A weak voice inside her head insists she not despair. Dilemmas ten times worse than this one – captured, armed and sentenced to sacrificial death on an uncharted alien world – have they escaped before. They were typically, Moira is forced to admit, two members stronger than they were now. There was no Abraham to swoop the Lover in on a rescue mission; there was especially no Two-Bit Switch to scheme some way from the Skyscratch clutches.
This is zottibles outside what he’d predicted for them on the surface of Gi; they’d come prepared for no natives, no theocracies, no public executions.
All about them, the Gitter drummers tremble the very mountains with their thudding war-song. While this works wonders for Moira’s hangover, it also provides a convenient conversational smokescreen, enough for the three captives to whisper out the details of their ingenious escape plan.
“How’s that,” Moira questions in Nemo’s ear, “ingenious escape plan coming?”
“All we gotta do,” Nemo whispers back conspiratorially, “is get our hands free, get our weapons back, not get stabbed, run back to the Lover, get aboard somehow, run the blockade, not get shot down and warp away.”
“Helpful.”
“Don’t worry,” Odisseus assures her. “I’m currently in the process of freeing my right paw.”
“And?”
He pauses significantly. “Get back to me in forty-five minutes.” This is followed by a few more seconds of scratching and struggling. “These vines’re thick as fuck.”
“Take your time,” Moira allows. “No rush or anything.”
Meanwhile, the Ceremony of Incessant Fucking Drumming slowly rises to a thudding crescendo. At a dramatic motion from Foreplanter, it suddenly ceases.
{God Beyond}, Foreplanter addresses to the heavens, {may Thou tear any shred of mercy from the fates of these three blasphemers, brazen enough to pose as Thine holy messengers. May a thousand gruesome ends be visited upon them as punishment for their temerity}.
“You know,” Nemo admits, “far as eulogies go, you could really do much worse. Colorful imagery, at least.”
{May they know unending torment in the dankest bowels of the Fernhollow}.
“Okay, it’s kinda starting to sound like there’s maybe just poop down there.”
{We pray, God Beyond, that Thou might deem our sacrifice worthy of your august and invinc–}
“Little long, maybe,” opines Nemo. “Hey! Firstseed Fuckfart!” he shouts, piercing the reverent silence with his irreverence. “Can we skip the exposition and cut straight to the murders?”
“Are you in some rush to fucking die?” hisses Odisseus.
{Silence thine ungodly speech}, threatens Foreplanter calmly, {or I shall have that vile red worm torn from between thy teeth}.
“I’d be flattered,” commends Nemo. “I’m just saying, any chance we could fast-forward through all the boring ceremony stuff? I gotta sit here, sniffing your spory assholes another second, I think I’mana ralph.”
“And the play here is?” mutters Moira. “Antagonize them so I can–”
“Oh, there’s no play here,” Nemo confesses. “I really might ralph.”
Foreplanter, bleached and blackened, stands stock still a moment, as though in contemplation. {Very well}, it relents. {This one, the one called Badass Supreme, shall have its wish granted}. It waves a dismissive gesture, Righty and Lefty clacking together, towards the soldiers that encircle them. {Feed the hirsute one to Fernhollow}.
“Oh, lovely,” remarks Odisseus. Moira feels all the Ortok’s escape efforts, tugging frantically at their entangled wrists, stop suddenly. “Well, I was thinking the last few moments of my pitiful life were getting a little tedious.”
“Lemme know if it is poop down there,” Nemo asks of his saltbrother before he’s hauled off to die.
Once slice of a glassrock blade is enough to sever Odisseus from this three comrades. A small curtain of Gitter guide the Ortok toward the edge of the chasm. All the while, he’s kept at a safe distance, surrounded by spear tips, and Odisseus plays the uncaged monster the whole way, snarling and snapping at anyone who comes too close.
Once he arrives, another whole production commences. The soothsayer recites some mumbo-jumbo and Odisseus is anointed with assorted dyes and oils, nearly biting off the arm of an inattentive guard in the process. The entire time, Nemo, replete with impatience, makes loud snoring noises.
“You know something?” Odisseus spins suddenly, to better regard his impudent saltbrother, the light of true honesty in his eyes. “All you’ve ever been is a selfish little–”
In a sudden anticlimax, Odisseus is smacked across the back of the head with a wooden haft. His whole frame goes rigid, he yelps something incoherent, drops heavily over the ledge and is swallowed by blackness.
“Me next! Me next!” hoots the Captain excitedly.
Once again, Foreplanter has no immediate reaction, confounded by the obnoxious enigma that is the Galactic Menace. {Take the other one instead}.
“Figures,” Moira sighs, her escape plan half-baked. Nemo, like a thwarted teenager, throws another mini-tantrum, stomping his feet in impatience.
Like Odisseus before her, Moira is treated to the whole dreary ritual again. She’s loosed from Nemo, dragged to the precipice, chanted over and doused in dye. She takes little notice of either this or all Nemo’s shouting, choosing instead to peer down into the void where they tossed Odisseus.
She’s not rewarded with much; to the naked eye, this “Fernhollow” appears to be nothing more than a massive black opening in the rock. The rocky promontory they stand on abruptly gives way, a few feet from where Moira stands, to open air, an impressive drop into nothing but inky darkness below. It’s a great open wound in the earth, its depth or contents unknowable, and Moira can easily understand how the Gitter came to fear and loathe the place.
The longer she stares, the more Moira notices a rank smell, carried on a hot draft, that wafts up from the pit below. She cannot help but imagine she’s about to be thrown into the open stomach of some gigantic subterranean creature. If so, for all Nemo’s idiocy, there may well be poop down there.
The drumming once again comes to a sudden stop. Moira grits her teeth and prepares to make her last ditch attempt. When she hears the creak of leather behind her, the guard winding back his weapon to strike, Moira launches into action.
All she does is duck. At precisely the right moment, Moira bends forward and the polearm haft goes whizzing over her head. The alarmed Gitter, from what she can see, completely loses its balance, flailing its many arms and struggling to keep footing. Moira leaps upright and launches out a savage Stinging Spith straight into the center of the cactoid’s torso.
Her baby-stomper rings true and gives the gigantic Gitter all the extra push it needs. With a sudden burst of terrified spores, the cactoid tumbles off the edge and down into its dreaded Fernhollow.
Before she can assess her next move, the falling cactus snatches Moira by the leg and sinks its spines deep into her flesh. Arms bound and off-balance, the equally alarmed Moira has no choice, in that moment, but to tumble off the side of the promontory. Moments later, she and the Gitter drop away from the world and into pure blackness.
CHAPTER 12
Odisseus swims in his sleep.
He has to dive deeper. This one coastal shelf, he's convinced, with its barren splay of rocks and algae, is far from his only option. The deeper he manages to dive, the more satisfying the prey that will await him, hidden down in that dark expanse of water.
A few slight flicks of the tail are all his streamlined Ortoki body needs to motor through the frigid waters. His limbs flush against his torso, Odisseus is a slick brown torpedo, his tail the engine that rockets him around the shelf and down into the deeper water. All he’s after now is speed; no tricky maneuvering, no aquatic dogfighting, just sheer momentum.
Beneath him, the mossy rocks and waving seaweed gives way suddenly to plunging depths, a blue darker and truer than the shallow cerulean of the coasta
l waters. Down there is the real cape, where the true treasures lay. In his imagination, they’re perfectly arrayed, waiting patiently for an enterprising enough Ortok to dive all the way down and retrieve them.
He brakes a moment, flapping open his hind paws and extending their webbing. Momentarily slowed, he bends his slender body forward and his tail bursts back to life. With a flutter of bubbles, Odisseus is speeding away downward and into that impenetrable well of indigo beneath him.
Some faint understanding comes to the young Ortok that he’s breaking the rules. Some part of him is aware that larger predators occasionally cruise the cape’s outer reefs, searching for easy prey. A juvenile Ortok, he’s been told countless times, would make an excellent meal for a great taakti or an iluuki ridgeback. The denmothers, one part of his brain attempts to remind him, would be furious if they discover he’s broken their edicts and went hunting where he wasn’t allowed. He is young, the rest of his brain insists, and full of youth’s swaggering invincibility and thus, downward he swims.
The Ortok dives for a full minute and more before those lower reefs do appear, spread out like a descending staircase before him, and his lungs are starting to strain from the effort. With a speed tinged with desperation, he chooses the nearest one, a crosshatch of intersecting coral, and quickly goes about his hunting.
Paddling his hind paws to stay submerged, the upside-down Ortok starts to scour every nook and cranny in the coral. He flips stones and paws into crevices, searching for anything edible among the rocks, the fuzzy green algae and the jagged stands of coral that litter the bottom of the bay. Tiny kuyapi crabs and schools of scattering ularuk are driven before him, the coastline’s apex predator, but these are literally little fish and not worth all this effort.
The prize Odisseus really seeks, the one he nearly drowns to obtain, is discovered another half-minute later, cunningly disguised as just another moss-spotted stone. The Ortok wraps paws around the scuttling shellfish, pries it from the muck and, with powerful kicks of his hind paws and frantic flailing of his tail, blasts back toward the surface.
It’s his closest call to date. He breaches the briny surface of the cape with lungs afire and his vision growing a little hazy. Despite all that, despite the danger and the risk and the threat of potential punishment, the euphoria of success, of discovery, or the reward he clutches to his chest, repays Odisseus tenfold. He swam to the bottom of the cape with impunity and is that much closer to full Ortoki adulthood.
Soon as he surfaces, instinct rolls Odisseus onto his back, the shellfish coming to rest naturally on his stomach. He gazes upward at a pristine sky, sucking in relieved breath after relieved breath, the sheltered water of the cape lapping gently against his fur.
The sky above is crystal clear, blue as the vibrant water of the cape. A few clouds, like wave-tossed seafoam, ride sluggishly past and the occasional dreambird, some rough approximation of a dozen various species, wheels and squawks overhead. The arms of the cape reach around either side, bristling with rocky outcropping and towering trees, to hold Odisseus and his fellow Ortoks in its protective embrace.
This cape, this landmass, these gentle waters have been an Ortoki habitat for uncounted generations, stretching back to the otterfolk’s primordial past. Here, among the tidepools and sheltered inlets, they construct their lodges, the shoreline protected from both seaborne storms and from the ravenous predators of the mainland. Here, the fishing is plentiful, the weather temperate and the seas placid.
Dangers would occasionally rear their heads, predators of land and sea, swirl currents, the odd heat-crazed bull Ortok. Day by day, though, the first few years of an Ortok’s life, frolicking and romping amid the tranquil waters and sandy beaches, were lazy, uneventful and occasionally mind-numbingly boring.
Today was different. Today, the intrepid young Ortoki diver braved the deeper seabeds and returned with an invaluable prize in paw – a padlock crab.
The name originally came from offworld fishermen, sporadically plying the planet’s liberal oceans. Fully retracted, a padlock crab was nothing but an impenetrable ball of pink carapace. Impossible to crack with claws or brute strength, only by twisting the interlocking plates of each padlock crab in very particular way could one access the flesh inside.
The cape’s expert fishers and clam-catchers claimed there was a fine art to cracking a padlock. If this art involved anything but repetitive trial and error, however, Odisseus had never discerned it. Now, here he floats, his very own padlock crab resting on his chest and all the time in the universe to crack its specific combination.
It’s here, riding the mild surf that rolls into the cape, his belly to the sky and his concentration on the crustacean at hand, that young Odisseus is literally torn from his dream. In this case, a serpentine tentacle reaches up from dark waters far below the Ortok and encircles his unsuspecting ankle.
Before Odisseus can cry out or struggle free, the tendril entwines bone-crunchingly tight around his hind paw and tugs him downward. The Ortok pup makes one squeak of distress, muffled by seawater, before he’s pulled beneath the surface. Yanked towards the bottom with irresistible force, Odisseus has one fleeting view of the surface of the water, dappled and interlaced by a spiderweb of sunlight. Then the dream fabric gives way, a theatrical backdrop torn violently from its hooks.
The true Odisseus, the Odisseus of here and now – an Odisseus two decades older, two hundred pounds heavier and innumerable worlds wearier – snaps back to his senses.
He’s immediately assailed by a flurry of new strange and unpleasant sensations. There’s utter darkness and a putrid smell. There’s many somethings wet and frondy slapping him repeatedly and there’s a great sense of motion and speed. Something, it quickly becomes clear to him, is legitimately dragging him by the ankle through an endless morass of slime, darkness and foul stench.
Possibly through poop, it belatedly occurs to Odisseus.
Twisting about, the Ortok lashes out in all directions, attempting to sink his claws into something hard and stable – the ground, ideally – to somehow impede this fisher of Ortoks. His claws only rake through more pliable material, something wet and fibrous, shearing away like paper beneath his paws.
His surroundings so surrealistic, Odisseus is forced to wonder whether he’s actually still dreaming and whether that dream simply transformed into the blackest of nightmares.
For what feels like many minutes, he’s tugged along like this, all his flailing useless to resist whatever’s dragging him along. His eyesight slowly starts to adjust to his dim surroundings, providing Odisseus the faintest suggestion of shapes and outlines, as they whip past him on his way to wherever.
By craning his neck, Odisseus can catch a glimpse at the thing that’s ensnared his ankle. A glistening cord of inhuman muscle is cinched tightly around his poor hind paw. All of a sudden, the tentacle cranks suddenly upward, hoisting Odisseus off the spongy ground and dangling him precariously in the air.
Below him, Odisseus sees a circular pattern of faint light, tiny bulbs of glowing orange, that helpfully illuminate the ghastly scene. What Odisseus sees is a gargantuan alien mouth, a void full of bizarrely-shaped teeth, fleshy flaps and a deeper darkness somewhere inside. From the angle that the tentacle dangles him, it’s an easy assumption that he’s about to be fed to said yawning mouth.
He’s surprisingly calm, Odisseus discovers, seconds away from falling into a gigantic alien vagina-mouth-thing. There’s none of the shrieking, frenzied-clawing panic one might assume would accompany so gruesome a fate. It’s an inarguably bizarre fate that he’s found, down this black abyss at the outer edge of the known galaxy. At the same time, there’s a certain unique, almost pioneering quality to such an end. He’ll certainly be the first Ortok this unimaginable subterranean horror has ever eaten.
That’s when the whole creature convulses, shuddering with shock or pain and Odisseus is thrown clear. He sails through the muggy darkness, the orange lights vanishing from sight somewhere behind
him. He comes to a violent landing amid some shrubbery that, for all its effectiveness as a cushion, reeks to all the moons of Jotor.
Aching and disoriented, the confused Odisseus eventually crawls up onto his elbows and squints around, attempting to gauge exactly what happened and how much danger he’s somehow still in.
The darkness, some distance away, is pierced by a flickering flame. Little more than a burning torch, this humble light is a beacon in this pure black night, spelling out the Ortok’s surroundings all the more.
As predicted, the prone Odisseus is up to his neck in vegetation. Slick black leaves and waving fronds form an endless undergrowth in every direction. His theory about a gargantuan monstrous mouth is partially right, he discovers. In the halo of torchlight, the creature’s revealed to be a behemothic flower, its great leathery petals a dozen feet long and tipped with glowing orange bulbs. At its center yawns open a toothy maw, fangs dripping a yellowish ichor.
An athletic humanoid figure stands in defiance of the drooling beast. Brown as mud, she hefts the blazing torch in one hand, a glittering sword in the other.
As Odisseus watches, phosphorescent tendrils spring to life from the surrounding vegetation and snap like whips at the lone figure. With feline grace, she dodges aside, swiping with sword and torch, fending off every twining tentacle. Transfixed by this heroic spectacle, Odisseus climbs to his feet to get a better look.
Following the light of the torch, Odisseus watches the figure dance back and forth around the central bulb, sword slashing with deadly effect. He watches the monstrous flower writhe in pain from each blow. He watches lithe humanoid deal a few savage and conclusive blows to the flowery behemoth. The scent of yellow pus reaching his nostrils, Odisseus makes a small, disgusted noise and that makes the figure spin, a coiled spring, ready for another attacker or three.
Moira Quicksilver is drastically changed by her primal environment. Grime and soil are streaked across her clothing, her face and her hair. The weapon in her hand is undeniably of Gitter make – wooden hilt, glassrock blade, wicker weaving keeping the whole thing together. The crackling light of her torch catches in Moira’s eyes, revealing something utterly cold and primordial. In that moment, she’s the original hunter, with sharp objects and open flame for her weapons.
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