Chapter 15
Like all halflings from the land of Erinthalmus, Reetsle Baggershaft did not like running. He could do it—they all could do it—but that didn’t make the experience any less unpleasant. For one thing, his knees locked in place just before the leg was fully extended, and for another his feet twisted inward and both sets of toes scraped together. The result was not only excruciatingly painful, but counterproductive to the act of running; Sort of like nodding one’s head while leaning against a wall.
But as unpleasant as the experience might be, and as ridiculous as the halfling might appear, he was more than willing to endure the discomfort and humiliation if it meant keeping up with the titan.
“Hey, Mums!” he cried, watching his colleague’s strides carrying her further into the gloom. “Hey, wait up, would yeh! Yeh know I cain’t keep up with them long legs’a—”
Cocking her head back, Muminofilous said, “Shhhhhhhh.”
“Ah’ right, Ah’right,” he hissed, his voice lowered, but no less irate. “But slow up, huh.”
Mums turned back to the west, checked the grounds before her for obstructions, then cocked her head back a second time and directed her eyes at the mercurial darkness behind.
In a flat and toneless voice, she said, “You were right, Reetlse.”
Reets nearly tripped over his knees. “I was what?” he asked.
“You were right,” she said again, turning sideways and sliding through two rows of water casks. “We shouldn’t have stopped.”
Reets opened his cock-eyed mouth and let the jaw gape over his collar. He couldn’t have heard her correctly. His ears were obviously playing tricks on him.
“Say again,” he called.
Mums skirted a post with a rusty lantern hanging from its peak and said, “We should have stayed on the horses.”
Reets tottered along behind her, his shock slowly turning to skepticism. He’d known the old cow for one and a half human generations and not once in all that time had she ever voiced such a compliment.
Still waiting for her ulterior motive to descend upon him, he said, “Mind tellin me what brought that on?”
“Not at all,” Mums said, rolling around a pen of excited chickens and then waiting until she was well passed the flapping wings and noisome clucks to add, “There is something stalking us in the Sway.”
Reets’ contorted face lit up like a barbarian bon fire. “I knew it!” he spat, spinning on his heels. “I knew it!”
He took three gimping strides towards the creature in the east and the weight of a large and furry hand came down on his shoulder.
“The corral,” Mums said, spinning him to the west, “is this way.”
“I don’t give a healthy spit—”
“Reetsle, please—”
“—no corral, woman! So you can jus’—”
“—would you please lis—”
“—filthy hands off’a me,” he finished, stopping his fruitless struggle and glaring daggers at her.
Mums returned the glare with a look of bestial calm. Part of this, he knew, was the leather of her face restricting its movement, but another part was the oppressive fear he knew to be ravaging her mind.
After one and a half human generations, Reets was aware of the titan’s habit of withdrawing inside herself when upset. Again, you couldn’t tell by her heavy brows or sagging cheeks (no more than you could watch the movement of lava below the surface of a volcano), but if you listened to her closely, the signs were always there.
For one thing, she spoke less frequently when she was upset. For another, she did so in tones of cold sobriety.
Reets opened his mouth to call her on this, to chide her for allowing fear to rule her mind, but the sound of running feet interrupted. In the corner of one brown eye, he saw Janusery sprinting around the nearest dome of canvas and skidding to a halt beside them.
In his hands, the fancyman held his pack and bedding and on his face he wore a bemused little frown. He craned the frown back and forth between Reets and the titan.
“I thought we were leaving?” he said.
“We are,” Mums answer.
“My axe!” Reets shrieked, taking a kick at her. “I ain’t goin’ nowheres ‘til I get a piece’a…,” the rest of his statement became muffled growl as he lowered his mouth to the titan’s fingers and sank his teeth in her flesh.
Over the sound of his chewing, he was aware of the fancyman stepping around him and glancing back the way they’d come.
“Is something back there?” Fancy asked.
Seemingly oblivious to the gnawing at her hand, Mums said, “Yes.”
Eyes fixed in the east, Fancy said, “Do we know what it is?”
Mums shook her head. “No,” she said, “and if the fates are with us, we will reach the corrals and never find out.”
Reets tore his teeth from her hand. “Oh, I aim to find out,” he snapped. “I aimed to do a lot worse than that!”
“Reetsle—”
“You swore on your fates!”
“Reetsle, you need to lower your—” She jerked her head to the east.
Reets stopped flailing and followed her gaze, his body stock still while she cocked a furry ear to the camp. The camp neither moved nor stirred, but offered a creepy prelude to that which waited beyond the sun.
“We need to go,” Mums said.
“So go!” Reets shrieked, leaping against her grip. “Get on with yeh! Take your filthy hand an’ jus—aaaaaargh!”
In the vicinity of his shoulder, it felt like the titan’s fingers were turning his flesh into gooseberry jam, like his bones were crumbling to dust. He screamed until his wind was exhausted, then stood there wheezing because it hurt too bad to draw another breath.
When she finally eased up, he locked his blue and brown eyes on her and said, “Bloody Guts, Woman! Doan’ You Ever TouAAAAAAARGH!”
This time it felt like his arm was coming off at the collarbone, as if the whole of his upper arm were being liquefied between her fingers and turned into soup.
When the tension abated, and he was physically able to draw wind, he said, “Ah’right! Ah’right! Ah’right!”
Mums studied him closely, liquid eyes unblinking. “I have your word, Reetsle?”
“Oh yeah,” he wheezed. “Oh yeah, jus’—jus’ take your filthy hand off.”
Reluctantly, Mums removed her hand. Reets sagged on his knees like a wet sock. Overhead, he was vaguely aware of the titan asking Iman to set a path for the corral. The captain gave a curt nod and hurried off. Mums lowered her gaze and informed him that they needed to make haste. Reets continued massaging his shoulder.
“You gave your word,” Mums reminded.
“Yeah,” Reets said mockingly. “So’d you.”
“I think you’ll find my word is sound, Reetlse. I saw nothing in the prairie.” She gave him a nudge with the business end of the cudgel. “I only heard it.”
“Yeh lied is what yeh done.”
“Well, that is your opinion, Reetsle,” she said, nudging him further, “but when you ask if I can see anything and I cannot see anything, and I tell you I cannot se—”
“Save it,” he said, shying from the cudgel and starting after the captain. “Yeh best jus’ hope I doan’ get shed of yeh, woman. Cause if’n I do, I’m gona be on that thing like stink on guts. I give my word on that.”
He glanced back to see how badly he’d irked her, but Mums did not appear irked. She appeared frightened, her head twisted over her shoulder and her eyes fixed on the shadows of camp. She reminded him of those sissy Denbauk brothers after he told them one of his classic bedtime tales.
He turned back around, ducked the bottom of a hanging lantern, and said, “Your actin’ like a baby, Mums.”
Sidestepping the lantern, Mums moved back into line and said, “You haven’t heard what I’ve heard, Reetlse.”
Reets chuffed arrogantly. “Wou’nt matter if I did,” he said. “Wou’nt ma
ke me act like your actin.”
Mums seemed to reflect on this for a time, the thud of her platter-sized feet the only sound at his heels. “The banks of the Mela,” she said. “That was the first time I heard it moving through the hills, milling about in the reeds like a coyote or groundhog…,” she trailed off, temporarily lost in reflection. “It seemed innocuous at the time,” she said, “the way it drifted near, then drifted away, the way it never stopped moving.” She trailed off again. “It wasn’t until it followed you back from the river that I knew something was wrong.”
Reets tensed, a patch of cold forming in his cheeks. “You let me go to the river…,” he paused to let that sink in, “…and yeh din’t warn me there was a mon—”
“As I said,” she interrupted, “before the thing decided to remain nearby, I had no reason to suspect it as anything more than an inhabitant of the Sway. Before it began circling the camp, I hadn’t...,” she hesitated, almost choking on the words, “…I hadn’t heard it move.”
Reets curled his already twisted lips. “How’s that work?” he asked. “How yeh hear the thing, but not hear it move?”
“The way it moved,” Mums amended. “When it first revealed itself, I heard the reeds moving, but not the creature. I didn’t hear it, specifically, until it began creeping around the camp.” Another tense pause. “That was when I interrupted your palaver with the troops.”
Reets grunted, then said, “So it moves funny, huh?” He waited for a response, imagined the titan scanning the camp once more, then said, “Yeh back there, Mums?”
“It’s closer now,” she said, and he could tell by the projection of her voice that she was facing him again. “It’s bigger than I thought.”
Reets waited, then added, “How big?”
“Judging by the pawfalls,” she said, “I would say a little less than…,” she hesitated, “…maybe the same as Barge.”
Reets’ mouth gaped and he felt his pipe nearly fall from his lips. Barge was Mums’ trusty steed, a special titan breed of equine raised in the Dead Lands to the north and designed to support the weight of her kind. Typically, they had diner-plate hooves, barrel-thick heads, and bodies like siege machine.
“That’s pretty big,” he said, swinging his head at the dusky space near a pyramid of barrels.
“Yes,” Mums agreed, “but it’s the way it moves that troubles me, Reetsle. You should hear the thing…,” her voice faded, dissipating like mist in the sun. “When you first came back from the Mela…and it moved close enough for me to hear…,” she drew a deep breath, “…I thought it was slithering.”
Reets wrinkled his brows. “How can yeh tell its size, if it’s sl—”
“Because it has feet,” she interrupted, sounding as bewildered as he felt, but also sounding profoundly more disturbed. “I heard its pawfalls eventually, just as I hear them now, but in the beginning, when it first came near…I heard only the slithering.”
Reets gave his head a healthy shake, and when that didn’t help, he shook it again. His much-neglected imagination was unable to construct such a fantastic animal. He tried picturing a cart ox in the prairie, then picturing it with tentacles instead of legs, then he gave it up and cleared the image from his head.
As if reading his mind, Mums said, “It’s no animal with which we’re familiar. My guess is that it’s either a Nameless from the Uncharted or an ugling from the Bottoms.”
Reets groaned hopelessly. “Oh, I hope it ain’t no ugling,” he said. “Yeh cain’t kill uglings,” he added. “I mean…yeh can, but your arms go numb.”
Behind him, Mums must have agreed with this statement or was too worried to care, because she made no comment on the matter. Reets glanced back at her and, sure enough, there she was with her head craned back and her eyes wide, still searching in vain for the giant creature that slithered on its feet.
Reets turned back around, puzzling over the physiology of such a beast. He was from the Hinter, after all. It wasn’t like he was a stranger to beasts and beasties. In the Hinter, the indigenous wildlife could have any number of limbs…though he couldn’t recall any of them slithering about on them.
Could Mums be wrong?
He straddled a discarded sack of laundry and let the thought fester in his mind. By the time he had both feet back on solid ground, listening to the excited whinnies beyond the last row of tents, the notion had passed. There was no way the titan was wrong. Not with eyes and ears like hers.
Besides, he added to himself, them horses ain’t spookin themselves.
He rounded a log pile and gimped into a shallow skirt of grass marking the edge of the prairie. Against the smoldering red of the western sky, he spied two corrals backlit by the sun, their stilted frames black and colorless.
Inside each, he saw the black and colorless silhouettes of eight horses as they stirred up dust and tried to tear the pens to pieces. In the pen on the right, the privates’ steeds were bucking and kicking and ricocheting into the fence. In the pen on the left, hands raised and movement slow, Fancy was trying to approach their own frantic steeds.
Seemingly oblivious to Fancy’s lilting tones and casual gait, the three horses before him continued to buck and to rear and to take swipes with their forelegs. Reets found the reaction a little disturbing to say the least. It was one thing for Barge and Bloodhair to shy from him, but the man’s own horse?
“Reetsle,” Mums called, moving around him and lumbering for the corral, “would you gather the saddles, please.”
Reets huffed at the request, but went to the riding tack all the same. As much as he hated receiving orders from the fat cow, at least she hadn’t asked him to assist the fancyman. It looked like a whirlwind of hooves and teeth in there and he wasn’t exactly the swiftest of foot.
Good luck with that, Janu’ery, old boy, he chuckled to himself. Hate to see yeh catch a horseshoe to the head.
He pulled a saddle from the fencing, slung it over his shoulder, then tugged loose a blanket with his free hand. Tossing it atop the saddle, he reached back for the reigns, lifted them from the post, and caught sight of movement coming from Eastpost.
He turned to face camp, squinted at whatever private was foolish enough to question the titan’s orders and come back to argue, and found no one there. He strained his eyes a little longer, grunted that he must be going mad, and turned back to the fence.
In the corner of one eye, the shadows of Eastpost flickered once more.