by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 11
As it turned out, the interior of the Harriun wasn’t as harrowing as its name implied. It was creepy and disturbing and unsettling beyond all reason, but it was not overtly hazardous. At least, not in the manner Brine foresaw.
After listening to Reets’ tales and the Legends from Fendly’s time, he’d expected to hear creatures lurking behind every bole and see clawed footprints pressed deep in the sand. Instead, he found the place as dead as the Hill in the midst of high winter, nothing flying through the air, nothing scurrying up the tongues.
At first, he wondered if the wildlife was simply keeping to the darker parts of the forest, keeping back from the tool-wielding laborers and the exposure of the fields, but the deeper he plunged, the deader it became.
The only noise was a strange gurgling that came from deep within the wilderness. It sounded every now and again, a low and guttural vibration that seemed to tap into his teeth and spine, but it never came near.
In a way, Brine thought it sounded like the creaking of real trees as they swayed in a real breeze, but he knew that wasn’t the case. These weren’t real trees and there wasn’t any wind, not in Jashandar.
Once, when his curiosity was at its peak, he’d stopped to listen to the haunted gurgling and managed to discern a pattern and duration. It started out hard and fast, like his stomach on the first day of a winter fast, then slowed quickly to a groan, then died out.
Whatever it was, he quickly put it out of his mind. Like the sun overhead—or the sun he supposed was overhead, somewhere beyond the occluding tongues—the rumbling was sort of there and not there, always with him, but always out of reach.
If he stopped and listened, he could hear it gurgling somewhere in the distance, but for the most part it was background noise, always coming from somewhere else and never presenting him with any problems.
The boles, however, were an entirely different story.
As Brine stood in the light of Arn’s Promise and peered in at the gloom of the Harriun, he had suspected the space between the boles to be full of nothing but empty shadow. He had been wrong about that. The space between the boles was full of other boles, smaller in stature, but equally disgusting.
These bollets as he called them (it was either that or bapling, a bole sapling) were quite literally everywhere. Some were no larger than cabbage bulbs and littered the ground like tiny droplets of tar and others were as large as knee-high stalagmites and created whole hedges of acute triangles.
Then there were those that Brine hated most, the ones that rose twice his height and that sprouted a thinner version of the overhead tongues. Only these tongues, unlike their larger counterparts, hung down to Brine’s chest and felt like dead snakes.
Needless to say, he tried his best not to touch them, picking over bulbs and skirting around hedges, ducking under tongues and scrunching up his shoulders. Making matters worse was the long, yellow sleeve clutched in his hand and the daft old man sticking out the other side.
Before too long, the constant straddling and stooping began to take its toll on the disciple and he felt his legs growing heavy and his breathing growing weak. He felt his feet drag the ground and his sandals groove the sand and he thought, I need to high-step it or I’m going to have problems, and then he had problems.
Before he could react, one set of toes sank deep in the grit and he went tumbling forward, sticking out his hands and flailing his arms and grasping for anything handy, which was nothing.
His fingers sank into something that felt like the underbelly of a frog and, an instant later, his face did the same.
“Gughhh!”
There was no exterior film or residue on the bole, but Brine came away spitting none the less, spitting and wiping and making no end of revolted expressions.
It had been warm! The skin of the bole had been warm! It had the texture of settled pudding, the plasticity of fresh wax, and it was warm! Not as warm as he was—far from it, actually—but it was definitely not cold or clammy.
Scrambling back from the thing, he wondered briefly if something had been leaning against this bole, something slumped against the trunk with its arms hooked and its ears cocked, something listening as he and his partner tripped their way through the sands.
He looked down at the smooth granules around the base of the bole—save for where he’d fallen, obviously—and realized the only thing to press itself against the tree, at least recently, was him. The warmth he’d felt was being generated from within the bole.
Still wiping at his cheek, he thought back to the felled bole in the Leresh and decided this wasn’t so odd. Anything with the insides of fauna was likely to act like fauna, right? And most fauna emit their own heat, right? Even reptile and amphibians emit some heat.
Another image of the tattered bole slipped inside his head and he thought, But if it’s producing its own heat…
“…what else is it doing?”
This last part came out of his mouth in a half-whisper, a quiet musing spoken to no one but his own curiosity. He cocked his head on its side and ran his eyes up the bole, his mouth gaping open in an apt expression of wonder. It was almost like the act of touching the thing had broken through an emotional barrier and now, with said barrier removed, his desire to know was running rampant through his mind.
He cast a quick glance at his partner, found him with his face still shoved in the Wogol, and cocked an ear for the Lathians. Somewhere to the north, he could hear the fearless leaders shouting orders at the subordinates: Tie this thing down, Dig a trench for that thing, Go gather up these other things.
Actually, he wasn’t close enough to pick out the details, but that’s what he imagined. The important part was that camp was being set and that the Lathians weren’t leaving.
He brought his head level with the place where his hand and face had struck the trunk. He stared at the depressions in the skin…and felt his breath catch in his throat.
The slippery black skin was slowly lifting into place, swelling out from the center of the blow and erasing all evidence of his violation. It reminded him of the flowers from the garden and how they opened to meet the sun, moving with such a dearth of alacrity that they actually appeared not to be moving.
He could see the impression of both hands—one with no fingers as it was curled in a fist, the other with all fingers splayed and grasping—but what really held his gaze was the impression of his face.
It was his face…but it wasn’t his face. The longer he stared, the more it reminded him of what his face might resembled had he been burned in a fire or disfigured by a beating or—he swallowed hard—trapped inside the skin of this full-grown bole.
It was that thought that disturbed him most, the thought of being pulled inside by the overhanging tentacles and then wrestled into place by the pliable skin, slowly suffocated like an ant in molasses. He watched the impression of his teeth smooth flat, the blob of his tongue level out. He got to his feet and backed away.
Before that unsettling scene, he’d actually considered digging along the base of the bole and seeing if it had some sort of root system. Instead, he circled the bole (at a distance) and stared up at its great flawless length. When his eyes reached the top, he searched for an opening in the tongues and found none.
That was a shame. He really wanted to see how they branched from the main trunk, if they grew out from the sides or directly from the top or it they sprouted from a bulb like the cabbage droplets on the ground. In the end, he was left only to guess, unable to see past the lolling tips and swollen tubes.
Anything could be up there, he thought, and immediately felt cold. Anything at all, he added, unable to stop himself. And I bet it could have its head pushed down so it could see me and I couldn’t see it.
Ahead of him, the call of the Lathians rang in the boles and suddenly he wanted to be with them, or with Godfry, or with Sira herself. He turned to leave, reaching for the old man’s garment without bothering
to turn his head, and something on his right stopped him dead.
He lowered his arm and took a step forward, his curiosity tempered by fear. Whatever the thing was, it was located in the side of the bole, at about head-height, and it was all but glaring at him.
I was falling before, he thought. I was falling and tripped right passed it. But he could see it now. He could see it clearly.
He took another step towards the thing, only an arm’s length away, and since he was only an arm’s length away…
Don’t, Rugs.
…he leaned forward for a better look. It was a hole. Or at least, it looked like a hole. With his eyes you never knew, so he lifted his arm…
Rugs, don’t do that.
…and ran the tip of his finger around the edges of the thing.
It was a hole all right, some sort of puncture mark in the skin of the bole, and what was more, as he leaned forward for an even closer look, he saw the pinky-wide bore was not alone. There was another beside it, and another beside that. In fact, by the time he finished counting, he was face-to-face with four finger-thick holes, each one separated from the other by the width of a thumb.
Now this is interesting, he thought, picturing a woodpecker and a burrowing insect and trying to imagine how desperate a bird, or bug, would have to be before it stuck its mouth, or body, into something like this.
It wasn’t much of a hypothesis, he knew. He hadn’t seen any birds or bugs since entering the Harriun, and even if he had, he wasn’t sure they were capable of drilling a tree with four perfectly-formed holes, and even if they were, he doubted they were capable of accomplish the same feat twice...though something had.
He retrieved his monocle and stared up at the second set of perforation. It was roughly one body-length above the first set and identical in every way. He made a quick check of the other trunks (those in his general vicinity) and found them to be without holes. Turning back to the set of holes at eye-level…
Get back, Rugs.
…he leaned in a little closer and moved the monocle right up to the trunk. Dark smears of amber crusted the rim of each opening, a crusty residue that reminded him of dried honey. He raised his free hand from his side and scratched the one on the far left, watching as its residue broke away with no more resistance than one of his own scabs.
He wiped his finger on his mud-caked robes, leaned the monocle in a little closer, and wondered if maybe he’d been thinking about this all wrong, if maybe it wasn’t something that had gone into the bole, but something that had come—
Something grabbed his arm and he screamed, spinning around and finding the culprit to be Godfry.
“Sweet Amontus Almighty,” Brine breathed, fixing the old man with a terrified look…and noticing, gradually, that the old man wore the same look.
“Sam’s boy,” he said, his wrinkled eyes staring past him to the north. “Are they calling for us?”
Brine followed the old man’s gaze to the sleek columns in the distance. “No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure they’re setting camp.”
Godfry nodded, but he did so unconvincingly and he continued to stare into the throbbing flora in a way that greatly disheartened the disciple.
Brine said, “Why do you ask?”
Godfry’s brows lifted towards his bushy hair. “Oh, there for a time,” he said, sounding rather indecisive, “I thought I heard names…maybe ours.”
Brine wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think it’s names, Godfry, not unless someone—”
And just like that, like a silver spike through the brainpan, the authoritarian cries to the north morphed within his ears and he realized he was hearing the same word screamed repeatedly in the trees.
And it was a name.
