The Demon in the Forest Read online

  Her family was no exception. When she arrived at their cottage it tore Mael's heart to see them, until she washed away the emotion and became completely calm. Her newfound understanding of human biology told her that banishment of her emotions beyond the immediate emergency was dangerous. She put that knowledge aside for the time.

  After her first quick exploration Mael crisscrossed the village methodically, filling one and then a second pillowcase with useful items overlooked or rejected by the enemy. This included coins, a lot more than she would have guessed the raiders would leave behind.

  Any food that she came across she immediately ate—a crushed heel of a loaf of bread, an apple core, an entire smoked ham unaccountably hanging in plain sight in a pantry, a smashed egg which she crouched down and ate like a dog, ignoring the dirt she also ingested. Her insides were impervious to dirt and channeled it into a second stomach that grew within her belly. Acid stronger than in her human stomach leached minerals from the dirt.

  When Mael realized what was automatically happening she paused for a moment in thought. Then a smile slowly formed on her face.

  From then on she also saved small pieces of metal, of copper and such and that rare metal iron. One of those pieces, a short rusty sliver of iron, she began sucking on with saliva that quickly became acidic. The dissolved iron and loose flakes went into her extrahuman stomach. Over days and weeks her body would migrate it to her fingernails and toenails.

  That thought hatched another. A tiny sliver of flesh began to grow behind each nail. Eventually her flesh there and the nail would form into retracted claws that could be snapped out as short knife blades.

  There was no container with water or beer in the village still unbroken and the communal well had feces and urine from the invaders in it. Yet even Mael's extrahuman body needed water, and the closest pure water was a good distance away in a small stream.

  She thought for a moment, probing her two stores of biological wisdom. One was that of Eyt. The other store every human owned, though it was unavailable to ordinary human minds.

  Then she went looking for empty containers. The biggest she found was a wooden washtub with one slat broken halfway. She drew water from the well with a salvaged bucket and rope to replace the one thrown down into the well. She filled the washtub as full of poisoned well water as it would hold.

  Then she went looking for a leafy bush, a scavenged knife with a broken tip in one hand. With it and extrahuman strength she harvested several leafy branches.

  Back at the tub she dropped all but one of the branches, closed her eyes, and sent her esoteric sense into the branch. She found what her earlier knowledge search had told her should be there. Just underneath the bark was a pathway that carried liquids containing different kinds of food for the plants. Some liquids went from leaves to branches to roots, some went the other way.

  Mael sent her wishes into the branch and thence to the leaves. After a while she began to receive answers from the leaves. Then she opened her eyes and, holding onto the cut end of the branch, slowly swished the leaves through the water. It had to be slow to keep from stirring up the sediment of feces that had settled to the bottom. And to let the leaves, acting upon her esoteric command, absorb poison from the water.

  After a while the messages from the leaves said that the leaves had absorbed all they could. Mael carefully lifted the branch from the water and discarded it. She repeated this several times with fresh branches. When she was done the eastern sky was lightening toward twilight.

  Now she took up a cracked but still waterproof mug, dipped it into the water, and lifted it near her nose. She sniffed deeply of the scent arising from the water. The water seemed clean enough, at least for her. She took a cautious sip. It did not taste good, so she shut off her taste. But despite the odor the chemical poisons in the water were well below her now-great tolerance.

  Another kind of poison floated in the water—biological poisons made up of invisibly small very simple animals. Unlike the chemical poisons they were no danger to her whatsoever, even if they had been several orders of magnitude more numerous.

  Maelgyr'eyt swallowed a mouthful of the water. The microscopic animalcules attacked her body through the skin of her tongue, throat, and gullet. And her body devoured them.

  When her thirst was well quenched Mael went back to scavenging. By the time the sun was over the horizon she was done. She drank long of the tainted water a second time. As an afterthought she told her body to create within herself a bladder-like water reservoir and drank again, finishing most of the safe water left in the tub and storing it in her extra bladder for any coming need.

  The lightening sky reminded Mael that the soldiers from the garrison would likely be here soon, probably sighting the carrion crows that were already gathering in a towering spiral above the village. They would figure out who had raided the village and bury the corpses with the proper ceremonies.

  Mael picked up her pillowcases of junk and would-be treasure and bore them into the depths of the forest where no one would bother her. Nor would any animals.

  Earlier in the forest, at the thought of danger, her body had grown an organ in the back of her throat which she had owned a few millennia back in another body. It could spit a small glob of a paralyzing spit several body lengths.

  SHE was the demon in the forest now. Any animal that attacked her would quickly become food.

  The deep forest was beautiful to someone who had no need to fear it. The tall columns of the tree trunks were spaced almost regularly, the result (Eyt's knowledge said) of centuries of ever-so-slow jostling amongst the trees for soil and sunlight. Light fell through the leaves and tinted the air green. It was like a Gods-made cathedral.

  Mael found a cluster of mossy stones that made comfortable chair backs when she sat in the cushions of deep leaf cover around them. Near her she spread her possessions and sorted them, using as tables the leaf-covered forest floor and some of the nearer stones. Among the material were clothes which would fit her for when she must go among humans, but for now she was comfortable unclothed.

  With her half-broken knife she cut some of the cloth and leather remnants into the parts of a crude pack and sewed them together with leather cords. It had a flap to protect its contents from weather yet was easy to open. To the pack she attached straps that she could put her arms into which would let her wear the pack on her back, leaving her arms and hands free.

  Once done Maelgyr packed what she wanted, discarding some possessions she decided she would not need. On top of everything else in the pack she placed the rest of the food she had found, then lay yawning in the bed of leaves. Lumpy and strewn with a few small branches, the bed would have been uncomfortable to her before she'd died. Now her body easily and nearly instantly changed its shape and its skin to protect her.

  For a time Maelgyr mourned her family and friends, bringing up memories of them and praying to her gods that they would be happy in the afterlife.

  She/it also mourned the centuries-long passing away of Eyt's ghost family/friends. Though mourning was the wrong emotion. More like—saying goodbye.

  The life of a demon/ghost was near infinite. Its lost companions could sleep till this round sphere of a world was engulfed by the larger flaming sphere that was its sun, which would some long day away expand or explode into a larger size. Then some of her ghost family would wake to take up a home inside the sun. But most had chosen not to sleep but to merge with shorter-lived creatures. As Eyt had with Maelgyr.

  Some centuries or millennia hence Maelgyr'eyt would split into two beings with identical memories. One would be a ghost, one solid. Then there would be two Maelgyr'eyts. They might stay companions for a time, decades or centuries, but eventually would go separate ways.

  As had happened hundreds of times before. She was still Maelgyr, but a Maelgyr with a much longer memory. She remembered her earlier lives as she remembered bright yesterday when she had been praised for mastering weaving or faded yesteryear when she had
played hopping/counting games. Remembered dancing beneath two moons in a luminous lavender sky. Swimming like a vibrating arrow beneath a crinkled sky of mirror-like water surface above a gently waving bottom of long lime-green seaweed. Lazily soaring on miles-long wings in rarified methane air.

  And, oh! The conversations she had had, the knowledge she had gotten over her long life. An instant she contemplated this virtual library before drawing back for a time till she could return to it without getting lost in its riches.

  Maelgyr'eyt turned over, not because she was uncomfortable but more as a punctuation for her thoughts.

  As she settled again Mael observed with mild interest that all her hair had fallen out and was being replaced with new hair which would insulate or cool the skin beneath it far better than her old hair. She ran a hand over her skull, swept away the remnants of the long hair there, and fingered the short fuzz on her scalp.

  Something was different about her skin....

  Focusing her esoteric vision on it she saw that her skin was sloughing off like dandruff. Underneath the old was new skin made up of invisibly small hexagons attached edge to edge. This made her skin tougher yet more flexible, something that a knife or arrow would have a hard time piercing.

  Such changes had been happening without her attention. Some of them might be undesirable. She made an internal sentinel to warn her of such changes so that she could block or shape them. It would not be convenient for her skin to turn bright red in the middle of a conversation!

  Though such change could come in handy. Indeed, she had just thought of a situation where she might use it.

  The war band of the enemy who had so horribly destroyed her village was out there somewhere. Perhaps they were retreating to their own village hidden somewhere over the mountains from which they had come. Or they might be resting so they could attack another village.

  Mael had no faith that the garrison or her country's army could find them. But Mael could. She could track them better than any bloodhound, her senses superior to those of any animal or ordinary human. As one seeker, not several, she would be better able to avoid notice. And she could be stealthier than any dog or woodslion. No one would have any warning of her coming.

  And when she found them? Kill them quickly. Or slowly? Enslave them? Kill some, enslave some, let others go free?

  She would have to wait till she found the enemy and knew more about them. Though she knew enough already about one of them: the leader of the triple who'd raped her.

  A change in her hands came to her attention. The nails of her hands had lengthened in the last few hours and the edges grown sharp. It would be days or weeks before they became thick and sharp enough to be effective claws but they looked dangerous.

  And the muscles and structures to retract and extend her claws, being softer than the claws, had grown quite fast in the last few hours.

  Mael withdrew her still-weak claws and extended them, withdrew and extended them, withdrew them one final time. She grew drowsy, pondering.

  The forest demon smiled as she thought of meeting the men who had merged with her for a time. She might even nurture the two underlings and their companions in a new way of life. But as for their leader—

  Mael's claws flicked out, relaxed slowly back into secrecy.

  She sighed and re-settled her body.

  On a world with two moons she had been a blue centaur with six limbs and a lithe catlike body, a poet who had loved sunset and moonrise and had a philosopher for a mate. Many millennia had passed since then and many memories of that life had faded. But she had kept one sharp: she and he and their kits in a huddle, watching first one moon then the other rise as they drowsed....

  The immortal shapechanger drifted into sleep.

  What's Next

  Mael's next story is Phoenix's Flight, which tells what happens when she returns to her home island of Nothos to find it in deadly peril.

  Available in Spring 2012.