Grimoire: Tracked by Terror

“Jarvey!” Betsy’s voice shook from fear and tension. Jarvey couldn’t reply. The snakes had them penned in against the fence. Two gray-green cobras, their hoods spread and their yellow evil eyes sharp, had closed in behind them, and the other six arranged themselves in a deadly ring. All of them were huge, eight or ten feet from nose to tail, and all reared their hooded heads up three feet or more above the ground. Jarvey could hear them hissing, could see their black forked tongues flicking in and out of their fanged mouths, could even smell the musty, sour scent of them.

He broke off Two of the snakes, the two toward the street, were backing away, swaying as they did so. Their heads jerked strangely, almost as if they were gesturing for Jarvey and Betsy to come after them. The ones behind Jarvey and Betsy darted forward. Betsy said, “I—I think they want us to follow them.”

“No,” Jarvey said. “They’re driving us. Don’t get too close to them. They aren’t friendly.” He and Betsy took a couple of steps forward, and the ring of snakes slithered to move along with them, the advance ones backing away, the ones at the side and to the rear following their every movement. People were out, but the moment the snakes and the two young people moved out of the alley and into the street, everyone just melted away, back into the shops and buildings. No one yelled or seemed surprised. They all simply turned away, averting their gazes, and slipped out of sight. Jarvey had the creepy feeling that the people had seen this kind of thing happen before, and that they knew where the cobras were taking them.

Once in the street, six of the cobras spread out behind Jarvey and Betsy. The two “leaders” turned and slithered forward, up the cobbled hill, toward the park. “What are they doing?” Betsy asked.

Jarvey couldn’t get over how quickly everyone had fled the streets. The place was like a ghost town, as if word of the snakes had raced ahead. They reached the park gates, and the line of snakes behind them drove them inside. When they came to a fork in the grassy lane, the cobras forced them to the left, away from the onion-domed towers of the palace.

They didn’t go far. A tall wall, looking like stucco, sealed off one side of the park. The lane led to an iron-barred wooden gate. One of the gorillas in armor stood beside the wall, head lowered, glowering at them. As they approached, the creature pushed the gate open and gestured toward it. “What are you doing?” Jarvey asked, thinking that maybe, just maybe, animals could talk here.

Before Jarvey could yell a warning, she broke into a run and hurtled through the open gate. The snakes didn’t seem to mind, and the gorilla simply watched her pass by. So Jarvey ran too, rushing through the opening. Behind him, the gorilla slammed the gate with a hollow boom.

“Come on,” Betsy said from up ahead. On that side of the wall the lane had become a narrow, winding path leading into a dense tropical forest. Trees reared up to the sky, their limbs overhung with vines. Birds screeched and chattered, and the air zinged with a million insect sounds.

Jarvey groaned. He’d been so frightened by the deadly snakes that for a moment he’d forgotten the book. “You’re right. What do you think we should do?”

Easier said than done. They couldn’t always stay within sight of the barrier, because the underbrush grew thick and dense off to their left. Jarvey felt bewildered, on the verge of panic. Moving from the theater of Junius Midion to the ship and then the town had been disorienting enough, but this wandering in the wilderness threw his sense of direction completely off. They had to pick their way through the trees and brush, and now and again some animal bellowed or howled in the distance. The air felt as thick and wet as steam. Moisture dripped from the leaves, like a slow rain, and when a drop splashed Jarvey’s neck or face, it felt almost as warm as blood.

As they pushed on, the trees on either side of them crowded thicker and darker, and the trailing vines looped down as if trying to slow their progress. Finally they hit a thicket they couldn’t force their way through, a tangled barrier of thorny vines and interwoven saplings. “No good,” Betsy panted. “We’d need saws and axes to cut our way through this mess.”

Jarvey shook his head. “I got lost about five minutes after they threw us out,” he confessed. He squirmed. He didn’t like the heavy, humid gloom under the trees, or the sense that the screeching, yowling animal sounds had been coming closer. They climbed over the tortuous roots of a huge tree with a lumpy, knotted trunk, its dark gray bark deeply grooved in an odd diamond pattern. “Let’s rest,” Jarvey said.

They sat on one of the gnarled roots, and Betsy leaned back, squinting up into the green canopy overhead. “If we could only see the sky, we might have some sense of direction. We could at least judge the time.”

Jarvey felt frozen. Two round lumps on the trunk of the tree had split, and the splits had widened. Vast eyes, pale woody brown with black pupils, gazed at him without any trace of emotion. Beneath the eyes a horizontal slash opened—a mouth of sorts—and in a weirdly creaking voice, the tree spoke: “The hunt has begun. The Nawab has entered the forest.”

They trudged on, winding between stands of trees, pausing every so often to listen for sounds of pursuit. Hours dragged by, a long, dreary time of trying to find a passageway through the forest, backtracking, and trying again—long, exhausting, frustrating work. They heard nothing but the clamor of birds and the buzz and rattle of insects. “This is hopeless,” Jarvey gasped. “We don’t know which way were going. We don’t know where the Nawab is. We don’t even—”

A clatter of wings and an explosion of high-pitched shrieks burst out not far away. Jarvey spun around and saw a dozen or more bright green birds speeding through the trees, dodging the trunks and banking to the left and right as they fled some disturbance. One of the birds wheeled sharply in the air and landed on a branch just above Betsy’s head, ruffling its feathers and shaking its wings. It was the color of a parrot, but it didn’t look like any parrot Jarvey had ever seen, but more like a smaller version of a vulture, despite its coloring.

Jarvey picked up a chunk of wood and threw it at the bird. He missed, but it squawked and flew away in the direction taken by the others in its flock. “Some hunt,” Jarvey said. “Everything in the forest is aware! If the Nawab gets tired of hunting us, he just has to ask a tree, or a bird, or a dumb lizard! Maybe even the rocks!”

“No,” Betsy said urgently. “If the trees can move, don’t you see, they’re herding us. We have to fight against them. I had the strangest feeling back there in the thicket that the trees somehow got closer together as we neared them. I think they were deliberately shutting us off If we could get past them, we might get away. Or at least we might find the wall.”

They broke off in a new direction, and sure enough, the trees began to grow closer and closer together. They came to another thicket, or maybe just an extension of the first one, close-packed and impenetrable. “What now?” Jarvey asked.

She led the way to a tree that had bent, crooked branches sprouting from the trunk almost from the ground up. She scaled up into the tree, climbing from branch to branch almost the way she would have climbed a ladder, and Jarvey followed her, scrambling as fast as he could. The branches began to tremble under his hands, and then something grabbed his foot.

At first, Jarvey thought he had snagged his foot in the fork of a twig. He jerked his leg, and whatever had his ankle only tightened. He looked down in irritation and thought he would faint. A snake had seized his ankle, a thin green snake!

He almost lost his hold on the branch and actually slipped down a few inches. The green coil on his ankle loosened—it wasn’t a snake after all, he saw, just one of those hanging vines. He reached down to tear it loose, and it whipped forward, wrapping itself around his wrist. “Aghh!”

“What’s wrong?” Betsy was already high above him. The thinner branch she had seized was swaying ominously, as if trying to throw her off She looked down, then descended toward him. “Here, I’ll help.”

“It’s some kind of trap.” Jarvey took a few deep breaths. “Don’t fight it, Bets. It’s worse if you pull against it.” He had gone limp, and he cautiously pulled his ankle out of the loosening loop. “I don’t think it wants to hurt us. It’s just trying to keep us from climbing.”

Betsy had grabbed the vine and tugged at it, trying to rip it in two. She winced as a loop of the rope-like thing flipped toward her head, as if trying to choke her.

With a shudder, Betsy relaxed her arm, and the loop of green vine unwound until she was able to slip her wrist out. “All right. It wants us to come down. I see. Ready?”

“Climb!” Betsy clambered up the branches, nearly leaping in her haste, reaching for one, grabbing it, hauling herself up, and already grabbing the next.

Jarvey swung himself up after her, dreading the clutch of another vine. He heard the twigs beneath him swish as the vine lashed toward him, even felt the slap of the vine against his foot, but it just missed. “Come on!” urged Betsy from far overhead. “I can see—”

She screamed as the tree threw her. That was the only word for it. The branch that she was on whipped up and down, like a person shaking water off one hand, and Betsy lost her hold. Jarvey made a desperate grab, closed his hand on her wrist, and felt himself nearly jerked out of the tree himself The vine caught up with them and wrapped itself around their ankles, tugging them toward the earth.

The vine refused to release its hold on them until they reached the ground. As they touched the earth again, it unlooped, freeing them. “The trees are even thicker now than they were when we started to climb,” Jarvey said. “They do move somehow.”

“Magic,” Betsy said. “The wall’s over that way. Not too far. I could see the roofs of the buildings in the town. Harbor’s off to the right. I could just glimpse some of the masts. Maybe if we—”

They tried to head in the direction of the wall, but the going was treacherous, broken ground cut by the twisting roots of ancient trees. “Maybe you could try some magic of your own,” Betsy said.

“How?” Jarvey was tired, his hands were blistered, and he felt slimy with his own sweat. “I command the trees not to move! I order the vines not to grab us! Stay away, monkeys! I’ll blast you with my power! Think that will work?”

For a heartbeat, Jarvey thought he had been shot. White light filled the world, a sound like a cannon going off next to his head shook him to his bones, a burst of heat and a stench of burning filled the air ...

Betsy was shaking him, her mouth moving, but no sound came out. No. Jarvey blinked and heard only the ringing of his own ears. The sound had been so loud that it had deafened him. “What?”

Betsy didn’t reply in words, but yanked him to his feet—he had gone sprawling to the ground—and dragged him forward. He saw a gap in the thicket, a ragged, smoking hole four or five feet across. The steaming vines twitched aside as Betsy dragged him toward the opening. Thinly, as if she were standing a long way off, her voice broke through: “We can make it! Hurry!”

The trees and brush writhed, trying to send twigs and branches into the smoldering gap. Red sparks of fire crept through the dry edges of the hole, and Jarvey flinched away as they passed close to a burning branch. “Wait, I can’t keep up!”

Jarvey looked behind them. The blasted thicket was already closing up, though a thin haze of blue-gray smoke still drifted from it. From this side, the barrier looked as if it ran for miles away from the wall, following the rise and roll of the hills. Somewhere back in there the Nawab was hunting. No wonder the poster had warned about his intent.

They had come to the edge of a steep drop. The cliff led almost vertically down ten or twelve feet to a row of dunes. “We can climb it,” Betsy said, studying the vegetation spilling over the top of the crag. “We can hold on to these vines.”

Betsy prodded one with her toe. It swayed back and forth but did not react. “Don’t think so. These seem ordinary. I think the stuff in the forest might be enchanted to have some strange kind of movement, but these are just plants.”

It wasn’t a pleasant climb, especially with his raw, blistered hands, but Jarvey followed Betsy down to the crest of a dune of coarse gray sand. The ocean rolled in a few yards away, low waves breaking and boiling on the beach. The sun had sunk toward the horizon off to the left, and it looked swollen and red. “We don’t have much time until night,” Jarvey said. “We were in there all day.”

They made their way toward the docks, perhaps half a mile distant. Jarvey could see the masts of three or four ships, and out at sea another vessel stood away from the shore, tilting to the left as the wind filled its sails and took it out to sea. Soon they were walking through a scatter of driftwood, broken masts, snarls of fishing nets, even a snapped-off oar or two. An upended ship’s boat, its bottom staved in, stuck up out of the sand like a beached whale, its surface roughened by knots of barnacles.

At last they scaled a low stone wall and stood at the end of the docks. The pier where their ship had tied up was about halfway down. By then the sun had set, and a deep twilight had fallen.

“Okay,” Jarvey said. He wondered if the Nawab was still hunting them. Maybe his spies had told him of their escape. Maybe he was coming this way right now to find them.

In the rising darkness, they darted from doorway to doorway, down alleys and over fences, until they reached the warehouse. “Hope those snakes are gone,” Jarvey said. “I’ll check it out.”

He told himself that the cobras had only been guards. They hadn’t wanted to bite him, just to drive him and Betsy out into the forest, that was all.

To his relief, the alley stretched dark and empty. With Betsy close behind him, he felt his way down the fence until he located the loose board and pulled it to one side. Betsy slipped in before he could tell her to wait, and he followed.

Jarvey didn’t answer for a moment. He could feel the layer of dust on the beam, could even feel the rough patch where the Grimoire had rubbed the dust off But as for the book itself...