Chapter 18
Sliding over the lip of the Devil’s Dome and into the golden one’s abode, Kowin the healer felt like bolting for the pasture as well. Whatever this deceiver was—this thing that could see without being seen—it felt like the creature was directly above him. The itch at the base of his skull had started to burn.
He raised a drooping sleeve to the back of his neck and rubbed it vigorously. The scratching helped, but only as a distraction, and never for very long. Once he stopped, the drilling pain came back in a flash.
He left the sleeve where it was and made a quick survey of the lair. A shadow spilled down from the western rim and spread across the floor, but he could still make out the general outline of the place. It resembled the lumpy hollow of a collapsed volcano.
He lowered his head to the floor and received a different impression. The details down there were dissolving in the dying light of late afternoon. He tipped back his hood and saw the sky in midst of a wardrobe change, trading in its bright blue coat for one of darkest murk.
He made an unpleasant face at the shadows and tried to imagine his return trek down the side of the Dome. He saw himself feeling around with his toes for the next jutting boulder, saw himself grasping blindly with his hands for a next fissure in the stone.
“Gar,” he said, speaking in the wee small voice that sounded nothing like himself. “Gar, we needs to hurry.”
The black sackcloth at his right shoulder swelled like bullfrog’s throat.
“We needs to not be here.”
The swell drifted towards his left side, receding gently.
Kowin gave the back of his neck one last caress and set off around the perimeter. When it came right down to it, he didn’t really need to find anything in the lair. He just needed to look around the place and make a report. The council couldn’t expect him to know what had happened to the golden one. They could only expect him to recount the events of his mission and to sound credible while doing so.
He picked up the pace, turning his waddle into a trot. He had been going about this mission all wrong. All he needed to do was make one sweep of the Dome, take the bizarre clues back to the council, and dump them in their lap.
Here go, idiot council. These clues for you. Good luck!
This thought tried to bring a grin to his pale and twisted face, but his lips wouldn’t move. They were frozen in place by the cold hands of fear. Wonderful though his plan might be, he was still eye-ball deep in the nastier part of it. He still had three-fourths of a monster’s lair to traverse before he got to the good part, and floor of said lair was not being kind.
It wasn’t the gaps and crevices he had to worry about; it was the drops and rises. The recesses of the lair had been filled with dust and debris and smoothed flat by the golden one, but flat did not mean level. The floor might have been continuous, but it was also lumpy and erratic and unyielding to the touch.
Kowin tripped three times before finally slowing down and taking baby steps across the ever-changing floor. He was amazed at how slow he needed to move in order to anticipate the changes with his toes.
On a positive note, if he did happen to trip over the stones and land on his face, he wouldn’t have to worry about falling on anything. There was always the threat of careening over the rim and tumbling down the side, but if he managed to avoid that, and keep himself in the nest, the worst that would befall him was a stubbed toe or bruised knee.
Where many lairs lay covered in rib-cages and jaw bones and shards of pointed bone, the lair of the golden one bore no such clutter. This predator fed in the lands beyond the Drugana (consuming its prey whole no less) and, thus, its lair did not suffer much in the way of calcareous waste.
Here recently, it did not suffer much from the obstruction of gold either, not since the extraction teams learned of the beast’s extended leave and snatched away ever gleaming nugget and shining chunk.
Prior to that, however, when Kowin used to bring the seeing sphere to Dome in hopes of a watching the bloody annihilation of the royal extractors, he nearly went blind from the sun’s reflection.
He didn’t have that problem now. Partly because the sun was a dying ember in the western sky, but mostly because the beast’s natural camouflage was no more.
Kowin stopped at the south side of the nest, the halfway mark for all intents and purposes, and raised a sleeve to the back of his neck. It was still sizzling like a splatter of grease from a skillet, but he couldn’t imagine why. There didn’t appear to be anything up here.
He turned to survey the path he had taken and made a grim assessment of his labors. The hem of his robe was a little dustier, the soles of his feet a little dirtier, but otherwise he had nothing to show for his efforts. What could the creature that sees-without-being-seen possibly want?
He lifted his head to the dying sky, searched for some sign of his transparent admirer, and said, “What?”
The dying sky did not respond, and neither did the prairie. Around him, the silence of the Sway continued ringing in his ears, a thousand muted voices screaming out in unison, screaming at the gathering gloom in the east as it came sweeping through the pasture.
He lowered his hood to the floor, more so because he was tired than because he assumed he’d find anything, and made it three waddling strides before his left foot came down on something like a tree branch.
He jumped and shuffled back, placing a hand to the rim and preparing to vault. Before he could, though, his eyes found the thing he had stepped on and stayed his anxious legs. Whatever it was had not moved.
He cocked his head sideways and squinted at the thing. It sort of looked like a tree branch, a long and crooked shaft not unlike those clotting the boughs of the Shun, but what it was exactly, or why it had come to be up here, he could not say, at least not while it remained concealed in the shadows of the lair.
“You seeing this?” he said, ostensibly speaking to Gar, his invisible companion. “You seeing this… this stick?”
The sackcloth at his hip, on his left side this time, puffed up like a blister.
“I seeing this,” he announced, taking a step closer and sending his pink eyes to either end of the stick-like artifact. On one end, he spied the makings of a paw. On the other end, a hard and shapeless mass.
Since there was a paw on one end, Kowin assumed the dried-out mound was a carcass. Just to be sure, his eyes went back to the paw and he gave a closer look to the digits and claws and opposable thumb…
Opposable thumb?
It was nearly two-dimensional in structure, as flat as it was broken, but there was no mistaking the position of the fifth digit in relation to the other four.
“That not good,” he breathed, giving the paw one last look then turning to the crunchy heap on the other end of the arm.
With regard to size and shape, he was guessing the animal had been roughly the make of a large dog or small pony, but with the current dimensions reduced to that of a folded bed roll, it was difficult to extrapolate the beast’s original design.
He knelt down beside the husk and pried his fingers beneath the edges. It felt hard and angular and practically weightless, like grabbing an enormous chunk of pumice. He propped it on one side and watched as some of the smaller pieces broke free, dropping to the ground.
He peered at the underbelly and saw the other leg right away, possibly the thing’s tail. There might have been half a face as well, smooshed into the armpit. He lowered his head to the area, pressed his hood next to the surface, and saw that it was a face, and an ugly one.
“This an ugly thing,” he said, still not knowing if it was ugly because of the damage or because of the way it had been made.
He sat up a little and picked at the face with his sleeve. There was the socket of an eye, sans the squishy ball. That tissue had burst and spewed across the lair, drying into dust by now. There was also an opening below the socket that was either a nostril or a tear.
Kowin brought hi
s eyes closer and saw it was a nostril. It had to be a nostril because, below that, there was a larger gap that had to be a maw. Most of the teeth had been pried loose of the gums while the skull and jawbone were wrenched mercilessly together, but there were still a few lodged deep in the bone.
The teeth in the creature’s mouth looked like sowing needles—short, thin, and pointed—and there was only one creature of which Kowin knew that had teeth like that.
“That not good,” he said, this time without feeling.
He stood slowly, the hazy effects of déjà vu miring his movement, and stared down at his second dru’gore of the day.
He raised a sleeve to his hood and scratched at it stupidly. None of this was adding up in his cold, sadistic mind. The dru’gore had come back, the golden one had disappeared, and the two of them had gone mad. He was getting a headache just thinking about it.
“Clues not help,” he said, crawling to his feet and shaking his hood. “Clues like…like biting animal you pull from trap, biting animal you drop on soft parts of lap.”
He cringed at the image—memory, actually—and decided it was time to go home. Going on this mission was like reaching into a pile of yellow, intricately-shaped puzzle pieces and pulling out something the color of midnight and with no edges at all, a piece that implied a second set of pieces scattered within the first, pieces that, once completed, would form a picture he did not wish to see.
This not real, his mind screamed. This not a real thing.
But it was. He had not one dead dru’gore, but two. Two dead creatures of indestructible magic that returned to Jashandar and committed the one act they dared not commit in all the ages they were here.
Well aware the dru’gore had not died of old age or exposure to the elements, he tipping back his cowl and searched the skies for their killer. There was nothing above him, or in any of the four directions, so he lowered his head to the ugly remains.
He thought about what the titan-hag had said about the land, about the Drugana waking from its long and involuntary sleep. If that were true, then he was right back where he started all those generations ago: in need of a barbarian from the Hinter to do battle with the old ones.
Mad old ones, he corrected, shivering at the thought. They had been bad enough the first time, when he first visited the land. He didn’t want to think about how bad they’d be if they’d finally lost their minds.
He stopped scratching at his hood and moved his sleeve the burning pinprick at the base of his skull. This time he would be up against the old ones and a mysterious watcher, an entity that could see-without-being-seen.
“Gar,” he said, not looking where he was going as he edged towards the rim. “Gar, I thinks, maybe, we go home.”
At the side of his hip, a fist-sized section of sackcloth rose from his side and smoothed into nothing.
“We haves all clues,” he continued, backing across the loose rock and dust and tripping several times along the way. He’d managed to keep his feet, but he couldn’t believe how difficult it was to walk while staring at the sky.
Keeping up with the feet, he said, “That what we tell mad halfling. We tells him golden one is killer and ‘gore come ba—” his toe met with a chunk of stone and skidded to the side “—These good clues, yes. These good clues and I thinks halfling not—” his heel struck a drop in the floor and he stumbled forward “—I thinks, maybe, he be happy. I thinks maybe he not—”
On the third occasion, his foot met with a rise in the floor and he went down like sack full of crazy, arms flailing, robes thrashing, body reeling without any chance of correction.
He was aware of his head striking the floor and making a muffled crack within his hood, but already he was scrambling to his feet, diving for the rim and seeing a movement overhead, a fluttering, a quavering.
He did not look up, but levered himself onto the rim and pulled, clawing at the stones even as a large and rippling mass came plummeting down and covered him whole.