moment lasted could not be measured, but when the light from Upworld began to fade at last, she bent down and touched her face to his hand. Pool’s fingers twitched, not unmindful of those sharp, white teeth, but she did not bite. She turned, letting his limp hand stroke at the smooth side of her head, back and forth and back again. She lay down, belly to the ground at first and then, as she pressed her smooth cheek into his hand, she rolled onto her back.
“Pool and Echo,” he said.
“Good hunt,” she replied, with that same, dry tone of unnatural humor.
He would have laughed if he knew how. He purred instead, somewhat raggedly, and mounted. She arched her back; he slipped his hands beneath her shoulderblades, supporting her. His knees prodded at the backs of her thighs as he pierced her, and she wrapped his hips with only a little hesitation. He nuzzled at her open mouth as he began to move. She shifted once, grumbling, then sighed and put her arms around him.
The light went away, and Pool was alone in the dark with Echo. Upworld’s air was cool and sweet and wet with rain, and Pool knew who he was and where and with who, and life was very, very good.
Pool by R. Lee Smith
Coming mid to late 2014!
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