Chapter 3
Still swim-thrashing through the thick reeds of the Southern Sway, Kowin shuddered a little at the memory of the smoke being blown beneath his chamber door, affected once more by the same feeling of dread he’d experienced on the day in question.
He thought about the way he’d squatted in the darkness and watched the gray cloud rising from the floor, the compulsive need to know that gripped his mind and sent him crawling, pig-like, across the room.
He stopped at the door and pressed his cheek to cold, rough floor, laying one pink eye to the threshold.
Another puff of smoke slipped beneath the door and Kowin realized the person on the other side was kneeling down as well.
“I see yeh, Spook,” the messenger said, his breath thick with burning berry leaves.
Smelling this, Kowin’s breath stuck in his chest. There was only one person in the castle who smoked berry leaves, only one person who called him spook.
“Guess what?” the messenger growled. “Council’s got a job fer yeh.” More smoke, more burning berries. “Want’cha to go down to them stones in the Sway and have a look-see fer that great, golden freak.”
The very decree Kowin had inspected last night slid beneath the door and the messenger on the other side said, in a husky voice rife with ill-spirited mirth, “So I reckon yeh best get a move on, there Spooky. It’s a long walk fer som’un with li’le legs like yours.” The messenger chortled and said, “Lot’a nasty ole feather grass ‘tween here and there, I reckon.” The chortling became a cough as the smoke overtook his lungs. “Lot’a that nasty ole sunshine, too.”
Kowin sneered at the folded parchment, then shied away from it.
As if in response to this move, the messenger on the other side of the door said, “An’ if’n yeh decide not to go, Spooky, I bet’cha can guess what happens to yeh.” Then, in a voice nearly choked with laughter, “An’ I bet’cha can guess who gets to do it to yeh, too!”
The wicked chuckle rose from the floor and broke into an even louder guffaw, fading down the hall as the heartless messenger limped his way to the stairs.
After that, Kowin didn’t move a muscle. He sat petrified on all fours until he could no longer hear the evil emissary in the stairwell. At some point, he must have scurried beneath the seeing sphere, hoisted his knees to his chin, and gotten lost in his thoughts, because that was how he found himself sometime later.
He was curled in a ball and watching the dark light of the sphere reflecting off the talon-like nails on his toes, his thoughts drifting back to the one occasion he had disobeyed the vicious little cripple.
It had been one or two kings back on the Jashian time line, back in the good old days before the healer was familiar with the brutal emissary from the Land of Erinthalmus and back when ugling sightings were a regular occurrence.
At any rate, an ugling had been spotted somewhere near the rim of the Bottoms (slaughtering the Jashian cattle, as usual) and the wretched halfling had been sent to summon the healer from his chamber.
Naturally, Kowin had ignored the summons. He was a dark member to the Brood, after all, and he didn’t have to worry with the demands of some filthy cripple. As the twisted little man stood in the hall and barked his orders at the door, Kowin went about his merry business of cleaning traps and baiting snares.
It was not until two days later, as Kowin stepped unsuspectingly from the shadows of his chamber and into the faded lantern light of the corridor, that he realized the error of his way.
From out of nowhere, he was waylaid with something that felt a good deal like a piece of stove-length firewood, the voice on the other end of the firewood screaming, “Yeh gona do your job, Spook? Huh? Are yeh? Are yeh gona do it? Cause if’n yeh don’t—if’n I gota come back a second time—I’m gona use my axe!”
Of course, there had never been a second time. The royal healer, like his crippled antagonist, was not stupid. He knew that anyone crazy enough to beat him senseless with a piece of firewood was also crazy enough to come back with a double-bladed axe and finish the job, and it was this image that sent the healer scrambling for the Devil’s Dome.
He took a moment to picture himself dragging his body through the cellar with only his chin and whatever nubbins the beastly halfling had left at his hips and shoulders…and that had been enough. He crawled out from under the seeing sphere, pulled his sack-sloth hood over his pale, bald head, and set out for the Sway.
To be honest, though, it wasn’t the loss of his limbs that bothered the healer. For all he knew, they might grow back, but even if they didn’t, it wasn’t like their removal would hurt. Kowin had been gored by bulls, mangled by cougars, and chewed on by scabe-wolves, and he had never felt pain.
What bothered the healer were the consequences of losing those limbs. If the mad halfling removed his ability to walk and to point, Kowin wouldn’t be able to serve the Brood. And if Kowin wasn’t able to serve the Brood, he was going to be in a heap of trouble.
The Brood didn’t like it when you accepted their supernatural gifts and then failed to make good on your promises. If, for example, you agreed to secure control of the Drugana in exchange for congenital analgesia and corporeal immortality, and then you lost control of the Drugana because you were hacked into a thousand pieces by a halfling with a death wish…the Brood would revoke their gifts.
That was the downside to serving dark entities from beyond the great divide; they would be over there waiting on you once you left this plane of existence, and you would leave once they rescinded the immortality. You would pass over to their side of the divide and they would take you into the things they called arms and they would reacquaint you with your pain.
Even in the blistering heat of the sun (trapped within the suffocating black of his sackcloth), Kowin felt a shiver of trepidation passing down his spine. He clenched his eyes shut and clawed a little harder at the reeds, eager to put this whole ordeal behind him.
“Stupid halfling,” he spat, speaking between mouthfuls of spear grass and milkweed. “Oh, how I hates the halfling. I hates him so much that I hopes he drop axe and cuts off big toe. Yes, yes. I hopes, maybe, he trip on gimp leg and he fall on axe. Oh, that even better. Maybe cut off head. Or maybe tear hole in belly and spill small, crippled guts all over the—”
The feather grass that Kowin had been swimming through for the last two days disappeared from the end of his sleeves and he fell headlong into empty space. He managed a helpless yelp along the way, then slapped the ground with his belly, knees, and head.
He couldn’t be sure—not with his cowl over his eyes and his senses jarred—but he strongly suspected he was stretched upon the ground, and had grass in his mouth.
He made chewing motions with his teeth and discovered it was grass in his mouth. He shifted his arms and legs and felt whole clumps of matted weeds beneath the greasy fabric his robes. There was just as much grass in this hollow as there was anywhere else in the Sway, only it was bent over and smashed fla—
He jerked up his cowl and looked around. There was a dull throb in his face from the impact, but he ignored it. He was focused on the wall of grass that appeared to circle him on all sides. He ran his wide, pink eyes along its length.
He gasped and sat bolt upright. This was it. This was the depression the long-haired brat had described to the council earlier that moon cycle, the depression he and the hick-king had supposedly found when they located one of the mystery killer’s victims, a cow with carcass folded in half and its sides perforated with tow fist-sized holes.
At the time, Kowin hadn’t believed them. He’d suspected the brat of lying to make himself look good and the hick-king of not knowing what he was seeing. He suspected this because he knew the creature that killed in this manner—a dru’gye, the creature had been called—and their description was flawed beyond belief.
First off, a dru’gye did not leave its prey to rot on the ground. It consumed its meals in one long and breathless slurp. Sec
ond, the depressions in the flora were almost as rare as the carcasses. Since the dru’gye’s metabolism was so slow and it only fed two or three times an age, the ground hollows usually sprang back up before ever being discovered. Third, and most importantly, the only dru’gye residing in Jashandar…did not feed in Jashandar.
As part of an unspoken truce, established between kingdom and dru’gye over an epoch ago, the kingdom and dru’gye were bound by a set of rights and responsibilities. As for rights, the kingdom extracted a small portion of the dru’gye’s natural byproduct as tribute to the crown and the dru’gye received a nest outside the range of his natural predators. As for responsibilities, the kingdom agreed to protect the dru’gye’s nest in the southern fringe of the land and the dru’gye agreed to do all its unnatural feeding outside the borders of the kingdom.
But if that true, Kowin wondered, looking around stupidly the large depression of grass, what I lay in?
His drooping cowl came to rest on a decaying bulge at one end of the hollow.
And what that laying over there?
He turned his pale lips down and frowned at the dead thing in the corner. The creature’s spine and haunches were facing him, its head and legs clearly twisted towards its midsection, but unlike the carcass the brat and hick-hick had found, this one sat without a fog of sickly-sweet putrescence or a swarm of ravenous insects.
It had been dead for quite some time.