“And you only thought to mention that now!” Rene screamed at her.

“Not my fault you’re as deaf as a dingbat,” she smarmily replied.

“Oh, shit on it!” he swore.

Rene laced up his boots in a fury of motion, balling up his tattered socks and shoving them in his pockets. Snatching up his sheathed sword and the survival kit, he kicked dirt over the remains of the fire and started to run back into the jungle. Then he did a double take and turned back to Zildiz who was still bound to the sapling, clearly torn between his sense of duty and the urge to save his own skin. His captive on her part was behaving as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

“Have you finally reached the inevitable conclusion of your thought processes?” she yawned.

“What?”

It was Zildiz’s turn to roll her eyes at him.

“I’ll help you along this once, since we haven’t the time to wait on your mental faculties. There’s only one way you’re making it out of this alive. Untie me.”

“Like blazes I will. You’ll gut me soon as you got the chance.”

“I know a place where we can hide. I camouflaged it myself. We won’t be able to escape leapers in the brush, not in the daytime, and not with eyes like theirs. My lair is the only option. If you cut me loose, I can get us there with minutes to spare. If not, you can always try outrunning them.”

Rene fumed. She had deliberately concealed this information to give him no time to think things through. By rights, as her captor, he was under no obligation to ensure her continued survival.

But she was also unerringly correct in her assessment of the situation. Rene advanced on her with an ugly snarl, drawing his sword. Zildiz calmly stared him down, ‘cool as some cucumbers’, as Lethway would have put it.

The drums were getting louder by the moment. He cut her free and Zildiz turned her back to him, presenting her bound wrists and looking at him expectantly over her shoulder.

“Absolutely not. Your arms stay tied. Chop-chop!” he said, shooing her onwards, “Lead the way.”

“I can’t run like this. Either remove the silk completely or we’re not getting anywhere.”

“You ever heard of a little thing called compromise?” Rene’s temper was so frayed at this point that his voice came out in a high squeak, “Alright! Fine! But your wings stay clipped.”

“They don’t work anyway.”

“Not taking that chance. Your blades. Pop em out.”

“Why?”

Rene vented a cry of hysterical frustration and activated the sword, holding it in both hands as if he meant to lop off her head.

“Pop em out right now, or by jimbo I’m taking em off at the elbow!”

Zildiz reluctantly complied, her serrated swords sliding out of their housings. General truce or not, she knew that the Leapers would take any chance to murder a Gallivant if they thought they thought could do it unobserved. Especially once they discovered what she had done to Kryptus and his pack. She had to get moving, even if it meant debasing herself this way.

But she immediately regretted her choice when Rene promptly snipped her swords off at the roots.

“What have you done!” Zildiz screamed as her weapons clattered to the ground. She whirled on him in outrage and Rene took a hasty step back, hefting his sword warningly.

“Don’t be overdramatic,” Rene said, scooping up the blades and chucking them into the survival kit for future use, “I’ve only disarmed you. You’ll get them back later, if you behave.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

He cut the bindings of her arms and gave her a shove.

“What are you waiting for? Ice Cream Day? Beat your feet!” he ordered.

The pair set off with Zildiz stumbling ahead, Rene dogging her heels. Ahead of them he could hear what sounded like a mutter of a rolling avalanche, the thumping growing ever more distinct as the hordes of unseen savages neared their position. Each staccato drumbeat was answered by another that varied in rhythm and pitch.

Rene was reminded of the whistles, bugles, bagpipes and drummer-boys which helped commanders give signals to line infantry regiments amid to roar of battle. If the Leaper tribes were holding a long-distance conversation, then he dearly hoped that he and Zildiz were not topic of their discussion.

Zildiz hissed in pain when she slipped and jammed her foot into a crack between the stones. Rene placed his hands on her waist to help heave her out, but she twisted out of his grip and growled at him. They eyed each other warily until her good sense won out and she allowed him to help by gouging out the rocks and digging out her ankle. They ran on, Zildiz moving with a noticeable limp that was slowing them both down. She was clearly struggling to support the added weight of her useless exomorph.

“Are we close?” he demanded of her. Zildiz was all but running on all fours, hellbent on reaching shelter as the sinister percussions rebounded through the fog, multiplying the effect so that it seemed the whole jungle was alive with them.

She’s just too slow! Rene realized. So he did the only thing he could think of and seized the woman from behind. Zildiz kicked and screeched a little, but soon lost the energy to do even that as he bundled her up in a fireman’s carry and hurried on. Stars above, she was heavy! Thankfully they were mostly moving downhill, which spared him a lot of effort.

“Just point the way. I’ll get us there,” he panted. There was no time to argue. He barreled into the heart of the fog and felt smooth pebbles clattering under his boots and heard the trickle of nearby rapids. They were back on the river’s edge, he realized.

Zildiz guided his steps until they reached a tall outcropping of red and white granite. It was topped by a pile of flotsam that’d been deposited by some past flooding. Or so it seemed.

“Here,” said the Gallivant as they climbed to its summit. She pulled aside the pile of detritus and revealed a spacious burrow cunningly disguised and cozily constructed. Rene hopped down after Zildiz and she closed the hatch of dead vegetation over them, plunging the pit into a sudden gloom. When Rene’s eyes finally adjusted, he gave a grunt of recognition. Lining the sides of the burrow was the big tent cloth that had slowed the safety pod's plummeting descent.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked Zildiz, poking at it.

“From the same current that washed me up on the shore,” she said, “Now shut your breathing hole. The hairs on their bodies are like ears. They can sense the tiniest vibrations…”

Rene tore open a rent in the tent material and scrabbled at the stones until he had a spyhole that was just large enough for him to squint out into the smoggy murk. The avalanche of motion was upon them now, so close it made the sluggish river quiver like a spoonful of bone marrow.

As if emerging straight from the bowels of the netherworld there came rushing out of the fog a horde of ravening beasts. On countless pads and claws and hooves they skittered, hopped, crawled or bounded across the torrid current.

Rene saw herds of reptilian frillheads, the bone spurs on the herbivores’ backs rattling like sabers as they made the crossing, closely pursued by packs of buzzing daggergnats that sank their lance-like proboscises into their flanks, cruelly goading them on. Flightless chiroptadons beat on their hairless chests and swung along on the knuckles of their vestigial wing arms. Ten-meter tall ultrapods crashed through the brush and flattened whole trees with their hammerhead antlers. Swarms of rodents, timid fawnmice, flocks of birds, squealing quickpigs, rolling pollies and a host of new species he’d never even dreamed of fled before the larger animals.

Guiding the stampede northward were bands of Leapers. Most soared above the ethereal mists on airfoils of thin-sown silk streaming behind the. Others strung out ziplines between the trees and slid down them with the claws on their feet. The largest Leapers had bright colorations on their underbellies and the sides of their humps, orange and green spots upon which they had painted garish tribal signs. Rene saw swirling suns and grinning devils, or eyes pierced through with barbs and weeping tears of blood. Adolescents and children rode in pouches on the backs of their elders, beating the drums they had woven tight across their knees.

Rene curled himself into a ball and tried his hardest not to exist. For what seemed an eternity the dread host bellowed and crashed around their hiding place, until at last the drums slowly receded in the distance.

“How many?” Zildiz prodded him.

“Too many,” Rene whispered, “Armies of them, all moving with one purpose.”

“It has summoned the kindreds to the Dawning Chambers,” Zildiz told him. The Gallivant knelt at the bottom of the pit and scraped out a hole in the gravel which quickly filled with water, “The god has been roused to anger, and the world shall quake at its passing. It will come for your people, and when It is done, it shall be as though they never were at all. Not even the mute stones shall bear witness to their memory. For nothing will remain of them but dust and bones. Dust and bones.”

Having said her bit, Zildiz bent down and lapped up the water with her tongue.