Chapter 28
As Jaysh awoke the next morning and gathered his things—which, suspiciously enough, were not scattered all over creation as they had been while in the presence of the kryst—he discovered that he’d been right about the Bottoms.
The sun was up, the Sway was shining, and the rolling vapors above the muddy sinkhole had changed from a perpetual wall of darkness to an innocent bank of fog.
He slung his pack and bow over a shoulder, roused Serit from his fitful slumber, and tottered down for a closer look.
Halfway down the incline, at roughly the same place where the grass gave way to mud and he had slipped the previous night, he could see the fog losing its density. By the time he’d skidded to a stop at its ghostly edge, he could tell the laws of nature were once more in adherence: opaque from afar, dissipation up close.
“We’re good,” he said, motioning for Serit to follow, then taking two steps down the slope and stopping to repeat the motion.
Further up the slope, his shivering companion did not move, his haunted eyes fixed on the gliding curtain of white.
“It’s not like last night,” Jaysh told him. “We’ll be able to see.” Without waiting for the general, he turned and picked his way down the slope. After a time, he heard Serit doing the same, then a curt, “Ohhh—” as the fog began to do its thing to the old man’s flesh.
Perhaps the process lost some of its effect after the first occurrence, because Jaysh didn’t find the penetrating freeze nearly as unsettling as he had the previous night. It still felt wrong to him—at least initially, it did—but after a few moments inside, the bitter cold went away and the vapors were no colder or warmer than the autumn fogs over Blue Hole.
“Cold goes away,” he called, speaking over his shoulder.
“I should hope so,” Serit muttered, sounding perfectly miserable.
Jaysh took a few more steps, noticed the fog displacement at his feet and how it varied from place to place, then added, “Watch your step.”
Moments ago, he could see his moccasins in the mud, but now there was only a stream of cloud below the knees. If the general were to lose his footing now, and come crashing into the back of him, there was no telling where the two of them would stop.
Jaysh skidded a little further, cognizant of the Serit’s voice growing faint behind his head—“Oh, my goodness. Young Jaysh, how in His name will we ever—Oh! Oh, my! My, my, my—My boots! My boots are going!”—but he ignored him and focused on the mist. The mist was where the action would be.
He felt the muddy bank leveling out beneath his feet and watched as the area of visibility expanded from an arm’s length to about three or four paces into the distance. It was barely enough room to keep from walking up your partner’s backside (or sliding into it, as seemed to be the case behind him), but he could see, in a manner of speaking. Or rather, he could if there was anything to see.
Jaysh stood there listening to the gentle mmp, mmp of his heart pulsing in his ears, the only other sound besides those of the general boots on the slope of the hill. He panned his head back and forth and waited for the fog to reveal more of the land. It never did.
He was getting the distinct impression that there was nothing down here. No rocks, no tress, no black and misshapen stumps. As far as the eye could see—which wasn’t very far, admittedly—the whole of the Bottoms appeared to be one vast tract of flat, smooth mud.
He cocked an ear forward and listened for the sound of moaning spirits and yipping fiends, for the sound of hooked claws raking at the soil and tearing loose the ground.
He heard nothing.
Jaysh considered Serit’s fears from the previous night, those regarding the Bottoms being an evil pit where the souls of the banned haunted and the minion of Sira prowled. He could not help but shake his head.
Despite the religious lore passed down through the generations, and despite the many historical documents regarding ugling attacks that Serit had allegedly read in the hallowed halls of the royal library, Jaysh no longer believed the Bottoms were evil.
Until he looked down, that was.
Somehow, due either to the impairing effects of the fog or to the anxious focus of his gaze, he had not noticed the details of the ground. He noticed them now, though. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop noticing them.
In a way, they reminded him of the swamps in the Gabatween, those marshy lowlands that lie to the west of the kingdom. He had never been there personally, but he’d heard about them, and he imagined this was what they looked like…minus the vegetation…and the wildlife…and of course the water.
It was something like water, he supposed. He could see it down there on the ground, covering every quadrant of the basin floor. Only it was thicker than most pools he had seen. It was blacker, too.
He knelt down, but made no move to touch the stuff. Its gelid surface reminded him of the afterbirth he had seen in the Sway, left behind by some mother after she dropped her calf in the reeds and, obviously, before that mother turned round to eat filthy gunk.
It didn’t come this way, he thought. The kryst wouldn’t have come this way.
He glanced down at the muddy banks on either side. Somewhere along the way, the dead bodies of the biters had petered off and disappeared. They had either grown tired of killing themselves against the kryst or the kryst had slaughtered the entire pack. In either event, only the loaf-sized depressions of the statue’s footprints gave evidence of its passage.
Jaysh watched them as they made a path down the hill and entered the sickly black ooze. He might have suspected the creature of vanishing before setting foot in the mess—goodness knew, he would have—but there was half a track at the rim of the sludge, as though the creature had stepped right inside.
He tracked his eyes beyond the half-print, moving them along the surface of the goo. The prints were deep, as he well knew (he’d been tripping over them ever since he’d begun to trail the kryst), but there was no sign of them beneath the slime.
He moved his eyes to the slime directly beneath his chin, analyzing it. Even if he could see the footprints beneath the surface, or even if he’d stood here and watched the kryst wander out until it was neck-deep, that didn’t mean he and Serit could duplicate the feat. The inky gunk might be acid, or poison.
He pulled out his knife and tapped the point in the slime. The tip sank in like a steak knife in the side of a blood pudding. He pulled the blade back to his face and sniffed it. It didn’t smell toxic, despite its appearance.
He moved the blade back to the rim and slowly drove the point into the lake of mucus. Before the hilt reached the surface, the point struck something below. It was soft, and a little added pressure drove the point deeper, so he assumed it was the mud upon which he stood.
He withdrew the blade, checked the tip, and sure enough there were traces of brown mire beneath the blacker globs of plasma.
Well, that’s a good sign, he thought, sliding his moccasin forward and edging the toe into the lip of the mucus. He tapped the toe of the leather into the sticky mire and pulled back, elevating the tainted edge. He waited for the animal hide to smolder or burn or develop maggots and worms, but it did none of these things.
He tapped at the residue with his finger, got just a few daubs of the stuff on his index finger, and waited for the explosion of pain, or for blisters to form and to pop.
It didn’t happen. It felt cold, and damp (as was expected), but there were no adverse effects from prolonged contact.
He wiped his finger and blade on his shoe and sheathed the latter. He stood to his feet and dropped a moccasin in the goo. The black afterbirth rose over the sides, almost to his exposed ankle, but nothing happened. He brought his other foot forward and set it down, this time the mucus was deeper and rose to the white flesh between his moccasin and pant leg. There was the sensation of cold and damp on his skin, and then it faded.
He was starting to feel pretty good about their chances…and
heard a gasp from behind him. He spun around and saw Serit standing at the base of the ravine, gawking at him.
“It’s okay,” Jaysh said, raising his hands and waving for the general to calm down. It wasn’t helping.
Serit’s mouth closed for an instant, then popped back open. “What…is…THAT!” he demanded, pointing at the tarry soup. “What—Why…Why are you out there?”
“Kryst came out here,” Jaysh said, pointing his own finger at the foot prints leading to the gooey rim. “But it’s okay. I think it’s just…,” afterbirth from Sira’s Pit, came to mind, but aloud he said, “…oil. Like lantern oil”
Serit curled his ample mustache. “It looks like snail slime,” he said, his sneer lessening. “Only it’s black.”
Jaysh looked at his feet, both of them submerged in the slop. “I know,” he said. “But it don’t hurt none. Come on.”
Serit looked like the woodsman had asked him to leap to his death. His eyes went to the trail of heavy prints in the muddy slope. “How is that a viable option?” he asked. “We can’t track the kryst from in there.”
Jaysh, who had already thought of this, slid his feet through the oily goop and stopped directly in front of the half-print at the edge of the slime, the last print left by the crystal protector.
“Yeah, we can,” he said. “You can feel the tracks in the mud. You jus’ got’a go slow is all.”
Serit no longer looked appalled, but there was still a good deal of detestation in his eyes. He looked down at the edge of the motionless, wet sludge and stared. His head began to shake very slowly.
“You got boots on,” Jaysh observed, and this seemed to help. Serit let his shoulders fall and took a step into the shallow lake of slime. He made a face, uttered a guttural, “Eyuhhhg,” and kept coming. Jaysh turned and led him further from the shore.
After a few tentative steps, Serit said, from behind him, “What if it gets deeper?”
“We stop,” Jaysh said, having thought of that as well. “But if the kryst came out here, I don’t think it will.”
“You still feel its footprints?”
“Yeah,” Jaysh said. “Don’t you?”
“Ehhhh…yes. I suppose.” A moment of silence passed. “You’ll tell me when you can’t feel them, will you not?”
“Yeah,” Jaysh said, gliding from one massive print to the next. “Sure will.”
But even as he said it, he didn’t think there would ever be a cause to do so. The tracks were so deep, and the trail so straight, there was no chance of him losing the path…which was why, much later that morning—after plunging so far into the Bottoms that backtracking was no longer an option—he was utterly shocked to feel the kryst’s trail go cold.
“Is something the matter?” Serit asked, responding to the woodsman’s sudden stop in the goo.
Jaysh forced himself not to look down. To do so would be a dead giveaway that his thoughts were on the prints. He slid his feet to the left, mimed listening to the fog, then slid back to the right and did the same. He felt no sign of the kryst’s prints along the way.
“Jus’ listening,” he said, cocking his head over his shoulder. “Thought I heard something.” But this, as it turned out, was the absolute wrong thing to say.
“Like what?” the general asked, his boots slopping quickly in wild, erratic steps. “What did it sound like?”
“The kryst,” Jaysh said. “Like the kryst. It wudn’t a bad sound.”
“Oh,” Serit said, his boots slowing to a stop. “Oh, well, that’s…that’s a relief.”
“Yeah,” Jaysh said, skidding out to the east again and feeling for a place in the mud where the kryst might have landed after hopping into the air. He had never seen the creature leap before, but in light of current events he was open to the possibility.
He skated about for several long moments, steadily expanding his perimeter a little at a time, hoping he didn’t miss one of the depressions where a gargantuan foot had come down, but in the end he felt nothing. No dip. No rise.
He stood panting in the goop, staring back the way they’d come. Serit was starting to sound worried again. Jaysh couldn’t see him for the fog, but he could hear the man brushing at the place on his chest where his medals had been, dancing in place, clearing his throat.
From behind him, disembodied in the fog, the general’s voice said, “Young Jaysh?”
Jaysh winced, but did not look over. “Yeah,” he answered.
“Young Jaysh,” Serit continued, his tone level, “can you still feel the kryst’s footprints in the mud?”
Glancing down at the place in the fog where his faded brown pants vanished in the soup, Jaysh turned east and continued to march.
“Nope,” he said.
Serit hummed thoughtfully. “Me either,” he confirmed, his boots hastening to keep up. “A moment ago, I slid my boots from side to the side, in quite a great arc, and the tracks were no longer there. What, um…What do you suppose that means?”
Swishing his hand through clinging tendrils of mist, Jaysh said, “I ain’t fer sure…but I reckon it means they ain’t there.”
There was a pregnant pause behind him, one bulging with fear (if not swollen with panic), and the general said, “Oh.”
Jaysh heard an unspoken question in that oh, but he ignored it. He knew that if he answered that unspoken question—telling the general that they were following their noses and hoping to get lucky—the old man was sure to conceive his gestating fright.
If that were to happen, there were certain woodsmen who were apt to be grabbed and manhandled and, as a result, distracted from hearing the kryst. Bearing this in mind, Jaysh decided to answer the unspoken question with a minor half-truth.
“Last I felt of em,” he said, referring to the footprints of the kryst, “they was headed this direction.”
“I see,” Serit said, his voice an octave too high. “So am I to understand that…right now…there is no longer a trail?”
Jaysh shook his head. “Kryst’s up here,” he said, knowing that he had no proof to support this claim and that, even if it were up here, the chances of it being directly in front of them were next to nothing.
Serit made some throat noises and said, “Is there, um…Is there a chance it turned around, perhaps? Circled back to the Sway?”
“Huh-uh,” Jaysh said. “Would’a bumped into us.”
“Oh,” Serit said, and again it was that doubtful oh, the oh without conviction, the oh that would eventually raise its ugly head and bite the woodsman on the backside. “What if it’s, um…if it made a rather large circle?”
With his panic on the rise, Jaysh felt his temper begin to slip. He spat a streamer of black at the air and said, “Why would it?”
“I…I’m…I’m not, uhhh…entirely—”
“It knew where the Sway was,” Jaysh said, thinking out loud. “Ain’t no reason to swing wide.”
“Yes, well, it…it was just a thought. I assumed it didn’t disappear,” Serit said.
“Uh-huh” Jaysh said, sounding as though he wasn’t so sure.
“One last question?” Serit asked, apologetically.
Jaysh grunted for him to go ahead.
“Are we lost?”
Jaysh shifted his vine from one cheek to the other, exhaled slowly, then opened his mouth. What he planned to say was something along the lines of, Cain’t get lost in a sinkhole, or maybe, Jus’ be thankful we ain’t neck deep in biters, but what he did instead was stop and turn to the north, staring into the impenetrable fog and opening wide his bloodshot eyes.
In his periphery, he saw Serit materialize from the haze. He turned north as well.
“What is—”
“Shhh!”
Serit took a step back.
“Listen,” Jaysh whispered. “Yeh hear it?”
Serit shook his head.
“It’s up a-ways,” Jaysh said, moving in the direction of the disturbance. “A long ways,” he added, advancing
on the noise and listening as high-pitched vibrations became light and melodic tones, something like wet chimes playing in the dew.
He listened a little longer, then broke into a trot