Into the thinking kingdoms - Alan Dean Foster [82]
Simna drew his sword. “Well, he can’t have this one. I need it.” Behind him, Ahlitah tensed and hunted for an opening.
Pulling the sky-metal blade from the scabbard on his back, Ehomba closed ranks with his friend. “And I mine. Mirhanja would still recognize me if I returned home without a face, but how would she look deep into my eyes if they were taken away?” He held his sword out in front of him, the moonlight glinting off the sharply angled etchings in the singular steel.
The vohwn looked at the double display of sharp-edged weaponry, though what it looked with no one could say, and laughed from the vacancy where its mouth might have been had it enjoyed a mouth. It was a sly suspiration, a sound that played beguilingly around the outer ear without ever really intruding, yet they heard it anyway, a laugh that froze only random drops of blood within their veins.
A phantasmal hand, skeletal and blue, reached toward them. Simna ducked. Ehomba held his ground and swung. The sky-metal sword moaned as it cleaved air and wrist. Like an emancipated moth, the severed hand of the vohwn went drifting off into the night, possessed of a life of its own. The specter cried out elegiacally and drew back its arm. As the empty face stared down into the severed wrist, it promptly grew another hand.
The herdsman hissed at the swaying, unsteady Knucker. “How do we get around it?”
“Well,” the drunk responded thoughtfully, “you could make a break to your left and cross the street, but then you’d run into the borboressbs.”
Glancing in the indicated direction, Ehomba and Simna saw a dark slit of an alley give birth to a dozen or so pony-sized homunculi. They had cloven hooves and walked with a permanent crouch. Bright red skin was subdued somewhat by the feeble moonlight. Goatlike tails switched back and forth and bristle-black hair covered their bodies in isolated, unwholesome patches. Their faces were blunt and plump, distorted by mouths full of sharp snaggle teeth that ran from ear to ear. When they gaped, it looked as if their skulls were split horizontally in half. Each had a single horn of varying length growing from the center of its forehead, and they were armed with curving, scythelike short swords fashioned of metal as bloodred as their exposed flesh.
They had been gabbling in an unknown tongue until they caught sight of the travelers. Now their unfathomable discourse was transmuted into an ominous muttering as they turned toward Ehomba and his companions. The presence of the towering vohwn did nothing to dissuade their advance.
Knucker spat something lumpy and brown onto the street and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Beware the borboressbs. They like to pluck out a man’s veins while he’s still alive and slurp them down for a snack.”
Ehomba tried to count the advancing freaks while keeping a watchful eye on the vohwn. It was still busy regrowing its hand, and had not moved from its position in the middle of the street.
“What about the other way?”
Knucker squinted and struggled to focus. “Well, you might have done that a minute or so ago, but it’s too late now.” He nodded to no one in particular. “Grenks.”
Slithering down the sidewalk came a trio of four-legged blobs that blocked the way from street to structure with a splotchy mass of pulsating pustulance. They looked like animals that had been fashioned from tied-together balloons. Big as buffalo, they loped along on barrellike legs that bounced them lightly off the ground. They had no feet and no hands. Everything about them was rounded and pulpy. Behind them they left triple trails of ichorous lump-filled slime whose stench reached the travelers even from a distance. It lay where it dripped for long moments before evaporating.
The repulsive, malformed heads were all pop eyes and gaping mouths, the latter limned with greasy, saclike lips. They had no teeth, but from the depths of those revolting