Chapter 34
“Mums! Mums, you in there!”
Mums rolled to her feet and lumbered to the window, her imagination having gone wild with imagery. She just knew the slithering creature from Eastpost had taken hold of Reetsle. She saw it in her mind’s eyes as clearly as she saw Iman Janusery stepping out of her way.
The halfling had been making his false trail through the soaking colony, paying no mind to where he was or what he was doing, and the slithering creature had come from out of nowhere and snatched him from the water. It had hoisted him up in one enormous hand and was now doing to him the horrible thing she had witnessed at the corral.
But no, she thought. I can hear him splashing in the water. He might be pursued, but he is not captured.
She stopped at the window and laid a hand to the sill, aware of a peculiar sensation crackling through her center, something like the static electricity that built along her fur during the winter cycles. It was sparking and leaping and causing her insides to feel light and disjointed.
It struck her that the halfling’s cries—Mums! Hey, Mums! Mumsy!—were cutting through her head like rusty knives, and wasn’t the spongy wood against her thigh sending needles of energy through the surface of her flesh? She slipped a hand into the gut-white vines covering the window and felt a wave of crawling skin travel the length of his arm.
“MUMS!” the halfling cried, his wet footfalls ceasing just outside. “JANU’ERY?”
Why is he yelling? Mums fumed, pushing back the tendrils and shielding her eyes. This one’s banging on the walls. That one’s playing town crier. Did we not sit at the banks of this very bog and hatch this plan together? What do they think is going on?
But that was just it. The two of them didn’t know what was going on. They had not seen what she saw last night and they did not know what the slithering creature had in store for all those it caught.
Reminding herself that she needed to enlighten them to the precarious nature of their situation—once she had them together and once they were safely locked away in this second–story bedchamber—she leaned her massive head through the window and peered down at the sloshing street of black.
The halfling wasn’t there, only a sheet of bobbing, ebon water.
She stared at it for a moment, confusion welling in her mind, then heard the splashing of twisted legs moving through the foyer. She withdrew her head from the window and the splashing ceased, replaced by the whoosh of displaced water and the thud of the front door closing on its frame, all of this followed by the soft thunk of a crossbar being dropped into place.
She winced at each and every noise, grimly pleased that he was no longer yelling, and decided that there was no time like the present. As soon as he made his way to their bedroom hideout, she would disclose to both of her partners the hideous truth about their pursuer. Maybe then they would take this operation seriously.
She turned to face the entryway, letting the vines squish back into place across the glass-less, pane-less window, and noticed that Iman had vacated the room.
She stopped listening to the footfalls of the halfling as he rushed blindly through the saturated rooms below and let her ears travel along the upper levels. She listened for the thump of displaced drawers or the scrape of rotten furniture, but heard neither of these sounds. She would have to track down the irresponsible captain once Reetsle arrived, but for now at least one of them was being quiet.
Below her, the halfling was on the move. With the front door secured, she could hear him splashing through the dining room, hesitating as he peeked inside the kitchen, then the sitting room, then backtracking through the foyer to the musty staircase.
Unlike Mums, he never hesitated at the foot of the stairs. He pounded up the rickety steps like a halfling possessed, moving so fast that he skidded in the black sludge layering the hall and slid right passed the chamber door. She watched him and his oversized battle-axe go gliding a few paces down the corridor, then come scrambling back inside the room.
“It’s here!” Reetsle yammered, stabbing a finger at the window and doubling over for breath. “I heard it—heard it down yonder.”
Mums glanced at the vine-covered window and stepped away.
“Yeh hear it?” he gasped, hobbling towards her through the room. “Tha’s our boy, ain’t it?”
Mums thought that it was, but rather than confirm this, she filled her lungs with air and emptied them very slowly.
“Your voice, Reetsle,” she said, politely. “Please lower it.”
She turned back to the window and poked a finger through the tendrils, moving one brown, apple-sized eye to the gap and peering out at the colony.
The street-waters below, where Reetsle had stood jumping up and down and screaming for his partners, were very slowly reverting to their previous tranquility. The waters at the eastern rim of Elnor, however, were starting to ripple with movement, and she could hear the cause of those ripples crashing its way towards them.
She still didn’t know what the creature looked like, but she could tell it was big. It sounded like a massive oak falling into the water, only the closer the thing came, the less it sounded like single tree and the more it sounded like three distinct trees striking at the bog.
Mums closed her eyes and listened and the sounds changed as they advanced. The first and second eruption sounded like boulders being dropped into the morass and the third sounded more like a wave crashing on a shore. The pattern repeating itself in the air, a pair of striking splashes then a slow and steady whoosh of displaced water. She opened her eyes and exhaled.
“It’s here,” she said.
“I knew it!” Reetsle bawled. “I knew I heard the th—!”
Mums spun on him like a ravenous bear. “Lower your voice!” she hissed, and watched as the halfling not only lowered his voice, but took several steps back from her, the look in his blue and brown eyes a kind of subdued fury.
Mums felt the pins-and-needles electricity settle down and a cold phantom of regret washing in to take its place, followed swiftly by a mountain of oppressive guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It’s my nerves. They’re…,” she trialed off, inhaling deeply, then exhaling slowly, “…I shouldn’t have snapped like that.”
Reetsle gave her an appraising look, appeared to be assessing her proximity more so than her apology, then shrugged.
“Doan’ worry bout it,” he said, swiping a hand through the air and acting like it was no big deal. Mums might have believed him, too, had she not seen the fury still smoldering in his eyes. “How close is it?”
Mums turned back to the gap in the vines and let her eyes unfocus, listening to the splash…splash… whooosh at the eastern rim. She began to nod slowly, almost resolutely.
“It will pass by soon,” she said, fixing him with her wet brown eyes. “We need to warn Iman.”
Reetsle grabbed a stool by the door, one slick with slime and missing its back, and dragged it to the window.
“I think he’s just down the hall,” Mums said. “If you’ll go and retrieve him, I’ll monitor the creature.”
Propping the stool against the wall, Reetsle said, “You fetch im—I’ll listen.”
Mums stiffened. “Reetsle, you know you can’t—” hear as well as I can was what she meant to say, but that half of the sentence seized in her throat as the sound of displaced water sped up in her ears. Outside the window, the languid, splash…splash…whoosh had changed into a frantic splash-splash-whoosh, splash-splash-whoosh, splash-splash...
She turned to the window and felt as though her insides were running out her toes. Had it heard them speaking? Could it sense the trail growing fresher? Was that even possible in two hands of ground water?
“Never mind,” she said. “There’s no time.”
Reetsle said nothing, but she felt him climb atop his stool and weasel in beside her, felt the vines slither in place as he made a split in the living curtain. <
br />
Together, they peered out at the black and the brown of the swamp, out at the edge of the colony where the open streets of Elnor gave way to looming cypress of the Dell. There, the ebon waters of the bog were rising and falling and sending bowing waves of black out from the trapezoidal trunks.
The first of these waves drifted into the streets of the colony, struck the side of a roofless home, and rebounded to the source. Before it could travel full-circle, though, two more rippling lines rolled out of the wooden stalagmites and plowed straight through it, these two coming in quicker succession than the first and standing taller as well.
Mums felt her breathing slow as she watched the pattern persist, each set of waves coming closer on the heels of the last and each set rising a little higher than those before them. Soon the waters of the Dell were frothing and churning with activity, lily pads lifting, street-waters foaming, branches and wall-planks floating off through the colony.
With a tremendous crash, something long and white threw itself out of the stumps and vines and dived below the water—Splash!
Mums started despite herself and knocked Reetsle from the stool. She heard him strike the floor behind her (letting out a curse upon impact), but she did not turn to check on him. She could not turn to check on him. No more than she could sprint down the corridor and warn the captain to be still.
Her eyes were nailed to the abomination extending from the waters. It had submerged its head below the surface, but the rest of it stuck up like a colorless pillar of meat and disappeared into the trees. She thought it looked like a sallow neck, but she needed to see more of the thing to be certain. She needed to keep her nerve the next time it moved.
Before it could, though, a second long ashen beam threw itself out of the lily pads not six paces from the first. It buried its head in the water as well (Splash!) and then went still.
From just behind the wall of trunks and horse-hair mosses, a massive whooshing sound filled the air of the colony. With it, something huge came pressing through the vines and branches, something indistinct in the vegetation, but with that same corpse-like hue as the vertical shafts protruding to either side.
One of the beams pulled loose of the water and threw itself forwards, the one on the other side followed suit, and it was then that Mums saw the fingers at the ends of each shaft. The beams were arms, and as one of them ripped free of the water and lurched across the muck, she saw the mass of white behind the trees crash a little farther into the open. The arm on the left did the same, shivering slightly from the strain, and the white mass came crashing through the vines.
Mums wasn’t sure the tissue between the two arms was a torso, but the thing affixed atop the tissue was definitely not a head. It looked like the drooping boughs of a fully-developed weeping willow, only instead of leafy green boughs, these boughs brought forth a cascade of black, corn-silk hair.
At her elbow, Reetsle leaned out the window and muttered a curse to Rendel.
Without speaking—without looking—Mums placed a hand on the halfling’s headgear and drew him back inside. She wanted to do more. She wanted to twist his little face around and scream, See! Do you see! That’s the thing I saw! That’s it! And if you think that’s something, wait until you see what it can do!
Instead, she raised her cudgel and cradled it in her arms. She watched the creature move and felt his insides squirmed. There was just something about the way it dragged itself through the water that made her uneasy, as though it either didn’t have legs or its legs were without feeling.
She scanned the rear of the thing for legs and saw something like an ivory shoal of sand peeking up from the water. If that were a leg, it was clearly along for the ride. The actual mobility was based solely upon the industry of the arms.
Or humps, she corrected herself, remembering the three shadowy humps she’d observed at Eastpost, the two on the outside and the one in the center. She thought about the bobbing motion that pursed them out of Eastpost and realized the outer humps had been the creature’s shoulders and center hump its wilting head, as one arm thrusting forward and dropping the shoulder, the other arm curled under the body and raised a shoulder. Watching this in the light of day, she couldn’t wait for the creature to disappear around the mansion.
But would it? she wondered, glancing at the street where she’d watched the halfling start the false trail. Did Reetsle have time to finish?
Studying the crawler’s progress, she saw the creature was still three blocks away and following their real trail. She wouldn’t know anything until the creature travelled another two blocks. Two very long blocks, she added, hugging her cudgel and praying to the fates.
The crawler crossed the first block and Mums could see the hair on its head creeping down its spine, could see the roadmap of its vascular system showing through it doughy skin, squiggling blue veins, dark black arteries.
Can I see the other thing? she wondered. Can I see the thing I don’t want to see?
She lowered her eyes to what little of the thing’s stomach she could see. There at the lower torso and upper abdomen, she spied the queer vertical lines running down from the sternum and disappearing in the water. They were swollen and gray and stuck out from the rest of the creature like the tissue of a scar.
She wasn’t aware of her lungs seizing in her chest, but she saw the memory in her head with crystal clarity. She saw the dark of the previous night and the light of twinkling stars. She saw her shaggy paw swatting Bloodhair on the rump and sending Reetsle on his way. She saw Iman finish his marksmanship and follow the halfling into the west.
The crawler broke from the corral and veered towards them, the black of its body undulating against the charcoal of the sky, and then it just stopped on that last rise beside the pens, rose up on those colonnade-like arms and spilled forth something from the center of its body, something dark and cylindrical and shaped like a log. Only…
Only she knew it was a man. She knew because of the way the poor soul thrashed in reeds and screamed at the stars, screaming like he’d been set ablaze.
And that’s where he came from, she thought. From that gray slit in its belly, from that sideways mouth in the stomach of—
“Hey.”
Mums jumped and looked down, finding Reets shaking one of her arms.
“Yeh seein this?” he asked, releasing her arm and turning to the yard. Mums followed his gaze and felt her insides clench.
The crawler, instead of veering beside the manor and following after the false trail, was almost at the front door of the estate. It wasn’t possible, and yet…and yet she could see the white reef of its tail protruding from beneath the porch, rising from the water.
But how? she raged. How can this be?
She leaned back from the window, dropped her gaze to the halfling, and mouthed the words: Did you finish the trail?
Reetsle made a nasty face and mouthed, Yeah!
Mums pointed a finger through the muck-covered wall panels at the crawler beyond and raised both hands to her side, palms to the ceiling.
Reetsle shook his head and shrugged. He tapped a finger to his chest to indicate himself, then raised the hand between them and walked his index and middle finger through the air, pointing to the side of the mansion to indicate his false trail.
Mums nodded that she understood the message and leaned her head out the window. She made it about halfway, not quite far enough to see the thing’s tail still rising from the ichor, and the rotting bedroom in which she stood jerked sharply to one side, the planks shifting, the walls shuddering.
Wheeling back from the window, she raised her hands for balance and watched the halfling do the same, or watched him try. He went down in a heap of arms and legs and double edged battle-axe, but he was back on his feet in no time, staring at her with a puzzled scowl.
She peeked her head outside once more, knowing it had to be the crawler, but not knowing how. The blow had felt like the arm of a siege weapon striking the fron
t of the mansion and she strongly doubted that even a creature as large as the crawler cou—
Between the cracks in the gut-vines, she watched as something pasty and round slung back into view—was that an elbow?—and then the room was dancing out from under her once more. She swung her arms for balance and shot out a foot for support, aware of the ceiling spitting wood and the walls spewing fungus.
She caught a blur of movement behind her and saw the halfling in her periphery. He had a hand on the door jam and was kicking at a half-rotted pair of pants wrapped around his ankle. Freeing his boot of the musty garment, he sprang into the hall and raced to the left.
Mums lumbered after him, reaching the corridor and taking two steps before another sledgehammer blast took her knees out from under her. She careened into the wall and felt pieces of wood and plaster littering her mane. She pushed off the wall and carried on, bearing down on the halfling just ahead of her, his boots slipping in the black sludge and one hand braced against the wall.
She took two great strides, pulled almost parallel with the stumbling adviser, and felt a hand grab her from behind.