Winds of Change (28 page)

Other than staging it by daylight instead of darkness.

For a basilisk could not be moved by magic power - it grounded attacks out on itself, sent the power out into the earth, and ignored the attackers. And it could not be moved by force.

It could
only
be dealt with by persuasion. And a great deal of patience, as Elspeth would likely discover the hard way.

He took the gracefully curved stairs down to the ground, jumping them two at a time, suppressing the urge to whistle.

This promised to be very, very entertaining.

It was not just any basilisk. It was a basilisk with a belly full of eggs.

Snowstar held his torch steady, no doubt trusting in the cold to keep the creature torpid. It blinked at them from the hollow it had carved for itself in the rocky bank of the stream, but remained where it was. Torchlight flickering over the thing’s head and parts of its body did nothing to conceal how hideous the poor creature was.

“Havens, that thing is ugly,” Elspeth said in a fascinated whisper. Basilisks came in many colors - all the colors of mud, from the dull red-brown of Plains-mud, to the dull brown-black of forest-loam mud, and every muddy variation in between. This one was the muddy gray-green of clay. With the face of a toad, no neck to speak of, the body of an enormous lizard, a dull ash-gray frill running down the head and the length of the spine and tail, a mouth full of poisonous half-rotted teeth, and a slack jaw that continuously leaked greenish drool, it was definitely not going to appeal to anything outside of its own kind. And when you added to that the sanitary habits of a maggot, and breath that would make an enraged bull keel over a hundred paces away, you did not have anything that could be considered a good neighbor.

And that was when it was torpid. As soon as the sun arose, and warmed the thing’s sluggish blood, it would go looking for food. It wasn’t fussy. Anything would do, living or dead, so long as it was meat.

But as soon as the blood warmed up, the brain would warm up, too - and when that happened, nothing nearby would be safe. Not that the basilisk was clever; it wasn’t - it wasn’t fast either, or a crafty hunter. It didn’t have to be. It simply had to feel hunger and look around for food, and everything within line-of-sight would freeze, held in place by the peculiar mental compulsion it emitted.

Then it could simply stroll up to its chosen dinner, and eat it.

As Snowstar explained this to Elspeth, Darkwind created a heatless mage-light and sent it into the basilisk’s shelter, so he could get a better idea of how big it was. Elspeth shuddered in revulsion as the light revealed just how phenomenally hideous the creature was.

“Are we going to kill it now?” she asked; Darkwind had the feeling that she wanted to get this over with quickly. Well, he didn’t blame her. Being downwind of a basilisk was a lot like being downwind of a channel pit.

Snowstar answered for him. “Gods of our fathers, no!” he exclaimed. “If you think it stinks
now,
you don’t want to be within two days’ ride of a dead one! That’s assuming we
could
kill it. It has three hearts, that warty skin is tougher than twenty layers of boiled hide, and it can live for a long time with what we’d consider a fatal wound. It can live without two legs, both eyes, and half its face. Altogether. Assuming you could get near enough to it to take out an eye. Personally, I’d rather not try.”

Elspeth shook her head, not in disbelief, but in amazement. “What about magic?”

“Magic doesn’t work on them,” Darkwind told her, as he reckoned up the length of the beast and judged it to be about the size of three horses, not counting the tail. “It just passes around them and goes straight into the ground.
We
should have shields like that! An amazing animal.”

“You sound like you admire it,” Elspeth replied in surprise.

He shrugged, and walked around a little, to see if the basilisk noticed him, or if it had gone completely torpid. “In a way I do,” he said, noting with satisfaction that the creature’s eyes tracked on him. “It is said that they were created by one of the Great Mages, not as a weapon, but as a way of disposing of the carcasses of those creatures that
were
weapons, that even dead were too dangerous to touch and too deadly to leave about. Nothing else will eat a dead cold-drake, for instance.” His brief survey complete, he returned to Elspeth’s side. “They weren’t supposed to be able to breed, but neither were a lot of other creatures. Most of their eggs are infertile, but there are one or two that are viable now and again.”

He turned to Snowstar. The scout wiped the back of his hand across his watering eyes, and stood a little straighter. Snowstar was one of the youngest of the scouts; Darkwind was grateful that he had known enough to send for help and not attempted to move the basilisk himself. It
could
be done without magic, but the odds of success, especially in the uncertain weather of fall or spring, were not good. “Have you found any place for us to put her?” he asked.

“Yes, but it’s not as secure as I’d like,” the scout replied, wiping his eyes again. The wind had turned, and the fumes were - potent. Darkwind’s eyes had started to burn a few moments ago, and Snowstar had been here for some time. Small wonder he had watering eyes. “I’ve got a rock-bottomed gully along this stream; the sides are too steep to climb and there’s always lots of things falling into it to die. The only problem is that the mouth of the valley is open to the stream, and I couldn’t see a way to close it off.”

“Isn’t there a swamp somewhere off that way?” Darkwind asked, waving vaguely in the direction where he thought he sensed water.

“Can you get the thing that far?” Snowstar asked, incredulously. “If you can, that would be perfect. There’s plenty for it to eat, no
hertasi
like it because it’s full of sulfur springs, and the sulfur’s enough to make sure any eggs it lays won’t hatch.”

“If we can get it moving, we can get it that far,” Dark-wind told him. “The problem is going to be getting it moving without getting it worked up enough to think about being angry or frightened. If it’s either, it’ll start trying to fascinate everything within line of sight.”

“Right.” Snowstar spread his hands. “I’ll leave that up to you. Get it moving and I’ll guide you to the nearest finger of the swamp and make sure nothing interferes with you on the way.”

“That will do.” Darkwind studied the hideous beast, trying to determine whether it was better to lure it out of its rudimentary den, or force it out.

Force it out, he decided at last. He didn’t think that the beast was going to take any kind of bait at the moment.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, turning to Elspeth, who still watched the basilisk with a kind of repulsed fascination. “It’s comfortable and it feels secure in that den. You and I are going to have to make it feel uncomfortable and insecure, and make it come out. Once it’s out, it will try to go back in again; we’ll have to prevent that. Then we’ll have to herd it in the direction we want it to go.”

Elspeth licked her lips and nodded, slowly. “We use magic, I presume?”

“That, or mind-magic, or a combination of the two,” he told her. He yawned as he finished the sentence, and hoped he wasn’t going to be too fuddled from lack of sleep to carry this off. Elspeth looked as if she felt about the same. “Got any ideas about what might drive it out?”

She leaned back against a tree trunk and frowned at the beast. “Well, what would drive you or me out of bed? Noise?”

Interesting idea.
“That’s one nobody I know of has tried.” He thought for a moment. “If it were warmer, we could lure her out with an illusion of food, but she isn’t hungry in the semi-hibernation she’s in right now. Heat and cold in her cave - no, too hot and she’ll just wake up more, and we don’t want that. Too cold and she’ll go torpid.”

“How about rocks in her bed?” Elspeth hazarded. “Sharp, pointy ones. Maybe combine it with noise.”

“Good. Good, I like that plan. It should irritate her without making her angry, and if we make her uncomfortable she won’t want to go back in there.” He scratched his head. “Now, which do you want? Rocks or noise?”

“Rocks,” she said, surprising him. “I’ve got an idea.”

Since he already had a notion about the noises that might irritate the basilisk, that suited him very well. He had been afraid that Elspeth wouldn’t think herself capable of manifesting good-sized stones, but evidently she already had a solution in mind.

“Do it, then,” he said, shortly, and concentrated all his attention on a point just behind the basilisk’s body. The one thing he
didn‘t
want to do was frighten her - just make her leave her lair. If he frightened her, she might be aroused enough to set all her abilities working, and that would do them no good at all.

Fine thing if I met my end as a late-night snack for afoul-breathed, incredibly stupid monster.

He already knew how some pure, high-pitched sounds irritated wolves and birds; he reasoned the same might well be true of this beast. It just had to be loud enough and annoying enough.

Dissonance,
he thought suddenly. That might work even better; two pure tones out of tune with each other.

He’d done this before as a kind of game, when he was just learning very fine control. He’d gotten good enough that he had been able to produce recognizable voices out of the air. Producing pure tones wasn’t all that hard, it just took a lot of energy.

He started near the top of the human-audible scale, figuring to go up if he had to. It took him a moment to recall the trick of it, but when he got it, Snowstar jumped as a nerve-shattering squeal rang out from the basilisk’s lair. The young scout clapped both hands over his ears, his expression pained. Darkwind wished he had that luxury.
He
had to listen to his creation in order to control it.

When he glanced out of the corner of his eye at Elspeth, he saw she had blocked both her ears with her fingers, and her brow was creased with concentration.

His sounds didn’t seem to be having any effect, although already he noticed the basilisk shifting her weight, as if she found her position uncomfortable. He raised the notes another half step and waited to see the effect.

Another increment followed that, until he had gone up a full octave, and still he was not getting the reaction he wanted, although the monster turned occasionally to snap at the empty air, as if trying to rid her lair of its noisy visitor.

Finally, he took the sounds up past the range where even
he
could hear it, and he had one of the longest ranges in the Clan. Elspeth had taken her fingers out of her ears two steps earlier, and Snowstar had taken his hands down before that, with an expression of deep gratitude. This was the range that animals other than man could hear; he wasn’t about to give up this plan until he’d passed the sounds that bats used. And from the look on Elspeth’s face,
she
wasn’t going to give in until she had produced rocks the size of small ponies.

Neither of them had to go that far, although whether it was Darkwind’s dissonant howls or Elspeth’s stones that finally tipped the balance, he couldn’t tell. The basilisk had been snapping and shifting uncomfortably for some time when he changed the tone again, and the basilisk came pouring out of her lair, burbling with anger and frustration.

She stood there for a moment, wavering between the discomfort of the lair, and the exposure of the outdoors. If she dove back in again, they might never get her out.

Before Darkwind could say anything, Elspeth solved the problem for him. He sensed her grabbing the underlying web of earth-energies at the mouth of the half-dug lair and yanking.

The lair collapsed in on itself, leaving the basilisk nowhere to go.

The monster rumbled deep in her chest, and turned, heading downstream and away from them, into the darkness. “That will do for a few furlongs, but then we’re going to have to turn her out of this stream when it forks,” Snowstar said, as the basilisk plodded out of the range of his torch and Darkwind’s mage-light.

“Don’t worry, I think we can deal with it,” he said, breaking into a trot along the graveled streamside, sending his mage-light winging on ahead until it illuminated the unlovely rump of the basilisk. She was moving at a pretty fair pace; he’d had no idea they could move that fast. In fact - was he going to be able to keep up with her?

Elspeth supplied his answer, as she and the Companion trotted up alongside and she offered him a hand up. “Gwena can carry two for a while,” she said. He took her at her word and got himself up behind her. “Are you going to use that sound of yours to drive that thing?” she asked once he was settled and Gwena was bounding after the tail of the monster.

“Yes,” he said - shortly, as it was difficult to speak when bouncing along on the rump of a trotting mount. “That - was - the - idea - ”

:I have another idea,:
Elspeth said by Mindspeech.
:lt’s a reptile, which means it can probably sense heat very well. Let’s create a ball of warmth about her size, and lure her along with it. Keep it a couple of lengths ahead of her until she’s where we want her, then dissipate it. What do you think?:

He switched to Mindspeech as well.
:That is an excellent idea. This is going to be great news when we get back to the Vale,:
he told her, and smiled at the glow of well-earned self-congratulation that met his words.
:You’ve helped uncover something entirely new, and very useful to us. The other forms of driving these monsters have all been much riskier. You are going to make your Clansibs quite happy with this news.: