Chapter 22
Jashandar Denbauk stared at the place in the reeds where Zeph had been lying, too shocked to do anything but squat there on his knees and listen to the tiny cat-thing as she went slicing through the heather (shhh—shhh—shhh). He couldn’t be certain, but it sounded as though she were moving in the direction of the Hill.
Directly outside the blind, Mister Whitehead and his crew were jumping back in surprise and making all manner of startled phlegmy noises, one of them stepping on Jaysh’s wrist, another brushing against his shoulder.
Jaysh ignored the contact and waited for something more to happen. He didn’t want to go toe-to-toe with these things armed with a skinning knife and a mouthful of dirty words. He’d rather lay there on his belly and wait for Mister Whitehead to decide that Zeph was too quick for him and his friends.
At the gap in the concealment, Mister Whitehead let loose a series of gargled barks, each one giving the impression that his windpipe was every bit as melted as his face, and the cat-thing’s rustling movements were soon accompanied by the sound of five pony-sized bodies tearing through the reeds.
Jaysh leapt to his feet and threw off the canvas, an inarticulate groan rising in his throat. He had wanted to say more—could hear the word, “NO,” being screamed in every fiber of his being—but all that escaped his lips was an idiot’s growl of terrified rage.
He went storming after the rustling sounds in the west, charging blindly through the waist-high vegetation and clawing madly at the sheet of canvas that had somehow snagged about his head and shoulders.
In his haste to engage the enemy, he had put more effort into making his feet than shedding the blind and now it trailed off his head like a magician’s cape, fluttering in the air and making all manner of racket.
By some miracle of the God in Whom his brother believed, Jaysh managed to keep his feet as he wrestled with the canvas. Not once did he stumbled or fall and not once did he contemplate slowing his blistering pace. Those thoughts did not come until his head was free and his eyes took in the prairie.
Several paces ahead of him, as the muted light of dusk struggled to illuminate the Sway, a squad of pale and deliquescing mounds peeked up from the motionless grasses. Jaysh watched them as they stood watching him, a colony of fat and grubby serpents rising from the lawn.
These were doubtlessly the melted ones that had surrounded his blind and then given chase after Zeph, but it wasn’t these five that turned his knees to rubber and sent an ice storm screaming through his chest. What gave him pause for thought were the ripples of movement he saw beyond the five ugly faces.
A loathsome curse word for defecation slid across his mind and he couldn’t help but slow his legs. The Sway was literally shivering with movement in the west; No sign of the creatures’ ugly little faces, but the rustling patterns were all over the place, each one moving in the direction of his special little friend.
She ain’t gona make it, he thought, and inside his chest he felt his rage reassert itself and blast his fear into pierces. He quickly forgot about how many enemies he faced and thought instead about his furry little friend and how scared she had looked.
“Get!” he roared, yelling as though at a pack of stray dogs. “Get off’a her!”
He screamed at them a third time, using a derogatory term to describe their mothers, but the distraction did not work. Those rustling movements in the distance continued on after his friend and those closer to his ever-racing feet (the infamous five, in other words, who had started this whole ordeal) turned and came at him.
Jaysh drew back his arm and prepared for the stabbing. He didn’t know which one he’d take down first—whichever one reached him first, he supposed—but he had no intention of them getting back up. He’d put the pointy end of his blade in the side of their head, wait for the next ugly target to waddle into range, and that, as they say, would be that.
Only it wasn’t that easy.
When the five melted attackers were within four strides of him—heads leaning back, lips splitting wide, clear fluid gushing out all over—Jaysh realized the categories of first, second, and third were not going to apply. They were going to hit him all at once.
He dove to the side and rolled, the five gaping mouths sweeping past him in the current of their momentum. He sprang to his feet and whirled and the infamous five were on him at once, the grasses alive with a dull clomping sound he did not immediately recognize.
It sounded like the sound of two juicy melon-halves being clomped together in the air, but Jaysh soon put two and two together and realized he was hearing the fleshy slap of gums snapping at the prairie, the latest one leaving a warm rope of saliva slathered on his arm.
He wiped at the sticky mess and backpedaled from the strike, waiting for the next melted visage to explode from the reeds so he could drive his knife (and part of his hand, if necessary) through the side of its liquefied head.
From the right, one of the devils lunged out of the weeds and he swung for it, thrusting the point of his weapon with all his might and watching in horror as the ugly mask sank into the grass like an anvil in a pond.
He had time to curse the elusive fiend and already the next one was upon him, coming from the left this time. He swung for its eyes, gritting his teeth as he did so, but again the dirty-white skull dropped out of sight before contact was made, the tip of his dagger ripping through thistles and feather grass.
It went on like this for quite some time, the melted things leaping from the grass, Jaysh jerking back an arm or leg—clomp—the melted things sinking out of sight, Jaysh thrusting his weapon at the empty shadows, always backpedalling, always spinning to check his rear.
In what could have been considered a lull between attacks (but what was really a fleeting moment in the barrage clomping gums), Jaysh lifted his eyes and saw the breezeless prairie vibrating with bodies. Where he had seen rippling grooves of movement here and there, he now saw the whole prairie shaking with life. They were everywhere.
He staggered back, remembered his backside, and spun around, his mind a whirlwind of panic as he watched the reeds at his waist erupting with bulbous eyes and gaping maws. He turned from one and two more took its place. He turned from these and another reared its head beneath his outstretch hand.
Something brushed the back of his legs and he leapt from its touch, spinning to see if it had come to the surface and finding his feet tangled in the flora. He went down on his side, the world vanishing in darkness and reeds, and his attackers continued to lunge, now leaping over him and landing on his legs.
He flailed out from under them and struggled to his feet, rolling away from their bodies and breaking into a run, sprinting in the direction where he’d last heard Zeph.
The melted things carried after him, the attacks becoming more frequently, the clomping of lips closer each time. If he took his eyes from them for a moment, they were sure to have him. One of them nearly had him as it were, coming at him from his blind spot and meeting him in mid-spin. He managed to deflect it somehow, shoving its sagging head to one side as he twisted by, but now there was another in his new blind spot.
He sliced at this one with the knife and flung himself on, taking two strides before the ground dipped, his ankle turned, and his body went down in a long, reedy roll.
Flailing like a drowning man, he scrabbled at the weeds and found his feet, taking three or four more steps before a pair of pasty mouths lifted from the burs directly before him. If not for their gagging cries, the lunging monsters might have caught him about the thigh and stomach, latching onto his tender arteries and vital innards. As it were, Jaysh did hear them and veered sideways, avoiding injury from one set of jaws completely and transferring the mouth of the other from the tender flesh of his belly to the firmer muscle of his hip.
But firmer muscle or not, the pain that struck him—oh, sweet Pit on a stick!—was like nothing he’d ever felt, and in a flash of adrenalized understanding he remembered seeing
the rows of hair-like protrusions in Mister Whitehead’s mouth and thought to himself, They were teeth. Skinny, little teeth.
He gritted his own teeth and he went down like a petrified tree. He was vaguely aware of the grasses rising over his head and the ground slapping him on his side, but he was keenly aware of the anguish in his hip as a hundred needled teeth embedding themselves in his flesh.
He made to transfer his blade to his right hand, the side of his body where the parasite was attached, but the awful little creature must have seen this (or felt it going on) because it began to thrash against him, trying to tear away the mouthful of flesh.
Jaysh tensed in one long spasm of pain, the ache in his pelvis so deep and debilitating that he wanted to roll over in the grass and retch until he expelled the paralyzing hurt from his body. With his teeth clenched and his back arched, however, there would be no retching in the grasses, and when he was finally able to force apart his jaws, it was not to expel food, but to fill his lungs.
With his new chestful of breath, he let out an air-rending scream that seemed to take on shape and fill the prairie. There was no grass here any longer, no melted monstrosities, no sky or stars. There was only his pain and his scream, the former serving as fuel for the latter, the two seeming to feed into one another as Jaysh lay there shaking and trembling and wishing he would die.
Let it pass, he begged, oh please, please, let it pass…
The pain did not pass, but it did subside, after a time. Jaysh didn’t remember how exactly (he couldn’t think clearly at the time), but the fact that he could think clearly now implied that something had happened. The scream, on the other hand, had passed. It had run its throat-shredding course and left him hollow and nauseated. He lay on the ground, limp in the grass, aware of his lungs gasping for air.
In the direction of his feet, the distant sound of rustling lit in his ears. He wondered if they had caught up with poor Zeph and were ripping her to pieces, two or three of them playing tug-of-war with the carcass.
Picturing this, his thoughts went to the fiend locked around his own hip. He realized it was no longer thrashing against him or making that gurgling growl. He could hear the faint sound of wet growling far beyond his moccasins, in the east, but not at his side.
With all the delicacy of a mother stroking her young, he lowered a hand to his waist. He didn’t want to touch the thing’s melted face, but if he’d fallen on the creature and broken its neck, he needed to know. He needed to pry the thing from his body.
His fingers touched down and he felt cloth: the side of his pants, the bulge of his belt, the ruffled tail of his shirt. Beneath these, there was a forest-fire of pain radiating from his pelvis (and likely a semi-circle of bloody pinpricks shaped like a mouth), but above the fabric his attacker was not to be found.
He puzzled over this for a time, wondering if the fiend had given up on the tougher fabric of his pants or had gone to gather reinforcements, but he was too relieved to care. The retching pain had left him and that was all that mattered.
Although, if it had gone for reinforcements…
He propped himself on his arms and raised his head above the grasses. His eyes were watering and his neck was trembling, but he could still see the darkening prairie around him. He could tell right away it was no longer shivering with pale, melted forms.
He stopped searching the pasture and turned his head to the nightfall beyond his feet. There were stars overhead that would have told him he was staring into the east, but he knew this already. He’d seen the horizon in both directions and he could tell the difference between the graying twilight of the west and the impenetrable nightfall of the east.
From out of that terrifying nightfall, he heard the rustling weeds and the gagging of phlegm-filled throats. There was another noise as well, much louder than the other two, but at first he did not believe his ears.
It sounded like rock…like rock grinding on rock.
He held his breath to listen and lay there a bit longer. Now, the sound was unmistakable, the sound of someone fooling with a birdbath, the sound of a decorative stone basin spinning on a decorative stone plinth. But stone? Way out here in the Sway?
Too exhausted to shake his head or frown, he turned his face to the south and thought about the distance to the Devil’s Dome. There were three stories of stone down there—lots and lots of stone—but the Dome was over a league away, not to mention lying in the wrong direction.
His thoughts went to the throbbing ache rising from his hip and he wondered if he were delusional from pain, if maybe he was suffering from shock and blood loss and his senses were playing games with him.
He turned back to the sound of grinding and thought he saw something move against the lightless horizon. He blinked at it, convinced the delusion had spread to his eyes, but there did appear to be something over there.
It was sticking out of the vegetation right in the center of the gravely ruckus. He couldn’t say for sure it was stone—it was barely visible against the vacuous night—but he assumed it was stone. The rock-on-rock grinding was coming straight from the thing, and there was nothing else rising up in that direction.
Unable to tell much more, he wondered if it were possible for fourteen hands of stone to shove its way through the ground in a handful of moments. He couldn’t be positive (he’d been dodging a sea of biting faces as he’d run through the area), but he didn’t remember that stone being there before, and surely he’d remember something that large sticking out of the ground.
He let his eyes fall to the blanket of thistle and weeds surrounding the obelisk, searching them for some explanation as to where the column had come, and saw movement against the night. It was faint, but it was there.
He scrunched tight his eyelids, held the focus of his gaze in the one place, and then drew back from the sight.
The movement was still faint in the distant gloom (he’d looked right over it on the first go, as he had with the pillar), but now it was all he could see. The grasses around the pillar were shivering as they had when Zeph first made her escape, only now it was worse.
Now, the ugly creatures responsible for the shivering were erupting from reeds like hairless missiles, throwing themselves against the column of stone with no regard for their own personal wellbeing.
Jaysh thought back to his harrowing flight across the pasture, recalling the way these vicious fiends had ducked his thrusts and dodged his kicks and remembering as well the gelid feeling of despair that overcame him as he watched them evade his strikes.
None of that was happening, now. The hoard of melted creatures was behaving like a pack of lunatic dogs, hurtling themselves at the pillar with projectile-like force and paying no heed to the shattering of teeth or the rupturing of eyes. It was suicide, pure and simple. They were killing themselves against the pillar.
Jaysh leaned forward and took a better look, this time at the pillar. As bizarre as it was to see the melted things battering themselves silly against the obelisk, it was even more bizarre to realize the obelisk was moving.
He didn’t know how it was possible, but possible or not that was what he was seeing. Due to some strange phenomenon beyond the woodsman’s comprehension, the inky cylinder appeared to be moving away from him, sliding snail-like into the east.
He watched a moment more, realized what he was really looking at, and decided the idea of ambulation wasn’t so bizarre. He wasn’t looking at a simple pillar of stone, he decided, not with a bulge on top for a head and two black bars for its arms.
As he watched, the kryst took hold of a melted biter attached to his side, pried its teeth from his crystalline body—producing the rock-on-rock grinding Jaysh had heard—and lifted it to the side. Very carefully, the kryst lifted its other hand, already gripping a biter by the midsection, and brought the two hands together.
Grimacing at the effect, Jaysh watched as the two misshapen heads turned to mush in the kryst’s palms, the collision making a muffled crack in t
he cool dusky air, not unlike the cracking of eggs in a thick leather bag.
Still lumbering into the east, the kryst dropped both biters in the Sway (dark and syrupy fluid still spilling from their skulls) and reached for its next two victims.
Jaysh slumped into the reeds.
Part Six:
Unclean Places