the latter was bending over the prone form of Clarissa Stark. It said, “This one appears to be damaged.”
My laughter rose in pitch and became a long, despairing wail. I toppled to one side and hit the ground in a dead faint.
° °
I was aboard a ship, on a voyage to the other side of the world. I was on a stretcher being carried up into the jungled hills of Koluwai. I was being shaken back to consciousness by a hand on my shoulder. I yelled and pushed myself away from it, bumped into warm bodies, and lashed out with my fists and feet.
“Aiden, is that you?”
Clarissa Stark. Clarissa Stark!
I opened my eyes and looked down at myself. I was naked. The grease Iriputiz had smeared over me was dry and breaking off in large glittering flakes.
Then I looked up and saw figures. There were the—the things I had seen earlier, there were Koluwaians, and there was Clarissa.
She was still wearing the clothes I’d last seen her in—the trousers hanging over misshapen legs, the shirt pushed up by a humped and twisted spine. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, with tears streaming from them.
“Clarissa, where are we? Where are we?”
“I don’t have my goggles, Aiden. I’m blind. Were we rescued?”
“I don’t—I don’t think so.”
Though I tried desperately to avoid looking at anything but her, I couldn’t help myself, and glance by fearful glance I took in the immediate environment. We were sitting among a group of Koluwaians, five plump men and three fat women, in a forest clearing. The trees were the same as I’d glimpsed before—of phenomenal size, raised up on mangrove-like roots and heavy with enormous purple fruits from which faint sounds issued. The air was filled with the muted whispering and mumbling, which reminded me of the noise one hears in a theatre during the brief seconds between the lights going down and the curtain going up.
Six creatures were busy around the edges of the glade. They were pushing sharp hollow sticks, similar to bamboo, into the fruits and collecting, in what appeared to be skin containers, the juice that ran out through them.
One of the things noticed that I’d regained my wits, stepped away from the trees, and approached us. It looked down at me. It was so dreadful in aspect that it was all I could do to suppress a scream.
In terms of species, it resembled an amalgam of mollusc and crustacean, with a carapace of slate grey. Its body was reminiscent of a mussel shell, standing on end with the seam at the front. From the base of this, four crab-like legs extended, while the top of the torso curled outward in a frilled and complex manner to form wide armoured shoulders. The arms—which like the legs reminded me of the limbs of a crab or lobster—had two elbows and ended in three extremely long fingers and a thumb, all of which moved without cease. A fluted shell—shaped like a hood—protected the head. A revolting “face” bulged out of it. This was the only visibly soft and fleshy part of the creature. It had the appearance of a snail or a slug, in that the skin was grey and wet-looking, with no bones beneath it to give a defined shape. It was, in fact, almost entirely mouth—the long opening dividing it vertically—with outer lips fringed with small red feelers, like a sea anemone, and a further set of flexible inner lips which slid over a hard beak, just visible at the back of the orifice. There were four eyes, two to either side of the mouth, the upper pair being the largest. They were like black beads, circular and carrying no expression. A small bump was located above each upper eye, like nascent horns.
The creature was about seven feet tall and wore nothing but a leather harness, which held five long wooden barbed spears against its back.
“I am Yazziz Yozkulu,” it said, in Koluwaian. “You have been delivered, as these others once were—” It wiggled its fingers at the islanders. “This place is the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings. Your appearance is very curious. Are you damaged?”
I couldn’t answer. With each word that emerged from the creature’s horrible maw, I seemed to recede from the world, until I felt that, rather than participating in it, I was merely looking on as a spectator.
“We are not injured,” Clarissa said. “Forest, you say? Where is it located?”