by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 19
The distance from the floor of the Harriun to the ceiling of tongues was only three stories in height, but for Brine Denbauk it might as well have been the other side of the world. He could see that something was up there (something sticking down through the canopy that could not be a tongue), but outside of that he had no idea what it was.
Where the tongues were long and straight and tapered, this thing was bent at its middle and the same diameter from one end to the other. It was also the color of spoiled goat milk left to curdle in the sun.
That imagery gave him an idea and he began to wonder if the thing could be a tongue that had gone bad, an albino tongue or merely a dead place in the canopy. He puzzled over that a moment longer, then decided it couldn’t be. If the tongues could change like that, he was pretty sure there’d be more of them on display, and this was the only one he had seen.
He placed his dirty fingers to the outside of each eye and pulled the skin taut, stretching the lids until his eyes became slits. This sometimes helped his eyes to focus, but today it did nothing. The pale thing in the tongues did not change.
He lowered his hands and let his shoulders slump, a gesture of mild disappointment. He might have been more disappointed, but he was simply too tired. He muttered a prayer for strength and fumbled with his hip pouch.
He hated to withdraw the monocle on the move, fearful that one of the vine-chewing brutes might knock him down and send it skittering into shadows, but he had no choice. If he wanted to see what was up there, he was going to have to take the risk.
He tugged free the knot in the drawstring and reached inside, staying his fingers only as the stunned silence of the mercenaries became a series of cries, men slapping each other on the shoulders and telling each other, “Hey! Hey, look at that! Look up there!”
Brine pulled his fingers from the hip pouch and turned towards the cries. The Lathians had stopped gawking at the ash-colored branch and were now gawking at something to his left, something that had them scowling and pointing and cursing at the air.
Carefully taking several steps to the right, Brine drew a deep breath and turned his head to the left, scrunching his eyes at the place where the mob was staring.
At first, he saw only the hazy outline of the tongues and the slightly-clearer outline of the supporting boles. It was the same thing he’d been staring at since entering this blasted wilderness; black on black with lots of extra black slathered in between.
Only it wasn’t all black.
He took a step forward and saw the bole closest to the ivory branch had a pale and green fluid smeared down its side. He took another step closer and saw that the fluid stretched the full length of the bole.
At the point where the bole disappeared into the tongues, the smear of green was as wide as the shoulders of an average-sized man. As it moved down from the canopy and closer to the floor, it tapered off to a dribble no wider than Brine’s pinky.
It could have jetted up out of a hole, he supposed. If it came out of a tiny hole, that would account for the narrow diameter at the base and the wider span at the terminus. Of course, that did nothing to explain why the liquid had not drifted in the air and covered the adjacent boles or surrounding tendrils.
It came out of the ceiling, the fire-voice declared.
Brine shook his head, but without feeling
It poured out of those tentacles up there, the voice crackled.
Brine stopped rotating his skull and considered the assertion. He decided it might be a dye of some kind…maybe. It was altogether possible that one of these thugs had crawled up there with a bucket of dye and dumped it down the side, just to mess with him.
Sure they did, the belly-fire said. You see any ladders lying around, Rugs? Do yeh? You see any rope or grapnels hanging down from the tongues?
Brine didn’t bother taking his eyes from the smear. He knew better.
Take a look at that branch again, the belly-fire advised. See anything on it?
Brine shifted his gaze back to the crooked white branch. Now that the belly-fire mentioned it, there did appear to be something on the tip, something that looked an awful lot like the greenish fluid on the bole.
There wasn’t much of the stuff, just a smattering of it really, and pale to the point of being nearly translucent, but that was probably why he’d overlooked it in the first place.
As for the five thorn-like darts he now saw forking from the end, he couldn’t say why he’d overlooked those. If he had to guess, he would say it was because they looked remarkably like fingers, and he hadn’t wanted to cope with that. Because if the dart-things were fingers, that would mean the branch-thing was an arm, and if the branch-thing were an arm…
As if the pallid limb had taken a swipe for his face, Brine took a step back. He could not see what the appendage was attached to on the other side of the canopy—if, indeed, it were attached to anything—but he had the grisly suspicion that it was not a part of the indigenous flora.
He took another step back and thought about Reets, about whether or not the halfling had ever shared a bedtime tale that involved fluid of this color. He couldn’t say he remembered such a tale, but it had been a long time.
He kept backing, bumping into shoulders, into packs, bouncing off of arms. He waited for one of them to shove him back or to curse his name, but they never did. With their own eyes fixed in the tongue, the Lathians didn’t seem to mind.
Helpless to do otherwise, Brine stopped backing and panned his head at the throng, searching their faces for a set of the jaw or a cast of the eyes that said, Yep, tha’s what I fig’erd.
What he saw instead was the same expression of slack-jawed awe that marred his own unnerved features.
Not a good sign, the fire-voice said. Not good when these guys are stumped.
Movement caught Brine’s eye and he turned back to the green-smeared bole. Sladge was moving from the streak of pale fluid to a spot directly below the arm-like protrusion. The big man’s head, rising clearly above the heads and shoulders of his men, was shaking back and forth with something like anger.
Sladge stopped below the claw-tipped spectacle and studied it for a time, his bearded lips muttering soundlessly, his great head oscillating with rage. The change of perspective had apparently not helped.
“Wha’ yeh think, Sladge?” a voice called from somewhere to the right.
Brine turned to the speaker and found a sea of bearded faces directed at their leader, the shock having worn thin and the need for answers having pushed to the fore.
Sladge continued muttering to himself and glaring at the arm.
From far back on the left, one of the men answered for him, telling the others that he thought the thing overhead was the arm of an ugling. There was a moment for this to settle in and then a second man, somewhere on the right of the throng, said he heard that uglings didn’t go near the Harriun. Another pause ensued, then from back on the left again, the first man said he heard the second man’s mother was a whore.
Just like that, what had begun as a soft susurration of worry had steadily grown into a dull roar of conjecture, each man offering his thoughts on the matter and the next quickly refuting it.
“Sladge!” a new voice hollered. “Hey, Sladge! What is that thing?”
But Sladge, aside from the insistent mutterings of his lips, did not answer, so enthralled he was by the bloodless arm.
“Is it dead?” another voice cried from a different section of the mob.
At this, a perplexed silence swept the hoard and several men craned their heads to see which idiot had spoken. This was followed by a swarm of derogatory assertions that the thing in the tendrils could be nothing but dead, each of these statements preceded by a rather insulting means of pointing out the appendage’s bloodless hue and complete lack of mobility.
Brine, as a practicing disciple in the ways of Amontus, probably wouldn’t have used such crude language to illustrate these points, bu
t he could not help but agree. With its pallid color and pasty skin, the dangling appendage had every appearance of dead tissue.
“But if’n it’s dead,” a different section of the crowd cried back, “what took Egzert?”
To this, a wave of yeahs rolled across the thirty or so mercenaries, each man slowly remembering what it was he’d been doing prior to staring up at this shaft of dangling meat. When they had no answer, a few took it upon themselves to shout the question at their mesmerized leader, calling out his name and asking for his take on the query.
Sladge made no reply, still shaking his head, still mutter his words.
“An’ if’n it’s dead,” another man cried, “how’d it get all the way up there?”
Another volley of yeahs erupted from the crowd, but this time they took on a more urgent cast, and the throng itself began to converge upon its leader, its collective voice screaming out his name.
Sladge, seemingly content in his numb state of disbelief, neither noticed nor heard the advancing mob. It was not until one of them shuffled forward and poked the big man in the ribs that Sladge finally broke from his stupor and turned to glare at his assailant.
Very slowly, the big man’s eyes took in the staring faces of his worried men. His expression softened.
“Wha’s goin on, Sladge?” the staring throng cried.
Eyes wide, head turning slowly from one face to the next, Sladge could only grimace pitifully and say, “I doan’ know, but…,” he trailed off, his jaw tottering and his head beginning to shake, “…but somethin ain’t right.”
The mob went silent, carefully digesting the words of their guide. Then one of them, masked in the anonymity of the crowd and certainly delirious with his own primal fear, cried out, “Wha’ the Pit’s that supposed to mean?”
But rather than elaborate on this explanation or respond with a harsh retort, Sladge only winced at the question, donning an expression of such hurt that Brine expected his eyes to start welling and his cheeks to bear tears.
“Well, I says we cut out!” a man on the far right bellowed, his voice directed now at the mob rather than their leader. A barrage of yeahs rolled back at him, as did Sladge’s attention, the big man’s eyes losing their affliction and widening to the size of goose eggs.
Brine was sure the big man was going to lose it this time, sure he was going to come out of his shell and start throwing men about, but surprisingly enough he did not. He gave the men one last wounded stare, then turned to the hunchback standing beside him.
Blathus Sneel, clad in gray sleeping attire and leaning easily on his cane, blinked lazily at the large leader. From the placid expression on his face, Brine would have thought the raging mercenaries were nothing more than a swirl of rustling leaves.
Without a glance in their direction, the hunchback shook his head.
Sladge’s grimace grew worse, the look of a man trapped between the proverbial rock and the hard place. He glanced weakly at his minion, then took a step towards the adviser and lowered his mouth to his ear, whispering something only they could hear. The rigor mortis expression on the counselor’s face did not change, and when Sladge had finished his dissertation, the old man only shook his balding head.
Sladge winced once more and stabbed his eyes at the crowd, making the tense face of man deciding whether or not to dive into unknown water. He turned back to the adviser and lowered his head to the old man’s ear, attempting to make another entreaty on the part of his crew, only this time something happened.
About halfway down, Sladge appeared to lose his balance and drop to one knee. It was the strangest thing Brine had ever seen. The big man had made the same move only moments ago, but now it appeared as though he were succumbing to lightheadedness.
Sladge fought back, lifting his head of curly black hair and straightened himself out, but the dizziness returned much stronger than before. The big man’s head lolled sideways and his eyes fluttered. Around him, the mob took notice and lowered its voice.
Sladge was down on both knees now, one monstrous arm braced in the sand. He stayed like that for maybe a moment, barely enough time for the faint to present itself, and then Brine saw the heaviness leave the guide’s eyes, saw the swoon depart his head. Sladge drew his hand from the ground and found his feet.
Brine bunched his hands into fists. If possible, this was even more frightening than the thing dangling from the tongues. Hadn’t he seen something just like that in the anteroom outside the king’s chamber and along the Lathian road in the Desert of the F’kari?
No, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t seen it. He’d experienced it.
Drawing himself to full height, his face set like a basalt tombstone, Sladge the Lathian surveyed his men. They surveyed him back, cautiously. Then, as they saw the strange weakness leaving the big man’s body (seeing, as well, that it did not appear contagious), the general outcry of, “Let’s get the Pit out’a here,” began to circulate the crowd.
Sladge took a step forward and stabbed a finger at the crowd. “We ain’t goin NOWHERES!”
Another stunned silence swept over the men, bearded faces frozen in mid-sneer as their small minds weighed the fear of their guide against the fear of the Harriun. Brine could almost see the mental scales at work, the two sides teetering precariously for a time, then the Harriun side slamming down hard on the mental tables of their mind.
From several places in the mob, Brine heard the defiant cry of, “How come,” percolate through the men. No one was running for the hills just yet (at least no one wanted to be the first), but they were still a good sight from nodding their heads in ascension.
Sladge recoiled from the display, wilting like a stray dog. Despite his previous display of alpha-male aggression, the big man actually drew back from his men, the mistreated look, so out of place on such a large and sun-dried face, returning to his eyes.
He directed the expression at the hunched adviser at his side and the hunched adviser stared at him, his sleepy gray eyes seemingly oblivious to strife passing between the leader and his crew.
Another faint overcame the big man (head drifting, eyes blinking, arms slouching), then the spell lifted and he was roaring like a lion once more, the pinched skin between his eyes crashing down, the slight gap between his lips collapsing in a line.
“I’ll tell yeh how come!” he roared. “It’s your god-bannin job, tha’s how come! An’ I’ll whip the first of yeh what tries it, that’s how come too! Yeh hearin me, are yeh?” He made a grab for the closest man. “I’ll cook n’ eat yeh! I’ll gut yeh an’ let yeh watch. An’ if’n yeh fig’er to go on the sly, I’ll track yeh down an’ then cook n’ eat yeh.” He paused, lips quivering. “We took a job here, boys! We took a job an’ now we’re gona do it. An’ I doan’ care if it takes us to the gates of Sira’s Pit, we’re gona make it happen. An’ if’n any of yeh thinks dif’ernt from that, then you bes’ co—”
From everywhere at once and from nowhere in particular, the Wilderness of the Harriun gave forth a horrify cry.