Now their path apparently took them away from the shoreline again. The cavernous overhang of the sea cave had given way to sections where the cliffs above had collapsed altogether into mounds of gigantic rubble. Seethlaw led him in among it all, up through a narrow ravine between drunkenly angled blocks each the size of an upended imperial coach. They began to climb away from the sea. Ringil touched his hand briefly to the pommel of the Ravensfriend again.
“When did you give me the sword back?”
“You’ve had it from the start. You just weren’t aware of the fact. It’s a simple enough trick. That one, I
“I’ve been carrying this thing all along? Even in the forest, when we camped?”
Seethlaw looked back at him, mouth quirked again. “We haven’t reached the forest yet.”
Ringil felt the strength run out of his legs like water. The rock wall to his left seemed suddenly to be toppling over on him.
“Then . . .”
“Shut up!”
Seethlaw had locked to a halt in the narrow space ahead of him, one closed fist raised, point-man-style, for silence and stillness. Very gently, without moving any other part of his body, he nodded upward. Ringil followed the direction of his gaze, and stopped breathing.
One of the akyia had not, it seemed, been content to stay in the ocean and watch them leave. It crouched on top of the right-hand block, two yards over their heads, poised lizard-like on arms splayed wide. Powerful-looking hands curled like claws into the fissures and features of the granite.
Ringil’s hand flew to the pommel of the Ravensfriend. The akyia’s head tilted, lamp-like eyes fixed on the movement.
For the first time since he’d known the dwenda, Ringil thought he heard genuine fear in Seethlaw’s mellifluous voice. He dropped his hand back to his side. The akyia shifted its head again, met his eyes directly. It felt like a physical blow.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” said Seethlaw, very softly. “Don’t move, don’t do anything sudden at all.”
Ringil swallowed and remembered to breathe. Held the creature’s gaze, stared at it while his mind stumbled after comparisons.
The akyia looked like a harbor-end pimp’s nightmare of womanhood. Like something dreamed into being from the fumes of one too many flandrijn pipes and the constant, stealthy background slap of water against the pilings under the wharf. It was long-haired and full-breasted, pale-skinned in the light from the worn-out moon, and smoothly muscled from a lifetime in the water. But the hair straggled back from a skull built out of angles to make you scream. The eyes were the size of clenched fists, and for all that Ringil sensed a ferocious intelligence in their stare, they were set in sockets that had more in common with the skull of a lizard than anything human. Thickly ridged cheekbones forced them back and up, separating the upper features from a chinless lower face that seemed wholly prehensile, and currently held the circular lamprey mouth aimed at the intruders like another massive eye.
It raised itself on the angle of the rock, scuttled down a couple of feet so it was hanging almost upside down on the wall above them. Ringil watched in fascination as two long, fin-fronded limbs coiled about in dark silhouette behind its head. He could hear them rasping as they sought purchase on the top of the block.
He cleared his throat.
“Just stay where you are,” Seethlaw murmured. “If it wanted to hurt you, it already would have.”
The akyia claw-walked its way down the wall of rock until it really was suspended upside down almost within touching distance of Ringil’s head. It brought with it the salt waft of its body, the fresh blast of ocean water overlaid with more fragrant elements that were curiously similar to Seethlaw’s scent. Its hair hung in its eyes like the strings of a wrecked fishing net until, with a motion that was startlingly feminine, it lifted one hand from the rock and swept the strands back behind its head. A nictitating membrane flickered up over the left eye, the circular lip of muscle around the mouth flexed in and out like an iris, and Ringil, staring up with a crick in his neck, saw concentric rings of teeth lift themselves briefly erect and then lie down in the throat again. He swallowed hard, fought down the terrible sensation of vulnerability that crawled in his face and scalp. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the akyia could bite open his head as easily as a Yhelteth fisherman’s machete taking the top off a coconut.
From deep in the thing’s throat came the same glutinous chittering he’d heard earlier. It cocked its head back and forth between man and dwenda as if puzzled by the juxtaposition.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ringil thought he saw Seethlaw nod.
Then, rapid as a fleeing lizard, the akyia whipped about on the rock and was gone, back over the top in a succinct thrash of pale curves and coiling rear limbs. Ringil heard it scuttling away somewhere above them.
