The White Rose

Chapter Twenty-Three: THE PLAIN OF FEAR

It was the time of the Monthly Meeting. The big confab during which nothing gets done. During which all heads yammer of pet projects on which action cannot be taken. After six or eight hours of which Darling closes debate by telling us what to do.

The usual charts were up. One showed where our agents believed the Taken to be. Another showed incursions reported by the menhirs. Both showed a lot of white, areas of Plain unknown to us. A third chart showed the month's change storms, a pet project of the Lieutenant's. He was looking for something. As always, most were along the periphery. But there was an unusually large number, and higher than normal percentage, in this chart's interior. Seasonal? A genuine shift? Who knew? We had not been watching long enough. The menhirs will not bother explaining such trivia.

Darling took charge immediately. She signed, "The operation in Rust had the effect I hoped. Our agents have reported anti-imperial outbreaks almost everywhere. They have diverted some attention from us. But the armies of the Taken keep building. Whisper has become especially aggressive in her incursions."

Imperial troops entered the Plain almost every day, probing for a response and preparing their men for the Plain's perils. Whisper's operations, as always, were very professional. Militarily, she is to be feared far more than the Limper.

Limper is a loser. That is not his fault, entirely, but the stigma has attached itself. Winner or loser, though, he is running the other side.

"Word came this morning that Whisper has established a garrison a day's march inside the boundary. She is erecting fortifications, daring our response."

Her strategy was apparent. Establish a network of mutually supporting fortresses; build it slowly until it is spread out over the Plain. She was dangerous, that woman. Especially if she sold the idea to the Limper and got all the armies into the act.

As a strategy it goes back to the dawn of time, having been used again and again where regular armies face partisans in wild country. It is a patient strategy that depends on the will of the conqueror to persevere. It works where that will exists and fails where it does not.

Here it will work. The enemy has twenty-some years to root us out. And feels no need to hold the Plain once done with us.

Us? Let us say, instead, Darling. The rest of us are nothing in the equation. If Darling falls, there is no Rebellion.

"They are taking away time," Darling signed. "We need decades. We have to do something."

Here it comes, I thought. She had on that look. She was going to announce the result of much soul-searching. So I was not struck down with astonishment when she signed, "I am sending Croaker to recover the rest of his correspondent's story." News of the letters had spread. Darling will gossip. "Goblin and One-Eye will accompany and support him."

"What? There ain't no way…"

"Croaker."

"I won't do it. Look at me. I'm a nothing guy. Who's going to notice me? One old guy wandering around. The world is full of them. But three guys? One of them black? One of them a runt with…"

Goblin and One-Eye sped me milk-curdling looks.

I snickered. My outburst put them in a tight place. Though they wanted to go no more than I wanted them along, they now dared not agree with me publicly. Worse, they had to agree with each other. Ego!

But my point remained. Goblin and One-Eye are known characters. For that matter, so am I, but as I pointed out, I'm not physically remarkable.

Darling signed, "Danger will encourage their cooperation."

I fled to my last citadel. "The Lady touched me on the desert that night I was out, Darling. She is watching for me."

Darling thought a moment, signed back, "That changes nothing. We must have that last piece of story before the Taken close in."

She was right about that. But…

She signed, "You three will go. Be careful."

Tracker followed the debate with Otto's help. He offered, "I'll go. I know the north. Especially the Great Forest. That's where I got my name." Behind him, Toadkiller Dog yawned.

"Croaker?" Darling asked.

I was not yet resigned to going. So I passed it back to her. "Up to you."

"You could use a fighter," she signed. "Tell him you accept."

I mumbled and muttered, faced Tracker. "She says you go."

He looked pleased.

As far as Darling was concerned, that was that. The thing was settled. They hastened down the agenda to a report from Corder suggesting Tanner was ripe for a raid like that on Rust.

I fussed and fumed and no one paid me any mind, except Goblin and One-Eye, who sent me looks saying I would rue my insults.

No fooling around. We left fourteen hours later. With everything arranged for us. Dragged out of bed soon after midnight, I quickly found myself topside, beside the coral, watching a small windwhale descend. A menhir yammered behind me, instructing me in the care and stroking of the windwhale ego. I ignored him. This had come on too swiftly. I was being shoved into the saddle before I'd made up my mind to go. I was living behind events.

I had my weapons, my amulets, money, food. Everything I should need. Likewise Goblin and One-Eye, who had provided themselves with a supplementary arsenal of thaumatur-gic gewgaws. The plan was to purchase a wagon and team after the windwhale dropped us behind enemy lines. All the junk they were bringing, I grumbled, we might need two.

Tracker traveled light, though. Food, an array of weapons selected from what we had on hand, and his mutt.

The windwhale rose. Night enveloped us. I felt lost. I hadn't gotten so much as a good-bye hug.

The windwhale went up where the air was chill and thin. To the east, the south, and northwest I spied the glimmer of change storms. They were becoming more common.

I guess I was getting blase about windwhale-riding. Shivering, huddling into myself, ignoring Tracker, who was a positive chatterbox yammering about trivia, I fell asleep. I wakened to a shaking hand and Tracker's face inches from mine.

"Wake up, Croaker," he kept saying. "Wake up. One-Eye says we got trouble."

I rose, expecting to find Taken circling us.

We were surrounded, but by four windwhales and a score of mantas. "Where did they come from?"

"Showed up while you were sleeping."

"What's the trouble?"

Tracker pointed, off what I guess you would call our starboard bow.

Change storm. Shaping.

"Just popped out of nowhere," Goblin said, joining us. too nervous to remember he was mad at me. "Looks like a bad one, too, the rate it's growing."

The change storm was no more than four hundred yards in diameter now, but the pastel-Iightninged fury in its heart said it would grow swiftly and terribly. Its touch would be more than normally dramatic. Varicolored light painted faces and windwhales bizarrely. Our convoy shifted course. The windwhales are not as much affected as humans, but they prefer to dodge trouble where possible. It was clear, though, that fringes of the monster would brush us.

Even as I recognized and thought about it, the storm's size increased. Six hundred yards in diameter. Eight hundred. Roiling, boiling color within what looked like black smoke. Serpents of silent lightning snapped and snarled soundlessly around one another.

The bottom of the change storm touched ground.

All those lightnings found their voices. And the storm expanded even more rapidly, hurling in another direction that growth which should have gone earthward. It was terrible with energy, this one.

Change storms seldom came nearer than eight miles to the Hole. They are impressive enough from that distance, when you catch only a whiff that crackles in your hair and makes your nerves go frazzled. In olden times, when we still served the Lady, I talked to veterans of Whisper's campaigns who told me of suffering through the storms. I never wholly credited their tales.

I did so as the boundary of the storm gained on us.

One of the manias was caught. You could see through it, its bones white against sudden darkness. Then it changed.

Everything changed. Rocks and trees became protean. Small things that followed and pestered us shifted form…

There is a hypothesis which states that the strange species of the Plain have appeared as a result of change storms. It has been proposed, too, that the change storms are responsible for the Plain itself. That each gnaws a bit more off our normal world.

The whales gave up trying to outrun the storm and plunged earthward, below the curve of expanding storm, getting down where the fall would be shorter if they changed into something unable to fly. Standard procedure for anyone caught in a change storm. Stay low and don't move.

Whisper's veterans spoke of lizards growing to elephant size, of spiders becoming monstrous, of poisonous serpents sprouting wings, of intelligent creatures going mad and trying to murder everything about them.

I was scared.

Not too scared to observe, though. After the manta showed us its bones it resumed its normal form, but grew. As did a second when the boundary overtook it. Did that mean a common tendency toward growth on a storm's outward pulse?

The storm caught our windwhale, which was the slowest getting down. Young it was, but conscientious about its burden. The crackle in my hair peaked. I thought my nerves would betray me completely. A glance at Tracker convinced me we were going to have a major case of panic.

Goblin or One-Eye, one, decided to be a hero and stay the storm. Might as well have ordered the sea to turn. The crash and roar of a major sorcery vanished in the rage of the storm.

There was an instant of utter stillness when the boundary reached me. Then a roar out of hell. The winds inside were ferocious. I thought of nothing but getting down and hanging on. Around me gear was flying about, changing shape as it flew. Then I spied Goblin. And nearly threw up.

Goblin indeed. His head had swelled ten times normal size. The rest of him looked inside out. Around him swarmed a horde of the parasites that live on a windwhale's back, some as big as pigeons.

Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were worse. The mutt had become something half as big as an elephant, fanged, possessed of the most evil eyes I've ever seen. He looked at me with a starved lust that chilled my soul. And Tracker had become something demonic, vaguely apelike yet certainly much more. Both looked like creatures from an artist's or sorcerer's nightmares.

One-Eye was the least changed. He swelled, but remained One-Eye. Perhaps he is well-rooted in the world, being so damned old. Near as I can tell, he is pushing a hundred fifty.

The thing that was Toadkiller Dog crept toward me with teeth bared… The windwhale touched down. Impact sent everyone tumbling. The wind screamed around us. The strange lightning hammered earth and air. The landing area itself was in a protean mood. Rocks crawled. Trees changed shape. The animals of that part of the Plain were out and gamboling in revised forms, one-time prey turning upon predator. The horror show was illuminated by a shifting, sometimes ghastly light.

Then the vacuum at the heart of the storm enveloped us. Everything froze in the form it had at the last instant. Nothing moved. Tracker and Toadkiller Dog were down on the ground, thrown there after impact. One-Eye and Goblin faced one another, in the first phase of letting their feud go beyond its customary gamesmanship. The other windwhales lay nearby, not visibly affected. A manta plunged out of the color above, crashed.

That stasis lasted maybe three minutes. In the stillness sanity returned. Then the change storm began to collapse.

The devolution of the storm was slower than its growth. But saner, too. We suffered it for several hours. And then it was done. And our sole casualty was the one manta that had crashed. But damn, was it ever a shaking experience.

"Damn lucky," I told the others, as we inventoried our possessions. "Lucky we weren't all killed."

"No luck to it, Croaker," One-Eye replied. "The moment these monsters saw a storm coming they headed for safe ground. A place where there would be nothing that could kill us. Or them."

Goblin nodded. They were doing a lot of agreeing lately. But we all recalled how close they had come to murder.

I asked, "What did I look like? I didn't feel any change, except a sort of nervous turmoil. Like being drunk, drugged, and half-crazy all at the same time."

"Looked like Croaker to me," One-Eye said. "Only twice as ugly."

"And dull," Goblin added. "You made the most inspiring speech about the glories the Black Company won during the campaign against Chew."

I laughed. "Come on."

"Really. You were just Croaker. Maybe those amulets are good for something."

Tracker was going over his weaponry. Toadkiller Dog was napping near his feet. I pointed. One-Eye signed, "Didn't see."

Goblin signed, "He grew up and got claws."

They did not seem concerned. I decided I should not be. After all, the whale lice were the nastiest thing after the mutt.

The windwhales remained grounded, for the sun was rising. Their backs assumed the dun color of the earth, complete with sage-colored patches, and we waited for the night. The mantas nested down on the other four whales. None came near us. You get the feeling humans make them uncomfortable.