Chapter 17
Jaysh no longer needed a clear view of the thing with the white head to know that it wasn’t a creature of this world. He need only see its clammy white pelt slinking down the hillside and heading for the bait.
No creature of this world—scabe-wolf, coyote, cougar—would have ever come back. They might have come the first occasion, snooping around for the source of the talking or for whatever beast was giving off the delectable smell of horse crap and perspiration, but not the second.
Unless they was sick, he amended, chewing at his vine. Or they got the rage.
But as Jaysh watched old Mister Whitehead slipping down the ridge, he didn’t think the creature looked sick. It didn’t stagger or weave, or tremble or shake. Rather, it moved with the steady gait of a predator, its head held high and its purpose set.
Watching this, Jaysh also began having doubts about his rage theory. Creatures overcome with the rage were on the other end of the mobility spectrum. When they moved through the terrain, it was at a hammering run. This thing was strutting down the hillside.
What was more, on each of the rage incidents Jaysh could recall, there had been an impetus for the fury. When the squirrel had charged him in the Shun, it had been out of its mind with the foaming disease. When the blue jay had chased him from his hunting tree, it had been protecting its nest from a perceived predator.
Old Mister Whitehead, on the other hand, had no stimulus for the rage. Unless, of course, it was an ugling, and then it probably had the foaming disease coming out the ying-yang. From what Jaysh had heard, the foaming disease was just a way of life there.
He curled his lip and waited for the worst. If he were lucky, there would be something left of the decoy to sew back together. If he were unlucky, old Mister Whitehead would tear it to shreds, jump on the pieces, and then pee on it. It was the difference between having his mission delayed and having it terminated.
He sat up on his arms, being careful not to disturb the purring cat-thing beneath his chin, and squinted at the ugling. He could just about pick out the details of its face, the stunted snout, the heavy jowls, the total absence of ears.
This was the first actual ugling Jaysh had ever seen—he’d only ever heard about the ones when he was a child—but it was certainly remaining true to its name. It was, without question, a very ugly-thing.
Jaysh winced at its steadily worsening features, his stomach turning over the deer sausage and cheese he’d eaten for breakfast. He’d always heard an ugling’s stink was the worst part (that one whiff would have you puking your guts and shoving clay up your nose), but he didn’t see how that was possible. There was no way it smelled worse than it looked. There was—
Jaysh went cold, his butt-cheeks clenching together. Old Mister Whitehead—old Mister Ugly-As-I-Wanna-Be—had just come to the patchwork dummy in the middle of the valley, the one smelling of delicious sweat and savory horse apples, and waddled right around it.
From the blankets beside him, Serit Branmore released a long and wintry groan.
Jaysh shushed him and prayed the general would hold still. Below them, the sallow-headed thing was making its way through the remainder of the basin in a direct route for the hillside where he and Serit were hiding.
Jaysh had been fooling himself about the thing’s interest in the hodgepodge of old pelts and horse stink. It wasn’t interested in those. It was interested in the voices it had heard coming from the concealment.
The creature broke from the basin and began ascending the slope, its head swinging side to side like some of the larger lizards Jaysh had seen darting around the rivers and creeks.
From his right, Serit said, “Young Juh-Juh-Juh…”
“Shhh,” Jaysh hissed, pulling his skinning knife from his waist and bringing it to his chest.
“It’s cuh-cuh-cuh—”
“Shhh!”
Jaysh scraped the knife blade along his nose, soothing an itch that plagued him. Now, if only he could allay the itching in his mind so easily. It felt like the world’s worst patch of poison sumac, intensifying with every hammering step the creature took, screaming at him that his skittish partner was right about the creature’s black intensions: It wasn’t just coming for a look-see; It knew exactly where they were.
Jaysh clenched his jaw on the vine, holding the tension until the old man’s fear drifted from his mind and he was able to think. There was no chance the thing had seen or smelled them, not with the screens he’d made and not with the whole of the valley reeking of horse excretion.
The creature had heard the two of them conversing, it had come to survey the area, they had seen it and shut up, and it had moseyed back the way it came. Then, once it departed, they resumed their conversation, it heard them again, and now it had come back for a closer look. No big deal. It hadn’t seen them and it didn’t know where they were.
Serit, who couldn’t have disagreed more apparently, let loose with another puppy dog whimper.
“Shhh,” Jaysh hissed, his voice soft. “It ain’t seen us,” he said. “Keep your mouth shut and hold real still….it’ll pass.”
He lowered the blade from his face and directed the tip at the gap in the screen, wondering what would happen if the creature walked over the top of him. Would he be able to stab the thing to death before it managed to chew off his face?
He supposed he could, if he struck a blow to its neck or chest and then shoved with all his might to keep the creature at bay, fended it off until it bled out.
He moved his eyes back to the ugling’s head, studying the soft part of its face. If he went for those softer parts, his tender hands and fingers would be dangerously close to the creature’s rather menacing jaws. If it opened those jaws as he stabbed for the face, his friends would be calling him Lefty.
You ain’t got friends, Gariel’s voice assured him. He would have nodded at this, but he feared to move. The ugling was no more than a stone’s throw down the slope and, man-oh-man, was it looking like a creature he didn’t want to tangle with.
It had the huge and swollen cranium of a hunting mastiff and the thick lower jowls of nothing Jaysh had ever seen. He could have said it had the jaws of a water imp, or of a bear trap, but that wouldn’t have been doing them justice. They were enormous—impractically enormous—the sort of jaws that weren’t made for chewing food but for inflicting pain.
If’n that thing ever got hold’a my arm…
He let the thought fade and continued searching the creature’s face for places to stick the business end of his dagger. In addition to the freakishly thick skull, it had a mastiff’s sagging brows and cheeks as well, the folds of skin lining its eyes, the wrinkles of flesh surrounding its snout, the wads of meat on the jowls, but no, wait…
As the thing came closer and Jaysh could better see the excess skin, he found himself making a face he hadn’t made since he’d been a small child, back in the days before he’d seen scabe-wolves tearing live deer into pieces or maggoty gut-piles left behind in the Shun. It had been a long time since he’d seen a sight as revolting as this.
The ugling’s face didn’t have wrinkles, it was a wrinkle. The whole of its head looked like a wax sculpture held to close to the flames. Only the word head was too descriptive. When evaluated on visual merits alone, it was no more a head than a plate of scrambled eggs.
Well, except for the eyes. It did have eyes.
As he’d done with the rest of the glabrous abomination, Jaysh made this assessment based upon their function and not their form. They were set in the middle of the thing he chose to call a head (shoved down deep in those rancid rolls of doughy flesh) and there were two of them. Had there only been one of these first-sized pustules, he might have mistaken it for a smooth portion of brain pressing out of the skull.
Beside him, seeing the same thing that Jaysh was seeing, Serit began to moan.
The sallow-thing stopped and lifted its mass of drooping flesh, directing its malignant gaze at the gener
al’s blind. Jaysh chomped down on his vine and held his breath, hoping beyond hope that Serit would do the same.
Around him, the breezeless prairie seemed to hold its breath with him and, miraculously enough, so did Serit. It might have been that the general swallowed his tongue or passed out from the shock, but in either event the moaning ended and silence resumed.
The ugling listened a moment more, then continued up the hill.
Jaysh took a breath and released his tortuous bite on the vine. That had been a near miss, but the next ordeal was already upon him. The beast’s current trajectory was taking it straight towards his blind.
He still didn’t hold with the idea that he’d been detected by sight or smell, but that didn’t mean the idiot creature wouldn’t feel him when it tottered over the screen. It might be a mindless imp, but it probably knew the difference between solid ground and a canvas-clad body.
Jaysh tried sliding his legs towards his abdomen, to prepare for his leap into action, but the process was difficult at best and impossible at worst. With the ever-present threat of rustling grass and moving canvas, he could either maneuver into striking position and bring the creature on the run or he could remain in concealment and forfeit any chance of a decent retaliation.
Jaysh remained frozen in the blind, still trying to make up his mind as the sallow-headed fiend came to a halt in the weeds and wrenched the decision from his hands.
Two or three body lengths away, the creature lifted its head from the vegetation and directed its face to the sky. Two folds of skin near the neck split wide, the lower flap hanging down, the upper flap wrinkling towards the eyes, and in the recesses in between Jaysh saw a dark and dripping gap lined with scores of tiny hairs.
His mind swelled with dread. He could not fathom a use for those hairs, not unless they functioned as eyelashes to whisk away debris, but he thought the glistening black hole had to be the mouth.
He was not wrong.
From out of that syrupy gullet, the melted thing forced a sound that was half gurgle and half shriek, a sound that made Jaysh think of a sickly man drowning in his own phlegm.
The horrible wetness of the cry receded in the hills and Jaysh wondered if the monster were baiting him into the open.
The idea seemed about right, particularly since the thing had heard his voice coming from this general area, but right or wrong Jaysh had no intention of taking the bait. That deliquescing fiend could gurgle until its throat tore loose. He was not leaving his cover.
The melted-thing filled the pasture with another bubbling cry, and beneath his beard Jaysh felt Zeph twitch against him. She was asleep for now, but for how much longer? How many more of those choking cries would it take before she roused from slumber?
This thought brought a streak of cold racing down his spine. It was one thing to bully the general into silence, but bully Zeph was another story entirely. If she got wind of what was happening outside this blind, she would not be pleased.
As carefully as he dared, Jaysh lifted his bristled chin from the cat-thing’s back, cocked his head to the side, and glanced down. He saw no yellow eyes beneath him, bulged in alarm or narrowing in malice, so he relaxed a little and returned his gaze to the prairie, moving his head just in time for the melted thing to utter another of those wet and caustic cries.
Jaysh kept his head still on this occurrence, choosing to lower his chin to the cat-thing beneath his jaw. Within that coil of fur and scar tissue, he neither felt nor heard a reaction, her gentle purring the only noise.
From the distant hills of the prairie, however, something else was responding, something so faint as to be unidentifiable, but something substantial none the less.
Jaysh cocked his ear to the sound, listening as it grew in volume. It rose from a faint hum to a slight vibration, then from slight vibration to gentle roar. After that, the roar became a rumble and Jaysh had the distinct feeling that matters had just grown distinctly worse.
Unaware he was doing so, the sound of his movement now masked by the thrumming, Jaysh slid his knees beneath his belly.
The melted-thing turned to face him, blind eyes looking everywhere and nowhere, then quickly returned to the east. In that direction, the sound of bodies came thrashing through the Sway, the sound of short and stocky legs pounding at the soil.
Too quick, Jaysh thought, laying frozen in the blind. With rapidity like that, escape was impossible.
He slowed his breathing and tried hard not to worry. It was difficult, though. He kept thinking about what would happen if they were discovered by these creatures. If they couldn’t outrun them in a footrace, that meant they’d have to fight, and they couldn’t win that fight.
Outside his concealment, after what seemed like an eternity of deafening blows, the barrage of footfalls came to a quick and stuttering halt.
Jaysh stretched is neck and tried to get a look at them, but due to the angle of the gap he could not see. There was only the blubbery face of the melted-thing that had called them.
Jaysh squeezed the handle of his skinning knife, four words chanted relentlessly in his head: Doan’ move the canvas doan’ move the canvas doan’ move the canvas doan’ move…
The melted-thing before him waddled forward in three slapping steps, much faster than it had traveled up the slope. It stopped short of the blind and only fear stayed the woodsman’s trembling knife hand. He had every reason to expect the sharp bite of teeth or claws and to react in kind, but instead his terror held him back and he was assaulted only by the creature’s stench.
This, he soon found, was not without injury. With the sagging bulk of the ugling’s chest rising before the gap, the reek of its body quickly filled the interior of the screen, the rotten putrescence of congeal milk and day-old armpit.
Jaysh’s gorge rose in his throat and he thought of the more obese merchants with which he’d bartered, the ones who stunk of sweat and cheese and who, he imagined, had a difficult time cleaning their innumerable creases.
He tried breathing out his mouth, forbidding himself to think about what the stench was doing to his tongue, and listened to the creature.
Without the dying light of dusk leaking through the gap, he had only the rustling of the weeds to tell him the melted-thing was lowering its head to the surface of the blind. Then, as the cavernous silence rolled out the valley, he heard something thin and slimy strike out from its head.
Thhhp-Thhhp…Thhhp-Thhhp
Something the size of a feed bucket brushed against the top of the concealment, something firm collapsing the leather ceiling and pushing it slowly towards the woodsman, pressing it down and down and finally stopping a hand’s length from Jaysh’s right shoulder.
The thin, slimy thing shot out again: Thhhp-Thhhp…Thhhp-Thhhp
Continuing to test the canvas, the melted-thing pressed the roof a little further, stopping less than a finger’s width from the woodsman’s back. Jaysh pointed the tip of the dagger over his shoulder, ready to make one sharp jab when the time came, then watched as the melted thing lifted its snout and the ceiling rose.
Mind swimming with relief, Jaysh had time to exhale, to wonder what was happening, and then the thing above him did something that turned his blood to ice.
It spoke.
It wasn’t human speech, nothing so comprehensible as the Jashian tongue, but it was definitely a kind of speech. For one thing, it was very similar to the gargled cries it had made earlier while calling for its accomplices. For another, the effects of this choking communication could be heard as its accomplices began spreading out around the screen.
This might have had more of a disheartening effect on the woodsman, but at that exact moment a stirring occurred in the vicinity of his chin and distracted him. He looked down and beheld a pair of citrine eyes staring in the direction of the rustling movement.
No, no, no, no, no…
Zeph stared a moment longer, then turned to the gap in the camouflage screen and sniffed the shado
wy air, sniffing it once, then twice, then—
Even as her eyes went bulging, Jaysh made a grab for her, his fingers sinking in the grass as Zeph bolted for the pasture.