Childhood Demons Ch. 03

What will you do in the morning?"

He snorted a little quietly, "First I must live through this night.

I cannot say. There are only four of us left, and we are a long way from being anywhere that is safe. It was a good walk to come up here from the coast. I cannot begin to think of how we will get back down with a horde of men after us every step of the way. And we have very little ammunition."

She looked at him, "Do you wish to go back to your outpost? I have the feeling that you do not like these Frenchmen very much, other than the others that you fight with - who are not French as you said to me.

I have a boat down at the coast. I was told that many of the ones here only fight since it is better than dying right away. If you are one like that, then you may wish to consider a different road now. What if I told you that I wish to leave this land and go to the northern coast and from there, father north - somewhere in the mountains?"

He thought about it and he nodded at last, "I would want for the three with me to have the same chance, if it is possible."

She smiled back and opened her cloak for a moment so that she could tie it a little tighter around her neck, "If it is what they wish. But they will still have to fight their way down - with my help, of course. Then it remains to be seen if they would want to travel with such... strange shipmates to their eyes. The question in my mind is... would you? I think yes.

He nodded, "I would anyway I think, Jötunn girl. To have the chance to be free once more and far from here..." he looked across at her and smiled, "I think that I would swim across the Mediterranean - if I had you to hold onto."

She thought it was a humorous thought and so she nodded as she stepped closer, "Stay here. I will try to hunt the ones who have gone to get more. They are frightened of the dark, for they cannot see well in it. It might not be a long hunt. I will return to you and we will see how hard we must fight to get down

You and I both carry too much muscle to float well. I think that some practice might be required in swimming together before we put things to the test."

"Where would we practice?" he asked with an intrigued smile.

Yasmikha's head went back as she laughed softy, "Somewhere safe to begin, I think. We wouldn't want to drown from our floundering at the outset, so it must be a place without water - just to start.

I had my bed in mind for such a purpose."

The Finn could swim well, but he decided not to let on. He only grinned and nodded, "Then I cannot wait to begin to learn at your hand."

He didn't know if it was meant as a parting shot or anything of that nature, but he felt it as her hand caressed his backside for a moment.

"I am a little different," she said, "I have the sight and with it or not, in all of my life, I have never seen a man like you are. You are a human, this I can feel from you, no matter what my eyes tell me, though they are in agreement."

Her long fingers patted him back there once and then she drew her hand away to turn and walk off, "But I have never met one who has a tail like yours. I wonder,... how you keep that secret living as you do. Soldiers or warriors have little to hide from their fellows. So there is also some power in you to be able to hide it. I am very interested."

He was alone again the next instant and he looked back to where the rest slept, wondering at her words and about if the others would want to leave by sailing away. He drifted back to check on them and set down the rifle. After a moment, for some reason, he elected to pick up the squad weapon to have it a little handy and he walked out into the road for a moment.

He didn't have an answer for much of what was in his mind, so he just let it drop there, since right then, he had something else rising within him. There was nothing to be seen out there; only the flakes of snow blown about by the fitful mountain breeze.

Not wanting for the level to go too high, he stepped over to one of the ruined buildings and set his weapon down to take care of the most immediate matter.

He looked around in the deepening gloom, glad of the hour and the way that it could hide things that needed to be hidden - such as him needing to piss right then.

This idea to come here to 'teach the herders a lesson' had been the purest folly from the outset, but then he was merely a trooper. Who would listen to a condemned criminal sent here to serve out his sentence instead of greasing the guillotine with his blood?

A pity that the locals weren't cowed at the sight of the legionnaires marching in.

He snorted softly to himself. How stupid were the French officers anyway? Did they really think that these people hadn't heard, didn't know just how thinly the Legion was spread in Algeria right now, what with so many men shipped westward to help the Spanish with their little 'problem' in keeping the Rif tribes under their heel in Morocco?

Here, just as in many localities, the Berbers and all of the other assorted groups had done the only thing possible. They'd set aside their squabbles with each other and were working together to throw off their own yokes.

So coming here - in the teeth of a cold winter's early onslaught - seemed especially stupid to one trooper.

Probably the only one who actually liked the weather up here in the mountains.

By perhaps the purest foul luck and happenstance, Kari had walked off the tramp steamer that he crewed on, dying for a night off the old barge on that one night long ago. He'd only wanted a quiet drink alone in a place where the floor didn't creak under him just because it was moving. He'd been a sailor for a good while, but even to him, surviving that last Atlantic storm deserved a drink just to put the memories of those two hellish days and nights to bed.

But the net effect was that there were two men dead at his feet that night - two snot-nosed toughs from the back alleys of Brest. They'd tried to call him out for a fight, all the while wanting only to single him out in the street where no one would help the big Finn and they'd split whatever proceeds that his corpse held in it's pockets.

He wasn't concerned over their fates, since they'd done everything possible to ignore what was plain to most any man with eyes and a brain. The trouble with two dead turds on the ground was that they were French turds, and that little fact opened the sluice gates for the world of shit that landed on him for it.

Kari had taken the only choice offered him, to travel to Paris under guard and join the Legion to serve his sentence out in Algeria or wherever the Legion took him.

The way that things looked to him this night, he might be at the end of his long road at last and would soon see his darling Thrud once again on the other side.

The fighting, once it had begun was just a long, slow battle of attrition. Mathematically, it was simple. Throw enough zealous men against the limited number of legionnaires and you were bound to come out on top - sooner or later and given enough time and bullets.

In spite of it all and the rather bleak and hopeless way that things looked to him at the moment, Kari hoped that his adversaries didn't mind too much if he went out fighting and took as many of the bastards with him as he could.

He wondered for a moment as he stood pissing against the wall of a building set into the hillside under the mountaintop. He smiled a little after a moment. They didn't know it and it likely wouldn't have meant a thing to the ones out there in the dark trying to kill him, if the big girl had missed any, but in his heart, he was on their side. He figured that he had about as much reason to hate the French as they did.

But he was loyal to his comrades. The French government could go down in flames for all he cared, but there was a bond between men who fought side by side or back to back, if necessary.

He bent to pick up the heavy machine gun, careful to lift and cradle the ammunition belt as he did. It wasn't meant to be portable once in action, but it was his weapon and his responsibility out here. If he kept it out of the shit, then there was a better chance that it wouldn't fail him when he needed it.

And if Kari needed that heavy piece of machinery, then his comrades needed them both even more.

Kari Fornjót was something of a rarity even here, in a regiment of men from many places and many lands. He met the occasional Swede or Norseman in the Legion, but even to them, he was someone who proved difficult to laugh and joke with, or to bond to as a comrade. He didn't care, particularly. If the world to turned to shit again, he'd still defend the lot of them.

He was six-six, heavily-muscled, white-blonde and under the right circumstances, he could be murderous. Some thought him stupid, but if they came to know him, they'd walk away with the thought that he was really just a large, quietly-thoughtful man. Those whose notions regarding his intelligence persisted would see his slow, slightly shy smile as he began to laugh along at whatever joke had been played on him.

But then his good-natured slap on the back might take weeks to feel better all the same - if it ever really did.

There was more to Kari than any of them knew. He looked as though nothing affected him, but that was only the front that he maintained. He was actually a little shy. He actually did have feelings, and he actually did have a tail - which some other aspects about him kept hidden so that no one would ever know of it or even suspect that he was different.

It had been an unforeseen part of a bargain made long ago when he was just a boy, but all the same, it was there.

He actually still mourned the loss of his wife, taken from him by the full weight of the avalanche which crushed her and their home in the shadow of the only mountain large enough for it around for miles. He carried that pain locked within his heart in a state of stasis, like it was only last week and not seven years ago.

His mother had taught him the old ways and he knew many arcane things. To the uneducated - or the overly-educated, he seemed like an anachronism for the things that he mumbled at odd moments when they were in action. He seemed sometimes to be able to almost bend space and time a little; giving the impression that he'd merely sidestepped away from something which was had been bound to kill him only a moment before. To the right person - who took the time to actually get to know him so that he might trust them a little, he might smile and nod that it was what seemed to have happened.

He never spoke of it and he could indeed manage many things - but he couldn't pull a mountain off his Thrud.

Something else which Kari had learned at his mother's knee was that space and time were continuums much like say, the confluence of a pair of usually quiet rivers right where one was at any time. If you were gifted, properly taught, and sensitive enough, you could feel them all around you at any moment in time.

And if you were all of those things, then you could also feel it when something in those continuums shifted, for like any fluid mediums, shifts such as that produced ripples both above and below.

That was why Kari froze in place at that particular instant and stared at the closed door to what might have been a rough sort of blacksmith shop in the ruins of what might once have been a little village situated in the long hollow of a mountain pass where they were holed up, killing the tribesmen who were either too full of fervor or desire to kill legionnaires that night to mind the danger to themselves then.

He looked at the thin line of darkness under that door for a long moment.

After a little while, he saw the darkness fade and then become a barely-lit and slightly flickering line in the snow before it.

And after a little while longer spent with his senses bent in that direction, he heard the first of the screams.

There was nothing to be heard outside where he stood, not a real sound there in the darkness, other than the cold wind and the soft sighs of the snowflakes there against his cheek. But that didn't change what they were.

They were the sounds of a female from one of the many... other sides, being dragged against her will over to this one.

There was only one real cry, and that was when she appeared on this plane from wherever she'd been until now. Even that ended in quiet sobs which were still muffled out on the other side of the door in the snow.

Kari looked back in the direction of his few, still-breathing comrades. They were all asleep, overtaken with the debt that running and fighting for one's life could place on a man after two days of it, once he had a few minutes to relax and really rest for a time.

None of them stirred.

He looked at the door in front of him once again. Another man, had he heard what Kari had, might have come to doubt that he'd actually heard anything at all.

But Kari didn't.

When the real screams started - the ones which were originating completely on this side - he knew that he'd been right. He just didn't know yet what this was.

There were more screams - this time in agony - followed by deep sobs and at first, unintelligible speech. Kari knew that sound, though he couldn't understand it clearly by more than feel for a long moment before something clicked in him and then he understood everything. It wasn't easy because that form of speech had no relation here, not even a dialect spoken anywhere on this world.

He'd heard it before, again at his mother's knee, before he'd come to know it a little well. She couldn't speak it either at first.

But the ones that they'd seen together through the portal 'mirror' that she'd erected out of nothingness in the darkness had spoken it as they'd looked back certainly had. So he knew what he'd likely find on the other side of that door once he opened it.

In spite of himself, he spent a moment remembering. In his mind's eye, he recalled the small young pair there among them, a small girl and an even smaller boy, a brother and sister as he came to learn later. The mirror couldn't be passed through by a hand, for example, yet it could pass other things. He and those little demons had spent many minutes with their hands flat against the membrane there between two worlds each time that the portal had been created and maintained by two mothers for a time.

And each time, for periods which had lasted from seconds to over an hour now and then, three children had held their hands up so that their palms could touch through the thin boundary.

Kari's father was a fisherman - and a reindeer herder both. It meant a lot of nights where Kari's mother was alone, doing her best to raise her son by herself until her man could find someone to buy the rights to his share of the herd.

She raised the portal one night in order to show her young son that other places existed beside and beyond theirs. In doing that, she'd come over time to make a friend in one of the ones on the other side - a mother just like her, the mother of the young pair of demon-children.

For his part, Kari could remember the feel of those clawed hands against his own across that boundary, where things couldn't - or weren't supposed to be able to travel through. Yet he remembered staring into those eyes and learning to exchange feelings and even thoughts as foreign as they were to his own at the time.

He looked at the door again.

The worn and tired old door was locked, but that only slowed Kari for a moment. When he bashed it in with his shoulder and stepped through, his own personal reality seemed to shift and bend. The place was lit by a fire in a hearth and Kari wondered where the smoke went, since he'd smelled nothing of it outside and they'd been here for over a day now. There were oil lamps burning here and there and there were many crude tallow candles set all around.

There was indeed a female trapped and bound by iron chains within a circle and the nature of that circle kept her in a great deal of pain. But that didn't account for half of what he felt from her. Her skin was a very dark gray and she had clawed feet and hands. At the moment, she was in a pile, curled up in agony and grief on the floor.

There was a second one there - a small male - flying over everything and looking both enraged and frustrated as he crashed into things in the limited space that he had for it as he tried to get into a position where he could defend the one on the floor from what assailed her.

She was sobbing, shorn of her wings and left with bloody, torn, short stumps there on her back. Her tormentor was a man, a human man who brandished a strange old sword and held it a little high as he tried to grasp her tail so that he could hack it off as well.

She screamed and tried to pull her doomed tail away and the pair struggled for a moment until Kari told the man to stop in Arabic.

At the sound of his voice, many things happened.

The man yelled one incantation after another as he hurried to stand inside of a second circle, still waving the sword in a threatening manner at Kari now. Kari for his part, knew what was being attempted and he did his best to mutter the things that he knew of to combat the binding that he began to feel on him. He had to hope that whoever this person was, he would have no idea of the... flavor of what a Skolt shaman might use in his defense.

He muttered bindings of his own and the sword fell from the man's icy numbed fingers as he stood covered in thick hoar frost, held completely in the fetter of Kari's binding. With a look around - especially in the direction of the other one of them, who hovered and stared back at him, he set the machine gun down. Out of all of his comrades, there was no one who could pick it up and hold it for long, never mind use it without it being on it's pintle tripod. Only Kari could.

When Kari looked at the female, he found her looking back and then things turned to long moments of horror to Kari as he saw the luminous green eyes which until then had seemed to be almost capable of lighting the room by themselves turn to soft brown ones and an instant later, he was looking at Thrud herself as she pleaded and beseeched him - by name - to help and free her.

Even still, he stepped nearer to her, trying not to let this illusion overtake him.

She spoke of her joy at seeing him again in his own language perfectly as she stood bound by chains fastened in different directions all around her and begged him to free her, saying that she was so weak and hungry that she could hardly stand.

He shook his head firmly.

"I know what you are," he said.

"So please, if you want my help, then stop this and let me see you just as you are. What you do now hurts me too much and I know that it is false. I want to help you - if you will let me live once I do so that I might do what I can for you."

At first, she continued, but he kept shaking his head. "You waste what little time that I might have. I cannot hold that one forever," he said, indicating the motionless man with his chin, "He is dismayed and frightened, so he fights me even now."

Nothing seemed to work for a time, until he slowly moved his hand forward to place it in the middle of her chest between the breasts which were killing him to feel against his skin again.

She looked at him and finally saw the pain that she was causing and shifted back. When she did, her speech became rougher and much less polished, "Please... help... me. On this side... here... I am so hungry."

They both knew that it was only the chains on her that prevented her from attacking him out of need and hunger.

"Give that one to me," she rumbled, discarding Thrud's voice as she did. What she was left with was more of a yearning growl.