Chapter 21
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
Brine went down as though paralyzed at the neck, dropping flat on the sands and pulling his Wauk to the front. He squeezed it tightly to him and prayed fervently to God, praying that whatever he’d just heard would remain hidden from his sight.
Around him, he could hear the hiss of steel on leather, the groan of bow shafts pulled taut. Several Lathians were muttering clench-bellied curses under their breath, cursing both god and devil alike.
Brine continued praying to Owndiah for mercy, asking Him to forgive the unbelievers who were so savagely taking His name in vain and explaining that these savages meant Him no disrespect, but were simply frightened for their lives, a feeling the disciple could expound upon at length.
He lifted his head from the gritty floor and saw a sea of bearded faces searching the boles of the Harriun. Many were crouched low or down on one knee. A few had receded from the outer rim of the group and converged on their fearless, though possibly unstable leader.
Sladge had not moved from his position beneath the clawed arm in the canopy. Like his men, he had his chin up and his eyes bright, turning his head in a slow circle around the tongues. Unlike his men, he was still shaking his head and muttering, “Ain’t right,” to no one in particular.
Beside the big man, Balthus leaned on his cane and stared blankly at the ribcage of a mercenary in front of him, his eyes unfocused and his thoughts a thousand leagues away.
Brine lifted his head to the tendrils above and the trunks on all sides, searching for movement in the shadows and glowing eyes in the trees. Finding neither, he turned his attention to the crouching escorts.
His eyes might be no better than those of rheumy-eyed vole, but the men around him could track a tear drop on a rainy day. So if any of them made sudden movements one way or the other, he would know to do the same, and if Sladge and Balthus didn’t approve and wanted to stay around to carry on the—
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
The second utterance was actually worse than the first. Brine had been caught off guard the first time, not to mention distracted by Sladge’s red-faced diatribe, but this time he was ready. This time, with his body stoked on adrenaline and his bat ears tuned for disruption, he felt his brain soaking up the cry.
It sounded like someone huge trying to keep their hands warm, a behemoth from the Dead Lands holding its fists to its mouth and breathing on the knuckles. Only it wasn’t the quick Haa-Haa of a man (or giant) breathing warmth on his fingers. This was the sustained, opened-mouthed hiss of an aggressive lizard.
On a grander scale, it sort of reminded him of the tiny bluff-lizards of the F’kari, the little reptiles that puffed themselves up and hissed at you when cornered against a wall. They used to scare him to death at the monastery, surprising him as he made his way between sanctuary and dorm. Often times, he didn’t even know they were there—this little thing no larger than a squirrel, usually hauling tail to get out of his way—and then, bam, something was hissing at his ankles.
Of course, the flash of cold fright he’d experience back then was nothing compared to the steady terror he felt now. Like the deep and resonant hissing overhead, his terror seemed to go on and on forever, continuing in his chest even as the open-mouthed cry broke off and a strange barking cough ensued.
“…Khaut-Khaut-Khaut.”
Perhaps the monster hadn’t attached this part to the first cry, or perhaps Brine had been too busy shoving his face in the sand to hear it, but he was hearing it now. It sounded like a cross between a raven’s caw and a dog gagging on a bone.
Until it ended, that was. After that, the silence was deafening.
Brine winced and felt his body become a wad of nerves and muscle. He forced his lungs to draw air and sent his auditory probes back into the boles. He was searching for a slithering in the tongues or a shifting in the sands, but instead he heard the sound of weaponry; the groan of a bowstring on his right, the clink of chains on his left, and rub of leather all over.
In the center of the mob, movement caught Brine’s eye. He turned to see the bull-necked Sladge lower his troubled face to the blank stare of his adviser. Balthus, his vacuous stare still directed at whatever mercenary happened to back into its path, lifted his face in turn.
Sladge’s hard, anthracite eyes had been greatly softened by the two preceding cries, but as was the case before, it took only a moment of Balthus’ somnolent gaze and the big man’s scowl was back and ready for duty.
Sladge tilted his head and appeared to be sampling the air with his ears. Finding nothing in that section of wilderness, he tilted his chin the other way, listened for a brief time, then drew his sword and took off to the right, his furious eyes fixed on the lesser tongues.
The men in that direction quickly deduced what was coming and shuffled out of the way. Sladge stomped between them and never hesitated as he met the lesser tongues and pressed between their limp, swollen caress. One by one, his men followed after.
Brine bit his lip and tried to make his brain work. What was Sladge thinking? There was no good reason for the big man to think the hissing-thing was over there. Brine certainly couldn’t pinpoint the creature and his ears were something of an anomaly.
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
With his hand around his wauk and his knuckles turning white, Brine watched the Lathians filing after their leader, each man vanishing into the flopping black drapes with shoulders hunched and weapons high.
Overhead, the hissing became a cough and the cough an eerie silence.
Brine squatted among the departing Lathians and listened to the crunch of their boots on the sand. The sound reminded him of the sands of an hourglass counting out the moments—His moments.
Before too long, the last of the men would move from sight and he would be left alone in the Harriun. He withdrew his seeing lens and jerked it first to the departing men, then to the sagging flora of the forest. He had no desire to confront the thing hissing in the boles, but at the same time he had no desire to sit here alone either. He turned the monocle behind him and peered into the growing dusk.
Overhead, from everywhere and nowhere, the hissing-thing opened its maw.
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
Brine was on his feet. Without further ado, he had his robes hoisted and was sprinting for the Lathians, the monster’s cry still stretching across the air as he lowered his head and went slamming into the tendrils, his hands tearing at fleshy strands until his fingers met air and he knew that he was through.
He took two frantic strides, not even enough time to lift his head or open his eyes, and struck something like a lumpy mattress. He recoiled into the wall of tongues, caught himself before he tumbled inside, and lifted both head and lens to obstruction.
As he suspected, it was a queue of muscled shoulders. He’d found the missing Lathians, every last one.
The two men in the back of group craned back their heads to see who he was. He expected them to give him a nasty look—he knew they didn’t like him—but they merely looked and turned back around, their eyes lifting to the dangling canopy above…like everyone else.
As though watching the whole scene and finding the antics amusing, the hissing-thing let loose with a guttural, “…Khaut-Khaut-Khaut.”
Brine stopped surveying the men and tipped back his head. His monocle never made it to the canopy. Before his bulging eye could get that far, it had taken notice of the bole on the other side of the mob.
Running down its face, two hands wide and stretching the full length of the bole, he saw a wet and dripping smear. He could not discern the color of the stain, not with sunset so close at hand, but had one of the men withdrew his flint and tinder and lit himself a fire, he knew what color he would see.
Red, he thought. It would be red. A wet and runny, arterial red.
But that can’t be, said another voice, his rationale mind this time. That can’t be Egzert. We’d ha
ve heard the creature that did this, we’d have heard it thundering through the boles and kicking up sand, we’d have heard Egzert screaming at the tongues, we’d have heard his body being dragged across—
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
With his eyes on the boughs, Brine felt the men before him sinking to their knees. He dropped down beside them without thinking, trying to look everywhere at once while trying to keep his head as close to the sand as possible.
On the far side of the mercenaries, he caught sight of Sladge, the big man easily noticed as he appeared to be the only one not cowering in fear or swiveling his head. Rather, he was marching past the dark and shiny stain that Brine knew to be crimson and moving towards a place on the left in the lesser boles.
Somewhere in the distance, the hissing-thing said, “...Khaut-Khaut-Khaut.”
The big guide never broke stride. Back stiff and sword held high, he moved with his angry eyes fixed on the lesser tongues, his ears seeming to hear noises the others could not hear.
Brine cocked a famous bat ear in the big man’s direction and, for a moment, thought he heard the mysterious noise. It sounded like someone or something running across the sands, the heavy pomp-poomp-poomp of padded paws or soft-soled shoes.
Oddly enough the noise never changed in volume or locale, as if the stalker were jogging in place just beyond the boles. This notion was so ludicrous that Brine began to wonder if his ears had finally deteriorated, if they’d finally joined the ranks of his eyes.
At the edge of the clearing, the sound that drew Sladge was still moving. The big man jerked his head to the right and changed trajectory, never slowing as the Lathians before him—a man with a green cloth folded into a bandana around his head—realized what was happening and scrambled out of the way.
Sladge moved to within five paces of the snaky curtain and stopped. He nodded in both directions and the men on either side, though well back from the focus of his stare, fanned out slowly and flanked the sagging branches. He waited until each man was in position then advanced upon the boles, raising the hilt of his sword to shoulder-height just as something big and black exploded from the tongues.
In the penultimate moment before all Pit broke loose, it had looked like the tongues had simply come alive and taken the guide. Brine was aware of something sleek and rolling coming out of the flora, something so similar in color and texture to that of the boles that it could have been a part of the boles, and then the heads and packs of the Lathians clouded the air before him.
All he could be sure of after that (tumbling over backwards and making an impression in the bole behind him) was that he had been wrong about the tongues taking Sladge. Instead of sucking him in, the slippery flora of the Harriun had spat him across the clearing.
Brine could see the big man moving from left to right over the tops of the fleeing Lathians. Sladge appeared to be lying on his side, one arm flopping up and down like a thick hairy flag, and just bouncing through the air. That wasn’t possible, of course, and Brine told himself it wasn’t possible, but it was happening. Sladge was twenty-five or thirty hands up and just bobbing across the clearing.
Brine watched as the big man’s flailing body rushed head long at the nearest bole, threw itself at its face, and went scampered up its side like a feral cat. It was then that Brine saw the huge boulder-like creature moving along behind the Lathian guide.
Sladge was in its mouth.
The bole-creature—for that was what it looked like in skin texture and hue—clawed its way up the trunk and advanced upon the tongues. In its wake, it left a pattern of holes in the sleek black skin, a row of four holes every ten or twelve hands.
Brine watched the thing in horror. It was in plain sight and he could see without much trouble that it was not feline. His earlier comparison had been made based upon a memory from the awkward days of his youth when an orange tabby came streaking across his path, snatched up a chipmunk from the garden, and carried straight up the nearest tree.
Brine remembered the scene well, remembered the way the cat had come from nowhere and went back there just as fast, the way it throttled the ground squirrel by the neck, the way it hit the nearest tree and scurried up its boughs. He also remembered going inside and sitting in the library until the horror of the moment had left him. A very different reaction from what he experienced now.
As though dipped in cement, Brine’s body couldn’t seem to move. He stood gaping up at the place in the tongues where the creature had disappeared and wondering to himself if it were safe to move.
Without warning, the tongues at which he stared began to thrash as if alive, shaking with such force that he feared they might tear lose and fall upon the ground. It was several long moments before he noticed the dark and shiny fluid peeking through the tongues and leaking down the trunk.
That spelled the end for him.
Safe or not, he yanked up his hem, turned to the south, and sprinted for the castle. Behind him, several of the mercenaries were doing the same, bearing down on him with powerful legs and massive boots. He didn’t know how many had decided to follow—couldn’t know without looking—but he imagined they all would with time. He couldn’t imagine the sort of silly sod that would stick around aft—
Godfry!
Veering to the right, he slowed just enough to skirt a rather thick bole and resumed his heated pace, sprinting in this manner until he realized he was going the wrong way. With a stitch in his side and a burning in his lungs, he would have reached base camp three times over had he been moving in the proper direction. He slowed his gait and transferred his energy from legs to neck, whipping it around at the boles.
“Godfry! Godfry, where are you!”
Suddenly, he was just sure the old man wouldn’t hear him. His teacher’s ears weren’t keenest at best of times, let alone when they were shoved in a book. So what if he never found him? What if Godfry went right on reading as the gelatinous bole-monster broke from the tongues and snatched him up?
“Gooooodfryyyyyyyyy!”
Something yellow flickered between the pillars and he threw on the brakes, skidding in the sand and careening towards his quarry. He would have screamed for the old man to get up and get moving, but his breath had left him and he was forced to fall upon the clueless counselor and drag him to his feet, an act which allowed the old man to reach his feet, but made no concession for him to match the disciple’s strides.
“Here, now!” Godfry balled, stumbling along at a precarious angle. “What’s all—” and then he was being dragged.
Brine cocked back his head, saw the old man scrambling to keep hold of his gripstick and book (and spitting out good deal of sand and beard in the process), and then spun back around to find himself face-to-face with a sight he could never have predicted.
The Lathians were barreling towards him from the south, sprinting out of the undergrowth at break-neck speed. Brine had time to evade the first hurtling body, but the next two caught him completely off guard. The first slammed him in the shoulder and the second knocked him to the sand.
He went crawling to his right, mind spinning from what he was seeing as much as from the impact of the blows, and another man sped out from tongues, this one nearly trodding on his fingers.
Brine scrambled out of the way and dragged Godfry behind him, his mind wondering what these fools were doing. What could they possibly gain by moving deeper—
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…”
The cry was in the south now, on the very heels of the fleeing men.