Deomans of Faerel Read online

  So, this is it? This is Faerel?

  She noticed something else, something she just assumed was a part of the transference process, the crossing over. All around her, clinging to practically everything in sight, Claire spied barely perceptible dotted lines. Each line gave off a soft glow of a different color. They were very hard to see, but they were everywhere—in the form of webs strung from tree to tree, trailing insects and birds in sparkling streams of glitter, emanating up from the ground in waves.

  From her chest sprouted a very thin one of purest silver. It rose high up into the air where it disappeared. She reached out to grab it and found she could not. Her fingers passed through it as if it were not even there.

  The astral strand. “Wow,” she said softly. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to be able to see that.”

  She looked about. Where was everyone? Where the hell was she, for that matter, and how was she supposed to figure out where to go and what to do next? The woodsman must have been a part of it all, but he was nowhere to be seen. Surely he had not left her alone? In the back of a vegetable cart? Like some kind of… of…

  She caught sight of her arms and legs. They were withered, grotesquely thin and brown like the twisted bark of a dying tree. She held her hands before her face and gasped. Each looked like a bundle of twigs.

  “My god, I’m a scarecrow.”

  “Good morning,” the same jovial voice proclaimed near the side of the cart.

  Claire skittered back with a rustle.

  “Now, don’t get too excited,” the woodsman said, gathering up clumps of mossy leaves that had fallen from her head. She noticed a faint harmony of high-pitched voices and suddenly realized the tiny things fluttering about his head were not butterflies at all but a whirling gaggle of iridescent creatures that looked like tiny children.

  He held out his hand. What was in his palm could have easily passed for a wad of pale green hair.

  “There now. See what you’ve done? You’re going to lose all your color before I can get you to market.”

  His face took on a strange charge and his eyes swelled. He grabbed her by the forearm. The pixies dashed away in a startled buzz.

  “Hey, now! You wouldn’t have any plans of leaving, would you?” Then the madness in his eyes shifted and he nearly broke apart with laughter. “Leaving!” This time he did laugh, heartily. But he held firmly onto her arm, painfully scraping lose the uppermost layer of flaky epidermis that was her skin. “Get it? Leaving?”

  Claire fought against him. She tried to pull away but was powerless to do so. The weakened condition in which she had arrived had not improved and she could do little more than keep herself from being pulled right out of the cart by the frightfully deranged man.

  Perhaps this was it. Perhaps this was as strong as she would ever be. He shook her a few times and more of the green clumps fluttered about.

  He released her. The sadistic spasm apparently over, he simply pushed her and she toppled back into the pile of turnips, collapsing like a folding chair. She felt nauseas but held her composure. This time she did not try to get up.

  The woodsman did nothing to restrain her, fearful, perhaps, that he would leave more marks on her body. Where he had grabbed hold of her had already flaked away leaving a smooth patch of much lighter-colored wood exposed. The spot ached like a sunburned bruise and looked very unlikely to ever heal properly.

  Surrounded now by stinking skins and sun-swollen turnips, Claire closed her eyes and gave in to the jumbled swaying movements of the cart as it passed noisily over the uneven road stones. She flopped and clattered about, clanking against the floorboards like a discarded topiary, the haughty whistling of the woodsman and the clang of the cowbell ringing in her ears.

  She hadn’t signed up for any of this. Or had she? She couldn’t remember and, for the moment, didn’t really care to. She squeezed her eyes shut, milking sparkles out of them, and tried to slow her breathing. The woodsman was taking her somewhere, but she just wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere she could disappear all over again.

  A sharp stinging pain flashed at the base of her skull. The blue sky dissolved away in an instant and everything went black. There was a crackling sound like electricity, and then a blank field of white opened up around her.

  “Come hear often?” a scratchy voice near her knees inquired. She glanced down. She jumped back when she saw an emaciated chicken looking up at her with big round eyes.

  There was just no other explanation. It was Uncle Clucker, the feature character from one of her favorite childhood Net programs. The old yard bird looked scrawny and slovenly. Across his bright-white suit of feathers were several patches where nothing but pimpled pink flesh showed through. Feathered arms ended in the traditional four-fingered hands, one of which grasped the stub of a thick cigar. A wispy plume of purplish smoke clung to its ashen tip.

  Beneath big blue eyes poked a crooked beak of vivid banana-yellow, the surface of it stippled like the skin of a plastic orange. A wrinkled blob of pink flesh jiggled beneath. His only clothes were a grimy pinstripe vest and an electric-blue conductor’s hat. Through the top poked a cluster of feathers, one or two slightly bent over.

  What the hell is he doing here? She put her hands to her head. “Great, now I know I’ve gone completely bonkers.”

  “What makes you say that?” the wiry chicken asked with genuine sincerity.

  Claire could think of nothing to say in response. Of course, she thought. Why would anyone expect a CG chicken to think anything strange about this?

  “Nevermind,” she said. But how was she doing this? Back on Earth she had her netplant. How could she possibly be accessing information over—

  “Look, Claire, this is real.” The chicken insisted. “This is all real. I know you’ve been screwed in the past but you have to accept the fact that you are here and that this is happening.” He paused, scratching his head. “And that you are a tree.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “No, seriously. You are a tree, Claire. More specifically, a hamadryad.”

  “Wha… what the bloody hell is a hamadryad?”

  “A hamadryad is a tree that can walk around and… well, why don’t I just explain it to you like this…”

  There was the sound of an old projector and the distorted rambling of old-timey music. And then a full orchestra took over as the crisp, white field dissolved, revealing a panoramic meadow agush with windblown flowers.

  “The hamadryad…” a very proper and overly annunciating man’s voice said, “…supernatural creatures capable of appearing as both a tree and as a person.”

  The image zoomed along the meadow as if shot from a helicopter. It slowed as it neared the edge of a thick forest, centering on one lone tree that looked something like an oak. “In its tree form, the hamadryad looks like any other tree you might find in the woods. Careful now! That tree is a hamadryad!”

  The camera zoomed in, skimming the bark of the tree, down past its roots and into the soil. A black-and-white image popped into frame, a grainy animated sketch of the roots of a tree. A coiled section of the root bed bulged and flashed. The music shifted.

  “The hamadryad begins its life in the roots of other hamadryads nearing the end of their years. They develop as a polyp and take one full season to mature.”

  Great, Claire thought. I’m a hemorrhoid. The animation morphed to show the roots of the tree pushing the polyp up toward the surface of the soil.

  “Once mature, the polyp is forced to the surface where, with any luck, it emerges into the world of the living.” The crudely sketched polyp unfolded into the shape of a new tree, then the image dissolved back into a realistic image of the same tree the whole spiel had started with. “Thus, the life cycle of the tree-spirit is renewed.”

  More images appeared, each as cheesy as the next. But the gist of the information got through. All in all, Claire learned that hamadryads were tree spirits that could take the form of either a tree or a person, depending on their curr
ent reserves of energy. They could also communicate with other trees, and in doing so send chained messages across long distances.

  There was one more thing: when threatened, hamadryads could instantly drain vast amounts of energy from any living creature by simply placing all of its fingers on the victim. This engorgement of energy resulted in a transformation that temporarily gave the hamadryad a near-perfect humanlike appearance that could last for months.

  Have to remember that one.

  The images stopped coming and the field of white light returned. It was a lot of information, but Claire discovered it was all still there, all solidly stored in her head as if she had taken months to memorize every single word and image.

  “You know…” she said with a smirk, “this all feels very much like I’m accessing my old netplant.”

  The chicken shrugged. “The transference process. You know. Somehow all of the stuff that was you got jumbled up and translated into a new you over here.” He lifted his shoulders. “Hey, don’t ask me. But if I was to show up here with some kind of gland in my noggin that made it so that I could, oh, access and record information on just about anything, I wouldn’t be asking too many questions.”

  Claire smiled, eying the bird suspiciously. “Okay then. Right. So… how do I use this thing? I mean, it feels different.”

  “Yeah, kinda weird, ain’t it?” The chicken bit the end from a cigar and then fumbled with an oversized lighter. “You don’t mind, do ya?”

  “Be my guest.” At this point she didn’t even care if he was there at all. She had a million and one questions to ask, points of reference to make and then cross reference. But she immediately sensed that this was going to be different.

  “Don’t work that way over here,” Uncle Clucker said, puffing away to gain ignition. “You ain’t using the old brain-bug anymore. You don’t have it. It don’t exist.”

  Claire felt panicky. “Then… then what the bloody hell is—”

  “Shhh. Just relax. Like I said, it’s a special gland. What you saw was a just a preview, a teaser. But it basically works like your old netplant. Only where this one connects I have no idea.”

  She felt a slight pain in her head. “I think something’s wrong.”

  “Nah. You just have to get used to this thing, like anything else. Over time you’ll get much better and can stay in here longer.”

  The pain sharpened into a knifey warning.

  “I have to get out now, don’t I?”

  The field of white fizzled away. Once again she found herself looking up into a bright blue sky and smelling dead animal pelts. Something snapped painfully against the flesh of her shoulder. She winced and rolled woozily over.

  The maniacal woodsman glared down at her from his perch atop the cart bench, the ends of the reigns in his hands like a whip.

  “Stay down back there!” he growled. “Don’t want anyone catching sight of you. Asking stupid questions.” He turned his attention back to the road, the pixies still buzzing about his head like a swarm of dayglo gnats.

  The information she had gathered while in the pseudo-net gave her a dangerous idea. If she could just find the strength to roll over the edge of the cart, she could plunge her feet into the soil. She needed to root. It was the only way she was going to regain her strength. She knew that now. But she had no idea how long she needed to do so in order to gain enough strength for movement. She could succeed only to find herself trapped and unable to move at all, possibly even losing consciousness altogether.

  The opportunity finally came a few hours later when the cart suddenly pitched down and came to a grinding halt, causing the turnips to tumble about. Claire heard the sound of water flowing beneath the cart, its fragrant scent teasing her senses, begging to be supped up.

  “Damn it all,” she heard the woodsman say. Creaking wood told her the evil little man must have climbed down to free the cart from wherever it had become snagged.

  This was it. Her one and only chance.

  She reached up, squeezing every ounce of energy she could muster, and grabbed hold of the cart rails. With a titanic amount of effort, she pulled her head up and peered over the side, trying not to rustle too much in the process.

  The cart was stuck in the middle of a shallow stream, slightly pitched over on the side where she lay. The woodsman was somewhere on the other side snorting and huffing as he struggled to free the stuck wheel. Only a few feet below, the gurgling waters of the stream flowed beneath the cart and into a deeper crevasse that slinked across a scraggly knoll.

  “You will… floats,” a tiny voice said.

  At first she thought it must have been her own voice, or maybe some perverted version of Uncle Clucker. But she wasn’t sure the chicken could appear to her in a conscious state. This had to be something else entirely.

  “You are… dries, so dries,” the shaky, almost whispering voice came to her. She gasped when she realized the voice had come from one of the turnips that had tumbled near her. Two beady black eyes like watermelon seeds blinked up at her.

  “Are you… are you speaking to me?”

  “Water… the stream… jumps… jumps whiles you still can! You will floats!”

  She saw them now, the other turnips. The bottom of the cart was a death camp of dying vegetables piled on top of one another, each of them softly moaning, their skins swollen and flaking under the incessantly grilling suns.

  Mustering every remaining ounce of energy, she grabbed the talking vegetable in one hand and pulled herself up and over the edge. She made a hell of a noise as she tumbled over the side, sounding something like a Christmas tree tossed from a balcony. The pixies whined as she splooshed down into the cool, rushing water.

  She nearly convulsed with shock. The water was so refreshing, so soothing, seeping into her thirsty wood-skin. Overcome by a sudden state of euphoria, she gave in to the current and lay back against the water, floating, allowing it to pull her along as if she were nothing more than an origami sailboat. She felt herself dip down over a slick crest of rocks, picking up speed, when something went terribly wrong.

  The blade of the axe fell ruthlessly into her skull. A searing wave of pain exploded through her body. Deeply embedded into one cheekbone, the blade held firm as the woodsman dragged her limp body from the babbling waters and up onto the muddy bank.

  He glared down at her, a burning rage in his eyes.

  “No sense in trying something like that again, Missy!” he growled. “A fine life of luxury I had in mind for ya, a splendid respite in some nobleman’s home. But now it’s the scrapheap for ya! Nothing left but to make a good batch of kindling out of ya for the next wintering!”

  He stepped down onto her head and heaved, leaning back to pry the blade free. It came loose with a sucking noise. He tossed the axe aside and reached down to grab her by the shoulders. Claire immediately brought both hands up and grabbed him firmly by the wrists.

  What happened next could not be prevented. Claire could no more stop it from happening than keep her own heart from beating. Some kind of primitive reflex took over and a powerful surge rushed up from the pit of her stomach, through her torso, and into her arms as her fingernails plunged deep into the soft flesh of the woodsman’s wrists.

  The man shrieked in agony, the pixies scattering as his face lit up in a violent rush of pain. He fumbled and jerked, sobbing as he jerked backwards, but no matter how hard he tried he could not break free from her tenacious grasp.

  Claire felt the eyes roll back in her head as all the pain melted away in a whoosh. A warmness filled her, ebbing sweetly through her body like warm honey. The despondent agony that had plagued her since her arrival dissolved, washed away in a gush of climactic bliss and sinusoidal harmony.

  She opened her eyes and nearly wretched at the sight of the shriveled shape still stuck to her fingertips. She quickly shoved the puckered carcass aside. The lifeless husk rattled to the ground like a sack of moldy twigs, collapsing in a grisly heap.

  The cow-thin
g stumbled forward, jerking the cart free. It looked back at the cart and then over at Claire as if utterly surprised it had managed to free itself. And then it simply broke into a trot and tromped off down the road.

  But Claire was incredulously stronger now, her mind and reflexes razor sharp. She sprang forward and chased after the cart. Within a few strides she caught up to it, leapt nimbly onto the sideboard. She climbed onto the bench to gather up the reigns.

  Of course, she didn’t really know what to do next. She’d seen movies, really old movies, where dusty chaps grabbed the reigns of runaway wagons and pulled. Which is just what she did. Miraculously, it worked. The floundering cow-thing came to a stop at a point where the cobbled road split into two, one length leading off down a long stretch that divided two fields, the other veering off in the other direction where it crossed a covered bridge about a hundred meters away before climbing and disappearing into thick woods.

  The woods, Claire thought. Somehow he knew to find me there. She spotted a shovel laying on the floorboards, beside it some chains and a box of crude tools. He must have… dug me up. Dug me up from the ground.

  A buzzing ignited and she realized the pixies were now swarming around her head. But they were not attacking, only flittering and cavorting merrily about their newfound playground. One flew to within inches of her face and she was able to catch a glimpse. Incredibly, it looked very much like a small naked girl with neon-pink skin and iridescent wings like a dragonfly. For its size, its eyes were large and profoundly emotive.

  For the time being she decided to ignore them. She also decided to keep the cart. It wasn’t all that difficult to drive. The cow-thing didn’t seem to have the energy to pull too fast and was easily steered from left to right with a simple tugging of the reigns in either direction. She took her time, guiding the beast and the cart over the covered bridge and up the gentle slope that lead into the woods. Somehow, the woods just seemed a natural spot to hide until she could figure out where she was.