Chapter 31
In the immortal words of Iman Janusery (dear old friend and gambling aficionado): Jashandar Denback had been courting with lady luck. Not only had Jaysh been right about the lack of evil in the Bottoms, he had also been right about the wet chimes he’d heard to the north.
He slowed his pace from a trot to a saunter and waited for the source of the falsetto tinkling to materialize from the fog. He already knew what it was—what it had to be—but he wanted to see the thing before he moved much closer. Not that it was evil, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Not in this place.
Ahead of him, the cloud cover dissipated and the details began bleeding through, the panorama of gray giving way to an oily landscape he had only glimpsed on his belly. It was not much to look at.
As the soles of his feet had been telling him all morning long, the floor of the Bottoms was as smooth and rolling as the mud plains in the Gabatween, only without the flora and the stumps and the random pools of water, and of course the Gabatween didn’t look like some diseased ugling had blown its nose on the place.
But ain’t that lettin’ up a bit? he wondered, lowering his eyes to the ground. Where the frictionless, black ooze had once risen to his ankles and splattered at his pants, it now cresting only to his soles.
He pressed on, listening to the falsetto voices of the chimes growing louder in his ears, watching as the tarry slime around his feet gave way to a creamy, brown mud. A clean mud, if there was such a thing.
He moved closer still and the mud gave way to a shallow stream of water, a muddy current flowing from left to right and swimming around the fist-sized stones poking from the surface. The water was a muddy-brown and the stones a polished midnight…together they formed the trickling that led him.
The wet chimes, he thought, moving his gaze from the melodic banks of the river to the deeper sections at the center. Well, the relatively deeper sections, he corrected. They were deeper than the banks where he stood, but they were shallow compared with the rest of the river. This whole area would be considered shallow compared with the sections in the Sway and the Shun.
Jaysh had never really thought about it before, but it just dawned on him that the pastures of the Sway, or possibly the kingdom as a whole, must be steeper in the east. He knew from experience that the Blades were the taller of the two ranges—he’d hiked them both on several occasions—but apparently the Kilashan’s base was at a greater elevation.
Has to be, he thought, or it’d never make it up the slope.
He imaged the river pouring out of the foothills to the east then rushing down the slopes of the Bottoms, watched them passing through the slippery basin here then pooling at the slopes in the west, pooling and cresting and eventually carrying on into the Sway.
He thought about this a bit longer, amazed that a man could spend twenty ages of his life in the same place and never come to grips with the physical workings of its waterways, then took a better look at the river and noticed something even more amazing: It wasn’t black.
He surveyed the whole of the channel for as far as the fog would allow, then lowered his eyes to the water at the bank. It was a dark and chocolaty hue, to be expected considering the mud beneath his feet, but it was a far cry from black. In fact, compared with the greasy sludge he’d seen yesterday at East Bridge, these waters were as pure as a fresh mountain spring.
From behind him, still gasping for breath in his attempt to keep up, the general of the Jashian military must have noticed as well.
“Is that the Mela?” he asked.
Kneeling down beside the tinkling waters, Jaysh grunted that it was.
The sound of bristling lip-hair ensued, followed by: “Is it cured?”
Due to the movement of the river, the mists were thinner here than elsewhere in the Bottoms. Not so thin that Jaysh could see the banks on the north side, but thin enough so he could see three-quarters of the way across. Within those three-quarters, he spied no poison.
“Looks that way,” he muttered, peering upriver with a disappointed scowl.
Unable to see the scowl, but apparently able to hear it in his tone, Serit said, “I’m sorry, young Jaysh, but wasn’t that one of our objectives?”
Jaysh had no idea what an ub-jek-tib was, but he could tell the old general was asking about his mood. He leaned towards his good hip and crawled back to his feet.
“I was hopin to beat Iman here,” he said. “Hopin to get ahead’a him on the river, then hike back west an’ meet him as he come this way…,” he trailed off, his voice becoming a deep growl of pain as his injured hip came into play, “…but judgin by the look’a this place, I reckon we missed ‘im.” He pointed to the right. “Reckon he done fixed the Mela down yonder.”
In the corner of his eye, he watched the general turn and search the mists to the south, the lethargy of his movements radiating uncertainty.
“Have you seen any sign of the kryst?” the old man asked.
Jaysh panned his head from east to west, thinking of something to say. When they set out this morning from the Sway, Jaysh had been certain the crystal man would reemerge from the mist. As he was so fond of saying, to those who were foolish enough to ask, you just couldn’t get rid of the thing.
As time wore on, however (and the kryst continued to go missing), it seemed obvious the glittering creature had either moved on or been destroyed. Jaysh doubted very much that the biters had destroyed it—not after watching their systematic slaughter in the Sway—but something else might have taken it down. They were in the Bottoms after all, and even if it wasn’t a portal to the banned, it was home to all manner of vicious uglings.
At any rate, when Jaysh heard the trickling waters of the Mela, he’d essentially made the decision to give up on the kryst and seek aid from the captain. Say what you would about the good captain’s abysmal tracking, he was still the best planner in the kingdom, and they were in need of another plan.
Rather than speak this aloud, though, Jaysh merely gave the general a flicker of eye contact and shook his shaggy head.
“I see,” Serit said, focusing thoughtfully on the sprawling brown of the Mela. He seemed to consider something for a time, the rasping of his ragged breath mingling with the burbling of the watery shallows, then said, “Could we ride east to meet him?” He turned his head to the right. “If the Mela is cured,” he said, “would they not be riding towards us from the source of the cure?”
Without thinking, Jaysh spat a line of black at brown banks. “If’n they fixed it down yonder,” he said, nodding to an imaginary blight in the east, “I reckon they’d go round this place on the way home.” He turned and gave the general a knowing look. “Wou’nt you?”
Serit’s face crinkled. “Yes,” he said dolefully. “Yes, I would.” He lowered his dejected gaze to the ground, staring at the snot-like mucus. “Is there any sign of their passage? Coming or going?”
Jaysh didn’t even bother looking. Like the kryst before them, there would be no record of the party’s passing. Not unless they kept themselves in the narrow strip of mud between slime and river, and he strongly doubted that had happened. When the party passed by here yesterday, the river would have been thick with poison. They would have set a course through the slime and avoided the banks like the plague.
For a moment, Jaysh considered crawling to the south on his belly—feeling for hoof-prints in the mud and hoping to get lucky—but then he realized there was no guarantee the party had passed on this side of the Mela. If they’d followed the northern bank, he’d be wasting his time, and the Bottoms was no place to waste time.
He shook his head and broke into a casual walk to the west. “Welp,” he said, setting a course along the Mela and trying to alleviate the old man’s concerns. “It din’t fix itself.”
As they walked, he shared with Serit the details of their escape, explaining to the general that, in lieu of the sun’s position in the sky, his internal clock was telling him it was not yet midday. T
his meant they had ample time to vacate the Bottoms before nightfall returned and the basin became an abyss.
By afternoon, they’d be in the Sway and riding their horses, and by nightfall, they’d be enjoying a savory meal and the comfort of their beds. In the morning, they’d have warm bathes and a delicious breakfast of crisp bacon and peppered eggs, and afterwards Iman would scheme for them a new plan to vanquish the mystery killer.
“Wha’ yeh think’a that?” he asked. “Bacon ‘n’ eggs sound good, doan’ it.”
Slopping along behind, Serit said, “You don’t think those creatures took them, do you?”
Frowning at this, his mind spinning with images of some creature laying paws on his bacon and eggs, Jaysh said, “Took who?”
“Iman and the others,” Serit said. “They didn’t have the kryst to protect them against those biting hoards.”
Jaysh thought about that for a few paces, then gave his head a sad little shake. “No,” he said at last. “No, they din’t.”
“I do hope they’re safe,” Serit sighed, squishing along quietly for a time, seemingly lost in his own compendious thoughts. “What do you suppose those creatures were, young Jaysh?”
Jaysh shrugged. “Looked like salamanders, to me.”
“They did at that,” Serit agreed, “but did you notice the hindlegs?”
Jaysh frowned, suddenly aware of the throbbing in his hip. Placing a hand to his bandage, he wanted to remind Serit that he’d been a bit preoccupied with the front of the creatures to worry much with the rear, but instead he simply shook his head and uttered a guttural, “Huh-uh.”
“Well, I did,” Serit said matter-of-factly, “and there were no hindlegs, none at all.” He hmmed to himself pensively, then said, “And did you notice the melted skin?”
Jaysh had, and told him so.
“Skin like that makes me think of imps, young Jaysh. It makes me think these things were lurking in the Bottoms, smelled us in the Sway, and slipped out to feed.”
Staring at something dark and round as it materialized from gloom, Jaysh said “Could’a been.”
“Yes, it could,” Serit said, going on to say something else that the woodsman completely ignored.
Jaysh’s eyes were locked on the thing in the mist, the thing that was three strides away and lying on the ground. It was probably a muck-coated rock or the remains of a stump, but somehow Jaysh didn’t think so. He found himself veering away from it.
“The only part I don’t understand,” Serit said, oblivious of his partner’s sidestepping, “is why Lorn abandoned his king—his royal charge, mind you—and then entered a vile place such as the Bottoms. Honestly, young Jaysh, there is no historical precedent for such behavior. This is history we are seeing, history in the making. I am telling you, our grandchildren will speak of this day with their grandchildren, the day that Lorn the Kryst, protector of kings, forsook his royal charge and went chasing after imps.”
Serit paused. “In my opinion, it’s as much an anomaly as what befell Aden at the end of the Lathian War. Do you not see the similarities, young Jaysh?”
Jaysh might have, had he been listening to anything the old general was saying. As it were, his attention was fixed on what he now saw was a hump rising two hands from the ground.
“Young Jaysh?” Serit said. “Are you all right? Is everything—” He gasped, his slurping bootfalls stutter-stepping through the fog, dancing away from the mysterious hump. “Do you see that, young Jaysh?”
Still trekking west, still giving the hump a wide berth as he passed, Jaysh nodded his head. Not only did he see the hump, he was now so close he could see the hole in its right side, the hole that filled its face from top to bottom and reminded him of the entrance to a burrow.
He stooped veering right and darted sharply to the left, ensuring that when he passed the obstruction, he did so around the back. If it were a burrow, and if it did have a denizen, he had no desire to tempt whatever lived inside with a tasty bite of his leg.
On the other side, he gestured for Serit to the move left as well, never taking his eyes from the ominous swell of mud.
Only it wasn’t a swell. There was nothing pushing up from below, no heavy rock or jutting stump. In fact, as Jaysh passed behind it and the details clarified, he saw it was actually comprised of several plum-sized colds of mud, as if something had scooped tiny handful of muck from the ground and stacked them in a mound.
Considering the hole on the opposite side of the burrow, he wondered if the mud had come from deep inside the floor of the Bottoms. The longer he stared, the more the rippling hump reminded him of a crawfish burrow along the river, only the thing that made this was a good deal larger than a crawfish; more along the lines of a beaver.
Or a biter?
Nah, he thought, not a biter. The hole wudn’t big enough. Them melted things was bigger than any ole beaver.
Despite the realization, he kept his eyes on the burrow, fearful that something, regardless of size, might rush out and seize upon his leg, something long and sleek like a leech, something to wrap about his foot and drag him down to the mouth below.
When he’d moved a considerable distance away and felt confident he was out of range, he turned back to face the west…and found three more burrows emerging from the fog.
Serit began to whimper.
Two of the mounds were on his far left and one slightly to the right, all of them constructed in the same manner as the one behind him. He could see the uneven sides formed of various chunks of muck, apparently dredged up from below and piled into a dome.
The moved closer and felt his eyes drawn to the one on the right. It wasn’t miniature at all and neither were the balls of dirt from which it was made.
While the burrows on his left were comprised of apple-sized clods, the one of the right was formed with grapefruit-size clods, and while the entrances on the left were the size of a woodchuck’s den, the entrance on the right was the diameter of an overturned barrel.
Jaysh studied them warily and found the only commonality to be the direction of the openings, each one pointed at the sluggish length of Mela on the right. Seeing this, he wondered if the openings in the dens were a clue, if maybe they were one of life’s little Whats and if maybe they added up to form one of life’s little Whys.
He stopped wondering about the trajectory and began wondering about losing his footing in the slime, about skidding towards the larger burrow on his right and slipping right down its throat, gliding into the mucky darkness and landing on the soft, sticky denizen below.
Thinking about the mound’s filthy host, Jaysh found himself moving between the two smaller mounds and the one larger mound, passing between them in a hurry and trying to look in both directions at once.
He felt he was doing a fairly good job of this—his eyes flitting from one side to the other, never lingering for long in one place—when Serit’s puppy dog whimper escalated to a yelp.
Jaysh jerked his head at the old man, found him gawking and pointing to the west (one long, aged finger trying to poke invisible holes in the mist) and spun himself around.
Ahead of him, instead of three burrows drifting from the hovering white, there came a colony of lumpy, brown shapes. Only colony wasn’t the right word. What Jaysh saw swimming towards him from the risers was much too spacious to be a colony. It was more like a city.
Yes, indeed. If you were a disgusting muck-dweller in need of a place to call home, this was the place to be. This was the metropolis when it came to clod-piles in the Bottoms, a virtual clodtropolis if you will.
Jaysh slowed his pace, hoping to keep track of them as he approached, but to no avail. Even at a snail’s pace, the dark humps and darker portals seemed to blur into a kaleidoscope of gray. He might be staring at one section of the horizon while the other sections erupted with life.
Close behind, so close he was bumping into his pack, Serit yelped a warning. Jaysh ignored him and gestured over his shoulder for t
he old man to keep moving.
He’d already weighed the pros and cons of circumventing these mud-pimples and it was not to their advantage. The straightest path was still the quickest, and bearing in mind what would happen to their visibility when nightfall came, a detour to the south was out of the question.
Unless something came out of these hovels and threatened them, they needed to keep their tongues still, their legs moving, and slip to the other side in a steady, yet cautious manner. The portals, so far, had presented themselves as dead and lifeless and, unless he or Serit made undue noise to attract attention, there was no reason to anticipate a change.
There was a tug at his pack and Jaysh industriously ignored it. The tug came again, harder this time—almost unseating his moccasins from the slime—and Jaysh swung his arms in the air to regain balance. When his feet were planted, he whirled around, prepared to throttle the tugger, and went cold with what he saw.
Serit was staring in horror at something to the west, his eyes comically wide and his mouth a hair-lined cave at the bottom of his face. He was pointing at something ahead of them, pointing in the same frantic manner as he had pointed at the mounds.
Jaysh spun back around.
Halfway across the bugling terrain of clodtropolis, just visible in the dissipating fog and stretching from north to south as far as the eye could see, was a swath of something black and glistening.
Jaysh stood there and stared at it, waiting for the swath to move. When it did not, he resumed his forward progress and watched as the flat smear took on an impossibly dark hue, a glossy black even darker than the surrounding slime. The word road went through one part of his mind, but the other part of his mind was screaming at him that there were no roads.
After a few more steps, he could see that, whatever the thing was, it was much too wide for him to leap across. At roughly eighteen hands—or as wide as a man is tall—he might have been able leap across (if he slung his pack over first and got a good run at it), but the gangly old man behind him had no chance.
He crept to within three paces of the sludge and stopped. It was black like pitch, the gelatinous resin used on the larger vessels in Blue Hole and on the wooden shingles of most Jashian homes, but that wasn’t what it was.
For one thing, it had a glossy sheen that natural pitch lacked, and for another there were chunks of something inside it. The chunks gave the surface a rippled cast and Jaysh thought they were either congealed pieces of the sludge itself or debris from the ground below. For whatever reason, they deeply disturbed him.
Huh-uh, he thought. I ain’t jumpin that. No way.
He looked south, searched for a place where the layer of sludge ended and they could go around, but saw no end in sight. It disappeared in the wall of fog and gave no impression that it waned along the way. He turned to the north and moved for the river, hoping to get lucky and find the waters had washed the sticky filth from shore. If that were the case, they could just wade around the mess through the shallows.
The fog thinned around him as he walked and before he knew it he was standing at the banks of the Mela. He peered down at the shallows of the river…and felt a massive fist of ice squeezing on his chest.
Unlike the thinner slime of the basin floor, the tarry sludge of the swath clung to the banks like a head of a leech. Worse yet, at the places where it touched the gently flowing waters, it turned them black with a greasy floating film that Jaysh found all too familiar.
He winced and stepped back.