"Must be," he answered. "Spits says he didn't use his nets to … fish for the dead, but this has to be it."
"Course I never fished fer the dead!" Spits boomed, laughing weakly. "What'd I do that fer? Mind, I been thinking about it since Harkat asked, and I recall a couple o' people who drowned when I was fishing 'em out. So I guess it probably has been used to drag up corpses — accidentally, like."
Spits's eyes practically shot out of his sockets, they were darting so swiftly from side to side. There was definitely something the ex-pirate wasn't telling us. But I couldn't pump him for information without indicating that I didn't believe him, and this was no time to risk making an enemy.
After eating, we discussed what to do next. Spits didn't know anything about a Temple of the Grotesque. Nor had he seen any people during his long, lonely years here. He'd told Harkat that the dragons usually approached the lake from the southeast. The Little Person was of the opinion that we should go in that direction, though he couldn't say why — just a gut feeling. Since I'd no personal preference, I bowed to his wishes and we agreed to head southeast that night, moving under cover of darkness.
"Ye'll take me along, won't ye?" Spits asked eagerly. "I'd feel awful if ye went without me."
"We don't know what we're … walking into," Harkat warned the grizzly ex-pirate. "You could be risking your life … by coming with us."
"Nowt t' worry about!" Spits guffawed. "'Twon't be the first time I risked it. I remember when the Prince o' Pariahs sailed into a trap off the Chinese coast …"
Once Spits got talking about his adventures on the pirate ship, there was no stopping him. He regaled us with wild, bawdy tales of the plundering they'd done and battles they'd engaged in. As he spoke, he sipped from his jug of poteen, and as the day wore on his voice got louder and his tales got wilder — he told some extra spicy stories about what he'd got up to during shore leave! Eventually, with the sun starting to set, he dozed off and curled up into a ball beside the fire, clutching his almost empty jug of poteen close to his chest.
"He's some character," I whispered, and Harkat chuckled softly.
"I feel sorry for him," Harkat said. "To be stuck here alone for … so long must have been dreadful."
"Yes," I agreed, but not wholeheartedly. "But there's something 'off' about him, isn't there? He makes me feel uneasy, the way his eyes flick left and right so beadily when he's lying."
"I noticed that too," Harkat nodded. "He tells all sorts of lies — last night he … said he'd been engaged to a Japanese princess — but it's … only when he talks about his job on the … Prince of Pariahs that he gets the really shifty look."
"What do you think he's hiding?" I asked.
"I've no idea," Harkat replied. "I doubt it matters — there are … no pirate ships here."
"At least none that we've seen," I grinned.
Harkat studied the sleeping Spits — he was drooling into his unkempt beard — then said quietly, "We can leave him behind … if you'd prefer. He'll be asleep for hours. If we leave now and walk … fast, he'll never find us."
"Do you think he's dangerous?" I asked.
Harkat shrugged. "He might be. But there must be a reason why … Mr Tiny put him here. I think we should take him. And his net."
"Definitely the net," I agreed. Clearing my throat, I added, "There's his blood too. I need human blood — and soon."
"I thought of that," Harkat said. "It's why I didn't stop him … drinking. Do you want to take some now?"
"Maybe I should wait for him to wake and ask him," I suggested.
Harkat shook his head. "Spits is superstitious. He thinks I'm a demon."
"A demon!" I laughed.
"I told him what I really … was, but he wouldn't listen. In the end I settled for persuading him … that I was a harmless demon — an imp. I sounded him out about vampires. He believes in them, but thinks they're … evil monsters. Said he'd drive a stake through … the heart of the first one he met. I think you should drink … from him while he's asleep, and never … tell him what you really are."
I didn't like doing it — I'd no qualms about drinking secretly from strangers, but on the rare occasions when I'd had to drink from people I knew, I'd always asked their permission — but I bowed to Harkat's greater knowledge of Spits Abrams's ways.
Sneaking up on the sleeping sot, I bared his lower left leg, made a small cut with my right index nail, clamped my mouth around it and sucked. His blood was thin and riddled with alcohol — he must have drunk huge amounts of poteen and whisky over the years! — but I forced it down. When I'd drunk enough, I released him and waited for the blood around the cut to dry. When it had, I cleaned it and rolled the leg of his trousers down.
"Better?" Harkat asked.
"Yes." I burped. "I wouldn't like to drink from him often — there's more poteen than blood in his veins! — but it'll restore my strength and keep me going for the next few weeks."
"Spits won't wake until morning," Harkat noted. "We'll have to wait … until tomorrow night to start, unless you … want to risk travelling by day."
"With dragons roaming overhead? No thanks! Anyway, an extra day of rest won't hurt — I'm still recovering from our last run-in."
"By the way, how did you … get it to drop you?" Harkat asked as we settled down for the night. "And why did it … fly away and leave us?"
I thought back, recalled yelling at the dragon to let me go, and told Harkat what had happened. He stared at me disbelievingly, so I winked and said, "I always did have a way with dumb animals!" And I left it at that, even though I was equally bewildered by the dragon's strange retreat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I THOUGHT Spits would have a sore head when he awoke, but he was in fine form — he said he never suffered from hangovers. He spent the day tidying up the shack, putting everything in order in case he ever returned. He stashed a jug of poteen away in a corner and packed the rest in a large sack he planned to carry slung over his shoulder, along with spare clothes, his fishing net, some potatoes and dried fish slices. Harkat and I had almost nothing to carry — apart from the panthers teeth and gelatinous globes, most of which we'd managed to hang on to — so we offered to divide Spits's load between us, but he wouldn't hear of it. "Every man to a cross of his own," he muttered.
We took it easy during the day. I hacked my hair back from my eyes with one of Spits's rusty blades. We'd replaced our handmade knives, most of which we'd lost in the lake, with real knives that Spits had lying around.
Harkat stitched together holes in his robes with bits of old string.
When night fell, we set off, heading due southeast towards a mountain range in the distance. Spits was surprisingly morose to be leaving his shack — "'Tis the closest thing to a home I've had since running away t' sea when I was twelve," he sighed — but several swigs of poteen improved his mood and by midnight he was singing and joking.
I was worried that Spits would collapse — his legs were wobbling worse than the jelly-like globes we were carting — but as drunk as he got, his pace never wavered, though he did stop quite often to "bail out the bilge water". When we made camp beneath a bushy tree in the morning, he fell straight asleep and snored loudly all day long. He woke shortly before sunset, licked his lips and reached for the poteen.
The weather worsened over the next few nights, as we left the lowlands and scaled the mountains. It rained almost constantly, harder than before, soaking our clothes and leaving us wet, cold and miserable — except Spits, whose poteen warmed and cheered him up whatever the conditions. I decided to try some of Spits's home-brewed concoction, to see if it would combat the gloom. One swallow later, I was rolling on the ground, gasping for breath, eyes bulging. Spits laughed while Harkat poured water down my throat, then urged me to try it again. "The first dram's the worst," he chuckled. Through wheezing coughs, I firmly declined.
It was difficult to know what to make of Spits Abrams. A lot of the time he came across as a funny old sailor, crude
and coarse, but with a soft centre. But as I spent more time with him, I thought that a lot of his speech patterns seemed deliberately theatrical — he spoke with a broad accent on purpose, to give the impression he was scatterbrained. And there were times when his mood darkened and he'd mutter ominously about people who'd betrayed him in one way or another.
"They thought they was so high and mighty!" he growled one night, weaving drunkenly under the cloudy sky. "Better than dumb old Spits. Said I was a monster, not fit t' share a ship with 'em. But I'll show 'em! When I gets me hands on 'em, I'll make 'em suffer!"
He never said how he intended to "get his hands on" whoever "em" were. We hadn't told Spits what year we'd come from, but he knew time had moved on — he often made reference to "yer generation" or said "things was different in my day". I couldn't see any way back for Spits, and he couldn't either — a common refrain of his when he was feeling sorry for himself was, "Here I is and here I'll die." Yet still he swore to get his own back on "them what done me wrong", despite the fact that the people he disliked would have been dead and buried decades ago.
Another night, while he was telling us about his tasks on board the Prince of Pariahs, he stopped and looked at us with a steady blank expression. "I had t' kill every now and then," he said softly. "Pirates is vagabonds. Even though we didn't kill those we robbed, we sometimes had t'. If people refused t' surrender, we had t' put a stop to 'em. Couldn't afford t' let 'em off the hook."
"But I thought you didn't board the ships you attacked," I said. "You told us you fished out people who jumped overboard."
"Aaarrr," he grinned bleakly, "but a man in the water can struggle just as much as one on deck. A woman too. Sometimes I had t' teach 'em a lesson." His eyes cleared a little and he grinned sheepishly. "But that was rare. I only mention it so ye know ye can rely on me if we gets into a tight spot. I ain't a killer, but I'll do it if me back's against a wall, or t' save a friend."
Harkat and I didn't doze much that day. Instead we kept a wary watch on the snoring Spits. Although we were stronger and fitter than him, he posed a worrying threat. What if he got into a drunken fit and took it into his head to kill us in our sleep?
We discussed the possibility of leaving the ex-pirate behind, but it didn't seem fair to strand him in the mountains. Although he was able to keep pace beside us during our marches, he had no sense of direction and would have become lost in no time if he'd been by himself. Besides, we might have need of his fishing skills if we made it to the Lake of Souls. Both of us could catch fish with our hands, but neither of us knew much about angling.
In the end we chose to keep Spits with us, but agreed not to turn our backs on him, to take turns sleeping, and to cut him loose if he ever threatened violence.
We made slow but steady progress through the mountains. If the weather had been finer, we'd have raced through, but all the rain had led to mudslides and slippery underfoot conditions. We had to walk carefully, and were often forced to backtrack and skirt around an area made inaccessible by the rain and mud.
"Does it normally rain this much?" I asked Spits.
"T' tell the truth, this has been one o' the better years," he chortled. "We gets very hot summers — long, too — but the winters are dogs. Mind, it'll probably break in another night or two — we ain't hit the worst o' the season yet, and it's rare t' get more'n a week or so o' nonstop rain at this time o' year."
As though the clouds had been listening, they eased up the next morning — affording us a welcome view of blue sky — and by night, when we set off, it was the driest it had been since we landed at Spits's shack.
That same night, we topped a small peak and found ourselves on a sharp decline into a long, wide chasm leading out of the mountain ridges. The base of the chasm was flooded with rainwater, but there were ledges along the sides which we'd be able to use. Hurrying down the mountain, we located one of the broader ledges, tied a rope around ourselves to form a chain, me in front, Spits in the middle, Harkat behind, and set off over the fast-flowing river, edging forwards at a snail's pace. Spits even went so far as to cork his jug of poteen and leave it untouched!
Day dawned while we were on the ledge. We hadn't seen any caves in the cliff, but there were plenty of large holes and cracks. Untying ourselves, each of us crawled into a hole to rest, out of sight of any passing dragons. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I was exhausted after the hard climb and fell asleep immediately, not waking until late in the day.
After a quick meal — the last of Spits's dried fish slices — we tied ourselves together again and set off. It began to drizzle shortly afterwards, but then it cleared for the rest of the night and we progressed without interruption. The ledge didn't run all the way to the end of the chasm, but there were ledges above and beneath it which we were able to transfer to, making the journey in stages. Shortly before daybreak we came to the end of the chasm and crawled down to a flat plain which spread out for many kilometres ahead of us, ending in a massive forest which stretched left and right as far as we could see.
We debated our options. Since none of us wanted to sleep in a hole in the cliff again, and the route to the forest was littered with bushes we could hide under if we spotted a dragon, we decided to head for the trees straightaway. Forcing our tired legs on, we jogged briskly over the plain, Spits feeding himself with poteen, somehow managing not to spill a drop despite the jolting of his arms as he ran.
We made camp just within the edge of the forest. While Harkat kept an eye on Spits, I slept soundly until early afternoon. Harkat and I caught a wild pig soon after that, which Spits gleefully roasted over a quickly constructed fire. We tucked into our first hot meal since leaving for the mountains more than two weeks earlier — delicious! Wiping our hands clean on the grass afterwards, we set off in a general southeast direction — it was hard to tell precisely with all the tree cover — prepared for a long, gloomy trek through the forest.
To our surprise, we cleared the trees a few hours before sunset — the forest was long, but narrow. We found ourselves standing at the top of a small cliff, gazing down on fields of the tallest, greenest grass I'd ever seen. No trees grew in the fields, and though there must have been many streams feeding the soil to produce such greenery, they were hidden by the towering stalks of grass.
Only one object stood out against the otherwise unbroken sea of green — a huge white building a couple of kilometres directly ahead, which shone like a beacon under the evening sun. Harkat and I shared a glance and said simultaneously, with a mixture of excitement and tension, "The Temple of the Grotesque!"
Spits stared suspiciously at the building, spat over the edge of the cliff, and snorted. "Trouble!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE STALKS of grass grew thickly together, a couple of metres high. We had to chop our way through, like hacking a path through a jungle. It was hard, slow work, and night had fallen before we reached the temple. Studying it by the light of a strong moon, we were impressed by its stature. Made of large rough stones which had been painted white, it stood thirty-five or forty metres high. A square building, its walls were about a hundred metres in length, and supported a flat roof. We did a full circuit of the exterior and there was only one entrance, a huge open doorway, five metres wide by eight or nine high. We could see the flicker of candlelight from within.
"I don't like the look o' this place," Spits muttered.
"Me neither," I sighed. "But if it's the Temple of the Grotesque, we have to go in and find the holy liquid that Evanna told us about."
"Ye two can trust a witch's word if ye like," Spits grunted, "but I ain't having nowt t' do with dark forces! If ye want t' enter, best o' luck. I'll wait out here."
"Afraid?" Harkat grinned.
"Aaarrr," Spits replied. "Ye should be too. Ye can call this the Temple o' the Grotesque if ye like, but I knows what it really is — a Temple o' Death!" And he stormed off to find a hiding place in a patch of nearby grass.
Harkat and I shared Spits's
gloomy opinion, but we had to venture in. Knives drawn, we crept to the doorway and were about to enter, when the sound of chanting drifted to us over the clear night air. We paused uncertainly, then drew back to where Spits was hiding in the grass.
"Changed yer minds?" he hooted.
"We heard something," Harkat told him. "It sounded like voices — human … voices. They were chanting."
" Where'd they come from?" Spits asked.
"To our left," I told him.
"Will I go check 'em out while ye explore yer temple?"
"I think it would be best if we all … went to check," Harkat said. "If there are people here, this temple … must be theirs. We can ask them about it and … maybe they can help us."
"Ye're awfully simple-minded fer a demon," Spits laughed cynically. "Never trust a stranger, that's what I says!"
That was good advice, and we paid heed to it, quietly sliding through the grass — which didn't grow so thickly here — cautiously closing in on the chanting. A short way beyond the temple, we came to the edge of a clearing. In it was a small, peculiar-looking village. The huts were made of grass and built very low to the ground, no more than a metre high. Either we'd come to a village of pygmies, or the huts were only used as shelters to sleep beneath. Rough grey robes were bundled in a pile in the centre of the village. Dead sheep-like animals were stacked one on top of another, close to the robes.
As we were taking in the sight of the village, a naked man appeared through the grass to our right. He was of ordinary height and build, a light brown colour, but with lanky pink hair and dull white eyes. He walked to the mound of dead sheep, dragged one out and returned the way he'd come, pulling the sheep by its rear legs. Without discussing it, Spits, Harkat and I set off after him, keeping to the edge of the village, still hidden in the grass.
The chanting — which had died down — began again as we approached the spot where the man had disappeared into the grass. We found a path of many footprints in the soft earth and traced them to a second, smaller clearing. There was a pond at the centre, around which thirty-seven people stood, eight men, fifteen women and fourteen children. All were naked, brown-skinned, pink-haired and white-eyed.