Eloy's Challenge

by Kara Timmins

  Eloy motioned for the others to come in closer. “Malatic, you take the lead. I’ll be right behind you. Neasa and Goodwin, you watch for signs we’ve been spotted. Cough twice if you do. Sound good?”

  “Sounds fine.” Malatic took a breath and shook out his arms. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal being back here. It’s making me feel sick.”

  “You’re not alone,” Eloy said. “Let’s all be sure we make our way back out.”

  “The sooner we start,” Malatic said, “the sooner it’ll be over.”

  36

  The entrance to the camp was hidden around a mound of rock, an appendage from the goliath mountain. It was tucked away like a secret, which it was in a way, and made it seem as if it had come out of nowhere—like an illusion. The entrance wall was more commanding than Nicanor’s. For a moment, Eloy forgot he was supposed to be pretending he had seen it before. His awe was the only thing in his mind. He could see in his periphery that Neasa and Goodwin were doing the same. Eloy stood before the construction of the reeds and timber that spanned from one end of the crook in the mountain to the other. He bent his neck back to see the top. The wall was at least three times taller than his own stature. A rope weaved and tied between each piece of wood to secure it, bringing everything together. Eloy looked closer to see through any gaps but found that the face of the gate, with its intricate weave, was only one layer of many. He stood back with a new appreciation of its structural accomplishment.

  “We’ve come to report,” Malatic said, his volume ricocheting off the rock walls, making Goodwin jump.

  They waited for a response, but nothing came.

  “We’ve come to report,” Malatic said. “Open the gate.”

  Eloy could hear a hum of human sounds coming from the other side of the gate, but they didn’t seem to be close, and no one responded to Malatic’s call.

  Malatic moved past Neasa and stood next to Eloy. “I think whatever’s going on here just started to look worse,” he whispered.

  “If no one’s at the gate . . .”

  “If no one’s at the gate, then Anso’s fighters are in really bad shape,” Malatic said.

  Neasa turned to face Malatic and Eloy. Goodwin closed in and stood at her side. “What should we do now? Seems to me the damage has already been done. What else can we do here?” Neasa seemed to be careful to keep her meaning ambiguous in case someone was listening.

  “We have to see what’s going on,” Eloy said. “We have to know what’s happening in case we need to . . . help.”

  “Then what should we do?” Neasa asked.

  Malatic didn’t wait for an idea. The front of the gate seemed to be designed to make scaling it a challenge, but Malatic took off his leather shoes and used his bare feet and lithe body to find the places to step and move. Eloy held his breath and tried not to think about Malatic falling off. Eloy and the others stood at the bottom without movement or sound as Malatic reached the top. He swung a leg to the other side, fearless of the sharp points, and stopped before starting his descent down the other side.

  “Mal, is everything okay?” Neasa asked.

  “It’s . . .” Malatic said. “It doesn’t look good from up here.”

  Eloy thought he could see a shudder shake Malatic, threatening his balance. Malatic seemed to use the shake to refocus on getting down the other side of the gate to open it. Eloy felt worse not being able to see him or know what was happening on the other side. Eloy put his ear to the gate and followed the soft reverberations that he took to be Malatic finding his foothold. When the gate swung out from where the three stood waiting, they all let out a nervous laughter from their relief.

  Eloy didn’t know what Anso’s camp was supposed to look like, but he knew what he saw wasn’t right. The main path running through the middle of the camp was littered with debris. Strips and chunks of fabric—from clothing or tents, Eloy couldn’t tell—sopped up the mud and fluids on the ground. Poles from the tents stuck out of the earth purposeless with the fabric in muddy piles. Eloy scanned the mess. The telltale signs of battle were absent. The disheveled camp had all the signs of dilapidation from apathy and disorder.

  And then the smell hit them.

  The aroma of decay had been present in the forest, but it lacked condensed confinement. Based on Malatic’s reaction, Eloy expected to see more bodies, but saw only one next to the gate. The smell was enough to get an idea of what Malatic saw from his higher vantage point. Eloy was glad he wouldn’t have to see the destruction in panorama.

  Malatic looked down at the body close to the gate. “I don’t need to be much in the way of an observer to know that this one didn’t die like the ones we came across earlier.”

  The man had been dead for at least a few days, and the cause of his early departure was the result of a rough, handleless dagger to the soft, hollow part of his throat. The knot of his flag was tied at his forehead.

  “It’s not usually the ones at the top who guard the gate. Look there.” Malatic pointed to the dead man’s hip. “His waist tie has been cut off. That’s where the others kept their pouch of green powder.”

  “Someone killed him for it.” Goodwin said.

  “Based on the quality of the dagger sticking out of him,” Malatic said, “I’m guessing his authority over the underlings lost its power to something else.” Malatic turned toward the pathway into the camp.

  The entrance of Anso’s camp was similar in the squalid nature to Nicanor’s outer tents. It seemed both leaders shared the sentiment to keep the fighters they were willing to lose at the front. A meaty padding of added security.

  Bloated, blackening, and rotting limbs stuck out from under the tents, and every sound of sickness from inside of them made Eloy flinch. He would have turned around, leaving this gap in the mountain that had become a tomb, if it weren’t for the sound of life somewhere ahead of them. Evidence that Anso had lost a large chunk of his fighters assaulted all of their senses, but that didn’t mean that Anso was broken, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t regain enough footing to inflict pain on the land and the people Eloy wanted to protect. There was still too much they didn’t know.

  As Eloy and the others moved closer, bouts of laughter cut through the wasteland of the outer area. The people laughing were wreathed in death, yet they didn’t seem to be affected by it. The bustling activity of the living increased the farther they got from the overused tents at the front.

  Eloy felt relief in finding their way into an area populated mostly by the living, but they were still far away from the laughter. How could there be laughter? How could there be sounds of life among all this disaster? He would never get used to the reality of people being able to carry on next to suffering.

  The smell of human waste and rot lifted just enough that they were able to breathe out of their mouths without having to taste it, but they were still surrounded by the effects of whatever had plagued the people of the camp. None of the fighters looked the four in the eye for long, and those who tried were too disoriented to hold their gaze long enough to come to any conclusions. Those walking around did so with unsteady legs, and a few dropped down to their knees, where they stayed, staring and unmoving. Others vomited on the ground between the tents. The level of destruction was less in the nicer area of the camp, but it was only a matter of time before the wave of death hit the inner area too.

  The four kept to their formation with Malatic at the front, Eloy behind him, and Neasa and Goodwin side by side at the back, but the more they saw, the more they tightened close to one another. Every step over a suspicious fly-swarmed mount or sidestep of a fallen tent brought them closer together.

  “There’s something up there.” Malatic spoke low, like he was walking through sacred ground—as if he were trying to be respectful of the dead.

  They had hit another edge of another layer; this time, the delineation from one sectioned-off area was c
learer in the form of a barricade. The wall that stopped their progress wasn’t made with the intelligence of the older, main wall. The barricade was made from splintered tree limbs, broken tables, tattered fabric from tents, clothes, and weapons. Whoever was in charge of its construction had needed something built quickly.

  “There has to be a way in,” Malatic said. “Anso wouldn’t corner himself inside no matter how bad things got out here. There has to be a break in this wall.”

  “Can’t we just climb it?” Goodwin asked.

  “We could,” Malatic said, “but I am willing to bet there are people on the other side of that wall waiting to kill anyone who sticks so much as a hand over the top. Similar problems don’t always have similar solutions.”

  “We need to find the entrance and talk our way in,” Neasa said.

  Malatic reached behind his head and tightened the knot. “It shouldn’t be far. We ready?”

  Goodwin took a deep breath. “Ready.”

  Eloy and Neasa nodded.

  After a short walk, they rounded a jut of the barricade and found a section of the wall—no more than five strides across—left open, neatly cleared away of any debris. Just as Eloy suspected, the passage was guarded.

  Both of the guards wore their red flags tied with the knot on their forehead. The female fighter had a stature that mirrored the broad-shouldered male standing at her side with his sword raised. She didn’t share the characteristics of the others they had seen in the second layer who seemed to be at the beginning stages of deterioration. “Get back to your section.”

  “We’re here to report,” Malatic said. “We just got back to camp, and it looks like we should have stayed away.”

  The female fighter crossed her thick arms over her chest. “There isn’t anything you have to report that can be of any importance.”

  “We met up with the tute in one of the towns,” Malatic went on. “He was . . . engaged in a pressing activity. He requested we come ahead on his behalf and give Anso an update.”

  “Pressing activity, huh?” the woman said. “That sick old tute. That explains why you’re not sick yet. That tute took a whole sack of the clean stuff before he left. How far back did you say he was?”

  “A few days at the most,” Malatic said.

  The woman shrugged at the man across from her. The man lifted one shoulder.

  “If you won’t let us through without him,” Malatic said, “we’ll go back out to ensure his safe delivery, if you don’t mind. This place isn’t exactly the cot of comfort I remember.”

  “You ain’t kidding,” the female said. “No need to go back. I’m sure Anso will want to hear an update. And if he doesn’t”—she shrugged—“that’s your problem. If I see any of you trying to make off with anything on this side of the barricade, I’ll flay you and feed your friends your jerky flesh myself. Understand?” She stepped aside.

  “We won’t touch anything,” Malatic said. “Don’t you worry.”

  The man didn’t move aside. “All but the young one of you have some different-looking weapons.”

  “We’ve been on the road for a long time,” Malatic said, “and have been lucky enough to come across more than a few stupid travelers who shared their fine weapons . . . once we cut their heads off. As custom, they’re yours if you want them.”

  Eloy resisted the urge to grab for the hilt of his sword. The thought of his sword in the hands of one of Anso’s fighters was enough to make him want to fight his way out of the camp. Malatic gave Eloy a flash of a side glance, too fast for anyone else to notice, a look imploring Eloy to trust him. Eloy did. He had to let Malatic lead them through this.

  The man stepped to the side. “Your spoils are yours to keep, fighter. Just noting their strangeness.” The man turned to the woman. “You take them to Anso. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble after this morning. It should take the lowers a while longer to get just desperate enough to forget again.”

  “Fine. You four, start walking.” The female warrior stared at each one with a glare as they passed through the break in the barricade. Once on the other side, the woman strode to the front of the group.

  Malatic and Eloy were careful not to move too quickly as to keep themselves walking in step with their escort. Eloy listened to the crunching footfall of Neasa and Goodwin behind him, sounds he knew even without seeing, and focused on whether there were any others following behind or closing in. There weren’t any. He focused on the new section of the camp. The center was the inverse to what he had already seen: where the wall had been disarray and chaos, the other side was in perfect order. The pathways between the uniform tan tents were clear and raked.

  “What exactly is going on around here?” Malatic asked.

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “You’re going to find out soon enough,” she said, “but I’m of the mind that any man should see his own death coming if he can. You just remember what I told you about what I would do if you find yourself wanting to help yourself to anything that’s ours, you got it?”

  “We didn’t take your threat lightly,” Malatic said.

  “Good,” the woman said. “You remember that when you hear what I’m about to tell you. I assume you got the supply that’s keeping you going from the tute. I always thought the amount of erum that man took was too much.”

  Malatic and Eloy instinctively looked at each other when she said the word. Erum. The green powder capable of turning a dying man into a mouth-frothing animal had a name.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” the woman went on. “Whatever he has left will be his last. You too.” She looked at Eloy, and he did his best to feign a look of dread.

  “Why?” Malatic asked dramatically.

  “The last batch of erum we got came after thirty days, just like all the others. It looked just like it always did, came in hollowed-out tree trunks filled to the top with the green powder. All the higher-ups gathered around and got their portion, just like always. I was set on a task, so I didn’t get mine, but by the time I got back here, everything had turned bad really fast. They were bleeding out of every hole in their faces. Everyone who got their share and put it in their mouth went down before night. A fighter shouldn’t fall like that. We cut a few open just to see and everything inside was red and yellow muck and sludge, like porridge. Anso had a few of the lowers test the batch to make sure the erum was what did it. They went out the same way.”

  “What about the others?” Malatic asked. “Looked like there was something else wrong with the people at the front of the camp.”

  “That’s the other part,” the woman said. “The part that will be particularly important to you. It turns out that not having any erum causes some unpleasantness.”

  Eloy forced himself to fidget with his hands.

  The fighter looked over her shoulder at him as she walked and lifted her upper lip in something that was between a smile and a snarl. She continued explaining the details with more vigor. “It took a few days for the unders to run out of the erum they had. We didn’t really even notice at first that something was wrong. They all seemed a little slower. Then after more than a few were used as an example of what happens to the lazy, it started to become clear that something else was going on. That’s when they started getting sick. The ones who were known to do the most of it went down fast—that is, if they didn’t just kill others who had more. That happened a lot too. Eventually, even the ones who only used it a little bit ran out. It’s a rough way to go. There’s just no fluid left in the body after a while—can’t get anything in, and if you do, you can’t keep it in.”

  “What about you?” Malatic asked. “You don’t seem worried for yourself at all.”

  “We’re not going down like you and the others,” she said. “We have more than enough of the last bunch, the one before the bad batch. It’ll get us to the next delivery. The last one was just a
bad batch. That’s what Anso said. There will be more for us. Good stuff. Clean stuff.”

  “What can we do to get some of it?” Malatic asked.

  Eloy saw what Malatic was doing. Even though they weren’t at risk of actually suffering the fate of the lowers they pretended to be, their lives were in just as much danger if the female fighter suspected they weren’t who she thought they were.

  “It’s not up to me,” she said, “but I doubt you can. Then again, who knows? If Anso is happy to have the tute come through, he just might be feeling generous. If not, well, you know.” She smiled.

  The area of the highers wasn’t made of anything that would be considered lavish, but the accommodations were drastically superior to the living area of the lowers. Eloy noticed similarities between Anso’s camp and Nicanor’s, but their personal tents within it were very different. Where Nicanor’s had been oversized and garish, Anso’s was subdued and camouflaged by its uniformity. Unlike Nicanor, Anso didn’t have any fighters guarding his tent.

  The greatest luxury of the tan tent seemed to be the quiet, the disconnect from the noises Eloy heard coming into the camp. The gurgles and moans of pain had become such a constant tap of discomfort that Eloy thought he had become immune to it, that he had tuned it out. But when he was in the proximity of Anso’s tent and its normal-toned murmurs he realized that the sounds of suffering had been rubbing away an unseen piece of him.

  The normalcy of the hum of Anso’s inner cocoon was bliss amid chaos, and it made Eloy aware of something else that was a balm to his nerves, he didn’t see nearly as many highers around as he had expected. He thought there would be a sizable group of them waiting out the storm of trouble on the plentiful side of the barricade. Those present were lounging and staring off in the distance as they were undoubtedly imagining when the next delivery of erum would be getting to them and freeing them from the looming swing of a slow-falling ax blade. Whatever they were contemplating didn’t involve the four strangers walking toward Anso’s tent.