Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

go down into that shadowed area. Stay there and wait. I’ll shoot them if I can. If not – when you hear the first shot, run, and keep going. Get as far as you can.’

‘What about the ring – rings?’

‘Either they don’t work or they haven’t. I don’t know how they work – do you?’

‘No – but I can’t leave you—’

He turned and glared at me, white-faced. As if he’d happily kill me himself.

‘The other village is somewhere here,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a chance.’

‘I mean – you—’

‘Oh, me. So what, me?’

‘Venn—’

‘I ought to feed you to them. Go – Guljurri ban!’

It was a dreadful curse of some sort. I felt what it meant, even though I didn’t know. It had nothing, I bet, to do with furballs.

Confusedly I thought, He’s going to let them have him, if he misses with the gun. He’s frightened and trying to save me – this is all wrong – but I’m making it worse.

So I slipped away from him without another word, into the tangled shadow between the trees. I hid, as he’d told me.

I was frightened daft myself, but somehow it didn’t seem real, and I thought, Nothing will happen.

Then, the vrabburrs came.

PEARL FLAMINGO VILLAGE

They were very big, that was what I thought first. Then that one vrabburr was larger than the other. A parent and child, perhaps. Daddy or mummy vrabburr teaching baby vrabburr how to hunt.

Sunlight shone on them, but also they were all part of the forest, its bars of shadow and dull highlights on their pelt. So in a way, the forest too seemed to be stalking us, had become the vrabburrs in order to attack us properly.

They’d halted, a short distance from Venn. We’d made a tunnel through the foliage, and they could see him clearly, with the loaded gun pointing at them. His arms looked steady. He looked immoveable, heroic. (Hopeless?)

One, the bigger one, lowered its awful dog-rabbit-tiger head, and savagely tore up a mouthful of moss. (So they’re vegetarian – as well!) The other sat there on its fat haunches. It would have looked amusing if it hadn’t been what it was.

And then this smaller one – just launched itself at Venn.

Yes, it was racing, and the speed – two flying hops – grotesque and terrifying – and it was there – it was against him – on him – he was lying under it – and I’d heard the gun fired, the shot had split the sky – but it hadn’t done any good—

The other one was coming in now too, racing and hopbounding.

I’d forgotten the rings. As he said, we didn’t know if or how they worked – and they hadn’t—

This is perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve ever done. So far. I ran out of cover, which he’d risked his life to send me into. It wasn’t bravery – it was terror – and stupidity.

I started screaming and shouting. Every bad word, every mad word – and everything ending Vrabburr! Vrabburr!

And I rushed towards them, yelling and shrieking and waving my arms—

The bigger one hesitated. It sat back, and reared up, with its ghastly rabbit front feet – with a rabbit’s huge digging claws, I now saw – half raised, as if ready to slap or punch me.

But I’d gone nuts. I know I had this image in my mind, not thought out, just there, just what was going to happen, of running right into it, thumping it in the chest, bashing it on the nose if I could reach high enough—

Oh, it wasn’t just for Venn. It was for everything.

I was nearly there – and the one on top of Venn was horribly growling, so I thought the worst, and he was silent – and I was yodelling something about man-eating marmalade (I suppose I meant the colour of their pelts—)

When—

The standing-up, ready-to-box vrabburr abruptly toppled over. It fell, like a striped velvet cushion, and lay on the moss.

Venn had shot it after all, and it had only just realized?

But then the other one, the one sitting on Venn, rolled tiredly off him, as if it just couldn’t be bothered, and preferred to take a nap.

He couldn’t have killed both of them with one (delayed) shot.

I pulled up, coughing, breathless.

Only then did I hear a strange thin buzzing sound, which I now understood had made all the fine hairs rise at the base of my scalp.

What now? Some murderous insect, or swarm, perhaps?

Wildly I looked up and around. Nothing. Even the humming-birds had wisely fled.

Venn sat up. His jacket and shirt were torn, there were scratches on his neck and cheek, bleeding, but they didn’t look very deep. He looked quite green, but it may have been the green shadow.

‘Venn.’

‘Feigned dead,’ he said, off-hand, although I could now easily see him shaking. ‘It’s the best thing, if they get you. Slows them down. They don’t like dead meat, much. They can’t decide, you see, if you’re still worth eating or not.’

‘Oh, I see. That’s clever. Very cool of you to do it.’

We sounded as if we were at a tea-party. ‘Oh, hallo. I’ve just been pretending I was dead as a vrabburr tried to eat me.’ ‘Oh, hallo, how fascinating. Well done.’

But I kept rubbing my ears, trying to clear the noise out of them. Venn was starting to do the same. And both vrabburrs lay there, like heaps of orange and black plush.

The people stole across the glade, and I thought they were only shadows, disturbed by tiny returning birds, or the sun and some non-existent breeze moving things.

And then there were several of them, men and women, a group. Standing there, just below.

The five at the front took the pipes out of their mouths, and the buzzing whine ceased.

Dark, dusk-coloured people, a skin shade I think is brown, but looks almost blue or green in the forest. Light clothing almost the same colour.

Three ran past me, to bend over the vrabburrs, stroking them, putting some loose