by Ben Galley
“See?” said Laughs, smiling back at them. “Perhaps my humor is meant for better life forms.” He picked up the seed.
“Better life forms or just dumber ones? It seems You’ve finally found something that thinks as low as you do.”
Laughs’ smile left. “Insult me all you want, but do not insult the biting blossoms. These plants deserve respect. They protected Hathis for thousands of years from foreign invaders and the predators of the jungle.”
“And look how well that worked out,” said Baji.
Laughs stared, his tongue slipping in and out of his mouth. He unraveled the sapphire and put it down.
“What are you doing?” said Baji.
“Carry your own treasure, and let’s see how well you protect it from the creations of the Flaw.”
Scrap tried to intervene. “She’s only joking, Laughs—”
“No, she isn’t. Her tongue hasn’t stopped since the day we’ve left. I’ve had enough of her insults.”
“My tongue?” said Baji. “Yours is the one that’s almost driven us insane with your terrible jokes and incessant rants. If only I let that dire monkey have you then we would have all been saved from any more of your nonsense.”
Laughs whispered, and the biting blossoms suddenly snapped out, three of them locking their jaws around the gem.
Baji charged the plants.
“Stop!” yelled Scrap, hoping the bandit would listen. Instead she grabbed the sapphire with her one good arm and attempted to pull it back from the plants’ grasp. The biting blossoms resisted, and as she fought against them, another of their stalks crept to either side.
“Baji!” called Scrap, reaching for one of his bullets, but it was too late. The blossoms bit down, one on her left shoulder, the other on her right ribs. She called out. All the others besides Laughs ran to her, but the biting blossoms pulled her apart. One tore her arm from its socket, the other rent a chunk the size of her sapphire away from her side. She crumpled to the ground and where the rest of the stalks made quick work of her remains, stuffing her into their long, already-engorged gullets.
Scrap stared at the blood-stained floor, helpless, wishing the plant would regurgitate his friend back to whole.
“Why did you kill her?” said Tama, voicing Scrap’s thoughts.
“I didn’t. The biting blossom made that decision on its own. I just asked it to the hold her gem.”
“You baited her,” said Scrap. “You knew what it would do.”
Laughs spat his acidic saliva into the pile of blood beneath him. “It serves her right. You should be thanking me for removing another stain from Hathis.”
“Thank you? I don’t—”
“It’s coming.” Trinka interrupted him as she stared down the hallway. “The shadow.”
Scrap peered into the darkness. Something curled and twitched in the blackness.
“Take me to the totem,” said Scrap.
“We’ve just lost Baji, shouldn’t—,” began Tama.
“Trinka,” said Scrap. Baji would be lost for nothing if they turned around now. There would be time for mourning later.
The jungle-diver nodded and led them down another hallway, away from the gathering shadow. As they crept onward Scrap noticed the splatters of blood that now decorated his jerkin. He tried to wipe them on the vines, but no matter how hard he scraped the blood wouldn’t come off.
“Your botamancer just killed your friend and you have no reaction, other than to keep looking for your totem?” whispered Tama. “Has the Flaw infected you too?”
“If I can find it, then her death will be worth something,” said Scrap, partially trying to convince Tama, partially trying to convince himself.
“You’re even a bigger fool than I realized,” said Tama.
Scrap felt anxious. Afraid. He kept looking over his shoulder to meet the eyes of Laughs to see if there was any remorse in them, but they were nothing but greed-filled pupils as he glanced down to the seed in his hand.
He had always thought his friend contained more than that. He had seen him whisper to flowers to get them to bloom early just so children could pluck them. He never knew there was such hatred in him to allow him to kill. Perhaps Baji just knew the right formula to draw it out of him, or perhaps it was always hidden inside Laughs. Just like Scrap’s own dark desires, the same ones that made him destroy his competitor’s shop, the ones that kept him diving deeper and deeper into the Hathis to find his family’s totem.
Perhaps he knew his friends as little as he knew himself and it just took the Flaw to bring the truth out.
They rounded another hallway and Trinka stopped. “There,” she said.
Scrap followed her finger, and standing beneath a beam of foggy, dust-ridden light was a table. Made of amberwood, it looked golden beneath the illumination of the great fire. There were 5 seats that surrounded it, and carved into the pieces of table in front of each seat were masks.
Totems.
Those of the great houses who once held the most power in Hathis.
He recognized the face of the aru bird instantly, the creature whose feathers had been used to sew together flesh for ages. It matched his grandmother’s description perfectly. A bird with a beak like a hook and eyes so full they dominated most of its head. It gazed back at Scrap, and though it was motionless and quiet, its face bounded inside of him, celebrating the realization of a dream, the keeping of a promise that he had made himself and his family. The empty, carved face ushered forth a parade inside his head. One nothing could stop, not Baji’s death, not Tama’s dour insistence, not even the threat of the Flaw.
He took out his parchment and the stick of blackbark he planned on outlining the totem’s shape with, but before he could approach he noticed the shadows twitching overhead.
Trinka stepped back, and the darkness finally revealed its pet.
Eight long legs emerged. They stretched out from a spiked, black frame so large it looked like two boulders locked together by grotesque, fleshy sinew.
It was a spider the likes and size Scrap had never seen, only made more horrible by what it descended from. Not a web, but a rope of intestine, red and glistening like a vine painted for decoration.
And now with his eyes adjusted, Scrap saw a hundred crisscrossed versions of guts made into a net like he had seen countless lesser versions of the monster before them spindle in corners of houses or between trees. Things were stuck there too, cocooned in throbbing, waxy stomachs.
If it weren’t for the fear coursing in his bones, Scrap might have felt his stomach roil.
The group huddled together as the spider landed upon the table. Its mandibles clicked, splashing the blood frothing from its mouth like celebratory wine. Its eight eyes looked them up and down. They were as white as the waves on the Sad Sea.
“What is it?” said Laughs.
“The shadow,” answered Trinka, as if she had been expecting it all along.
The spider crawled down from the table and stopped in front of them.
Scrap loaded his sling and went to shoot it, but the spider spat. A crimson goo struck his hand before it could swing. The spit knocked him to the ground. The bloody glob of saliva stuck to the floor and it took all of Tama’s strength to pry him from it.
It was the only distraction the arachnid needed. When Scrap looked next the spider was upon them. It sprang, wrapping Tama in its grip, sprouting a tube of intestine around the Boarling’s shoulder before he could fight back.
Laughs whispered beside them. The vines that made the hallway rose and lashed out, catching four of the spider’s legs. It screeched, and Laughs giggled in triumph. But the spider turned and spat. A wad of fleshy spit struck Laughs’ mouth, quieting his whispers. The vines let go.
The spider lashed out with one of its hind legs so fast that Laughs couldn’t move before it impaled his leg, nailing him
to the ground. His cries were muffled beneath the spider’s spit gag. The spider turned to Scrap and Trinka.
With the goo still lingering on Scrap’s sling, he could not unravel it to shoot the bullet. He fumbled in his pouch for another, hoping to throw the damned thing, and looked to Trinka for help.
The jungle-diver had snuck around the side of the spider, giving her a clear angle at its abdomen. All she needed to do was strike out with her machete and she could distract it, perhaps even gut it if Miracle could cut through its formative shell.
“Do it!” shouted Scrap.
But Trinka’s machete never rose. She turned and fled further into the Threndadi, her eyes never meeting Scrap’s again.
Scrap blinked, stunned.
She had done exactly what she said she would do. She had found a way to distract the shadow and pass it. Scrap and the others were nothing more than another set of tools acquired to cut down the obstacles that impeded her journey.
Though Scrap had seen her determination for years, and heard countless stories of the impossible places she had been, he never thought that she would cast aside her friends to reach them.
They had drank together. They had shared food and sang songs many late nights after his store was closed and the streets of Dust Break rang heavily with music to welcome the moons.
But that was all gone as he watched her disappear into the shadows and the spider engulfed him with the rest of its legs, the ones not pinning Laughs to the ground. It hugged him, clamping down his arms. It spun its sickly web around him, tying it tight around his shoulders and legs until he was wrapped like a package about to be delivered.
The spider left him squirming on the ground, where he tried desperately to break free of the hot intestines that reeked of bile and blood. But it was useless. His bindings were too strong. If Tama couldn’t break them beside him, then surely, he couldn’t.
The two watched as the spider went to Laughs next.
“Trinka…” said Scrap, as he looked at Tama.
“To the darkness with her,” said Tama. “We’re not dying because of a jungle-diver’s indifference.”
And even as his friend spoke, and his other friend was being tied down, the amberwood table caught his eye.
It was so close, and yet it seemed the Flaw and its denizens were still doing their best to keep him at bay. To swallow him in its darkness and keep that dream in the distance out of sight, just as it had done with the rest of Hathis. The rest of his family. The rest of his home.
A sudden anger rushed inside of him, and though he could not break his bindings, he stretched them enough, so he could move his hand, the one that still clutched the bullet. And though he could not throw it fast enough to activate the fire totem as it was meant to be activated, he could run his finger over its shape just the same and use the friction as a secondary trigger.
The spider gathered Laughs in its arms and returned to its glistening, gut web above the table, leaving Tama and Scrap for later.
Scrap snuck his thumb over the totem and traced it, pressing hard into every nook of the carving. Soon he felt heat. Next, he felt pain. Fire sparked and sizzled. A length of intestine burst into flame. His bindings lessened, but his hand was not saved. Agony shot up his arm. He rolled about the floor, snuffing out the fire, trying to suffocate the pain.
“What are you doing?” said Tama.
But it was already too late. The bindings fell away. The fire had stopped. He looked down at his hand and saw smoke rising from the raw red patches that covered it. The air stung it. He had to bite his lip from crying out. He looked away, hoping if he didn’t see his wounds he wouldn’t feel the pain.
Above them, Laughs made muted cries as the spider sunk its mandibles into him. Scrap looked down to his sling. It was still sticky and useless. He doubted that he could fill it with his one hand now burned beyond use. Nor could he climb. The darkness had Laughs, but it still didn’t have him.
He limped over to the amberwood table.
“What are you doing?” hissed Tama again. “Free Laughs. We can still save him.”
Scrap dropped his sling. The totem looked up at him. Scrap could have sworn he saw a smile in its frozen, unmoving face as it if was relieved to finally have been found.
“Scrap,” said Tama. “Scrap!”
Scrap put the parchment over the totem and started scribbling, the fall of the blackbark stick against the paper barely hiding the cracking and muted moans of Laughs. Slowly a shadowy replica of the totem came to life on the parchment.
“Scrap!” said Tama.
And when he had finished, and every last detail of the totem had been copied, so had the spider completed his meal. It no longer slurped and cracked. Laughs’s noises had ended, but there was still someone talking.
“Scrap, you fool.” Tama whispered, but his voice seemed far away, his words lost in the distance created when caught in a dream. It was only what Tama said next that crossed the divide the totem had created in Scrap’s mind. “Are you going to leave me?”
Scrap froze. They were the same words Tama had uttered to him when he found him broken lying in the street those many years ago. And just like then, they pulled him from his thoughts.
Tama lay in a knot of guts, his tusks smattered in blood and whatever other residue slipped off the spider’s ugly webs. It was the same stuff that decorated his face when Scrap found him lying in the alleyway, crying, barely able to move from his breaks.
He hadn’t left him then, and he wouldn’t leave him now.
Scrap came to his side, and with the sharp end of one of his bullets, sawed at Tama’s bindings.
“Laughs is dead,” whispered Tama. His gaze was transfixed overhead.
“I know,” said Scrap. One of the intestines snapped. The spider screeched overhead.
“The spider was devouring him and you did nothing,” said Tama.
Another of the bindings snapped, loosening its grip. Blood dripped down onto the floor beside them. Scrap looked up and saw that spider had turned its attention to them. It scampered down its own web, and Scrap sawed faster.
“Why?” said Tama, unafraid.
Scrap tore away another binding and the rest of the web fell away.
“Run!” he shouted just as the spider descended to the ground. He turned down the hallway, towards the wall breach they had entered from, not checking to see if Tama was following. He felt the parchment containing his family’s totem tucked safely in his pocket. In the insanity of the chase, he thought so long as he made it out with the tracing, he had made it out with everything he needed. And when he reached the fractured wall of the Threndadi, he tore open the vines that Laughs had closed it with and scurried through without looking back.
He leaned against the outside wall, catching his breath, sweating, feeling his pocket to make sure the parchment was still there. He sighed with relief, and only then did he realize that Tama had yet to follow him out.
“Tama?” he said, hoping that his friend would answer. But only silence did. He felt his heart picking up in his chest. The realization of what he had done was settling in. He knelt before the hole, peering into the darkness. “Tama!” he screamed, in desperation.
And then suddenly, the Boarling’s head scurried through the opening. Scrap grabbed his hand and pulled, but the sapphire still hanging from his back caught on the leftover vines.
“Drop the sapphire,” yelled Scrap. He heard the spider’s screeches emanating from inside. He had no doubt it still pursued them.
But Tama refused. “I’m taking some part of the rest of them out of here even if you won’t.”
“The spider!” reminded Scrap.
“And you care?”
His words were so misplaced and unexpected that for a moment, Scrap stopped pulling.
“Just let me die like you did the others. That’s the only reason
why you brought us anyways.”
“What-what are you saying?” said Scrap, fumbling for reason amidst the chaos.
“This whole thing was done so you could feel closer to your family. Yet take a look around you. Your family is dead. You’ve killed them all for a piece of paper.”
The words struck Scrap like a fist. The others were gone. But they had known the risks just like Scrap. They were all hardened adventurers. They had faced death countless times. Their deaths by way of the jungle were inevitable, it just happened to be on this adventure. And just as he went to tell Tama he was wrong, the Boarling’s eyes lit up.
“Behind you!” he yelled.
Scrap turned, and there, rising over him like a god risen from the jungle, was the great, strange viper, its hood extended, its eyes gazing into his own as if it were peeking into his soul.
Scrap tried to reach for a bullet, tried to look away, but the creature’s scales captured him. In them were countless, detailed images of his life, portraits of different times and people. Cities he had seen. Customers he had sold to. Lovers he had taken to his bed. All of them were displayed before him like some puzzled vision of his time alive, altogether forming a story of all his failures and successes.
Yet for all there was to see in the serpent’s incredible scales, his eyes fell to the scenes that contained the ones still in the Threndadi behind him. The ones he had left in order to make the drawing now in his possession.
There he saw Baji sitting across the table from him, lighting a cup of rum on fire before passing it to him to slurp down. He remembered the cool burn he felt as it passed his lips and tongue and slid into his stomach. Beside her he saw Laughs, in Scrap’s shop, telling some ridiculous joke and holding his belly with laughter. Next was Trinka. The serpent’s scale showed the time she had come to Scrap interested in the mysteries of totems and they had spent an entire day talking about his craft. He had never seen someone so interested, and never before had such a conversation about his work despite her quietness.
And then lastly, there was Tama.
He stood beside Scrap, his arm on his shoulder, as they looked over his dead mother before she was dragged out to the jungle and returned to its soil. He wouldn’t have gotten through that day if not for him.