SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 14: The Gate of the Gods (part 1 of 3)

The men camped with a strong wind that night, and they reached Gate of the Gods at noon the next day. The wall of black rock was composed of layer after layer of molten slag, each an inch thick. The gate was a simple arch, thirty feet tall at the center. Men had trampled the ground beneath the arch, while Mastodon Men, a type of giant carnivorous ape, had pounded off bits of the black molten slag for use as crude knives.

As the wagon crossed beneath the arch, Tull noted that Scandal inhaled deeply and seemed to stiffen with fear. Only then did Tull realize that the innkeeper had never traveled outside of his home town. He'd been drinking swigs from a bottle of wine, and now he nervously crawled onto wagon and began singing nervously, like a child trying to keep bad dreams at bay. His was a bawdy song noted for its endless verses:

Oh, with all the time I spent in jail,

I should have been a jailer,

But I love a whore in every port,

and that's why I'll stay a sailor.

Oh, I knew a girl named Dena.

She lived in old South Bay

She so loved to get naked,

She threw all her clothes away.

All the men were so happy,

they began to shout "Hooray!

"Hooray!—"

"Quiet, you foo1!" Phylomon hissed, and the blue man hurried ahead, scouting the trail.

No one spoke for much of the day as they marched.

They watched for danger, and signs were everywhere. A dozen yards on the other side of the arch, they found the fresh track of a Mastodon Man—a footprint twenty-one inches long and twelve inches wide. The redwoods were tall and dark, and their bark was often scarred and pitchy twelve feet up where sabertooths had sharpened their claws. In the perpetual gloom under the redwoods, plants grew to enormous heights. Giant ferns stood over six feet tall, and the wild raspberry had selectively bred over generations so that only those with leaves as broad as plates flourished. Moldering serpentine limbs of vine maple climbed fifty feet into the air in an effort to reach the thin sunlight that filtered down, and all the limbs trailed old man's beard.

The party traveled for hours, following a trapper's path into the mountains, before they finally found a clearing in the late afternoon where the grass was thick enough to keep the mastodon from straying in search of food.

The clearing was situated on a gently sloping hill. There, a shallow pond, muddied by wild pigs, sat in a fold near the forest floor. They parked the wagon just inside the line of trees, and Scandal and Tull unpacked while the Pwi unhooked the mastodon and cleared an area around camp.

It was still two hours to nightfall. Phylomon took his great black dragon-horn bow from the back of the wagon and strung it, fitting a loop of the bowstring over one end, bending the bow with his knee, and fitting the second loop over the other end. He reached into his quiver and took out two rectangular pieces of leather, like tents, which he fitted over the strung ends of the bow so the bowstrings wouldn't catch in the brush. "I believe I shall go hunt some swine," he said quietly, nodding toward the muddied pond where the bank was pocked with tracks.

"Do you want me to come?" Tull asked, knowing what game Phylomon stalked. "I'm handy with a spear."

"No," Phylomon said, as if grateful for the offer. "I can handle them by myself. I've done it often enough."

Scandal said in a bluster, "We've plenty of meat. I don't want to be up butchering all night!"

"I don't believe that even you know a recipe to make this particular breed of swine palatable," Phylomon told Scandal. He ducked off into a thicket of vine maple and began stalking toward the hilltop without a sound, into the deep woods where "pigs" would sleep until early evening.

"You're damned right I don't want gamey wild pigs," Scandal admitted. "but by the Blue Man's left test . . . I mean, if you kill one, bring the backstraps back. They might be all right."

Phylomon made his way up the hill so quietly that not even Scandal's squirrel would have heard him. He'd kept to the old trapper's trail all day and figured he would find sign of the Goodman boys to one side. The only sounds were the occasional rap of a woodpecker in a distant tree and the drone of bees. Far away, the snarl of a scimitar cat echoed through the hills.

A hundred yards into the woods, it was so dark that the heavy brush dissipated for lack of sunlight. The ground was pocked and furrowed where wild pigs had rummaged for mushrooms. Phylomon found cat prints larger than his hand with his fingers spread wide, and on a branch he found a tuft of yellow-white hair from a sabertooth. The hair was dry and old, and from the bones that moldered beneath the redwood needles, it looked as if the sabertooth had killed a moose calf here in the spring.

He followed the trail, walking north of it a hundred, two hundred yards, scouting the ground for human tracks. It did not take long to find them in the thick humus. The ground was springy, covered with leaf mold. In these woods, a walker could hide his sound, but not his tracks.

Phylomon deduced that the men had watched them strike camp, then headed away. The slavers had been kind—they'd even marked their trail here and there with bits of bright yellow cloth so they could follow it by torchlight. They'd scrambled over fallen redwoods, waded through dense ferns. Phylomon followed them.

A mile from camp he found a small hill where he could watch a trail that wound down into a bowl-shaped valley. Phylomon crouched by a blackened log and placed a small convex mirror in the bark above him so he could watch his back.

Fear. I taste your fear, the blue man's skin said to him.

Phylomon's muscles began to twitch in tiny electric jerks. Phylomon often told others that his skin was a symbiote, but he did not tell them how intelligent the being was, nor did he tell them of its powers.

"Gireaux, my old friend," Phylomon whispered. "We have strong enemies."

Kill? Shall I kill them? the symbiote asked.

"We shall fight them together," Phylomon answered. "Weave your armor about me now and prepare to strike. Feed from me. You must be strong for this fight."

Dizziness struck as the symbiote began to feed.

Phylomon's heart raced. He could feel the creature drain him, siphoning his energy. His skin began to darken. The symbiote was stretching, drawing static energy from the air. It was a good day for it—storm clouds scudded across the sky. He felt his skin tighten, binding him as if in leather, and the symbiote tightened his eardrums, tuning them to the small sounds of the woods.

Phylomon sat, and for a time he replayed a memory in his mind. When he was young, he'd loved a woman, one of the poor short-lived temporaries. He'd been taking drugs to enhance his learning abilities at the time, so he recalled every moment of his youth. He replayed the memory of a visit he'd made to this forest with his wife. It had been in his youth, just after he'd led the Neanderthals in the attack that decimated the Slave Lords in Bashevgo. Those had been happy times, for Phylomon believed then that he'd destroyed the slavers forever.

The trees had been young, their trunks narrower. He'd made love to his wife in a bed of ferns, and they'd watched Thor rise. Green storm clouds had played across the face of the tan moon, strung out like pearls on a necklace, and when blue Freya had risen and overtaken Thor in its flight, the two moons shone from behind a banded cloud and colored the sky like opal.

Phylomon replayed that night, perhaps for the thousandth time. In a way, though his wife was long dead, she remained immortal within him.

Phylomon heard the slavers from Smilodon Bay long before he saw them. They'd sent a scout, a large fellow in a green tunic and tan pants.

Phylomon made sure that the man saw him, by walking about and stretching in a patch of sunlight, then sat down in a bed of ferns. The scout immediately dropped upon spotting Phylomon, then went crawling back to the others.