Page 22

Chapter 22

I was awoken not by the light of dawn but by the tramp of many feet and much whispering. I cracked my eyes, wondering if I dreamed, and saw the wardens stepping around me on the boat to peer out at the river past the cliff’s edge.

I sat up. I could barely make out the form of Tangis sitting on the deck across from me. I whispered, “What’s going on?”

“Wardens say they smell something dead in the water,” Tangis said quietly. “Something floating down to us. Their noses say it’s human. They can’t see it yet. But it’s close.”

I clambered to my feet, peering at the trees about me. I thought I could make out slashes of pink light leaking through the leaves, suggesting dawn was near. I hissed Malo’s name at the clump of wardens at the prow of the boat until she finally broke away.

“What is it?” Malo demanded.

“Tangis says your people smell a body.”

“Yes, Khusabu and Sabudara do. They’ve the finest noses. But it’s not here yet, though it’s coming.” She sniffed the air. “Ah…I think I have it now. About half a league upstream. I wonder why no scavenger has taken it yet…” She sniffed again. “Yet it smells…strange.”

I summoned the map in my mind. “It will be coming…downstream from where the camp is, yes? The very one we wish to raid today?”

“It is. But bodies in the water about a camp is not uncommon. Perhaps it is our impostor. Maybe someone got as sick of his shit as I.”

I joined her at the prow of the boat, waiting. Dawn light slowly filtered through the trees, and soon I could make out the far bank. Then it came.

The body floated facedown, arms at its sides, its feet low enough in the water that they were lost in the muddy haze. It was not yet bloated, and we could see no marring to the corpse as it approached us. One of the wardens pulled a lance from the stock of arms, reached out, and hooked the body. Then he brought it close and rolled it over.

Instantly the wardens recoiled, crying out; for on the underside, the body was not truly a body at all.

From the chest to the hip bone, the bare torso appeared to bloom into a tangle of silvery, slender skeletons, like the bones of many fish, yet it was difficult to tell where the man’s body ended and this twisted storm of glistening fishbones began. It was as if they sprouted from his flesh, or from his pelvis and rib cage, like a school of minnows leaping from his abdomen, and some of the skeletons had eyes that were small, malformed, and peeping.

But worst was his skull, which no longer bore a face. Instead his eyes and cheeks and nose had been replaced by a clutch of coiling, dark tubers, complete with tiny, pale roots. They had apparently erupted from his head with such a violent burst that they had dislocated his jawbone, which hung by a tendon from his skull, and it, too, sprouted tiny dark tubers, some of which had dislodged his teeth.

Malo hissed something at the warden with the lance, and he let it go, then tossed the lance in after it. I watched the body float away and sniffed my vials, carefully engraving the sight I had just beheld, no matter how horrible it had been. The wardens fell to whispering questions, until Malo turned to me.

“Kol,” she whispered. “What in hell was that? Have you seen anything like that before?”

I tried to calm my heart, and considered it. An idea had already floated to the top of mind, but I fought to ignore it, for it felt too mad to speak aloud. I would not say such things, I decided, not yet.

“I have not seen that, but…I’ve seen things like that,” I said carefully. “It has the look of serious contagion. Something has altered that man horribly.” I looked to Tangis. “Correct, Princeps?”

He nodded, his dark face now white about the lips. “Y-yes…I have viewed such things in books, but…I’ve never seen such a sight in Yarrow, or any of Pithia.” He swallowed and said to Malo, “We’ll have to take precautions, ma’am. For while I’ve no idea what happened to him, we’re going in the same direction—yes?”

“Of course,” Malo muttered. She walked to one box in the boat and opened it. Within were two dozen warding helms, and she began passing them out. “Have you worn one of these?” she asked me.

“I wore one in Talagray, for a bit.”

“Drink as much water as you can—for I can’t say when you’ll have your next chance—then get it on. It is a difficult thing to wear in the heat, and my folk shall love them even less, for they’ll dull our noses and eyes and ears far more than yours. Yet we must. I don’t want us exposed to whatever did that to that man.”

I took a great draught of water, stuffed the helm on my face, and strapped it down. Instantly, the world about me turned to dark and acrid oilcloth. I readjusted it until my eyes aligned with the glass eyepieces, and the world coalesced into a blurry, glassy version of itself.

I peered upriver through the eyepieces. “I am ready if you are,” I said softly.

Malo laughed dully. “How ready could one ever be for such a task?”

—

The journey upstream was tense and silent, all of last evening’s merriment wiped from our minds. The wardens seemed especially affected. I reckoned that the warding helms disrupted their senses so much that they were bothered a great deal.

“We grow close to the camp,” murmured Malo. “To arms, then.”

She and the wardens began stringing their bows and fitting them to their slings. The wardens did not wield common bows but ones unusually thick and long. I saw for the first time that many of the wardens had one arm wider and more corded than the other; some had hints of purple to their elbows and hands and forearms, as if the appendages had been grafted for strength.

We followed the little river around one long curve. Then Sabudara flung out a finger, pointing ahead, and whispered one word: “ Ute! ”

“Seen something,” said Malo softly. She tugged at the reins, slowing the seakips, and went to Sabudara. Together they huddled and peered off into the trees. Sabudara pointed at some distant part of the canopies, and I stuck a spyglass to the glass bulb of my helm and squinted.

Eventually I found it: the silhouette of a person, crouched on a stand at the top of a tree. The morning sun was just behind them, so I could make out no more than their shoulders and head, but they peered out at the river toward us. They did not move but sat still as stone.

Malo, Sabudara, and another warden knelt behind one of the boat’s armored walls, whispering. Then Malo plucked at her cloak, ripped some fibers free, and dropped them, gauging the wind. She whispered something; then, all in unison, the three wardens aimed, drew, and fired, their strings creaking and clacking as the missiles took flight.

All three arrows flew straight and true—incredible shots, so accurate I was awed—and pierced the figure in the tree three times. Yet the figure did not cry out or stagger. They sat still and silent, as if perfectly content to have been shot through three times over.

The wardens frowned, confused. Malo waited for a moment, studying the figure, before tugging at the reins of the seakips again. She nudged the beasts to the shore and gestured to her people. One of the wardens leapt out, slipped into the brush at the bank, and scaled the tree quick as a squirrel.

We watched as he made it to the stand and vanished into the branches. Then we heard a grunt, and a creak above, and something large and dark plummeted into the water before us.

One of the wardens hooked the thing with a spear and hauled it aboard. A few wardens gasped with surprise. It was like a statue of a man in a crouching position, but it was wrought of tightly wound vines, all closely compact and blooming here and there with rosy-pink cups. It had been shot through with the three arrows, two in its wattled chest and one in its neck. I found the figure strikingly lifelike: something in the tilt of its head, like the vine-person had just heard something startling.

“Strange,” said Malo softly. “A trick, perhaps, to scare off intruders?”

I spied something glimmering in the depths of the vines. I crouched, drew my knife, and dug at the vines until I freed the thing.

A belt buckle, made of brass. Not just a buckle, though, but also part of a belt, like the vines had grown around it and torn the leather to pieces.

We all stared at it. Then I hacked at the vine-figure, splitting it open like a hunter field-dressing an animal.

I found within the vine-person several talint coins, five buttons—and many bones. Rib bones, two femurs, a handful of vertebrae. Yet far more troubling than any of this was where I found them, for I discovered all these objects in places where I might find them on my own person: the buttons on the shirtfront, the ribs in the figure’s side, a femur in its thigh.

“Kol,” said Malo softly. “What is this thing? A totem?”

“No…I think I know what this is,” I said. “As well as what happened to the man in the waters.”

“Then what is this devilry?”

The memory of a few words bubbled up in my mind: The purest of titan’s blood—or qudaydin kani, as is the proper name—is powerfully metamorphic. When it comes into contact with a significant concentration of living tissues, it mixes with them, forcing a strange blending. Flesh becomes as leaf, and leaf as bone, and so on. All is warped.

“I think it…it is titan’s blood,” I said. “That is what has done this. For this was a person once, but no longer.”

“By hell,” murmured Tangis. “You think…”

“Y-yes,” said Malo, shaken. “I see. The man in the river—he had tubers growing from his skull, like the hina root I chew. Yet…his very face had been transformed into them.”

“And now these people, positioned in the brush,” I said. “But they have been turned into brush, as if they were mixed, warped, or muddled with the world about them.”

“Such things have been seen within the Shroud,” said Malo quietly. “But—how do we find them here?”

A call from the bank: the warden who’d climbed the tree emerged from the brush and gestured to us. He shouted something to Malo, his voice high and panicked, indifferent to being overheard.

I saw Malo’s green eyes grow wide and her helm’s glass bulbs grow hazy with hot breath.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There are more of them, he said,” she said. “More plant people, standing in the jungle. And…something else. Something he saw from the stand.” She tugged at the reins until the boat drew closer to the bank. “A growth of plants, so thick he could not see through it.” She put her bow on her back and buckled her quiver of arrows tight. “Very strange—and right where the camp should be.”

—

We moored our boat, leaving two wardens behind to guard it, and slipped ashore, weaving up a narrow trail into the jungle. The trees were close and dark, and after the sights we’d seen and with our warding helms affixed atop our heads, the forest seemed otherworldly.

We found that the warden had been right: standing among the jungle paths were three humanlike statues made of vines and ferns and grass, and even clutches of mushrooms. Yet these were not crouched like the first had been: rather, they seemed frozen in midstride, often with one foot rooted and stuck to the soil. It was like they were running away from something up the path—the very direction in which we now moved.

After a few turns I found Malo and the other wardens stopped ahead, for the way was blocked by a huge, thick wall of interwoven tree branches and vines, all sporting many strange blooms. The wardens were hacking at the wall with their short swords, but they made little progress.

“Here the trail ends,” Malo said to me. “We would need axes to go farther.”

I studied the strange blooms on the wall of vines. They seemed a mad mixture of flowers: rosy trumpets, spidery cruciforms, and dainty little blue cups, scattered among the dark leaves.

“I’ve seen blooms of this kind before,” I said quietly. “In the Plains of the Path, before Talagray. Where the leviathans of the old days had fallen.” I thumbed one of the blue cups. “Malo…how does this blood normally function?”

She shuddered. “Titan’s blood affects nearly any porous organic matter. If it gets on your skin, or if you breathe it in—or if it lands on leaves, or soaks into the ground to be absorbed by the roots of plants—then it begins changing things, often in unpredictable ways, very quickly. This is why we wear glass and metal and algaeoil when near it, for it does not affect such materials. But there is only so much known of what it can do. Few witness its warpings and survive.”

I gazed at the wall of trees before us. “And we’ve not seen or heard any smugglers about? No sign at all?”

“The helms make it hard, but I have heard nothing,” she said. “I think we are alone here. Which should not be so…”

I thought for a long while in silence. “If this is titan’s blood,” I said softly, “how do we still live? Shouldn’t we be affected by now? For helms alone can’t be enough. We’d need entire suits to protect ourselves.”

“I…don’t know,” said Malo after a long while. “I cannot comprehend any of this.”

I grasped the handle of my sword and said, “Stand back.”

“You think you can cut through?” she said.

My eyes fluttered, and the memories returned to my muscles. I twisted the handle of my sword, unlocking it from its mechanical sheath, and then my glimmering green blade was free.

“The hell kind of sword is that?” asked Tangis.

I turned and hacked at the wall of growth. The green blade cut through the branches like they were simple grass, and soon I had made a narrow portal in the vines and branches; yet the wall was thicker than I’d thought, and I was forced to keep going.

“Follow me,” I said to Malo. “But stand clear of my blade.”

They did so, filing in behind me as I slashed my way along, cutting a dark path piece by piece and ripping out the tangled branches to clear the way.

Finally the brambles came to an end, yet I did not see daylight filtering through the gap I’d rent, but a shadowy, quivering luminescence.

I pushed through the remains of the wall and staggered into a deeply shaded clearing. I squinted into the shadows about me.

Then I froze.

“Kol?” whispered Malo behind me. “Why do you tarry? Keep going!”

I stood still for a very long time, struggling with the sights before me, my words choking in my throat.

“Kol?” Malo asked.

Not knowing what else to do, I stumbled forward and allowed her and the others to enter and see what awaited us. My mind was so swimming with bewilderment and terror that I hardly registered their gasps and screams, though I wished to scream myself; indeed, I wished to scream until my lungs would break.