The Empire's Ruin, page 67
It was a lie, of course, a promise she had no business making.
None of us make it, Gwenna, the Flea murmured in her ear. The only question is how you finally go down.
* * *
The historian was right.
It did feel good.
Gwenna couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment she’d walked into the sickness, but holy Hull did it feel good.
They’d climbed the steep trail up from the beach, then followed Jonon’s track north into the jungle. It wasn’t hard to see which direction the admiral had gone. His men had left a passage of hacked vines and churned-up mud that even a blind person could have followed. Of course, Gwenna had no intention of catching up. The admiral had warned them about following, and she didn’t plan to test him.
“I thought we were trying to hurry,” Cho Lu said, halfway through the first morning.
Gwenna shook her head. “Sometimes slow is fast. With Jonon’s men clearing the path, we’re using less energy than we would otherwise. Eating less food. Drinking less water.”
And so, for the first part of the morning, they moved at a leisurely pace, stopping once when Rat had to piss, another time for Kiel to examine some kind of strange, oblong seeds.
“It’s not so bad,” Cho Lu said, peering up into the green. “I was expecting something … stranger.”
Despite the dire predictions of Rat and the historian, Gwenna had to agree. She’d spent a fair bit of time down in the Waist, and this jungle looked more or less like that one—green everywhere, plants cascading from the trunks of massive trees, vines draped across the limbs, sunlight wan and watery, trickling down from so far above it might have been imagined. There were flashes of color and movement. Small birds darting through the understory. A yellow snake sliding into a rotten stump. A spider the size of Gwenna’s fist skittering across her web. It was probably all dangerous, maybe even deadly, but hardly the land of horrors Kiel had described.
When a small blue lizard darted across her path, she found herself laughing.
“Did you see that?” she asked no one in particular. “Did you see that? I swear he looked back at me as he went by. He looked guilty.”
“Fast,” Rat said, dropping to all fours to imitate the lizard’s scuttling. “Fast little dog.”
“Not a dog,” Cho Lu said. “Lizard. Li. Zard.”
That got Pattick laughing, and within a few moments the whole march had come to a halt.
“Dog! Dog! Dog!” Rat chanted, still pretending to be the lizard.
Cho Lu chased after her, arms spread wide in the manner of a bumbling drunk.
Gwenna started to call them back, then doubled over with laughter, unable to breathe.
It was a relief to be laughing, a joy, a delight just to be alive and outside, breathing fresh air after so long locked in the brig. She found herself wanting to run ahead, to race along the path that Jonon’s men had carved, and …
“Wait,” she said. The word felt wrong in her mouth, awkward, even cruel. She made herself say it again. “Wait.”
Rat ignored her, continued her frantic dance, spurred on by the laughter of the legionaries. Gwenna felt the laughter bubbling up inside her all over again at the sight of the little girl, the same girl who had been so grim, so guarded, actually playing.
She forced down the thought and the laughter both, turned to face Kiel.
The historian was not smiling.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Gwenna asked.
He nodded.
“This is what?” Pattick asked, clapping her on the back. His hand lingered on the base of her spine. It was the kind of casual intimacy that, in other circumstances, might have earned him a broken wrist. Instead, she found herself leaning into the touch.
“What is this?” he asked again, shifting his hand around to squeeze her waist.
Gwenna moved the hand deliberately away. It felt like a loss.
“This is the sickness,” she replied. “We’re in it.”
Pattick blinked.
Cho Lu laughed out loud.
“This is what you warned us about?” He shook his head. “I should have been sick all my life!”
“The euphoria,” Kiel said gravely, “is only the beginning.”
Dhar frowned. “Like rum.”
Cho Lu shook his head. “I’ve had rum. Plenty of rum. This is way better than rum.”
“I shipped with a sailor once,” the captain replied, “who took a fall from the mast. His pain was very bad and so his friends, against the orders of my surgeons, brought him rum. When I went to visit him he was very drunk, very happy, claimed the pain was gone. The next morning, he was dead.”
“We’re not going to die,” Pattick said, shaking his head.
Gwenna turned to the soldier. “Do you remember how we felt back on the beach?”
He stared at her like a man lost. “I mean … sure. Scared and all that, but—”
“Scared,” she said. “Exhausted. Confused.”
Even as she said the words, she doubted them. It was a strange sensation. She remembered the horror of staring up the cliffs into the overflowing jungle, remembered her own doubt, remembered the dread at being asked to lead the small, doomed group, but none of it felt real. All the emotions might have been something she’d dreamed, a strong but passing phantasm. Nothing more.
Of course, that was exactly what Kiel had said would happen.
She could still hear his warning, but like her old emotions it was slippery, almost impossible to hold.
“No monsters yet,” Cho Lu said cheerfully.
“Still,” Gwenna replied. “No one drinks from the streams. No one eats from the trees. If we didn’t pack it in, don’t touch it. Watch each other. Watch yourselves.”
They looked like a group of children chastised by an adult for playing too noisily, but their chagrin didn’t last. As soon as they were moving again Cho Lu started singing old drinking songs under his breath. Gwenna recognized a few of them. They were the same songs her father used to sing late at night in front of the fire, when he’d had a little too much ale. As Cho Lu tapped the rhythm against his leg, Pattick snuck in a dance step here and there, to Rat’s unending delight. They were lost, of course, faced with a difficult march across dangerous terrain, but despite it all Gwenna couldn’t help feeling hopeful, even happy as they forged ahead into the jungle.
* * *
Yutaka’s screaming saved them.
One moment Gwenna was stepping over a downed, mossy tree, wondering why she’d never noticed how attractive Cho Lu was, how attractive Pattick was—even Pattick, who she’d always considered pasty and ugly—the next the avesh was swinging through the vines directly overhead, screeching as though she’d been scalded or stabbed.
“What—” Cho Lu began, brow creasing.
Gwenna reached for one of her swords, but Kiel proved somehow faster, spinning and leveling his spear just as … something—Gwenna caught a glimpse of teeth, claws, bloodred eyes—erupted snarling from the underbrush.
The historian’s spear turned it aside, but the beast roared, twisted, ripped the spear from his hands, then roared again.
It moved like some kind of cat—a jaguar or tiger—but it was larger than either, and, Gwenna realized with a delicious shudder of horror, covered with scales instead of hair. It bared its teeth, lowered its head, hissed, slid a pace closer, then leapt off into the shadows of the forest.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Pattick said, staring at the place where the creature had disappeared. “Was that…”
“That,” Kiel said, reclaiming his spear, “was a gabhya.”
“Not so tough,” Cho Lu proclaimed. “One thrust sent it running, tail between its legs.”
Rat, eyes wide, shook her head. “Is so tough.”
Gwenna dragged in a deep breath. Beneath the green, and the mud, and the heat she found another smell, one she hadn’t noticed before, almost like rotten meat or dried blood.
“I’m not sure it’s gone,” she said, sliding her second sword from its sheath.
Yutaka yammered in the branches above. So the creature hadn’t drowned after all.
Rat glanced up at the avesh, then out into the trees once more. “Not gone,” she agreed.
Pattick and Cho Lu exchanged a glance. Kiel set aside his spear, and nocked an arrow.
The next attack came from the other side. Somehow the beast had looped around them, moving through the thick jungle silently as a breeze.
Gwenna heard the twang of the historian’s bowstring as the cat erupted from the shadows, then, a fragment of a heartbeat later, the wet thwack as the arrow slammed into the back of the thing’s snarling maw. It was a nearly impossible shot but it barely slowed the creature. Instead of dying, as any decent animal would have, it snapped the wooden shaft between its jaws and came on so quickly there was no time for Gwenna to think. No time to decide or doubt. In the fragment of a heartbeat her training took over.
Kiel stepped aside smoothly, the jaguar lunged for him, and she swung both her blades in a great, sweeping overhand arc down into the creature’s neck. The shock of the impact shuddered up her arm, jarring her shoulder. She dropped one of the swords when the animal jerked, twisting toward her, bloody teeth bared, but that was why the Kettral carried two. How the thing was still alive, she had no idea, and she didn’t plan to leave it that way.
As it snarled, she drove the steel of her second blade directly into its eye.
Hot blood showered her. The cat seemed to lean into the sword, as though it were still trying to get at her. Then it spasmed once, twice, and fell over.
She wrenched the sword free and stepped back.
For a moment no one spoke.
Then Cho Lu let out a high, delighted cheer. “You slaughtered that thing!” He whooped again. “You carved that fucker apart!”
Pattick was more subdued. He stared, wide-eyed, at the corpse. “What is it?”
The historian knelt beside the huge cat, peeled open one of the eyes with his fingertips. Clotted red streaked the yellow irises, as though the blood vessels inside them had hemorrhaged.
“This is what happens,” the historian replied, “when the sickness seeps into something mortal.”
“No,” Cho Lu said, grinning, shaking his head. “This is what happens when Gwenna Sharpe gets pissed off.” He bared his teeth at her, hefted his sword, as though planning to take another stab at the dead beast. “You killed the shit out of it.”
Gwenna shook her head. “Not just me.” She turned to study the historian. “I’ve spent my whole life with warriors, women and men who were very good at killing things. Most of them would have missed that spear thrust.”
Kiel did something that might have been a shrug. “As a younger man, I spent some time hunting.”
“Hunting.”
He nodded.
She narrowed her eyes. “Before you became a historian.”
“Yes. Before I became a historian.”
* * *
It was nearly dark when they finished digging the circular ditch, then building a short palisade with stakes cut from a small copse of trees. Not much of a defense, but it might slow another creature like the one they’d killed that afternoon. For a while, Gwenna stood at the edge of the rough wooden wall, staring out into the night. Even with her eyes, she couldn’t make out much—just a scrawl of branches and vines across the darkness.
What else, she wondered, am I not seeing?
Behind her, the others were finishing a cold dinner of salt cod and water. Not enough water. She’d started them all on strict rations and could already feel the thirst gnawing at the back of her throat. She could hear the trickle of a stream somewhere off through the trees, the sound of the water urging her to drink, drink.…
She forced it away.
“I’ll take the first watch,” she said, turning back to the camp.
Rat pointed up into the trees. “Yutaka watches.”
The girl seemed to find that a comfort; Gwenna wasn’t about to trust her life to a fanged creature born in the throes of Menkiddoc’s disease.
“I’ll sit up.”
“You can wake me for the second watch,” Pattick put in. “Me and Cho Lu.”
Cho Lu groaned. “You heard Rat. The hideous little monster bear is taking care of it.”
“Bear?” Rat asked.
“Like Yutaka,” the soldier explained. “Except a lot less scary.”
Gwenna expected all of them to sleep, but when she settled herself against the broad trunk of a tree, Kiel joined her.
“I will watch with you awhile,” he said.
She blinked. “You’re not tired?”
“There are things more important than sleep.”
As usual, she had no idea what he was talking about.
For a long time the two of them sat in silence, gazing out into the alien night, Kiel’s bow strung at his side, one of Gwenna’s swords naked across her knees. Finally, the historian looked over at her.
“You have a question,” he said.
Gwenna frowned. “I have a thousand.”
“Perhaps you could begin with one.”
“What is the sickness?”
The historian pursed his lips.
“The better question might be, what does it do?”
“Fine. What does it do?”
He glanced down at his own hands, studied the lines of them, then looked out into the night. Gwenna was on the verge of asking the same question again and louder when he finally replied.
“It affects all living things differently, unpredictably. One tree will rot while the trunk beside it grows to enormous proportions. A third, just ten paces away, might sprout tails instead of limbs.”
“That’s the kind of horseshit I expect to hear from drunks at the tavern, not from Annur’s imperial historian.”
“You saw the scales of the cat you killed earlier. You saw the eyes.”
“Not the first time I’ve killed something with weird eyes.”
Kiel performed a shrug. “Here, there are plants that feed on blood. Molds that grow nearly as fast as a man can run. House-high fungi. Swarms of flies that burrow into the eyes. Spiders the size of dogs that weave webs across canyons…”
“Sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“It is the nature of this land’s disease to realize the implausible.”
“How?”
“By increasing capacity.”
“Would you please try to make sense.”
“It is difficult to explain in terms that you would understand.”
“I’m no historian, but on a good day I can rub two thoughts together.”
He nodded. “We are carrying food with us—rice, barley, dried fish. Without it, we would die. Even the most ravenous creature, however, even a woman on the verge of starvation, can only eat so much. The body cannot handle more. A plant, likewise, requires sunlight, but provide too much and it dies.”
“What does this have to do with Menkiddoc? With the monsters?”
“The disease allows creatures to … take in more.”
Gwenna tried to make sense of that. “The plague crippling an entire continent comes down to the ability to eat larger meals?”
“The plague allows plants, animals, people to feed off any source of energy—sunlight, the vibrations of the earth, the wind.”
“Living off the wind doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It is not the ability to do so that is the curse, but the inability to stop. The disease strips all limits. Or, at the very least, it raises them beyond comprehension. Nothing here is ever full. You could devour half a pig tonight and keep eating. The land cannibalizes itself.”
“So, why the monsters?”
Kiel lifted an arm, studied it a moment, then let it drop. “This frame was not made to accommodate so much. You and I eat and we stop eating. We do not absorb the power of the wind. Sunlight does not make us grow.”
“But in the sickness…” Gwenna said, understanding burrowing like a slick worm into her brain.
The historian nodded again. “Everything is hungry, and nothing ever stops eating—eating sunlight, eating blood, eating the earth itself. Power floods through flesh and bud, twists it, corrupts it…”
“Makes spiders the size of dogs.”
“Or trees that walk. Or any of a thousand other things that should not be.”
Gwenna forced down a shudder. Spider dogs she could stab. Walking trees she could burn. “What about people?”
Kiel nodded thoughtfully. “With time, it will warp a human body to some degree, as it does with animals. The bulk of the energy, however, it pours into the mind.”
“And that’s what drives you mad.”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Perhaps you have heard stories.”
Gwenna thought back to those ale-sodden nights in the tavern, listening to the tall tales of smugglers and pirates.
“Visions and voices, mostly. The usual crazy shit.”
“There is nothing usual,” Kiel replied, “about the visions and voices that arise from this disease. They are real.”
She blinked, wondered if she’d heard correctly. “Real what?”
“Real phenomena.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The diseased have visions sometimes, visions they are not equipped to endure, but that does not mean the visions are false. Those visions depict the truth, in this world or another.”
“Another?”
“Surely, you do not believe that this”—he gestured with a hand—“is everything.”
Gwenna stared at him, then out into the darkness. Something off in the trees cried out, then fell silent. The historian didn’t look crazy. He didn’t smell it. He looked like a man seated beneath an apple tree in his garden, pontificating blandly on the progress of his green beans.
