Chapter 8
There was something at the Devil’s Dome as well. It was stuck to the side of the meteor-like stones and Kowin, with his arms over his head and his legs spread wide (practically dangling from the stones by two hairline cracks and a slight indentation), could feel its gritty texture beneath the fabric of his sleeves.
He hoped it was a clue. He hoped it were the clue, the very one that would determine the whereabouts of the golden one and put an end to this miserable mission. He could not even believe how badly he wanted to get off these boulders and back to his experiments.
As he suspected, the act of ascending the Dome had proven to be quite a chore. After circling the great heap and seeking the easiest route to the top, he’d discovered that there wasn’t an easy route to the top, only routes with varying degrees of difficulty.
Realizing this, Kowin had located the boulder with the least amount of grade—which meant it had plenty of grade, just less than the others—and began to climb. The process was slow and steady and left much to be desired in the way of observation.
Pressed hard against the rock-face in spread-eagle fashion—pink eyes squinted half-shut from the strain—he could no more see the ends of his sleeves than he could the sprawling prairie below or the eternal sky above.
By the same token, he had no idea what he was feeling beneath the fabric of his robes. It felt like a callus film over the stone and the first word that came to mind was moss.
Now that he thought about it, he was on the north side of the heap. Not that he planned it that way—the smallest of the Dome’s gargantuan stones had been over here—but the north side of any structure tended to have moss or lichen or some thallophytic plant.
Only…if it truly was moss, and if he truly was on the north side of the pile—the shadiest side—why did the moss feel dead? Shouldn’t it be thriving?
Still unable to see the substance, he rubbed at it again, scraping the now-tattered ends of his sleeve across the patch. There was definitely a film of on the rock, but it felt neither soft nor moist. Rather, it felt rough and scratchy, like the surface of dehydrated mold.
“Oooooh,” he moaned, sounding like a simpleton. “This is clue. This is clue number… oh…,” he trailed off, biting his lip, “…what it called…five? No, it not five. That number of fingers...”
He gave up trying to count and continued to climb. One handhold…the next…a crack for his fingers…a hollow for his toes. Slowly but surely, his pink eyeballs rose along the Dome, creeping up the side until finally, at long last, they came to rest on the gritty scum.
He gasped and nearly did a backflip into the clear blue sky.
The hard film on the side of the boulder was transparent—Or mostly transparent. The longer he studied the phenomenon, the more flecks of color he saw hiding within, flecks of color that gave the desiccated fluid a slightly emerald hue, only emerald did not do the fluid justice. He wasn’t sure any color would.
The scabby fluid that lay a finger’s length from the brim of his cowl did not have a true color. It might have at one time, before its moisture and essence was stolen by the sun, but now there was only the ghost of a color, a lime-like hue so faint as to be almost translucent.
“I know this,” he said, his eyes bright. “Gar, I know this. I know this clue.”
He hung there on the Dome and thought about where he had seen it before, rifling through the list of crusted fluids stored in his mind. Very slowly, his eyes lost their brightness, then sank to the brown of the boulder.
“It will come,” he said, sounding anything but sure.
He cocked his eyes to the sky, being careful to keep the side of his cowl pressed against the stone—pressed so hard his earlobe grated against his skull—and peered up at the lumpy remainder of the Dome.
Above him, he saw more of the greenish fluid decorating the stones, traveling in a zigzagging pattern from where he was perched on the rocks to where the rim of the structure pressed against the sky.
He twisted his chin back down and thought about what he was seeing, trying hard to identify the clue. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t a part of the stone. His fingernails had scratched through the layer as they clawed for purchase.
He thought about the possibility of the fluid being spilled from above and decided it was plausible. No, it was more than plausible. It was downright likely.
Considering what lived at the top of these stones and the messy manner in which it incapacitated its prey, a splattering of fluid was not out the question; Although…
Kowin stood hugging the rock-face and thinking about the messy means by which the dru’gye incapacitated its prey. That would have taken place in the wilds where it hunted, not the top of the Dome. The Dome was just someplace to sleep between feedings.
With his doubts on the rise, Kowin tried to remember all the times he’d observed the golden one with the sphere, tried to remember the creature secreting a greenish fluid such as this, but nothing came to mind.
He thought about the royal extraction team making its regular visit to the Dome and steeling away the creature’s lustrous camouflage. He thought it possible that something had spilled during one of these engagements, but he could not fathom what it might be.
He replayed the numerous extractions in his mind (he always watched, just in case the dru’gye returned mid-heist and laid waste to the royal thieves), but he did not recall anything being left behind; no bags or water skins, no grapples or lines.
He supposed one of the men might have panicked during the ascent or descent, losing his footing on the stones or his grip on the lines, but even if that had happened and the silly sod went bouncing down the side (cracking open his head or suffering a compound fracture), what did Kowin expect to come squishing out of the man’s tattered flesh?
“Man spill red blood,” he said, as through trying to remember, “but maybe this…,” he paused, standing there gape-jawed and squinting, “…Gar, you thinks, maybe, this a thing’s blood?”
The Gar person said nothing, but there was a distinct swelling in the sackcloth along Kowin’s left hip.
“I thinks so, too,” Kowin said, and he seemed to remember a jar of diluted-green fluid resting on his dust-coated shelves. He had a habit of collecting the most interesting fluids and organs, but, alas, taxonomy and organization were not his strong suits. He had no idea where the jar was or when it had been filled or from what creature.
“What makes this, Gar?” the healer asked, voicing his concerns aloud.
The only response from the prairie came in the form of a shallow ballooning along the albino’s right shoulder.
Kowin waited a moment more, searching the air about him as though Gar might materialize before his eyes, then leaned his pale nostrils against the crusty green scum and drew a breath through his nose.
When his olfactory senses failed to register anything the first time, he repeated the process a second time, then a third. On the third endeavor, a hint of dusty stone registered at the back of his tongue. The residue itself, however, emitted no fumes.
“What makes you?” he said, moving one frayed sleeve to the greenish scum and scratching a flake from the stone. He brought the speck to where he could see it and turned it in the hateful sunlight, flipping it this way and that and muttering to himself about which animals he’d tortured and which animals he’d snared.
“I know this clue,” he said, closing his eyes and opening his mind. Since he rarely left his chamber, and he never left the castle, it shouldn’t have been difficult to recall. His whole life was one big cycle of tedious events: checking traps in the garden, arguing at the roundtable, cutting open his experimen—
The answer came to him in a flash, slamming his brain like a two-story drop from the side of a rock pile.
“Gar!” he said. “Gar, I know what this is! I know!” The speck of green trembled on the black of his sleeve. “This a dru’gore’s blood! This come from a dru’gore!” His frantic gaz
e shifted to the Dome. “It bleeded here, Gar! It bleeded right here on this rock!”
There were only so many creatures that bleed pea-green blood, which is what this mess had resembled when it first spilled from its owner and splashed upon the rocks. What was more, Kowin had been staring at the creature just that morning, standing right beside the thing in a depression of grass no more than twenty paces to the northeast, staring right into the holes on its crumpled faded flank.
“Right here on this rock,” he muttered, this time to himself.
Perhaps he should have drawn the conclusion sooner, but it wasn’t his fault. His anger at having been deceived had clouded his judgment, and the exhaustion of the climb hadn’t helped, and of course there was the location of the blood in relation to the bleeder.
“On this rock,” he said again, his insides churning.
He twisted his eyes to the slope above and reexamined the trail of gore. It was splattered on the rocks in a zigzagging pattern that implied the creature had been killed at the crest and then bounced to the prairie floor.
“This rock, here,” he said, caressing the stone without looking at it.
He twisted his cowl to the north and stared at the depression in the grass where the dru’gore’s carcass lay rotting. Something bad wrong was happening here. The golden one had begun killing for pleasure—killing a dru’gore, no less—the dru’gore were back in the Drugana but not killing for pleasure, sneaking around and clambering up the side of the golden one’s lair, something they had never done before…
Kowin lifted his head to the meandering green stain, the serpent of dried mucus slithering down from the rim.
His insides felt like ice.
“Gar?” he hissed. “Gar, you hears me?”
There was no response from either the Dome or the prairie.
“Gar, I scared.”
Along the side of one arm, his sackcloth bulged, then receded, then vanished from sight.
Kowin took the hint and continued to climb.