White snows crept down inky mountains towards
the great sound, fusing with the covering cap of blue ice. It was below this surface, deceptively thin
in places and prone to shifting, that the albino narwhals played during the
season of blood. It was a simpler time.
The
Fencer remembered the old hunts as he stalked through the shadow nothing of the
White Jungle. Back home the men tested
the ice before them with long lances made from whale tusk. If they found song they’d set up a breathing
break in the sheet and there wait. When
the pale flesh rose above the waters they’d use the harpoons, sticking the
bulls as deeply as they could, holding on as the ice went red. Sometimes the ice shattered beneath their
feet and those who fell had the shivering death. On the whole more pleasant than their current
hunt.
In
the dark they stalked a fellow hunter, perhaps a man or something which had
given up that title for one of more culinary diversity. Every noise was a deadly clue and in this
jungle there was an overload of information.
Each chirp and grunt roused a paranoid worry but they couldn’t help but
continue on, blind, ears open, noses expecting to smell their own blood at any
moment.
Man
in the dark has much to fear. Such is
sight that its absence is itself a trap.
Perhaps it was the Riddle’s work that most other creatures managed in
the gloom on superior senses while the human being was lost, mad, easy
prey.
The
Fencer drew his weapon and most of the insects troubling him scuttled away from
the unnatural chill. In the dark Dhala’s crimson eyes glowered and he
hoped it wouldn’t give them away. Part
also hoped it did. That would resolve
this game of shadows quickly. This was
not his sort of hunt.
The
jungle’s song was heavily layered and constant, a sea of living noise which
would drive anyone mad in time. The
trees and vegetation sang with their pollens and saps, even their rot was an
attractive melody for the rubbish eaters.
Flying fox barks and the demoniac trill of the lak-lak bird. Choruses of cicada merged with crickets and chirping
frogs. Beneath it all was a beating
layer of grunts and knocks which neither man could place.
At
bad moments the song would stop around them and they froze, unwilling to break
the silence. A strange scent often
accompanied these breaks, full of biological musk and the faint traces of
blossom.
Time
was as lost as they. It had been ten
minutes or all night, each breath taken was its own day. They chased the faint memory of their prey as
the way out of the jungle was confused and hidden by the utter black beneath
the thriving canopy.
“I
wish those glowing insects were back,” grumbled the Trumpeter.
The
Fencer quickly hushed him, as did several unknown things in the dark. Then, thinking better of it, he responded.
“How
did you hunt on the Wondering Mountains?” he asked, taking several tactical
steps away from the musician.
“I’ve
already told you that.” The Trumpeter’s
annoyance lived in people who did not listen, and it was strange, the Fencer
was usually a good listener.
“Tell
me again,” said his friend from farther off.
“We’d
make a bunch of frightening noise and chase goats and other things off the
cliffs,” he said.
“Keep
going.”
“I
can’t, there’s something tugging at me.
It’s wrapping around me like a vine, only it’s hairy and I feel hot air
from above. Fencer. Fencer?!”
The
swordsman raced back, unsure of the exact location of his friend. In the shadows he stumbled into a tangle of
hairy tentacles, flesh the consistency of pudding but capable of flexing with
terrible strength. Ropy limbs began
creeping over him as well.
The
thing wiggled around their bodies, snaking through their clothes, then, with a
sudden lunge, the upper portion pulled down and a drooling maw clamped down on
half the Trumpeter’s head. He screamed
and so did the creature, from one of its other mouths.
Soon
each man realized the hideous thing wasn’t hairy, but that its primary
tentacles were covered in extremely fine wires or cilia. Caught up in these stringy masses each
movement was difficult, like pulling out hair at the scalp. The Fencer tried to wrench his sword arm free
and with as sickening tear he felt cold liquid bleed from the torn out
roots. Then the creature howled.
Its
scream was a pure, shrill vowel sound, a high whine which rang the ears. Another body crashed into the Fencer and he
wrestled with what turned out to be the Trumpeter. Their predator’s grip weakened enough that
they stumbled free.
“You
used me as bait!” blubbered the musician as he took out a match and lit a
taper. Nothing was revealed in the
flickering light.
The
foliage stood out pale as bone, still and windless. Around them flocked dark, furtive things, the
heavy drone of black bees, the whispers of unseen birds. But at the place where the thing attacked
them there was nothing.
“I
stabbed it!” he argued, brandishing a dagger.
His scalp was bloodied with deep pock marks where the thing’s teeth had
bit him and his clothes showed sign of violence. “I can feel its tepid blood all over me!”
The
Fencer took the taper from his hysterical companion and investigated the
direction both of them were sure the creature lay. There had been no further noise after the
scream, not sound of the branches creaking under its weight. Yet nothing showed, no blood, no body, like a
ghost.
Unwilling
to take the risk, the Fencer tossed the flame at the spot. It hit something unseen and ignited like lamp
oil. The scream began again and they
fled into the welcome darkness.
Fire
and blade were their salvation. This
fact wasn’t lost on the swordsman. Even
his name implied a tool, a sword and a method.
Fire was the first invention, the first instrument by which the
thoughtful mortals of the past altered their world. Even now it was the primary answer against
the Riddle.
Thoughts
like these filled the darkness of their journey. They no longer had sign of their quarry and
there was no way back to the witch and Inoke.
Perhaps it was cruel to leave him at her mercy but the jungle poured
blood over the Fencer’s mind, making empathy difficult. They could only move forward, following their
ears and noses towards whatever hints the witch left. Her strange garb produced a distinctive
perfume and if they had hope it rested in those unique blossoms she wore.
In
time something crashed behind, followed by a laugh sounding through the jungle,
a ghostly thing, neither in front nor behind.
They chased it and it chased them.
Moonlight
greeted them in a clearing made by a short ripple in the ice. A ridgeline jutted up a few meters, unfit for
trees, crenelated with lunar flowers that only showed their otherworldly colors
in such light. From that elevation the
jungle continued upon that faint plateau, thick with stacks of snow. There were shadows there.
Eyes
lit up the dark, a thousand gleaming hungers.
Not snow but webbing. Bundled
prey marked an anawke colony. Perhaps this
was the edge of the shadowed boughs where their companions in the larger
hunting party waited, only arrived at by chance and at a completely different
angle.
They
were two against a horde of wooly spiders.
Forelimbs raised, the things scuttled and jumped most alarmingly for the
men. The wind set the hair covering
their bodies crawling with motion, like slick, white oil.
Into
these the Fencer went laughing, eyes full of violence. Against the tangled mass of fat, pale death
he stretched a smile across his face and launched his tired body amongst the
fangs and poison. His head was full of
vorpal dreams, calculation and fever. There
was no option except blood, no freedom except death.
The
Trumpeter was robbed of his audience. The madman he traveled with took up the glory
and he was left wondering what to do.
For the moment all the spiders were after that tiny speck of muscle,
rage and enchanted ice. Abandoning his
friend was out of the question, but even now he wasn’t allowed his own
amusement.
Through
the commotion he heard cautious movement behind him. Turning, he beheld an entity, half man and
half phantom. The musclebound creature
was painted with foul ichor, blood and sap, powdered with pollen and flower
petals. Partially invisible, he wasn’t
all there, with holes cut out from the surrounding jungle so that eyes, small
and hungry, watched with intensity.
“Oh,
it’s you.”
“You
think you know me?” asked the camouflaged man.
“It’s
only a fact; you can’t be anyone but yourself.”
“You
have a choice,” said the familiar voice.
“Myself or the spiders.”
He
gestured and the Trumpeter saw his companion half tangled in silk, blade up to
the arm in the body of one anawke while another clambered around to plunge its
fangs into the soft man’s flesh.
“Hoxu,
I thought you were a civilized cannibal.”
“Civilization
is a tool which serves a purpose. For me
it provides warm beds and stocked larders so that in time I can go afield and
engage my mouth and tongue in more acquired tastes. I needed to learn of the jungle before I
could hunt my fill, and you two are interesting enough that you should be a
part of me. Fear not, your spirits won’t
go to waste in the Lattice.”
They’d
been tricked, flushed out into this hive of eight-legged monsters by
design. Hoxu had gone native, spattered
with the blood of the things he hunted, wearing the jungle as a disguise with
to steal the fruits he dared not reach for openly. Just like the mountain goats, the Trumpeter felt
that if he ran he’d plunge into a trap laid by this hunter.
The
cannibal’s strategy was total. Using the
Jomoth was no more an issue for Hoxu than using a spoon to eat his gore. Revealed, he was a monster, liberated from
the weakness of man by ingesting the power of things more potent than any
mortal. Wearing their blood, eating
their hearts, through this practice he gained the strength of those he
consumed. To the anawke he smelled as
one of their own, as he did to all the creatures of the jungle.
Slowly
the demon of a man approached. A blur,
bloody-lipped, eager to take his kill before the anawke could take it from
him.
“You’d
make a good companion to the witch,” mentioned the Trumpeter as behind him the
spiders hissed and chittered.
“She’ll
be joining me soon,” smiled the monster through too-white teeth. “To devour her is to devour the jungle.”
Then
he stopped. Behind the musician the
noise changed. Turning he saw the
massacre.
High
up, the nightmare black blade fell. The
anawke split apart, seeping its essence upon the churned up snow.
The
Fencer danced upon the dead. Sometimes,
when the magic was strong, Dhala’s
touch froze its victims utterly. There
was no reason for it, though the Trumpeter suspected an emotional
connection. Shattered remains misted in
the lunar brightness. A pile was
forming.
Poison
flowed over the lone swordsman. The
creatures were full of the stuff, popping like waterskins and disgorging their
contents. More in-tact bodies lay about,
cooling in the Winter cold. Moving like
a meteorite, the Fencer took a flitted towards another, the inky sword whipping
out like a frog’s tongue.
There
were four left of this hunting band, perhaps this whole colony. Then there was three. At two the strange, patchwork smell abandoned
the scene. On one the Trumpeter saw Hoxu
vanish into the jungle, his plan no longer of any use.
The
Fencer stooped, panting, while the life within his opponents bled the last of
their heat into the Winter air. In his
mind the swordsman calculations echoed with deafening intensity and like a
fever dream he couldn’t help but see the endless visions of lunge and parry,
riposte and strike. It was hard to come
back from the abyss of the blade, that inky depth.
“I
said, Fencer, are you dying?” called the Trumpeter for the second time.
The
swordsman sent a sharp glance towards his companion. So easy to strike out, so easy to send the
blade to work.
“Hoxu
was here,” explained the musician. Now
the Fencer took note. “He’s after us,
and Eley, to eat.”
They
followed as quickly as they could, through many tiny violets, through the pale
fungi growing across the ice. A scent
arrived for them and they readied their weapons. Out she stepped form shadow, the witch, and
she looked at them and was alone.
