“I’m hungry.”
The taiga stretched front and behind, back and forth. A great grey ghostly sea of trees and snow and whatever animal life was too stubborn, slow, or tough to leave. It sneered at rainforests; it could swallow deserts whole. To find a larger landscape you had to travel to a shoreline.
There hasn’t been any rain here in six months and twelve days, and it isn’t coming anytime soon.
“I’m hungry.”
The sky was a calm, cool grey that didn’t quite feel ready to be blue. The colour of freshly cooled corpseskin, of a kitten’s eyes, of-
“I’m hungry.”
Couldn’t keep too much of an eye above, though. Not with the snow underfoot taking al-
“I’m hungry.”
Crunch like bones under every st-
“I’m hungry I’m hungryI’mh-”
Lun removed the spoon from the cook-pot and inserted it into Naddabas’s face, and silence returned to the larch and spruce for some six appreciative seconds.
“Was that done cooking? It didn’t taste like it was done cooking…”
Lun returned the spoon to the cook-pot. Once upon a time, it had been a helmet. Once upon a slightly earlier time, it had been a cook-pot. It had not taken the return to its roots gracefully.
“It wasn’t done cooking.”
“You were hungry.”
Naddabas sighed, wriggling in her own guilt, in her little body-sack against Lun’s broad back. It would’ve tickled if Lun had any nerves back there. “True. True. And true a third time. Damn and noise, it almost didn’t hurt the taste. What’s in there again?”
Lun swirled the spoon, half-glancing at the effect produced. “Pine nuts. A bit of bark. Some sort of songbird.”
“Was it the one with the red throat that goes chee-chee?”
“No.”
“Was it the one with the blue throat that goes he-saw-me?”
“No.”
“Was it the one with the yellow back and grey wings and black tummy and bright red eyes that won’t stop following us and never makes a sound?”
“No.”
“Rackets. I was hoping you’d finally got it.”
“It’s smart; hides whenever I pull the sling out. I don’t know where it is.”
“Hope it gets lost. Hope it gets lost into a bear’s belly. That’d serve it right.”
“Mmm. It’s done cooking.”
“You eat first. I can see you’re burning low there. How much did you use to light that fire?”
“Not so much.”
Naddabas’s smile settled into place on her face like a cat in a well-worn cushion. “Liar, liar, liar,” she sang. “I can see your eyes guttering. Go on. Take your meal. And do it fast, before you become even worse company. I can’t chat with a friend who’s gone cold and stiff as a board, can I?”
Lun got to her feet with an annoyed grunt, and she knew that Naddabas knew that meant ‘oh fine.’ Only one in ten things her talky little friend said might be worth the air they used, but that was still a lot of truths at the end of the day.
She reached into the fire with her big rough hands wrapped in their charred leathers, yanked out the two least-crumbled logs, and carefully slid them under her coat. It accepted them with the smooth ease warranted by something that could’ve passed as a large tent, and she leaned back with a sigh. Then she coughed.
“Too far gone?” frowned Naddabas.
Lun’s shut her eyes. One. Two. Three big slow breaths. Then she opened them again and the campsite was just a little bit brighter than before. “No. Just got sapstuck. Trees are gummier than a glue factory.”
“Too hollering right. We should head south.”
Lun sat down again, but smoother. She spat out a little cloud of smoke and watched it wander away. “No.”
“Come on, come on, don’t be stubborn. He was probably lying anyways. We don’t need to come all the way out here, we can go back home! I’m sure they’ve forgotten about me anyways, and I can show you all the best places to eat, maybe introduce you to a boy or two I know with the most amaz-”
“Can’t go back ‘till we find it. You know that.”
“But-“
Lun returned the spoon to Naddabas’s face, removed it, and repeated the action at a practiced pace that just barely allotted time for breathing until it clanged against bare and empty metal.
“I’m sorry,” said Naddabas. “But you know this won’t work. We ran out of potatoes two days ago. We ran out of meat two weeks ago. A little bit farther north and we’ll run out of trees, and then what’ll you do?”
“Burn bracken and lichen,” said Lun.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help – I know all this is my fault – but we really have to think about fixing the problem in a way that doesn’t kill us. Understand? If you drop dead and fall over and squish me out here, we might as well have stayed home.”
“And I’m sure you’ll do us all a favour and explain why you haven’t done just that,” said a third voice.
It was a very polite voice, a very proper voice, a voice that would’ve fit right into the fifth quarter tidily – as a statesman, or perhaps a statesman’s uncle.
It was also altogether wrong. Some syllables seemed to have been produced by rubbing together bristles. Others had been replaced by near-identical copies that fit into place as well as a two-year-old’s jigsaw.
Lun’s eyes flickered. Naddabas tried to stand up, forgot she didn’t have limbs, and fell over.
“Rackets!”
“I’m sorry?”
“She’s ecclesial echoes,” said Lun.
“Lapsed!” hissed Naddabas. “Lapsed! I don’t believe a word of that nois-that NONSENSE anymore, but the language STICKS to you, it reall-”
“Names, please,” said the voice. “Names, homelands, business.”
“Lun. Tioloon, third quarter. Mining.”
“Naddabas, Tioloon, fifth quarter, and I suppose assisting a suicide. And yourself?”
The speaker stepped forward. All forty of him.
“Ujj six-through-forty-six,” he said. “Broodlands. Conquest.”
“Never seen one of you this far north,” said Lun.
“I could say the same,” said Ujj three. He was smiling, Lun thought. Naddabas would know for sure. Lun had never taken any of the social classes, and didn’t know how to read expressions through all those emptied eyes. She kept trying to meet his gaze and failing as the bright little orb switched from one eyesocket to the next. “Tioloon is nearly four thousand miles away. I’ve heard some of the first quarter don’t even believe in snow. How did you plan to survive up here?”
“Potatoes,” said Lun.
“And how well did that work?”
“Pretty good until we ran out of potatoes.”
The Ujj’s eyeball danced from socket to socket, and Lun guessed that meant laughter maybe. She glanced at Naddabas over her shoulder for support, but the serpent was already halfway through her second bowl of actual, honest-to-toneless potato soup without any bark at all, and didn’t seem to be in the mood to notice much of anything.
“As humorous as your optimism is, miner-to-be Lun, I suspect that you didn’t plan for that at all. You don’t eat, do you?”
Lun thought about that. “Sort of.”
“Sort of. You haven’t so much as glanced at the meal since you walked in, and you gave your companion the entire pot of your own…food… and then there’s that little bit of business I saw with the firewood. Miner Lun, would you kindly remove your coat?”
Naddabas looked up sharply and shook her head, but by then Lun was already working her way through the buttons and didn’t notice.
The room glowed red.
“Ah,” said Ujj-three. “That explains how you haven’t frozen to death yet, at any rate. May I touch it?”
Lun shrugged, and the Ujj leant forwards and carefully traced his long, barbed fingers over the seam between flesh and metal. He hissed as they approached the mouth of the furnace that sat where her belly should be, and withdrew them in a languid huff that made her think of a cat.
“Ah! Well now. That’s not a common sight. Tell me, is it fully-functional?”
Lun knew the entire rest of the conversation, but she decided she’d have it anyways. “Yes.”
“And do you have the tools to operate it at full capacity?”
“Most of them. The basics.”
“I can provide you with better. Tell me, miner Lun, are you by any chance smith-qualfied?”
“Can work all the way up to fifth quarter. Specialize in heavy machinery, have a bit of war-crafting training.”
The Ujj’s eye throbbed in its latest roost – a beetled, furrowing pit made for thinking and frowning by Lun’s guess. “Impressive. Why not sixth?”
“She’s hopeless with people,” chimed in Naddabas. “One minute she won’t talk to save your life from boredom, the next she says all sorts of nonsense that-”
“Interesting.” The Ujj wrapped his fingers around his fingers around his wrists. “Smith Lun, then. I have a proposal. You need food – and, I suspect, fuel. We are mere miles from the treeline, and once you pass it you will find nothing to sate the fire in your belly. I have food, and fuel, and an army that is in pressing need for a smith. Do you see my idea?”
Lun held her hand out.
The Ujj’s eye positively sparkled with glee. “Ah. I appreciate the gesture, smith, but you don’t want a handshake. It’s the barbs, you see – I’ve had them compared to fishhooks, but considerably sharper.”
“No shake, no deal. Mind the gloves.”
Ujj-three shook and the deal was set.
Set dead fast. Lun helped him disentangle.
“You idiot. You PHENOMENAL idiot. Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”
“Not really,” said Lun. She was watching the bobbing legs of Ujj-fourteen (thirteen?) in front of her, trying to place where he put his strange long feet in the wandering hollows of the knee-deep slush that infested the sprawling clearing the Ujj had claimed for his barracks. “Tell me.”
“Do you know anything about the Ujj?”
“Not really. Tell me.”
“Do you know what our chances are of getting out of here alive are now?”
“Not really. Tell me.”
“We’re both going to end up deader than daddy’s dear-”
Lun placed a finger to Naddabas’s lipless mouth. “No, really. Tell me.”
Naddabas bit her. Lun let her chew on her finger for a minute, then took it away.
“That tastes AWFUL.”
“You knew that. Still bit it.”
“Go shout yourself. Listen, you can trust an Ujj as far as you can throw them.”
“Pretty far? Can’t be more than a hundred and ten pounds wet.”
“I-you, not YOU-you. They’re – they’re sneaky. And they’re treacherous. You live your whole life as a little brood of a mere few thousand bodies surrounded – literally surrounded – by your elders and knowing that you’re only alive because they don’t feel like crushing you with a fifty-to-one numbers advantage, and you learn to be paranoid, trust me. Then they get kicked out into the world to make a name for themselves, and oh look, it’s full of people that don’t have thousands of bodies, and they do what bullied children do to people smaller than them. And they’ll always know more than you do because one of them knowing something means the whole brood does! We’re surrounded by more than two thousand soldiers all of which are the hands feets and EYES of a single evil little backstabbing barbpawed skinhunting bastard who’s likely out here on a crazy gloryhunt, and if any one of him thinks we’re up to something he’ll all come down on us at once!”
“Really.”
“Yes, yes, REALLY! And he WILL come down on us, because we’ll try to get away once we realize that he’s never letting us walk out of here because why would he let a perfectly good smith trek out into the snow to freeze to death when he could have her right there at home making mechanized death for him!?”
“Hmm.” Lun squinted into the gathering dark. There was a misshapen blob ahead that was supposedly a tent. “Well, we’ll think of something.”
Naddabas’s swearing was only interrupted by sleep some ten minutes later. A full belly always took her that way.
Lun carefully removed the bodysack from her back, stripped off her coat, and made a little nest for the serpent. Then she set about checking her tools. The Ujj had some real nice steel here – good stuff, maybe even blade-quality – but his forge was barely-there. Damaged supplies? Procurement mistake (no, not when the procurement officer was literally part of your own head). Who knew.
She reached down to her belly and unlatched the handle. Red light glowered.
Coal, too. Nice.
Lun fed a measured set of lumps through the hungry steel maw in her torso, felt the heat glaring inside her. It wanted out. It wanted to make things.
So she took it and pointed it and she made it so.
The sixth major battle (Naddabas called it a skirmish at best) of the Taiga War took place the next evening. Scores of Ujj on skis rushing down a sloped gully on one side, and some sort of strange, loping things that were mostly fur and teeth on the other, hurtling out of burrows in the snow. They screamed as they fought, and given the amount of punishment that they took before going down, there was an awful lot of screaming.
“If I wasn’t already damned to cacophony by doubt,” muttered Naddabas from Lun’s shoulder, “this would sure do it.”
Lun nodded, and watched as the battle began to work itself out under their eyes. The Ujj were swinging axes in two hands, great thin sweeping things halfwhere between scythe and timbersaw that moved like silk through air and limbs.
Well, in theory.
“I can’t believe you did that,” said Naddabas. “Giving them decimators – even if they’re knockoffs? Your masters would have your hide tanning in a tub.”
“They’re not.”
“Pardon?”
“Not fakes. Did the best job I could. Not shop-quality, but still.”
Naddabas’s voice dropped into the register she called ‘threatening’ and Lun called ‘funny.’ “You gave. These polite little. Psychopaths. TIOL DECIMATORS?!”
“Near enough as I could. I’d have tossed most of these out. But look – see down there?”
Naddabas craned her neck. “Where?”
Lun pointed. An Ujj (fifty?) had swung his blade, struck true, and was now being spread at increasing velocity over the nearby snow by his angry opponent.
“Ugh.”
“Should’ve cut it in half clean, or near enough. But it sticks in the bone – see the ribcage is still all in one piece? – and it doesn’t kill fast enough. They just get mad and maul you while the blade’s stuck. Close quarters, two hundred pounds of muscle and bone beats one hundred ten pounds of barbs no trouble.”
“Fascinating. If I could still throw up without putting my life at risk, I would.” She glared up at the calm gray sky. “I bet this is that stupid bird’s fault. Do you see it? I haven’t seen it since we got here. It’s never around when something like this happens. Probably hopes we’re dead.”
By now the fight was over. Most of it. Some of the wounded were still thrashing, and the Ujj put them down with long quarrels that seemed more needle than anything.
“Not bad,” said Ujj-three. He bore no decimator at his side, just the finely-serrated sword that composed the brood’s more standard armament. “Better than before at least. Not good, of course. Smith, I am somewhat disappointed.”
“Go and do better yourself then,” snapped Naddabas.
The Ujj spread his arms wide in what was probably meant to be a disarming gesture in a species less pointy. “I am interchangeable, of course, but I am well aware that outside the broodlands this is not a…commonly grasped fact. Protocol dictates a specific body should be kept as liaison for dealing with specific outlanders. It puts them more at ease.”
Naddabas stared at him for an insultingly long time. The Ujj’s body language showed a cheerfully insolent lack of impact.
Lun nodded, and turned from the battlefield. “Right. I can see what the problem is. First things first, I’ll need more supplies. Do you have any better steel?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll make do with extra.”
Naddabas hung from Lun’s left arm as she worked, swinging the tip of her nose perilously close to her friend’s furnace and back again, in and out with the rhythms of her heart.
“Watch it.”
“I can’t help it. I like the warm.”
Lun carefully maneuvered a red-hot bar of metal around her snout. “Go and eat something.”
“No. If I do that I’ll fall asleep, and I need to talk to you. We need to think of a way to get out of here.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Naddabas’s tongue tickled against the seam between Lun’s flesh and metal. “I’m entirely serious. If you win this fight for him, he’ll never let us go. If you lose it, he’ll kill us if the nasty little fuzzies don’t. And if it turns into a stalemate he might try to get persuasive. I know Ujj persuasive. They can do amazing things with those fingers.” She peered into Lun’s stomach, leaning her farthest yet. “What’re you making, anyways?”
“A way out of here.”
“Oh,” sighed Naddabas. “That’s nice.”
Six minutes later her head was limp, and Lun set up the coat-nest again before Naddabas could slide loose and fall into her furnace.
The seventh battle of the Taiga War took place three days later and twenty miles north, on the very cusp of the greenline, where the tundra began to plant its feet – the only grayer land. Tiny, withered trees strained grumpily under the weight of flying bodies living and dead, and the wind set in halfway through the day, whipping snow into even the most deeply-set eyesockets of the Ujj and clearing the way for the eighth battle of the Taiga War, which arrived quite suddenly.
“Shh,” said Naddabas, her mouth barely moving. “Shh.”
“I am shh,” said Lun quietly. She was sprawled flat on her stomach, and already the snow had half covered her. A few more minutes and they’d be invisible.
“No you aren’t. You’re breathing too much. You’re noisy.”
Lun grunted noncommittally and tried to keep her airways clear; her face had already tried to ice to the snow.
“See, there you go again. So noisy. It’s those big lungs. There’s one of them four paces away – yours, not mine – and he’s almost found you. Two more steps and you’re done.”
Lun breathed out and spoke, got ready to hold the inhalation. “Where.”
“Right. As in, not-left. He’s there in one, two ohracketshe’sfasterthanhe-”
A blurred mass of angry darkness hurtled at them through the snow, then reversed itself in midair with a meaty thud. Lun stood up and brushed herself off, then began patting down her coat.
“What are you DOING?”
“Looking for my hammer,” said Lun.
“Right pocket second from the top – honestly, I can’t be your memory all day and all night. And why should I? You’ve practically turned that thing into its own filing system!”
“I’ve been busy. I forget things.” Lun pulled out the hammer, made her way towards the sound of snarling, and found the thing pulling itself out of a snowdrift with its one working arm. It really was as much teeth as fur – they erupted from its chest, its…face. Even its knuckles were grimed with molars, and the claws that were sliding loose from their sheaths were more canine than talon.
It swung at Lun one-armed. She leaned back, then swung forwards. It went down again.
One more swing.
“I hate it when you do that,” muttered Naddabas.
“Wasn’t going to stop until we did,” said Lun.
“I still hate it.”
“True.” She reached down and disentangled the snapper from the thing’s limp arm, checked the grip on the thing for wear and tear.
“I hate those too.”
“Not nice,” Lun agreed. “Blunted, though. The teeth are hard.”
“What sick bastard thought a noose and a steel-toothed trap needed to be crossbred, then jammed on a heavy-pull quarrel?”
“Ti the mastersmith. A noble wanted a safe bear-hunting tool.”
“Did it work?”
Lun pocketed the snapper and leaned in closer, ruffled through the fur and fangs. “Until he got careless, yes.”
“Should’ve carried a hammer.”
“Most people should.”
Naddabas retreated farther into her bodysack. “Are we escaping now?”
“Shh,” said Lun, straightening up quickly. She felt her friend’s body swell to protest, then immediately deflate as Ujj-three emerged from the swirling whiteness.
“On the run,” he said. “I’ll sit tight and wait for this little piece of vexation to pass us by, then push forwards.” He patted the haft of his crossbow, adding to the maternal air he already cradled it with. “Fine work on the ammunition. I lost several hundred, of course, but that was during the counterattack. I trust you’ll have a better plan for next time?”
Lun tapped at her side, finger tickling at the base of Naddabas’s bodysack. “We will.”
“Good,” said Ujj-three. “Excellent. And as a little extra motivation to add a little extra swing to your hammer, smith…”
Lun waited politely, allowing the sentence’s tail to collapse without grace.
“… I believe that we will find ourselves at the object of your quest within the week.”
Lun stopped tapping.
Ujj-three’s attempt at a smile was earnest. The eye twinkled, it really did. Naddabas could barely look. “Oh yes. How many things are there of value out here after all, at the end of the greenery? We seek the same substance, smith Lun. Why, you are far from the first lone prospector we have found on our little expedition!”
“Lone,” said Naddabas irritably. To Lun, the single other person in the midst of the Ujj.
Lun thought for a minute. Then she thought for four more seconds than that. “Stardrops,” she said at last.
“Precisely,” said Ujj-three. “Precisely! And what good luck that we found each other!”
And he clapped her on the back hard enough to bruise and walked away.
Lun stood very still and tried not to panic. “Naddabas?” she asked.
“Here,” said a very small voice. “Just missed me. Not quite barbed enough, it seems.” A long, slow hiss slid out. “I swear, that bird’s bound to show up again any minute. It might run from trouble, but it’ll want to watch us go down squirming, mark my words. It wants to eat me.”
Lun began to breathe again. “I could kill him.”
“No no no bad idea do whatever your other idea was. They’ll know what happened.”
Lun’s hand was at her pockets again. “Not if I’m fast enough.”
“No! No. You had a plan, and we’ll do that. You DID have a plan, right?”
The smith stared into the white. “I did. Maybe.”
“Then go to it. And that’s not the right pocket.”
One week later, they reached the stardrop crater.
It wasn’t an easy fight, when you saw the terrain. Uphill to the rim, then downhill to the burrows. They had to seal those with rocks in the end just to slow them down, furry limbs heaving and shoving and gouging clawmarks through the stone.
It wouldn’t have happened without the smith, the Ujj assured them. A good job, that. They would’ve had to clamber uphill to the crater’s lip through a hail of splintered sling-stones without the smith. A massacre.
But as the smith was there, they had their armour filled with padded bark where it squeaked, and they had a thick, dark tarry oil spread over their blades where they shone, and they each held a strange shield of beaten metal which shone back everything around it – and here that was snow, whiter than a worm’s heart.
And behind those mirror-polished shields they simply walked uphill. By the time the fight started, half of it was over, without so much as a scuffle.
After that, out came the spades – once decimators, now forged into a less formal, noble shape. Half-shovel, half-rake, half-crowbar, half-halberd. They kept what you fought at arm-and-a-half’s-length while they just tried to figure out what all the bits were supposed to be, and by then they were usually dead. And once there was nothing near you, why, there was nothing for it but to shovel scree, scree, scree. The edge that bit into bone and failed to pierce it still carved through permafrost like an avalanche through furry bodies, which was precisely what it caused.
Lun and Naddabas walked well at the rear this time. They couldn’t help but notice that Ujj-three never left their side.
“Down there,” he said. “Down there is a treasure fit to raise a brood from numeral to alphabetical in a single year. To ransom a king. Oh, smith, you have delivered it to me as surely as if you’d done so on bended knee!”
“You’re welcome,” Lun said. And Naddabas didn’t say anything.
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” And the walk became a jog, then nearly a sprint. There might not have been much to the Ujj, but most of that was limbs. By the time Lun had caught up with her steady pumps, Ujj-three had stopped running.
The stardrop was smaller than she’d expected. A little over half again her height, and twice as long as that. But she knew just looking at it that there was weight there. Something so heavy it fell out of the sky and left a mark this size in fragments was a mass you used mathematics to measure, not scales.
“Beautiful,” murmured Ujj-three. He scraped at its surface with a barbed finger, watched in happy awe as it snapped in half and fell away like a pine needle. “Beautiful. That would have left a mark in granite. Beautiful.” He turned back to Lun. “Have any of Tioloon been privileged to work with stardrop before?”
“Ti the mastersmith,” said lun. “Made a decimator with it.”
“Of course, of course, of course,” the Ujj whispered. “Tell me, how did it play?”
“It took three men to lift for six seconds. They never found it again. The cleft’s still visible in the sixth quarter.”
Ujj-three laughed at that, long and loud and altogether not right. There were pitches, sounds, entire cadences in there that were not proper to hear, however personable the intent behind them. “Oh, ah me,” he said. “Ah! What fools we all become, when such wealth is at our fingertips!” Then he shook his head. “Which is why precaution is necessary. Thank you, smith.”
Lun’s hand was in motion before the last word was finished, but the Ujj was faster. However, Lun’s hand contained Naddabas.
Naddabas was considerably faster.
The noise that came out of the Ujj was the first genuinely real thing she’d ever heard from him, as it vibrated up through her fangs and out her spine. But it had one thing in common with all he’d said: it just wouldn’t stop.
“FUT UP!” she yelled past the mouthful of – flesh, possibly? – she’d embedded her teeth into. “FUT UP!”
Needle-fingers came up to tear her away, but Lun was still moving, with her other hand now, and there was the hammer after all.
One moment the eye shone with fear, the next it was gone, and Lun picked up Naddabas from the ground.
“Urgh.”
“I missed you. Don’t fuss.”
“You almost shook my teeth out.” She peered blearily up the slope, which was beginning to run downhill towards them with certain angry goals in mind. The Ujj brood had spent almost a thousand of himself to reach the skydrop, but the loss of a single one at such a juncture seemed to have made him particularly sore. “Please tell me this was part of your plan.”
Lun shrugged. “Sure.” She’d replaced her hammer and was absently rummaging through her pockets again. “You remember which pocket I kept my polish, oils, and tars in?”
“Fifth from the bottom left side,” said Naddabas. “I don’t think fluids will help.”
“No,” said Lun. “So I used them all up this morning. Had to make room.” She extracted her prize with a grunt. “Found it.”
The big sack was worn, grimy, and seemed to have been made from an unpleasant sort of leather. But Naddabas, after having spent seven years as Lun’s friend and the last two snugged into the small of her back, recognized the stains on it as familiar and comforting.
Coal.
“You’ve been burning hot all this time, haven’t you?” she said.
“Been ramping up,” the smith admitted. “Just needed the kicker.” She began to open the sack, then shook her head and began to yank at her buttons instead. “No time. Get behind the skydrop. Hurry up.”
Naddabas was already on the move, world-still-spinning though it was. The big boulder whirled in and out of either side of her vision, then upside down, and then she was corkscrewing her way underneath it. From the corner of one eye she saw Lun stuffing the sack into her gut with both hands as the frontrunner Ujj began to close with her, then her vision was filled with nothing but dirt and stone.
Then it went white and black and she woke up again, slightly singed. Lun was calling her name.
She worked her way out. It felt like someone had pan-seared her spine.
“There you are,” said Lun. “Why weren’t you behind it?”
“No legs,” said Naddabas. “Can’t move that fast. You almost got me. You almost got me! You almost SHRIEKING GOT M-”
Lun picked her up and hugged her.
“Fine,” said Naddabas. “Fine. Why didn’t you explain this part to me?”
“You hate metalworking minutia.”
Naddabas looked around the crater.
Six hundred Ujj lay flattened, crumpled to the ground by the blastwave.
“Minutia. Right. Tell me what happened.”
“Skydrops heat up fast and harden up when they heat. They get hot when they fall, it’s what makes them so heavy. Ti the mastersmith performed tests in-”
“Tell me what happened in a brief, useful, and exciting way.”
Lun shrugged as she began to walk upslope, jiggling Naddabas’s crisped tailtip in a painful way. “The fuzzies were metal caps on their teeth. Skydrop caps. Kept them sharp. The Ujj saw it and wanted to take their source. I saw it and knew the source was going to be well-used. Look at the slopes. Most of that scree is full of skydrop flakes.”
“So when you popped your doors-“
“Don’t call it that,” said Lun. She was
“Sorry, sorry, sorry… so when you popped your doors-”
“PLEASE don’t-”
“-you spontaneously superheated the entire surface of the slope they were running down.”
“Forged,” said Lun. Naddabas heard very little satisfaction in it. They were walking through the Ujj corpses now; each body reddened on the surface, seared to white and yellow fat on the underside. Wisps of steam were gently billowing from wounds surrounded by quietly re-cooled stone and cooling flesh.
“That was human skin you put in your furnace, you know,” said Naddabas.
“I know,” said Lun.
“They would’ve used you to hold coal and me for a swordhilt if you hadn’t-“
“I know.”
Naddabas sighed, a very little sound in a very large space. “Thank you again. And don’t feel so badly. Remember, this whole trip is my fault.”
“No,” said Lun. “And it was necessary. No avoiding it.”
“Well, I think that all could’ve been easier if we’d just gone home still. But at least we’ve gotten one good oh NO!” groaned Naddabas.
Lun turned around.
There, an all-too-visible blot in the distance now, perched on the heaviest of Ujj-three’s brows, crouched a large bird with a yellow back and grey wings and black tummy and bright red eyes that seemed to glare right through you. Dangling in its beak was the tiny shape of Ujj’s eye. The fires seemed to have spared its twinkle.
“Too good to be true,” muttered Naddabas. “Rackets. Let’s go home.”