Chapter Forty-One: The Jungle Wild

We left early the next day, with Nakla clear-headed and John seeming upbeat, with a jauntiness in his step that didn't seem out-of-place on a young woman's body. We continued along the main road leading out of Garsellast and up into the jungle valley beyond.

It took about two hours for us to pass the rice paddies and little villages that served as the city's suburbs, a little carved-out enclave of civilization at the rim of the wild continent. People looked up as we passed, and most of them simply watched, though others assumed that a well-armed fifty-strong group were probably up to no good and fled for their homes, or else fled up into the hills (which, Nakla repeatedly pointed out, was not a very safe thing to do).

Most of this march was up a gentle slope, with terraced paddies stepping up every hundred yards or so. Barely visible to either side were great stone edifices, brown and dark gray and stretching up perhaps a mile. The mountains beyond were even taller. This was the entrance to a great valley - the passageway through the mountains was perhaps ten miles wide and the valley beyond even broader, spreading out to fifty miles near the spot where it emptied out upon the continent's interior. Very little was known about that interior, beyond that it became increasingly dry until you arrived at a great stretch of barren, scorching desert. But we wouldn't be going anywhere near that far - Aru-Khazi was surrounded by jungle for many miles in all directions.

"You might find yourselves at home there," Nakla said as we marched. "Assuming the king doesn't kill you on the spot, that is. It's said that Aru-Khazi was once a great fae city, long since gone to ruin…"

"Aru-Khazi isn't a fae name," Gaelin pointed out.

"It's sauryx," Nakla agreed. "Its name, 'em Aru-Khazi', means the Cursed Temple, so-named after the big, ruined ziggurat at the city's center. It's said that all who tried to breach its domain died horribly… I may know one or two who did… until the Sun King's vizier managed to force the vault doors apart with an ancient spell he found and the king and his vizier found many great treasures within that dead place…" it sounded almost like she was quoting scripture.

"The vizier… he's a great sorcerer?" I asked, a feeling of worry rising in my chest - I got the feeling that Alathea hadn't taken Orealis's magical potential all that seriously when she'd consigned him to a palace holding cell.

Nakla nodded. "Very great - he's said to be nearly a match for the Sun King, himself, both in madness and in power. That is why the Sun King offered him the first kingship in fae… the first among his lieutenants when he names himself high king over all the fae."

"You seem to know a lot about him," I said.

She just shrugged, her smooth, scaly face as unreadable as ever. "People talk."

As the rice paddies petered out into the shrubs and vines of the jungle, the path quickly devolved from a gravelly, wagon-rutted trade road into a modestly-worn explorer's trail, well-cleared and worn down by traffic for the first few miles, but gradually becoming more and more wild, the jungle encroaching as we passed beyond the point where most casual adventurers went.

The jungle was a lot like I imagined a jungle might be like, albeit far stranger. It was dense and verdant green, humidity exuding from the earth and from every leaf and stem, warm little streams and rivulets running through the terrain like a webwork of moisture. My clothes were damp against my skin before we made it a mile, and the vines and little trunks I had to brush past barely shifted the moisture-heavy fabric. Fortunately, we fae are not especially heavy sweaters, and Estival fae like Calivar are right at home in the tropics. I was a bit worse for the wear, perspiration beading on my forehead and warming my already-hot clothes, but at least I wasn't like the few unfortunate humans and fauns among our number who dripped sweat or panted desperately, refilling their canteens every hour and making their way to one of us to cast purifying magic over them.

All manner of things skittered about, from monkeys the size of squirrels to spiders also the size of squirrels. Some were probably larger. The flowers were strange and pungent, exuding the stinking sweetness of putrefaction, their great red and orange blooms glistening with moisture, looking more like fleshy wounds than proper flowers. And everywhere… everywhere… it felt like we were being watched.

"The trees here are strange," Dill muttered.

I regarded my half-sylvast handmaiden. She was faring in the jungle better than most, the little flowers blooming from her hair and skin even livelier than ever. Like me, she didn't carry a machete like most of the others did - there was no need to. She could hum a bit of woodsong and simply cause the vines and branches to retract to a spot that would allow our passage. But, unlike regular plants, which would obey for days if not indefinitely, the vegetation crept right back soon after she passed - dense jungle ahead of us and behind, like we were travelling down the esophagus of a great and ravenous plant-beast.

I was about to ask her what she meant about the trees being 'strange', but it was obvious enough as soon as I thought much about it. They were the source of my sense of being watched. Unlike regular trees, which possess a sort of group-identity along with all of the plants connected to them (which, ultimately, is almost all plants, since they are connected via root and airborne essences for many miles), these trees possessed only the bare threads of connection to one another. Instead, they were more like individuals, observing us carefully and very much aware of our passage through whatever vague vegetal senses they possessed.

"The sword cuts them well enough," Master Dhyr stated. If anything, they seemed disappointed that we could move the jungle out of the way without cutting anything.

We passed ruins, at least a dozen of them, white and pink stone long since swallowed up by the jungle. Many of them had obviously been picked over, with graffiti from the various claimer parties announcing that they'd been emptied or picked clean. Astorix discovered a crystal the size of Chala-fir's arse here, one declared, below which somebody else had added: No crystal in creation was ever so large. Other ruins simply had skulls and other bones piled near them - a clear enough warning that danger lurked within.

"What's so dangerous in those ruins?" I asked. "Are they guarded?"

"In a manner of speaking," Nakla said. "Most often, they're guarded by the native tribes… not really tribes, but infested beings that must have once been sentient. They can be any race, but most are fae because they don't age and die the way the others do. They simply go through the motions in their catatonia, decade upon decade, barely surviving as they cultivate their corruption, until an unwary traveler stumbles across them, only to be afflicted by the same illness. Other times, a troop of ghost monkeys… the tree-singers… have set up shop there, and it's best to skip over the area until they've exhausted the region of prey and move to untapped jungle."

"Ghost monkeys?" I said. I had a vague notion that I knew what those were.

"Venomous, predatory monkeys," she nodded. "So named because their troop sounds like…"

A strange, sonorous moaning noise came from the distance. Many such noises, joining in a slowly-rising chorus of spooky, soft howls.

"Shit… exactly like that," she said. "Gather in tight and be prepared to chop, bat, or stomp anything that comes near you.  If they spit on your flesh, you'll become ill, and if they bite you, that's a slow death sentence… they prefer to eat their prey alive."

The droning moan grew louder and louder, the trees above rustling with movement.

+++++

The ghost monkeys were a lot smaller than I expected. For some reason, I expected howling, muscular mandrills crashing down from the trees and charging like linebackers. Instead, they skittered down, hopping about, moaning right up until they bore their pink-dripping canines. Most were the size of small housecats, though one or two were larger (the size of large housecats, I suppose). And they were fast.

I tried to use the woodsong to wrap them up, but it was next to impossible to catch them because they were so agile. I found it much more effective to simply launch whole vines and branches away like a singing bowstring. My reactions were pretty fast and my perception pretty good - I backed into part of our circle and kept the ruddy little bastards away, mostly through woodsong but also by slashing and sticking a few with my sword. No problem…

A gob of spat venom hurled right at my face, and only Master Dhyr's blade managed to block the spittle with a little ting. Pink oozed down the steel. I wondered if the monkeys were immune to their own venom? Dhyr might never find out - their swordsmanship was far too precise, each stab or slash neatly ending the life of an insane little simian. Gaelin grunted from his spot next to me - he hadn't managed to dodge a glob of venomous spit and was stumbling about, trying to wash it from his eyes with his canteen. I grabbed his belt and hauled him back into formation.

Behind me, Dill muttered something… she wasn't much good in a fight, but her woodsong was plenty useful. But what could she do beyond what I was, with launching vines and small trunks of the skittering bastards away and hoping to quell the ounslaught? There were hundreds of the things. Before my eyes and to my horror, one of Gaelin's men stumbled to the ground and was hauled away by a dozen or more chattering, howling monkeys. They bit and tore into his flesh even as he screamed and struggled to escape. Gaelin cried out and, once again, I had to grab his belt and drag him back into formation.

"You can't save anybody if you're dead!" I shouted.

Another man collapsed… Corporal Vell, the faun from my personal guard (the one who wasn't Lieutenant Ro)… the monkeys began to drag him away. We were being overrun. We'd killed perhaps a hundred monkeys, and we'd barely put a dent in their numbers. They absolutely swarmed the trees, leaping and screaming about the canopy before skittering down from all directions to assault whatever spot looked weakest. And, I realized, their entire strategy involved approaching from above and skittering out at unpredictable angles… I think Dill had realized this, too. I pushed back behind our defensive circle and crouched next to her, helping her weave the woodsong:

I am a stranger here,
you do not care for me, nor I for you…
     it is folly to pretend otherwise.
     But I am not your enemy.
Your enemy is a man who makes his fiefdom here,
     deep in your bosom.
     He is my enemy, too.
     You are full of bitter hate,
          and I am full of hot anger.
Let us join, if only briefly.
     Your bonds do not join readily.
     I do not expect commitment from you,
     and nor do you trust me…
          but surely you feel my anger,
          and that anger has not yet burnt you.
Yield to me, and let me pass.
Let us be neutral,
     and when I have devoured the subject of my hate,
     you may devour the rest.
     None shall stop you - certainly not I.

It felt wrong to sing the woodsong like this, something full of bitterness and hate instead of the promise of friendship and a shared love of growth. It was a song to a jungle that eyed the world greedily, that devoured instead of flourishing with the people and creatures of its domain. It was a song of a deeply sick land. But it was effective.

The jungle receded from us, the branches and vines, even the trunks of the trees creeping back… five yards… ten yards… twenty yards… twenty-five. It was a huge clearing by the standards of this jungle, so deep in the Outer Realms. And the ghost monkeys didn't know what to do - their tactics were bred by instinct, not intelligence. Thus, when the jungle receded from their quarry, they ran at us in straight lines across twenty-five yards of flat, muddy terrain, only to be skewered by a sword, zapped by a spell, or dropped by one of the little throwing knives that Dhyr had deployed to test their aim against small moving targets.

"If only they ran in trickier approaches," they muttered.

After Meliswe barbequed one particularly large monkey… apparently, the 'alpha' of their troop… the remaining ghost monkeys panicked and fled, the last of them scattering into the far jungle, their ghostly moans far quieter on account of all of their brethren we'd killed. We'd lost four of our own and had another dozen bitten or spat upon - the former would have surely died if we hadn't brought a full kit of fae medicine with us, and Meliswe and I worked long into the evening in that clearing, preparing potions and poultices to save our wounded.

"With the jungle receded like this, we'd best make camp here," Nakla observed. "We won't find a better clearing - not by a long shot. If we surround our perimeter with dead monkeys, nothing's likely to get to us…"

"Because they'll be afraid of whatever killed the monkeys?" Meliswe asked.

Nakla nodded. "Most of them. And anything that's not afraid will probably take a body and snack upon it - a fitting sacrifice to the things that creep in the night."

+++++

With our camp made, we sat around the campfires… we had three of them, on account of there being so many of us. Forty-two people is just too many for one fire. Fortunately, we had a huge clearing to avail ourselves of. The retreating vegetation had swept it almost perfectly flat, with a base of soft soil - not at all bad if you had to sleep there, which we did. Dhyr snacked on roast monkey meat - I suppose that, not being a primate, they had fewer compunctions about eating monkey. While most ate grease porridge, I gnawed at some of the cured meat that Meliswe had thought to pick up in Garsellast.

"Have you got enough to share?" came a small voice - John Bishop in his cutesy half-dancer body.

"Just a few bites… we have as much grease porridge as you might like, though," Meliswe said.

John shuddered. "Can't stand the stuff - that's all we ate on my trip out of this accursed place, and it just about killed me. It was a bloody mistake coming out here with you - I'm bloody useless in this… body and I'm sure I'm going to die before I so much as spot the Cliffs of Dover from afar…"

"Hey, I won a whole bloody war in this body, good sir, and you're taller than I am…"

He stared into the fire for a minute, his sharp little teeth tearing into the strip of jerky. "It's just… I'm just worried that, even if you can deliver all you've promised to me, that it won't be enough. What if you make me some facsimile of John Bishop, open a portal to Earth, and look, there's Piccadilly Circus… what if that's not good enough?"

I shrugged. "Then we wait until we think of something better. No matter where we are, we have to make things better a little bit at a time - real life is a campaign, not a battle."

"Too true. Well said," John said. He yawned and stretched his gangly arms. "Well, I'm tuckered. I'll see you all at reveille."

"Night, John," I said.

I didn't sleep well that night - if the image of angry, venomous monkeys skittering up and dragging me off into the humid darkness wasn't bad enough, Meliswe's constant shifting and little yips of fright as she looked out into the black of night just made things worse. It was the first time she'd ever slept rough - we'd always had decent tents during our campaign through Autumnal - and, moreover, this was a far stranger and wilder land than any of the fae realms. Heck, it made the wilds that stretched between the realms look like a grassy Parisian promenade. I finally got a little sleep close to dawn, when the knowledge that there was enough light to see approaching things by collided with the thunderheads of my exhaustion and I lost time for an hour and a half, awakening to the smell of grease porridge heating over a cooking fire.

I cannot recommend grease porridge to anybody, not even my most bitter enemy (not that I have too many of those). It's my understanding that the humans and fauns of Alfheim have used the stuff for years, whether traveling inland or by sea. It's a chunky, crumbly powder that keeps for months in its waterproof packets and, when heated with a little water, forms a thick and filling porridge that will keep you going. We fae have various alchemical ways to preserve food that makes it substantially more tolerable, but we didn't have enough for everybody to have some, and I wasn't about to eat braised peppers and fried cutlets in front of my people while they gulped down grease porridge. So I gulped it down, too.

We were pleased to find that our fae medicine, true to its reputation, had not only managed to pull our injured people back from illness or certain death, but to get all of them fit to travel after they got a little coffee in them (fortunately, dried grounds keep very well). We continued through the jungle, its dense, verdant foliage once more engulfing us… though it seemed more forgiving than before. We barely needed to cut a vine or branch, much to Dhyr's disappointment. Somehow, the jungle respected us just the slightest bit more, enough for Dill and me to part the densest and most impassable bits, like Moses parting the red sea, and lead us through.

"Well… that's a problem," I said.

Unfortunately, unlike Moses, we couldn't actually part a large body of water, not even a slow-moving river, muddy-brown, glistening in the sunlight, and relatively broad. It was perhaps two hundred yards to the other side. I'd seen it as a small blue line on Nakla's maps, but it didn't seem so small up close. And, unlike my previous tromps through unfamiliar and unfriendly terrain, there weren't any bridges to make use of.

"We can fly across," Gaelin offered.

"Yes, we can fly across," Calivar said. He pointed to our small fae and fae-kin contingent. "That's, what? Five of us?"

"Six," Alfina said. My guardswoman wasn't technically fae-kin in the legal sense, but she was plenty capable of flying two hundred yards.

"Six out of forty-two…" I said. "What do you think, Nakla… what's the safest way to cross?"

"We usually make rafts for this sort of thing. Most often, I'd just go upriver for two days to where the river's less than half as wide, but then we'd lose almost that much time in getting to Aru-Khazi. If you've got five decent woodworkers with you, it shouldn't take more than a few hours to…"

Grant me a boat
     borne of seeds,
     and it shall sail downriver,
          I know not where.
Shape it true
     for four men or five,
     and when my task is done,
     you shall find new shores.

Dill and I both sang more or less simultaneously and, sure enough, we now had two very sturdy canoes made from solid jungle wood. Little clusters of seeds bunched at various points within and without, such that they might germinate and grow wherever the canoe eventually wound up.

"Yes, yes, I forgot about fae magic," Nakla said, her slit eyes rolling in skewed directions.

"Woodsong is sylvast magic," Dill said… "though the fey did provide the foundation to it…"

"Yes, fine… whomever's magic." Our guide said. She removed an oblong mirror from her pack and stepped out toward the shore, squinting in the sun and angling the reflected light across the water.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking for ghost monkeys," she explained. "If there were any in the trees, there'd be a lot more movement. We should be safe to cross. Why don't I cross first with one or two of your big men, just to make sure the coast is clear?"

Meliswe shot her a skeptical look. "Or those of us who can could just fly across…"

"With all due respect, ma'am, you can fly across whenever you like, but it would be safer to wait for the guide…" Nala tapped her chest with a clawed finger… "to scout the area first. Unless you'd like to be the one to stumble into a tribe of corruption-crawling natives."

"Perhaps we should let our lovely guide go first…" Gaelin said.

"Yes, along with the big ones," Dhyr, who was definitely neither big nor a man, said. They leapt into the boat without so much as budging the hull, and waited with a toothy grin.

"Right… and how about that big fellow…"

Lieutenant Ro stepped forward and into the boat, causing it to slide into the river. Only Nakla's fast reflexes stopped it from sliding off into the flow. She grabbed a pair of oars (Dill had thought to grow a few sets of those, too) and hopped into the boat, pulling it from the lazy, lapping shores and into the current. The river was slow, but not that slow - it took five minutes for Nakla to cross, at which point she'd drifted fifty yards downriver.

She paced into the jungle while Ro and Dhyr scouted the shore, scouring the terrain for pathways and dangers. Dhyr spotted some sort of river snake bigger than they were, skewered it through the throat with their little rapier-like sword, and then hauled the dead but still-thrashing thing further ashore with some help from Ro. From across the river, we could barely make out Dhyr shouting:

"I've found lunch!"

It was certain to be better than grease porridge.

When Nakla crept back out of the jungle a few minutes later, she waved the all-clear, which meant we could start moving people across. First and foremost, of course, were the fliers - the four fey and two fey-kin in our group. Our other boat loaded up with people while Lieutenant Ro returned to the first boat and began to row across in great strokes powerful enough to gain against the current. Even with two boats, it was going to take a while to get everybody across a few at a time. As we fliers buzzed over, I thought I spotted a sandbar in the middle of the river, perhaps ten yards wide, and wondered whether I might raise it with magic or do something with the woodsong to improve our crossing efficiency… and I spotted something else, something off in the jungle beyond us. Firesmoke. I cursed at myself - it was hubris for Nakla to think she was a better scout than a fey who could flit above the treetops.

I touched down at the far bank, my breath a bit fast from the exertion.

"Nakla, I think there's a native encampment near here… I saw quite a bit of firesmoke about a hundred yards back in the jungle."

Our guide nodded coolly and turned to look up the embankment and into the dense, green mess of jungle beyond, as if that might help her spot anything. Then she waved and I heard rushing and crunching through the wood. At first, I thought it was a great jungle beast, but no: two dozen men with rifles rushed to the bank, their guns leveled at us. Nakla pivoted and dropped to a bow.

"Great lords of the Sun King, I, Nakla the Huntress, have delivered the fey to you as promised… I hope our deal still stands?"

In that moment, realizing we'd been betrayed, rage coursed through me and my mana followed in rapid pursuit. Sword in hand, I raised my fist to the heavens, summoned a mighty lightning bolt, and fried Nakla the Huntress to a crisp on the spot. An instant later, the crack of gunfire rang out and something hit my shoulder like a Jack Johnson punch. I felt my body splash into the muddy water of the river shore.