C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“All I have to do.” Pyetr started to suggest Uulamets could do it himself, but Uulamets said, clamping down hard on his arm,

“Failing which—I give nothing for any of our lives, do you understand me? I will not sleep tonight, but I can hold out only so long. Pay attention!” Uulamets said as he opened his mouth a third time, and the grip was all but painful. “You will go out at that hour, you will take the things I give you—you will do exactly as I tell you. Both of you.”

Chasing after the vodyanoi when it was on the retreat at the knoll was one thing; stalking it on its own terms was quite another. He truly wanted to say no.

But if they lost Uulamets, he admitted to himself, he did not trust the sword that much, and, unhappily, there seemed no way for an old man, a boy, and a ghost to do much against a thing like that, either, without the sword and some fool to use it.

“Well,” he said, and scratched a prickling feeling at the nape of his neck when Uulamets had told him the simple details, “lead it up to the porch. How fast is it?”

“Very,” Uulamets said. “I wish I could tell you that exactly.”

“You’re sure it won’t cross your line.”

“It shouldn’t,” Uulamets said.

So they all went out onto the porch at the first of the dawn, himself and Sasha and Uulamets and Eveshka, Sasha with one of Uulamets’ precious pots in hand and his own instructions, namely to stay step for step with him down the walk-up, then to duck down underneath immediately as they reached the bottom and stay there.

“Just stay out of my way when I come back,” Pyetr said to Sasha as they reached that point. “I’ll be coming fast.”

He earnestly hoped so, at least, as he made the lonely walk across the yard to the dead trees and the beginning of the path they took down to the river for water. The river, Uulamets said, was the best place to attract the thing.

Certainly, Pyetr thought.

A nocturnal creature like the vodyanoi was a little dim-sighted, Uulamets had said, where it regarded things unmagical; and therefore the small bracelet Pyetr wore about his right wrist, braided from a lock of Eveshka’s hair, would shine like a lamp, Uulamets swore, so far as the vodyanoi was concerned—

Uulamets said walk slowly down to the river.

Uulamets said dip the bracelet into the water and be on his guard.

God, it was dark down there.

Sasha shivered in his hiding place, his knees going numb against the ground, while he peered out into the dark and waited.

And waited, what seemed an ungodly long time.

Pyetr would be coming fast when he came up the hill, that was the plan: attract the thing right up onto the porch, which was the highest point they could lure it; and right there, right beyond the fence and across the road, was the gap in the trees where the first rim of the sun always showed and always cast its first light on the house.

Master Uulamets had the end and the sides of the walkway up to the porch secured with a dusting of salt and sulphur; and his own post was here, with another jar of the same, when Pyetr should come racing up that walkway with the creature in pursuit.

His own job was to dash out then and draw one line with the salt and sulphur to seal the trap.

That was the plan.

But he very much wished, as he sat shivering in his hiding-place, that Uulamets had set his trap a little closer to the river, and he hoped that Pyetr would not take any chances.

There was a sudden, a clearly audible splash. He heard Pyetr yell.

And nothing else.

PYETR COLLECTED himself on his feet, his sword still in his hand, by some presence of mind he would not have credited in himself. He could see, in the faint sky-sheen on the water, vast ripples where the thing had gone back under. He hoped to the god it had gone back—whatever had come lunging up out of the water right for his face—a horse, a snake, or something huge, dark, and wet that no rational man could ever admit seeing, involving, his shocked memory recollected, a vast array of teeth.

His legs began to shake under him. The tremor spread to his arms and his hands and he was ashamed of himself for that, but not very: it was time, he thought, to make a sensible retreat—the more so because for one very dangerous moment he had lost track of it. For that lapse he was honestly vexed with himself, and anxious, seeing the huge wallow in the clay where it might have slipped back into the river. He hoped it had.

He had been scrambling for his life at that moment. He had never seen anything so fast, never expected it to be out of the water in one move—the wallowed track went as far as the brush; and to his chagrin he realized that that brush went as far as the stand of dead willows between himself and the boat dock and the road.

That same run of brush likewise edged the trail to the house. That was both ways up, the only two routes to safety that he had, cut off if it had gotten past him onto shore, and right now he could not swear it had not.

“Pyetr!” he heard. Sasha’s frightened voice, from up the hill. He was afraid to answer. He was afraid to move from where he was, on his narrow strip of shore between the brush and the river, and he had no idea which direction to watch first.

“Pyetr!”

God, he thought, the boy was coming down.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted.

And saw a liquid darkness flow across that hillside trail, hip-high to a man.

It put itself between him and the house.

It lifted its head then and began to slither and heave sideways down the slope toward him.

“Sasha!” he yelled, gripping his sword, and thinking wildly of a dive for the river—but the river was where it was most powerful. “It’s on the trail! Look out!”

It gathered speed, it changed its shape and size as it came, smaller and faster. He poised himself to dodge if only it reared up the way it had before, but it was not doing that: its coils rubbed along the trunks of dead trees and slithered wider again as it came.

He jumped the thing, trod a soft back and sprang for the path, but its tail whipped around and hit him with a force that knocked him back against the brush.

Its face came around toward him then, all teeth, and he hit it a blow with the sword edge, which it did not like: it reared up and turned its glistening dark head toward a crashing in the brush, a high, shouted, “Here I am!”

Pyetr’s head was still ringing. He thought he had heard that, and he heaved himself for his feet with all the strength he had left, no wit, just a straight double-handed attack, as the vodyanoi hissed like a spilled kettle and reared up, breaking branches, screaming when he hit it, still screaming as he kept on hitting it for all he was worth.

It shrank, smaller and smaller until it was only man-sized, a withered creature dusted in pale powder, and Sasha was suddenly in the fray with a stout stick in his hands, clubbing it while it howled.

It was too tough to stab. Pyetr gave up trying and simply hit as hard and as often as he could, afraid it was going to recover and kill both of them.

“Get out of here!” he yelled at the boy.

Which Sasha did not; Sasha kept hitting it, too, yelling, “Keep it from the river!”

At which time Uulamets arrived and pinned it to the ground with the butt-end of his staff in the middle of its back, while the creature whined and clawed at its own now-manlike face, whimpering and rubbing its eyes.

Pyetr staggered over to a tree to catch his breath, aching from head to foot, while Sasha grabbed hold of him and asked him was he all right.

Honestly he was far from sure. He was trying only to get enough breath to stand upright, and simultaneously to watch Uulamets and the creature on the shore.