by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 38
Mums came awake with a start, the whole of her world coming apart at the seams. She blinked at her surroundings and found herself seated in a dimly-lit chamber. She sniffed the air and smelled rotting vegetables and a thick, tongue-coating musk. She leaned away from the wall and felt soggy, worm-ridden wood beneath her rear.
Where was she?
For a moment, she couldn’t remember. She knew only that the building in which she sat was rattling and shaking at its foundation. She could hear, as well as feel, the trembling of an immense weight rustling against the supports.
Is it a quake? she wondered, and then she recognized the bed and wardrobe opposite her, then the recumbent halfling sleeping by the window. In a flash, everything came back and she remembered the living nightmare she’d escaped when she’d drifted off to sleep.
She lifted her head to the peeling plaster of the ceiling and wondered what she had missed. The last she remembered, her watch was over and Iman had taken her place by the window. She had pulled the cudgel between her knees and was tracing her finger along the lines, reflecting upon the flying thing and the crawler and their chances of escape.
Apparently, she had fallen asleep. She did not recall falling asleep, but there was no arguing with the foul taste on her tongue and the painful stiffness in her joints. She had drifted off to the land of slumber and the obstacle above her had somehow resolved itself.
If she needed more proof than the groaning of the roof joists (which reminded her of dead trees creaking in a storm), she need only look to the steady rain of plaster spilling from the cracks in the ceiling.
She turned her head to the window and listened to the sound of shingles scraping down the roof and splashing in the water. She listened to this until the low whoop of sails unfurled overhead and all sound was lost in the steady beating of giant fleshy wings. Wind beat down over the window and the vines began to slither.
Beneath the rustling tendrils, Reetlse sat with his chin on his chest and arms in his lap. At the sound of the gale force winds, though—when his abysmal hearing finally picked up the noise—he came awake with a snort and scrambled to his feet. He climbed atop the stool and leaned through the wind-blown flora, blinking repeatedly at the dying sky.
“It’s leavin,” he said.
Good, Mums thought, coming to her own feet in a much more elaborate process than the one employed by the halfling, one that involved her club, the adjacent wall, and parts of a crumpling bedpost.
Still in the throes of that process, her voice strained from the effort, she said, “Is it joining the other?”
“Doan’ look like it,” Reetsle muttered, and she could tell by the angle of his head that this was probably a safe assumption. The other had moved around to the hole in the northern wall—had its arm shoved inside and was fumbling around the furniture—and the halfling’s head was now cocked up at the eastern sky.
Using her club as a cane, Mums peeked through the tendrils and saw that her colleague’s assessment was correct. The flyer was flapping away from them and into the distance, moving so swiftly that by the time she picked it out of the gloom, it was nothing more than a pale tube with wings on each side and a feathery ball on the bottom.
It looks like a hatchet, she thought, a two-headed hatchet with a knot in the handle.
Beside her, Reetsle said, “That east, yeh reckon? Southeast, maybe?”
Mums studied the black horizon into which the flying monstrosity flew. At this time of day, it was difficult to distinguish direction. With the sun nearly down and dusk almost upon them, three of the four directions would appear as identical black sheets.
Except for the west, she mused. If she were to march down the hall and into the rooms on the west side of the manor, she would see the sagging memory of a swamp backlit by the ruddy remnants of a blazing sky, boughs like inky blotches splattered against a fire, trunks like tarry stripes smeared against a cherry void.
The green and the brown and all other spongy details of the bog were no more, soaked up by darkness and dissolved into one solidifying slab of concentrated black.
It was into this solidifying slab that Mums now gazed, the whole of the eastern horizon a dreary sheet. If not for the memory of how she’d arrived at these ruins, and of which direction led back to the Sway, she wouldn’t have been able to answer.
“I think it is,” she said at last, watching the flyer vanish in the dusk.
“Tha’s what I thought,” Reetsle said. “The Dome’s down there.”
Staring at the place in the night where there had once been wings and a body, Mums said, “It looked like the golden one, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, it did,” Reetlse said. “Ceptin’ fer not being gold.”
Mums said nothing, but she had been thinking about that as well. She had decided the skin color fit nicely with her overall theory that Jashandar was reverting to Drugana. If they could have rivers turn black and animals turned to pulp, then why not a golden one turned pasty? Wasn’t anything possible at this point?
Pushing the vines aside and leaning out the window, Reetsle turned his gaze to the left and eyeballed the crawler. Once he had the creature’s tail in sight—swishing around the corner and rippling in the water—he cleared his throat and spat. The expectoration didn’t come close to its milky target (landing no more than six strides from the front door), but Reetsle didn’t seem to mind.
“Yeh ever seen one’a them things,” he asked.
Mums peaked around the sill, not as far as her colleague, but far enough to see the tail sloshing in the inky fluid. In truth, creatures like the crawler tended to steer clear of the Dead Lands, and to the best of her knowledge they hadn’t been spotted in Jashandar since the Time of Arn.
Never the less, she had seen one. She’d seen it every day for the past few moon cycles as she and the other counselors held council in the king’s chamber. It was depicted in the painting of Arn on the wall above the headboard.
Even now, she could see the watercolors of that scene as clearly as she saw the nose on the halfling’s face: Arn’s mouth in a scream, his eyes like massive eggs, his giant axe hoisted. Before him in the Sway, fleeing into the crags and gullies of the Mad Man’s Pass, the old ones in all their dead-skinned glory, crawlers on the ground, flyers in the sky, some other variation moving in between.
“The painting,” she said at last. “The one on Sam’s wall.”
Reetsle made a revelation grunt. “Tha’s were I seen it,” he said. “I thought I seen it somewhere. I jus’ couldn’t ‘member where.” He sniffed to clear his nasal passage. “They’re a lot smaller in the paintin.”
Mums nodded that they were, but the miniature scale was only one factor hindering the titan’s recognition. When the crawler had first broken from Dell, she’d felt a glint of familiarity as she beheld its pasty skin, but then the fear and fatigue sank their fangs in her mind and the connection had not been made. It was not until she watched the long tube of the flyer pass before the window that the painting came to mind.
Reetsle said, “Never had no dealin’ with em, though.” He shook his head and made the helmet rattle against his ears. “Would’a never guessed em to act like this.”
Mums glanced down at him. “Like what?”
“Like they was smart,” he said, flicking a finger at the crawler’s tail. “You look at that paintin and you think they’re all wild an’ savage, like a bunch’a wilda’beasts from out’a the Hinter, all tooth an’ nail an’ no brains.”
Mums listened to the sound of something like a giant serpent flopping around in the chambers below and said, “Well, it has been groping around the lower levels for most of the afternoon.” She shrugged. “An intelligent creature would probably have tried something new by now.”
Reetsle spat at the porch roof. “Maybe,” he said. “But you saw how they was actin. Like they had themselves a little plan.” He motioned to the murky place in the east where the flyer had disappe
ared. “It was almos’ like that other’un there come swoopin down out’a nowhere to keep us from sneakin away from this’un here.”
Staring at the encroaching darkness, Mums felt her insides go cold. She had not thought of that possibility, but if it were true…
“It’s almost like they got the mind pau’r,” Reetsle said, returning his gaze to the crawler. “Like one of em can talk in its head and the other’un can hear what it’s sayin.”
Mums shook her shaggy head, but said, “Perhaps.”
“Think about it,” Reetsle said. “How else that flyer know we was in the Dell?”
Staring at the dim outlines of rooftops between the mansion and the tree-line, Mums said, “How did the crawler know to bypass those homes and come to this one?”
“Or find us at Eastpost.”
“Or know we were moving to corrals,” Mums said, “when we could have been moving for the sleeping quarters.”
Sneering at the crawler’s tail, Reetsle spit out the window and went still. Minus the expectoration, Mums joined him, listening as something thick and meaty thumped about in the lower levels of the manor.
“Welp,” Reetlse said, speaking unexpectedly and grabbing up his axe, “time’s a-wastin I ‘spect. Best get goin’.”
Mums turned from the window and felt the leather in her face try to frown. “What did you say?”
Looking around the gloom-filled chamber as though something had just occurred to him, Reetsle’s gaze came to rest on a scattering of moldy socks by the hall door.
Kicking at the stockings, he said, “Janu’ery on guard, is he?”
“He is,” Mums said, “but what did you say about going?”
“I told yeh that boy was worthless,” Reetsle said, now glaring at the pair of pants lying in the hall, the ones that had nearly felled him in his earlier flight from the room. He scowled at them, then turned and fixed his eyes on Mums. “What’s he doin’ now?”
Mums glanced at the empty cavities in the chest of drawers, then at the drawers scattered against the wall. “I believe he’s gone down the hall to look for something—”
“He’s what—?”
“—and seeing how he could have monitored the two brutes outside with his head in a bucket, I didn’t see the harm.” She paused to gain his attention. “Honestly, Reetsle, right now I’m a bit more concerned with what you—”
“What an idiot,” Reetsle snapped, wrenching his hands around Old Friendly. “A fool-headed idiot,” he added, turning to the hallway and shaking his head. “I say we leave im.”
Again, Mums tried to frown. “Reetsle,” she said, using the calm and cool tones of one giving the other party the benefit of the doubt, “that’s the second time you’ve mentioned leaving.”
Reetsle turned his questing glare on her, stared her down for a moment, then snorted. “Was yeh plannin on stickin round?”
Mums opened the broad expanse of her bovine mouth…and nothing came out. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Had the little heathen gone mad? Had she banged his head off the wall on the way up the stairs?
“Reetsle,” she said, trying to remain calm, “if the flyer was working with the crawler, why do you suppose it detained us until nightfall?” When the halfling continued to say nothing, she pointed to the silent gloom outside and said, “Do you not hear what’s going on out there?”
Reetsle flitted his eyes to the window, then crept to the rectangular void and cocked an ear to the swamp. After a time, he cocked the other ear and made the same expression.
“Sounds like it has all day,” he said. “Sounds dead.”
The lamplight of revelation flared in Mums’ mind and she nearly brought her lips to a smile. In the midst of her fear, she had forgotten the halfling’s hearing.
The swamp outside did, indeed, sound dead, but it hadn’t always sounded that way. This morning, when the Mela Party had entered from the banks of the Sway, it had been alive with a cacophony of wild cries; balloon-throated animals clinging to trees, bulbous-eyed invertebrates peeking from pools, hard-bodied pests buzzing through the air.
Mums gestured to the window and endeavored to describe the absence of these sounds, explaining to the halfling how every ughzzzing insect and ayeeeping bird had up and vanished when the sun began to set. When this failed to sway him, she told him of another creature she’d heard (it had been auoooting all the day long) that had recently crawled to the uppermost branches of the tallest tree and clamped both hands over its noisy little snout.
Reetsle glanced to the window, then back to the adviser. “So you’re tellin me…,” he said, still sounding confused, “…that the way is clear?”
“Yes—I mean, no.” She drew a breath and released it. “It is, but not for us.”
“Fer what then?”
Mums dropped her shoulders, refusing to dignify this with an answer.
“Boggen?” Reetsle asked, his expression condescending. “Are yeh talkin bout boggen again?”
Mums nodded, slowly at first, then with increased force. Like anyone who’d spent time in Jashandar, she and the halfling had heard the histories about Elnor. She had heard about the kingdom’s first-and-only attempt at expansion in the Forest of the Shun and she knew the attempt had flooded one night during the Time of Galimose.
According to the royal scouts, there were no new waterways leading into the flood zone, and the elevated water table could not be explained by precipitation alone. It was surmised, then, that the northern Shun had succumbed to a subterranean pool breaking through to the surface. A supposition that only grew stronger when, on the night following the infamous flood, all colonist and irrigation crews disappeared from the Colony of Elnor. No blood, no signs of violence, no carvings in the trees. They were just gone, vanished from the region as mysteriously as the ground water appeared.
Reetsle stared out the window for a while, then frowned and shook his head. When he spoke, he couldn’t even meet her eyes, staring at Old Friendly instead.
“Them’s old hist’ries,” he said. “Real old.”
“I know.”
“Whatever happened to them people,” he said, “it could’a moved on.”
“Or it could have stayed,” she challenged. “It’s not like anyone comes here at night,” she added, pointing to the swamp outside.
Reetsle considered this, not happily by any means, but considering it all the same.
“We still have the occasional swimming imp in Blue Hole,” Mums told him. “Was it not last week that a fisherman reported his boat eaten?”
“Yeah,” Reets sighed, staring ruefully at the floor, “it was.”
Mums let that sink in, then said, “If we have swimming imps coming through the bowels of Blue Hole, why not boggen through the bowels of the Dell?”
“Ah’right, ah’right,” Reetsle said, raising a palm to ward off her tongue. Mums watched him anxiously, watched as he lifted his head and directed his gnarled face about the room, first at the exposed slats in the walls, then at the missing plaster on the ceiling and the floorboards black with decay.
Staring at this last depressing sight, he said, “We gona make it in here?”
Mums didn’t answer right away. Partly, because she didn’t know, but mainly because she didn’t think they would make it. When the colonist had disappeared, it had been at night and the majority of them were likely in their homes. Possibly, a few had been outdoors, perhaps drawn to some new phenomenon appearing in the trees (something strange and spectacular that had washed in with the flood), but most were likely inside.
“I think our chances are better,” she said, speaking very fast and taking a step forwards. All of a sudden, she needed for him to weigh in on this idea. She needed to hear that she wasn’t crazy and that they might survive and she needed to hear it from him.
She was the planner—the dreamer, if you will—but not the halfling. Reetsle was the Architect of the Real and the Founder of What Is. So if he thought they cou
ld make it—good old Spit-in-your-eye Baggershaft, the counselor who told you how it was no matter how much it hurt—then maybe they could.
Reetsle stood there stewing, twisting Old Friendly’s handle and watched the blades spinning in the air. He did this for what felt like an eternity—rolling the double blades from top to bottom, from bottom to top—and then lifted his head.
“If’n we stay in this hole,” he said at last, “I reckon we’d—”
From the outside in the hall, Iman interrupted with an excited, “Hey! Hey, guys! Guys, you gota see this!”