Ray stood up. On the far side of the clearing, the trees bent apart, and something with too many legs stepped through them and blotted out a strip of stars.
He slid his left foot back and put his hand on the hilt. He had one sword, which meant he had exactly one strike.
It came out into the last of the light, and for the first time he got a real look at it.
The body was long and low, slung between the legs like a hammock full of wet laundry. The legs were jointed in too many places, and there were more of them on the left side than on the right; he got to nine and stopped counting.
At the front hung a head that was mostly mouth. It swung low, an inch off the grass, and snuffled along the ground as it came.
Every step pushed the air against his face. The smell came with it, the wet basement from his first night, only now it was close enough to taste.
It stopped at the garden. It put its mouth into the dirt where the carrots used to be and found nothing, because Ray had already eaten them. Then the head came up and turned, slowly, toward the porch.
'Okay. Okay, okay.'
He had a line ready. It had come to him on its own, the way they always did: something about picking the wrong house. He could hear exactly how cool it would sound.
He shut his mouth on it. The last two times he'd said something cool first, the lightning had stayed home, and he'd ended up running. There was nowhere to run tonight except into the cabin, and he had just seen what that thing did to a garden.
It started toward him. It came straight, across the open middle of the clearing, the head low and the legs going in a rolling order he couldn't follow, at the same slow walk as before.
Ray set his front foot on the line. He picked a spot on it, the place under the head where all those legs met the body, and put his eyes there and nowhere else. The trees went soft. The stream went quiet in his ears. He pulled the breath down slowly, all the way, with his mouth closed, and waited for the heat.
It came up through his heels and into his legs. The thing was twenty steps away, then fifteen, and the smell was so thick his eyes were watering.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form."
The head dropped, and the mouth opened.
"Thunderclap and Flash."
The crack went off the cabin wall and rolled down the valley.
Then there was cold water in his ears, and he was lying on his back in the stream. The water was up to his chin and moving around him like he was a rock, and above him was a lot of stars.
His legs were gone from the hips down. His hair was standing straight up out of the water, and sparks were ticking along his bracelets and hissing out where they touched the surface.
In his right hand he had a handle, and there was a stub of blade on it no longer than his thumb. The scabbard was still on his belt. 'Finn's going to need more charcoal.'
He turned his head, which was the only part of him that would do anything, and looked back up the bank.
A black stripe ran across the clearing, from the porch step to the stream, without a single bend in it. On either side of it lay a dark heap. The left heap had most of the legs, and one of them was still moving, folding and unfolding at the knee in no hurry. The other heap had the head. Both of them were smoking.
"Holy shit."
He tried to get out. His arms worked, so he dug his elbows into the bank and pulled, and the mud let go, and he slid back into the water. He tried again with the same result. The third time, he just lay there and let the stream go around him. It was pretty cold, and he was pretty sure he had won.
...
Marceline came down the valley a little after full dark, with the bass on her back and no rush at all.
She had spent the whole flight guessing what he'd bring. Something slow, probably. Something he'd sing with his eyes closed, like he was sorry for it. She had half a mind to tell him she'd heard it already, whatever it was, just to see his face.
She smelled the clearing before she saw it. Burnt air, the kind a tree gives off after the sky hits it.
Then she was over the trees, and she stopped. There was a stripe of scorched grass across her old yard, as straight as a string pulled tight. On either side of it lay the stomper.
She knew the thing. Everybody in this valley knew it. It had been walking up and down the bottom of the hills for as long as she'd lived around here, flattening whatever was in the way. It had stepped on this garden twice. Nobody bothered it, because it wasn't worth the trouble, and she had never bothered it either.
Now it was two things. The cut went through it clean, a little off the middle, and both edges were black and still smoking. One of the legs kept folding up and straightening out like it hadn't heard the news.
'Well, shit.' She floated down closer.
She followed the stripe with her eyes. It went across the garden and past the porch step and ended at the stream, and in the stream, on his back, lay her tenant.
His hair was standing straight up, dripping. Little blue sparks were crawling around his wrists and dying in the water. He was holding a sword handle to his chest with both hands, and when he saw her above him, he lifted it about an inch.
"Hey, landlady."
She laughed. It was out of her before she had even decided whether it was funny, and it went on for a while.
...
When she was done, she came down and looked at him upside down, her face a foot over his.
"What the hell did you do to my yard?"
"Pest control." Ray's teeth were clattering. "You're welcome."
She took him by the collar with one hand and lifted. He came out of the stream all at once, like a boot out of mud, and then he was hanging from her fist with his legs dangling underneath him and water pouring out of his shoes. She wasn't even leaning.
She turned him around to look at him. His hair was still up. She poked it with one finger, and it snapped at her with a little blue spark, and she yanked her hand back. Then she poked it again.
"Stop that."
"It crackles." She did it a third time and grinned at the spark. "Do the thing again."
"Can't. I'm out of sword." He let his legs swing to show her. "Also out of legs."
"For how long?"
"A while. I've never timed it in a river."
"It's a stream. It barely comes up to your chin."
"You're late, by the way. I had to do all the pest control by myself."
"Pest control's not in the deal."
"Then knock it off the rent."
"Nice try." She floated him over to the porch and let go above the step, and he landed on it hard enough to rattle his teeth. She settled cross-legged in the air in front of him, a little higher than his head. "Pay up."
Ray looked at her. He looked past her at the two smoking halves of the thing in the yard. He had been going to pick a song on this step before the ground started shaking, and he hadn't picked one.
Then he remembered her hand over his mouth, cold and smelling of apples, and a name he had only got half of out.
"Three nights ago you told me not to say the names."
"And?"
"There's one you didn't let me finish." He wiped the water out of his eyes. "This is that one."
Her eyebrows went up. She didn't say anything, which was how he knew she remembered.
He had no legs to stand on, so he sat up as straight as he could and started it the way the record did, with nothing under it at all.
"Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy
I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
Little high, little low
Anyway the wind blows
Doesn't really matter to me
To me..."
It was meant for four voices stacked on top of each other, and he only had one, so he did them one after the other and let her hear the gaps. She tipped her head at the first line. By the end of the opening, she had stopped floating in a slow circle and was just hanging there.
Then the song turned, and he sang it straight at her.
"Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away..."
Her eyes went sideways to the yard, to the stripe and the two halves on either side of it. She showed every one of her teeth.
It was slow for a while after that, and he let it be slow. Then the song went completely out of its mind, and he went with it.
He had never done this part in front of anybody. He did the high voices in a falsetto that cracked, and the low ones down in his chest, and he argued with himself across the porch, turning his head one way for one side and the other way for the other side. It was the stupidest thing he had ever done on purpose.
"I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche! Scaramouche!
Will you do the fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning
Very, very frightening me!
Galileo! Galileo!
Galileo! Galileo!
Galileo, Figaro!
Magnifico!"
At the part about lightning, her eyes had gone straight to his hair, which was still standing up and still crackling now and then. She lost it completely. Ray kept going, because the other side of the argument was coming.
"Bismillah!
No, we will not let you go!
(Let him go!)
Bismillah!
We will not let you go!
(Let him go!)"
By then Marceline had dropped a foot out of the air from laughing. Then, halfway through the laugh, she swung the bass around off her back.
When the song went heavy, she came in under it. She didn't know where it was going, and she didn't care. She found the key in two notes and hit it hard, and the whole porch buzzed through the seat of his wet jeans. Ray gave up on sounding good and just shouted it, and she grinned at him over the neck and played louder.
"So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can love me and leave me to die?
Oh, baby!
Can't do this to me, baby!
Just gotta get out
Just gotta get right outta here!"
Then the song came back down, all the way down, to where it had started. She took her hand off the strings. He sang the end quietly, to nobody in particular.
"Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me
Anyway the wind blows."
She didn't say anything for a long time. She laid her palm flat across the strings so nothing would ring. The one leg out in the yard had finally stopped moving.
"That's about six songs stuck together," she said eventually.
"Does it count?"
"...It counts."
"Better than the last one?"
"Don't push it." She was looking at the strings. "Same guy? Ben?"
"Different guy."
"Name."
He opened his mouth. She held up one finger before he could get anything out of it.
"No. Don't tell me."
Ray grinned and didn't. His hair had started to come down a little on one side.
She let the bass hang and reached past him to the step, where he had dropped the handle. She turned it over in her fingers. The stub of blade had gone blue and rainbow-colored near the break, and she ran a thumbnail along it.
"Okay, so here's what I don't get." She waggled it at him. "Where does a squatter with no money and no food get a sword?"
"A friend lent it." His brain was still somewhere back in the song, and it came out easy. "He's got a whole pile of them in his tree house, by the pond."
The handle stopped moving in her fingers.
Ray looked up. Marceline wasn't smiling anymore. She had gone completely still in the air, the way nothing that was breathing ever did.
"What tree house?"