Chapter 35
Jaysh stared at the Mela in stunned disbelief, his eyes perceiving the impossible. There at the river’s edge, in the place where the gravy-brown waters of the Mela should have been flowing against the slimy black banks of the Bottoms, the poison had returned.
Only it cain’t be, his mind told him, trying not to be outdone. It caint be cured down yonder an’ then gone sour up here.
Jaysh moved his gaze into the center of the river and saw that he was partially correct. The bulk of the greasy-black film was located in the water before him and to the west, but in the area to the east the effects of the poison were not fully realized.
He turned his head and studied the Mela to the east, watching as the glistening slick broke apart and left an uneven pattern of brown blotches on a predominantly black river. Even further to the east, the toxic sludge thinned more so and the pattern reversed itself, becoming a system of black splotches on a predominantly brown river.
Beyond that, at the place where the mists solidified and he could no longer see, the noxious substance was gone entirely.
Jaysh lowered his head to the highway of pitch cutting him off from the Bottoms to the west. He still didn’t know where it came from (other than, out of the fog to the south), but now he knew where it ended.
He stared at the place where the viscous, lumpy swatch disappeared below the inky waters of the Mela. It seemed like a huge coincidence that these two phenomena should overlap—a swath of gummy black sludge ending at the point in the river where the waters turned slick with poison—but for all he knew that was precisely what it was, a big stupid coincidence.
He scratched his beard lazily and wished Zeph was with him. Vine helped him prime the think-pump, but when it came to calming his nerves so the think-pump could work, nothing came close to holding his little friend and running his hand down her back. He could almost feel the fur and scar tissue beneath his calluses, could almost register the smooth purring of her throat and the soft warmth of her body…
Standing well back from the glistening, black tar, Serit Branmore said, “Is this it?”
Never taking his eyes from the sludge, Jaysh stepped back and squatted on all fours, his hands and knees sinking in the lesser slime that coated the Bottoms. After that, he used his toes as anchors and slid forward on the palms of his hands, moving his nose towards the sludge.
When his head was an arm’s length away, he caught a whiff of the invisible fumes rising from the tar and that was pretty much it for his olfactory experiment. The stink was worse than any odor he’d ever smelled, far worse than the odors he and Iman used to smell wafting from the healer’s chamber, back in the days when he and Iman were young and stupid and believed spying on adults—assuming that word applied to the healer—was the greatest joy ever.
“Young Jay—”
Jaysh was aware of Serit speaking, but did not understand the words. He was aware of bootfalls slopping towards him from behind, then the pressure at his shirt collar as someone hauled him back from the sludge.
“Oh, my—Breathe! Breathe, young Jaysh! Please breathe!”
Jaysh was trying, but his lungs were fighting him. They were fearful, no doubt, that he might try and inflate them with more of those heinous, killer fumes. He continued to cough and to gag and to lay on his side and eventually enough clean air entered his system.
He pushed away from the ground-mucus and struggled to his feet, a spindly hand patting at his back.
“Are you better?” the general asked. “Do you feel better now?”
Wiping tears from his eyes, Jaysh felt something long and heavy hanging from the front of his beard. He plucked at it weakly and pulled away a string of saliva as long as his forearm and as thick as a quill. Wiping it on his pants, he nodded to the general that he was fine.
“Just keep breathing,” Serit told him, “and step away from there, if you would.”
Jaysh felt the old man take hold of his arm, apparently to assist in this endeavor, but the woodsman jerked free of his grip and staggered off on his own.
Taking no offense to the slight, his attention still focused on the pathway of sludge, Serit said, “This must be the concentrated form, young Jaysh. The form it takes before being diluted by the waters of Mela.”
Doubled over by another palpable wave of lightheadedness, Jaysh said something that sounded a lot like, “…mmmgh…,” but which had sounded more like, yeah, as the word had passed before his mind.
In response to this inarticulate grunt, Serit said, “You probably shouldn’t have done that, young Jaysh.”
Jaysh lifted his head and glared at him, watching as the general turned his calculated gaze to the fading river in the west and appeared to be waiting for some enigmatic item to materialize from the clouds.
When nothing ever did, he said, “They didn’t make it…did they.”
This declaration hadn’t been framed as a question, so Jaysh felt no obligation to answer. He could have, though, now that his lungs had remembered how to function and now that it was fairly obvious that something had happened to the Mela Party.
The fact that Jaysh and Serit had reached this point ahead of Iman—traveling on foot through much of the Southern Sway and getting lost in the mists of the Bottoms—did not bode well for the captain. Still, he could not bring himself to speak the words aloud.
Lowering his head to the thoroughfare of glistening black sludge, Serit said, “They would not have missed this.”
Again, Jaysh silently agreed with the old man. Even if Iman’s party traveled on the north side of the river and could not see the trail of sludge on this side, they would have seen the changes in the river. That would have been cause to stop and investigate, and when nothing of relevance was discovered to the north, they would have crossed over at the shallows to the east and backtracked to this point.
Still frowning at the gunk, Jaysh could only shake his matted head.
Serit lifted his gaze to the overhead clouds and released a low groan of despair, the sound of all hope being siphoned from the soul, then turned to Jaysh and hit him with a look. What now? the look asked. What do we do now?
“Let’s get out’a here,” Jaysh said, making a nod towards the ghostly humps of Clodtropolis.
“Through there?” the general asked.
“Bout have to,” Jaysh said, turning north and facing the Mela. “Less’n we wanna take our chances in the river.”
Serit turned north as well and said, “Oh, I…I don’t know about that, young Jaysh.”
“Me neither,” Jaysh said, watching the poison in the east. If this were to work, they would need a suitable place to cross, and if they hoped to escape the Bottoms before nightfall, they had no time to backtrack to the shallows, which meant they were up for a swim.
He ran his eyes along the fog-line in the east. Out there, the current was tearing the lethal concoction into misshapen camouflage and carrying it to the west. From the look of it, he thought the waters would be safe to cross, but they would have to walk much farther than that if they hoped to reach the other side.
The same current that tore apart the poison would also sweep them into it. Combine that ugly truth with the general’s emaciated physique and questionable athleticism and they might never walk far enough to the east.
Less’n yeh gota drink it to die, Jaysh thought, trying to remember if the dead livestock had been drinking from the Mela or had merely stepped inside its waters. If the toxins had to be ingested, then he and Serit might be able to back into the river, assume a backstroke position—head held high—and half-float, half-kick straight through the mess.
He was still mulling the idea over when his eyes swung sidewise and caught sight of his partner, that gangly old man who could recite every king from here to Arn and back, but who probably couldn’t lift his arms over his head without first warming up.
Following his gaze, Serit said, “I’m a very weak swimmer, young Jaysh.”
“Are yeh,” Jaysh said, watching in his mind’s eye as the old man panicking halfway across the Mela and began thrashing in the poison, gargling on a mouthful of the fluid and then sinking out of sight. He shivered at the sight and lowered his eyes to the swath.
Following his gaze, Serit said, “If you are considering a walk to the other side, do keep in mind the concentration of the poison.” He pursed his lips, then relaxed them. “My boots might resist the saturation, but I worry for your footwear, young Jaysh.”
Jaysh glanced at the place in the ground-mucus where his moccasins were hiding. They were made of unlined deer hide, and he hadn’t oiled them in quite some time.
“But perhaps,” the general said, “we can leap to the other side?”
Jaysh grunted at this as well. He had already played the scenario in his mind and it ended no better than the general’s swim into darkness. He doubted the old man’s legs remembered how to run, let alone run in a basin full of slime.
“Welp,” Jaysh said, walking towards the crawfish village, “I reckon we ought’a have a look-see.”
Serit took a few reluctant steps. “Er…for what exactly?”
“The end’a this thing,” Jaysh said, gesturing to the trail beside him. “It’s gota end somewhere.”
“It does?”
“Yep,” Jaysh said. “We din’t cross it on the way in, back ‘fore we turned and come north.”
Serit brighten at this. “That is true,” he said. “It has to begin somewhere north of our earlier trajectory.” He hummed thoughtfully and Jaysh could practically hear the transition from panicked-Serit to inquisitive-Serit. “Where do you suppose it came from?”
Jaysh dropped his gaze to the tarry substance and frowned. He had no idea where something like this came from, but he didn’t want to give voice to the reality lest he reactivate the panicked-Serit. So, taking another page from Iman’s book of How to Look Smarter Than You Are, he said, “Where d’you reckon it come from?”
There came another pensive hum from the general, followed by, “Well, most subterranean oils tend to form pools after bubbling to the surface, so I don’t believe it seeped up from below. But of course, this is the Bottoms, so perhaps tend to doesn’t apply.”
Jaysh stabbed his eyes at the poison. “I doan’ reckon it bubbled up,” he said. “See them ripples jus there?” He slowed and pointed at a cluster of lumps in the glossy surface, like a smear of jam over the berry seeds. “That’s prob’ly rocks under there.”
Serit hummed that he saw them and then came to a stop.
Jaysh turned and found him staring into the hazy eternity above, the general’s troubled expression that of a man who expected rainbows and found only clouds. Serit stared a moment more, then lowered his gaze and resumed his trek. The woodsman did the same.
“Reckon something’s up there,” Jaysh said, pointing a hand to the clouds.
Serit sighed despondently. “Oh, I was open to the possibility,” he said. “It was quite a walk down the side of the basin, and there is quite an abundance of mist hanging overhead.”
Jaysh glanced at the abundance. “You see anythin up there?”
“No,” Serit said, “but there were a few times I thought I heard something up there. It sounded like banners flapping in the wind, or a large mass passing through the air. Each time I looked, though, I saw only wisps of smoke and the illusion of shadow.”
When nothing else followed, Jaysh gestured to the trail of sludge and said, “You doan’ think an imp made this? A flyer, maybe?”
“If an imp or ugling made this,” Serit explained, “I can assure you we’d have seen more than smoke and shadows, but on a more salient note…,” he trailed off and cleared his throat, “…I have issue with the composition of the trail. If you look at the sides, young Jaysh, you see there is no splatter about them.”
Staring at the smooth lip of the swath, Jaysh said, “Yeah.”
“And,” Serit went on, “the swath itself seems to be following a rather straight trajectory.” He gave his throat a thoughtful clearing. “I dare say that if you and I were to pour a bucket of molasses on the ground from, oh…let’s say the castle parapets…do you believe we could be half as precise as this, what with air currents and muscular aberrations being what they are?”
Growing more and more intrigued by this line of reasoning, Jaysh opened his mouth to ask about that last big word—the one about a bear’s muscles—but before his tongue had time to form the question, he spied something new coming toward them from the fog.
From behind him, Serit said, “I can tell you, young Jaysh, the answer is no. The molasses would spread from one end of the castle to the—OH MY GOODNESS!”
Advancing forward in a crouch, Jaysh cocked his head back and shushed the old man, doing so without taking his eyes from the thing materializing in the south. He kept his head like that for several more paces, sending an unspoken message to the general that he had no qualms about shushing him a second time or about traipsing back there and swatting him over the head.
Serit did not need further encouragement. He held both his tongue and his bootfalls.
There yeh go, Jaysh thought, turning his head back around. Cause if’n this thing here turns out to be what I think it is…
Jaysh took one more weak-kneed step and then stopped. He’d moved close enough to see that the enormous mass taking shape in the fog was not a troll. It was a giant hillock of mud clods, one that stood three times taller than the matted hairs on his head.
He tipped back his head and assessed the composition. The sloping walls of the knoll were made of clods as big as Mums’ head, each one ostensibly dredged up from below and stacked upon the other, and the grisly opening in the northern face of the mound was tall enough for the titanic ambassador to go striding in without having to worry about getting the god-awful slime on her mane.
Not that she ever would.
For one thing, there was no way to tell where the floor of the giant burrow led, only that it descended into the ground like a ramp to the Bad Place. For another, the floor of the burrow was covered in the thick, black poison Jaysh and his partner had followed from the Mela.
This is it, he thought. This is it.
He watched the dark and gummy trail sloping down like the diseased tongue of a leaper, then he ran around to the rear of massive burrow and swept his eyes along the mucus-coated ground. There was no sign of the noxious trail back there, no sign at all.
Yep, he thought, moving back to the cave-like entrance. This here’s it.
He turned and surveyed the lesser burrows in the colony, looking for one that might serve his purpose. Spying one in the east, he trotted after it like a man possessed.
“Over here,” he hissed, waving for the old man to follow. He picked up the pace and never broke stride until he was sliding behind a waist-high burrow.
Moments later, Serit came ambling into view and fell in beside him, legs kicking in the slime as he said, “Young Jaysh, just what do you think you’re doing?”
Jaysh placed a finger to his lips and told him to shush.