interrupted me with the exclamation, “Ah! They’re returning already! The hunt was successful!”
I could see no sign of the warriors. “You can hear them?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
Clarissa furrowed her brow. “It’s—I just—I feel them, Aiden.”
Before I could probe this statement further, Spearjab’s party reappeared, carrying between them an ovoid-shaped creature from which multiple flexible appendages extended. When they reached the side of the Ptall’kor, they squatted down and set to work ripping the thing’s skin away from the white flesh beneath. They then slit it open and scooped out the guts. As I watched this, I felt cold fingers gripping my spine, for it was impossible not to think of the corpse of Polly Nichols with intestines exposed, which, of course, led me again to a contemplation of my hallucination and the monstrousness I suspected was lurking in the shadowy regions of my soul.
The Quee-tan was sliced up, and steaks, like dense crabmeat, were distributed.
With the exception of our meal in the Valley of Reflections, we had thus far subsisted only on berries, nuts, and fruits. The prospect of flesh, in light of my previous experience, was not one I welcomed. I turned to Kata and said, “I’m hungry but I cannot eat this if it will affect me like the Yarkeen.”
“It won’t,” she answered. “This is not sacred. It will fill your belly but nothing more. Enjoy it—Quee’tan meat has become a very rare treat.”
So, cautiously, I tucked into the raw flesh. It was delicious.
After we ate, the entire party slept, and it must have been for a considerable time, for when we were awoken, the slow-moving suns were noticeably higher in the sky.
It was the yodelling of animals that brought us to consciousness. A pack of around twenty glossy green creatures with ribbed exoskeletons, bulbous heads, and eight spidery limbs apiece were passing close by. They were leaping like gazelles, clicking the mandibles that extended from their pointed faces, and emitting wolfish yips, yaps, and yowls.
“They are Tiskeen,” Mademoiselle Clattersmash told us. “They are harmless at the moment.”
We embarked upon what proved to be the final leg of our long voyage.
As the Ptall’kor hauled itself over the jungle and across the cultivated fields, the uncertainty and fear I felt concerning our destination and eventual fate were kept at bay by my delight at witnessing Clarissa’s transformation. Again and again, she stretched and danced and cavorted, sometimes coming perilously close to the edge of the living platform, and evidently causing much bemusement among the Aristocrats.
“I say! What in the name of the Saviour is she up to?” Colonel Spearjab asked me.
I regarded him, still astounded to hear the English language coming from his repulsive vertical mouth. “She’s simply enjoying the sensation of healthy limbs,” I said. “For most of her life she has been malformed and suffering pain.”
“The sensation of healthy limbs,” Spearjab echoed. He suddenly straightened his four legs, which caused him to almost double in height, and threw out his long arms, waggling his fingers. The outer lips of his mouth peeled open and the inner beak pushed outward.
“Gaaaah!” he cried out, then sank back down and said, “My goodness, that’s very nice indeed! I shall recommend it to my colleagues. Hey? What? Harrumph!”
He scuttled away, leaving me to ponder the fact that I comprehended nothing—nothing!—of this world called Ptallaya and its demented inhabitants.
Throughout the remainder of the journey, Spearjab and the Aristocrats occasionally burst into spontaneous bouts of stretching and dancing, looking so utterly ludicrous that I couldn’t help but laugh. Between that and Clarissa’s obvious happiness, I might almost say that it was an enjoyable period, though whatever pleasure I felt most definitely was not shared by the Koluwaians. For some unaccountable reason, Kata and her group had become rather morose and silent, and, if anything, their mood blackened the nearer we got to Yatsillat.
I asked her what was wrong.
“It is all changing,” she said. “The new ways are not our ways. The new language is not our language. We are afraid these things will be difficult to learn before we are released. How can we serve efficiently when we don’t understand anything?”
“I’m the one who doesn’t understand. Why are things changing, Kata?”
Her deep brown eyes slid away from me. I followed her gaze and saw she was looking at Clarissa.
“Because of her.”
“Clarissa? What has Clarissa got to do with it? She knows no more of this world than I.”
“It is not what she knows of this world. It is what this world knows