by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 43
For a few awful moments, Mums felt helpless to do anything but stare at the dark outline of the window, and listen. On the floor to one side, Reetsle sat with his wet stone frozen on the axe and his head craned up at the vines. Behind and to the right, Iman’s incessant tapping had ceased and Mums imagined him standing with one hand on the wall, one on his sword, and both eyes twisted to the window.
Outside, fluid sloshed wearily against the buildings like dock waves lapping at a harbor, and beneath that the delicate droplets of spill water falling from awnings and limbs—plink…plink… plink—and beneath that the unnatural silence of the Dell, which in its own way seemed the loudest noise of all.
Scanning the swamp with her ears, Mums tried to imagine the source of the eruption. She hadn’t heard a plunk or a plop as something heavy dropped into the water, and there hadn’t been a whap as something long and flat had fallen from a great height. It had been a genuine eruption, the sound of something down below tearing loose of the mire and surging to the surface.
Whatever it had been, it was now gone. It had slithered back down to the cold and the dark of the bog and left behind the sleepy slooshing and the brittle plinking and the sound of silence so rich and sweet.
Mums thought there was something missing in that silence, some white noise she had been tuning out until now. She closed her eyes and pondered the missing sound—the waves outside growing faint, the quiet in the room growing loud—and then it hit her.
She glanced down and cocked an ear to the floor, trying very hard to hear the thumping from below. Reetsle, who must have caught sight of her movement and deciphered her purpose, crawled to his feet and crept for the window. Moving close on his heels, Iman flanked the moldering sill on the other side.
Unable to hear anything in the watery rooms below, Mums turned to face her companions. Reetsle was climbing atop his stool and Iman was sticking a finger through the vines. Both of them were peeking outside in the direction of the crawler.
Mums felt herself moving towards the window, not because she wanted to see, but because she needed to see. She needed to see what wasn’t down there or she wouldn’t sleep a wink. She’d sit up all night and stare at the darkness, driving herself mad with the what-ifs and what-mights.
Stopping beside the captain, she made a break in the vines and peaked outside, scanning the area to the left where she’d last seen the crawler. A myriad of dark shapes and shadows stared back at her, but none resembling her quarry.
Groaning with frustration, Reetsle leaned out the window a little further and said, “Yeh see it over there?”
“I don’t,” Iman said, moving his ear to the gap and pausing to listen. “I don’t hear it either.”
“Yeh think that flyer come back fer it?” Reetsle asked. “Splashed down like it done before, then made off with its buddy?”
Mums thought to correct him—to point out the distinct absence of a plop, or a whap, as the source of the disruption moved from water to air and not from air to water—but for some reason she couldn’t speak; She could only back away from the window, and tremble softly.
Moving his eye to the gap, Iman said, “We’d have heard its wings, wouldn’t we? All the wind?” He gave his head an imperceptible shake. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
Mums took another step back.
“Well, I cain’t hear it,” Reetsle announced, cocking his head over his shoulder. “Hey, Mums. You hear anything?”
Taking another step back, Mums felt her stomach lurch at the question, or at the answer to the question. It was one thing to know there was nothing out there (to see nothing, or to hear nothing), but to actually give voice to that factuality…Well, that would be like letting loose the nightmares from your head.
Reetsle said, “Nothin, huh,” then turned back to the window.
“Do you think it left?” Iman asked, shoving his head through the vines and panning it back and forth. Before Reetsle could answer, he said, “It couldn’t have left. We’d have heard it moving through the trees.” He folded his arms and placed a hand to his chin, one shadowy finger tapping at his lips.
Mums stared at the flickering blackness created by the captain’s finger…and felt the wet of the wall press against her back.
“You sayin it’s playin coy with us?” Reetsle asked, speaking in a tone of voice that implied he did not completely agree with the captain. “You think it’s tryin to lure us?”
“No,” Iman said, finger still tapping. “We can go down and look,” he said, nodding in the direction of the sitting room, “but I doubt it. That thing’s a bruiser, not a stalk—”
“Le’s do it.”
Iman stopped tapping his finger and stared down at the halfling, staring at him as though his words were the magic key for which the captain had been waiting.
Don’t do it, Mums thought, wishing her mouth worked so she could talk the good captain off the ledge. Reetlse’s been waiting for this ever since I yanked him from the grass and threw him on his horse, but you, Iman Dear, you have more sense than this…
As if to validate her supposition, Reetsle descended his stool and hobbled to the hallway door, pausing there long enough to say, “Yeh cain’t hear it. Yeh cain’t see it. Yeh doan’ reckon it’s hidin…,” the glow stone sat on the dresser and tinted him a sickly shade of green, “…I say we go see what’s what.”
Iman swung his head from Reetsle to the glow stone, his black form hesitating as he appeared to weigh the pros and cons of this action. When the weighing was over, he turned back to the halfling in the hall.
“And if it’s gone,” he said, “you’re thinking of leaving, like tonight?”
The halfling shrugged at the blackness of the corridor. “Maybe,” he said.
Iman turned back to the thing that was not a melon, studied it like the disciples of Valley Rock might study a holy relic, and straightened himself to full height.
“Let’s have a look,” he said, and strode across the bedroom, stopping at the door as though he’d just remembered something. He made a glance at the representative from Igus standing in the shadows. “You coming, Mums?”
Mums listened as Reetsle chuffed derisively from the hall (he knew better than to ask) and shook her shaggy head.
“Okay, then,” Iman said. “We’ll be back.”
He disappeared out the door and followed the halfling. Mums felt her knees buckle and her back sliding along the wall.
No, she thought, you won’t.
She slumped to the floor and pointed her head at the floor, staring at the darkness and listening to her companions.
In the hallway outside, the squeak of the floorboards was like the shriek of small children. In the stairwell beyond, the tromping of their boots sounded like the knocking of the crawler. And in the flooded foyer below, the swoosh of their movement was little more than a murmur in the night.
She listened to those ghostly movements as the pair investigated the sitting room. They found it empty—as she could have told them—and were back inside the foyer in no time, sliding the crossbar out of the way and pulling the door through the shin-deep water.
The splashing stopped…the ripples ebbed against the walls.
From outside the vine-strewn window, came the distinctive, …plink…
Mums lifted her head and listened, watching in her mind’s eye as her companions peered outside and searched for the crawler, hunting the dripping blackness for the place of its hiding or the proof of its demise. For them, there could be no believing without seeing.
One of them planted a foot outside, probably the halfling if she were to guess. Remembering the intense way in which he held his axe, she imagined he would want to be first.
Should I go? she wondered, her mind a mixture of apprehension and guilt. Should I go and try to talk sense to them? Or drag them back and stuff them in the wardrobe? I could do that easily enough: Overpower them in the street, drag them up the stairs. Not the
most pleasant of nights, but I could do it.
Another hesitant foot landed in the bog, this one slightly heavier.
Mums slid herself up the wall and decided against an intervention, not because she didn’t feel like muscling the boys under, but because she didn’t feel like setting foot in the dark waters at the foot of the stairs. For some inexplicable reason, the idea of breaking the surface of those waters chilled her to the bone.
She moved to the window and parted the vines with a finger. She couldn’t see the captain or halfling, but she could hear them. Human ears would have heard only the sibilant sounds of scratching, and halfling ears wouldn’t have heard even that, but her ears detected every whispered word.
She heard Iman making various arguments for leaving the Dell, heard Reetsle warning him to keep his mouth shut, heard Iman promising to keep his mouth shut—promising so much, in fact, that Reetsle had to threaten him again—and then she could see them.
Reetsle crept from beneath the porch with his axe at the ready and his helmet ever-turning. Iman followed a stride or two behind, his head and sword high, his gaze traveling in no discernible pattern.
The blind leading the blind, she thought, lifting her gaze to Elnor and studying its dark doorways and screaming windows.
Three houses to the right, movement caught her eye and she brought her eyes to bear on the disturbance. By the time she looked, the entryway had gone still and she caulked it up to an overactive imagination.
She returned her attention to the yards and alleyways and told herself that if there were boggen out there, they were creatures of the wild and would, therefore, favor the waters of the swamp to the ruins of the colony.
She swept her eyes across the pockets of street-weeds and sidewalk cattails, hunting them for lurking figures and beady eyes and finding nothing but gloom. She moved a block to the right, passed a whole intersection of blanketing lily pads, and studied an old wagon leaning in the street. When nothing peaked around the side or over the top, she continued down the street and spied the legs of an overturned table jutting up from the water and something that could have been a log floating in an alley.
At the sound of whispering, she turned back to her companions, located them half-a-block away, and saw Reetsle gesturing to the colony limits. He was explaining that the cause of the disturbance had obviously retreated deeper into the bog and that they would have to leave the colony to continue the search.
Iman said he couldn’t agree more, but wanted to retrieve Mums and the glow-stone first, advocating that they might be able to see by the light of the rock and alluding to the fact that, if indeed the way were clear, they could keep moving east without returning for the titan.
Reetsle seemed to consider this as he turned to the black wall of the east (listening as Iman reminded him that the bog beneath those boughs would be darker than the streets of Elnor and, thus, their need for the glow stone greater by comparison), but in the end the halfling only shook his head and told the captain it was a huge waste of time.
“Mumsy ain’t leavin that bedroom ‘til sunup,” he said. “No way, no how,” and then he vanished in a geyser of gray water.
In the window of the mansion, Mums’ went cold with shock.
Across the street, and in front of the first row of homes, Iman was staggering back from the blast with both arms pin-wheeling. The halfling, however, was gone, vanished from sight like a puff of—
No! No, there he was. He was stumbling back as well, nearly falling over from the muck at his heels and the weight of his axe, but he was still on his feet. Neither of them was making an effort to turn from the spray and sprint for the mansion, but they were on their feet and they were backpedaling, and when movement from the airborne drizzle finally drew Mums’ gaze, she saw why.
As it came capering out of the shower, both stick-like arms gouging at her companions, Mums thought it was a piece of drift wood flipped up by the attacker. On second glance, though, she saw it was the attacker. With a body of knotted vines and the face of gnarled branch, it fought like no vegetation she had ever seen, and for one horrible instant she was sure its sharpened pokers would skewer the halfling’s face.
Before it could, Reetsle found his balance and laid her fears to rest. He planted a foot behind him, brought Old Friendly overhead, and split the creature in two jagged halves. They fell over in the street and bobbed in the water…water that now churned with unspeakable life.
“Get—Get out of there!” Mums screamed, her fingers sinking through the sill.
Across the street, something like a drowned rat had stomped out of a geyser to the right and the halfling was spinning to intercept. On the left, the captain had his hands full with something that resembled no animal Mums had ever seen, something donning both feathers and scales and a greasy black tail.
She watched Iman thrust his sword through his attacker’s middle, ducking the clawed wing that came lancing for his head, and then he was ducking the enormous axe head that came singing from behind. The halfling, caught in his element, was paying no mind to where he was or what he was doing, his weapon flashing in the night and causing Iman to fall away, his sword raised in defense and his attention finally drawn to the titan’s beseeching cries.
He jerked his head to the manor window and Mums screamed, “The door, Iman! Get to the door!”
Iman whirled for the halfling and went sifting through the bodies. On his left, something like a squid with legs flopped towards him and on his right something like a frog-headed lizard (huge, buttery eyes blinking circles in the night) stepped through a thicket of cattails.
In one fluid movement, Iman sliced a handful of tentacles from the squid, sidestepped the lizard-frog, and grabbed the halfling by the collar. Even from a block away, Mums heard Reetsle’s gagging yelp as he was pulled backwards. Iman, however, never slowed, not as the lizard-frog had another go and not as Reetsle tore at the good captain’s fingers.
Without a deviation in his stride, Iman pierced the frog-thing through one runny eye and gave Reetsle a thorough shaking, the boggen falling with a twitch and the halfling making a gasp for air. The captain, picking up the pace, sprinted back from the squirming wall of bodies.
It was then that time in the bog slowed down and Mums could almost see the captain’s mind at work, could almost see the instant he realized the enemy was too great (and too close) and that he had no chance to flee.
As she watched, Iman hefted the advisor in the direction of the mansion and turned to face the advancing hordes. Mums was screaming at him to keep moving towards the door, but Iman Janusery either wasn’t listening or he couldn’t hear, and with the waters erupting all around, it was probably a little of both.
Mums drew another breath, prepared to scream at him a second time…then stopped as she realized the captain was actually holding his own against the dripping foe. His sword was like a steel dervish as it sliced through the creatures, cutting them down like a scythe through dead wheat, and she couldn’t help but wonder how he might fare had he any assistance from the halfling.
She scanned the black water between the captain and the manor and found Reetlse a few paces behind, jumping up and down beside a mound of dirt and hollering into the tumult for the captain to save him. She couldn’t hear his every word—not with the cascading mayhem of the bog a few paces away—but she thought she heard the words mud and arm.
She directed her gaze accordingly and saw a row of fangs set in the oozing peak of the mud pillar. It was trying to sink them into the halfling’s head as Reetlse ducked and dodged and slapped the maw to either side. She drew her eyes to the arm the halfling wasn’t using and found it buried in the muck-creature’s midsection.
“His arm! Iman, his arm’s stuck!”
She didn’t know if Iman heard, but he seemed to know in any event. Making token slashes at the closing attackers, he grabbed the halfling by the belt loops, lowered his shoulder, and gave a mighty heave. Reetsle convulsed with the force,
but his arm remained fixed.
Iman yanked a few more times, saw he was getting nowhere fast, and began attacking the pillar instead. He sliced a large chunk from the side of the muddy column and it continued its assault. Slivers of the mud-monster’s body dropped into the swamp, but on it went, chomping ravenously at its prey even as the waters of the Dell came roiling up to the back of the captain’s heels.
Mums heard Reetlse scream, “Get it off, Get it off,” heard the captain panting for breath as he split his time between hacking down the pillar and parrying at the creatures, and then she heard only the groaning of floorboards as she lumbered from the room.
Outside in the hall, it was more of the same, but once she reached the stairwell, there was no creaking at all. She leapt down the stairwell in the perfect imitation of a creature much smaller than a titan, landing in the ground water with a magnificent splash and paying no mind to the biting cold at her legs.
She charged through the foyer and was in the yard in moments, pressing into the monstrosities that converged upon her friends. One of them reached for her and she swatted it with her club, watching as it sailed out of sight like a bug. The others, undeterred by this violent display, came at her en masse and she gave them a taste of cudgel in much the same way, sending them flying through the air or skipping along the water.
Ahead of her, Reetsle was still fending off the muck-monster, but Iman now had his back to them and was yanking on his weapon, fighting with a tentacle that had coiled around the blade all the way to the handle.
Iman never saw the titan as she tucked her club beneath her arm, grabbed him and his partner by the upper arm, and jerked them both towards the manor, jerking so hard that teeth clicked, joints popped, and both of them came shooting free of their attackers, Reetsle from the mire and Iman from the tentacle.
A few of the creatures limped back into Mums’ path as she splashed for the front door and she ran them over, kicking one or two out of the way as she slipped inside the manor and dropped her cargo in the water.
Retrieving her club from beneath her arm, she cried down at Iman, who appeared to be the more coherent of the two, “The Door,” and then she went to work on the arms and feelers that were foolish enough to stick themselves inside, smashing them to pulp and splinters.
In the corner of her eye, she saw Iman crawl to his feet, grab the door with both hands, and slam it against the myriad of tentacles and limbs reaching through. When the intruders did not budge, he slammed it again, but this time, like a tidal wave of bodies, the creatures threw him back against the wall.
“Again!” Mums screamed, swinging her cudgel into the thick of the mix, catching glimpses of Reetsle now at her side, chopping with his axe at whatever she failed to smash with her club. The captain pressed the door shut again, and again the door closed on so much slime and scales, recoiling sharply, and bouncing him off the wall like a scarecrow.
Mums opened her mouth to yell for him to try a third time and saw something huge coming out of the swamp. She stopped, had time to think, This is it, this is what took the crawler, and the colonist, and now it’s come for us, then the other feelers and arms retracted from the door, and the master tentacle (as thick as her upper thigh) lanced into the foyer, snaked around her waist, and hoisted her into the air.
She felt the water leave her feet, felt the disorientation of being shaken like a leaf, and then the tentacle was recoiling for the bog. She shot her arm and legs out, went spread-eagle in the entryway, and caught the door jam with the bones in her wrists and ankles. The tentacle shook with violent tension, flailed from ceiling to floor and from wall to wall, and tried a second time to dislodge her from the manor.
Mums tried to keep her limbs rigid as best she could, felt her wrists and ankles bang off the door frame once again, and this time she was aware of her midsection sinking a little further into the night. After that, she knew only the dizziness of the spinning room and the numb blows about her head and body, aware that she was slowly losing consciousness and soon would be unable to catch hold of the frame.
The thing on the other end of the tentacle must have felt this as well and commenced to beat her about the foyer a third and final time. As it created slack to do so, the good captain lunged forward with his sword and hacked the tentacle like a bleeding branch of wood. After only a few powerful blows, the tentacle trembled grotesquely, dropped Mums to the floor, and retracted through the door.
Mums hit the water and began kicking with her legs, feeble gestures that made more waves than anything else, but she was moving away from the door and she knew that was important. She knew her legs and body needed to be clear of the entryway so Iman could close it. Otherwise, when the thing on the other end of the tentacle stopped licking its wounds and came back, the passage would lay open.
She heard whoosh of the door against the ground water, the scrape of the crossbar in its brackets, and she allowed herself to go still, the sound of Reetsle’s voice the only sound in the foyer.
“Jan…Janu’ery,” he said, his voice a stranger in her ears.
“Yeah…,” Iman gasped, lying further away.
“Janu’ery, yeh gota help me…get’er up.”
Still panting like a dog, Iman managed a winded, “…catch my breath?”
“Nah…,” Reetsle said, “…she’s bleedin all over.”
And then, as if the eerie stillness of the Dell were leaking inside foyer, Mums heard no sounds at all.
The further adventures of Jaysh and Brine will continue in the third and final installment:
Jashandar’s Wake - Book Three: Jashandar’s Wake
About The Author
L. S. Kyles lives in the North Central Midwest with his wife and children. If you would like to contact the author, you may do so at [email protected] .
