(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 17 minutes)

As they lapsed back into silence, thoughts of the Half-Biters and Beerbetters were left behind. The eye of Xeams did not leave their sky, but soon its powers would be neutralized under the humid greenery. If half the stories of the place were to be believed, only grabblers had a good chance of surviving a journey to the jungle’s center, facing just as much risk on the way out. Even if Roddery Graychild were to pursue them into the dense tangle it was unlikely he could get many others to do so, especially after being half-drowned or whole-drowned by the enigmatic hand of Hexaclete.

Instead the grabblers’ sights were set on the jutting ruin ahead, offering the furthest and least-impeded ingress into Rooth Tugt that, according to Beocroak, also aligned with their heading. To investigate it they would first have to scale the intimidating rock ridge upon which it grew like broken teeth, difficult, but not so much as the crumbling wall of the basin. Or so they thought during that last stretch of Welkmadat, all the way to the start of the climb.

Something above must have crumbled this time, to provide the projectiles that gave no warnings but their shadows. They were of intelligent origin, as the falling stones kept finding the grabblers’ current positions and only began when they were too high to safely dismount and retreat.

“Jeremiad!” Beocroak warned as the first one fell. He led the climb, so she understood the alert to be instructions as well, seeking his shadow as shield. Now was not the time to insist she could climb as well as him single-handed. Whichever way he evaded she followed, watching the curve of his spine as if she stalked an unaware serpent through the desert on all threes.

The assault continued for a length of time better described as thirty-six rocks than three minutes, and it might have gone on longer and more than that if Beocroak had not recognized the last one dropped as something he could catch and balance in one palm. It was pellet-shaped, quite even, rather like an arrow dropped onto a bowstring when given to a grabbler. Beocroak silently drew the arm muscles taut, tightened his limb as rigidly as he did when denying poisons his tiniest blood tributaries, and launched the stone vertically.

Its slight angle was intended; it disappeared over the lip and there was a sound of scattering that followed, an odd jumble of unmistakable yet contradictory elements: wing beats and foot pounding. Jeremiad knew her master decided to press on, as he resumed climbing. No more rocks fell, and neither did the elder grabbler after he pulled himself over the ledge. Silence meant safety, so she hurried to join him.

Rolling to her feet at his side, she too saw that the ruined fortress appeared abandoned. Dark pillars gnawed to half height by erosion moved down the ridge, toward the jungle they vanished into, fencing in chunks of roof now upturned and capsized in the soil. All crests and emblems were long licked away by the hounding winds that patrolled the jungle’s exterior without being able to break in.

The only clue as to the original builders was the stone itself, not native to those parts, and its significance was lost on the grabblers, who did not study the history of man, wise as they were in their understanding that a man had only to die to become history, and would then know all of it completely.

What they didn’t know was that the dark building material was a favorite of the Injured Party: those settlers who first moved into the cold and god-infrequented north. Numbering only hundreds, they were survivors of the Ghastly adventurer who made Rooth Tugt wild, a lost name of the oldest thing’s time that flouted the symbolic Goodly authority of the sun. It sprang from subterranean cover at night and hunted for the best places to plant things poisonous and thorny. As they sprouted it was called the hunted garden, as they spread it was called the roots that tug, and as they claimed dominion the dying who did not join the Injured Party bloodily sputtered the cursed name Rooth Tugt.

Injured by that Ghastly god enough to take it as their name, they journeyed on crutch and cane, still not visited by the resident Goodly god who was unaware of the happenings on that coast for two decades solid. Warmed only by hard-won campfires hewn from sparse wet twigs in the melting regions and their own indignant anger at abandonment, the Injured Party vowed no need of anything Goodly or Ghastly.

Discovering seams in the rock under the ice from which issued bubbling waters and immense walls of steam like rivers of cloud, the Injured Party used their working minds that had carved survival on the trail to harness this curious morally neutral power. They fed it to wooden machines, and later to metal ones, progressing so wondrously that now only those remaining in the melting regions had to bake the mud and dirt into their cakes.

They kept excellent records, on paper no less, but there was no mention of what dwelt in their old collapsed fortress, what might have big feet and wings and what had definitely dropped thirty-six rocks on the trespassing grabblers.

Nor were they announcing themselves as Beocroak and Jeremiad crept forward, listening for any clue as to their presence. Distantly behind and above them the eye of Xeams watched with equal curiosity, making no effort to warn them if it did see anything of note. The reaperweed’s combat experience was close enough to theirs for all of them to recognize the lack of prints in terrain moist and loose enough to make them.

“Master, there are no animals here.”

“None but those that don’t want us here.”

“What animal sweeps its own tracks away?” He stopped, inhaled.

“Well!?” he asked the ruin and the sky that suddenly felt like a low roof. “What animal?” There was roar in his voice, not a command, but something worse to anything listening that thought it had dignity: a challenge. The grabbler was clear that even if he was a trespasser, his own presence was imperative enough to make them wasters of his time. Nothing could stop him, unless it was going to then and there.

Wing beats. Too large, too loud. Hearing them behind her, Jeremiad immediately dropped to her stomach, correct in her assessment that it would be something too big for her to best with one turning strike. A chunk of crumbling roof bigger than a bed flew over her, would have struck Beocroak dead if he too had not dropped at the sound of her connecting with the ground. Both grabblers rolled and righted, only able to catch shadows streaking behind the pillars or overhead.

Some of these shadows seemed to go fleshy at the extremities, gripping the sides of the pillars to clamber up them, to swing behind cover. The tossed debris slid down the hill between the fortifications, eating the tops of its friends, and only when it skidded to a distant low halt did the grabblers hear what its grinding flight was likely meant to cover. Footfall slaps. Not on the ground where they should be. Up in the supports, like lizards from cracks, like toads over low walls, but most like Beocroak’s next word.

“Apes.”

The demon apes of Rockrain, as Graychild’s handpicked storyteller had called them, took his challenge and swung out from hiding wielding hands both bare and laden with rough hand axes. One kicked Beocroak in the chest with both feet, sending him sliding back uphill, a strange effect to witness and contingent upon his grabbler stance steadier than most trees.

Jeremiad put her back to his to both stop him and complete their circle of awareness, but they were more in need of a sphere. Wings beat again as another ape dropped between, split them with a foot on each back, and pushed them apart, Jeremiad into a stumble. A count of their new foes eluded her, clear enough though that they were outnumbered. Beocroak stood no chance if he had to worry about her, so no matter how drastic her choices she considered them all better than audibly stumbling. She grabbed a furry foot as it flew by.

The creature hoisted her off the ground, into the descending peaks of the pillars, pausing to beat its wings, a pause she used to assess its anatomy and learn what they were up against. They were all larger than her, with the smallest rivaling Beocroak in size, with full coats of charcoal fur that went silver around the face, chest, wrists, and ankles. Tall narrow foreheads sloped down into powerful protruding jaws and fleshy lips in permanent curmudgeonly pouts. Small sad eyes of dark amber like pried-open nuts betrayed profound depth of emotion.

With arms that could make grabblers jealous, and squat legs that had ceded most of their territory to those arms, she recognized the animal from descriptions and drawings as a gorilla. Apes liked warmer more forested parts than she had yet visited, and she had not encountered any monkey too large to sit on her arm until now.

It did not concern her that monkeys were bad for grabbling, with small throats, haughty dispositions, and little in the way of weaponry outside prehensile tails that took much mastery. What concerned her was that no one drawing gorillas had bothered to draw the wings on them, which seemed an important detail as they dragged her further into the sky.

A fall could end her as easily as a rock. Jeremiad released the ape’s foot and landed on a bridge of roof remaining aloft between two pillars, not without cracking it. Her bare feet twisted, judging its stability by its subtle movements. She could stand there, at least long enough to watch two of the apes circle her on the wing, staying just out of her reach intentionally. Their wings were black leather stretched across pinion fingers of bulbous knuckle, like those of a bat. Between their flaps was another surprise; the demon apes were clothed.

Around the legs it was little more than a loincloth. The belts were cloth and held in place by two wide strips that rose in a V over the shoulders. The entire flock wore them in green with only the barest trim of two silver stripes on the edge of the largest pieces.

Her assessment ended when one of the circlers landed opposite her with all its weight, turning a crack into a split. The two pieces would’ve tilted toward each other and collided, crushing her between, had she not seen it coming and leaned into it before the ape could escape its own trap. Her back conformed to the piece behind her as it fell and she struck with one leg in a move so like a spear thrust that the ape couldn’t predict it.

She pierced its belt and pinned it to the other falling piece, trapping them both in a precarious collapse that ground to a halt in the middle of the two pillars. For Jeremiad this was but an arena, one more fair than the open, as the pressing ruins shielded her from attack in every other direction. Her free leg kneed the ape’s ample gut and sent its breath overboard. Two more kicks in rapid succession stunned its joints so it couldn’t respond before she released her arm, which had been holding their embrace apart. The pieces fell lower, closer, pressing them together below the waist. Now close enough to use the arm she had also freed, Jeremiad pelted the ape’s jaw with punches, narrowly avoiding attempts to bite on the follow-through.

Its teeth weren’t coming loose, so she switched target to the nearer wing, where it connected to the shoulder, proceeding to squeeze the bone and throttle back and forth, grip tightening as she sought an internal point that would break rather than bend.

Before she could disable its flight the beast remembered its substantial weight advantage, heaving right, peeling out of the collapsing rock vice and forcing her to do the same to the left. Landing on her feet, Jeremiad tried to whirl around and face the ape, but she’d been stripped of her confining shield and left vulnerable to the apes’ numbers.

One kicked her from behind, sent her rolling over the rubble she’d just been stuck between. Another kicked her out of her next attempt at balance, and a third swooped in for what was their favorite maneuver apparently. They could hardly be blamed, as it effectively knocked her into a pillar. Massive gorilla hands closed around each shoulder, flipped her and bent her to the pillar’s curve. There were three on her, and the middle one reared back for something between a grab and a punch that looked capable of tearing her head from her shoulders.

Under the gorilla’s arms she spied Beocroak straddling one of them, failing to rip out the rest of its bottom teeth as more demon apes seized his arms and stalled the momentum. They had lost. The simple trap was likely not designed for grabblers; it was a cruel contortion of luck that the unsettling lack of animals that merely disturbed most trespassers somewhat disarmed those cast in The waters of Gaw’s palm.

Something inside Jeremiad melted all at once, wet, cold, and stinging. A mewl escaped her lips. Far from an appeal to their mercy, it was shame, a gasp at the totality of her failure. Years she had spent with it following her, groping at her in sleep separate from the demon, bubbling up in her meals after the fifth bite. She thought she would’ve had an immunity to it now, like so many venoms. Now she knew it was just waiting for the worst moment to burst. She had been the one doomed, not her cursed master, and he was right, she never would have been safe until her training was complete. Tears fell while she still had a face capable of producing them. The black palm thrust; she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Stop!” a voice dropping from the sky boomed. She’d never heard one so deep; Beocroak’s was a sparrow drinking song in comparison. The demon ape’s hand stopped short and pulled away. Then her shoulders were freed. With her forearm she rubbed the tears from her eyes and saw Beocroak rising, his assailants backing away timidly as well.

Between them all, creating a circle about him with all their bodies, landed another gorilla of unique poise. Its eyes bore concentrated clusters of needling light like distant reaching stars. Standing higher on its knuckles than the others, the muscles on its arms were the most defined: rolling dunes of volcanic sand.

Upon its back was a pair of wings of a different character than its brethren, covered in feathers instead of skin, not unlike a gigantic vulture, or perhaps a raven given the hidden hues of purple and blue almost glossy enough to catch the eye. The demon ape spoke again, no hint of anything Ghastly in his words.

“You trespass in the fortress Rockrain. You were warned with its name.” The grabblers recalled the welcoming projectiles. “You did not heed. Why, if you have a reason, should we allow you to live?” Beocroak and Jeremiad were permitted to approach each other, and only after the master surveyed his apprentice’s condition and found it stable did he answer.

“We wish only to pass through. We will divert to the jungle if we must.” The bird-winged gorilla examined Beocroak top to bottom, much as the man had just done to Jeremiad. The intimidating creature’s silent mulling draped a sheet of lead over all of them. Doubling the effect, the ape then considered the eye in the sky staring like an abscessed eclipse.

“Pass through? As if this were an ordinary trail with something on the other side. Through Tugt is the sea. Do you live underwater? I think your destination is somewhere short of that, where all the adventurers ask after. If one ever came out they could give directions to all the others and trouble us no more.”

“We have no quarrel with you,” Beocroak tried again.

“You should want one,” the demon ape snarled back. “When you lose to us we might just throw you out.” A black hand rose and pointed at the endless carpet of green over its shoulder. “Lose to something in there and you will be digested. Or worse, cursed.” He saw their expressions soften. “Of course we know what we guard. It is the only reason you could be passing through.”

“What are you?” Jeremiad asked. Having not been killed and simultaneously prevented from fighting further, her insides still burned, her muscles stretched on the rack.

“We were once like you,” the gorilla answered with disarming authenticity; the grabblers now thought of the ape as ‘him’ rather than ‘it’. “Seekers of the Many-Spotted Hoard. Treasure Hunters. Those looking to cast curses or break them. We are the fortunate, who evaded the monsters of the jungle and encountered only the final obstacle: the druid.”

“A hidezinhide,” Beocroak told Jeremiad, expecting her to be more familiar with the term used in Lazuli Pawlm. If there was an opposite to the grabblers in Hexaclete’s Land it was the hidezinhides, less ambitious and clever than witches, as depraved as the hooked worms in the bellies of alley-bound garbage eaters.

They were not a people, united only in their practice of manipulating form. A pact with a demon might make a witch, while the scavenging of an extraordinary animal might make a hidezinhide. Man-eaters and monster descendants alike were hunted by aspiring druids, who would use any means necessary to bring the animal down with an intact corpse. Then it would be flayed and they would wear the skin, day and night, month after month.

One of two things would happen. Either the hide would seal around them, the gray animal now shaded enough from the sun to take power and be reborn, or the druid would master the ghost, tame it, and control the effect, capable of shifting between man and beast at will. As long as they never removed the hide they would keep their power.

In Pawlm this was blasphemy, as spineless as the hide itself, disrespectful to the animal that had not offered its aid or been dominated with a grabbling hold. Hidezinhides were discussed with grabbler children, not to frighten them, but inform them as to the sorts of disturbing people-creatures they might find if they traveled beyond sight of the river Plur.

For a moment the pair of captured grabblers recoiled at having been bested by hidezinhides who had stolen gorilla skins, except their wings did not fit this theory. If a druid ever fought two gray animals they would ally to defeat the human, creating a hybrid, but one of only animal intellect. These were not druids, but they were subservient to one, as the gorilla leader explained.

“The druid protects the hoard. No one may take its magical treasures. If you try he will curse you, mix you up into animal and man like tossing you in a perpetual stew. Whatever he has used most recently will flavor you.”

“Gorillas in your case,” Jeremiad concluded, “with bats and birds.”

“The druid saw in me a certain dignity,” the head ape said, “and so granted me feathered wings, rather than those so often mimicked by demons.” His black wings spread wide, and when every forearm-length feather was most outstretched they gained a brief iridescence so that he became a shoal of blue and purple. “I have been tasked with leading these accursed men and women. Together we do as we are ordered, lest the druid exercise his powers from afar and degrade us further into roaches and worms.”

“I am Conquerobber.”

Beocroak and Jeremiad shared a glance. The name suggested, but it was nothing to the fact of their strange powerful forms. Only his intent and strength were germane. The elder grabbler had already crafted his question, was almost too reticent to bring it out.

“Is it the druid’s orders for you to stop us?”

“It is,” Conquerobber confirmed. The other gorillas shifted position, closed in, stepping with their knuckles to shrink the gaps in an impenetrable wall of black fur and battering muscle. “We all sought the horde and found these cursed forms for our trouble. We take solace in our obedience preventing that fate in others as we now prevent it for you.”

“You are his slaves,” Beocroak pointed out.

“We are the defeated, left as warning. And that warning can get very loud.” The grabblers both recalled the accursed, that pathetic beaten creature that had guided and fed them before Beerbet in exchange only for company, for quiet tolerance devoid of detectable hatred. He had known the way because he had been to Rooth Tugt.

From his cycle of beak masks they now assumed he too had fallen prey to the druid. Perhaps he had been quick, suffered only a glancing blow from a projectile curse, leaving him mostly human rather than another winged gorilla. So, the Rockrain apes’ protection was not hypothetical.

“You will not let us pass? No matter what?” Jeremiad tried one more time.

“No,” the head ape said. Despair hooked the grabblers with cold iron. “However.” Iron shattered. Any hope was all hope to them now, this close. “I can exercise strategy however I wish in preventing entry. Sometimes alliances must be made, and access granted, to keep out a greater host.” His thick finger migrated again, pointing into the sky, at the eye of Xeams. “What is that? Why does it approach?”

The phrase ‘greater host’ gave the grabblers all the justification they needed to be transparently honest with the guardian gorillas, especially after they took a moment to stare at the eye and confirm for themselves that it was still growing. That meant the Half-Biters were still hunting them.

In great detail they recounted their entire experience in Beerbet and the resulting trek. The apes cocked their heads at mention of Beocroak’s curse. Stopping to ask if there was an item in the Many-Spotted Hoard that could break curses, the grabblers got satiating confirmation. Yet the apes appeared apprehensive, shifting their weight on their knuckles in the greatest moment of structural instability their impassable wall had betrayed to that point. They did not have faith the grabblers could reach it and claim it, which was fine by the grabblers, who needed only each other’s confidence.

Their retelling continued. The eye of Hexaclete now belonged to another, one who had rallied an army out of Beerbet that was not actually more than a mob, without armor and with barely any proper weaponry among them.

Then the honesty briefly came to an end, for they misattributed Graychild’s motivation to the Many-Spotted Hoard, and not to vengeance against Beocroak for accidentally killing one of his deckhands and intentionally ripping the face off another. If the apes knew they were just after Beocroak they would know to prevent the invasion of Rooth Tugt entirely by sending the grabblers away.

“And there is the hand to consider,” Jeremiad told them. Somewhere a hidden figure had taken possession of Hexaclete’s hand as well. Were there to be a battle it could manifest again. The grabblers couldn’t provide its owner’s motive.

“The meat of your claim is simple enough to check,” Conquerobber assured them. He turned and leapt, flapping his wings to hop from shorter pillars to the tallest one, where he swallowed a barrel of air, beat his chest, and roared out over the jungle. A bird answered his call, shooting up from the leaves like a needle before spreading drab and bedraggled wings of swamp scum green.

Swooping in and landing on Conquerobber’s robust forearm, the grabblers did not get a good look at the animal until its master hopped back down to their level. It was no wonder identification evaded them, as its form was unique not just to Rooth Tugt, but to its stiller frogspawn mires.

The ape had it behaving like a trained falcon, and while its legs were thin and long like one its head was absurdly wide. A gray shovel beak acted as frame for loose throat skin that could swallow suckling pigs whole. Big round eyes stiff as owls’ were tilted at the beak’s corners so that the bird stared off in baffling directions as if it had adapted to seek the least relevant parts of every scene it occupied.

Odder still, the ape showed it affection not by scratching its chin, but the roof of its open mouth, which made the bird gurgle in delight. A few clicks of his tongue ordered the pet to its mission; it flew off over the lip of Rockrain and back into Welkmadat.

“Pursefrown will scout for your Beerbetters,” Conquerobber said. “Until then you should rest, eat. We’ll want you at full strength if you are to help us repel them.” He clapped his leathery hands, prompting three of the bat-winged ones to jump off a ledge to one side of the ruins and fetch the foraged staples of the jungle.

“If we successfully drive them off you will not impede us?” Beocroak asked as Conquerobber led them to a lower recessed pocket of the ruins, what was a fire pit and circling stone benches in the days of the Injured Party’s residence there. They sat.

“I cannot ever give my permission. But. If you fight with us it will ultimately protect more of them from the jungle, so you are better to us as fighters than prisoners. Should you, when the battle is all but won, sneak away while we finish them off, there is little I could do. We are forbidden to leave our post.” He didn’t smile because gorillas didn’t, but there was rueful amusement in the loose side of one lip and its flash of a single pike tooth.

Understanding was had, and owing to stalwart grabbler culture, conversation between two humans and a talking winged gorilla with a falconry hobby somehow died. Few things could reignite it, but some of them were, minutes later, dropped practically into their laps by apes passing overhead.

Rooth Tugt was apparently richer in fruit than anything else, the classification being a mere guess on the grabblers’ part based on luster and stem, since all the colors, patterns, and shapes were extremely foreign. Normally yellow did not go with purple stripes and orange would not be caught in the company of black specks too shiny to be mold.

More armfuls arrived, and more gorillas, until the entire cursed outpost had sat for their evening meal. A head count numbered the apes eighteen. To Jeremiad this did not seem sufficient, assuming Graychild’s crew had convinced even twenty or so Beerbetters to continue on after the drowning. For their part the apes did not seem concerned, going about their fruit preparation calm and meticulous and practiced, so she decided to reserve her worries for her own performance.

First was getting fed, a harrowing prospect given that the gorillas’ peeling and splitting was very selective, tossing away rinds, seeds, and pith that must have been poisonous for their bestial stomachs to reject them. Luckily there was no testing or jesting; their hosts simply tossed pieces their way once they were safe.

Beocroak and Jeremiad gave their thanks before devouring it all, breaking up the monotony of fruit by trying to pick out each bite as distinct from the last. Pale green crescents were as bloated as grubs with astringent juice while bent conical berries on red strings were like syrup as translucent wheels peeled into fragrant airy layers until heavy tree melons with their tops lopped off spilled sticky pink glue that had to sweetly combine with saliva for many seconds before it could be safely swallowed.

Nourishing as it was, Jeremiad found herself preferring the cold wriggling fare of the coldboil. A grabblers’ muscles needed much lean meat to stay refined, and she had grown accustomed to the fare enjoyed at Beocroak’s side after so long deprived of good food in her early days as Jeremiad.

When her branded name was new nothing came to her dinner bell roar. Trapping was undignified for a grabbler; the limbs were the traps and they did not involve waiting around in the underbrush. In order to keep a semblance of her people’s cut strength she had to handle money and purchase meat. Finely marbled aurockin that she bought was sand in her mouth compared to shrimp worms that sacrificed themselves to a coldboil she’d called up.

Back among the apes, pleasant tart tastes became a churning lagoon of acid in her stomach, so she sought distraction, made the desperate grabbler move of talking without being addressed first. She chose for this her neighbor, a smaller gorilla cleaning between her teeth a with a string stripped from one of the tougher fruit husks.

“What preparations do you make for battle?”

“None,” the ape answered. Voice deepened by curse, it was still unmistakable that she was a woman. “If we are to die we will no longer be cursed. If we live, then we can end our curses another day.”

“At least you have each other.”

“At least we have him,” she said, nodding her large head at Conquerobber.

“What happens without him?”

“Some people become animals when there’s no one telling them what to do,” the gorilla sighed, flicking away her spent string. “Imagine how bad it gets when they start as animals.” Jeremiad knew she meant more than infighting and bullying. Her thoughts turned to the leader rather than what he prevented. Was it merely the less demonic and more heavenly wings that granted him his authority? They helped, but she sensed something else. Whatever it was she would see it come out in the battle, of that she was sure.

And there would be a battle, as the frog-mouthed bird called Pursefrown returned to Conquerobber’s arm after the meal. From the taps of its claws the head gorilla learned there was an approaching force, and the Rockrain apes would be significantly outnumbered.

“So sleep well my friends,” he said with a raised voice to all the ruin. “May it be the last time or just another night.” Surprising the trespassers yet again, the apes settled in to sleep immediately, most of them right where they sat, some sitting back to back and letting their heads fall. None stayed awake to guard them, but they both understood it would be foolish to flee, as that meant their captors trusted their senses to be acute enough to hear sneaking bare feet knock two pebbles together.

For a few minutes they had trouble accepting that sleep was the best option for themselves as well. They hadn’t had any lying down for nearly a week. Aside from arming themselves with animals, recuperation was the only way to shore up their strength for a battle against the least anchored portions of Beerbet. Thanks to the eye the element of surprise was already lost. Beocroak silently guessed at the time of the upcoming clash with thoughts of Pursefrown’s flight speed and the Half-Biters’ previous pace.

“Four hours,” he advised Jeremiad, who put her back to his and closed her eyes, not trusting the gorillas enough to lie down. Alone before they crossed paths, his reliability had become her religion. If Beocroak was not there to trust, then in all the world she could trust only herself. If there was anyone else, they would have taken her in first.

Her master’s estimate of the mob’s arrival was more like four and a half hours, as he had built time in for them to rise and recruit weapons from the nearby jungle, which they presumably had to do through roars alone so as not to upset any of their hosts who hadn’t been able to place a single human toe on any Rooth Tugt foliage in years.

The demon of sleep was elsewhere, singular in presence as they were, usually sending a lesser incorporeal demon known as a nightmare in their stead. Something of higher priority than Beocroak had pulled them away. Yet Jeremiad did not sleep as soundly as she might have, not vigilant against the demon but nervous about her roar that was but a peep beside her master’s.

Rooth Tugt was a brutal proving ground for any, grabblers not excluded. There was no telling how far Beocroak’s reputation had been able to penetrate the tree line, or to which lines of animal. All she was certain of was her reach and influence being less than half his. Could she call anything at all out of such a harsh environment? To roar without answer was to stick your arm down an empty hole and grab naught but shadow. An embarrassment.

She could feel this and still succeed, as long as it did not infect and weaken her roar. A desire to practice by constricting her vocal muscles nagged her, but if she did so with her back to Beocroak’s he would feel it through her and know her exact doubts. Tantamount to questioning his teaching that would be.

Her uncomfortable sleep was the best vote of confidence she could give, and she gave for exactly four hours. As one the grabblers rose, leaning on each other’s backs for stability. Then, assuming the gorillas were aware of their status through their grumbling breaths and dreamy drooling, they wove their way through the scattered furry bodies until stood beyond the pillars, overlooking a sea of treetops webbed with vines and sprouting parasitic flowers sent up like flags of surrender.

Setting aside the thought that they might’ve discovered a tribe more stoic than their own, the pair prepared their roars. Beocroak would go first. With any luck, some creature too intimidated by his timbre would answer Jeremiad’s call instead. He took a breath that could’ve gotten him to the bottom of the briny basin and kept him there for supper.

Unleashing it quaked the topsoil and convinced nearby roots to spend the next months digging deeper. Its volume was the human utmost, Jeremiad able to withstand it easily thanks to his technique that lowered its pitch into harmless vibrations. If the canopy had responded in a representative fashion it would have produced visible outward waves in its leaves, perhaps even an uprooting or two. This was a roar that could harvest crops, turnips popping like corks, if the turnips knew what was best for them.

Three animals answered. More, his apprentice assumed, as those that congregated at his request would fall back after the first two emerged, aware that grabblers rarely armed themselves with more than that.

Closest was a turtle that lurched out of its pond in a fashion more befitting a murkodile. A heavy snapper with a hooked maw, like the bill of a petrified eagle, it lumbered forward dutifully, frilly wings of mottled elbow skin testifying to its ancient age. Turtles were common fare for grabbling, shells serving as excellent shields and hammers as well as protecting the turtle, allowing the grabbler to focus more on the fight. Snappers were the most advanced among them however, notorious for their ability to sever even grabbler limbs in single bites. They were pruning shears of the human body. A Rooth Tugt snapper answering his roar was as much a challenge as it was a sign of respect. Any cowards this jungle had to offer had already been eaten.

Next to arrive was a python out of the trees, green as an unripe banana, jeweled in a million scales most bulbous and prominent on its pink lips as vibrant as the poisonous parts of the jungle’s fruit. Sanded and polished yellow eyes snapped into a perfect black crack like split obsidian. As its length emerged from between the trees and weaved around boulders of ruin it declared itself more than long enough to constrict Beocroak to death. Its lack of limbs in no way meant it was a slouch. Assuming her master tamed it with his grasp, it would serve as more than a whip, a technique actually better suited to lizard and rodent tails.

A snake was all muscle, especially the arboreal ones, and it would be better utilized as an extension of his reach, able to wrap around targets and reel them in. Once, before her banishment, Jeremiad had witnessed another grabbler wind such a serpent around a wheelbarrow only to rapidly unwind it and send the heavy item spinning on its solitary wheel like a top, knocking down all those in its path.

And there was a third, no less respectable, just much much slower owing to its own style of limb-lacking. A gigantic snail of spiraling conical shell heard the roar, left behind its half-sucked fermenting fruit, and began its slimy march toward Rockrain. As all snails worth their salt knew, it was most likely to arrive too late to assist. Many of them answered regardless, as they would never get to move so swiftly as when they were swung by a grabbler.

Either his new shield or his emerald throng could make Beocroak a Jeremiad if his concentration broke or his demeanor faltered, deepening his apprentice’s fear of her own forthcoming recruit, but still not to the depths of producing no weapon at all, just a dismissive cough from out of a rustling bush. He looked her way as his weapons climbed the hill, nodding brusquely in complete faith.

She nodded back, but before she roared, for a reason she couldn’t place, she looked over her shoulder at the apes. It was impossible they hadn’t heard his roar, but none had roused, none but Conquerobber, who still sat against a shelf of ruin with one massive gorilla hand draped limply off his folded knee. His eyes were open, still pinpricks of starlight, except now they stared directly into hers with a new reshaping heat, as if a wordless god sharpened those stars on their cosmic wheel. The look told her to go on, to roar. If she couldn’t address Rooth Tugt how would she ever traverse it?

Jeremiad planted her feet. Took her own breath. Twisted it, turned it into a screw of air. This was her roar, not Beocroak’s. Sharper, higher. A spear with no target of infinite supply. She leaned forward.

“Daaht!” If she started tossing them like sweets to street urchins that would send a message of insecurity. One should be enough. They waited. Her face grew hot, and her neck stiff. Unable she was to bear the agonizing rotation that would have her look at her master’s disappointment; if she had she would’ve seen him staring into the dark green tangle just as intently.

Not far into the overlapping trees there was a patch of shed rotting bark and mushroom caps perpendicular to their own stalks. Nothing happened there. Moments before, the most concentrated spike of her roar had struck it. It didn’t get far past the surface, but the flat trundler preferred shallow burrows anyway, less like holes than like tucking themselves into the dirt. Something happened there. Bark curls and their perched mushrooms shifted, only a little, as the plated creature slowly slipped out, tested the stagnant air with its lazy antennae, and found the threaded shaft of shredded scents that was the path of Jeremiad’s roar.

When it emerged the grabblers could see the flexible tips of its antennae spiraling each other, climbing the shaft; it was unable to navigate any other way thanks to eyesight so poor that the squished compound lenses at the extreme left and right of its nodule head were more useful as patches of shell that didn’t itch as much as the rest.

She refused to let her shoulders drop in chagrin. Nothing had to answer. It chose her, and she would die before dishonoring it.

“Millipede,” Beocroak said, pursing his lips, his python and his snapping turtle settling by his side amidst the pillars and watching the bug approach in much the same fashion. Neither of them could identify its name, so it was likely unique to Rooth Tugt. “Armor for the whole arm.”

“Offense will be in leg flexibility,” she added to his assessment.

“A fine weapon my apprentice.”

“Thank you Master.” To expect any better was folly. It was a miracle word of her roar had traveled that far at all; of course it had not jumped from the exoskeletal to those clad in scale, feather, and fur. The journey just from amphibious pincepouncers to this barely aware deviant of the detritus was already a gift she should not look in the mouth, only reach.

It stopped at her feet and bent its front half up to her, leg pairs rhythmically saluting her in a rolling wave. Brown and rusty orange, its armor was only drab compared to the hazardous rainbow of toxic fruit peels piled nearby. With colors like that she doubted it had a drop of poison anywhere in it, to be expected, as it was their cousins the centipedes that tended to use such substances more, as they were hunters. These ones ate muck and liked it.

She decided to supply the intimidation herself, and that began with an assertive thrust, sheathing her arm as deep in the millipede’s gut as it would go, all the way on this creature, any more and her fingers would emerge to grip the other end. Its strong stomach proved a boon, as it wasn’t the least bit distressed, its armor plates creaking compliantly.

Jeremiad tested her plated gauntlet with swings and arm contractions. It bent well at the joint, a good sign for combat. She rapped its back. Thick enough to withstand wooden clubs perpetually. Stone for less than a battle. Metal only twice in the same spot. The legs, she reminded herself. Its durability mattered not if she struck first and struck true.

Adjusting her grip and arm orientation, she watched how the legs responded. Each pair was independent when not in the rhythm of locomotion. Locking her elbow could separate the orientation of those pairs on the shoulder from those on the forearm. A phantom punch sent the back half of the legs stiffly forward as jabbing spines; a roll of the shoulder curved the others backward, which could hook and rend on whirl-around to devastating effect.

Not long after, as Jeremiad shifted on impatient soles to adjust to the greater weight on one side, the shadow of the eye of Xeams came over them and settled. Its pupil defined the battlefield in cut fragments of scrutinized darkness, turning the columns into voids with chalky luminous silhouettes. Color seemed to leech out of Rockrain, replaced with the rising tide of a chanting crowd.

The apes did not bother to go to the lip and observe, finding their stretches more engaging. Both grabblers went to look, striding through a field strewn with the residents’ popping joints, like rain-softened boulders tipping over onto each other. At the edge they had climbed earlier in the day they peered over to make their own estimate.

Graychild had organized them well considering the state the hand’s splash had left them in. A solid sixty men and women of able age and body were there, separate from his crew, holding torches put together out of the driest debris they could find. All were armed with something, if not a sword a club, if not a club then a hot illuminating poker, and if not one of those a branch chopped until it was easy to brandish.

With the eye the attackers knew exactly what to expect: gorillas hurling rubble and plunging from the sky. Graychild had advised fire, always peckish for fur and feathers, and excellent for lighting their way under the eye’s shade and the day’s dwindling rays. Carrying these instruments prevented them from climbing up directly as the grabblers had, forcing them to break to both sides and scale the swelling land full of fissures like bread nearly out of the oven. Once they reached the Rockrain plateau they would reform and charge into the fortress. It was imperative to take as many out from the high ground as possible before that advantage was lost.

Wondering if they, as technical prisoners, had to serve as the first wave, the grabblers looked over their shoulders only to nearly miss the apes passing overhead, some thunderously flapping on their leathery wings, others leapfrogging between pillar peaks until they launched themselves over the swishing embers of the splitting force.

A handful remained in the fortress to select rocks, tossing them up to be caught midair. Flying rolls confused the throngs below as to their trajectory, and then they were released to become the first hits of the battle.

“Xeams!” Captain Graychild signaled. His lieutenant paused nearby, seeming to freeze like a frightened deer instead of acting, but his influence was over the eye. Its pupil shrank, targeted one of the soaring gorillas. Escaboulnté’s more economical use of the organ had failed to discover this ability, which was the cumulative effect of a god’s focus on a lower being. Something in the chosen ape’s spirit was disrupted, its flight robbed of power. With a yelp its wings collapsed and folded around its dropping body, though they served as yet another projectile when rolling down the craggy sides of Rockrain.

Only one could suffer this at a time, but plummeting with only armed Beerbetters to cushion the fall could empty the defenders’ ranks within minutes, so it was up to the grounded grabblers to assert themselves if they wished to honor the bargain that was only slightly coerced.

“There,” Beocroak pointed out, identifying Roddery and the gray clothing of his surrounding streamlined sailors, “the one with the thick sword. If he falls they all retreat. Beware the reaperweed, leave him to the apes.”

“Yes Master!”

Beocroak roared. When he turned he was greeted by his python and snapper, heads only slightly bowed. They were ready and worthy, as long as he was. Granite beak and spring-loaded jaw opened wide to welcome. The grabbler armed himself with one motion, guided them in tightening their fitting bites with the horse-flank twitches in his muscle. Allowing them to linger on the seasoning salt of his sweat was most unwise, so he put them to work by powering through the pillars and leaping into the fray. A swing of the python ordered it, for all three of their sakes, to wrap its tail around the support above that had just served as one half of the starting gate. Its secure grip swung the grabbler into the crowd, where his outstretched legs bowled over Beerbetters like empty bottles, the pokes of their weapons completely neutralized on one side by the shielding snapper.

Being under a rockfall halfway through a climb was hardly even a trap, Jeremiad decided, when compared to watching her master at work. Nothing paralyzed her more. That would be her greatest challenge, she decided again, not these stragglers of one petty social order overturned. If these people had any sense they would’ve scattered to less hectic lives like the more reasonable pincepouncers radiating out of their overturned bucket.

“Daaht!” The millipede sheath on her arm rattled, every pair of legs rasping their carapace blades against their neighbors with abrasiveness that could shred clothes and skin alike. Without the reach of the snake or the defense of the turtle, she would have to be much more selective with her entry point into the fray.

Getting in would be easy, taking out one, two, or three combatants trivial, but then they would start to understand what they were up against, surrounding her and closing in. The tail of their assault perhaps, where the last of them were thinned as they trickled in. She could strike there and rush around to the rock wall in retreat, using the millipede to climb it much faster than before and rejoin those in Rockrain.

“Jeremiad!” Conquerobber’s hollow-redwood voice called out from nearby. The vulture-winged leader was charging toward the ledge. His use of the name dampened her spirit. It was meant for the mouths of grabblers, a shame not to be suffered under those who were not blessed by the softer sister. But his use was not experimental, and that could mean only one thing. “Your escort!” He swung one arm in a swimming stroke, his frog-mouthed swamp bird then sailing over that shoulder and letting out a mournful loon’s wail. It tilted and circled in front of her, polished fixed eyes as resolute as that of Xeams overhead. It did not look powerful enough to lift and carry her, but its master would not have lent it if it couldn’t. Now she did not have to concern herself with a planned exit. Fight. Fight until the millipede must molt its scratches. Until she molted her name.

Beocroak had thrown himself a good distance over the ledge, owing to his python, so his apprentice too used the specific strength of her weapon with the slightest hop over the side, putting her into a slide down the incline which she slowed and directed with her dragging arm’s many millipede legs.

Someone with a torch turned to greet her, a metal tooth glinting in its light, but the battle-rage in the oncoming grabbler’s eyes reflected all the more. Defensively they aimed the fire at her on outstretched arm. She wished to demonstrate how foolish this was. All she had to do was get close enough to confirm the character of the flame, easily judged by its color at the base, informing her of its temperature.

Famous fire-walkers casually strolled across embers that grabblers might fill their tubs with. Skin tempered to armor was invaluable when one’s arm or leg might be buried in the chemically caustic guts of belly-dragging spit dragons, and they took care to armor it everywhere to accommodate the diverse bodies of the animal domain. Jeremiad could withstand the fire of the torches easily, for thirty seconds perhaps before it would leave anything more than an ashen smudge on her.

Pushing off from her slide she flung herself at the Beerbetter and grappled with him in a way perpetually unexpected among those who had never seen a woman of her tribe fight. The flying cradle of her body caught the torch between her thighs, pulled it along as her legs closed around the man’s head, surprising weight suddenly on his shoulders. She squeezed. The burning stick suffocated just as he did, the two pressed against each other, a nasty burn inflaming and peeling across the bridge of his nose.

She felt his body go limp in terrorizedd defeat, dismounting before he could collapse and take her with him. A terrible scar would be inevitable, and perhaps damage to his sight, but he would live if he was smart enough to slink back the way he came. Most of these people were not warriors, and death would be earned more through disrespect than the threat they posed individually. Jeremiad would spare them if they allowed it, just as the supposedly demonic apes of Rockrain had spared them.

“Raaah!” another Beerbetter challenged, turning against the tide to come at her, conveniently avoiding the circle of his fellows trying to suppress one grounded gorilla. She tested her millipede on him, ducking under the swing of his branch and thrusting. Vermin legs climbed his clothes, ripping through, tapping brass buttons and clasps that went flying like cogs from a smashed clock. Its climb up his chest left only minor abrasions beneath his shirt, its actual purpose to draw the grabbler right up to him.

Close enough to bite his nose, she stared, transfixing him. Then she jumped and spun, catching his head in the same vice of her thighs, which still had a few orange-hot flecks of wood stuck to them. Stung and stunned, she wrenched with her weight again and tossed him into a tumble down the rest of the incline.

He was still a mobile mess of shouts and grunts when she slid down after him, not to engage further, his existence was all but erased from her mind, but to seek a route that could get her to the head of the attack on that side, where the crew of the Thumbscale was. Their makeshift horde had already ascended significantly, so there was hardly anyone near the tree line, freeing her to rush to the front and climb with her millipede from there.

But the edge of Rooth Tugt was about to get even emptier. The taciturn eye of a god overhead had distracted from all the other eyes: searing specks of pure avaricious light bobbing up and down in the black under the trees as if on the waves of a collaborating sea. This most hostile jungle, hungriest above the Half-Bite, had been grown in trickery, in voracious manipulation, and the chasm of that cosmic appetite infected the plants so that they ate the animals. It infected the animals so that they could overcome the plants and eat anything else.

A maw more gums than fur and more saber teeth than gums split and bent two upsettingly large trees. It swallowed the man she had tossed down the hill, silenced him in an instant. Then it was gone, the greenery stilling so quickly that it must have been grabbed from behind. Nobody was looking down, and only Jeremiad noticed. That was not a thing that could be grabbled, and not just because of its size.

Her plan changed. Pursefrown cried again, somewhere behind her, not far. Jeremiad crouched, held her millipede over her face so as not to look at the spot where the beast had only partially emerged, just in case it would see her gaze as a challenge. The swamp bird swooped in, taking her recoiled stance as an invitation to extract her. Its deft talons closed around her shoulders and lifted her with preternatural ease. Perhaps everything born in Rooth Tugt was at least that much stronger than expected. She wondered if the eggshell it had broken free of was made of diamond.

Her targets were briefly under her, but she elected not to drop, instead tapping Pursefrown’s leg when she was back over Rockrain. The assault had already progressed far, the eye downing any gorillas that targeted them, so she would meet them at the crumbled fortress gates.

Beocroak wasn’t quite finished with his attempt. The reaperweed’s observed pensive positioning confirmed he was the one using the eye, and that its suppression of the aerial apes prevented his participation in the fight. Graychild would be vulnerable.

The Beerbetters would have given Beocroak a wide berth at this point, the injuries he’d dealt already in double digits, but there was no width to occupy as the uneven rising trail pinched closer to the plateau. So instead they cowered and let him shove through until he reached the Thumbscale barrier, where every fighter had at least the courage to face him and at least a sword to do it with.

His python was weaker in the face of edged weapons, his snapper stronger. Beocroak swiveled his shoulders to put the massive turtle out front as a wall, tucking the green snake behind his back where its muscular slithering could propel him at nonsensical speed. Even the turtle contributed to the momentum, the webbed and clawed paws on its right side shooting out and scooping at the uneven ground in rhythm with the grabbler’s charge. Extended blades clipped shell and were forced back, crushed against wrist until dropped. A sailor or two dropped as well, scratched by turtle, stomped by grabbler, and slapped commensurate with the number of crests and troughs in the undulations of an enthusiastic python.

But the inner circle had an inner circle. Graychild’s best fighters, those fully human anyhow, were immediately identifiable by their triangular formation crystallizing between their captain and the infiltrating grabbler. There was a tall woman with a sloping gargoyle face and black eyes called Lettemon. Between her and an upright sneering rat called Raggachokio was the sleight-of-hand swordsman Badcards.

Three against three, as the Thumbscale crew had learned enough from the fight in Beerbet and the legends Roddery had pulled out of the locals on their long muddy road to not underestimate a grabbler. Everything they armed themselves with was another opponent. They also knew they had to meet him, not simply wait for his attempt to bowl them over, so they pressed forward with swords and daggers.

At the clash the smallest sailor, Raggachokio, clambered up the turtle shell and tried to bury his dagger in its soft openings. Lettemon swung mightily on his snake side, as if her sword was an ax and the grabbler a tree. Badcards circled around the occupied snapper and tried to slice the head off the snake, which would’ve taken Beocroak’s hand with it.

Beocroak could not fight three duels at once, but he had won many battles, and in that construction lay the wisdom that victors must sweep, must select the actions that most mimic a natural disaster in order to clear their surroundings. First came the evasion, achieved by disarming himself.

It was nothing more than a step backward and a release of his grip. The snake slipped off and fell to the ground, Badcards’s nimble sword slicing the air between hand and dropping serpent. The snapper was left standing on its side, the slight twist of Beocroak’s extraction turning it enough for Raggachokio’s blade to catch on the shell’s fluted edge. Lettemon’s swing missed the grabbler and struck the invulnerable plastron with just enough force to rock the snapper forth and back, dropping it onto its flat belly.

Roddery’s guards could have recovered faster in the physical sense, but their dumbfounded gawping at the air and inert material they’d struck stalled it. Now the disaster: landslide. Beocroak kicked the edge of the snapper’s shell. The whole animal slid forward and smashed a retreating Raggachokio’s knees, instantly turning the flesh to bruise and strips of bone to splinters. He toppled, screaming.

The shell hadn’t traveled far and was still within Beocroak’s reach. Bending down and grabbing its edge with both hands, ducking under another swing from Lettemon in the process, the grabbler then swung in his own fashion. He had not only the strength to lift the turtle off the ground completely, but also to emulate the falling boulders that inspired the technique. Once he became a spinning wall of scutes there was little any of them could do to stop him. Lettemon had to fall back. Badcards was bitten by a flashing turtle head he couldn’t even make out, losing the skin off his elbow, which bled profusely.

This guided landslide might have made it to Graychild, if the eye of Xeams didn’t divert its focus from the gorillas to the grabbler. Intense nausea overcame Beocroak and took the bottom out from under his constitution, subjecting him to vertigo he could normally resist. He had to abort the spinning to steady himself; as he slowed he saw the Thumbscale crew moving in. Even without the eye’s suppressing rays he doubted he could take them all on.

Escape was prudent. A roar too low to hear rallied his weapons back to him. His hand outstretched behind his back was swallowed by the python as it spiraled up to his shoulder. The snapper steadied itself on its feet and bit his other side enough to secure. The sensation of free-fall caused by the eye would be less disorienting if his feet were actually off the ground, so Beocroak swung the snake as high as he could, where its tail wrapped around one of Rockrain’s outer supports tighter than any knot.

On his gut-grabbing command its muscles contracted and pulled him into the air along with the snapper, successfully reeling them back to the high ground. He looked about. The rear of the ruin, where the land sloped down. Beerbetters would be breaking around both sides any moment now, fusing into a single stream that might swarm the gorilla nest and leave them nowhere to go. The druid did not let them stray far from their post, but they were almost certainly permitted to die there.

Some of the apes were already perched high in the masonry where corners of roof remained, shielding them from the eye and giving them vantage to drop on the stream once it passed under. It was their equivalent of reforming a defensive line. The grabblers should offer theirs as well, an opinion shared by Jeremiad as she clapped her millipede onto his shoulder, strong and intimate as any embrace, more so because an animal was wielded between them. Together they moved toward the downhill opening, old stone steps overtaken by rainy mud a thousand times until it dried over them as a tattered cloak of soil.

Captain Graychild took the first step up. Technically that meant he still led the charge, very clever considering that the Beerbetters, seeing his courage, immediately overtook his slowing cluster of mariners and clambered up the steps trailing red streaks from torches now shorter and more frustrated.

Only Beocroak had the reach to discourage them before they crossed the threshold of the fortress, which is to say only the python did. Rolling his entire shoulder, the grabbler cast his serpent down the steps in a green wave, the surging Beerbetters unable to disperse without throwing themselves down the steep sides they’d just wrapped around. One of them was caught; the python coiled around her many times, fast as any spider cocooning its prey.

Rather than constrict her on the spot, he pulled the snake back to him and directed it, with a scaly nudge against the Beerbetter’s neck, to squeeze there. Such animals preferred to kill slowly, to savor hunts that only happened every few months at their most frequent, but this was battle, so it begrudgingly gave up on enjoying her wheezes and promptly broke her neck. Thus turned into a projectile, Beocroak had her unraveled and bowled her down the steps on her side, knocking over several assailants who were then trampled themselves.

Beocroak felt a soft slimy press on his ankle and looked down to see that his reinforcements had arrived. The snail. It wasn’t too late. Briefly relieving himself of the turtle’s snap, he obliged the brave slurper by grabbing the conical tip of its shell, flipping it in the air and burying his hand in its flexible mouth. Together man and snail propelled, him throwing and it spitting, turning it into a javelin having the time of its life. The thrill seeker landed in the chest of a hand seeker, dropping them dead with an upside down snail planted in them like a flag, wet edge flapping resolutely.

It did little to dissuade the hot thirsty mass of them, strung out on exertion, yanked forward and up by the sight of a fortress door torn down long before their own arrival. Both grabblers steadied their stances and braced for the thrashing horde.

A roar echoed out over the hill, the jungle, and in the ears of the behemoths and leviathans lurking throughout Rooth Tugt or slumbering in mimicry of its landmarks. A grabbler roar. Not of Beocroak. Not of Jeremiad.

The bird Pursefrown cried in response, streaking above the attackers, suddenly more luminous in the night sky owing to the algae in its feathers that glowed in darkness. An airborne Conquerobber flew to meet his pet from the other direction. At great speed the two were combined. Turning in the air together as if in dance, Conquerobber’s arm was lost in the glove of Pursefrown’s mouth. The bird’s wings extended to their fullest, as did its legs, accompanied by a sound of the joints locking, like a gate latch wrapped in meat and hide. The sharp rake this formed would not bend under the pressure of any ordinary man.

As they had suspected. Conquerobber was once from Lazuli Pawlm; he had known the blessings of Gaw Digi-Tally. This was why he was afforded the less demonic wings and the leadership of the other apes, further confirmed by their baying in support of their champion and the slapping of their perches.

His glory swooped down toward the battle, his fellow grabblers’ awe already dampened by extending understanding. Conquerobber’s body was a testament to his failure to defeat the jungle. It had exacted the price of his survival as his humanity. What he had sought they now sought. The gorilla had armed himself with Pursefrown not just to unleash his full strength, but to give Beocroak and Jeremiad their final warning. If they could not fight better than he was about to, they would fare no better than him.

And he fought with the best Gaw had ever birthed from her palm. His swamp bird was too wide of bill for a normal grabbler’s arm, with his gorilla dimensions fitting much more comfortably. Perhaps he was the only one to ever wield that animal, at least as an adult. Its wings were almost as strong as his own, oriented as his arm saw fit, allowing them to change direction mid-swoop with the precision of a pivoting antelope springing off a murkodile’s maw. Whomever he chose as his victim would not know until they were in his grip or raked by Pursefrown.

Two of them learned they were chosen simultaneously. One Beerbetter suffered the gorilla’s feet clamping onto their shoulders while the other’s neck was caught between the bird’s talons. Both were lifted into the air, extricated so quickly that no one could even throw anything into Conquerobber’s path. The gorilla had already sealed their fates with five air-breaking wing beats that achieved lethal height.

The luckier of them was merely dropped, Conquerobber daring the Beerbetters to save him with a catch, a dare they did not take him up on. The other was subjected to a spin propelled by four wings that tore the spit from their mouth and the blood from their unbroken fingertips like leaky pen nibs. Streaking red like the torches, but far wetter, the already-unconscious Beerbetter was thrown far out over the canopy, where a cousin of Beocroak’s python emerged in a geyser strike and caught them.

Finally the character of the crowd’s din changed from anger to fear. Their momentum remained the same, as they now sought the limited shelter of the crumbling roof sections to put any barrier between Conquerobber and themselves. They did not bother to look and see that the grabbling gorilla was no longer targeting them. Now he went for the eye.

His climb should have been halted by the eye’s misuse of Hexaclete’s divine attention. It did work on him just as it did his subordinates and Beocroak, but his weapon had a mind of its own and wings powered by it. When the eye had paralyzed the ape Pursefrown flew. When it shifted to the bird the ape renewed his efforts. They would not be stopped until the bird’s claws were raked across the eye of Xeams like the final tally gouged in a prison wall.

That left the reaperweed no choice but to end its manifestation, for the first time since they had set out from the city. He lifted his eye patch and it was gone like a reflection rolled into a ripple, the air left behind vacuous and chilled as Conquerobber sailed through it. Raven wings wide, he rode its invisible curling edge, luxuriating in a new sensation, of which he now had so few in life.

The vanishing of the artificial moon and its reflected light darkened the sky to a black like stained cotton, misty jungle clouds suppressing the stars. It shifted perspective on the battle lower and gave the grabblers a look at their actual predicament.

They, along with the Beerbetters, had been bamboozled. Glinting in the distance, at the tail of Rockrain worming into wicked weeds, were the fine steel weapons salvaged from the sinking of the Thumbscale. As soon as they had been seen ascending toward the fortress, Graychild’s crew had slowed to a crawl so their recruits would overtake them, and once they had they quietly retreated toward the jungle, on the line toward the clearing that held the hoard, as directed by Xeams.

Those wishing to plunder it and exact revenge upon Beocroak were now in the lead, having correctly assessed the Beerbetters as worthless under the canopy. What value they had as meaty shields would quickly be expended and overridden by the noise they would make through a place so full of hungry dozing monsters. Yes, better to spend them on distracting the demon apes that blocked the way.

Jeremiad was about to look to her master, certain that the plan would be a charge in order to break straight through and pursue the Half-Biters. There was a better plan however, hatched by the gorillas, and no doubt ordered by Conquerobber should such a situation arise. Both Beocroak and Jeremiad were suddenly plucked from Rockrain’s entrance by gripping feet on their shoulders. The elder grabbler let slip his snapper, but kept his snake, certain he would need it.

The two apes carried them over the Beerbetters while the rest continued to fend them off. It was unwise to look back and see how they fared, dangerous as the path ahead was, especially as it ceased to be a path at all once the vegetation was too dense to see Graychild and his remaining crew. Faith told them Conquerobber would finish gliding along the calming divine presence of the vanished eye and return to hold down his fort. His efforts were to give them a chance to reach what he could not, to break what he now suffered, in the name of all grabblers.

When their winged escorts reached the edge of the territory the druid had allotted, they warned their passengers to prepare. Beocroak threw out his python across the gap, its coils taking Jeremiad with only the strength needed to keep them tethered to each other. Thrown. The last heat of the battle was washed away by streaking night air. Ahead of Graychild. Aimed straight at the lake of lights. Beocroak pulled Jeremiad closer, held her in his free arm while he cast the snake behind them to create drag in the upper layers of the canopy.

They leveled out, dropped into a barrage of leaves, rapids of foliage. Choosing instinctively, the serpent bounced here, pulled and snapped a branch there, expertly slowing them until it caught a limb wide enough to support them all. Let down gently, Beocroak’s arm slipped out of the snake’s gullet. It was gone with less than a hiss, swallowed into the tree like reclaimed drool. Jeremiad did the same, releasing her grip so the millipede would crawl off her and tuck itself back into the detritus once more.

Both understood the resulting stillness was deceptive. Many things were aware of their presence, and they walked a tightrope of invisible judgment. Was it worth a pounce? Does a man that large and dense take two stings to fell? There is no hunger, but is there the desire to hunt?

Beocroak and Jeremiad shifted into a quiet run, with him leading. In the wake of his powerful aura she was safest, so as with the jellyfish storm she stepped where he stepped, ducked where he ducked, rolled under this branch and leapt over that moldering log. The only light was ghostly green fireflies, which they gently grabbled by providing their arms as perches under their flight paths.

They became four forearms in the drooping cluttered black, spotted green mantles of jetting squid in a sea of their own ink. Under their flight was only the slightest squelch of mud or crinkle of shed bark.

By Beocroak’s estimate there was still half a day’s journey ahead of them, and it would not make sense to arrive bereft of rest or stamina, so at some point they would each take a brief shift of sleep while the other stayed awake to guard. But for now they wished only to widen their lead on the Thumbscale, which couldn’t have had the wind on her side with so much jungle in the way.

Graychild would not be able to assess the gap anymore either. Thanks to the trees the eye was useless. Whenever a shaft of clearing was in their path the grabblers checked the sky and found it remained empty of the disembodied tool’s overwhelming presence. But they also did not hear anything that indicated the party was under attack by Rooth Tugt. No tail swipes toppling rotten trees. No screams suddenly muffled by throat skin. Had it already been decided that they would both reach the lake? Did the druid know of their presence, and did they count on the two sets of invaders to politely neutralize each other so the Many-Spotted Hoard could get back to its business of slowly sinking to metamorphose into buried treasure?

None of these questions had been answered after several hours of the pitch black obstacle course. Without any cue she could discern, Beocroak’s green arms stopped ahead of Jeremiad and whispered that they should ascend into the trees for their final sleep before the quest was complete.

The trees of Rooth Tugt were none too welcoming. Every limb was twisted and tense, swirls of bark pockmarked like seed-dusted bread gone too dark. Leaves twice the size of their heads ended in dripping scorpion barb curls. Lemurs too agile to be caught near their fireflies snarled behind the veil of darkness and leapt away belly-first.

No crook was sufficiently stable to rest their backs, so they straddled the highest bough strong enough to support them and turned to face each other, locking arms. Fireflies crawled along their fingers in orderly lanes, exchanging members until many mating pairs formed, glowing ever brighter in an instinctive hope that fertilizing their eggs upon the grabblers would be the same as mortals receiving a Goodly blessing.

The locked arms served only to stabilize them. Now one could sleep. Beocroak told her to take the first watch by closing his eyes. She did not protest. Questions swimming in her mind were liquid themselves, only half-formed, and if they cohered enough to words she would ask them only when it cost her own rest, not his.

As in the basin, her master seemed open to attack from the demon of sleep. If one violent twitch could be wrested from him they both might pitch over and fall to their deaths. After a few minutes she noted no change in the pulse she felt in his wrist, not even a flutter, so it seemed the demon once again had better prey to torment. Or, in their sight beyond the conscious world, something had become inevitable. The grabblers were in the aura of a fate too gravid to be tipped by droplets of dream-dabbling.

Her attention turned to the jungle itself. It contained little potential, with her down an arm and its fare too large and too strong to trust. Any lessons she drew from observation would be just for survival, should she ever pass through again. It made sense though, to watch on watch, and to listen.

Animal song was infrequent, nothing wishing to reveal its position to anything else. What she did hear she could not place, not even as bug, bird, or frog. Most informative was actually her sense of taste, the caress of the treetop mist encouraging her tongue to roll, to form and test a pool of it in her mouth.

Something of ice to it. Not an actual chill. She recalled water’s unique ability to expand as it froze, where most other things shrank. There was something expansive in the mist, bubbles that hadn’t been blown, icicles winter had not yet drooled. Was this mist off the lake of lights, impregnated with the magics of the nearby hoard? Was it fouled like the basin, not with salt but with curses that would seep into your flesh over time?

Should the lake actually contain lights, that seemed a reasonable enough warning not to quench one’s thirst there. Mentally she mapped what she couldn’t know, iterating on the horde’s shape and size, its placement in respect to the lake, whether or not there would be stepping stones across the water.

Successfully breaking her master’s curse would not get them entirely out of danger. Graychild could catch up before they departed, turning the lake into an arena, where she would have nothing to grabble. The luck of her millipede was significantly due to their presence at Rooth Tugt’s edge. Nothing in the middle would bow to her authority, even with her remaining arm performing admirably. Once she was in the mouth of a thing with eyes it would see she had nothing left to defend herself with, and it would bite.

Fighting hand to hand was not difficult. She could take any man twice her size who was not out of Pawlm. The problem came in numbers, of men and of blades. She could best any two at once who were not Xeams or the captain, and the addition of one more foe would only be doable if she had a full set of limbs.

How desperate was Beocroak, to drive them into this corner with enemies, not animals, nipping at their heels? Perhaps he thought that, once free of the curse, he alone had the strength to stave them off. She believed that, suddenly, so much so she had to double check. His face in the pale green firefly glow was oddly smooth, eyes almost grown shut, forehead creases and cheekbones and beard curls perfect for rain to ramp down and twirl up in.

It made her believe something else. She was looking at a god. Grabblers would be a third category, not Goodly or Ghastly. Grandly. Those who can move like the rocks do. Those who wield life rather than enmesh in its cloth. And if he was, there was a word for it. It was the word to which her many questions adhered, which pushed the mist off her tongue and sat there, fat and insistent, until Beocroak’s eyes opened. He would expect her to close hers, no need for words. No need, but a desire that made her skeleton feel as if it was made of metal, as if her joints could not be moved until she had an answer. Who she followed, who they really were, was as much her business as the color of her own blood.

“Master,” she whispered, “are you a tallyweed?” She also knew there was no worse question to ask him. It was the central question in his prolonged, across the veil of death, duel with Dignidog, who had already answered the question for himself with a yes. A yes he had died defending. A yes his ghost tried to claw out of Beocroak. In her master’s retelling he deliberately did not provide his answer, and that satisfied her, in those days where no one would take her as anything but a sideshow pit fighter. Now, on the cusp of Grandliness, it did not satisfy.

“What is a tallyweed to you?” he asked back, once it was clear his stony expression would not shame her into her shift of sleep.

“A person created by the gray Gaw Digi-Tally, as opposed to one like myself, who was merely adopted.”

“Merely? Is that how you think of my adoption of you?”

“I think the world of you… and the world is the material of Gaw’s outstretched hand from which flow the blessed waters of-“

“Jeremiad, think on tiptoe when you speak of this to me. What is a tallyweed to you?”

“A leader.”

“Am I your leader, or am I your guide? Your friend? Your father?”

“You are-“

“If I am your leader then we are nothing. You would be my soldier, my pawn, a means to an end. Without me you can do nothing, because there is no one to lead you to water. If I threw myself out of this tree right now and broke my neck, would that doom you? Or would you go on?”

“I would go on.”

“Then I am not your leader, thank the Goodly. A grabbler does not lead an animal. We make them weapons. We do not pretend that we will not overrule them when we choose. Animals we keep around are friends. Even Dignidog knew that, as loyal to his garbage-eater as he was to his awful scheme that would chain a man to a thousand others and have them all tugging.”

“You are not my leader, Master Beocroak. But… I would follow you.”

“Only to the lake of lights my apprentice. Then you cannot follow. If we should leave it, it will be side by side. No more Jeremiad. I know it is not our way to ever shed the brand of Jeremiad, but Gaw did not write any rules. She only leaves tally marks in the ground with stone fingers, and you are one of those just as much as anyone else who has lived in the concern of the softer sister.

When you leave the lake you will go by a new name. You must choose it. No one can lead you to it. Beware the man who has words for what you are when you already feel whole.”

She shed a tear. It wasn’t to blubber, just to keep her eyes from being waterlogged while they rested. Plunging into sleep far faster than expected, she found a bountiful overgrown orchard of name-growing trees. Trying them on kept her asleep, until warm permeating daylight sent away the fireflies to lay their eggs in tight clusters under leaves. The brush of their wings brought her back.

A moment later she dropped out of the tree, before Beocroak, and started running toward the lake of lights.

Little difference between the cloying night of Rooth Tugt and its day was perceived by the racing grabblers. It was no neutrality of constant mist, though it was a constant. The day had just been eaten by the night. A vile creature had stolen those lands with nefarious seeds, and the shade had hidden the crime. What daylight did come through was sensed by the denizens much more than the visitors.

Eerie quiet made their measured but labored breaths all the louder; they could hear their toes cracking more frequently than twigs underfoot. Occasionally a leaf big enough to use as a mask would fall, not because it changed color, but because it had grown too thick.

As had the mist. Fog was a better word for it now, shrubs and trees barely rising out of it like treetops after an apocalyptic flood. The pair had to slow down, as every step needed precaution.

It was accompanied by rainfall. Having started a minute earlier, the patter of it only reached the grabblers once it had worked its way zigzagging from leaf ramp to leaf ramp through every layer. They hoped it would do something to clear the fog, perhaps leave streaks in it at this density like it would on window glass. Alas, the two were partners, exacerbating each other until the grabblers had to blink away rain and swipe away fog with their hands.

The ground became swallowing mud, enough that they transitioned to just logs and stones wherever possible. Those fallen leaves took on a rotten pallor as soon as they were moist and suctioned to their bare feet with a tenacity matching the jellyfish that, in their only stroke of luck, were not the precipitate this time around.

Jeremiad kept on, almost frenzied, yet still able to discern the sudden absence of one sound amongst the million raindrops. Beocroak had stopped. Without question she halted her momentum and immediately leapt backward, recalling her last few positions with no need to look over her shoulder. He was behind her somewhere to warn her if need be, and if something had gotten him already there was no chance of her taking it on forward or backward.

Beocroak caught her shoulders, setting her down beside him so they could go back to back once more.

“Listen,” he warned. Her only concern had been her slapping footfalls and his, so now she opened up her ears to other possibilities, took a deep breath and held it so exhalation wouldn’t interfere with identification. Nothing at first. Bubbles? Just bubbles in the mud created by the rainfall. That niggled. There were two kinds of bubble, and a third burst in her mind as she realized one of them was unmistakably gurgling inside an animal throat: a growl of extremely low tempo.

It was ahead, moving left around them in a wide circle. Then it ceased. Resumed in front of Beocroak. It could fly then. She hoped it could fly, as a leap like that would mean something far worse. Flying things almost always had hollow breakable bones. Pouncing ones usually got to yours first.

“I’ve heard tell,” Beocroak said slowly, deliberately matching the pace of the growl, “of something that might live in Rooth Tugt.” The growl faded away, faded in on Jeremiad’s side.

“Enlighten me Master.”

“Ordinary hunting won’t do where even the hummingbirds are hunters. A big cat cannot stalk quietly enough; they will be found out. But… some say there is the rain leopard. It steals seed clouds out of migrating mist and raises them as its own. Then they hunt together, the cloud obscuring everything and making noise with rain so the leopard can approach from any direction.”

“Do you believe in such a thing Master?”

“I believe if there was such an animal it would have the most sensitive hearing in the world, to find prey in the driving rain. Perhaps if we both roar together, as loud as we can, we could-“

Krak!

A deafening slam in the sky. It was as if lightning and thunder had a miscommunication, blundering into each other when they meant to take their turns. As fortified in all her senses as any grabbler twice her age, Jeremiad still winced and crumpled under the sound’s intensity, aware that one of the trickles down each of her ears was too warm to be rain. Beocroak steadied her.

“Can you hear me?” she almost heard him say.

“What was that?”

“Thunder I think. If there was a leopard it drove it away.” He held out his hand, allowing her to observe the lifting rain mostly in the stilling of the vegetation. “We’re close now.” She spared him further questions, testifying to her fitness by taking the same steps she’d already taken twice before.

Continued in the Finale