Chapter 25
Out of all the Hunt Days and Scout Days that Jaysh had ever experienced, only two had taken him near the Bottoms. The first time, he’d run across something that scared him half to death and kept him up for most of the night, but the second time wasn’t so bad. The second time, he’d actually come across something of value.
Despite the valuable find, though, two visits was all it took for Jaysh to decide he never wanted to return. There was just something about the place that made his stomach float; like the way the ground sloped into oblivion and appeared to be eating itself, or the way the fog spun in circles like the coils of a snake.
If possible, visiting the Bottoms at night was even worse.
Jaysh turned to speak with Serit, to alleviate the old man’s concerns and put his mind at ease, but taking one look at the general’s petrified face, he quickly let the matter go. For now, at least, there was no reaching him.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and began hobbling towards the fog. He limped a few paces and glanced over his shoulder. Serit’s silhouette was right where he left it. The historian’s arm might have come up before his chest (allowing him to gnaw his fingers or brush at the place where his medals had once hung)—but otherwise he appeared unchanged.
Good, Jaysh thought, turning back around and feeling better about his task. Considering where he was going and what he meant to do, he had no time to worry about some skittish old man grabbing his arm or screaming in his ear. He needed to find the kryst and he needed to find it fast.
He took his eyes from the fog and tried to monitor the slope of the hill. Neither of them was doing him any favors. The angle of the hill was increasing with every step—and applying more pressure to wounds on his hip—and the density of the fog appeared to be growing more opaque the closer he came.
Jaysh paused in his descent and gave the scudding curtain of fog and long and appraising look. He was within ten paces of the stuff and it appeared as dense as ever, like one side of an enormous gray box.
He puzzled over this and wondered if the absence of sunlight were to blame. He’d never seen the place at night—by glow of moon and by twinkle of star—so perhaps that accounted for the difference.
Or maybe the stuff you think to be fog, isn’t really fog. Maybe it’s them evil spirits the disciples from the temples used—
He stopped that line of thought and gave his head a little shake. The bank of sweeping fog was not the disembodied remains of the unbelieving dead. Neither was it the concentrated evil of Sira’s loyal minion. His eyes were just having trouble adjusting.
He cocked his head to the side and listened for the splat of feet slopping through the mud or the scrape of teeth raking across stone or the crack of skulls banging off each other. He heard none of those sounds.
He took a breath and scratched his nose. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought this was the entrance to the Kilashan caves and he was hearing the sound of rocks not moving or of shadows congealing to gloom. He stopped listened and straightened his head.
Unfortunately for him, though, he did know better. A lot better.
His thoughts went back to the first time he had visited the Bottoms, that sweltering summer day almost eight ages in his past. He remembered standing hip-deep in the reeds roughly half-a-league to the west, a bright yellow ball hovering overhead.
Later that night, as he washed the back of his neck with a rag, he would realize how badly he’d been burned. At the time, though, he paid the tingling no mind. He was too busy staring at the blood on the ground.
Thinking back now, he thought the animal had been a goat, though he couldn’t say why. Maybe he’d found a horn in the briars, or maybe a hoof print in the mud, but to be honest all he remembered for sure was the blood. There had been a lot of it.
As for the predator, Jaysh had found a set of prints pressed deep into the ground. The spacing between the prints was wide, implying the killer had been at full sprint. They led out of the pastures to the east, stopped where the goat had been violently devoured, and then sprinted back the way they’d come.
Jaysh found the killer’s haste to be somewhat disturbing, the way it raced in and out and made short work of its prey, but what bothered him most were the creature’s tracks. The forelegs ended in paws (as one would expect), but the hind legs ended in hooves.
Jaysh had followed the killer’s trail to the east, his intrigue on the rise, and found the animal’s genesis and terminus to be the muddy depression where he now stood.
So maybe you cain’t hear it or see it, he thought, but you know it’s in there.
He ran his eyes along the face of the fog in another cautious, yet fruitless circuit. It wasn’t thinning, despite his best wishes, so he eased himself down on one knee and searched the ground for footprints.
He found them in no time at all, a series of rounded rectangles pressed into the soil, unique in that they were twice as wide as a human foot and without the addition of toes.
From behind him, recognizing the behavior for what it was, Serit said, “Oh, young Jaysh, please tell me the kryst didn’t enter.”
Ah’right, Jaysh thought, and located another of the statue’s massive foot-holes, following it down the slope.
“Young Jaysh?”
Still slipping along, Jaysh wedged the heel of his foot in the next print and said, “Uh-huh.”
“Is it in there?”
Speaking softly, as though whispering to the fog, Jaysh said, “Yeah.”
Serit released a low groaning sigh and began brushing at his chest, an act that would normally have resulted in Jaysh telling him to be quiet, but at the moment resulted in no response at all. The woodsman was searching for the place on the slope where the grasses ended and the mud began. He probed his foot a little farther.
Seeing this, Serit said, “Young Jaysh, that doesn’t look safe.”
With both eyes fastened to the tip of his moccasin, Jaysh said, “It is.”
Serit sighed, disappointedly. “Young Jaysh, before you go further I should tell you that my first encounter with the Bottoms involved a whole battalion of men—good men—and that nearly half of them were slain before the encounter had ended.”
Jaysh said nothing, only slipped his heel a little further down the slope.
“We were sent to vanquish a blood imp feeding on the royal livestock,” Serit continued. “You should know that we were unable to slay the beast, only drive it from the Sway, and it cost me half a battalion of men.”
Beneath Jaysh’s heel, the grass was slowly thinning.
“What you’re doing there,” Serit said, “no good can come of it. None whatsoever. Which is why every king and—”
Jaysh stopped his descent and craned his head over his shoulder. “What was that?”
“I said,” the general repeated, enunciating each syllable and word, “nothing good had ever come of the place.”
Jaysh stared at him, his mind brooding and his jaw working. “Yeh sure bout that?”
“I am quite sure, young Jaysh.” Serit’s silhouette raised a finger and shook it. “The Bottoms is nothing but a portal to the banned.”
Jaysh chewed his vine pulp as he considered this, then nodded his head, more to show he’d heard the old man, than to imply he agreed with him.
He turned his attention to the hillside and said, “Banned, huh.”
“Yes,” Serit said. “Banned. As in banned from Glory. The souls of the wicked. The minion of Sira. Is any of this ringing a bell?”
Scooting the toe of his moccasin down the slope, Jaysh said, “Maybe. But what makes yeh so sure noth—”
His moccasins met with the mud he’d been waiting for and he went sprawling like a newborn foal. There was a moment where he saw the grass racing past and the mists coming on and then he saw nothing as he rolled onto his belly and made a grab for the reeds. He caught hold of them and they tore loose of the soil, allowing him to slip further down the emban
kment.
He forced his limbs into a spread-eagle position and stiffened every muscle in his body. He could feel himself sinking in the muck, could feel the muck mounding below his arms, and then he was stopping beside the fog.
Above him, Serit was screaming.
“Young Jaysh! Young Jaysh, are you all right?”
Rolling his injured hip into the air and speaking through clenched teeth, Jaysh said, “So how come is it…,” he rolled onto his back, testing the position of his feet, “…that you think nothing good come out’a here?”
“Young Jaysh,” Serit said, “can we please discuss this later?”
Jaysh took the pressure off his heels and palms, slid three body-lengths down the slope, and dug his heels back into the mud.
Stopping just shy of the mist, he said, “No one ever go in here?”
Sounding more than exasperated, Serit said, “Of course no one’s gone in!—Please!—Young Jaysh, I need for you to climb back…”
Serit’s whining admonishment carried on somewhere above him, but it only registered as background noise in Jaysh’s ears. His full attention was now fixed on the black shroud sucking at his ears. He couldn’t have listened to the old man if he tried.
He rose to a sitting position, tested his footing in the mud, and gave his left hand a healthy shake in the air, flinging the muck all over then wiping the fingers on the side of his shirt.
With a relatively clean hand, he leaned forward and pressed his fingers to the place where airy blackness met heavy blackness.
“Young Jaysh,” Serit warned, his voice reasserting itself in the woodsman’s ears. “Young Jaysh, I wouldn’t—” and then his words seized in his throat as the dark outline of the woodsman’s fingers vanish in the fog.
Jaysh stared at the place in the fog where they should have been and could not see them. He moved them about and still they were lost. As far as his eyes were concerned, he’d submerged his hand in the vertical equivalent of an oil bucket.
From atop the slope, Serit whimpered at the night.
Jaysh wriggled his fingers and felt the mist swishing around them. The air on the other side felt thicker than the air around him, colder too, and a litter moister.
“It doan’ hurt none,” Jaysh said, cutting grooves in the mist.
“That is hardly the point,” Serit hissed. “Owndiah knows what you’re attracting on the other side. That might be the equivalent of dangling bait in a pond.”
The analogy resonated with the woodsman and he drew back his fingers, holding them up and staring at them. They didn’t look any different—not in the dark, at least—but they did feel cooler. He pressed them to the beardless part of his cheek, to get a better idea of just how cold, and was shocked to find they felt no different. Damp with mud, but no colder than his face.
He pulled his fingers away and stared at them, then shook them. The sensation of cold was fading slowly, but to some degree it was still there, the sort of chill he associated with rainy days in the latter cycles of harvest.
“What’s wrong?” Serit asked.
“Nothin,” Jaysh said, testing his footing to make sure his heels were planted firmly in the sludge.
“What did it do?” Serit asked.
Jaysh stood to his feet, made certain his left foot would hold, and then lifted his right. He waited to find his balance then sank it in the fog.
From up the slope, he heard a string of excited, no’s, coming from the general, but he only half-heard them. It was difficult to pay attention to anything with that all-encompassing cold seeping through his pants and permeating his flesh.
He extracted his leg and set it back down. It felt the same as his fingers, the same penetrating iciness sinking down deep and leaving his skin to warm. What that meant, he still didn’t know, but at least it didn’t hurt…and if it didn’t hurt, it couldn’t be bad, could it?
He waited a moment more and his leg continued not to hurt. Taking that as a good sign, he slipped it back inside the mist, leaned forward, and stuck in his arm to the shoulder.
From up the slope, he heard a terrified, “Young Jaysh! Young—!” and then Jaysh’s head was in the fog, the general’s desperate pleas nothing but vibrations in his ears, the sound of someone screaming under water.
Jaysh thought he could make out a few of the old man’s words—the more excitable ones at the beginning of each sentence—but then the chill settled in and Serit’s voice went away. Jaysh was aware of a sharp stinging in the side of his temple, a feeling he’d not experienced since the days of boyhood while chewing on ice, and then the stinging ebbed away, leaving him with only the cold.
Only he wasn’t cold. The cold, as it had done with his fingers and leg, was fading from the surface and sinking to the bone. After a while, even that left the body, the internal wintriness abating altogether.
For one worrisome moment, he wondered if his body had gone numb, if perhaps his flesh had frozen solid and he only felt warmer. To put his mind at ease, he told his head to tilt forward and was relieved to feel his neck tendons tightening and his beard bristling against his chest…His eyes, however, registered nothing.
Still staring at his belly, he blinked his eyes repeatedly and waited to see some change in the light, or a glimpse of his shirt. After several long and terrifying moments, it became clear that the realm below his neck was not there, his body was not there, the ground was not there. It was just more of the appalling blackness he’d seen from outside, more of the horrible murk he’d seen blocking out the world.
He felt his terror swelling like a tic on a hound dog and forced himself to concentrate on his balance and footing. There was no sense making matters worse by losing his grip and sliding further down the—
Long and bony fingers clutched his left arm. Jaysh gasped and gave them a swat, fighting with them for a few startled moments before realizing who they belonged to. He grabbed the fingers and he followed them out, watching as his visibility changed from impenetrable black to shades of black.
One of the shades, he saw, was in the form of a gangly old man. It was slipping in the muck beside him and tugging at his arm.
“Have you lost your young mind!” the black shape balled. “Have you!”
Jaysh didn’t answer. He flinched his arm out of the old man’s grip and began clawing his way up the mud slide. Serit did the same, both of them digging with finger and toe and hauling themselves back to the reeds. Once there, they crawled on to where the prairie leveled out and then collapsed on their faces.
After a long bout of panting (and of listening to the general pant somewhere on the other side of a dark curtain of reeds), Jaysh said, “If’n it makes yeh feel better…we ain’t goin’ in til mornin.”
Serit’s panting broke off so suddenly that Jaysh thought the old man had disappeared. “Go in!” the old man shrieked, his words punctuated by thrashing noises in the grass. “Why in creation would we go in? We don’t need to go in. We need to regroup. When your mission fails, you regroup, you fall back…,” he resumed is panting, “…you do not press ahead into enemy territory.”
Staring at the darkness of his hollow, Jaysh turned his head and spit. He knew Serit was a smart man. He knew Serit had reached the rank of general in the king’s army and had likely read a great many books along the way, but there were times—like right now, for instance—where he could be as dumb as the muck on their bellies.
Giving his frustration time to wane, Jaysh made another wet donation to the pasture and said, “Bit late fer that, don’t yeh think?”
There was a moment of stilled contemplation from his partner, followed by, “Whatever do you mean?”
Nodding to the darkness, Jaysh said, “You ‘member that first’un we saw? The one what come up from the north?” He paused for this to sink in, for the direction to sink in, then said, “Way I see it, we’re already in its terr’try.”
There was more pensive silence, then a series of excited thrashing movement—likely,
the old historian taking to his feet and staring back the way they had come—then more dreadfully pensive silence.
“That’s right,” Serit said, his tone sounding defeated. “They could be anywhere.”
“Could be,” Jaysh agreed, sitting up and peeling off his pack and bedroll. He pushed the pack into the vegetation and flipped the bedroll so that the grimy side was in and the clean side was out. He lay back down and placed the bedroll beneath his head, his eyes on the sky as he said, “Best we find that kryst ‘fore goin’ back.”
Serit didn’t move. “We’ll be able to see?” he asked. “Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, we’ll be able to see in the mist?”
Having no idea if they’d be able to or not, Jaysh winced at the constellations and said, “I doan’ see why not.”
Serit still hadn’t moved, still standing sentinel in the grasses. “And if we can’t?”
A shooting star zipped from one side of the weedy curtain to the other and Jaysh tracked it with his eyes. “If we can’t…,” his face winced once more at the sky, “…maybe the kryst’ll find us?”
Silence from the thistles around the general. “It could do that,” he said, his voice a little louder. “You said it never left.”
“Tha’s right,” Jaysh said, thinking to himself, I also said the thing jus stood round an’ stared at the back’a my head, an’ we both saw how that turned out. But instead of speaking this aloud, he spat his pulp at the reeds and said, “I bet you’ll need your rest either way.”
This must have struck a chord with the historian because Jaysh could hear him sinking into the vegetation beside him, rustling about with his own pack and settling in for the night.
Silence rolled out of the night like a heavy cotton pall and Jaysh was just dozing off when he heard the general say, not three paces to the left, “Young Jaysh, are you familiar with the legends and lore behind the Bottoms?”
Refusing to open his eyes, Jaysh folded his arms across his chest and said, “Is that them old tales yeh said wudn’t true?”
Serit hesitated, seemed to consider the woodsman’s words, and said, “There are those, yes—the historical legends—but there are also the religious legends. The lore passed down from our Druganian settlers.”
Rolling the word religious around his head, Jaysh said, “Like in the temples?”
Serit must have nodded, because all he said was, “Do you remember them?”
It seemed to Jaysh that he did. The memories were dusty and old and he couldn’t have given the details to save his life, but it did seem as though one of the advisers used to walk him and Brine down on holy days. It also seemed like there was an old guy inside the temple who used to shake his staff at them and tell them to be good or they’d float for eternity in the oily pits of Sira.
Chicken bones, he thought, remembering the old cuck’s staff and all its tiny white bones. When the old fella got riled—which was most of the time, Jaysh recalled—those bones used to rattle against the staff like claws on a door.
“I ‘member em,” he said, yawning hard. “What lore you talkin bout?”
Serit told him, starting with passages from the Wogol and finishing with documented accounts of what the first Druganians had seen when they pressed inside the Sway, the former detailing a time in God’s history when the banned had overloaded the pits (causing the oil inside to reach the ceiling and breech the surface) and the latter including eyewitnesses accounts of that very phenomenon occurring in the Bottoms.
In Jaysh’s mind, it was all rather hard to follow—especially with names like Eezheckial the Seer and P’falesheth the Scourged—but he did his best to keep up. Ultimately, it seemed as though the Druganian settlers believed that Sira’s pit had spilled its fluid through the floor of the Bottoms. After that, the rumors ran rampant, people claiming to hear moaning, others claiming to hear the voices of the dead rising from the mist.
Jaysh listened to all of this with as open a mind as he could muster (and might have dozed off a time or two along the way), then said, in a groggy tone of voice, “Sounds bad.”
Serit was quiet for a time, then said, “It is.”
Jaysh wiggled his tongue against a piece of vine he’d found between tooth and gum, then spat it at the air. “When I go in tomorruh…you wanna stay out here?”
Serit was quiet once more, a sure sign he was sleepy, then said, “If it is my duty to go, and if you think it is best, then…” he sighed a little, “…then I will follow you inside.” He sighed again, and this time it became a yawn. “But just you know, young Jaysh, I was quite right in what I said. No good thing has ever come from those mists—No good thing.”
Jaysh waited for more, but more never came. He rolled over on his side and let his breathing slow, thinking about his second visit to the Bottoms and the thing he’d found at its rim, the thing that wasn’t a dead goat and an ugling.
He didn’t know where his little cat-thing had gone, but he hoped she was okay.