C. Cherryh - Chernevog

Shapeshifters, Pyetr thought. In the god knew what shape. One could come up to the house in Uulamets’ likeness. Or Sasha’s. Or his. And Babi, who could recognize such things, had been with them. Babi had growled at the bannik, if that meant anything. He slogged through a boggy low spot, keeping his balance against Volkhi’s side. “I’ll tell you,” he said, between breaths and struggles after footing, “you say you daren’t doubt anything. I can, remember? Doubting’s a talent of mine. I doubt everything’s all right. I doubt we know what we’re doing. I doubt we’re going to find anything in the old snake’s hole, and I doubt my wife’s in her right mind, does that add it up?”

“It seems to,” Sasha confessed.

The river trail dwindled to a track under dead trees and degenerated into a brushy bog. Sasha clung to Volkhi’s back, his head buzzing with exhaustion and river-murmur. Time seemed muddled. He wished Volkhi and Pyetr to sure footing where it existed—there was no hope of following Babi, who had no sense about taller folk or obstacles Babi could pop past. Blink! and he was the other side, or halfway up a hill, or wherever Babi wanted to be, puzzled because no one had followed, no matter they were half dead of exhaustion and snagged in thorns.

“Babi!” Sasha called, wishing him to find ’Veshka, if nothing else, go to her, stay with her—but Babi paid no attention. Babi kept coming and going in his usual way, regardless of wishes. And from time to time he turned up on Volkhi’s rump, when the going got damp, to sit until they reached drier ground.

Wrong, Sasha kept thinking, desperately wrong to have come this way: recent rains had made the trail worse than the maze it was. He desperately wished them strength to keep going, wished Volkhi not to take him under branches, wished ways through this maze of dead ends and soft ground where Pyetr swore and stumbled knee-deep in water.

“It’s worse and worse,” Pyetr complained.”God, it’s a damn swamp!”

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said; but it hardly helped now. He called up more and more of their strength, telling himself he was more use on Volkhi’s back than struggling along afoot—he scarcely had his wits about him now as it was, and bit by bit the well-wishing he could do, using up strength and warmth from their bodies, would wear them down to cold and chills; it would kill them if he kept it up.

“I think we should stop,” he said, and let go his wishing slowly, argument enough, he was sure, for Pyetr to feel the truth of it in his bones. But:

“We can make the cave,” Pyetr said.

“The cave! God, we can’t get that far! If we did we can’t deal with him tonight.” He let everything go, and ached like winter in every bone. “I can’t keep us going, Pyetr.”

“I can,” Pyetr said, and took Volkhi’s reins in hand and led him, to Sasha’s dismay. The god only knew what strength Pyetr was going on now, swearing and struggling for footing in the morass he had advised them into, while he sat safe and dry on Volkhi’s back.

“Wait,” he said, wished Volkhi to a halt and slid down from Volkhi’s bare back into ankle-deep water. The baggage came off with him. “God,” he muttered in disgust and heaved the dripping packs up onto Volkhi’s back—but lifting them took more out of him than he expected, and he leaned trembling against Volkhi’s shoulder while his head spun, the whole due of his well wishing suddenly come down on him with a vengeance.

Pyetr walked back, laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, slapped Volkhi commiseratingly on the neck. “We both walk,” Pyetr said in a ghost of his own voice. “Volkhi’s done enough the last two days. Let him carry the packs, that’s all.”

“He can carry you,” Sasha objected, struggling after Pyetr as Pyetr led Volkhi ahead of him. “At least you don’t have to lead him! I can wish him, just let him go!” But even such simple wishes came with difficulty to his muddled wits, confused and scattered like so many birds. “Pyetr, we’re both taking for granted ’Veshka’s being a fool—but what if she’s not? What if she knows something we don’t? Maybe we ought to trust her. We don’t know what we’re walking into. Stop!”

“We’re not assuming anything,” Pyetr’s hoarse voice said out of the dark ahead of him. “We’re going up there to find out, aren’t we?”

Pyetr never had blamed him in all of this; Pyetr had never asked anything of him but answers he did not know how to give, and help he could not find—at least not in themselves any longer;

Pyetr just assumed his wizardry had failed and did not blame him for that either—

“Damn,” Pyetr gasped, and caught his balance, bent over as Sasha reached him, hauling his foot free of some underwater hole or root. He leaned against Volkhi a moment shaking his head and catching his breath in a coughing fit before he began to walk again.

Thorns and branches closing about them, leshys standing still and tall as trees…

Leaves falling in sunlight, a golden carpet on the ground…

Visions crowded in, brighter than the real night around him, filled with omen. Sasha panted after breath, tried from moment to moment to summon up strength where they most needed it. A night might seem to go on forever—but it had an end. This trail did. Only get to higher ground and they could rest, Pyetr surely thought they would get their second wind, Pyetr was that much stronger, he would go as long as he could push himself—

But Pyetr coughed, Pyetr swore in gasps and staggered and hurt himself and said, finally: “Dammit, Sasha, can you possibly give us some help here?”

“I can’t. There isn’t any more. We’ve gotten as far as we can, Pyetr.”

Pyetr just kept walking. Sasha did. His sense of direction was going, and he fended brush from his eyes in one long giddy confusion of hills and branches. He wished Pyetr’s cough to stop, stealing a little of his own strength and Volkhi’s to do it: dammit, he was nine years younger than Pyetr, at least his legs ought to hold up—if only he had spent less of his recent years at the books, if only, somewhere, he had learned to draw on himself the way Pyetr did, the only magic an ordinary man had to keep him going—while a wizard learned only, desperately, how to stop that kind of wish.

A wizard could never want things beyond reason: a wizard could kill someone… He hated his failure. He hated being less than Pyetr. That found a little more strength in his body than he had thought he had. He tried to find advice in Uulamets’ memories—

But he recalled Chernevog’s instead: Nature can’t work against itself. But magic, pure magic, has no such limits.

It took all a wizard’s magic to move so much as a pebble against nature: once or twice in a lifetime, master Uulamets had said, a wizard past his childhood could work a real spell—

If—

If he wished something magical with a child’s simplicity.

Or a rusalka’s ruthless single-mindedness—

God, I do know how. I do know how—

And we can’t, we daren’t, I won’t.

They climbed a bank to dry ground, moved as shadows in a starlit maze of white, peeling trunks, came down again to bog and brush. River-sound grew distant, a faint murmur out of the dark, beneath the dry rattle of limbs in the wind. “You ride,” Sasha urged Pyetr, again, panting for breath, but Pyetr refused— the foot was fine, Pyetr said, he had not hurt himself, he was only glad to get Volkhi to solid ground. “Can’t be that far,” Pyetr said, leaning on his knees a moment. “I don’t ever remember it being this far.”

Sasha thought, We’re not going to find Eveshka tonight. She doesn’t want to be found, she doesn’t want us to catch her.