Chapter 5
“Gar,” Kowin whispered, rising up on his arms. “Gar, you seeing this?”
From out of the prairie and from inside the circle, the Gar person made no reply.
Undeterred by the slight, Kowin hyperventilated for a time, then said, “I thinks, maybe, this a big clue. More big than clue I hear with crystal, or clue I see with sphere, or clue I…,” he trailed off, a troubling thought afflicting his mind.
If this were such a big clue—and, indeed, it appeared to be—how had he missed it? With the listening crystals, the answer was simple. Somebody had mentioned the depressions at the roundtable and he just hadn’t been in his chamber to overhear.
With the seeing sphere, though, the answer was not simple. With the seeing sphere, a device that only functioned as he leaned over its domed surface and commanded its spirits with stroke of his fingers, he should have seen at least one of these depressions. At that vantage point, they would have stuck out like gold plates on a granite floor.
As it were, he had seen nothing. He had been all over this region with the seeing sphere, checking it periodically over the last moon cycle or so, and he hadn’t seen squat. Not the dead cow reported by the long-haired brat, not the crumpled bear reported by the bushy-mouthed general, not even the gaping recess in which he now sat.
Slowly, and with a certain amount of growing dread, Kowin tilted his hood back and surveyed the ominous sky above, seemingly unaware of the bulge near the base of his cowl as it swelled between his shoulder blades and then sank away to nothing.
“Gar?” he called, speaking to the bulge in his robes and hearing no response. “Gar, you thinking what I thinking?”
Gar, who apparently was thinking what Kowin was thinking (evinced by his strong desire not to draw attention to himself), continued to hold his tongue.
There was, of course, only one explanation for why Kowin’s seeing sphere had not detected the recesses in the ground. Someone in Jashandar was blocking him.
He pondered the question further, being sure to keep his eyes on the everlasting sky as he did, and had no idea who that someone might be. Who, in the unholy name of the Brood, would want to do such a thing? Who in this world, or in any world for that matter, would dare to interfere with a loyal minion of the all-consuming Brood?
Now that he thought about it, where in the banning darkness would a person acquire the means to interfere with him? It wasn’t like there were speaking crystals and seeing spheres just lying around the kingdom.
“This not a big clue,” he said, panting like a dog. “This a bad clue.”
He lowered his eyes to the crumpled animal at the edge of the depression, a mix of emotion flooding his mind. If the deceiver was hiding the depressions from him, was the purpose to conceal the dru’gye…or the prey?
He stood to his feet and studied the animal from across the matted thistles. It was no larger than a scabe-wolf and the parts of its flesh that Kowin could see—the parts that had not yet succumbed to the relentless powers of decomposition—were milky white and glabrous, like that of a subterranean salamander.
“Oh, that—that bad, too, Gar. That bad clue number, uh… number two,” he said, panting for a time. “You seeing that?”
If Gar was, though, he made no comment.
Kowin took a step towards the rotten anomaly and began to wonder if the creature wasn’t pieced together from two separate species, wondering as well if he hadn’t seen the creature before. It was difficult to say with the advanced stages of decay nibbling at the monster’s flesh, but the closer he came to the decomposing mush, the more familiar it appeared, like looking at the faded painting of a long lost relative and seeing the features of their face materialize from the background.
He stopped at the thing’s sunken ribcage and gawked down at it. He knew this monster, knew it like the back of his pale, boney hand. It wasn’t possible that he was seeing it here, admittedly—not considering what had happened to its kind all those generations ago—but there it was…taking up space on the crushed reeds of the Southern Sway…little more than sun-bleached bones and desiccated skin…
A dru’gore—dead.
Kowin was not mistaken about the creature’s taxonomy. Oh, no. A dru’gore was not a creature it paid to forget. They were bloodthirsty little savages that, unlike the dru’gye in whose depression they lay, did kill for pleasure. Not to mention, they were atrociously unattractive.
But where it come from? Kowin wondered, scratching his hood with one sagging sleeve. And why it hide from me?
That, of course, was the question of all questions. Forget about the unlikelihood of missing these patches of crushed grass and the brutal slaughter they entailed. If a creature such as the dru’gore were traipsing through the kingdom, Kowin would have seen it long before now.
The dru’gore weren't exactly a shy creature. In fact, on its first day in the land, it would have sought out the nearest village and just had itself a gay old time of tearing the hapless proprietors to piece.
New like that, Kowin knew, had a bad habit of traveling fast. The villagers would talk—those that had survived—and one or two of them would have complained to the council, at which point Kowin would have heard through speaking crystal.
And yet he had not.
With his deceiver theory blazing like wild fire in his mind, he looked to the sky once more, but thought about his neck, about the back of his neck and the way that it felt.
Everything above him was as blue and vacuous as it had been when he’d set out on this troublesome journey, and had there been an invisible watcher up there spying down upon him and recording his every move, the sky above would have continued to be vacuous and blue.
Those who see without being seen do so without any fear of visual or auditory detection, no ripples in the light, no vibrations on the air. Tactile disturbances, on the other hand…
Kowin had used the seeing sphere for too many ages to be unfamiliar with the symptoms of an observation rash. He knew that extended observations, or zooming in too close, would cause the subject of the spheres spectral gaze to begin wincing and fidgeting and scrunching up their shoulders.
If he brought the sphere even closer to the subject, they would begin to reach over their shoulders and scratch the backs of their necks, rubbing vigorously at the burning sensation at the base of their skulls.
No one ever stopped to look into the sky when this happen. They had no idea that such elements as seeing spheres existed, no idea that the prickling rash on their neck was due to concentrated energy and not a bad case of nerves or floating pollen or the dander of horses.
Finding that the back of his neck felt no different from the rest of his hot and sweaty flesh (thank the Brood), Kowin relaxed a little. More than likely, there was a deceiver at work in this land, and more than likely that deceiver had a sphere at its disposal—using it to monitor the land and to hide the presence of depressions and the dru-gore—but for the time being the deceiver appeared unaware of Kowin’s presence in the Sway.
But how long that last? the healer wondered, dropping his eyes to the dead dru’gore at his feet.
It now appeared as though he had a third and fourth reason to quicken his hunt. His primary impetus, of course, was still a desire to placate the Brood—with a desire to avoid the business end of the halfling’s axe ranking in as a close second—but he was now racing against the deceiver’s sphere and rogue dru’gye as well. Perish the thought that one of them should find him clinging to a boulder on the side of the Dome.
He gave the carcass at his hem one final look and scurried to the edge of the depression, diving headfirst into the weeds and resumed his frantic swim to the south.
As he went, he thought once more about the dru’gye that killed by wadding up its prey and making depressions in the grass. Something was obviously wrong with the creature, based upon its indiscriminant slaughter of livestock and its attack upon the dru’gore. The latter had him completely st
umped.
Admittedly, dru’gye and dru’gore had never traveled in packs, or suckled each other’s young, but they didn’t go out of their way to kill one another, or feed on each other’s flesh.
Still pondering the conundrum, Kowin was suddenly reminded of a recent council meeting in which the titan-wench had warned her colleagues of the Drugana’s evil nature, blaming it for the happenings that befell them. Her colleagues had scoffed at the notion, but Kowin had taken the warning to heart.
He knew the Drugana was evil. That was why the Brood had sent him here, why he’d brought that slack-jawed Arn to clear away the old ones and why he’d stuck around to watch Arn’s descendants establish roads and irrigation and a system of exchange.
On the surface, Jashandar thrived, but way down deep, the evil festered, a wriggling green worm at the center of an apple.
Kowin grabbed a sleeve-full of grass and hauled himself forward, kicking at the blades around his ankles and wondering if there wasn’t some truth to the titan-wench’s theory. For if the land were reverting to its darker nature—to its actual nature—could the same be said for the creatures that dwelled here?
For the golden one, perhaps?
Within the protective fibers of his hood, a wicked sneer-smile teased the corners of his pale, peach lips.
“If titan-wench speak true,” he mused, “and if hick-king slay mystery killer…,” his sneer-smile widened, “…I thinks council get big surprise. What you thinks, Gar?” His yellow-stained teeth peeked out from his mouth. “You thinks they get the big surprise?”
Gar, true to his nature, continued to say nothing.
“I thinks so, too,” Kowin said, smiling even wider.
He knew better than to act so blithe with the Devil’s Dome at hand, the invisible deceiver on the loose, and the mystery killer still at large, but try as he might he could not stifle his mirth. Each time he pictured the council’s faces as they realized what they’d done, his amusement only soared.
In one decree, they send Kowin to save the golden one…in the very next they send the hick-king to slay it.
He couldn’t help but smile.