(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 14 minutes)
Survival was more of a current question for Graychild, who judged the eye’s fall by the encroaching shadow out the nearest tiny window. He was back on the ground, with Breakwater freed from the table and positioned across the throat of a woman collapsed against the captain’s chest, like a bow across a cello. In his other hand was the eye of Hexaclete, godly power making his wrist quake. It was eager. Impatient, and thus corrupting.
He knew he was stronger, but there was the matter of it dropping from the heavens. That would overpower him. The only reason the cowering crowd around him hadn’t done so was their fearful watching of the same shadow. Fools. Minds of rabbits, not men. So much more time they’d spent in the company of the old fencer, cozying up to him, and yet they hadn’t surmised the mechanics of transferring his power to themselves.
The woman he held wept quietly, unaware that he had no intention of killing her, just jamming the eye into hers, making the two one, if one of his crew did not arrive in time to take it before the collision.
Darker grew the little square of the outside world. Darker. Then a flash of absolute black, scaring even Roddery into thinking he’d waited too long. Everyone else yipped and yowled at the sudden change, quickly receding to confused silence as the colorless flesh twisted and squeezed itself through the window like an earwig out of a sugar cube: Xeams.
His landing was a roll not unlike the crab bucket’s, unfolding into a verminous scurry on all fours that took him right up to his captain, who wasted no time in shoving the effervescent orb of golden-red smoke right into Xeams’s left eye. The change was instantaneous, lifting the veil of shadow outside, bringing back the silence absent the eye’s plummeting rip of the surrounding air.
Beerbet was saved, but was there another danger in their midst? Xeams writhed upon the floor, snarling not in agony, but in struggle with an invisible murkodile. Arrows of light escaped between his fingers as they raked one side of his face. Hand bones showed through as shadows hugged by flesh lit entirely orange. They were not the bones of a man, bearing spurs, hooks to keep frightened mortal tissues from escaping. His soft exterior was a prisoner of his grim skeleton, not malformed, formed instead in the death preceding life.
The citizens’ whimpering stopped when Xeams’s struggle ended. Graychild freed his prisoner and helped his first mate to his feet, watched him blink away the shrinking light as it fell down his pupil, a red hot coal tossed down a well.
“How do you feel?” the captain probed.
“As if a lion is living in my skull. And it is asleep.”
“Keep it that way for the moment. The hand thief?”
“The hand itself! It was in the sky, turning the eye away. After a while it let go and disappeared. The thief, the grabbler man, he brought the eye down, threw an urchin at it.”
“Threw? From down here?” Xeams nodded. “Absurd. To think we run into that creature before we even make land, with the strength of a giant and not any magic in him to take the blame. Where is he now?”
“I saw them leaving.” Xeams pointed in the direction the pair had run. Roddery rubbed his chin with Breakwater’s pommel. Then he looked around, locked eyes with someone who hadn’t found the courage to find their feet yet.
“You there.” Graychild pointed with his sword that could make tables fly. “What lies in that direction?” The man glanced as if he might see the whole world through the wall. It took him a moment to cobble together an answer.
“Why, nothing sir. Mud. Dead trees. There’s not a trading post for five days on horseback. Then it’s the ruined fortress Rockrain and the jungle it holds back.” The Half-Biter closed his teeth like a portcullis, began mining his own thoughts with pickaxes. The hand turning the eye. Rockrain. Jungle. Whatever the thief wanted there. Every avenue of investigation was worth trekking down, and to do that properly he would need to take Beerbet’s information resources with him as he pursued.
Losing the thief was not acceptable. He’d come to the land that was Hexaclete’s with nothing instead of the Thumbscale because of that man. Down several crew, a dear cousin included. That was the only blood he’d brought with him that still ran warm, as his own was, while still on the family tree, drained and black by its proximity to death. If he ever had children by blood they would be few. His cousin could’ve made up for that in helping him establish in the north he’d already died for, the land that had sent him washed-up Breakwater as coy invitation.
Nothing ever made him feel like a landed fish gasping for air until that grabbler hit his ship, broke his ship. The cold in his fingertips was an old friend until it started to bite, right as he was swimming when he should’ve been strolling across the deck. A grabbler had bitten fingertips too, and somehow that was their strength. The land of magic didn’t make sense, and Roddery didn’t care that it was so much brighter and kinder to its denizens. Sense was the only way to control your own fate.
And sense was the current quarry of Jeremiad as the grabblers fled the city and began their journey to Rooth Tugt, to be taken entirely on foot in all likelihood. Lazuli Pawlm was not a land of steeds, as grabblers did not resign themselves to being cargo of animals. It undercut their authority.
Their feet could handle any terrain short of lava, making the silky mud of Welkmadat soft as slippers to them. An hour clear of their escape, with nothing in sight in all directions but the two hazes of inland and seaward, she chose to speak.
“Master, why do these men pursue you? I heard one of them call you a hand thief.” She didn’t see him tense, but there was a plaster of briny mud drying over his neck wound to aid its healing, and it cracked in response to her question.
“The hand was a deckhand, one of their crew. Captain’s family I suspect. In my escape from Wormskoll I was propelled by powerful forces beyond my control. As I landed I destroyed their ship and killed a few of them.
Apology does not settle such a matter as that. To uplift our buried Gaw and keep her from sinking to the underbelly we must embrace a strength that separates us from the lesser men. Sometimes they are a ruin in our footprints.” He stopped, stepped back once, showing Jeremiad his deep print in the gray mud, water pooling purple in its creases like poets’ blood. “The more we look back the more of the future we lose.”
They resumed walking. Jeremiad thought she understood. Something in her heart told her that looking back would hurt her twisting neck, and that twinge would leech into the rest of her body, sapping her of strength and will. In her past was her disabling injury, her expelling shame. Her lost hand was a ghost holding memories of her intact self; it refused to let go. It could do nothing else, occupied as it was.
On the other hand, her other hand. It fought valiantly and alone to keep her grip on the sheer cliff of grabbler greatness. One slip and its lack of companion would doom Jeremiad entirely. Looking up, looking ahead, things often appeared too distant and cast in sun spears for her to discern much. Beocroak showed her where to leap, and she trusted that after she had done so she would find something to grab.
Her master was her opposite, she assumed, having removed himself from Lazuli Pawlm instead of being banished. If his hands matched his majesty and mastery he would be an octopus. The best proof that he was the greatest grabbler to ever live was his ability to act as other grabblers would even while suffering under the yoke of a curse.
What the curse’s manifestation was or would be, she did not know. One’s curse was personal, like what people hid under their bed sheets, which ranged from the open sores and incontinence of illness to intimate perversions of curiosity. The accursed bird-face could not hide his, and she assumed that was what had brought him so low as to pluck worms from the ground. Some of Beocroak’s dignity was in her ignorance of his curse. Yet she could not help herself from picturing a vile creature, more demon than animal, gray-fleshed and yellow-toothed, coiling around his spine and testing the chew of his organs, just waiting for one ripe enough to pop in its mouth. This image brought to mind another question that was confounding enough to require two grabblers to converse on the subject.
“The one you fought, called Xeams… What is he?”
“What did you see?”
“In battle his limbs vanished and reappeared in different places. And when he bit you his head and neck turned into something that could bite you that way.”
“A reaperweed.” Jeremiad knew the tales. Born at the center of battlefields where absolutely everyone had perished, bursting from a gas-swollen gut in the guise of man, the reaperweed was the half-damned hybrid of Death and his transitioning subjects, so that Death might walk amongst them, see them through his children, and better learn how to bring everyone under his cloak all the sooner, end the nightmare that was the waking world.
“To most he would’ve appeared as nothing but a skilled combatant,” Beocroak elaborated, a thing he did not choose to do often. Piercing Xeams’s disguise required it. There were few things worse than life that did not explain itself via its appearance and demeanor. “The more violent death you see, the clearer their nature becomes.”
“What does he look like to you?”
“He is fully revealed to me. The reaperweed’s hide is the dead green of washed-up kelp. Lobes and seams divide its flesh into springy armor that repels blunt strikes. The neck and limbs are quite long and held far forward of the body. They do not look capable of standing or walking without falling over, yet they do. This illusion puts their face, hands, and feet right where they are in its disguise, but if you attempted to hit the body you saw you would strike only air.”
“Such a monster follows the orders of a half-bitten mariner? Why?”
“Reaperweeds are death-soaked, attuned to Ghastly forces. They are intuitive experts with the dark ways, but no wiser than any other man. He is a dangerous foe, not something to fear. Select the right weapon, use it wisely, and he will fall to it.”
“Did he come from the south as well? I thought there were no Goodly or Ghastly works down there in that different dark.”
“There aren’t on the surface. The underbelly is under the skin of the whole world. Sometimes it ruptures and some escapes. When that place suffers magic they suffer only the worst of it. It’s no wonder they come here.”
“There was another piece of her,” she said, changing the subject. “Hexaclete’s hand was there, forcing the eye off of us. Do we have an ally?”
“A coincidental one I imagine, my apprentice. Our shared code makes us the strongest of allies. Do not trust circumstance to provide similarly. These wars over her remains will grow as they are consolidated in fewer and fewer bodies. Let whichever cavalier cousin arrives deal with that patchwork adversary. That is a duel of appetites more crazed than ours.”
For a time that settled the matter. Comfortable silence returned, and might not have been broken until they saw the frayed green edges of Rooth Tugt if nothing eventful occurred. Both expected a recuperative trek until then, as Welkmadat, in its quieter stretches, had a peace like Pawlm, or a limbo of Pawlm shadows.
Grabblers dwelt in Gaw’s resting soul, relaxed and contemplated in eternities usually reserved for the divine, and would be quite content to walk for an age across an expanse of dulled color and faded horizon, calling up other lifeforms out from their hidden burial only to quickly consume them and end their own questions on the purpose of their existence.
Both suspected the Half-Biter crew would attempt to find them again after the encounter at Beerbet, but the commotion with the falling eye should’ve pushed them apart by weeks. The pair was in no hurry, as their progress would be so steady and so unflagging that it would put most travelers to shame. Their next battle with the reaperweed was far from their thoughts when they made camp that first night out of the city, forced to forego a fire thanks to a lack of tinder. Instead they sat across from each other cross-legged and hummed their roars, penetrating the sandy mud beneath as far as there was life that could listen.
After a while the spot between them disturbed itself and began to disgorge those creatures that responded. A coldboil. A solemn churning of deference and prudent sacrifice. Animals that could be safely eaten raw, that recognized their own advanced age and inability to spawn further, offered themselves as nourishment to the grabblers to sow influence rather than blood. For spineless and brainless things it could be a spectacular honor akin to being assumed bodily into Goodly graces in a shaft of digesting golden light.
Smooth shells killed themselves by popping open, useless pearls pink, onyx, and cerulean rolling away to clear the valuable flesh cocooned in viscous generosity. Burrowing slate prawns uprooted dark glossy weeds to serve as accompanying greens. A basking lizard severed its own tail with a biting yank. The coldboil clicked, hissed, and gurgled low between them as they sampled from it, alive and fading, utterly invisible at a distance.
Yet they were spotted. Jeremiad awoke first the following morning after sensing a subtle turbulence in the mists rolling over Welkmadat. No trace of the coldboil remained but discarded shells and a slight depression in the brackish ground. She took a small hooked shell to use in lieu of her sandy fingers, extracting the compacted grit of sleep from the corners of her eyes delicately.
Once freed her eye was caught, and by its own kind. Off to the side of the sky there was a spherical body. Too early and misty for it to be the sun. Too late and aware to be the dreaming moon. Jeremiad stared properly and came to understand the ill omen. She snapped the sand off her fingers.
Beocroak’s eyes popped open as he sat up. A single eye could express much even without its surrounding lids. Did the color contract? Did the pupil dart? Both grabblers learned what they faced by staring back at it.
The eye of Escaboulnté had moved from its perch over Beerbet, which had not happened since its appearance. It no longer passively absorbed the sights beneath it before narrowing in on suspicious characters and behaviors. Now it just looked at Beocroak and Jeremiad with bold diligence across nearly a day’s journey of mud flats. That meant it was no longer the city master’s eye. Someone with different aims had taken possession.
Only one party would take the initiative to aim that sensory tool of a god at two crab-taming street brawlers, the vengeful crew of the Thumbscale. Now that the grabblers were under unassailable surveillance, the Half-Biters could pursue them at great speed. Choices were plainly two: travel with haste, beat them to Rooth Tugt, and trust a jungle of biting beasts and venomous curses to repel them, or hold their ground, rally some weaponry, and face them in battle as soon as they arrived.
Beocroak communicated his decision by rising to his feet and setting off away from the eye. Speed would be the game. Wordlessly Jeremiad caught up and kept pace. It wasn’t a run, nor was it a walk. A balanced middle ground of effort traversed grounds beginning, middle, and end in the shortest span. Lengthened strides. Even reservoir breaths. No detours around difficult terrain. In opposition to a grabbler sometimes the terrain was the one who blinked.
And so began the pursuit, with one of the two parties unaware of the composition of the other. Their captain led the charge, the grabblers assumed, with the reaperweed by his side, but the number of crew beyond that was a mystery. More may have been recruited from Beerbet, considering they now wielded the eye of a god as a symbol of both power and authority. The captain could now promise them much, and deliver at least the sight of it.
The reaperweed alone was formidable, perhaps even a match for both grabblers considering that Jeremiad could not see him properly without more blood in her eyes. As they powered across the flats they considered the value of wasting breath, and thus the forge fire in their muscles, on discussion of their pursuers’ abilities and tactics. Ultimately they decided against it. Not a word was spoken all that day, nor most of the next.
In Beerbet the only horses they’d noticed had been tied up outside, and they weren’t many. Feeding an animal that size on the flats was impossible without carting the feed along, and they could not drink from the salt puddles. Thus the grabblers assumed the Half-Biters were on foot. Unable to power-travel like grabblers, they would be running part of the time and sleeping.
Beocroak and Jeremiad needed rest as well, but that was no reason to stop. Muscle memory ran without running, kept them going even with closed eyes and consciousnesses lost in the thick forest of dream prowled by the demon of sleep. As long as the demon did not catch them or force them to divert by signaling his hunt, their path across the barren beaches would not deviate and they would wake having remained in perfect parallel step.
Consistency would win the race and the day, or so they thought. What they could not take into account in full understanding was the eye, a reality that applied to the groups on both ends of it. Only she who was born with it knew how to work it without visiting godly consequence, and though its nature was Goodly, poor wielding could make it Ghastly, even ghastlier than that, as unintended tragedies had their own special kind of hurt, the most painful of hollows, reminding man there were always other realms in which they did not exist, in which they were dead before, during, and after their brief lives.
What was now the eye of Xeams disguised the actual gap of the pursuit by adjusting its own distance from the grabblers. As the reaperweed grew more accustomed to it he could cast it further from his body and report more and more details about the flight of their prey. The first thing he had learned was the initial cast itself.
The eye patch was to hide the human eye. Once the human eye was hidden, the godly eye it embodied could be revealed. Both could not be observable at the same time. Whenever Xeams wished to use it he had only to pull the patch down and blind himself by half, the void quickly flooding with fresh sight from a post in the sky.
Reaperweeds had excellent focus, less distracted by niggling potentialities of death than humans like creaking coconuts about to fall from the tree or edges eager to become landslides or mushrooms sadistically disguised as tastier less poisonous ones. Once he learned the eye’s cast he kept it out at all hours so the grabblers would have no chance of hiding anything. This was unnecessary, as grabblers only ever hid their limbs, and the purpose of it was not secretive whatsoever, usually hitting over the head with concussive literality.
Unnecessary, and not without disastrous consequence. Safely nestled over Beerbet, the denizens had not thought much of the wreath of clouds that endlessly circled the eye. If it was a storm it was sludgy, lazy. Perhaps it was just to keep the lidless eye from drying out, as it could not blink without Hexaclete’s eyelid clothing it.
Beerbet was further from the sea than the line the grabblers took. The eye was not in motion. Both of these circumstances had changed. Xeams’s eye powered through the sky, leaving swirling wakes of vapor, creating a vacuous trail that was then inundated with seaward air. The longer it moved like this the more it agitated the forces of the weather that could throw off sparks.
When Captain Graychild spotted those sparks in the eye’s cloak of clouds, and a moment later heard their rumbling, he told Xeams to pay it no mind if it wasn’t harming him. If the goddess’s remains began to cry lightning bolts they would strike far ahead of them, endangering or intimidating only the grabblers.
Beocroak and Jeremiad were not frightened, but they too did not understand what was occurring too far up to see. Clashing fronts off the coast gave birth to water spouts, a boon to fisherfolk when they threw sea life on deck as they passed by, a bane when they passed through and instead threw the boat to shore.
Powerful spouts were taller than any tower, tossing fish and other creatures into the clouds, where they sometimes were kept aloft in high winds and wound up somewhere distant, falling like rain, making peasants question why the gods would send them dinner from so far away when there were perfectly good rabbits in the next field over.
The lighter the creature the further it might travel this way, the more likely it was to get sucked into the wake of Xeams’s eye, hidden in the brewing storm clouds that eventually boiled over and became somewhat independent of the sphere. Breaking away, tossed ahead like a skipping stone, the storm caught up to the grabblers and darkened their day.
Rain retarded their progress as it turned packed silken mud back into slush. Multitudes of burrowed animals bobbed up and scrambled for stability in an expansive involuntary coldboil. Roaring at them to clear the way would do no good in such a disturbed medium. Most of them had little more than a muscular foot to their name and no eyes to navigate with. The grabblers’ feet were tough, but some shells were like razors, used as scimitars in fact, when they were large enough to swallow a grabbler fist.
Mudmouth fish had been part of the earlier coldboil, so the grabblers knew they were there and targeted them with their roars. The first time went unheard, overpowered by clattering thunder. On the second try Jeremiad’s left foot was swallowed. Beocroak’s right. The pairs completed themselves within another few steps.
The wide-mouthed fish and their flexible bodies could serve as shoes to protect against cuts and pokes. Keeping her head down, Jeremiad watched their amber eyes blink into their heads on their short stalks with every dip back in the roiling muck. Prudent as their use was, they also extended the grabblers’ toes with their tail fins into awkward flippers that slowed them further.
Still, this was not such a crisis that they needed to speak. Beocroak was ahead and pushing on, so Jeremiad did the same. The rain was nothing, and the problem of their feet was already solved. Even that slowed they would not be rapidly overtaken by the Half-Biters. Almost nothing could make them stop.
A plop. Beocroak’s eyes darted. He wasn’t sure he’d heard anything at all, as every raindrop was a similar sound, every bubble bursting at a scallop’s seam. If he’d heard it, it was larger than the others.
Another, louder still. His head jerked and he caught a glimpse of purple-blue collapsing into the stinking boil. Not a color he could accept. Another plop. The rate was increasing. Beocroak was forced to sacrifice yet more speed as he gave up the posture of a cart-pulling horse and looked deep into the sky.
Kicking winds made them change direction suddenly as they fell. At these turns the tendrils were briefly splayed in all directions like stewing noodles with their pot pulled from under them. Every vile dollop was that transparent purple-blue. Plop, plop, plop! They fell everywhere, and not even the slippery mudmouths would be safe from them.
“Jellyfish!” Beocroak boomed as he spun on his feet without stopping. Jeremiad knew how bad it was without taking the splitting slate of his tone into account. She too spun in circles as she continued to run, maximizing her sight of their haphazard trajectories.
Odd as it was, a stronger storm would have been kinder. Mightier winds could have shredded the jellyfish or cast them further inland, could’ve replaced them with heavier harmless fish. It could’ve been raining diving swordfish with gliding sharks and the situation would not have been as dire.
Jellyfish were foul beasts to grabblers, calamitous outliers to their entire combat art. There was only one way to grabble them, and that was by the bell where they could not sting. Then spiraling wrist motions could entwine the tendrils and create a stinging whip, irritating to lethal depending on the variety.
But some didn’t even call that grabbling, as the jellyfish had no brain. It could not respect or fear its wielder. It could not make decisions in partnership, which grabblers so often relied on between strikes to fill gaps in their wisdom and defense. Jellyfish never made way either, keeping some waters dangerous when all other aquatic creatures surfaced just to bow to the servants of Gaw Digi-Tally.
Worse, they had lessened resistance to jellyfish venom. While fairing better than a typical careless swimmer, that was due to the background strength of blood and muscle exposed to many a liquid ill. Lazuli Pawlm was far from the sea, and the river Plur carried no such threats. Their uselessness as weapons gave grabblers no reason to subject themselves to the suffering that would build immunity.
Jeremiad did not blame her master for failing to anticipate a jellyfish storm. This was an act of god stumbled into by reaperweed, and it was now up to skill and luck alone to determine whether they would ever see Rooth Tugt. She dodged her first jelly, practically cartwheeling out of its path. Its splash caught her ankle. More precision, she demanded of herself. Jellyfish tendrils could be so long and thin that they could strike invisibly when they seemed out of reach.
Dodge left. Spin right. A volley of them came in from the front on a steep gust. The pair had to take leaps and flatten like flying squirrels, let the jellies pass under, and land without stepping on them. The mudmouths would take at least one blow, but letting their weapons be harmed would damage their reputations with the wilderness.
The eye bore down on them curiously, staring with little understanding of what it had done. Its concentration was matched by the jellyfish storm as their numbers grew. A sideways wind turned them into discuses, grew them to their maximum circumference. Forced off their path, the grabblers had to flee in the wind’s direction until it changed once more.
Jeremiad spotted it too late. One jelly’s approach was blocked by another crossing its path ahead of it. Only after the latter streaked by did she see the former was aimed at her collarbone, and while she was already in the air with too much momentum in her current spin. Dread was the only tool left to her.
Except for the one that made its own decisions: the man who could make all the jellyfish’s decisions for them, and who demonstrated it right then and there by holding out a hooked arm thick as a branch, shielding Jeremiad. He took the streaking jelly on the forearm; its tendrils whipped around his limb in a vicious suctioning spiral.
Its stings were firing before its plastering to his hide was complete, giving him quick knowledge of its venom’s strength. Passing through Beerbet without gambling seemed to catch up with him as he spun a roulette wheel of colorful tendrils. In knowing to avoid the jellyfish grabblers also spared themselves the task of differentiating between the varieties. What had him could be pumping anything through his flesh and into his blood.
Searing sewing needle pain exploded across his arm: a forest of arrows fired from the troops of the sun. Standing still would’ve made pain management much simpler, but the jelly rain had not slowed. They had to keep moving, each wracked with their own torture, Beocroak’s in his flesh, Jeremiad’s in her heart as failure burned it out like a greasy pot thrown into the hearth.
Again he saved her. She wanted only to reward him for his compassion, that which riddled him yet weakened none of his spirit. He was the Goodliest god she had ever personally known. She couldn’t tell him there; it would only worsen their plight. Instead she fought to keep up, a liability, a helpless lamb chasing him into the battlefield begging for milk.
If only her knowledge could manifest into skill, for she already knew how Beocroak kept ahead of her with his wounded arm, and how he found the resolve to grab the jelly’s bell with his free hand, tear it away, and cast it aside for the beasties of the mud to eviscerate. It was much the same ability that staunched the bleeding from Xeams’s bite: tension held in place to clench the various passages shut.
This time he used it on his shoulder above the jellystrike, cutting off flow so the toxins could not reach his heart and other organs. The color of his scored flesh was neutral, reddened by the attack, paled by the response, turning his powerful arm into a stark landscape of erosion ridges. He held it close to his chest as he tried to gather speed.
A flash of lightning thinned the curtain of rain and jellies to reveal the first landmark they’d seen all day: a solitary dead tree mummified white and smooth. Its four branches curled like ram horns growing back into the skull; inside those curls was a possible salvation. Arms could fit through easily.
Both saw, both knew. The eye of Xeams saw, but could not guess as to their purpose when they surged toward the tree. Its canopy was too sparse to shield them, and they would be trapped under it even if it worked as it became an island surrounded by a barrier wall of piling jellyfish. The eye’s owner assumed the grabblers were shouting at each other in desperation, foolishly trying to chop the tree with rhetoric into something more useful.
“Daaht!” was the only sound out of either grabbler as Jeremiad roared. Beocroak needed her if he was to save them both once again. He needed speed, and he couldn’t get it if he was trapped in hopping waddling evasion. The path had to be cleared. A jelly was already in his way.
But the roar worked. Hardly a guarantee. There had to be another mudmouth fish in the coldboil cone in front of her, and word needed to spread from her bucket of pincepouncers to this more northern shore. She had known her strength to call before, and it would not have summoned much with a backbone.
A compliant fish slapped the ground in front of her, leaping into reach. Jeremiad pushed to get there, the fish on her feet aiding with flourishes of their tails that gave her the extra she needed for her hand to close around the hilt of its tail. Soon as she had it she flung it, end over end, arcing over Beocroak’s head where its jaws connected with the bell of the oncoming jelly. The fish fought, avoiding the stings, accustomed as it was to snapping at any prey that so much as grazed the wet cover of its burrow tube, adapted to everything it might bite into. The pair passed harmlessly between Beocroak’s legs.
His breath matched the storm as it nearly whistled out of his nose. Giving his all felt like it turned his blood to hot air and his entire front into a tower shield of thick iron. Everything he had, not into a grabble, but a tackle.
The culture of Lazuli Pawlm was also respectful of plants, though most could not be grabbled. Beocroak meant no harm when he collided with the dead tree at full strength in the hope that any lingering spirit would be pleased to provide shade long after its time. His leaping impact could have broken it in half if he had distributed the force improperly.
Properly, it tipped as if buoyed in water, exposing its shallow root web of broken nubs as it went to its side. Beocroak rolled out of his tackle and across its length, slipping underneath and catching it on his shoulder before it could bend far enough to drink from the coldboil. While it was within his power to use both arms to heft it, removing his jellystruck arm from its invisible sling against this chest would break the dam and allow the poison to flood everywhere. Jeremiad would take the weight that arm couldn’t; his trust was clear when he didn’t look back.
She hurdled the root web and dropped into a slide that ended under the base of the tree. Then she popped up and took it on her shoulder. Together they lifted it entirely off the mud and began to march.
Their arms were safe in the branch loops, as the tree’s two other limbs were directly above and already catching the splattering cascade of jellyfish. Finally Xeams learned how they would use the tree. The grabblers had turned themselves into its steeds so it could shield them. Moving the land to solve their problems was fascinating to him. Half-Biters were the other way around, in this and many other things.
His trance at their peculiarity only added to the storm’s strength. The number of jellyfish became bafflingly close to impossible, suggesting they’d been up in the clouds so long they’d bred into swarms where there was no predator to stop them. Higher and higher they piled on the tree, into a grotesque mound of squished blisters, sides draping sickly layers of purple tendrils that more than dripped a mixture of slime and rain.
These walls of worse-than-water on either side made the grabblers feel as if they were buried alive in a sinking coffin, the weight of the world growing heavier as the jellyfish piled. Too heavy. Soon the weight would force them to stop.
“Flip right!” Beocroak ordered. Together they halted, made their legs the entirety of the their strength. Using only Beocroak’s audibly swallowed breath as cue, both sprung at an angle without releasing their shield. Half the jellyfish were dumped on the ground while the other half flew off in messy arcs like the spray of a sea squirt catching the purple of sunset. After completing one perfect rotation they landed back on their feet unburdened to continue on through whatever the storm had left, with the torrential jellyfish finally lessening.
“So resourceful,” Xeams said as he walked beside Roddery and a few other crewmen.
“What have they done now?” his captain asked. He was starting to think it unfair that opponents with such incredible bodies were permitted to be as clever as him too.
“That storm I made was full of jellyfish. They knocked down a tree and carried it over their heads to avoid them.”
“Two can play at that game… and we’ve brought a lot more than two.” He looked over his shoulder at his underling Odebtte. “Fetch me some of the travelers. Entice them with a promotion, you can select the title.” She started to turn into the following crowd. “I find people are partial to Yeoman though!”
There were plenty for her to choose from thanks to her captain’s skillful handling of Beerbet’s near-destruction. Most of the Socket had witnessed him attack Escaboulnté seemingly unprovoked; the key to locking them in his own stable was that just as many had seen the grabblers fighting in the streets, including a rather gruesome face-ripping that came off as more disrespectful and artless than the gentlemanly duel between the swordsmen.
All Graychild had to do was erroneously inform them that the grabblers had come to take the eye for themselves, along with the prosperity it had brought the coastal city. The citizenry’s muttering in response told him much he didn’t know about grabblers, some of which he reflexively integrated into his tale to enhance its plausibility. Oh, so they had a petrified god in their homeland, buried up to her nose? What he meant to say was that they wanted to steal the eye for her, bring her partly back to the realm of flesh. The nodding told him he was bending the truth in the right direction.
Now he had the eye, and promised it would return to guard Beerbet once more, but that it would have to leave in pursuit of the fiends who tried to take it. Just as he hoped, they asked about the giant hand in the sky. That was the grabblers too. They had Hexaclete’s hand. In fact, he had personally witnessed that part of her demise fall from the sky, ridden by the grabbler man the whole way. Perhaps he thought his grabbling hands were more powerful than a god’s. She might have taken him into her confidence, her sky, and he used the opportunity to kill her and blight the land. All for power.
“But I am for justice, and just rule beyond that!” Captain Graychild claimed. “I’m going after them! We’ll get that hand and then Beerbet will be watched over by the eye and protected by the hand, patrolling the border on two strolling fingers, ready to flick away entire invading armies! Will you follow me!? Any man who does returns with my confidence and a guaranteed position in the new Beerbet. What say you? Do you rally to the Eye of Graychild!?”
Three hundred did. In hours they’d supplied for the campaign as best they could, though Beerbet was not a military garrison or trading post meant for stocking up. Most of the food was fish sold fresh, with preservation salt plentiful but rarely kept on hand in large amounts. The weight they carried across Welkmadat’s mud flats was largely tents, pans, and fishing spears that would work in a pinch as the more typical variety.
Odebtte arrived with his favorite resource, so that he might be resourceful himself. Three recruits walked beside him and shared their expertise, having passed this way before. The storm had dredged up many good things to eat, and they knew what to take and what to avoid. Evidence of this was clear when Roddery stepped on something with eleven legs that crunched underfoot, emitting the sweet smell of crab.
“Take some initiative then!” he told the one who had to be the best cook, given his mustache trimmed short enough to keep food and drink from mucking it up. “Don’t just tell me, show them!” His hand swept backward and encompassed the army he’d won in wager against his paltry crew. “Feed these people and be known as the man who does so. Then you’ll be cooking in the Socket for all those dancing women.”
“I can make soil cakes,” the second one volunteered.
“Soil cakes?”
“Mud cakes here, Captain, but yes. Good for the road.” They scooped up mud from between more appetizing things trying to burrow back out of sight. A demonstrating lick created an unexpected grimace. “Ahh, perhaps not. The storm rained seawater. Too much salt.”
“A shame,” Roddery said, glad he would not have to sample this northern fare. Goodly soil was more palatable than the inert dirt below the Half-Bite, meaning the only memories he had of such mouthfuls were those had when knocked down in defeat, which tasted of blood, grit, and mold.
“But I know other things!” the second volunteer added, unable to blink visions of dancing women away. “We’ll need water after so many days’ march out here. There’s a basin coming up, westways, difficult to spot if you don’t know where it is. It fills fresh.”
“Excellent work!” Roddery praised, slapping them on the shoulder before turning to the third vessel of local wisdom. “What say you?”
“Aaarrrahowow!” they howled in response before falling over and twitching. Reading the context of this northern ritual was going to wear his nerves thin, until he glanced down and realized there was a jellyfish wrapped around the howler’s ankle like a rumpled sock.
“We’ll have to slow down,” one of the other Beerbetters said, gingerly stepping around one of the purple warts themselves.
“Slow down?” Roddery repeated. “You know not who you’ve signed on with my friend. Not yet. Behold, and become on of my sailors!” He brandished Breakwater toward the sky as banner before kneeling to plunge it deep into the mud. Xeams’s storm provided a skin of water that hadn’t soaked into the ground yet, a skin that was just as viable as an entire ocean to the magic of his blade, and much easier to use than the disturbed air dancing over the crowd back in the Socket.
A shift underneath him spread behind, to all his hundreds, stopping them in their wet pooling tracks. Clouded water drained from their footprints and spread under the top layer of mud, which was now transformed into a raft and helmed by he who held Breakwater. Creases became folds became the edge of their raft’s deck as an oval formed and glided forward, over the lingering creatures of the coldboil and the thickening remnants of jellyfish rain as well.
A cheer rose up behind the mariner. Hats were tossed and barely caught, their speed greater than it seemed. In truth they were none the faster than before, as the pace of his magical rafts degraded with growing size, but as long as they could coast they wouldn’t have to watch their step, or step at all. He wanted them not comfortable, just in good health when they caught up with the grabblers. Someone would need to distract the hand of Hexaclete for him.
While he escorted his army across the mud he had more wisdom brought to him, not about travel and rations this time, but Goodly cousins most cavalier. Already his thoughts raced past the grabbler, to the entity that might be his next foe. A hobbyist historian of the gods was brought to his side and shared with him educated speculation. There were, in their eyes, two most likely candidates.
Over there in the third land they had surnames like Half-Biters, reversed so they were listed first. So Trampulty Dayne was just Dayne, as Roddery would not respect him enough at first meeting to use his full name. According to the historian Dayne ate crumbs from under the godly table of Norncanaan. Quiet as a mouse he scurried about in their tavern, though he might not have needed to in that boisterous crowd of monster slayers and heavenly body hunters.
Dayne ate their crumbs and drank their dregs. He kept his hand where he saw the prints of theirs, hours at a time, moving not a muscle. Sat in their shadows. Smoked their ashes. Collected their hair out of the dust he swept and hung bundles of them as dolls over his bed. Left endearing gifts for their lovers in their name. Anything and everything to insinuate himself into the Goodly fold. His own drop of divine blood was too diluted to notice at first. Once nourished, once sprouted, once bloomed, Trampulty Dayne appeared in the tavern doorway one day as one of them, a cavalier cousin, twice the size of some of them despite being half them the previous day.
Two made jokes and he killed them on the spot. That made Norncanaan and the others sore, but then he cooked the evening meal for them, matching the crumbs he’d long stolen from underneath their noses to their desires. One bite and he was part of the family, and he never left Norncanaan’s good graces after that.
Trampulty Dayne might come, across the sea at the news of Hexaclete’s death and fall. Or he might lose a duel for the privilege to the other suspect, and they might come.
They was she, and she was Bamperaisin Oxmy. Bathed in the blood of a giant Goodly hen, yes there was such a thing claimed the historian, Oxmy’s hair turned scarlet. The bloodfall that blessed her was from a decapitation for dinner at the tavern, where it seemed all politics played out in the third land. Plans for war drifted in foamy bubbles blown off ale, to dissolve in popping mirth.
Through loops of her scarlet hair Oxmy could see the wars reflected in the bubbles, the infidelity running in the chicken fat, the remorse in the eyes of the potatoes. She saw and read the other cousins to beat them at cards and outfox them in wrestling, tying them in knots and using them as stools until Norncanaan walked by and saw who she had bested and embarrassed.
One of those two would come, the historian claimed, staking their reputation on it, which Graychild found out was nothing to sneeze at by asking yet more of his new recruits to orally construct a web of social and professional knowledge on their raft. Ships were the best places for spiders to build such things after all, the winds bringing fresh prey each day.
Spiderwebs were among the first signs that the terrain was changing, for Beocroak and Jeremiad, along with uphill struggling and the appearance of dark, sharp, strewn rocks like mean scattered tacks waiting for the foot of something much larger than them. When two were close enough spiders bridged their points and built silken triangles that caught only droplets of fog.
These were fresh water. The weavers were deferential to the grabblers, eagerly skittering to the rocks so they would be free to descend and lick from the web, which they did so delicately enough to avoid breaking the strands.
When the sky had run out of jellies and rain they had abandoned their tree, having carried it so long that the weight was still in their shoulders somewhere; every time they tried to stretch it out it seemed to roll into a more obscure muscle they couldn’t target. At least Beocroak’s arm was relaxing again, having worked through the jellyfish’s venom.
The webs’ dew hardly did anything for their thirst, which had snuck up on them in the most insidious way. Briny air had leeched their throats and noses. The storm had fouled the surface with excess salt. Every coldboil offering they ate had salt in its flesh and fluids. Now there was a crackling flaky fire inside them, irritation spreading, drying them into mummies rather than rotting them into ghouls.
Sight of a great basin had brought the thirst into relief, without actually relieving it. Sunken into the mud, ringed by the largest of the dark rocks, backed by a steep wall of concentric ridges that would be difficult to climb, was a lake as still as a puddle with no plant life. In its place stood hardened stalks topped with the emptied molts of horrifying brine-tolerant bugs like jaundice-eyed direflies and gray fin-scorps.
They wouldn’t bother the grabblers if they knew what was good for them, leaving the visitors free to sample the basin, finding it was not potable. Its salty taste had also the flavor of rain, with Beocroak guessing it was normally fresh but had been tainted by the storm of the eye. Any travelers that relied on it would find themselves up a difficult dry creek when next they came by.
“Then perhaps our pursuers will turn back,” Jeremiad hoped aloud. “There are still days to the edge of Rooth Tugt, and no civilization therein.”
“Perhaps they will die,” her master said, extrapolating further. “Where would they go after finding this to survive?”
“It was their choice to follow us.”
“The more the gods are involved the less choice they have.”
“Much less than one god is involved.”
“Here we stay, so we can see.”
“Master? See what?”
“Whether they need our help.”
“I don’t understand. They attacked us. We went to Beerbet only to borrow one glance of the eye, and we didn’t even take that. We have a curse to break; their fates are not our concern.”
“Steady Jeremiad.” Her shared name chilled her skin. “Leave anger behind. You’ve just learned what a good word can do for your fame.” He referred to the accolades she’d earned from the crab bucket, already wielded in her favor when she roared a mudmouth fish to glove height. “It is the same with men. Ending this here, with a gesture of good faith, could end conflicts across entire lives before they begin.”
“You have seen this Master Beocroak?”
“I have lived it in reverse. I earned their trust in selling grabbling and they spread the word. Then I am bogged with offers. You refuse them all and yet you find some accepted. Then, suddenly, you are underground, about to die in Tauntalagmite’s new capital. I will not have that for you.”
“What if these Half-Biters just attack again?”
Her master had already planned it out, with but a few long looks at the basin’s surrounding terrain. The back wall was nearly sheer, could not be climbed by any man but a grabbler without special equipment. The sides were blocked routes of treacherous rock and unstable crumbling drift-logs. They would take hours to pass.
So the grabblers could swim the basin and climb the back, where they would have a perfect perch to wait for their foes. The eye of Xeams still had not left the sky, still reported their exact position, but from that perch they could see almost as well. If the Half-Biters immediately went for one of the sides the grabblers could resume their flight and have several hours’ head start. If they instead lingered at the basin, dumb in drought, perhaps the conflict could be dulled and broken, with the grabblers sharing methods like the web-licking to give them a chance to turn back.
Jeremiad brought up the possibility that some of them might be strong enough to swim and climb as they had, especially Xeams. What then? His answer was a nod toward several boulders on the edge of the cliff, of a weight and position they could use. A good push could send some of them over as falling weapons, and some larger than those could be loosened by burrowing animals Beocroak had time to summon from a distance with his resonant roar.
Secretly hoping for this result, Jeremiad was picturing Xeams skittering up the wall and getting crushed by a rock too big to fool with his illusion. The image helped preserve her vitality as they took the unpleasant swim across the whole basin.
Rather than spiral in the water and use her sole arm once per side she stuck to her legs alone. Thus the slower, she lost sight of Beocroak halfway across. Her heading wouldn’t falter, just as when they sleepwalked, allowing her to keep her eyes closed to prevent the brine burn. A nasty taste coated her cracking lips, of pond scum killed by the rain floating in a film of death. Holding her breath kept the taste out, closing her eyes the salt, unwittingly putting her in a state much like sleep.
Her thoughts on her surroundings were next to the surroundings themselves, easy to confuse for each other; she could be forgiven for thinking the shadow rising from the depths was real. Jeremiad scrambled to identify it. What animal would dare approach her as potential prey? Her maimed state didn’t prevent it from recognizing that her master ahead was complete. If she was dragged down he would dive in response immediately. A grabbler worth the salt in that lake could best any dweller there despite being out of their element. Only ocean depths would be deadly, with the pressure killing them as opposed to any mere animal.
The shadow rose regardless, charging at her like a cat from the brush. Her stroke didn’t falter, her mind demanding that it make sense before her body responded. How did she perceive it at all? Her eyes were closed. But not her thoughts. That was where she saw it, in an imagination gone lax during the repetitive swim deprived of several senses.
Since it was in her thoughts, and she was not truly asleep, it could not hurt her. With that realization the shadow broke against her into ten thousand black bubbles, each containing the sting of a hateful eye.
She could hardly blame the demon of sleep for striking at the opportunity. What would have been foolish was lurking about in her presence beforehand. There was no sign it could take her. Jeremiad was strong against them, as many were. In her dreams her lost arm returned from the dead and it ran nearly over with her blood once more. She was stronger in that realm, not weaker.
It knew that. Her thoughts cast ahead, to where her master was reaching the rocky wall, his swim transitioning into his climb seamlessly in a fashion she would not be able to reproduce. His body moved the way the world did, a rival realm at shrunken size. Out here he was the strength she would have to claw her way back to.
But in the demon’s somnolent spaces, she suspected vulnerability. Something in him had to be empty, perhaps emptied out, for him to fill it with her mentoring. A Jeremiad was meant to make their own way, and veer from the paths of other grabblers they should happen to encounter in the secondary world beyond Lazuli Pawlm.
Beocroak’s embrace was both fiery compassion to her, almost enough to burn her up, and an icy rejection of Pawlm’s thrust. In him there was some turmoil, and that was why the demon of sleep followed, to snap at him. There was time to guess at the subject before she reached the wall.
Hexaclete. Her first and best guess. Master Beocroak had regaled her with his harrowing ordeal in Toeteld, new capital of the gray dead, mere weeks before their meeting in the great Kelpwash of Welkmadat: the reeking garden that the tide moved up and down the beaches. According to him he was the sole survivor of a mutually selfish battle deep underground, so deep demons cheered them on as audience from behind their prison bars.
Rising as the only survivor, preventing a reaperweed like Xeams in the process, he fought his way through a rising undead city, warmed only by the blazing of grabbler trails as he invented techniques for taming and influencing gray animals.
Near the surface he faced his greatest challenge: dueling the ghost of a fellow grabbler that he had known in life. He told her the man’s name was Dignidog. She didn’t know him. She hardly knew anyone, and now that it was too late she assumed that was how she’d lost her arm. More friends would’ve meant more knowledge, and more ways out of that eel’s mouth intact. In her current form she doubted there was a single whole grabbler she could duel to victory, even with superior weapons, even with three to her opponent’s one. Yet somehow Beocroak had come from further behind than that, entirely incapable of laying a hand on his foe, and still defeated Dignidog who wielded a long time partner and friend.
At first Dignidog was the perfect explanation for her master’s distress, that what smelled so alluring to the demon of sleep. Dignidog had forced him out of Pawlm, followed him, challenged him, tried to drag him into the service of Tauntalagmite. Discord of that sort was unheard of in their culture. What happened to her was supposed to be the worst of it, and she was supposed to be the most responsible.
As she came to know Beocroak she lost confidence in that theory, for he had shared every detail about the duel, and few about what came after. It was the climax of the story, what brought them together, but his tone was cold, breaking off on so few words, expelling in his breath a fog of vaguery.
“Victory did not slow Tauntalagmite’s approach,” he had said in that hardening voice, like a chrysalis crackling to reveal nothing inside. “I had to beg for help. On my knees I begged Hexaclete and I was delivered, in her palm, to absolution. Dignidog accused me of being born in the softer sister’s hand, and just after I was reborn in the stronger sister’s. In her hand there was already so much compassion. It has contaminated me and I am not righteous enough to hold it in my core without destruction. It is too divine and I am too old and set in ways far from Gaw’s tally. You are young, and can grow around it. I gift it to you. Slowly I will release it, to nourish you, until you are ready to walk on your own. I trust you to tell me when my service ends.”
Dignidog’s life was now a book in her memory, as was Beocroak’s escape from Toeteld, and the quarter-volume currently being written between them, but she still had shining blank pages for Hexaclete. She found it odd, seeing as they lived in Hexaclete’s Land until a cavalier cousin renamed it. Her guardian had not only met the goddess, but been carried by her through the Goodly clouds above.
Even a grabbler should have more to say about that.
Her hand touched the wall. She stopped and spun to look up into the gray skies. A drizzle of pebbles led her eyes to Beocroak, climbing with astonishing speed as if he crawled upon the ground, fast enough to suggest he’d seen the shadow in his thoughts too.
When she reached the top there was no sign of his struggle, his soul once more encased in stone. Sat behind folded legs, his wordless voice was low in his throat, calling through the cliff to the animals that might help them create a landslide in the event of further hostilities. Calling to them was still pointless for her, and their elevation was now beyond the creatures of the coldboil, so she instead wandered a little past him, finding the moss-green edge of Rooth Tugt on the horizon.
Her calm was almost overridden. A gasp would’ve been the result, the first of her life outside of learning to breathe and hold her breath. For a moment she deeply regretted its potential flitting away. Being under Beocroak’s tutelage brought back the hope and wonder of childhood, so much so that she was close to gasping when she saw a new forest she wanted to run her fingers across and toes over.
When she did they would hit a bump. Bisecting the jungle border was a crumbling edifice upon a solid hill shaped like a ship’s bow. A birdcage of overgrown black pillars missing its dome, she guessed it was an old fortress, while Graychild’s sleuthing had already identified its name: Rockrain.
Returning to her calculating mind, she knew it would be their entrance. Legends of Rooth Tugt were of two stripes, with one being the treasure cluster in its hidden glade that could break her master’s curse, and the other being its cunning and voracious wildlife. Animals in that jungle were entirely unknown to her, most separated from the civilizations of Hexaclete’s Land.
In the harsh north the mechanized industry of the lumber towns still saw windows cranked shut when tawny-footed ice bears patrolled through snowy streets. The west had whales that greeted ships. But in Rooth Tugt there were things that had never laid eyes upon man, and whose first instinct of them would be to take a hearty bite. Grabblers beware. No reputation extended far into that dense greenery. No roars were storied, and they died under cicada whining alone.
The worst place on the continent for a Jeremiad. No, she flouted, the worst place for any Jeremiad not under the protection of the mighty Beocroak. What he discarded and spilled was enough to enrich her underneath. Together they would find the glade, pick apart its treasure hoard, and break that curse. Once he was free he would be all the more powerful, and all her kin in Pawlm would be to her as the gray dead had been to him, not harmless, but utterly gone.
Of course Beocroak had seen the jungle already, and her gasp had escaped, so Jeremiad returned to his side and patiently awaited their weapons, animals that were much easier to guess than those lurking inside the rainy tangle of Rooth Tugt. Broad-fang sand snakes and clayhogs would be the most likely to answer his call.
The former they might not even see, as they spent most of their time underground, their sensitive purple-gray tongues flicking out and scraping tunnel ceilings to taste the leaking juices of carrion, which they would then dig under and swallow, appearing to be a small calculated sinkhole from the surface.
The latter was short and fat, almost proud to display it as a family of six popped their heads up nearby, emerged from their den, and trotted amiably to the grabblers. Book hunters of the north, who put nature on pages with charcoal wands and then endlessly reorganized their records, would take umbrage to those creatures being called hogs, correcting you by explaining their nearest relation was the hippopotamus groups, but to Jeremiad they were hogs: rotund, fleshy in lip, poor in eyesight, and with hardly any tail to speak of. And they tended to oink.
Beocroak rose as they idled about. His roar had ceased, so his ward assumed there were sand snakes underneath them, busy plowing tunnels with their wide noses that could be collapsed with a precise nudge. The clayhogs would join their passages to the surface with their stubby yet practiced limbs. First they would need instruction.
Elder grabbler gently inserted his arm into the welcoming yawn of the clayhog matriarch as the younger did the same with the youngest of the litter. They didn’t grab any guts, as this was communicative grabbling. Animals of poor eyesight often learned better with touch, doubly so touch on the guts of a ruminant, where they did most of their thinking.
Gliding fingertips laid out a map of their surroundings on the clayhogs’ stomach lining, then indicated behind which rocks they should dig. Properly done, the grabblers could then customize a rockfall in several areas. Both arms slid out and wiped themselves clean of spit on the oblivious animals’ backs. Then the matriarch led by example, with the rest of her family following. Sprays of wet dirt went in all directions, just the latest sight to confuse the approaching Eye of Xeams.
Graychild would receive the report, but it didn’t seem important at the moment, enrapt as he was with a gem of a recruit who had been talking his ear smooth for hours now. Their hand-hunting party had cleared the jellyfish debris field and reached ground too dry for Breakwater to ford, putting them all back on their feet once more. Night fell. Oil lamps in limited supply led the way, themselves made to resemble the divine eye with globes of glass and metal irises to direct the beam.
“Basin’s near,” one of the recruits chimed in, trying to earn the captain’s favor, but he waved them off. This one had to keep talking. Not a scholar, scholars put too much stock in evidence. Not a gossip either, those sorts couldn’t penetrate into the heartwood lore of a society. Graychild had found himself a storyteller. The details would be wrong, and the timeline as well, but Roddery knew how to read a story and hear what in it was true. It was a form of code, and once you understood that you knew it could be broken.
“That’s the most notable feature of this jungle then?” he tested the woman with strands of her red hair dampened and fed into her crow’s feet to give the impression she had seen such firelight that her gaze now reflected it back onto a world of tinder.
“Oh yes Captain Graychild. Any other feature will be moving around between the trees, searching for people like us to eat. That’s the one that stays still long enough for word to escape, possibly on the wing of a demon ape.”
“Yes we’ve been over the demon apes with that lovely book hunter fellow, name of Phoggerer. You two should meet, you’d get along famously. I’ll arrange it. We’ll cross-reference you all night long and then the informed eye of Beerbet will oversee everything in full knowledge, perhaps even your wedding.” He nudged her with all the expertise the grabblers would soon expect of the submerged sand snakes.
“Stop it, I’ve already had four,” she snickered, managing to surprise the well-traveled and learned Half-Biter. “But is that Phogg with an F or a PH?”
“You’ll be rewarded with the proper spelling once you elaborate upon the lake of lights, and the…”
“Many-Spotted Hoard within?”
“Love the sound of it,” Graychild said with a sharp inhale through his teeth, as if about to blow the scalding steam off a bowl of soup. “Keep on, future Mrs. Phoggerer.”
“Every spot of the many has a story of its own, of which I know precious few,” she lamented. “Each is a treasure, something wrought by man or demon, that carries powerful magic. These things always fall out of the hands that owned them first, into ones even more wrong for them. The rules are never written down, and if they are they’re quickly lost.
Use magic wrong and you get yourself killed most of the time. I can see why you’re not afraid, carrying that sword of yours. One swing of that and you gave me another story to tell. What’s its name again?”
“Breakwater.”
“Breakwater,” she repeated to help herself memorize. “Breakwater, Breakwater, Breakwater, the rafting sword spat out of the Half-Bite.” Her crow’s feet grew a little longer in the talon, and her hair grew to fill. “Worthy of its own spot in the hoard. Hundreds of items all collected in and around the lake of lights, overseen by a curator who dares not touch them himself once they’re placed.
The jungle is where these things all end up, thrown away into a green hell, their long-suffering owners now too afraid to stand at the precipice of the actual underworld and toss them in, because you never know when a demonic craftsman might take offense or a Ghastly thing might toss it back.
The curator finds them and makes them as safe as they can be. It’s a hoard alright, but not a pile, as one of the fastest ways to grant a death wish is to bang two magic whatsits together. Each is put on a pedestal grown for the purpose, spaced equidistant from all the others, creating a perfect peppering, and that’s why it’s called the Many-Spotted Hoard.”
“And why is it called the lake of lights?”
“Couldn’t tell you!” she shouted, throwing up her gnarled weaver’s hands, “because nobody’s told me!”
She might not have been able to tell him even if she had known, given the parched throat cracking her words. The Beerbetters’ water skins and canteens had run dry, as expected, half a day from the basin. If the march slowed they would only worsen their condition. Once they arrived they could refill and decide whether to press on after the grabblers or turn back and repeat the hardship across the mud flats without the benefit of Roddery’s raft carrying them nearly a quarter of the way.
Coughing characterized the lot of them as they followed the few who already knew how to reach the watering hole. Leeched unexpectedly by intensely salty air from the upper sky where the eye swam, some even hacked up blood, painful not only from raw throats but craggy lip fissures as well. As such they did not wait on the ceremony of Graychild’s approval when they first caught sight of the basin’s edge; they ran.
The Half-Biter knew better than to scold them. Right now everything was still their decision; he hadn’t given a single order. One could lead, if they had the utmost skill, without ever issuing an order. All they had to do was redirect the peoples’ desires, then voice them. Convincing them they didn’t want immediate relief from their thirst was an unnecessary challenge just to assert a hierarchy that was still deniable.
Splashes. Some had bodies coated in thirst, so they balled themselves up and tossed themselves in. Before they could surface many more were at the edge with cupped hands, dipping like birds for their first drink.
Splashes. These were smaller weaker sprays, slightly pink in color. Many first drinks, not one swallow. Fouled with salt. Like the air, the mud, the blood of the coldboil creatures. Filmy and crestfallen, the divers flopped back out and shed their outer layers, their molts stiffening with residue almost immediately so that they stood like the phantom shells of brine flies.
“What are they doing?” Captain Graychild asked Xeams as he took his first mate aside, referring to the grabblers, whom he already knew had posted themselves on the opposite cliff and could see them in turn.
“Nothing,” answered the reaperweed. “They’re stood where they’ve been stood for hours now with those fat animals lounging around them. They’re seeing us drink salt. Why would they stay?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. Unable to see them from quite that far, he could make out one of the boulders standing at the edge that Xeams had pointed out as their neighbor. Locking his gaze on it, Roddery paced back and forth just to see it from slightly different perspectives. Why? What was their angle? Logically they should have left his crew in the dust of thirst and continued on toward this jungle that he now knew contained only one thing anyone could want.
“The eye did this!” one of the three hundred shouted, pointing at it in the sky as if it wasn’t so prominent as to make its reflection in the basin the next most prominent thing.
“Yeah, the eye brought that storm!”
“He doesn’t know how to use it!”
“Rally the crew,” Roddery told Xeams. A contingency was already in place to destroy them all in self-defense. The eye of Xeams just had to finish the drop it started before it belonged to the reaperweed. Its darkening shadow would quell any mob, squeeze the two parties apart, and allow those of the Thumbscale to continue on their own.
But it was a miserable risk to the eye. The Beerbetters might damage it with anything sharp they’d brought along in the process of being flattened. To use such a divine tool as a hammer was to make the most desperate move. Should Roddery Graychild ever have to use Breakwater as one he might then take his own life and rest his body on its driven length so it could serve in finality as a monument instead.
It took Xeams only moments to group most of the crew together, faster than the dehydrated masses could clump against them. In the midst of a mental game of posturing numbers to determine if they could intimidate the Beerbetters away without dropping the eye, a shadow fell upon them prematurely.
Everyone turned toward the sky as the eye of Xeams was forced to roll backward and make room for what broke through the clouds like five breaching whales. The hand of Hexaclete. Come to manhandle the eye once more? No. It descended. People scattered and yelled, only to pause when its speed seemed less than lethal.
It spun too, away from the palm that made the most sense for flattening them against the side of the basin. Becoming beckoning in shape, the bowl of Hexaclete’s hand was briefly like the permanent pose of her sister’s arm as it rose petrified from the pool Tallybirth. However the younger had always been the colors of the sky: ethereal of flesh, white of blood, blue of aether. Hexaclete’s hand was as she had been in life, golden to the point of flaming orange, alive like gourds rupturing in geysers of bonfire seeds. Hexaclete had been so alive that she could never linger in death as her sister did, burning through her force at five times the intensity.
When she fell she was gone, her powers inert, no will remaining in them at all. Instead of a society forming around her, heeding her wisdom, fighting the flaws that failed her, she left behind nothing but a neutral arsenal, weapons that could be foraged and used in the basest of human ways. Hexaclete’s hand could be made to scratch an ass if an imbecile or vagrant found it where it fell.
The character of its current wielder would be revealed, as soon as the hand made contact. Across from the frightened and awed Beerbetters, the grabblers watched its descent as well. Jeremiad walked to the edge of the cliff, toes confidently hung over it. Behind her Beocroak was crouched, his arm buried in a clayhog’s gullet to make more adjustments to their buried traps now that they could assess the approaching force.
“There are hundreds… One of them must have it,” Jeremiad said. As she squinted she made out the crowd’s body language, determined it to be anxious, wary. “Whoever it is they conceal it from the others. And it is not the same people who have the eye.”
“The mariners have the eye,” Beocroak said. “They’ve misled the others to aid them in their revenge.”
“But who has the hand master? They do not turn it against us.”
“Nor do they turn it against them. Look.” As they watched the hand dipped into the center of the basin. Those who fled uselessly against muddy inclines were now stopped by curiosity instead of the terrain. What would the hand want at the bottom of that basin? Then it struck many of them: the water.
A god’s eye could see far and in great detail; it could see what was smaller than a speck. It could see in brightest streaking lights and in crushing absolute darkness. Yet sight was its only ability and purpose.
A god’s hand was meant to act upon the world. What a man could change a god could change in many more ways. For one of the Goodly, tilling the soil made it fertile as well. Pulling on the ocean brought up an island. Snapping a shaft of light in half made enough fire to go around to all the uncivilized caves of the continent.
Perhaps, even guided by a novice, the salty water cupped in Hexaclete’s palm could run fresh between her fingers. They would be saved, dancing in the falls drifting over them, showering and drinking in equal measure. The further it sank, the greater the possibility seemed. What else could the hand want in the basin? What else but their salvation?
The hand was colossal. What it displaced was colossal as well. Whatever its intent, it had sunk too quickly to avoid endangering them. An invisible wave approached the bank swiftly, only rising as the bed did, rising when it was too late to flee like the tail of a skunk. A wave of screams tried to hold it back, offering little contest.
As the waters broke upon them they were washed into the surrounding rocky gullies that hid the basin from the nearby paths, some steep and sharp in a way one was only likely to notice after they were washed into them.
“The rocks!” Graychild shouted to his crew. Further back in their attempt to position against the Beerbetters, the Thumbscale crew had time to retreat a short distance, cornering themselves in one of the steeper ditches, the further incline made solidly of two layers of jagged stones. One would serve as the deck, the other the hull.
Breakwater was drawn, thrust. Sparks flew from blade against black rock, tumbling chunks flying from the press of the sword’s internal rod. As one the sailors hunkered down and grabbed the best rock in reach, careful not to grab too low so their fingers wouldn’t get smashed between the gaps as the stones shifted to form the most efficient raft possible.
The basin wave broke at their backs, peeling the stones up, rolling them, nearly tossing some of his crew, but Graychild had commandeered worse boats in worse scrapes and still made it to the edge of his old life, to then shove off aboard the Thumbscale, the only proper boat anyone would ever give him.
He heaved with all his might to bring the rocky scab around as the broken wave drew back. Mixed in with sediment and debris were Beerbetters, luck determined by their head finding up or down, with the exception of one head that found up, surfaced, and then found the hard edge of Graychild’s raft. Their cracked skull and spilled brain made clear the extent of Breakwater’s magic, which neutralized the stones’ weight and did absolutely nothing for their hardness.
In death this unfortunate was outnumbered by those who lived because of Graychild, and so they were quickly and irrevocably forgotten in the tumult of mud-darkened water and reaching arms as the sailors grabbed everyone they could and hauled them aboard. The deck grew to accommodate them as Roddery steered into every tumbling rock he could reach, riding the edges of the basin at an angle.
His crew was to save them, extend their working arms, hair lacquered down with effort, becoming so much more to them than any grabbler, saving their entire world with one reach, one grab, one pull. All the while the captain watched the basin’s calming center, waiting for the hand of Hexaclete to resurface. It did not. It might have no longer been manifest.
“Did he try to kill us?” Roddery shouted to Xeams, who could be counted on to appear beside him even if he wasn’t a moment prior.
“Only enough to make us look good,” the loyal creature answered.
“He didn’t try to take the eye.”
“He can’t take it without taking me,” Xeams pointed out. “Up there he can only destroy it. He didn’t because none of it is his. It’s all hers. These people respect their gods.”
“They’d better. They’ve got a new one coming… What are the grabblers doing now?” Xeams cocked his head, the great eye shifting audibly overhead, like someone repositioning in a hammock woven from crosswinds.
“Now they’re leaving.”
Indeed they were, though Jeremiad did not notice at first, unable to tear her eyes from the shocking devastation beneath them. The hand had come down so placidly, radiating warmth, more of it in her bones just from the sight of it than she’d had since they last had a real fire instead of a coldboil.
As far as she could tell, it had come to them in peace. It was a grabbler’s job to know the tenor of a hand, more so in command than communication, but she’d never had trouble telling when lesser fingers were itching to grab daggers from their belts instead of superior animals. Back in Beerbet she’d wondered if they had a secret ally that turned the eye away from them, and now the theory seemed confirmed, although the hand-wielder’s technique was questionable.
Why not just flatten them all with one meteoric impact? Why mislead them with such a slow and inviting approach? She guessed it possible that one among them had the hand and was trying to create a situation in which they could live but many of the others would perish. A very good swimmer perhaps. Or, they could’ve intended to wash them away without killing many, dissuading them from following her master further.
“Master, why-” She turned to air these questions to him, only to find he had already walked a good distance away, aimed straight at the ruined fortress Rockrain. Their preparations were abandoned, the clayhogs already waddling back to their den, oblivious to any change in fortune. Jeremiad took one last look at the settling murk, at the rocky raft collapsing and letting off scores, before she turned and bolted after her master on expert silent soles.
“Master,” she addressed again as she found his pace, taking it partly backward. “What does the hand of Hexaclete want?”
“Obviously it did not want to help them,” he answered coldly.
“Mightn’t it be an error? They tried to clean the waters with it and misjudged its size?”
“I wouldn’t envy them then, having to explain it to the others. For us it is no longer any concern. That will have ruined the air between us. We’re the ones making them go on, if they go on, despite no water. If they die of thirst they will blame us, swear eternal oaths to claim our heads should they see us long enough to make us hear that blame.”
“The eye will still be on us.”
“Not once we’re under Rooth Tugt’s trees.”
“Master Beocroak… what is your curse? I can see it dragging you down, but not its substance.”
“It has no substance. That is what’s so sinister about it my apprentice. It tells me what is possible. Then, when that possibility crumbles, it tells me about it again, and that it’s too late. Never too late to act. Always too late to appease. Hatred bears down on me no matter what I choose.
Please Jeremiad, do not ask me to describe my curse more than that.”
“No Master! Soon it will trouble you no more. Then we will go north, together.”
“Until your training is complete.”
“May it never be complete Master.”
“No, you will. It must. You must be free of me to have yourself, to have any peace. You will need no one, and there will be no one to call you Jeremiad and no one to call me master. Gaw will speak to you with silence. Her distant arm in Lazuli Pawlm will be your lost other. You will need no leader.”
“Yes Master,” she said to quell the mounting distress in his words. The curse. It doomed him, she assumed. Why else would he talk of a future apart? No wicked force would claim him, not while she still had a limb to sacrifice in his place. Were she but an armless and legless lump he would strap her to his back and carry her everywhere, calling her ‘apprentice’ all the while. Someone should die for Beocroak, she knew, without knowing who.
Blaine Arcade 