Black Forest

This is a short story and exists as a spin-off of a yet unfinished novel. It was previously published as a series of 20-something blog posts.

Black Forest

By Ion Fyr

©2021 Ion Fyr

ISBN: 9798755124508

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means with out explicit permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real or imagined people or events is purely coincidental.

I wish to thank M, K and R for their support.

Dedicated to my Invisible Friend

Ion.Fyr@gmail.com

I

Constable Blackwood Aristophanes Pool sat on a large rock, sweating through his light, linen clothing and way too far from his home office in distant Londbridge. The rock provided a roughly level seat in the sweltering noon shade of the distinctly odd airship floating above.

The footing of the mast consisted of an artificial jetty comprised of large rocks and pitted concrete which supported the mooring mast and possessed a modest, pitch smelling wood walkway leading from the base of the mast’s stairs to a short wooden pier.

Tied off to the pier was noisy steamboat—not one of those great river boats, with paddle wheels and an attempt at elegance—but a simple open topped sort, with a clunky steam engine sputtering in the midsection and benches for passengers in the bow.

The engine churned and belched smoke and steam, though it was not geared into the single submerged prop below the brown water. There was a second engine tied into the craft’s primary, running a pair of rubber belts. This device linked to two air pumps with fat hoses attached and leading over the edge. Several barely clothed local men monitored the engine and pump, now and then peering over the rail in a futile attempt to get a glimpse of their employer below.

Pool returned to his damp notebook, twisting his pencil stub between his thumb and forefinger, imagining the scene below. The hoses continued to move, dragging the tethered boat around to a small degree. He sipped his comparatively cool beer, sitting to his left on the same rock.

…

Etelka moved slowly, knee-deep in mud and muck. The water carried the sucking sound of each step to her ears. She would be completely blind if it weren’t for the chartreuse-tinted vision, provided by the goggles she wore inside the heavy, bronze helmet. Turning her body was easier than peering through the small side windows of the giant sphere on her shoulders.

The exotic material of the goggles burned through the muck and drifting sediment of the bayou under the airfield. Everittite was a rare mineral, and had properties which were still poorly understood. One of them was filtering out all but solid material from one’s vision. This was convenient because Everittite lenses had the drawback of inserting ghostly phantoms that hovered unnervingly in the distance, even under water.

The air flowing through the tube mounted behind her head, blew oily, and fetid smelling air through her hair. It mingled with her perfume before being sucked out through another hose mounted to the top of the helmet. Sometimes, due to the the vagaries of the chance breezes on the surface she would get a stifling breath of smoke from the engine.

Etelka walked counterclockwise around the stone base of the mooring mast. In addition to the ghostly phantasm the Everittite goggles showed a kind of aura of living things drifting in the distance, as well as alligators and tentacled monsters from the brackish water.

She continued, her left foot, buckled into a weighted boot, bumped into a submerged rock. The pylons of the dock where in front of her. If she couldn’t find what she was looking for—what she was certain was here in the muck—she’d have to climb back up the slippery pile of rocks and have the surface pump-boat move to the other side of the dock so she could continue. She probably would not have to fully exit the absurdly heavy submersible diving suit, but that was still a possibility. The men would help her to the other side and then back down into the water.

The suit was hot. The air being pumped through it was hot, hotter than the water around her. She would need a bath after this, something her airship could not provide.

…

It has been over a year since we last came to N’Aurelia. How I hate this dreadful swamp. The Baroness insisted, though, so I am obliged to be here at her side, so to speak. And to return in August of all months…

If only Miss Tagore could have accompanied us across the sea. She has for the most part evaded the long, transatlantic voyages we’ve made. I am not resentful. I miss her humor and I hate to admit, her chaotic demeanor.

Just the same, Miss Tagore DID lose the object, the Baroness is currently searching for, deep in the fetid murk of N’Aurelia’s airfield. It fell from the top of this very mast, I’m told, along with a deeply corrupt Alderman of the jungle city-state.

Pausing his diary entry Pool looked up at the faceted girth of Baba Yaga’s Hut, the private airship belonging to the Baroness. Luckily it was directly between him and the haze-shrouded sun. The light here always had a muted quality from the ever present humidity. Ominous cumulus clouds drifted by in the distance moving slowly west to east from the jungle toward the sea.

The distance from the top of the mast to the ground would surely kill a man. Pool wasn’t certain if a watery impact would do the same, although Miss Tagore had been fairly certain the Alderman was dead.

All of this just so we can go to the Black Forest and talk to some strange woodland creatures. I am absolutely loyal to the Baroness, but cannot always see what strange reasoning drives her.

…

Etelka could feel the air tubes growing slack behind her. The men were supposed to keep them taught so they wouldn’t get caught on submerged objects. This meant that their boat was directly over head, which in turn meant that she’d have to struggle up the slope of slime covered boulders at her side to go to the other side of the dock.

Could I perhaps go around the dock so as to not require ascending the mast’s foundation only to struggle down three meters ahead? She thought.

Turning the cumbersome diving suit to the right, she could make out the outermost support pylons.

Her foot brushed against something. Something was buried under the muck. The oozing sludge varied in depth, but had been covering her feet the entire time she had been down here, sometimes reaching her knees.

Struggling not to trip, she stepped back half a meter.

There was a curved object under the mud, barely exposed by the hole left by her boot print. Pottery? She wondered.

She stepped forward and dug the toe of her boot under it as best she could. Not pottery. The broken face of a skull turned to look up at her. Half it’s jaw bone was missing and the adjacent side was smashed in with most of the pieces missing. A startled crab crawled out and danced sideways away into the muck.

Alderman Stolison, I presume? She mustn’t be so sure. N’Aurelia was a cesspool. This could be anyone. Still, it gave promise.

Etelka began sweeping her feet, first one, then the other back and forth stirring up the muck, which was nearly invisible to her once it was in movement. She knew, however, that there was now a cloud of thick mud floating around her.

Her eye caught a gleam in a crack between two large boulders to her left, a meter up the slope of the mooring mast’s foundation.

Etelka walked heavily towards it. Her legs were tired from the trudging and sweeping all the mud around and burned with pain.

The gloves of the diving suit were large with fingers too large already for her slender hands. She glanced around for a small stick to fish it out with. Her eyes settled on a slime-covered reed, which she tested with her clumsy grip. It would suffice.

Using the reed she bent toward the crack, trying not to fall face first into the mud.

There! Caught you! She had found what she had come for.

…

Pool looked up as the pump-men, began murmuring then shouting in the local patois. He had never quite learned enough to understand more than a few words. It didn’t matter. They would speak in their broken Brethmanic to him and the baroness.

Two of them jumped down from the boat, holding the lower edge of their skirts up to keep them from getting too wet. It was fruitless in both cases. Their longhis (a manner of sarong) fell into the churned up water as they rushed to help the baroness and her strange diving suit up the rocks.

The baroness held a limp reed aloft in her left hand, threaded through some small object.

Could she have actually found it? Pool was astounded at her luck, finding a needle in a haystack.

One of the pump-men helped her unclasped the latches of the large bronze helmet, lifting it carefully off her head and setting it down on a rock, and revealing a sweaty, cobalt blue mat of hair.

Etelka smiled when she saw Pool looking at her.

He could not help but to smile back; her smile was mesmerizing and contagious.

“Quick, Pool. Take it before it slips back in to join Stolison.”

He stepped gingerly across the rocks, trying not to fall in or to drop his notebook, which he still clutched in his hand.

He slipped the 25 millimeter diameter cylinder off the reed. It was covered in green slime and muck. He held it daintily, but securely, trying to avoid soiling his otherwise clean clothing.

“Stolison? You found his body?” Pool quivered at the memory of the Alderman-come-mad scientist, who had…done things to him last year.

“Only his skull, and I’m not even certain that it belonged to him, but it was in the vicinity of our prize,” said Etelka with interspersed grunts as she squeezed out of the mud-drenched diving suit.

One of the men had removed the air tubes from the helmet and coiled them in the boat with the helmet placed on top of them. The other disengaged the weighted boots from the suit, rinsing them, then rinsing the suit as best as the muddy water would allow. These were also placed in the boat.

Etelka was drenched in sweat. She had removed the goggles from her eyes to her forehead as soon as her arms were free, pushing her hair back. Her white, sweat-drenched shirt was scandalously clinging to her skin as were her black pants.

She came to him, climbing over the boulders with her arms extended for balance.

Pool averted his eyes as much as he could and held the cylinder out, offering it back to her.

“Pretend that it is Miss Tagore that you’re talking to, with her relative lack of modesty,” she said. She took the slimy object from him, brushing off filaments of the tiny green plants that had colonized it.

Turning to the pump-men: “Thank you dearly for your assistance, gentlemen. Do you know of a place across the River where I can take a bath?”

They did, in fact, know of a place.

“Then, if you wouldn’t mind, could I get a ferry over to the city?”

After a painful climb up the stairs of the mast, all the time with her leg muscles burning, she returned with a bundle of clean clothes. Both Pool and Etelka enjoyed the wind on them on the journey across the vast river.

II

Later, as the pair of rings and disassembled nyereg, or saddle—a cylinder of gold that Etelka had created to fill the space within the pair of rings so that they could be worn in a practical fashion by a human. One end had a raised lip attached and the other was threaded so its own raised section could be screwed and unscrewed, allowing the two large rings to be removed.

Constable Pool sat writing in his notebook, now and then glancing up to look at the newly cleaned gold rings.

Where to begin…We or rather the Baroness has recovered the pair of rings, two of the five Miss Tagore and I captured in frigid Muskovy, from Madam Lenkova’s archeological dig-site two winters ago. Was it only two winters? It seems half a lifetime ago that I learned for the first time of the secret truths, hidden from the populace or buried in myths.

That tale is recorded elsewhere in detail, however, I will paraphrase it here, in the event my previous journals are lost to posterity. It has happened before.

Years ago, I was charged with a mission of utmost secrecy by the late Countess Penelope of Isenberg, and under the direction of Baroness Kekszemu (who I now accompany) with the object of traveling incognito under Special Assignment by the Crown, to journey into the territory of the Khanate of Muskovy where Crown spies had uncovered rumors of an archeology dig in the wilderness of Siberia. I was chosen in part because my own departed mother had her origins in the East and I could utter a few words in that language.

Once nearly there, the most unexpected event occurred and itself changed my life forever after. A strange woman, possessing the most unsettling demeanor and suspect morality, caught up with me having followed my route from Kekszemu Manor. Like the Baroness, the pursuant Miss Tagore, had similarly dyed blue hair, an unlikely coincidence—but just that—a coincidence. The most surprising detail regarding Miss Tagore, is that she had only days before, reasoned the control mechanisms of the Baroness’s Time Traveling device, and had come to us here from three centuries in the future.

Miss Tagore and I grew acquainted and with my meticulous attention to detail and her penchant for wanton destruction, we achieved our goal. The site was found and the mysterious artifacts were captured from the Muskovite professor, Madam Lenkova.

Among the objects that were recovered were five rings, each possessed of strange, unnatural powers—it was Miss Tagore who unlocked the secrets of the rings—powers imbued within them by an ancient beast.

Now, many will tell the reader that the myth of the Tigers and Dragons is just that, a myth. They will tell you what the folktales told them, that in the Dark Ages Terra was invaded by powerful sorcery-using Tiger-Demons from Space, who then laid waste to civilizations the world over, until their reign so enraged Dragons—who are fearsomely described—arose from the ground or sky or mountains, depending on one’s locality, to destroy the dreaded Tiger-Demons. They are more properly termed Rakshasa, and it was with great disquiet that I learned that they were, in fact, real and that the myths were true in a very literal sense. I have seen both dead and living rakshasa and fled the terrifying onslaught of a very real dragon itself.

As for Miss Tagore, my dear friend and companion in many adventures, she possesses modifications to her body that function like the mechanical computational devices, such as inventors today create, though they exist at such a small scale as to make them indescribable in these pages, and it was with these modifications Miss Tagore learned to communicate by means of the secret commands of the rings, rings which had been created and worn by the alien Rakshasa sorcerers.

As I have mentioned briefly in passing above Miss Tagore was engaged in a battle with an Alderman of N’Aurelia, this abysmal cesspit of a city, high above on this very mooring mast. In her victory, the second of the nyerek fell into the fetid water along with Alderman Stolison’s detestable corpse.

Pool was considering describing his treatment at Stolison’s hands, but the memory of it after all this time was still traumatic for him. He was thankfully interrupted by Etelka’s return from the cabin where she had been chatting with the captain and crew of Baba Yaga’s Hut.

“Have you figured out which is which yet, Pool?”

Etelka had picked up Nila’s—Miss Tagore’s—informality, especially in private situations. Pool still struggled with it, especially when it came from Baroness Kekszemu, who he secretly adored.

Pool picked up each ring, one in each hand, studying them, weighing them.

“I have no clue as to which one is which,” he answered. It was true. He had no clue. He had refrained from the modifications Miss Tagore and now the baroness possessed.

With a flourish of her fuchsia dress she sat abruptly down by him, at the end of the table central to the airship’s lounge. Her boots clanged on the metal grid of the floor panels beneath her. She pulled her chair closer to the table and Pool. Floral perfume wafted from her flowing hair an instant after she took her seat.

Etelka locked eyes with him as she reached for the rings. He was entranced and couldn’t look away from until she shut them, alabaster lids obscured the aquamarine gems.

Pool’s eyes went to her hands. She was holding the rings just as he had just done.

“I am by no means confidant, but I believe this one…” holder in her left hand higher “…is the translator ring. That at least is what my internal is telling me.” Mis Tagore’s word. Internal refers to her modification, acquired three centuries in the future from one of Nila’s special surgeons. “I say that only because this one is that horrible mind control ring…Or at least I believe it is. I find its touch repellant.”

Etelka put the repellant ring down with disdain. It hit the metal surface of the table top with a sharp clink. The table-top was inscribed with a map of the world and with a degree of serendipity, it had nearly landed on their current location in central Newland.

She then slipped the overly large ring onto her thumb, something she had seen Nila do, and closed her fingers around it.

She looked at Pool, he was looking at her and twisting the left point of his mustache. “What do you think is the root cause of periods of conflict between the Empire and Muskovy over the last two centuries?” Etelka annunciated clearly and carefully chosen words in her native Hunnish, ones which Pool was less likely to have picked up by proximity. The each spoke Brethmanic and Muskovitian, but she was fairly certain Pool’s grasp of Hunnish was limited to a few polite phrases and formalities.

“Baroness, it seems a rather odd digression from our investigation of the rings, but if you must know, I feel that as with any rival populations growing in number, they will at some point come into conflict over resources or territory. The Brethmanic Empire cannot expand to the North, West or South due to the ocean and seas, leaving only the Eastern frontier, whereas Muskovy is boxed in by the Sinese lands to their east and our possessions of the Sind, and also Pars to the South. They also historically have been jealous culturally of the superior accomplishments of the Empire.” Pool stopped his long-winded answer to her question, trailing off at the end as he realized it might have been an intentional aside, a test of the translator ring in her hand.

He looked at her eyes gleaming at him. She indeed showed the smile she always wore when she was enthusiastically interested in something.

“It was Hunnish that I spoke.”

“Ah. Very good. It sounded like the fluent, unaccented Brethmanic you typically speak,” Pool responded, releasing his mustache. The left tip was now slightly higher and tighter than the right. “What of the other?” he asked.

“I will secure it so that it doesn’t fall into any hands but our own.”

“That is wise.”

After sitting in silence, briefly jotting a few more lines in his diary, while Etelka rustled around in her cabin, she returned and sat back down next to him.

“Baroness, I know that the reason for this quest for the ring is so that you might use it to communicate with those things in the Great Black Forest that we fought off.” Pool harbored a memory of a pitch black night when Baba Yaga’s Hut, having been damaged and blown off, course made an emergency landing in a broad clearing amidst ancient ruins. During the night, monstrous things, ape-like but somehow different came at the airship, which was resting on the ground.

Shots were fired and several attacking beasts were killed. Miss Tagore fought off an incredibly large one and ultimately drove the remaining ones to retreat.

The following morning the company investigated, finding the corpses of the fallen monsters. The first impression is that their attackers were somehow a cross between a gorilla and a dog or wolf. They possessed the physiology of a gorilla, though tending toward hairless. The neck was longer and less thick than that of a gorilla and was mounted with a head, structured so as to belong to a bipedal organism, with mouth and eyes perpendicular to the spine, rather than in line with it.

The head was of a size similar to a gorilla, although with a much longer snout. A short-snouted wolf head, with a heavy brow, little hair and small, though still canine ears.

Miss Tagore—Nila—was the one that had interacted with…fought with the leader (clearly the leader due to his immensity and control of the others). She had returned from the field, as typical, speckled with blood.

The leader (Miss Beatrix had called it the goblin-king, a fairytale character) had used some manner of mind-control to convince Nila that she had both injured it, then that it had injured her. None of this is certain from their first encounter, because Nila had been the only one to really interact directly with it, and had been the only one to have actually fought it.

The decision to go back came to Etelka slowly over the next few months. She wanted to know what these creatures were. Not at all human, but despite their animal appearance, they possessed an intelligence. Once the decision was more or less final, she had to have a means to communicate. This meant going back across the ocean to N’Aurelia to find a ring lost in a vast swamp.

“Pool, it is my opinion that those things as you refer to them, are sentient beings, strangely overlooked throughout history, perhaps lost to folktales, as so many other things have been.”

“I will have Baba Yaga’s Hut prepare for a return voyage at the captain’s convenience,” she added.

…

Appealingly lush and verdant from above, in the marginally cooler air, though still turbulent, the hellish jungle city of N’Aurelia passed away behind them. Baba Yaga’s Hut, named for a witch of slavic folklore, swooped between and evaded massive thunder heads whose shadows dotted the canopy below. The muck-brown river wound its way to the sea.

It was not long—maybe an hour—until they reached the fading edge of the delta beneath them. Brown water and rich jungle turned to islets in grey water, lazy whitecaps visible near the edges of the barrier swamps and bayous were followed by calm water reflecting the sky, where it was not a matte algae green.

Pool, for a reason he didn’t fully comprehend or bother to analyze in himself, always enjoyed watching the transition from sea to land and land to sea, along with the topography of the mountainous cumulus clouds around the rocking airship.

He was perched, standing and leaning on the semi-circular cockpit console. Three seats: the one on the left was exclusively the Captain’s or if remotely necessary, the substitute pilot’s; the one on the right was the special one, belonging to the Baroness (as did the entirety of the airship)—[in a whisper] Baba Yaga’s Hut was also a time machine); and the center one, given to whatever guest needed a view.

The Captain, nearly recumbent and half asleep, lightly guided the airship by means of several brass rods by his right hand. The airship tilted this way and that, slowly navigating the humid airs of this equatorial realm.

Even at altitude, a thousand meters—maybe more—the air was humid. It cooled as they headed out over the open ocean, and most of the storm clouds receded. Pool sweated in his shirt, his linen jacket hooked over a chair in the lounge behind him.

Tiny white and brown surface ships plied the waves below. Pool tried to imagine the grit it would take to risk near-certain death over the edge of the continental shelf; things—big things—lurked beneath the waves of the wine-dark sea.

“Pool? Shall we talk now?” Etelka asked.

Pool was shaken from his daydream, imagining the tiny sailing boats below being swallowed whole by the leviathans of the deep.

“Hmm…yes, Baroness…” he responded.

“Remember, we are friends and that requires no excess of formality, Constable.” Etelka’s modes of speech depended on the situation. Calling him Constable in private, was almost always facetious, though in public, it was always appropriate.

The same applied to references to Miss Tagore. In private she was Nila. In public, in front of others, she was Miss Tagore. Really, only Nila understood the nuances. Etelka wondered where and when she was. So did Pool in his own way.

The table in Baba Yaga’s Hut’s lounge was covered in engraved metal. Pool had always guessed it was an alloy of tin. The engraving was of a map of the world, Terra, their world, as mapped as accurately as they could manage.

Etelka was sitting there, in the chair closest her cabin (first forward on the starboard side.) Her hair was loose, a look that Pool always liked, even adored. Cobalt locks drifted in loose curls over her pale shoulders. She twiddled the nyereg having only one ring on it now in her right hand. Etelka looked up when he returned from the cabin.

“Baroness…Etel….” he stumbled over her given name. “You want to discuss the ring?”

“Yes, Pool…Blackwood.” Pool had never heard her pronounce his first name before. No one but his long-dead mother ever called him by that.

“‘Pool’ will do. That name never really suited me, I think.” He meant it.

Etelka stared intently at him, trying to read him—it was always very difficult for her to read the expressions of others. They all wore masks—or she just didn’t get their meaning—regardless, it was hard for her. She knew Pool was a dear friend, but sometimes he seemed an inscrutable automaton, a character in a story.

Etelka swallowed, her mania draining away. “P…Pool, with this ring…” she held it up between her right thumb and forefinger. It was much larger than a human would craft. Bright, yellow gold. The nyereg was necessary for humans to wear them. “This translates language to language by means of rakshasan magic, or as we say, technology, though we do not as yet understand it.”

“And the reason for translating?”

“In the Schwarzwald, Fekete-erdő, also known in Brethmanic as the Black Forest—as you know—we encountered a race…a species never before documented on Terra. And, as you may have guessed, I sincerely desire to document them, to discover them and uncover their culture.”

“Baroness, I had always assumed that you were primarily interested in mechanical devices.”

Etelka tilted her head in the way that a parent often does with a child. “I am interested in everything, Constable Pool.”

…

Pool again wrote in his journal.

It was Miss Tagore who unlocked the secrets of the rings we found in frigid Siberia, dug from the frozen ground by Professor Anastasia Lenkova Finn. We had returned to Kekszemu Manor and Miss Tagore discovered first that she could initiate the powers of the rings by the power of her altered mind, a brain embedded with devices of the imagination, of the future.

She had been in the back of the Manor with the Baroness firing guns and inadvertently activated an explosion-inducing ring, to our collective surprise.

Not long after, we—or I should say—she came to the realization that one of the other rings allowed for the simultaneous translation of spoken and even written words, both to and from the wearer.

She had used the translation ring on several occasions, but the ring-saddle that the Baroness had constructed to provide a better fit on Miss Tagore’s slender fingers had been lost during a struggle atop that airship docking mast in N’Aurelia.

We travelled across the sea and the Baroness dove beneath the waters under the mast for the sole purpose of recovering it. To my amazement she found it.

She intends to use it to communicate with those beings, not human—but hardly animals—that we encountered in the Black Forest.

Pool wondered what Miss Tagore was up to and where she was. He missed his friend but was happy for the time alone with the Baroness.

…

From the cockpit, the booming, sonorous voice of the ever-present Captain announced the sighting of the European continent. Almost two weeks had passed.

Pool wondered how the man managed to not leave his seat for so long. (Pool had been aboard for two years, on and off, and had observed the Captain Gordon’s extreme inertness.) Both he and the Baroness took their respective leaves on a daily basis.

From the cockpit, a baritone voice spoke: “Baroness, they signal us. There are three warships on patrol off of Lusitania.”

Most airships of the Royal Navy had dedicated masts hanging beneath them for semaphoric communication. Because of its design and the constraints of the icosahedron Baba Yaga’s Hut did not. (Anything outside the icosahedral structure around the airship would be lost when it transits time. This alone would prevent unwanted boarding by assailants.)

“What do they signal?”

Beatrix, the chief engineer of Baba Yaga’s Hut sprang into action. Her curly brown hair bouncing in its ponytail. Running from the cockpit to the engine room, her veritable home, she cranked up the semaphore mast, which would then extend through the icosahedron of the outer shell of the airship. The wheel, with its handle set in the right side of its quarter meter disk, was cranked clockwise over and over, until the mast reached its full height, in contrast to the downward hanging masts of the Brethmanic warships.

Beatrix, the nominal first mate of the airship, called out the status of the mast.

The captain responded, indirectly, “Baroness, What is our message?”

“Tell them who I am…No, tell them I am Constable Pool.” Etelka shot Pool a big, snarky smile. “On Special Assignment for the Crown.”

“Baroness, you are of course aware that this airship is known to the Imperial Navy to belong to you exclusively.”

“Yes, my dear Pool. I am aware of that.”

…

Flags were waved. A lot of what Etelka wanted expressed via the semaphores was lost in the abbreviation. She knew that would happen.

Multicolor flags, some with glow-lights, spun around and up and down on the mast, directed at the lead airship of the Imperial Navy.

Etelka went to the cockpit. The captain, a balding, large man, who seemed part of the airship itself sat in the left-most seat of three. He had a thin, close-cropped beard and a large head. His ivory cane leaned against the console in front of him. Etelka knew it to be a sword cane.

“Captain,” she said with utmost and authentic respect, “I wish to avoid engagements of any sorts.”

“Understood Madam Baroness.”

A few moments later: “They wish to send someone aboard. They out-gun us. I recommend we suffer this insult for the time.”

Etelka rolled her eyes to herself. We have no time…

“Yes, do it, Captain. But only one and Attila holds the only gun.”

Attila, more burly than stout, Hunnish and a sworn protector of the Baroness Kekszemu Etelka, stroked his bare scalp. He was mustached and in his younger days something to look at. Now he carried an open double shotgun.

In Hunnish: “Madam?”

“Just don’t let them take control of Baba Yaga.”

“I would never.”

“That is why I love you, Attila.”

“Thank you, madam.”

Twenty minutes later, a skinny man—a marine by appearance—swung down from swung down a pendulous thread from the gondola of the flagship, like a descending spider. He had a hundred meters of rope on his harness. Attila had his gun on him for 20 minutes, from his position recessed in the open upper access hatch.

Attila gestured him down the ladder beneath the hatch when he landed on the top of Baba Yaga’s Hut and unclasped his harness. The marine squeezed by, smelling of weeks on an airship with limited bathing opportunities.

The marine was smallish and skinny and landed lightly on the floor of the engine room. Pool and Etelka stood waiting for him. Seconds later Attila dismounted the ladder.

“Why are we being impeded in our journey, marine?” demanded the baroness in Brethmanic, intentionally demonstrating her rank. (She had changed into a more formal looking dress and vest while the marine descended from above.)

“Baroness Kekszemu? Madam, your rather unique looking airship was identified, but I was sent to confirm that it is, indeed, under your command,” he answered. “The Empire is at war.”

“With Muskovy?” she asked, knowing it to be true already.

“Yes, madam. We’ve heard reports of the Muskovites attempting to flank us by approaching us from the ocean instead of from the east.”

“How do you know I am the Baroness Kekszemu? I could be an imposter?”

“It was asked of the marines onboard our ships if any had been familiar with your appearance, and I had. I saw you in Parliament once in passing. I was also given a description of Constable Pool, who you are known to travel with.” The marine nodded his head in Pool’s direction.

“I am satisfied with your identity and will report back to Command. They will drift the harness rope back over your envelope when you relate this code to them.”

Beatrix repeated the code, thinking “North, North, North” an odd code, but realized that it was an easy one to communicate via semaphore.

The marine was given a short tour of the airship to demonstrate that there were no hidden battalions in the cargo hold and then he and Attila climbed the ladder back to the top of the envelope.

Baba Yaga’s Hut was granted passage. Etelka was in a huff. It’s my fucking Empire, she was thinking.

…

Pool returns to his journal:

It is incomprehensible. I was only a short time ago a respectable and a-feared constable in Londbridge. What, oh, gods, have you wrought?

In the last fortnight, the Baroness, has become cross, so easily, at me. I do not understand.

Some rope-boy swung down from a Navy Ship in the late hours yesterday. The world turns on his words: Our Empire is now at war with Muskovy. We shall churn that butter. Muskovy is weak. This is all new (though not unprecedented.)

I wish with honest heart that Nila—I dare say her given name—Miss Tagore were here.

…

It took another couple days to reach their destination. They proceeded east across the Mediterranean, then north across the open water of Euxina along the west coast. After reaching that crossing Baba Yaga’s Hut turned Northwest toward Wallachia, eventually passing through a dangerous and high pass of the Carpathian Shield, one that had nearly killed them the last time they passed through.

In the hour before reaching the pass, an airship was sighted far to the east, on the frontier with the Khanate of Muskovy. They couldn’t be sure if it was a Muskovite ship or not. The best of their telescopes could only make out oblong dots moving along against the mountain background.

Nothing came of it. They had either not been seen or had not been deemed relevant.

…

After a white-knuckle passage with the Captain steering slowly through gaps between the mountains, guiding the airship against chaotic winds and updrafts, they exited the pass.

Then after another several hours over heavily forested foothills the captain spoke: “Madam Baroness, we have reached the clearing.” Gordon was pretty clear and articulate today. “I will anchor. Landing Baba Yaga’s Hut last time left us open to attack.”

“As you will captain.”

The nose of Baba Yaga’s Hut dropped a grappling anchor, designed to take hold of trees and the like. With Beatrix’s deft work, the anchor grasped the intended tree top, a flat topped black oak. The grapple did its job. the uppermost branches were entangled.

The hulk of the airship, Baba Yaga’s Hut, turned nose-first to the slight wind. Spotty sun glinted off of the polished brass rods that comprised the icosahedron. It was on the cool end of summer weather for mid-altitude alpine environs.

The Baroness Kekszemu Etelka stood before her gathered crew in Baba Yaga’s Hut’s lounge and addressed them. “Constable Pool and I will descend to the surface and penetrate the dark forest.” The cobalt-haired noblewoman walked a few steps across the grated floor. Taking in her left hand what looked to be an ancient rifle, and passing that to her right, taking another. “Constable Pool and I will go to ground and find these unknown…unrecorded people…”

So it was done. Two faux ancient “elephant guns” with a pistol and many rounds each, plus Etelka’s brass and steel semiautomatic and its own specialized magazines. They also each brought a light pack with supplies, including food and a waterproof tent. Each carried a telescope borrowed from the cockpit. Pool, of course, had his journal, but this time, so too did Etelka who intended to record their first contact with the forest people.

Etelka and Pool descended on the airship’s cargo lift. It swung gently side to side as it dropped and, lower, brushed past heavy, unyielding oak branches. The pair held the cables tightly as the triangular lift tilted and slid off the obstacles.

The ground in the clearing was dry. Pool remembered it from the last time. A very wide clearing, filled with dry scrub and ancient Roman ruins. There were sun-bleached bones out there, lying where they had fallen centuries ago, tangled in the dry grasses and scrub.

They surmised that it had probably been an outpost, on the edge of “we can’t conquer that”. Etelka speculated at the purposes of the stumps of the buildings and Pool attempted to find proof, at least in his mind, to support what she said. Much had been lost during the Burning Times and the subsequent Dark Ages.

There were bricks and really old masonry and north south aligned rectangles. Some of the upper bricks and mortar showed tell-tales of burning, as did many of the strewn and scattered bricks and blocks.

The smell of earth and the decaying vegetation, that dry straw smell, overpowering the dirt and sand, was everywhere.

As the cargo lift was cranked back up into the gondola of the airship, Etelka and Pool discussed their plans.

“We should camp here in the clearing tonight,” she began. “It did not take them long to notice our presence last time, as if they patrol the area. Perhaps, they follow hunting tracks through or near to the clearing,” she speculated.

“Will it be wise to have a small fire? And we will need to find a source of fresh water. What we brought from the ship will not last long,” said Pool.

“There are some low walls over there,” she said as she pointed to the north. “If we set up the tent in the crux of the walls we will be largely obscured and so will our fire. I they chose to come and introduce themselves, however—peacefully, that is—it will save us a trek through the woods.”

Pool was relieved at being given tacit permission for a fire. He never relished cold supper or breakfast, and hot tea would be refreshing in the morning.

“I am not overly concerned about our safety tonight in the clearing. We are still within site of the Hut and can signal them if we need to be extracted. The real danger begins once we are deep into the forest.”

The Black Forest was called that because of the impenetrable nature of the wood. Not just was the bark of the oak fairly dark, but the mossy depths shut out all light and from the clearing looked as black as night.

The camp was made. Despite Pool’s insistence on two tents, Etelka had countered that one was sufficient and would lessen the amount they would have to carry and assemble each day.

As the sun was dropping behind the distant trees to the west, Pool attempted to construct a small fire, but ultimately needed the assistance of the baroness, who was clever in many unexpected ways (or so he thought.) Dried grass was lit by sparks from a certain kind of rod and the back of a knife blade. To this little flame were added small twigs, more grass, and finally, small branches foraged from the edge of the imposing forest.

As they ate, they spoke of their plans, or rather Etelka’s plans. (Pool was there merely as an assistant—or in his mind—a protector.)

“Tomorrow, we shall rise at sunrise, break camp and head into the woods, aiming for the location from which they came at us last time.” She tilted her head to the [east?].

“They were aggressive before, Baroness,” he said. “What if they are again?”

“I was thinking of bringing them, their tribe, their community—however we shall call them—a gift. In most human cultures it is the appropriate action from guests to hosts. If they are social animals it might work.”

Pool saw her clearly optimistic expression, that bit of glee Etelka got when she was on to something or when she had invented something new. It encouraged him, though deep down inside, in the part that he would shortly write down in his notebook, he did have his doubts and a dark foreboding.

The night was moonless and clear and the stars were vivid, a thousand glimmering pinpricks in the black satin sky. Etelka wished she was back at her house in Kekszemu with her observatory. They were not harassed by the monsters in the pitch-black wood, but just in case, kept three hour watches over the smoldering embers, with the faint lights of Baba Yaga’s Hut hanging over them.

In the salmon-pink pre-dawn light, Pool awoke to Etelka already heating some water on the re-stacked coals of the previous night’s fire. It was only a small camp-pot, and a sizable portion of the water they had brought with them—they would have to find a source in the forest—but would suffice for their coffee and porridge.

While the water was coming to a slow boil, she peeped up over the ruined wall with one of the telescopes and scanned the tree line.

The camp was hastily packed up while the morning dew was still on the shrub’s branches—they would regret it later from the mildew on the canvas. Pool kicked some dirt and rubble over the embers, minimizing signs of their presence.

The salmon sky of the morning, strands of clouds illuminated by the dawn, gave an etherial vibe to their departure. Ahead were a dark and deep green and black tangle of ancient oaks.

As they approached, they could hear the ever-present chirping of frogs. Pool asked Etelka where they were.

“In the trees…on the branches, Pool…Constable.” Familiarity had made things awkward. “Tree frogs”

The trees did indeed thrum with the constant cacaphony of chirping frog-noises, jarring chords and uneven rhythms.

“We have no such frogs in Londbridge. I am unfamiliar with them, although I heard similar sounds in N’Aurelia,” responded Pool.

The edge of the forest, the perimeter of the clearing where they had landed, over which Baba Yaga’s Hut now floated, was a dense thing. Ancient, really ancient, meter-thick oak trees with wide spanning branches reaching 20 or even 30 meters horizontally, umbrella’d an undercarriage of moss covered fallen comrades, the throngs of which slowly decayed into new soil beneath their funeral blanket.

There were no paths, save for what the deer had laid out, and these, winding between the ancient trees, wound around and over the landscape, with little regard for topography.

“Pool,” Etelka said in a whisper, “Is that a footprint?”

They paused over the series of indentations—the one had led them to several more. It looked as if who- or whatever had laid down the prints had walked on previously laid prints, obscuring their plural presence.

While they both crouched under their packs, studying the prints, Pool briefly looked up and scanned what there was of the horizon. Every direction was blocked by trees, so that every space between trunks was filled with more of the same, all black and green. Paranoia brushed past him, like a slight breeze in an otherwise still forest, raising his hackles. With dirty fingertips he twisted the right branch of his mustache.

He focused on the directions of the coming and going of the tracks and could not for the life of him find the origin of this particular path. It seemed that the tracks started out of nowhere. Even standing over the first in the series, he could not find its predecessors.

Etelka continued to study the ones immediately before her with a small magnifying glass she had pulled from one of her many pouches or pockets.

“It seems as if there are three layers of prints, perhaps three creatures one time or one creature three times. They seem to be a mixture of canine and ape and have claws about two centimeters long. Clearly they walk upright, as well, and seem to weigh more than you, if we were to compare the depth of their prints and the depth of yours.”

“See how they are around 28 centimeters long, but splayed…I would also wager that their big toes are opposing, based on these shapes.” Etelka was talking to Pool, certainly, but mostly talking to herself. She poked at the rise in the print left by the deep arch of the creature’s foot.

They had seen no signs of camps or outposts in the wood from the air, no paths, no other clearings and no smoke from cook-fires.

“We should just walk in a regular direction, affecting as much of as a straight path as the terrain will allow. Doing this we are likely, I believe, to stumble upon the hunting paths of these creatures. They clearly move deftly through the wood, but I would think if they have hunting parties, they will frequent places where their prey would gather.”

Pool agreed with this and asked if she possessed a compass for the path of the sun was largely obscured beneath the canopy.

Etelka’s pale fingers brushed across her belt pouches—she needn’t even look. With a flick she unlatched the pouch and produced a small brass compass.

“Lucky, that,” responded Pool.

Based on the orientation of the clearing, they estimated that they were northeast of the clearing—the same direction the creatures had come from in their last encounter.

“If we move consistently in that direction we should cross any path that they have heading from their camp from any direction.”

The two of them headed out. Etelka kept the compass in her hand, checking it frequently, and Pool carried the heavy rifle from Baba Yaga’s Hut, and also most of the camp supplies.

It seems like days had passed. Etelka kept checking her watch almost as often as she checked her compass. Only a few hours had actually passed, but due the dark and quiet unending forest landscape they couldn’t tell the minutes from the hours. They avoided talk and tried to move as silently as possible, a method they had considered hesitantly—most predators don’t like being surprised.

Etelka insisted that they would announce themselves once they had located the camp of their quarry.

Unlike their other senses’ inability to accurately tell them time, their stomachs had no such problems. They stopped on the edge of a small brook and found a comfortable spot on the mossy bank.

While Etelka unloaded their cookware, Pool retraced their path a short ways to gather some dry-ish kindling and sticks to make a small fire to heat their water—this time water from the stream, both for their porridge supper and to replenish their potable drinking water.

She had just set up a circle of rocks and placed out a small tripod with their camp boiling-pot and was generally crouched down, still overlooking the stream, but in a shallow, two meters across, facing the stream, but between two enormous oaks and backed by a pair of fallen decaying and moss-covered trunks, when she heard unexpected splashes in the stream.

Pool still had the rifle, but Etelka was not unarmed. She crouched even lower, turning toward the stream in the direction of the sounds. With a fluid motion, she had both her brass and steel automatic as well as her telescope out and was scanning what horizon there was for the source of the splashes.

A deer and two fawns had stepped down off the bank, upstream 30 meters or so, and bent their heads to drink from the water just below where it babbled over some submerged rocks. Etelka regretted that Pool had the rifle—her weapon was not suited for hunting. Either of them could pull off an accurate shot with the rifle and make a clean kill, certainly at this range.

As she lay pressed to the ground, trying to hear Pool’s movements behind her, somewhere behind the fallen logs, her attention was drawn more violently to the deer and she embraced the loamy soil even more tightly.

A sudden flurry and rush of movement came at the troop of deer from an overhanging tree.

A barbed spear shot down, tethered with a cord to whatever launched it. It pierced a squealing fawn, which was hauled quickly up into the same tree. It quickly grew silent.

Etelka could see a stream of blood pouring out over the confused remaining mother and fawn, who looked around for a direction to bolt.

Within seconds, the adult mother deer met an identical fate. Still more blood, and now viscera poured down. The remaining fawn sniffed at the bloody water and started to move away up the opposite bank, the same bank Etelka lay on.

She hoped that Pool did not return just now.

It was in vain. She could hear him approaching from exactly the same direction the last fawn had gone. Soon the fawn was fleeing him. Then, as it leapt from the bank to the rocky stream bed, a figure, one of their elusive quarry fell from the tree, fell upon it, running a long blade (bone, antler? she wondered).

Another of the creatures—a scrawny one, smaller than her—landed on the opposite bank on its feet, with a deer carcass on either shoulder.

In the hand that wasn’t securing the dangling feet of the deer, it held the barbed wooden spear with a coiled cord looped over the same arm.

The one with the long knife—not steel, not metal at all—turned its head toward the direction Pool was approaching from. It sniffed the air and with the small body of the fawn still clutched in its left hand climbed the bank staring in the direction of the noise.

Etelka’s heart raced. If these things could do this to deer this quickly—it had only taken ten seconds—what of Pool?

Spear said to Knife something untiuntelligible. She wasn’t wearing the translation ring and wasn’t going to fiddle for it at this moment. There was a response, and both creatures looked in the direction of the noise for what seemed like minutes, standing so silently that they disappeared into the background foliage. Then with out so much of a word, they jumped back into the stream and splashed upstream until their footsteps could no longer be heard.

“Did you see that?” Pool said from behind her. Etelka let out a startled squeal and rolled over to look at him, her garments flaring. Pool had the rifle shouldered and a bundle of twigs and sticks under his arm.

“Baroness, do you not think that now is not the right time to be pursuing these creatures into their den, or, as you keep saying, their camp?”

“Constable Pool,” Etelka said with mostly animated irritation, “they…the creatures as you call them, act no differently than humans throughout the ages.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, or to turn the conversation away from what moves the story along.” Pool dropped his bundle of wood in the prepared circle of stones.

An hour later the little light that penetrated the canopy had diminished and they had resorted to using the failing light of the embers to prop up the tent. The bowl between the trees was sheltered and protected, but not suited for sleeping rough on the ground under a canvas tent.

Pool was adrift in fantasy falling in and out of sleep, thinking of days on the airship, clouds like mountains, days with his Baroness, when he suddenly awoke.

He reached for the rifle at his side, his fingers clutched the ancient—recent fabrications of “ancient”—carvings in the walrus ivory of its stock. Pool tried to pull it toward him. It was stuck on something.

Not so much as stuck, but grasped by something just beyond the canvas, which now suddenly seemed gossamer thin.

“Baroness,” Pool said in barely a whisper. “My rifle is stuck. Your rifle…”

“The rifle, Pool. For Gods’ sakes.” Responded Etelka.

Interrupting Pool, Etelka said, rather whispered, “There is a …smell outside of the tent.”

Then, without any sort of warning, the hand that clutched the rifle barrel that Pool himself was clutching pulled him from under the canvas wall of the tent instead.

Etelka was beside herself, if only for a few minutes. Her watch told her that it was an hour before dawn and they were still directly northeast of the clearing, above which Baba Yaga’s Hut hung dutifully.

She gathered her senses, and, kept her limbs away from the perilous edges of the tent. Etelka knew that the tent was barely a flimsy wall. It would not protect her from an attack by the creatures, the new people she sought to encounter. Oh, Constable Pool….

Fortunately, nothing came of the night or the morning. Pool was gone. She knew that it would be suicide to go rushing off into the lightless forest. The remaining hour before the first hint of dawn seemed like eons.

Finally, peering out of the flaps canvas, into the still and silent still deeply shadowed wood, she saw no sign of her friend. Her fingers clutched her automatic, steel and brass cold from the night. Her left hand brushed her hair back from her face—it was in disarray from first sleeping and then shivering in the center of the tent with her gun.

Moments of hesitation brought light enough to tell between green and black, most was still dark grey though. There was no sign of Pool, or even a struggle.

When he had disappeared, he had gasped then grunted, then it had been silent. Circling the tent, Etelka found a patch of disturbed moss where Pool had been dragged, but there were no apparent footprints—surprising because if Pool where unconscious or worse the added weight on someone or something carrying or dragging him should have been enough to leave some mark, some trace upon the ground.

About 20 meters from the camp, Etelka found the rifle and suspiciously, the 5 magazines Pool had stuffed into the pockets of his jacket earlier, all strewn in the same little area. She collected them.

Etelka returned to the camp. By some amount of luck, as she returned through the forest, she found more deer drinking from the stream in the same spot that their brethren had been killed last evening.

Bringing the rifle to bear on her shoulder, she cocked and fired, bringing down a small male deer. The others scattered from the shot.

The dim distant dawn corresponded with the direction of her now cracked compass. Etelka, dirty, not interested in packing up the camp, needed to get Pool back.

She made sure she had her belt, with all of the pouches, especially the ones with the alien rings, the compass, the ammunition for the rifle and her own automatic. She out of sentiment, brought her hat as well.

Etelka’s hunch was that the stream bed had been the route that the creatures had taken before. It was now likely the route that Pool had been taken. She surmised that they would prefer fresh water, so wouldn’t slaughter prey over a stream unless it was down stream. The stream would also explain the general lack of prints on the forest floor.

A half a day of trekking and Etelka now wished she had brought food and water with her. The water of the stream tasted okay, but who knows what ill fate awaited her the day after tomorrow for having slurped it up.

Still, with the carcass of her deer on her shoulders, legs on either side, she trudged on, until after hours—or was it mere minutes—Etelka knelt down into the water of the creek when she smelled smoke.

Peering over the bank, she saw a small clearing, meters wide, but adjacent to a hillock formed by many fallen and moss covered trees. Branches of living trees had been drawn out and pulled together to form a lattice of sorts above the underground chamber.

Little to no activity took place in the clearing between the creek and the shelter. Indeed, nothing remained there for very long at all.

Etelka freeing her blood-crusted hand from the foreleg of the deer she had shot, reached down and found the pouch where the ancient alien rings had been secured. Her fingers slid into them. They were too large and her fingers swam in them.

She stepped up and forward, climbing only on feet up the bank, into the small open space: the broad arms of the oaks nearly twined (in the way that trees do—never actually touching), all but covering the space beneath.

“I come bringing a gift for your leader, you chief and you all.”

Half a dozen of them stood looking at her, as if she were the alien. Etelka wondered if they had been there when she climbed out of the stream bed, or if they had quietly emerged when she spoke.

Millenia of special distrust had led them inward, to hide, to find the dark places where humans did not venture. With the ravages of the Time of the Tigers, this attitude was only strengthened.

Etelka had slipped the translation ring onto her finger. The fit was not at all good; it hung like a loose collar on her dainty, alabaster finger. She knew it should work, turning her words in Hunnish into whatever language they spoke, but at first there was no proof that it did.

Etelka scraped back her tangled electric blue hair, brown at its roots, from her sweaty forehead. Her strategic bun had disintegrated yesterday. Now it was a twisted mat with an infusion of leaves, dirt and twigs.

“I come to you bringing a gift…” offering the meat “…I want to know about you, to put it succinctly.”

The reaction to her sudden appearance, though they had smelled her presence, came almost as a shock to Etelka. They seemed mystified, clearly never having heard their language spoken by one not of their kind. The held postures, almost to the last one, of reluctant curiosity combined with restrained violence.

“Have you seen my traveling companion, by any chance? Tallish, human, mustache that he fiddles with when he thinks.”

From a cavernous hole beneath layers of fallen trees, dug beneath roots and dark and full of earthen odors, stooped a very large one.

When his head and shoulders had cleared the logs, he stood erect. He was without any sort of clothing; some of the smaller ones went with bands of leaves around their waists, but this one, this large one went entirely without.

He—clearly it was a ‘he’—stood twice as tall as the ones that had killed the three deer yesterday. Could this be the one that Nila fought? She wondered. It’s member was uninjured—a detail that Nila would contest. Although, her friend had insisted later that this individual—if indeed it was the same one—had powers to induce hallucinations. Etelka determined that she would be wary of mentalism.

The wayward Baroness Kekszemu turned her head and eyes from the gathered folk of the camp…hamlet…village. She struggled to put it into human terms. There were a dozen individuals, who, to her eyes, all looked alike except for their sizes. They were male and female—they were physically gendered like most Terran mammals—but the similarity from individual to individual was striking.

With the footprints, Etelka’s theory was confirmed. They indeed looked like a hybrid of wolf and gorilla. Bigger than the chimpanzee, upright, possessed of opposable thumbs on both hands and feet. Sharp and long canine teeth, and long snouts compared to the flat faces of apes. Pointed canine ears. Forward facing eyes suggested predator. They were also entirely hairless. Etelka wondered what they wore in winter.

The size of the chief—if we can call him that—was the most unusual thing. Indeed, looking around, it appeared to Etelka that the group pecking order was entirely based on size: this being based on a rather tiny sample size of a species she had virtually no experience with, of course.

“Do you have him somewhere here? My manservant who was rudely and inappropriately taken from my tent in the pre-dawn hours?” Perhaps they would respond to our human pecking-order, she thought.

The typical experience with the Rakshasan artifact translation ring had always been one of hearing the other speak fluent words in one’s own language, without accent or region other than that of the hearer. It was completely subjective. Speakers of two different tongues would each hear their own spoken.

This was different. The answer the Chief gave to her was not in Kekszemu Etelka’s native Hunnish, but instead, she was forced, her mind was forced to comprehend this creature’s own language.

It was very guttural, highly tonal and seemed to her to be the language of the foundation of Terra itself, even the Universe itself, so reflective of the relationships of nature to nature that it all made sense.

Had it even been Hunnish or any other language of the Empire or the world that she was familiar with, the Chief’s voice was many octaves deeper than hers, so much that Etelka felt that her bones vibrated with his speech.

“Your servant is alive. We have even fed and watered him. He is an object of curiosity for my people,” he said. “And to answer your next question: no, you will not leave here.”

Etelka, still wrapping her head around the unexpected manner of translation, after moment of rapid thought disguised as catching her breath, responded, “Why is it we will not be permitted to leave? There is so much for my species to learn about yours…” Her heart was racing more than she would have anticipated.

“I came here with the very mission to meet your people and your obviously potent self…”

“You speak as a warthog’s ass.” Chief was not going for flattery. Etelka recoiled somewhat as he stood even taller and seemed to grow in stature before her.

“Chief, sir, do you have a preferred title or name I may address you by?”

“I am Perpiscuitous Dream.”

That was fairly straightforward. Etelka felt no threat from them except for the one about not ever leaving, and a faint one that resembled in the slightest way, the way she felt when Miss Tagore wore the predator ring and sought her out. A feeling of being prey.

“And, if I may ask what are your people, your race, your species called?” From the corner of her eye she saw a disheveled Constable Pool manhandled out of the cave or whatever it was beneath the lattice of branches. She remained intently focused on Perpiscuitous Dream.

“We are Ngablakh.” It did not translate. All she heard was the deep-throated syllables.

“Why do you hide here? Our human empire is an open one. Open to many human races and cultures. I’m sure we could accommodate you and yours.”

Etelka noticed, again from the corner of her eye that Pool was dutifully attempting to record things in his pocket journal. He was dirty and looked like he had been shoved around and prodded, but ultimately not out of sorts.

Perpiscuitous Dream spoke briefly again. She repeated it out loud knowing that Pool couldn’t understand at all what was being said.

Also, remembering at last that she had taken part in one of Ms Tagore’s futuristic rituals and in the 23rd century received an implanted device. How does Nila do this? Internal vocalization?

Record-audio

Record-video -ocular

The implant was tied into her brain. In the underground lab three centuries in the future she trusted her friend, in part to gain access to this alien technology. Oh, the things we go through to advance Science.

Record-audio -includeRingTranslation

Etelka had no way of knowing if what she was understanding would be recorded. The Chief could be speaking gibberish for all she knew. She also had no idea what the proper grammar of the commands was. However, she continued to repeat the Chief’s answers for Pool.

The many questions she had mentally prioritized on her way here, on the voyage across the ocean had now left her wanting.

“How long have you been here, Chief? Our human records have no words about you other than fairy tales about monsters in the Wood. And I mean no disrespect, it is just that one would think that living fairly side by side for ages, we would know at least something of you.”

Perpiscuitous Dream looked at her askance. He then glanced around at his small tribe. She suspected there were more than just his small band under his command.

As he paused in thought, one of the smaller Ngablakh who had been scrutinizing Pool’s rough transcription with his ever-present pencil nub reached down and took the notebook from Pool’s hands.

Pool had not suspected this and looked bewildered as he coward beneath the standing male, expecting violence.

Etelka was shocked as well, and her hand hovered over her gun, not wanting to let them know that it was more than a bangle or other form of accoutrement.

The young (?) Ngablakh bit the notebook, tasting the paper and leather cover, before making a clear face of disgust (or did the ring also translate body language?) He then tossed it to another one, this a young female, who did much the same experimenting.

She turned her eyes back to the gigantic Chief, who was himself distracted by the playful young ones and seemed to be smiling.

He turned to meet her gaze.

“We have always been here from the beginning. The camps of men who in the times of the ancestors came and built in the clearing that you know, these did not last and burned with the rest of your kind when the demons came and then again when the fathers came and cleansed the world.”

“We have always known to avoid your kind. We are not blind to you. You are blind to us,” There were things the translation ring was missing, or mistranslating.

Etelka tried utilizing the command ring: “Sir, you should just let us go on our way. We won’t speak of your presence to anyone.”

He looked at her with contempt with a a tinge of mockery. She felt even more like food.

“I am done with this talk today.” This was clear. Perspicuous Dream was obviously bored with them and the interaction. “Bent-spear will…assist you in your adaptation.”

A medium sized male who looked like a small version of Perspicuous Dream sauntered over. They walked with slightly bowed legs and a kind of bouncy gait.

When they were alone with only Bent-spear nearby, Etelka in hushed voice spoke to Pool. Though Bent-spear was the only one near them, the others all watched from the edges of the small camp where they busied themselves with meaningless tasks to justify staying, moving small piles of sticks here and there and so forth. Both Etelka and Pool noticed this and Etelka slipped the nyereg off into its pouch, so they wouldn’t be understood.

“Are you okay, Pool? We have to get out of here. I’d like to learn more…perhaps, there are other more amenable Ngablakh out there, but I certainly don’t trust the Chief.”

Pool had been through a lot worse, he assured her, and he had.

They were left in a hollow between fallen logs with minimally sheltered area in the back, behind a small open fire pit. It was cold now, but there was a small pile of wood nearby. There was also one practical exit occupied by Bent-spear.

“Pool, give me what’s left of your jacket,” requested Etelka.

He looked at her with inquisitive eyes that she could just barely make out in the dim light, beneath the canopy and the shelter they had been given, but ultimately gave her the tattered and dirty garment. His shoulder holster was empty. He must have lost the pistol, she thought.

Sliding the nyereg back on to her finger—she really must keep them from finding her secret out—she spoke to Bent-spear. “We wish to dip this in some fat so that we can burn it for light, can you help us find some fat, or dip it yourself?”

Bent-spear turned out to be much more affected by the commands than his great leader. He left and in less than two minutes returned with Pool’s jacket dripping with hot animal fat.

“Thank you,” she said.

With the ring-saddle off, Etelka told Pool of her plan. They would wait until twilight or later….

“Bent-spear, are you there? Are you awake?” said Etelka in a quiet voice. She didn’t want Perspicuous Dream to be aroused.

He was awake.

“If I am not mistaken, there is a large heard of fat deer to the north, not far off, like all of my species, I can smell them clearly…yes, they are not far at all. Gather your tribe, your family and go hunt them before they escape. Their meat will feed you all for days, weeks even.” She wasn’t sure how much of a command that was, but after some looking about and sniffing the air of dusk, Bent-spear rose to his feet and loped off into the little village, telling everyone that there were deer to be had to the north.

“Pool! Quickly, take a couple of those branches there and come,” she said quietly but forcefully. The ring was back in its pouch.

The two humans slipped into the dark and circled the tiny village furtively until they had come to the south end, where the stream passed. Then they ran.

The first ten minutes of splashing their way south seemed to be going well. They they heard them.

Howls. Multiple howls. Including a very deep howl.

“Rip this in half and wrap each piece around the branches. We’ll never get out of here at this rate in this dark.”

As Pool tightly tied the fragments of his jacket around the end of the branches—it was clear from the beginning she intended them as torches—Etelka pulled out her mechanical lighter. It was not even an invention of hers, although she had made this one.

“With the flames, we will move faster, but they will sooner notice us. We must hurry.” She reached into her vest and pulled out a small pistol. “Miss Tagore gave me this one. There is just the one magazine.” Pool took it and chambered a round.

They ran along the twisting stream bed. Splashing the babbling brook with every step. The howls and growls grew closer.

Without warning Etelka stopped and back-tracked.

“But…Baro….Etelka!!??” sputtered Pool after Etelka as she scurried up the embankment. He could see the sputtering torch she carried. He could also hear splashing up the stream from their pursuers.

He was utterly surprised when she performed a stunt that he had only witnessed amongst gymnasts (or Miss Tagore in her special mode.) Etelka leapt nearly over him, torch in one hand and the antique rifle in the other and her own automatic flailing around in the small of her back.

Breathlessly, she exclaimed, with almost a gleeful smile on her fire-lit face, “Come on…our camp was there…”

They were back running. The Ngablakh were now only a couple hundred meters behind—the distance a long bow could land an arrow. Both were out of breath and had racing hearts.

Just as they broke through the forest wall into the clearing, one of the Ngablakh hooted and howled as he or she launched a spear at them, their atlatl spinning on the down swing. It grazed Pool’s arm. The stone point drawing blood from his left shoulder.

Etelka spun around, tossing the torch at a nearby dry shrub and raised the rifle to her shoulder.

As the bush burst into crackling flame and illuminated a greater area of the clearing she sighted on one of the pursuing Ngablakh down the barrel of the gun, felt the heavy recoil.

That one fell.

I came in peace. Did I fail to mention that? I at least brought them a gift. What kind of person kidnaps an ambassador? A researcher?

She chambered another round and took aim at the second one.

She missed. Twice. Three times.

The third was closer than she expected when she finally noticed…him. Fortunately for him the rifle jammed. She let out an uncharacteristic expletive and pulled her dangling automatic around.

After shouldering the antique rifle—she didn’t want to let them go, because they were a matching set that went with Baba Yaga’s Hut—she charged the auto.

There were now half a dozen more of the forest-dwellers in the clearing. Pool was behind her jumping up and down trying to gain the attention of the crew of the airship above them. He was yelling something incoherent even in Brethmanic. Maybe Beatrix is listening, she thought before spraying the marauding pursuers.

She had only intended to lay down cover fire so she and Pool could retreat to the airship and safety.

What she didn’t expect was the pair of concussive explosions from fifty meters above.

Etelka glanced up, side-lit by the burning bush next to her and half-surrounded by Ngablakh. Baba Yaga’s Hut’s starboard guns—small cannons really—sounded with deafening effect. Neither shot hit a target, but they spectacle of fire and smoke and noise caused the pursuers to pause and look to their own safety.

She took the opportunity to retreat to where hapless Pool was gesticulating, trying to think of his better moments. With a hand on his non-bloody shoulder, she calmed him down and handed him the rifle, telling him to unjam it before putting in the fresh magazine. This was all punctuated with short bursts in the general direction of the encroaching Ngablakh.

Without looking, Etelka could hear the cargo lift cranking down, above them. From the duration, she estimated another 90 seconds or so.

The field of combat was illuminated entirely by that one burning bush and being spindly and dry, it didn’t last long. The deep howls of the Chief, Perpiscuitous Dream, were in the field now.

Another pair of near simultaneous firings from above. The clearing already smelled of powder-smoke, not unlike firework celebrations.

The pursuers were kept at bay.

Except the Chief, who railed at and rallied his people—more than the dozen they had seen the village—to advance and recapture the human woman and her manservant.

Staccato echoing from Etelka’s gun. She wasn’t even aiming as she couldn’t see him at all, nor most of his people.

The cargo lift was low enough that Pool had begun jumping for it, although he was still a few meters short.

“Pool! I really need you to shoot. Now!!”

Seven Ngablakh sped crouched across the field jumping effortlessly over crumbling ancient walls, pushing aside shrubs and bushes to hurl spears at them.

Finally, Pool took aim at the closest and dropped her with one shot.

So, at least he got it unjammed. If only I had gotten more of the magazines.

Etelka dropped a clip and shoved another one in from her ammunition pouch.

More bursts.

“Baroness,” yelled Pool, “the lift is low enough to reach. You go first.” He offered clasped hands for her to step up, leaving the rifle hanging on his (not bloody) shoulder. Still he winced when her toe pressed his hands down.

Attaining the lift, Etelka lay on her stomach and lay down cover fire against the closest enemies. Then, looking over the edge saw Pool and stretched down an arm to him.

She was not strong enough herself to pull him up, but he was remarkably agile, albeit in a bumbling sort of way.

By the time they were pulled tight into the cargo hold of Baba Yaga’s Hut there were three spears lying next to them, and they would discover later, another four hanging from the gondola of the airship.

…

Anchor up.

In the lounge, sitting around the world-table, Pool spoke: “So, what now, Baroness? What of your research into these mysterious Ngablakh?”

She looked at him with piercing aquamarine eyes: “Constable Pool, where would we all be if we gave up so easily?” That said she left him with a manic smile, a kind that only she could manage, and retired to her cabin.