Chapter 14
Brine stood listening to the cries of the Lathians booming in the distance, that old feeling of unreality pressing in around him. He had felt this same sensation upon entering the Harriun, the sensation that his perception was simply putting on an elaborate gag at the expense of his mind, but shortly thereafter the feeling had ended.
His fear and disgust had helped in this regard, followed by his fatigue—the ducking and weaving and constant high-stepping—and finally the distraction of his fall and the mysterious perforations in the bole.
Now, however, with the husky voices of his guides echoing through the boles and his distractions no longer at the fore, the unreality had returned. Brine felt it washing through him like the dark tide from an even darker pool, like he’d slipped inside the nightmare of drug-addled mad man.
At the moment, all the elements of a good nightmare were present: deathly silence and clotting shade, drooping tongues and soulless sands, choking isolation and disembodied cries...
Just now, the cries were the worst.
Turning to his yellow-clad partner, Brine grimaced wanly and said, “Does that sound like Egzert to you?”
Godfry looked at him, both caterpillar bows raised high on his face. “Could be,” he said.
The disciple’s grimace deepened. “And does that sound like…,” he swallowed hard, his eyes traveling from Godfry to the dangling tongues and back again, “…does it sound like he’s lost?”
Godfry didn’t say anything, but his snowy white brows came racing down his face.
“You don’t think so?”
Shaking the white explosion of hair sprouting from his head, Godfry said, “I’d say he’s gone for a lie down.”
Brine turned to the wilderness on his left and gawked openly at the dangling tendrils and swollen bulbs, the look on his face speaking volumes about his feelings for the place.
No way, that look said. No way someone looked around this place and decided to have a nap.
“Maybe he fell,” Brine muttered, lowering his head to the ground and scanning the sooty soil. He tried to picture one of the Lathians with a full pack as he plundered across the terrain.
Maybe this fellow, this Egzert fellow, had stopped to relieve his bladder, or maybe his bowels. His bowels would have taken longer, which would have put him further behind and, thus, in a greater hurry to catch up. So maybe that was it. Maybe he’d been scurrying to recover lost ground, lost his footing in sand, and…
…and what?
As Brine surveyed the shifting surface of the soil, he didn’t see anything hard enough to knock a man unconscious, even if the man in question had his hands wrapped around the straps of his pack and could not free them.
Brine’s eyes flitted from the soft and pliable trunks to the round and blubbery bulbs to the black carpet of sand. Even if the man fell and slapped his head on the ground—which was, technically speaking, very small rock—there would still have been some give.
He shook his head. “He had to have gotten lost,” he said, looking back the way they’d come and refusing to accept what he already knew, what he’d known the very instant he’d heard the Lathian voices.
“No lie down?” Godfry asked, his expression a knot of wrinkles.
“I don’t think these guys take lie downs,” Brine said, still staring back the way they’d come. “He just got lost. That’s all.”
“Lost,” Godfry said, speaking the word as one who’d never heard it.
“Yes,” Brine said, tossing the notion around his head and trying not to think about the fact that these men ate, drank, and slept in the backcountry of Lathia and that the chances of one getting lost out here was about as likely as him getting lost in the courtyard of Valley Rock.
He glanced down at the tracks he and Godfry had made in the sand and thought, It would be kind of hard to get lost in a land where your back trail stood out that clearly. He lifted his head and listened to the cries of the mercenaries, then thought, It would be even harder to get lost with all that screaming going on, and surely the man didn’t have time to wander too far fro—
That’s right, Rugs, the fire-voice interrupted, its voice crackled up from below. He hasn’t had time, so cut the garbage and face the facts. You know what’s happened to him.
Brine made a pained expression and shook his head. I—I don’t know anything, he thought. I don’t. I know he’s probably not taking a nap and he’s probably not lost, or unconscious, but I don’t know—
The voice that interrupted his thoughts next did not belong to the belly-fire. It was gruff and self-assured and sounded so thick with backwoods accent that, at first, Brine could not place it. He knew only that the speaker was not one of the usual voices that visited him on these occasions, the voice of Mums offering counsel, the voice of Godfry posing questions, the voice of the belly-fire pelting him with scorn.
This voice did none of those things. It seemed perfectly content to yammer on and on with what sounded like a bedtime story.
Welp, the voice was saying, it all started when them corn-pickers found the felluh out there on the edge of the Promise. He was crawlin through the dirt an’ stalks, jus’ as naked as the day he was born, an’ he was a-moanin like there was no tomorruh. That was how they found im, see. All the moanin.
One’a the ole boys what found im, he said he owned a cow onced—some dumb old thing what kept gettin stuck in the mud—an’ he said the felluh they found sounded jus’ like that ole heifer, just like a cow buried clean up to the belly.
Course, onced they hunted im down an’ saw what he looked like, all that moanin made sense. The ole boy looked like someone’d cut his skin to noodles and left one end danglin from his body, hair matted with blood, hands an’ legs shiny with gore.
I guess his back an’ butt was the worst off, though. I guess it looked the ole boy’d been run over by somethin with knives fer legs and daggers fer feet. Jus’ a mess, he was…
All of a sudden, Brine knew the tale. He’d not heard it since he was a small child, but he knew it all the same. Some things you just never forgot and traumatic tales at a vulnerable age were one of them.
He let his eyes lose focus and saw the bedtime scene in his mind, saw it as clearly as he saw the boles around him. He and big brother were lying on Jaysh’s bed in the sleeping chamber, their bodies stiff and their eyes wide, and they had their itty bitty noses peeking out from the covers.
Across from them, leaning against the foot of Brine’s bed, one hand gesticulating with the stem of his pipe, the other digging at the pointed beard on his chin, the counselor from Erinthalmus was telling a story.
But anyhow, Reets said, onced that felluh calmed down enough to talk, an’ onced them corn-pickers got them gashes wrapped up good n’ tight, the ole boy went on to jabberin about whatever it was that tore im up.
To hear him tell it, it was nothin more than a wall’a hair with a mouthful of teeth. I tell yeh, that ole boy cou’nt get over them teeth. Kep’ goin on an’ on bout em, how they was in all the wrong places, how there was too many of em to fit right…
Them corn-pickers weren’t too flustered by it, though. They knowed what got the ole boy ‘fore he ever spoke. He weren’t the first to come crawlin out’a the Hair’yun…
The bedtime memory faded slightly and Brine’s eyes regained focus. In his head, he heard the tale still leaking from the past, but in the world around him he watched the darkness take on life. It was odd really, since everything else remained distant and vague, but in the spaces between the boles, the shadows were concentrating into a thick and oily soup.
…Never could give yeh much bout the beasties what got em, aside from the parts about hair an’ teeth, but that din’t stop em none from tryin. An’ this here boy weren’t no dif’ernt, so on he went, tellin bout how the shaduhs had arms or how the dark seem to come alive.
Weren’t nothin but pig swill, if’n yeh ask me. I’ve taken a few boys up to them bad trees an’ we din??
?t think it was so bad. It’s darker in there than in the fields, sure. But if’n yeh talk to them fellers what comes out, they’ll tell yeh the place is as black as a badger’s insides. Cou’nt see nothin in there, they’ll tell yeh. Cou’nt see to poke your one eye, they’ll moan.
The funny thing is, dark as they saw it is, they always get round to tellin bout them eyes. Cain’t ferget them eyes, they say. Big, black, an’ shiny, they are. Or the hair an’ teeth. They won’t never let yeh ferget about them, oh no.
But I ask yeh this…how’s one see a shiny, black eye in the dark? Or a mountain of toothy hair? How’s that, yeh reckon?
Not wishing to find out, Brine grabbed his partner’s yellow sleeve and gave a tug. Godfry made a startled cry, but did not resist, and just like that they were marching as swiftly as Brine dared towards the ghostly voices in the distance. In fact, he was moving so swiftly that had the old man given more than a shocked yell, Brine wouldn’t have heard. In his ears, there was only the harsh rasping of his breathing and, of course, the relentless yammer of the halfling.
But eyes ‘r no eyes, it were the takin those boys ‘membered best, the things comin fer em from out’a the dark, as they’d put it. Oh, they could tell yeah bout that jus’ fine, bout how they was a-sleepin or a-hikin, or just standin round, an’ all of a sudden there was beasties all over, a whole hoard of em jus’ a-carryin on, stinkin like an old dog what’s been rollin in the guts, gruntin like a randy old boar, movin round like a shaggy wall what’s takin on life.
Then they was on em, knockin em about an’ tearin off their clothes…
Brine was running now, plowing through the flora with bullish disregard for stealth and cunning. There were things in here with him, things he had no hope to outrun and no chance to overpower. His only chance was to reach the Lathians to the north, the men he could no longer hear over the thud of his own heart. If he could make it to where they were, everything would be all right.
If anyone could thwart a pack of black-eyed monsters, it was them. Brine just needed to find them before the black-eyed monsters found him, otherwise the things with teeth in all the wrong places were going to hop from the shadows and pounced on his back, tearing at his clothes and ripping at—
A curtain of tongues was coming straight at him, a curtain he would have avoided earlier that day but which he now slammed into without a moment’s thought, ducking the tiny island of hair atop his head and barreling through the snaky barrier, staggering into a clearing and nearly tripping over the various bulbs protruding from the sands. Only they weren’t bulbs…
They were packs and bedrolls and satchels and skins.
Staggering to a halt, he found himself turning in a slow and disbelieving circle, the relief causing his muscles to soften and his body to sag. In a way, he appeared to be melting there in the sands, his knees buckling, his shoulders slumped, one hand clutching at the invisible ailment tearing at his chest.
“Oh, thank Owndiah,” he breathed. “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.”
He’d made it. He’d truly made it. He was alive and he was well and, for the most part, he was going to stay that way. He’d made it to the heart of the Lathian epicenter and was surrounded on all sides by a perimeter of well-armed men. All he had to do now was keep his head down, his mouth shut, and wait for the things with too many teeth to meet the men with too many weapons.
Not the most Amian of philosophies, he knew, but it wasn’t like the Lathians had been hired for their good looks and pleasant dispositions. They’d been hired for exactly this contingency, for dispelling the wildlife and for removing whatever it was that blocked the flow of the Leresh. It wasn’t like he and Godfry were equipped to deal—
“Godfry!”
He spun around and went scrambling back the way he’d come, taking to his feet and diving through the veil of tongues just as the old man came hobbling through from the other side. They met in a tangle of arms and legs, cracked each other hard on the head, and went down in a heap on the other side of the hedge.
Brine was on his feet in a flash, spitting sand and yanking the old man’s sleeve like the reins to a rather cantankerous mare. Behind him, he heard Godfry make one inarticulate attempt at protest the abuse and then he was being shoved through hedge.
Following him through, Brine felt the warm squish of the tongues around his face and down his back and then he was on the other side, teetering on the brink of balance as both legs fought to slow his momentum. Despite this attempt, he felt the toes of his left sandal strike an animal skin littering the sand and he went down, dragging his teacher atop him.
He turned his head to the side and lay there panting into the sand. Across his chest, he could feel Godfry doing the same, only the old man’s breaths were deeper and less frequent and reminded him of someone suffering from the smoking-disease.
Checking from the corner of one eye, he could see that his arm was around his teacher’s throat in something like a barbarian chokehold. He loosed his grip, but did not let go. By the same token, his teacher did not try to break free. He only lay there as Brine lay there, breathing hard and staring at nothing.
After a while, Brine’s breath returned and the world swam back into focus. He could see his line of sight blossoming to its normal diameter. He could hear the haunted cries for the lost ringing in his ears.
“Eeeeeeeeeeggggg…Zeeeeeeeeeert!”
He lie there a moment more, listening to the desperate cries and feeling more and more afraid for the man who wasn’t answering, and then realized he could hear two speakers who were not bellowing for their lost man.
They were bellowing at each other.