The Questory of Root Karbunkulus - Quill

by Kamilla Reid

  His pa had saved him, barely escaping the beast himself, as it slid and clawed and eventually backed away from his weapon, back into its murky, watery depths. Zigzag’s pa took him home then, but not without a good tongue-lashing. “Why in blazes were y’out there on yer own? What kind of fool!”

  The boy couldn’t answer. Something had called him. A dare, perhaps. A dare from the Bayou itself. “Come find me! Come play!” it called. And so ZigZag’s young self left the city and let his bare feet follow the echoes. Deep and deeper he went into the twisted wet knots of this place until he found it. The throat. Large and looming and wide as his greed. Here the Bayou went silent and all he could see was a trail of lights, tiny golden orbs of light, shimmering despite the brightness of day. The lights disappeared behind the throat’s rocky teeth.

  ZigZag did not hesitate, but followed them, even as the mouth of the cave clamped down behind him, blocking sunlight and leaving him temporarily blind. A moment later hundreds of steps emerged, blue and glowing in the darkness. He took them two, sometimes three at a time, all the way to the large green door that curved into a point at the top. He knew instinctively he was not welcome. He went in anyhow.

  His eyes widened. He saw everything at once. Gold and power and Time and secrets. He wanted it all. But as his foot stepped forward the walls began to tremble. Indeed, he was not welcome here at all.

  Within seconds he was dodging debris as the entire cave seemed to be collapsing. He ran out of the room and found the stairs breaking off, one by one and falling into a black abyss. He leapt, taking whatever existing steps he could find and managed to scramble up to the mouth of the cave before it folded with the sinkhole deep into the hollow earth, taking trees and rock and mud with it. He pulled and crawled over the earth that swept toward him, managing a final desperate climb up the only tree that had clenched its roots far enough to remain.

  At last the sinkhole settled, leaving the boy dangling over its swampy new crater. He slowly, ever so slowly slunk down the trunk and put himself onto solid ground. He would have considered this escape a good omen indeed.

  But instead he found her.

  And worse, the Water Beast, now homeless and childless had found him first.

  “Why didn’t y’climb like y’been told!” The boy’s Pa rumbled along with the old truck’s engine. “When faced with a Water Beast on land, y’always climb!” To this the boy shrugged. He hadn’t remembered. But now, head to toe in green mud, his face half open and pouring life, he would never forget.

  To this day ZigZag keeps the memory. Along with another memory, a memory of a day, years later…one day when he exacted revenge on the Water Beast, showed it who was boss. Like he’d done to everyone else in his miserable life. Years of cold, unrelenting revenge had seen to it.

  ZigZag had escaped the loud, grimy city, dipped his pirogue into the mud-filled waters of the Bayou Vagura and punted his long pole from the shore. This, this was his place in the world now, the world that he so despised.

  For years he’d wanted to leave permanently, leave the city and his pa’s backhand behind. But that was like asking the stars to fall just for you. His pa was having nothing of it. No son a his was gonna pussyfoot ‘round in the bush, not when there was work to be done. No way, no how.

  “Soon” the Bayou would sing to him at night. “Patience…soon.”

  Soon just made ZigZag blaze with anger, sweat with hate. Night after night he tolerated the old man’s cold cruelty and night after night he’d take it out on the living things around him, anything…cat, squirrel, anything. Finally soon came. When his pa witnessed the stark gravity of his son’s hate, when he found him, his knife contentedly skinning something that was still alive, then he knew something weren’t right with that boy.

  He let ‘im go that very night. Sent ‘im with a sack of coins and a threat to never come back.

  There were no back hands that night.

  And so ZigZag the young man slipped away, followed the song of damp, dark waters…poled his pirogue along the lazy flow with its thick trees and hanging moss, turned himself toward the Bayou Vagura and went deep into its depths where it stilled and stunk of rot, where forgotten beasts lived and watched him with yellow eyes.

  It was here he found the Water Beast, the dark Queen, at the deepest part of the trees, where the water from four different rivers and seas met. There she was, sittin’, hummin’, watching him like she’d been waiting his arrival, and indeed she had been. She knew he was coming. She knew his dark desire. She knew he’d want her to play her part. And she was ready.

  It was a battle the trees still whisper to the wind, the night the water Queen was conquered, the hour of her great fall, when her blood turned the bayou red and the years and years and years of servility that followed. The years and years and years of cruelty under the scarred man’s cold hands.

  The years and years and years of her own surging revenge.

  “Soon,” her native water would sing. “Patience. Soon.”

  ZigZag had never used the sack of coins his Pa had sent with him. There was no need. The Bayou took care of its new sinewy god, offered him meat and drink. Taught him its secrets. He learned the language of the snakes, their tricks. He learned how to read water and make the wind carry his feet.

  But there was one thing, one thing of the Bayou Vagura that ZigZag, despite his best efforts could never conquer - the whereabouts of the Throat, the hollowed tunnel that had led his then uncalloused barefeet to its gifts. He had forgotten where he’d found it those many many years ago, had left no signs, no path. And though he sought it night after night, week after week, year after year, it remained lost in the Bayou’s enormity, a size that would take a man’s whole life to explore.

  But ZigZag was no ordinary man. He knew the power of desire, and what he desired now, more than anything were the treasures his eyes had eaten those many years ago. All of them. One was not good enough when it had brothers and sisters, still golden and mighty and unclaimed.

  Of that night, when his cheekbone cracked and a thick scar changed his name, he remembers only one thing: the bizarre shape of the sinkhole. The recognition had been brief, a mere second of registry while he dangled from that tree, but it would stay with him forever. Six points, as if a star had leaned in, kissed the earth and left its watery imprint.

  It would be another full year of seasons before ZigZag would stumble upon his childhood memory. There it was, as if time had not lingered near it at all. The clinging tree, still hanging by a splay of twisted roots, clutching the sinkhole’s rim. He spied it and blinked. Could it be? Yes. He’d found his prize, at last. The mighty Throat. The Gathering Hollows. Only now his treasure was buried deep beneath a murky green swamp-filled star kiss.

  He began digging that very moment.

  And he returned to dig every night thereafter.

  Months later, when the surface seemed barely scratched, he, for the first time in his life longed for help. It never came, of course for he was a lone thing. A creature who despised. And as his failure grew he despised even more, directing his heat toward the Bayou itself. And most notably the tiny creatures that shared its waters and leaves.

  Skeens.

  He’d watch them, skimming, dancing, playing over the water on sunny days when it sparkled. He’d watch these fragile creatures with their flitting wings and cherub faces and their Light. It was their Light that he despised. The Joy that came from them. He hated that light. He wanted to put it out.

  But the Bayou Vagura would not let him. It let him take a whip to the Water Queen anytime he felt like it. It let him skin a boatload of snakes. It let him chew on the bones of its dead things, even sicken the skin of its trees. But the Skeens he couldn’t even touch. Not a one.

  He knew it was because his heart was too black. A heart so black that the Skeens, in their Light couldn’t even imagine it. Oh but he imagined them. Saw them hanging from his porch, dead and dim.

  But not til they helped him first. He knew the
ir power. They would help him, oh they would, he’d make sure of that. They would help him and then…the porch.

  ZigZag pulled an old sack from a high ledge. He gauged the weight in his hand. He had never touched it, not even once after his pa had shoved it at his chest and told him to go and never come back.

  Now however, it felt useful in his grasp. For he had heard of some race…a buncha kids lookin’ for lost artifacts. Lookin’ for the Tome of Antiquilus…and undoubtedly the Gathering Hollows.

  His Gathering Hollows.

  Hmmm…might be some’n in it for him. And if not, well then the Water Beast would be well-fed for a couple days.

  Thus the crude, unfit man known only as Zig Zag and the sack of money that came with him, stood in the darkest corner of the ol’ tavern called The Shed. Before him, in a rickety chair sat Studaben Picklepug, the Guardian of DréAmm, who wiped the sweat from his brow, put the sack in his pouch and stamped the sheet of paper in front of him:

  ZigZag of the Bayou Vagura…blah blah blah….official guide for the Third Magisterial Treasure Quests of DreAmm…blah blah…the team Valadors.

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