Free The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson Page A

Nothing within was out of place. Aunty used to say, Don’t worry so much: the bag takes care of itself. She had always laughed at his fretful care. Wasn’t it better, though, to err on caution’s side?
    And stretching before him was the Wildeeps. Across stream, rich as the rainwoods back home, tangled ancient growth went on and on, green to the east and west horizons. The oceanic foliage rippled and petals like white tongues blew down. The whole southern bank of leafage tossed in gusts of wind which, midstream, Demane felt only as soft breath, scented with frangipani.
    And the ground over there was sacred, the jungle godlike and consecrated only to itself. A greatwork lay over the stream where he stood, and over the fast water running on all frontiers of the Wildeeps. Demane laughed. He ran for high steps through the rapids, and crouched down, to swing an open hand against the water’s rush and knock up white splashes. The two greatest wonders of his life, both together at once: one of nature, the Wildeeps where many worlds overlapped; and another wonder, this artifice of magi, the greatwork that bound this savage country and its denizens.
    Downstream, he saw a weird pulsing light, stationary just above the trees. Demane waded with the flow, west.
    Nude black dirt, a southrunning trail, cut into the greenery across stream. Some bright sign—a thunderbolt, caught and twisted by almighty hands—hovered coruscating at treetop-height over the mouth of the trail. Demane knew what amounted to a library’s worth of disparate lore, and all of it word-perfect, though he was illiterate in the four languages he spoke. Still, that brightness in the sky was legible to his very blood. It read,
Here
is the Safe Road
. Eyes closed, his face could find the folded lightning and know its meaning too, even as the blind feel upon their faces where the sun sits in the sky.
    The hard current dragged and eddied about his feet. Demane shuddered, and looked bewilderedly around him, coming fully alert like a slapped sleepwalker.
    What had he meant to do, exactly? Track the jukiere across the Wildeeps, kill the wizard somehow, and then return to Mother of Waters, all in one slender evening—was that the plan, then?
No
, of course not! He’d only wanted to . . . scout out the lay of the land. Ye-ah. That made some kind of sense.
    Well, brave scout, will you look at the hour? In the west one low cloud glowed sullen and red, its underbelly brass-bright. The blue dusk was blackening, the sun already below the horizon. Perfect nightvision had let the dark creep up on him again. Demane recalled some little animal in the grass. And he’d . . . killed it? And then what? Not
eaten
it, surely, had he? How? His spear, blades, and bow were all untouched in the bag. Running his tongue (not leathery and rough, but a soft fragile slug, like anyone’s) over his teeth: they were all blunt, not mostly pointed ivory tines. He examined his hands. Quarter-moon talons, keen-edged as scimitars along the undersides? Since when?
Of course
there were ordinary human nails at the tips of his fingers. He shrugged: nor did any strange new muscles move in his back. He was wingless. Some half-fledged potential stirred in him, though. Limitless and untapped, the wellspring of the Wildeeps awaited the one who would drink. So close to the Wildeeps, nothing was beyond achieving if only Demane would cease to hold himself back so fiercely.
And is that what you still want, no longer to be a man but a god
. . . ? He spun around and ran for the north bank of the fords. He fled back toward Mother of Waters.
    It was as though a great wind carried him across that first leg upcountry, not any strength of his own. But the Wildeeps dropped leagues behind, and the stormbird waned. Fatigue began to drag at his legs and Demane slackened from his best pace to one he could hold. The slow air momentarily strengthened to a breeze. Very nearby, in the dark above the trail, a night dog bayed. In a