Plague of Light

by Robin D. Laws

  I am not meant to overhear, but my senses are keen. The ex-slaver says this: “Nothing shameful in being scared. I’m scared all the time.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We move deeper into the jungle, the air growing hotter and wetter as we go. Our movements are quiet, and that is good. The boy, used to going unheard, is better at creeping than the priestess or the sorceress. He watches his steps carefully, never stepping on a crackling leaf or snap-ready twig.

  Hours pass. We stop by a stream to drink and rest.

  Murmuring voices echo from the tall trees. Our weapons leap to our hands. We array ourselves around the boy.

  Zenj hunters appear at the edge of the hollow. They halt as they see us. There are eight of them, bruised and bloodied. Quilled headdresses mark them as Indta, a wandering tribe. Over their shoulders they carry the carcasses of rat-like porcupines. There are more of the brush-tailed beasts than they can eat themselves. The main group must be nearby.

  The Stranger Greeting of the forests differs from that of the plains. No one owns the jungle. When parties meet, each must show his peacefulness, or be ready for war.

  In our clicking language, the Indta hunt leader signals that he is neither predator nor willing to be preyed upon. I step forward to do the same, identifying myself as tribeless.

  “We are—” I begin.

  “We know who you are,” says the hunt leader, who has introduced himself as Antemba.

  The Indta fear us.

  “We will not harm you.” In saying so, I am repeating myself. By giving the Jungle Greeting, I already promised not to prey upon them.

  Their weapons are down, as called for by the protocol of the greeting, but their muscles remain tight, prepared for flight or for battle.

  “You are hurt.” The slashes on their bodies come not from the teeth or claws of jungle beasts but from blades. “Who did you fight?” Although they bear the injuries of defeated men, I do not shame them by implying they lost.

  “They were as him,” Antemba says, pointing to Verkusht. He means that they were Bekyar.

  “Slavers?”

  “Garbed as slavers, yet they took none of us prisoner, even when we were helpless.”

  “They attacked you?”

  “They did not give the proper greeting, and so we were justified in falling upon them. They were greater in number than we first knew.”

  “How many were there?”

  “More than ten, less than twenty.”

  “These men you fought are our foes.”

  “We wish you good fortune against them.”

  “What more can you tell us?”

  “There was a pale man with them—an outlander. And they carried strange cauldrons that reeked of bad magic.”

  “Cauldrons?”

  “They were of a copper metal. Inside bubbled some terrible liquid. As if they were heated by flame, yet no flame could be seen.”

  Further questions yield little. I offer them healing. Antemba takes time to weigh his fear of us against the condition of his men. He nods. Sunasuka and Obai move slowly up the rise toward them. They lay on hands and chant their flesh-mending chants. The Indta nod their thanks and melt into the forest.

  “Could it be anyone other than Tarood and Brachantes?” Katiiwa asks.

  It is not really a question, but Verkusht answers anyway: “What other Bekyar would win a fight and take no cargo?”

  “How did they know to come here?” says Sunasuka.

  “Brachantes claimed to have seers,” I say. “Perhaps he knows where Kitumu’s temple lies. Perhaps he has magic that lets him find the boy.”

  Mwonduk reads our concern. “This is bad?”

  “The men who tried to capture you before in the village, they are nearby.”

  “They want me dead, like everyone else?”

  The answer catches in my throat. Brachantes wants to put the boy in a golden cage. He may be the only person who does not want him dead. I want to give the boy a choice—go with us and perish, or accept imprisonment in Brachantes’ menagerie, and live. But I cannot. The plague must end.

  Obai lies, so that I don’t have to: “I’m afraid so, my boy.” She turns the frowning side of her tattooed face toward us. “Shall we take the hunt to our hunters?”

  Katiiwa hefts her arcane harpoon. “I’d be willing.”

  Verkusht massages cramped fingers. “Tarood’s tough, and a seasoned slave-taker. These woods are his hunting grounds; he knows them as well as Xhasi or Arok. If there’s a chance of not meeting up with him, I say we take it.”

  Sunasuka says, “I’m with the Bekyar. I get into enough fights by accident. No point courting them on purpose. ”

  I am unsure. We will meet Brachantes again, of that I am certain. And it is tempting to put the battle on our terms. But then, fighting men often overrate the benefits of surprise. In such matters I have come to rely on Arok’s animal wisdom.

  The ape shuffles uncomfortably. He folds his upper lip up over his yellow fangs. “Fight and kill only if you have to. Better to sneak.”

  It is decided. Sneak we will.

  I plot a twisting course. We avoid the best streams, the flattest approaches, and any place with good forage. Along rocks we drag ourselves. We move when the air is hottest and rest when it cools.

  Still, after two days of stealthy trekking, they find us.

  Arrows snick through the air behind us. We turn, drop prone, look for better cover. Sunasuka has pushed the boy down and now lies half on top of him.

  A searing flash burns in my left calf. Then the leg goes numb. An arrow protrudes through the flesh. I reach down, snap off the feathered end and bloody head. The shaft will have to wait.

  The archers are Bekyar. They’ve abandoned their usual robes for those better suited to jungle hunting. Flowing whites give way to a mottle of greens and browns. Metal clips secure their sleeves and headdresses.

  A second volley of arrows falls ahead of us. The archers have compensated too heavily for our prone positions, cutting off their range.

  Katiiwa, Verkusht, and Obai crouch-walk upward, skitter behind thick-trunked trees, and return fire. Verkusht releases flying daggers; they fly, tumbling through the air, toward their targets. One lodges in a trunk, sending shards of bark into the air and forcing the archer behind it out of sight. Another strikes an archer’s hand, pinning it to the bow it held. The man drops, shrieking. A third dagger, hanging behind the first pair as if waiting for the opportunity, then seeks and finds his neck. He dies gurgling.

  To the dead man’s left, demonic tentacles, conjured from the void by Katiiwa, seize his fellow archers. As Obai summons a wasp swarm to drive off the rest, the tentacles hold their trapped archers out for Verkusht. His second round of flying daggers easily finishes them.

  Having proved our superiority from a distance, I expect a second wave of close attackers to charge us. I ready my spear.

  The wind shifts, bringing a terrible stench upon us. At first I fear the cloud spell I have seen Katiiwa cast, but the source is behind me. Arok booms out anxious ape-talk. I turn on my heels.

  Another dozen Bekyar huddle in a grove of trees, just out of thrown-spear range. Strapped to their bodies, as if pregnant with metal bulges, they carry the cauldrons the Indta described. Though clearly cool to the touch—or else the slavers would be burned by them—a boiling black liquid bubbles from their ornate rims. The Bekyar each pour the contents of their cauldrons onto the base of a separate tree. They’ve chosen the tallest of them.

  The tarry liquid sinks immediately into the trees. From the roots up, the trees tremble. Beneath their layers of bark, they writhe. The ripple of movement starts at the roots, making its way up to the canopy leaves a hundred feet up.

  The roots wrench themselves from hard-packed soil. They resolve
themselves into wide, clawed legs. Corrupted and oily, the trees thunder toward us.

  “Arok is beautiful and terrible in his rage.”

  The air is filled by Arok’s mournful howls.

  The trees bend down, lashing us with branches turned sharp and scaly.

  Sunasuka bellows as a tree seizes her and hurls her through the air into the whip-sharp limbs of another.

  A distorted obeche tree charges me on wide-rooted feet. I leap to avoid it, jabbing uselessly upward with my spear. I dive and roll, narrowly avoiding a stomp that would have crushed my bones. Regaining my footing, wobbling on my wounded leg, I hop to find shelter behind a closer tree, one not despoiled by the Bekyar cauldrons. The monster tree produces a furious rattle, shaking what remains of its leafy top. Already its leaves, exquisitely shaped to capture and funnel the jungle rains, have dried to brown, dead curls. The corrupted tree wraps its branches around the one sheltering me and uproots it with a savage tug. I fall back, loosed dirt spraying in my face. Wiping frantically to clear my eyes, I barely evade another stomp.

  Near the point where its trunk sprouts into a vast head of branches, I see a bulbous, heart-like shape pulsing under the bark, and make a choice. As the next stomping root-foot comes toward me, I reach out and grab hold. The obeche tries to shake me off. I clamber up its monstrous leg and onto the trunk. It lashes down at me with its branches, attempting to dislodge me. I wince at each hit, but its angle is wrong, and it strikes with only a fraction of the force it could otherwise muster. I’ve dropped my spear—there the closeness works against me—but have my dagger in my belt. Shimmying up, I see brief flashes of the others as they struggle against the monster trees. Sunasuka, with her nature powers, seems to have turned her tree on its makers. Obai has ignited the dead leaves of another with divine fire; these flames now spread to the trees threatening Arok and Verkusht.

  I have reached the throbbing knot-heart, and now draw my dagger to stab into it. Before I can aim and land my blow, the tree shudders. Its greasy bark turns to slime.

  The magic of the cauldrons has expired. The tree falls apart, rotted to sludge from the inside out. I leap out of it as it collapses, into the waiting branches of an untouched tree.

  We sprawl amid piles of smoking mire, which moments ago were majestic, healthy trees, towering high above the jungle floor. A dozen others lie uprooted by the onslaught.

  Arok gazes at the holes left by their absence.

  He looks at the slavers, who now regroup, scimitars in hand, braced for the next engagement.

  What he growls next in the ape tongue can’t be rendered for a scribe to write. It speaks of nature despoiled, of the righteous guardian, of surrender to berserk wrath.

  Before any of us can move, Arok is upon them, leaping in sudden, shocking bounds. Shielded by anger, he shrugs scimitars aside. The ape-man hits the formation of Bekyar like a flash flood. Those not caught in his grasp stand stupidly staring, until he reaches them. When he does, they are disassembled. With bare hands, with terrible strength, he tears through them. In seconds, each man becomes a mangled corpse. He tears limbs from sockets. Twists necks from torsos. He bites his fangs down into skulls and tears open rib cages as if flinging open pairs of shutters. He feeds the forest on the blood of its enemies. No longer is he merely Arok, awakened ape. Nature has entered him, made him an extension of its wrath.

  Moments later, there is not a living Bekyar in sight.

  As the ape’s rage crests, as he dances with the entrails of the slain wrapped around his neck and arms, I look to the boy, to ensure that someone shields him from this sight.

  He is gone.

  Their slavers may now all lie dead, but Brachantes and Tarood have what they came for. They have taken Mwonduk.

  Chapter Five: Justice in the Ruins

  We approach the ruins of Kembe. I have tracked Mwonduk’s kidnappers to its boundaries of crumbled stone.

  Brachantes and Tarood have lost their retinue—torn to shreds by Arok, for their trespasses against nature. Stripped of servitors, they seek shelter here while they plot their next move.

  Their weakened position cannot be taken for granted. Tarood’s cousin, Verkusht, testifies to the slaver’s abilities. His men used weird magics. We assume these were provided by Brachantes, and that he has other arcane surprises in store for us. If nothing more, he’ll likely possess supernatural means to contact more of Tarood’s men and effect a rescue from this place. This may be why they have chosen it: compared to trackless jungle, the ruins will be easy for reinforcements to find.

  Even if we are lucky, and their threat has been spent, we must still retrieve the boy quickly. Every extra day we spend here is one in which the firefly plague continues to rage. There is no saying how many lives Brachantes will have cost, by delaying us as we take the boy to the temple of Kitumu.

  There is no thinking of the fate that awaits him there. The boy is resigned to it. We serve nature, and this season it thirsts grimly for blood.

  We will think, then, only of our task.

  Only of our task.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It is our good fortune that Tarood made his escape from us alongside an outlander. A hardened slave-hunter, he knows movement in the jungle as well as any Zenj. But Brachantes errs as he journeys, leaving footprints in the soft mud and breaking the stems of low bushes. Mwonduk may have tried to leave clues in his wake. Along the path I find shavings from a yam, which he had on him when he was taken. Most of these would be carried away by ants within moments of hitting the ground, but a few remain to keep us on the path.

  And now we reach Kembe, hours behind them. We lost time as the spellcasters restored their magics. I would rest easier if I’d persuaded them to forge ahead regardless, but I have yet to hear an argument that would prompt a magician to head into danger without her hexes.

  A sensible person does not head into Kembe on a whim. All the tribes know it as a place of bad luck and sudden doom. Yet I have been here before. So has Tarood, or so Verkusht claims.

  “He sometimes keeps a holding pen here, when he captures more slaves than he can take home in one trip,” the Bekyar says. “The locals don’t like to come here, so that’s good for, uh, slaving operations.” He winces. Looks at me from the corner of his eye, to see if I could tell what he was about to say.

  I can. He was about to say that’s good for us. Had he a choice, he would still be a slaver.

  Lianas and edgevines cover Kembe’s gray stone walls. Great blocks of stone, hauled from distant quarries by means unknown, lie like fallen soldiers across its grassy landscape. Crumbled clods of masonry attach to them still. We pass through a stone gate, the top of its archway more than twenty feet above our heads. Vines reach down to brush at us; we part them like a curtain.

  Kembe’s remaining walls stand in three circles. The inner circle is the tallest, scaled for giants. We venture toward it, hacking our way through clinging bushes and dense stands of spear thistles, and come upon the second ring, the bones of a city built to human proportions. If we turned around and searched, I know, we would find the third ring that we passed over without noticing—a tiny version of the inner two cities, fading from halfling size into miniatures too small for use. You might think it an idol or model of the real cities, except that its crumbled hearths show the soot of ancient flames. Shattered pot shards, sized for beings no more than a foot in height, cover the floors of these tiny buildings.

  Fragments of tile cling to the walls of all three cities—the giant, the man-sized, the shrunken. Some bear a script found only here. Figures appear on a few. They have the shapes of men, though with fewer fingers and curious heads. The heads may be headdresses; the hands might be drawn that way because it is easier than making four fingers and a thumb.

  Some say that they were not human, nor were they elf, dwarf, or any other race still known. From these broken images
, men have made a story to explain Kembe and its vanished builders. They say that the Kembe came from the sky, riding silver chariots. Once here, they could not leave. Perhaps they lost the magic that propelled their sky vehicles. More likely, they broke taboos and were punished by the gods. Foreigners assume it was the Kembe’s own gods the giants transgressed against. The locals say it was ours.

  Either way, the Kembe shrank. They stopped being giants, and became merely men. They rebuilt their city to suit their reduced stature. For many more years they must have survived at this height. Then they shrank again, to become the beings occupying the last, tiny city on the outer edges.

  They shrank one last time, the story says, until they fell between the cracks of this earth, into another, smaller world, where perhaps they dwell today. Sometimes you’ll hear that they came not in silver chariots from the sky, but fell like rain, having lived once in another, larger world, where they were bigger than anything this one could hold.

  When this tale is told, it is always as a warning. Behave rightly, it says. Obey the gods, upholding their taboos. Do not be like the Kembe, or you and yours will shrink to nothing and vanish from sight. People like the story this way. The Kembe deserved what they got, it says. We can avoid their fate through rightful action.

  But when I see the Kembe ruins, I think they were like any people. Some good, a few bad, most in between. Yet still they were doomed, because the world devours.

  They were doomed as Mwonduk is doomed. Through no misdeed of his own, and for reasons we can never exactly find. When it is over, Obai will try to make sense of it. She will talk of balance restored and cosmic this and cosmic that.

  That is, if we succeed in getting him back at all. If not, there will also be doom. It will be of a different sort, and suffered by many instead of one. Still, the world will devour, and from a big enough distance—from the giant height of the original Kembe, perhaps—it will be the same one way as the other.