2
Word of Mouth
The northern reaches of the Night Jungle were sparse and quiet. Towering trees choked with vines and moss stood like the pillars of some long-forgotten temple. Half-bare, the drooping branches held wilted, browning leaves. Any color left in the jungle was quickly bleeding away. Dead leaves and rotting detritus crunched beneath Odessa’s soft-soled step. The high-pitched, undulating whine of cicadas was distant and muted by the pervasive stillness leaching deep into the jungle like a deafening pall upon the land.
A twinge of pain ran up Odessa’s arm. Beneath the wrapping of rune-covered hemp fabric and the scarred flesh, a restless aching in the marrow of her bones radiated from her right arm to her shoulder. She hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before due to that incessant ache and the occasional sharp jolt of pain. Now as she crept through waist-high ferns and beneath curtains of wilting palm fronds, lack of sleep and anemia were beginning to take their toll. Lightheadedness dulled her senses. Her feet were leaden and she could barely lift them enough to keep from shuffling through the undergrowth like a pig rooting for tubers. Despite her concentration, her leaden feet made enough noise to announce her presence to any quarry she hoped to find unawares.
Her chills had returned as well as the gnawing hunger that food could not sate. That hunger urged her forward in the jungle, bow in hand. A hunger deep within herself that threatened to swallow her whole if she did nothing to satiate it.
Yakun had taught her many things. How to control the flames of stolen godsblood and how to mask her unholy presence with runes. But for the hunger, there was only one recourse: to feed it.
In the year that she had lived in Yakun’s grove, so much had changed. She had grown strong. Her arms and legs were corded with thick muscle. The gentle curves of her youthful face had become sharp, severe edges. She had become a woman through and through. Any vestiges of youth that had remained in her were dead. She felt as if she had been reduced to nothing but sharp edges and ever-worsening hunger.
No matter how much she hunted or how many monkeys and rodents she killed, the hunger was never truly sated. It could be lessened. The hunger pangs could be dulled. But the hollowness within her continued to yawn wider.
She was padding down an old, overgrown game trail when she heard the murmuring. Barely perceptible above the rustle of dry leaves and the crunch of her own footsteps and the whistle of her own labored breathing.
She stopped, frozen with a breath held trapped in her lungs. For the last year, the only voices she had heard other than her own were those of Yakun and Poko, although she heard Poko’s more often than any other. But her searching ears heard the murmurings of a stranger’s tongue. It was much too faint to make out the words but there was no mistaking the sound of a strange voice in the jungle.
No one came this far into the jungle east of Noyo. There was little to hunt as Odessa knew all too well. There was no good reason for someone to journey this far into the dying part of the jungle.
Immediately, she thought of the hunters she had killed. The more time that had passed, the more guilt had found its way into her heart. Doubt played tricks with her mind the more she ruminated over the blurred events that grew more vague and indistinct with time. Maybe Noyo’s come to get me. Come to bring the cursed girl to justice.
To the north, the babbling continued. A continuous stream of noise like an incessant hum ringing in her ears, just loud enough to command her attention.
She knew she should return to the grove and tell Yakun but the constancy of the murmuring struck her as odd. Before she could fully collect her thoughts, her feet were moving and she was slinking through the undergrowth toward the gibbering voice. Curiosity bid her forward while the hunger inside her gaped wider.
The nearer she got, the clearer the voice became. A foreign voice, husky and warbling. Odessa kept an arrow nocked as she approached. As the voice grew louder, her fear of being discovered by Noyo troops was displaced by a nagging uneasiness. She came upon a small, shallow stream. Babbling along with the stream’s gentle music, the voice was clearer now. A few paces from the stream’s banks, she followed its winding course downstream toward the voice.
“Withering. Withering. Everything withering,” the voice said, syllables rising and falling like waves lapping upon dry, cracked earth. “Land’s poison. Water’s poison. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere and there isn’t naught to do about it. Nah, naught to do at all.”
Through the tangle of vines and stunted rushes, Odessa could make out a figure downstream. A hunched-over form standing in the stream, talking to itself. She slowed and hunkered down behind a dead kapok tree.
A splash as the stooping figure moved a few paces upstream. Odessa could see through a curtain of vines a long, shaggy-haired neck and a pair of gangly arms hanging in the water. Straggly hair hung from its thin frame, what was once white now a grimy yellowed brown. The arms parted the blanket of water hyacinth and sword plants that choked the stream’s surface.
The neck bent toward the water’s surface and the babbling paused, replaced by a wet slurping. “Good water,” the figure said, water dripping from the hair along its neck. “Clean water. Nothing like in Toth, no. Drank puddle water brown as dirt, I did. Poison water. Stomach twisted and turned for days. But kept me alive, it did. Aliver than the rest, I am.”
Odessa crept out from behind the kapok, bow loose in her grip as she peered through the vines. She had never seen a creature such as this. Hunched as it was, it stood at least a head taller than she. It stood on two bony legs like those of a llama or a goat. Long hanks of thin, scraggly hair hung from its body, obscuring its emaciated figure. Its head was turned away from her now as it dug water hyacinth bulbs from the streambed but from its head she could see two curled horns. It reminded her of the bruka but at the same time, it was different. More bestial. Yet it spoke so clearly. She reaffirmed her grip on the bow, all the same.
“Must gather my strength,” the half-starved creature said, chewing on a spongy hyacinth bulb. “That’s how I stay alive, yes. Don’t linger long. Rest and run. Rest and run.” The creature turned its head and Odessa caught sight of its head. Its head was mostly bald save for a scraggly beard of filthy brown that hung dripping along the bottom of its chin. Its face was a nearly human face but the proportions were slightly askew. The nose flatter. The eyes farther apart. And the skin was dark and leathery like a bat’s wing. Waxy leaves hung from its lips as it chewed. Vacuous eyes drifted along the stream’s banks. Odessa shrunk away from the wide, bloodshot eyes. Eyes filled with nothing but fear and desperation.
The creature was silent. Only the stream’s gentle babbling remained. Odessa froze behind the curtain of vines, bowstring taut in her fingers.
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“Who’s there?” the creature said, voice shaky and pitiful like a scared old man on the verge of tears. She could almost feel its panicked gaze through the vines. A few moments passed in silence, the both of them frozen.
I should kill it. I need to kill it, she told herself. Hunger pangs dug deep into her side. Her heart pounded and her blood ran hot. Her thumb and forefinger throbbed where the arrow sat pinched between them. Her arm itched to draw the bowstring back and let the arrow fly. The hollowness in her chest yearned for blood. But the creature’s face was so pitifully human. The fear in its watery, gunk-rimmed eyes. She thought of the wide, panicked eyes of the hunter as he wheezed his last breath through a crushed trachea.
Her fingers loosened and she let the bowstring relax.
“Hello?” she called out, peeking out from behind the vines. Her bow, the arrow still nocked, she held low behind a waist-high cycad. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The creature only stared back at her, bony body half-crouched and poised for escape.
Odessa’s fingers itched and ached but despite their protests, she unnocked the arrow and set bow and arrow down against the large drooping leaves of the cycad. She raised her hands so the creature could see them, empty and harmless. “I’m not going to do anything.” A slow, careful step forward, parting the vines hanging from the kapok’s branches. The creature’s muscles twitched at her approach but it did not run. It only stared, wide eyes darting around. “Are you well?”
Another step and she was through the curtain of vines and on the gentle slope of the stream bank. Mud sucked at her sandaled feet. She kept her hands raised at her shoulders.
The creature took a hurried step back. Water splashed around its bony shins.
“Wait!” Odessa said, making the creature flinch with the suddenness of her shout. The creature's body was tense and ready to run at a moment’s notice. She took a half-step back. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. I just want to help. You’re not well.”
“Weller than most,” the creature murmured. “Weller than most, I am.” From the stream’s edge, Odessa could see its nose, choked with dried snot. Beneath its filthy, matted hair was raw skin and oozing lesions.
“Are you sick?” Odessa took a half-step forward.
“No. Not sick.” The creature looked at her with an animal’s frightened wariness. “Poisoned. But I get better. Slowly I get better.”
“Poison?” Odessa asked.
“Yes, yes, poison,” the creature said. “Poison in the air. A great cloud of it rolling over the land. Killed all but me, it did. I live when others died.”
The curiosity that had drawn her from the cover of the vine-draped kapok tree came to a head. Yakun would want to know about this. News from outside the grove was hard to come by, carried only by the rare guest that came in need of healing or spellcraft. Information was vital. If the information was true, that was. The wide-eyed creature babbling to itself in godsforsaken jungle certainly had a crazed, half-mad look about it. “You said Toth, didn’t you?” Odessa’s sense of geography was vague and muddled but she knew the city, a floating city built over a bay far on the northern reaches of the Slateseer Sea. “You’re from Toth?” she asked. “That’s awfully far away, no?”
“Yes, Toth. Far. Very far. I’ve run for days and days, trying to run from the poison. Rolling over the land. But the wind carries it toward the rising sun. So I run here. Far, far away from where Toth used to be.”
“Used to be?” Odessa took a step forward, hands dropping a bit. “What do you mean used to be?”
“Toth is no more. Toth is gone. All gone. Dragged into the sea. I watched it happen from the hills. Saw it with my own eyes.”
“How can it be gone? Toth is supposed to be a massive city on islands and stilts. It can’t just be dragged into the sea like that.”
“But it was.” The creature fixed its gaze upon her, its wariness seemingly abated. “First came a wave. A huge wave over that wall. Then the wave grew like a mountain starting to come out of the water. The wall came crashing down and then came the tentacles. Bursting out the water. Thick as tree trunks. They smashed through boats and buildings and wrapped around the trees that held the buildings up and soon the whole city was dragged into the water.”
“Isn’t the bay and city and everything the Stone Queen’s? How did she allow something like that to happen?”
“The Stone Queen is dead. Poison killed her most of the way. Poison had been coming from over the sea for days before the city fell. Gray fog blown in from the bay. It had only just started reaching our hills when the city fell. On that day, Togatha was already so weak she barely could put up a fight.”
Uneasiness crept up the nape of Odessa’s neck. Whatever could kill Togatha, the Stone Queen of Toth, was a monster of inconceivable strength. It must be another god. A god from a faraway land or something. But the thing that had sent a shiver down her spine had been the creature’s mention of gray clouds. That has to be the Gray itself. Maybe that thing is what is causing the Gray in the first place. Because it has to come from somewhere. Odessa traced the sharp angle of a rune drawn on her bandage with waxy paint. Yakun will definitely want to hear of this.
“If what you say is true, how did you survive?”
“I ran. I ran and ran until I had left it all behind. I left my family and my home and I’ll run still further, I will,” the creature said, starting downstream. “You should do the same. When the wind shifts, it may already be too late to run.”
Odessa tried to quash the childish fear beginning to tickle her twisting guts and set the hair on the back of her neck on end. It’s mad with shock and fright. But still, its words had stuck a sliver of uneasiness in her mind. A thorny sliver set to fester in her mind and let take hold the necrotic rot of dread and despair.
The creature was splashing further downstream, bony legs parting the clumps of water hyacinth. The skin on the back of its legs and its tailbone was bare and mottled with open sores and patches of dry, cracked skin. “I ran and I ran,” it mumbled. “I run and I run.”
Odessa watched as it stumbled away, the flow of the stream pushing at the back of its legs. It ambled toward the southern bank. Her mouth opened and she was about to call out but she realized she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what she wanted. She thought she wanted to help the poor creature. To feed it what little she had in her belt pouch and tend its wounds. But in the back of her mind, some nagging need droned so deeply she could feel its unyielding compulsion reverberating in her bones. The fingers of her bandaged hand played along the fletchings of the arrows in her hip quiver. Her bow stood leaning against the kapok a few paces away. An itch in the back of her mind brought with it images of an arrow stuck halfway in the creature’s back. The overwhelming buzz filled her mind. White hot urgency lanced through her arm in spasms of agony. Her blood ran hot. Her throat, suddenly parched, tightened and it took all her focus to stay where she was.
Her bandaged hand moved to the knife sheathed on her belt. Her fingers wrapped around the handle until her knuckles ached.
The creature scrambled up the bank and ducked beneath a crooked tree to disappear into the jungle.
Odessa didn’t move for a long while. She only breathed, slow and deliberate, as the stream babbled along beside her. She closed her eyes, forcing the throbbing pain building up behind them to subside. The droning quieted eventually but her throat remained dry and constricted. The emptiness in her chest widened like an open wound. She felt sick to her stomach.
With concentrated effort, she slid the half-drawn knife back into the sheath and released the handle from her iron grip. A sigh escaped her lips, one of both relief and disappointment.