Jashandar's Wake - Book Two: Unclean Places

by L. S. Kyles

  Chapter 40

  Mums turned to face Iman with something like relieved anxiety brewing at her core. She wasn’t certain such a combination of emotion truly existed, but certain or not, those were the sensations she was experiencing as they grappled in her chest.

  One emotion was spreading out all warm and creamy as she heard the sound of their lost captain waddling into the chamber (and he was waddling for some reason, very unlike him), and the other emotion was clenching around her insides like a needle-studded vice.

  As pleased as she was to find that Iman had not been snatched away by the crawler and stuffed inside the gruesome belly-pouch, she was practically frantic with the need to hear Reetlse’s ideas for surviving the night.

  She whirled around like the hirsute nightmare she resembled, taking up space in the tiny scum-lined bedroom, and greeted the Jashian officer with a bestial stare that would have flattened any lesser man.

  As usual, Iman took no notice of the look. He turned shoulder-first into the entryway and swayed side-to-side across the threshold. Opposed to sounding alarmed (either by what he’d found or by the titan’s lethal glare), he sounded elated. His teeth were on display—though, perhaps in a grimace—and he was telling them how they simply would not believe what he’d found.

  “I can’t believe it myself,” he admitted, his voice now sounding strained, perhaps an octave lower than normal. “After all those ages of flipping over rugs and looking under tables…”

  “Iman dear,” Mums said, keeping the frustration from her voice, “I am actually glad you’re here. Reetlse is about to share information that will be valuable to all of us. You need to hear what he has to say.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Iman said, waddling in like Balthus on a bad day, his back hunched over and the corners of his smile stretched to the breaking point. “You need to see what I have to show you. You’re not going to believe it.”

  Mums leaned her cudgel against the wall and folded her shaggy arms across her chest. What she didn’t believe was that a captain in the king’s army could be so disrespectful and stubborn and borderline foolish.

  “Iman dear, whatever it is, I’m afraid it will have to wait. Reetsle and I were in the middle of an important conversation that means the difference between life and dea—”

  “Not my life,” Iman interrupted, grunting like a stone mason heaving slag from his bench. “My life’s going to be good.”

  Mums was an instant from grabbing him about the throat and showing him what kind of a life he was about to have when her anxiety over the boggen (and the long night ahead) suddenly intensify seven fold.

  She felt her arms unfolding and her emotional defenses lower. Inside her head, her internal voice began to warn her about the nonchalant manner in which this captain (her Guide to Elnor) had presented the horrors of this mansion.

  If memory served, this same man had considered these ruins a veritable vacation spot on some tropical isle, a little mold here, a few cracks there, But hey, Mums, you won’t find a place as nice as this…

  All of a sudden, she not only wanted to see this amazing find, she needed to see it. She needed to take a look for herself and decide if it was a cause for celebration or for alarm. So far, the sight that greeted her was not encouraging.

  At Iman’s waist, there was something cradled in both his muscular hands, something the titan judged to be rather dense based upon the way it bowed the man’s legs and yanked down both arms at the sockets. The other clue was the way he swayed around it—shoulders teetering like a metronome—instead of the other way around.

  “Seriously,” Iman wheezed, his mouth caught between grimace and grin, “you might want to sit down for this!”

  Eyes locked on the heavy wonder at the captain’s waist, ears still tuned to the preternatural silence outside, Mums said, “Iman dear, would you please lower your voice?”

  “You’re going to love this the most, Mumsy,” Iman cheered, his voice as loud as ever.

  Rather than warn him a second time about the volume of his voice (which had proven to be a colossal waste of time), Mums tried to focus on the potential danger he was hauling inside their redoubt.

  “It looks heavy,” she observed.

  “Oh, it is,” Iman said, exhibiting great care as he waddled to the right and set the object on the dresser. “But just look at it,” he added, waving to them blindly, unable to take his eyes from what appeared to be a lumpy melon.

  Mums took a step closer and discovered it was not a melon, but a rock. Then, as she came closer still, the object looked more like one of those eggs from the giant ice storks of her homeland. She stared at it in awe, trying to imagine how an ice stork would have made its way down here, then lowered her head level with the table and saw the object was round like a ball and not oval like an egg.

  And considering the way it bent him at the waist, she thought, it’s probably not full of yoke.

  “Is it rock?” she asked, trying to sound neutral.

  Beside her, Reetsle snorted like dog that smells a stranger on the other side of the door. “It’s a rock,” he said, shaking his head, then muttering something the titan thought sounded like, “Idiot.”

  “No, no, no. It’s more than a rock,” Iman said, ignoring Reetsle and reaching out to caress the thing’s side. “It’s a glowing rock. See it? Do you see the green on it, on the sides?”

  As it turned out, Mums did not. She saw pits on the surface, a few minor chips, and a handful of hairline fissures, all the traits she’d expect from an ordinary, run-of-the-mill rock. Trying to keep an open mind, she plucked the stone from the dresser top and hefted it in the air, hoping to discern whether it was solid. After two of three throws, she decided it was solid, and how.

  Sighing ruefully, she lifted the ball to her chest and took one final look, opening her fingers and spreading her palm and nearly dropping the thing as the phosphorescent green finally rose to catch her eye.

  “See!” Iman said, reading the awe in her face.

  Mums did see. She couldn’t speak—could only stare in wonder at the faint light emanating in the shaggy bowl of her hand—but she did see. The greenish light had been there all along, faint but there, hiding first in the captain’s tightly clasped hands, then later blending with the fuzzy mold of the dresser.

  With some trepidation, Mums brought it to eye level, still wondering if this were some kind of trick. “Where did you say you found this?” she asked, staring into the viridian hue.

  “Just down the hall,” Iman said. “In one of the walls.”

  “Walls?” Mums said, setting the stone down and examining her hand.

  “Oh yeah, right there in the wall,” Iman said. “Can you believe it?”

  Apparently, at the start of his watch, he’d revisited each of the manor’s rooms to see if he’d missed anything on his first inspection, and there it was, just down the hall in a pile of busted paneling, a faintly-glowing geode dislodged from hiding by the violence of the old ones visited upon the mansion.

  “I checked all the other rooms after that,” he said, sounding a tad rueful, “but I didn’t find any more, or any hidden compartments.” He ran his eyes around the chamber in which they stood. “I was going to check this one, but you two were still sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake you.”

  Rather than thank him for his thoughtfulness, Mums wiped her hand on her hip and said, “When you say in the wall, do you mean a vault, or a…a safety box?”

  Staring at the glow stone, Iman thought for a moment, then shook his head. “There wasn’t anything like that,” he said. “Not that I saw.”

  Mums held her hand before her face, turning it front to back and searching for contamination. So far, she found none. No residue on the fingers, no burn marks on the palm. Her hide felt a little warm from being rubbed against her hip, but otherwise it was the same shaggy paw with which she’d been born.

  Still staring at it, she said, “And your hands? Do they feel all right?”
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  Iman didn’t look at his hands. “They’re fine,” he said, the sparkle gone from his eyes, the grin dead on his lips. “Mums, this is someone’s treasure, not a poisoned apple. What are you…,” he trailed off, staring at her in silence, his breathing filling the room, “…what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” Mums said, sniffing at her paw. “It’s your stone I’m not so sure about.” She rubbed her thumb across her fingers and said, “It came out of a swamp where a colony of people vanished in the ni—”

  “A colony,” Iman interrupted, “overseen by a very wealthy ruling class. Did you not look at the place when you came in? This place is a mansion, Mums. A real-life mansion. It belonged to the colonial overseers, to a class of people who were filthy rich, and this,” he stabbed a finger at the glow stone, “this is the sort of thing you find in the walls of filthy rich people. You’re being ridiculous!”

  “Well, you’re being—” Mums stopped herself short. She was very closer to entering the name-game and redirected herself away from the relevant issues. “Iman…dear…would you please stop and listen to what you’re saying? If they were overseers, they probably weren’t stupid either. They wouldn’t seal their valuables away in a wall! That would make them rather hard to access, do you not agree?”

  To her surprise, Iman was nodding as though he did agree. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “That’s why I found it and the other hundred or so looters who came along before me walked right past it.” He took a step towards the stone. “You think we’re the first ones to come here, the first treasure hunters? Sweet Pit on a Stick, Mums, Jaysh and I used to come here all the time, and my father before that, and his father before that.” He put a hand on the stone, caressing it with his thumb. “Anything not in a wall or a floor or buried in the yard was stolen out of this place before you or I were ever born.”

  “Or maybe that thing was growing in the wall,” Mums countered, taking another step back. “Maybe it wriggled up from the same evil that befell these colonists.”

  Iman didn’t answer. Instead, his panting silhouette stomped to the wall behind the wardrobe and went still. She could hear him breathing over there—as she could hear the thump of the crawler’s arm below—and then a dull tapping on the walls, the captain’s knuckles rapping three times near the ceiling, then again at a lower point on the wall, then lower still as he made his way to the mold-covered floor.

  “You don’t know,” Mums told him, speaking to his pecking apparition. “You don’t know what that thing is.”

  The tapping reached the floor, paused as the tapper regained his feet, then resumed again near the ceiling at a place slightly closer to where she stood.

  She opened her mouth to warn him again about the dangers of his glowing rock, and then slowly closed her lips. She hated to admit it, but his rock didn’t really matter, not compared to what would happen once the darkness was complete. If she had to put her finger on what was bothering her, she would have to say it was the fact she’d let her fear of the crawler blind her to the captain’s rather obvious agenda.

  Throughout the day, there had been clue after clue tipping her off, but she had been too frightened to see them. The way he’d nodded like a woodpecker when she’d mentioned entering the Dell. The way he’d quickly explained away her concerns for the horses. The scorching pace he’d set once they’d entered the bog, all the stories he’d told about visiting the ruins as a child.

  She put her back to him, turning to face the window. His rock might not matter, and maybe he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he still wasn’t taking their situation very serious, and for that she was furious.

  Of course, once she’d turned around, she saw the halfling was no better. His dark outline was seated in the corner and he had his axe laid out across his lap, a wet stone rubbing against the blade and a rhythmic spray of sparks cascading down his pants…just sharpening his blades without a care in the world.

  Now that she thought about it, she’d heard the grating noise behind her, but had been so engrossed in her argument with the captain that she’d completely ignored it, much like the halfling was ignoring her now.

  I can’t win, she thought, watching the flare of orange dots spilling to the floor. One of these two cretins is going to get us killed.

  She didn’t really believe that, not yet she didn’t. She had already convinced Reetsle to stay out of the bog at night. All she needed to do now was reason with Iman about his evil stone and convince him to leave it behind.

  In lieu of turning around, she projected her voice over her shoulder and said, “Do you plan to take it with you?”

  From behind her, the tapping never faltered. “Well, yeah,” Iman said, his voice a little calmer, but still acerbic. “I’ll carry that one out and bring a sled back for the others.”

  Mums had to bite her tongue to keep from whirling around and screaming at him—Others? What do you mean, OTHERS?—but when the urge to scream had passed and she felt more composed, she said, “So you don’t believe the stone will be a burden?”

  The three-part tapping stopped on the second tap, and in the ensuing silence Mums imagined the young captain thinking about the way he’d hobbled down the hall with his rock clutched below the belt. She imagined him thinking about what he’d look like waddling through the shin-deep muck with that miniature boulder clasped in his arms.

  When the triple tapping resumed, Iman said, “That thing down stairs isn’t exactly fast.”

  “No,” she said. “But what of the boggen?”

  Iman chuckled to himself, a passionate, mean-sounding bark. “I told you already,” he said, “my father used to march through this place all the time and he never saw one shred of proof the boggen existed.”

  Watching Reetsle’s steady scraping, Mums said, “Did he come at night?”

  “Did he come at…,” Iman trailed off, giving this some thought. “If you haven’t noticed, Mumsy, treasure hunting is a bit of a pain when you can’t see what you’re doing. So no, he didn’t come at night. But it’s like he used to always say, with all the people coming and going during the day, with no one ever seeing anything in the trees, or hearing anything in the buildings, what’re the chances that a—”

  The rest of his argument was lost to the titan as, outside in the swamp, something erupted from the water.