Chapter 39
It was only a far-off squishing noise from deep within the burrow, but you would have thought it was the marching footfalls of Sira’s unholy army by the way Jaysh flipped around in the slime and went scrambled to his knees; mucus went flying, clods tore free, his pack slung sideways and struck the general in the face.
He glanced beside him at the general and frowned at the diminishing light. Even without a sun and sky, he could tell that dusk was upon them. He was sitting directly beside the military leader and even now he was having trouble making out the position of his eyelids. He leaned a little closer and saw they were closed.
Thank the stars in Glory, he thought.
He turned his attention back to the giant, two-story mound. He didn’t know what was about to happen, or what he was going to do when it did—he wasn’t even sure he had heard anything coming out of that enormous burrow, not when he was half-sleep at the time—but if something were about to happen, it would be infinitely more pleasant with the general asleep.
He lifted his head over the crest of his concealment and peered across the fog. From the great mound in the distance, no sound issued to his ears.
He frowned at the near darkness settling in the Bottoms and scratched absently at his elbow. He wondered if he had dreamed the noise in his half-sleep, or if Serit’s breathing had come out as a wet snore.
He stopped scratching his elbow and sank down until only his eyes and the top of his head crested the concealment. When he’d trotted over here and slipped behind this pile of mud, he hadn’t known his hunch would pan out. He’d simply trusted his instincts and found himself a place to sit and observe.
If he had to be honest, it was more than intuition that drew him to set watch behind the mud. It was the ten ages he’d spent living in the sticks of Jashandar and experiencing Mother Nature on a first hand basis. Because if there was one thing he could say about Mother Nature, it was this: When the old woman took to painting on the canvas of life, she did so with wild and messy strokes.
But not this trail, he thought, staring to the right and studying the trajectory of both long, straight sides. Nothin wald ‘bout this thing…It’s jus’ messy.
As if in agreement with this sticky assessment, a slow gurgle began to emanate from deep within the burrow.
A jolt of energy shot through the woodsman and he sat up once more, his right ear cocked at what he now knew to be real. The sound rippled the air once more, this time louder, and closer, and reminding him of noise he’d once heard in the Forest of the Shun.
He recalled the cool spring day with a vivid clarity, the raucous clatter of hatchets that originally drew his attention, the subsequent crackle of timber as one of the Shun’s finest made its way to the ground.
Intrigued by the ruckus—and with nothing better to do since the ruckus had frightened away his game—he hiked north to the disturbance and discovered a vast company of men logging the eastern rim of the Shun; Some working either end of the long saws, others hacking off limbs, still others piling the branches in heaps.
The ones he watched most, though, were the one harnessing logs to the workhorses and hauling them to the Sway. These men used long, metal poles to roll the timbers over thick, brown ropes, tying the ropes across the timbers and securing the lines to the horses, whipping the poor beasts until they dragged the logs to a destination outside the forest.
In the process, Jaysh noticed the forest floor had turned to soup. With the spring thaw only a few weeks old and the horses stamping at the ground, it had turned to soup in quite a hurry…and was now making a very peculiar sound.
As the team of loggers drove their pry bars beneath the timbers and forced them over the lines, the churned and runny ground was making a gristly, flatulent noise that reminded him of a rolling pin being smooshed across a handful of frog’s eggs.
Tha’s what I’m hearin, he thought, sinking a little lower behind the burrow. Somethin big’s movin ‘cross the scum.
From inside the enormous den, another juicy ripple echoed from its bowels, so close on this occurrence that he half-expected to see more of the sludge spewing from the oval, or maybe a cloud of fog carried out across the bottom on a rolling current of air…
Instead, the movement was beside him in the corner of his eye. He turned to see Serit staring up at him, his eyes poached and his features taut. He was still crouched in a ball against the side of their hideout—his spidery limbs pulled tight around his shivering body—but he now had one long and quavering finger to his lips and was miming the shushing gesture that Jaysh had been making most of the day.
Jaysh nodded and returned the gesture, an unspoken message passed between them as he pointed at the colossal warren in the foggy, darkening distance.
Serit didn’t turn to look. By now, even his old ears could hear the wet rolling sounds traveling up from the ground. He nodded and shrank back into a ball, his arm wrapping back around his knees and his eyes fixed firmly on the woodsman.
Jaysh let the general be and peeked over the top of his mud blind, aware that the flatulence inside was no longer a series of separate gurgles, but one long and never-ending raspberry ripping in the gloom—And ain’t there somethin movin round in there?
He thought that there was, and felt himself shrinking like his learned companion, his shoulder hunching so low that he felt a little like that hunchback who held council with Reets, his head ducking so low that he felt the whiskers of his chin touching down in the slime.
Something thin and white wriggled out of the darkness and into the mist, lingering there for an instant and then shivering back down. Jaysh watched this strange motility and his mind filled with images of worms and snakes and other squirming creatures. He felt a sudden urge to hide take control of his mind and readily put the urge into action.
Huddling down beside his bug-eyed partner, he lowered his voice and said, “Somethin’s comin out’a there, so doan’—”
A wave of noxious fumes billowed over the concealment and Jaysh went down, his body clenched like a fist and his tongue clogging the back of throat. He was aware of gagging—stomach knotted, eyes shut—but he was unaware of anything exiting his mouth; nor was he aware of the ground mucus coating one half of his beard and head or the pain in his hip flaring to life like a bonfire.
When the nausea passed and the gagging was over, he right himself against the burrow and sat panting for air, no longer worried about giving away his position, but focusing solely on the respiration process: deep inhalation, deep exhalation, pause to wipe tears from the corners of his eyes.
On the other side of the concealment, the squishing noises rang unobstructed in his ears. He could tell by the clarity alone that whatever was responsible for those sounds was now clear of its lair.
He placed a hand to the mud clods—steadying himself with an arm that did not, itself, feel steady—and lifted his eyes above the den.
The squirming things were writhing about on the outside the burrow, dancing about the length of the sludge in the same ebbing pattern he’d seen before: snaking forward two or three paces, then slithering back one.
As far as identifying the creatures, though, his mind drew a blank. He could see they were too long to be worms and too smooth to be snakes, but outside of those observations, the dying light of day offered no clues.
As for the huge, gray mass emerging from the burrow, he could see that without hindrance. It stood as tall and wide as the old dung wagons that used to frequent the stables…but it moved like no wagon he had ever seen. It scooted forward a few paces, hesitated as the wriggling things advanced and retracted ahead of it, then slid forward a few paces more.
He was still piecing the two movements together, searching for some revelatory pattern between the gray mass and the white wrigglers, when another rancid gust rolled out from the burrow.
Jaysh caught only a whiff of the odor and collapsed behind the clods, holding his breath and scrunching his eyes and w
aiting for the worst to pass him by…only, on this occasion, there wasn’t a worst.
The potency of first wave, it seemed, had been due to a buildup within the burrow. This second encounter wasn’t bad at all. It stung his eyes and irritated his nose, but it was nothing a set of closed eyelids and a sleeve across the mouth couldn’t handle.
Taking advantage of this, he filled his lungs to capacity and lifted his eyes above the mound. It was only then, as his eyes fixed hotly on the thing that was not a dung wagon, that the urge to vomit overtook him, not because of what he smelled, but because of what he saw.
His mind screamed slug, but that descriptor applied only to the base of the creature. That part was gelatinous and white and legless and slimy, but the rest of the creature resembled no slug Jaysh had ever seen.
In his limited repertoire of literary references, the only image that came close to this hideous creature was from one of Godfry’s mythology books. The picture, which Brine had shown him and Iman one day in the garden, had been of something his brother had called a centaur. It looked like a horse with a man sticking up where the horse’s neck and head should have been.
The thing wriggling up from the giant den was like a centaur, only instead of the perfect synthesis of horse and man, it was the perfect synthesis of sea-slug and man.
Only…
Jaysh took a double-take at the man-like creature sticking up from the slug. It had a torso, two arms, and a single white head, but there ended all similarities with humanity. The arms were flimsy white cords that resembled noodles more so than arms and the head was an empty wad of flesh with hundreds of wormy cilia squirming all over.
He searched the wad of its head a second time and, again, could not locate anything but writhing cilia. A closer look, however, revealed that the ends of each tentacle bore a shiny black seed that he assumed were its eyes. If not, he could not account for the accuracy with which it was casting those ropy arms and wormy fing—
A cluster of beaded cilia jerked towards the woodsman and went taut, as if snagged on invisible threads that were fastened to his face.
He collapsed against the mud and froze, pressing himself into its adhesive embrace as every muscle tensed with horror. Then, without moving anything else, he rolled his eyes to the side until he could see Serit sitting with head between knees and arms over his head, a sliver of vomit-laced mustache peeking below the knee.
Jaysh watched the mustache twitch like the feeler of an insect and waited for the manslug’s trajectory to veer off the trail of sludge and move in his direction. When that failed to happen and the creature’s juicy motility carried it further north, he braced his legs for flight and glanced over the clods.
The cilia were no longer trained on his hiding place, but were writhing as madly as before, trying to see everything at once.
Jaysh moved his eyes down the creature’s flank, down to where the bulk met the trial and the slurping noises ensued. In the rear and center of this underbelly, he could see only a meaty line of flesh rippling over the tar. In the front of the undercarriage, however (where the bulk of the slug lifted from the ground), there was something that caught his eye.
He squinted at the manslug’s lower torso as it dragged itself away from him and watched handfuls of inky mucus soughing off the creature’s stomach and plopping on the trail. At first, he thought these globs of poison were only residue stuck to its flapping underside from where it had leaned against the wall of the burrow.
As he continued to watch, though, glob after glob began to appear from the same area of the undercarriage. He watched longer still and saw the globs were dripping from holes in the manslug’s skin, leaking out like the ruinous eggs from an evil chicken.
Only them ain’t eggs, Jashy, Gariel’s voice told him.
I know, Jaysh thought, watching another clutch of glistening balls splatter on the trail.
What’cha gona do about em, Jayshy? the butcher’s daughter asked. You gona kill the thing makin em?
Jaysh glanced down at the skinning knife at his waist belt, then the bowstring over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure a skinning knife or a handful of arrows would do the job, but we wasn’t sure he had any other options either.
Reckon I’ll try the bow, he thought, releasing a defeated little sigh.
On a giant manslug, Jayshy?
Jaysh stared into the wall of hovering fog, now more gray instead of white, and thought about Swim Day and Hunt Day and all the other days he had lost to the ancestral evil of this land. After that, he thought about Beth and the Hill and how he so desperately wanted to sleep beneath her ever-watchful gaze.
In answer to his woman-friend’s question, he forced himself to stand, peel the bow from his shoulder, and pluck an arrow from his quiver. He notched it in the string and stepped around the mound, drawing the feathers to his eye and inhaling through his nose. He released the air through his mouth, took another breath, and nearly wet himself as someone grabbed him by the bicep.
He spun towards the general and cast him a very disapproving look.
Seeming not to notice, his eyes wide and his voice haunted, Serit said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jaysh took a step towards the man-slug. “That stuff fallin off it,” he whispered, “that’s the stuff in the trail, same stuff in the river.”
Still looking as though the woodsman were mad, Serit said, “You’re going to shoot it?”
Jaysh glanced down at the bow, then at the great white blur in the ever-shifting gray. He’d killed bear and deer with this weapon, punctured hide much stronger than the jiggling blubber he saw before him, but there now appeared to be quite a lot of jiggling blubber and he had begun to have his doubts. If he couldn’t reach the vital organs—assuming it had any—this was going to be a very disappointing hunt.
Meeting the old man’s gaze, he said, “I’ll aim fer the head.”
Serit’s face contorted in a grimace. “It could pull out its heart and you can aim for that,” he said, “but it would do you no good. There’s no reliable record of a man-made weapon dispatching an ugling.”
Jaysh blinked at him. “Wudn’t you the one tellin me bout that big red—”
“Yes, yes, that was me, but I never said anything about dispatching the creature—That was the healer! The healer did the dispatching.”
Jaysh dropped his shoulders. “Kowin ain’t here.”
“We could find him,” Serit said. “We could tell him about this place.”
Jaysh groaned and had to look away. Hunting for the healer would take days, and he didn’t have days. What he had was a clear shot at the creature ruining his Fish Day.
Staring at the manslug as it plodded down the trail of pitch at something less than a snail’s pace, he said, “We could do that, but what if it ain’t here when we get back?” He sniffed at the nasal mucus still dripping in his beard. “What if this thing only comes up every five ‘r six moon cycles? Wha’d we do then?”
Serit cringed in a beatific mask of panic, every tooth in his grimacing mouth exposed for Jaysh to see.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Tearing his eyes from the fog, Jaysh said, “Are yeh tellin me I can shoot this thing in the head…an’ it still ain’t gona die?”
Serit looked at the bow and again the cringe overtook him, the look of a man who knows the answer is maybe, but does not wish to plant such dangerous seeds of hope in a young and foolish mind.
“I don’t know,” he said, peeking up at the woodsman, then explaining, “There is one history describing a battle between an ugling and Arn,” he touched the double-headed insignia on his chest. “Arn beheaded the creature with his axe as the story goes, but…,” he shook his head uncertainly, “…but it is a very old history, young Jaysh. One of the first, actually, and we’ve already discussed how those can be distorted by kings and historians alike, and you know how the people of his land regard Arn with god-like reverence,” another pause to touch the insignia, “s
o there’s no telling what actually happened.”
Jaysh stared at him. He’d heard the words behead and axe and was already pulling the arrow from the bowstring.
“You’re sayin I need a blade?”
Serit’s face froze with indecision, the calculated look of man trying to think of the answer that led them away from the manslug and closer to the castle.
“According to one solitary tale…that allegedly took place over an epoch ago…,” Serit sighed an openmouthed sigh, “…yes.”
Nodding resolutely, Jaysh slipped the arrow into its quiver and slung the bow over a shoulder. He dropped his eyes to the general’s hip and nodded at the thing dangling there.
“Can I barruh that?”
The old man glanced at the sword on his waist, and winced. “Oh, young Jaysh, I don’t…you don’t want to do this,” he said, untying the belt beneath his navel, but doing so with that same reluctant expression. “After Arn beheaded the imp—” he paused to touch the insignia “—he lost both his arms.”
Jaysh waited for more, but the buckle had jammed on Serit and he had his face bent down and both hands wrestling with the leather. To pass the time, Jaysh studied his arms, trying to imagine himself running without the balance of his upper appendages. He saw himself laying face-first in the slime or running from a pack of melted biters or fleeing an enraged manslug with a sword stuck in its side.
He felt something nudge the knuckles of his right hand and looked down. The handle of Serit’s sword hovered by his fingers and he took hold of it, squeezing it like an enemy.
“Both arms,” Serit said, his voice miserable sounding.
“I heard,” Jaysh said, filling his lungs with a deep, rib-cracking breath and lifting the blade overhead.
He brought the blade down and swished it about for a time, to get used to its weight and length. He had no idea if he were really going through with this (at the cost of his arms), but it wouldn’t hurt to take a few exploratory swings with the weapon, just in case.
He lifted it over his head once more, prepared to test it a second time, and his eyes remained fixed on the ceiling.
Something big and white was plunging through the fog.