by Jeffrey Hall
Toes. Fingers. Hands. Feet. Cocks. Nipples. Eyeballs. Tails. Even two heads. They dangled from nails, motionless, glistening in a wet residue from the ever sap that a lone Chassa was applying to them even now to keep them from decaying or attracting the creatures who’d make a meal of such things. Though the collection demanded all of his attention like it always did, he couldn’t take his eyes off of the small pink nub of flesh that dangled over Lavender’s shoulder, looking wet, as if it still produced saliva and could still spit all the insults it used to so many years ago.
Moso’s tongue.
A thing he had lost when his debt had spiraled out of control, and he had dug himself a hole so deep that even his small earnings collecting harem-fuzz from the jungle could not pull him out of it. Lavender had taken his tongue to forgive what he was owed, but the Chassa still hadn’t learned the lesson it was intended to teach.Even after years of muteness and toiling with his tail to make his own language that someone could understand. Even after years of foraging the jungle with Wish, making just enough lunars to keep his skin from winding up on Lavender’s wall. His love of the pits, his love of beer and the brothels... Lavender took his tongue, but left Moso his desires, addictions that fattened Lavender’s pockets weekly. Pockets that the Chassa would fatten again now.
“Well? What have you got for me?” said Lavender, tugging on the amulet of dried lavender leaves that hung around his neck.
Moso hopped forward and put down the two lunars and the half moon earned from Boz. Lavender glanced down, then continued staring at Moso. “What is this?”
It’s two and a half, said Moso.
“I know it’s two and a half, but it’s a fraction of what is owed to me.” The Gibbon snapped his fingers and hooted, pointing to one of the men writing diligently beside him.
The Fossala shuffled a few papers without looking up. Finally he read, “Moso Mana Orini. Beer. Two lunars loaned. Five nights in the Roaring Rooms. Ten lunars loaned. Twenty games on the Leg Holes. Twenty-five lunars loaned. Interest. Two lunars accrued. Total, thirty-nine lunars at an accrual of five percent weekly.”
Wish’s heart dropped in his chest. Thirty-nine lunars. That was more than they had made in some years. Moso had been busy, and Wish had had his head too far up his own teeka to talk him away from his vices.
“Thirty-nine lunars owed, and you only come with enough to cover the interest and change.” Lavender scooped up the coins and flipped them to the Fossala scribe. “Is that why you brought your man this time? To make sure I don’t take your tail and tack it next to that once fast-moving tongue of yours? I assure you that even two of you can’t stop my cleaver when a debt of this size is owed.” Lavender brought up a fat machete from beneath the table and stabbed it into the wood. It made a loud thok.
Moso hopped back. The scribes on either side finally looked up. The Chassa painting the body parts with sap stared and sighed, as if annoyed with what would soon become additional work.
We have more jobs. We have more coin coming. This is just a taste of what I’ll bring to you.
“I’ve heard those same words before, and a month later you weren’t able to say them anymore.” He pointed to Moso’s tongue.
This time I am serious. With the walls crumbling, everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for what’s coming into the city. Things from the jungle are more desirable than ever as people keep trying to understand how to protect themselves from its creatures. Right, Wish?
Wish nodded, agreeing with the lie.The only way business had been going was down. No one wanted what was in the jungle when it was arriving on their doorstep nightly. He just hoped Lavender didn’t see that too. “We’ve four customers lined up in the next week alone,” he continued his lie, hoping he’d buy his partner time. Himself too. Lavender had been known to make examples of debtor’s associates in order to put the right fear into those who owed him money.
See? Moso stepped forward. Please, Lavender, as a long-time customer, I am begging you for a little more time. A little more patience.
“But I have even less time and patience than I do money, Moso.” Lavender walked his fingers down the back of the machete.
Double the interest.
“Double the interest, you say?” Lavender smiled.
“Moso, are you sure about—” Wish tried to intervene, but Lavender held up a finger.
Double the interest, repeated Moso.
“Fine,” said Lavender as he pulled up his machete and held it over his shoulders like his arms were the board of a stockade. “You’ve bought yourself a little more time and a little more of my patience. Consider it a deal to a long-time customer.”
The scribes went back to work. The sap-painting Chassa too. Wish exhaled.
Thank you, Lavender. You won’t regret it.
“I don’t do regret. You’re going to pay one way or another, either in lunars or by tail.” Lavender stretched his long arms to the end of his table, tapping the tip of the machete against the bottom of the wood. “Now let’s talk about tonight.”
“Tonight?” said Wish, but the Gibbon ignored him, his eyes still locked on Moso’s as if he were a cobra trying to hypnotize a mouse.
“You’ve bought yourself some space, but with the two lunars you’ve paid, you’ve bought yourself some credit too. The holes are hot tonight, I hear it in the crowd’s yells. A few right bets and the entire sum could be gone... plus a little extra to enjoy the company of one of your favorite girls in the Roaring Rooms.”
Moso’s tail flickered with interest.
“Moso, don’t be a fool,” said Wish.
How much are you willing to lend me?
Lavender snapped and pointed to the same Fossala. The Fossala answered without even looking up again. “Ten lunars.”
“Ten lunars. I’ve seen you triple that on a few good bets. Have the same luck tonight, and you’ll be square with me before the jackal trips over the Crone.”
“I think he owes enough.” Wish put a hand on Moso’s shoulder. “Come on.”
But he didn’t move.
“I find that debts are better paid with the help of friends, but credits, those are better handled by individuals. I would say your purpose has been served in my quarters, Wish.”
“Moso—”
He’s right, Wish. Go on. I am alright, signed Moso.
Wish stepped forward, but the four scribes rose from their seats suddenly, each with hands on a machete.
Lavender smiled. “You seem good at reading signs. I hope you understand this one.”
Moso turned to Wish.Go on, before you get us both killed. We’re just furthering a discussion, is all.
Wish eyed the four scribes, who in turn, eyed him with the intensity they had recently given their papers. He could possibly take them, but he doubted he could take the endless stream of thugs filling the rest of tavern.
“I’ll wait for you outside.”
Moso raised his hand, perhaps to say that was unnecessary, perhaps to bid him farewell. Either way, Wish didn’t linger for clarification. He walked out of the room and back into the bustle of the main hall with Lavender’s words at his back.
“It’s always good to see the great Wish Bibango. I just always wish it wasn’t in such circumstances.”
Furious, Wish pushed his way through the crowd, no longer afraid of who he would offend. He saw the bearded man he had accosted and his companions eyeing him as he emerged. He did not look away from the man’s gaze as he found a place at a table at the other end of the hall, a place where he had a view of Lavender’s backroom and Moso. Moso’s tail twitched furiously. Wish thought it said something like, How about five for now.
His fist clenched. The fool. He’ll gamble himself into his own grave, thought Wish.
“Green fucker. Hey, Green fucker.” The bearded man waved to him from across the bar.“Let me buy you a drink. Something to help you unclench that hand of yours from the jungle’s cock.”
His companions laughed. Wish ignored
him, looking the other way, and as he did he noticed a Fangkind sitting next to him, staring at him, laughing, his tongue lolling out of his jaw as if it were a piece of meat hung out to dry.
“It’s a good joke, no?” His voice rumbled as if a greater beast were trapped inside his chest.
Taken aback, Wishjust stared at the stranger. Fangkinds were a rarity in Chilongua, people that hailed from the mountains of the northern continent of Cassari. They resembled upright versions of the jungle wolves that prowled certain parts of the jungle, except for their lack of tail and darker, greyer, shaggier fur. The few he had seen in the streets of Fangmora had been merchants or travelers, those who had braved the Star Road and the jungle to explore and make profit from the northeasternmost city of all of Chilongua. They had looked nothing like the wolf sitting in front of him.
His fur was a grey so dark it bordered on black. The long strands of it that flared out from his neck had been formed into four smaller tails thanks to tiesof red bloodroot. The fur on his arms had been trimmed, cut down so it was nothing more than prickly nubs that could barely hide the pink skin underneath it. He wore a jerkin made of some black wood that Wish could not name. A totem of the third moon, the jackal, had been carved into its chestand stared back at Wish, emptily, like a blind third eye. When he saw that Wish wasn’t laughing, his mouth closed into a smile so large that it almost met his two pointed, pierced ears.
“Not about you removing your hand from the jungle’s doka, but that they feel they have the right to even speak to someone like you. They are funny little rodents, no?”
Wish raised an eyebrow, confused. The Fangkind leaned in closer to him.His hot breath smelled strongly of beer.
“They hide inside these walls, waiting for the jungle to drop morsels onto the ground before them so they can scurry out and scoop them up, catch a glimpse, fill that wondering in their heads before it stomps them out for good. And yet when they have these morsels, they quiver with them in their hands. They retch and laugh and piss themselves not knowing what to do with them. Scared beyond belief with them.”
Wish glanced into Lavender’s room. Moso was still there. Between the blabbering Fangkind and the bearded man, he wanted to leave the place as soon as possible. What was taking the damned Chassa so long?
The Fangkind kept talking. “And they should be scared. We morsels are the jungle’s champions.We are the crusaders of its chaos. The agents of its revenge. We bring the jungle’s anger to places it cannot reach. These rodents think they’ve found food, but what they’ve found is only poison.”
His hand shot up. Wish barely had time to duck. The Fangkind’s claw missed his head by inches. Wish unsheathed the dagger from his boot and brought it up, ready to gut the man, but stopped an inch from his jerkin when he heard a scream of agony behind him. The bearded man stood behind him, his arm raised, a dagger in his hand, one that would have ended up in Wish’s back if not for the Fangkind’s claws now embedded in the man’s bicep.
“Green fucker, was it?” said the Fangkind. He put his snout so close to the bearded man’s that for a moment Wish thought he might bite him. “Well, consider yourself fucked.” The Fangkind pushed the man away and held up his bloody index finger. It wasn’t one of the same black claws that populated the rest of his hand, but rather a wooden spike that had been outfitted to be an extension of his finger. In the faint light of the hall, Wish thought he could see a totem of a snake etched into it. “You’ll bleed out before the hour is over. No stitching will mend you. No medicine will heal you. No fire will seal you.”
The bearded man clutched his arm in horror. “You fucking rock-mutt,” he yelled. “You lie.”
“You have precious few minutes left in this world. I’d suggest you spend them more wisely than pondering the truth in my words.”
The bearded man looked to his companions, who stood nearby. Their eyes widened. One of them shook his head. The bearded man flashed five bloody fingers, signaling fuck off, before fleeing out of the tavern with his friends in tow.
The Fangkind wiped the blood staining his totemic claw on the table, before retracting it into a small sheath latched onto his finger.He looked down at Wish’s dagger, which still hovered by his belly. “I’d hate to see you shatter such a fine weapon.” He pointed to the totem of the jackal on his chest.
Wish put the dagger back into the slot in his boot. “Thank you.”
The Fangkind took a swill from a cup of beer by his elbow. Wish wasn’t even sure it was his. “What is your name? Not the one that your mother gave you, but the one the jungle has,” he said.
“Wish. Wish Bibango.”
“I’ve heard of you. The Djinn of Larmii,” said the Fangkind, using a name Wish had earned for work he did to rid the Fanglaran village of Larmii of an infestation of round snouts. “They say you can make the impossible happen like that.” The Fangkind snapped his fingers. “The genie of the jungle. It’s funny how strongly reputations swirl about this place. I’ve been here for a month and I’ve heard more stories about more people than in all of Dust Break combined. It’s almost as if this city is trying to compensate for its sad state with these words.”
Wish eyed the stranger. He’d been to Dust Break,a nation countless miles southeast from Fangmora. He must have possessed grit to have made it so far, that’s if he was telling the truth, which by the hard look of him, Wish had no doubt that he was. “And your name is...?”
“The jungle has given me the name Rive. The name from my mother belongs to her tongue alone. I never knew her.”
“No?” said Wish, feeling a sudden kinship with the man who had just saved his life. His mother had died when he was only five due to the red illness, a disease that slowly corroded her skin. All that he remembered of her was her hair, the long black tresses of it that engulfed him when she would kneel down to hug him. But even that was becoming harder to see as the years took him further away from the time when she was still alive. Her bones, the ones that still sat on the shelf of his father’s hut, were replacing that memory, and when he would think of her now, he saw the empty sockets of her skull staring back at him like graves waiting for him to fill them with something he was not ready to give.
Rive took another swig from his beer and shook his head. “She died before my memory even formed. The jungle raised me, and I’ve been doing its bidding ever since.”
“What brings you to Fangmora?” said Wish.
“The same thing that brings me to any infested cage like this, the jungle’s bidding. Looking for whatever work I can get.”
Wish opened his mouth to speak, but stopped as he looked over to Lavender’s room. Moso was gone.
“Sorry. I need to go.” Wish reached into his pouch, produced two crescents, and put them down on the table. “Another beer for saving my life,” he said, feeling cheap for offering what he could for a deed worth all of his lunars. He went to turn, but Rive’s callous paw was on his wrist before he could.
“Us green fuckers do not abide by the manners of civilization.” He forced the crescents back into Wish’s hand. “I am sure I will see you again, Djinn. The jungle has a funny way of throwing its morsels at the same rodents.”
Wish nodded. The Fangkind let go. Wish pushed through the crowd, leaving his strange new acquaintance sipping from his beerand laughing. He arrived to the front of Lavender’s doors. The Gibbon had another person before him now, but afforded Wish a single glance.
“I think you’ll find your friend at the pits. It appears they were too hot to ignore tonight.” Lavender smiled.
Wish wanted to curse the man or threaten him for once more sinking his teeth into Moso’s pockets, but refrained as he noticed the four scribes staring at him again.
He left the room and found Moso exactly where Lavender said he would: at the front of the largest of the Leg Holes, his tail wrapped around the tusk of a Boarling whore as he sat upon her chest, her left breast cupped in his right hand, a beer in his left. He was screeching his barely audible call amon
gst the rest of the ruckus, trying to encourage the painted beetle he had bet on. And thanks to his and the rest of the onlookers’ encouragement, the beetles scurried about in a frenzy, desperately trying to reach one of the cara cat’s eyes, things that looked like the fire berries the insects loved to eat so much. But that wasn’t their only battle. They fought not only to survive the others of their kind, but the swipe of the cara cat dangling over the center of the hole.
A fight with poor odds. One Wish thought Moso understood well. Still, it did not excuse his foolishness.
Wish grabbed him by his scruff and yanked him down from the Boarling woman. The woman reared in surprise, saw who had done it, and stepped back into the rest of the crowd.
What the fuck are you doing? said Moso.
“What am I doing?” said Wish, furious. “You owe thirty-nine lunars and you’re back at it again?”
Make that twenty-nine. I swooped in at the end and won the last run. To the Flaw with what Lavender said. I’ll be up on him by the time the great fire falls.
“How many times have you said that before? By the end of the night you’ll be saying goodbye to your tail too. Twenty-nine lunars is good. Quit now.”
The cara cat hissed.A beetle whose wings were painted purple had flown onto its neck and buried its needle-like feet into the cat’s fur to prevent it from being thrown off.
Moso clapped, spilling some of his beer. Come on! Make it two in a row!
“Moso—”
I know what I am doing, Wish. Trust me. The Chassa looked up at him. Don’t you have things to attend to?
“Not without making sure you’re safe too.” He reached again for his partner, but Moso retracted and pointed at a nearby thug. A Treeback overlooking the entire scene with an axe in his hands. Security entrusted to keep the pits in line. Not someone who would let another interfere with a high-betting customer such as Moso.
“Really?” Wish chewed his lip, furious.
The pits are hot tonight, I feel it. If you don’t feel it too, then Rogi here can show you out.