It took nearly half an hour, and when it finally arrived, it was so bizarre that Slate wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t fallen asleep while they waited and dreamed it instead.
There was a stone fish in the river.
At first, Slate thought it was merely stone-like—its skin hard and grey, patchy with lichen and wet with moss. But the sheer weight of the creature was rapidly obvious, as it ground its way up the rocky riverbed. Stone screamed on stone as it pushed through a shallow patch of rapids. Sparks jumped and flashed from the contact.
In shape, it resembled an enormous salmon, nearly six feet tall at the humped back, at least twenty feet long. The stone tail thrashed in slow motion, driving it forward, and a mossy, underslung jaw clapped with a sound like an avalanche. Its eyeswere broad, fist-sized lumps, and the scales appeared to have been carved.
“That’s a crazy big fish,” said Grimehug.
“It’s not moving very fast,” said Slate, after watching it rumble by for nearly a minute.
“Yeah, but it’s doing pretty good for a rock,” said Brenner.
Nearly ten minutes later, it had passed the rapids and was partially submerged again. Once in the water, it made somewhat better speed, and eventually vanished around a bend in the river.
It left behind a trail of round stones, spherical as geodes. Learned Edmund reached into the water and picked up one up, examining it from all angles. It fit neatly into his palm.
“Is that anegg?” asked Slate.
“I…many-armed lord, you know, I think it might be.” Learned Edmund’s eyebrows drew together. “If you figure that creature was like a salmon spawning…” He gazed at the rock.
“Is it going tohatch?”
“Only one way to find out, I suppose.” He tucked the stone carefully into a saddlebag. “Assuming it doesn’t hatch on a geological time scale, in which case none of us may be around to see it.”
Privately, Slate thought that the way things were going, they’d be damn lucky to be around to see it hatch on even a normal flesh-and-blood time scale, but she kept that to herself.
After that, the Vagrant Hills started to get truly odd.
They followed the river as well as they could. The trail left by the stone salmon was obvious downriver, scrapes punctuated by the round egg-stones. Learned Edmund scribbled rapidly in his journal.
Every time they had to turn aside from the river, to avoid a bluff or detour around an impassable thicket, it got weirder.
Most of the things they saw were, like the stone fish, unsettling but harmless. There was the clearing full of spiders, weaving a long and intricate mural detailing the rise of an arachnid civilization. There was a gully full of stones, each one with a keyhole in it. (Brenner tried to pick one with a pin. After forty-five minutes, he succeeded, and it crumbled into dust in his hands.) There was a tree with broad fleshy leaves that made kissing noises as they passed, and one that pulled vines tight in around itself and moaned.
It was nearly noon, and they were following an old game trail, when a rabbit hopped slowly into their path.
It was large and brown and leggy, and it sat up to look at them. Its nose twitched.
“Bunny!” said Grimehug happily.
The rabbit flicked its ears, looked up at Brenner, and said, in a deep, thoughtful voice, “You’ll die laughing, you know.”
They stared at the rabbit. It flicked its ears again.
The assassin’s hand went for the hilt of a dagger, and the rabbit bounded off the track, kicking up mulch and bits of bark. By the time his blade cleared the sheath, it was long gone.
Brenner was left sitting on his horse, holding a knife, with a bemused expression.
“Look on the bright side,” said Slate. “At least it didn’t saywhen.”
They passed through one band of trees and into another. Pine needles gave way to rotted leaves. The woods seemed darker and denser, and the brambles got thicker and required longer and longer detours. The ground sucked at the horse’s hooves.
“This is not a good place,” said Brenner.
“It feels…unholy,” said Caliban gravely.
“You’d know.”
