Chainer kept his back to Kamahl and stared at his own smoking hands. The censer lay in the tall grass, the stalks around it smoldering. "If it ran into me, I'd be a smear." Chainer's voice sounded odd to his own ears, deeper and more hollow, as if he were speaking through a tube.
"No," Kamahl said. "I mean it ran into you, like a sword goes into a scabbard. It was bigger than you, but then you were bigger than it, and… Fiers's teeth."
Chainer had turned in the middle of Kamahl's sentence, and his friend immediately stopped talking. "What's wrong?" Chainer asked in his hollow voice.
"Your eyes," Kamahl said. "They're black." "Everybody's eyes are black, you-"
Kamahl held his sword horizontally in front of Chainer's face, so Chainer could see his own eyes reflected in the flat of the blade. "Your eyes are black, Chainer. Empty holes." Chainer stared at his reflection while he ran a finger around his eyebrows and cheekbones. His eyes were deep, solid black, like the void of a bottomless pit. Chainer laughed, and the sound was more pleasant arid musical than he had ever noticed before.
"I just swallowed a gargadon whole." Chainer tore his gaze away from the blade and looked at Kamahl. "It could take a while to digest."
Kamahl sheathed his sword. "I don't like it. Is this going to happen every time you catch something?"
Chainer held his metal hand in front of his face, concentrated, and slowly curled the hand into a fist. When he looked up again, his eyes were normal.
"Not if I learn to control it." Chainer lowered his hand and looked around the empty glen, breathing deeply and evenly. Kamahl nudged him.
"You okay?"
"I feel great." Chainer took one last deep breath, then nudged Kamahl back. "Come on. If there's gargadons here, imagine what we're going to find in the really deep woods."
"I can't," Kamahl said. "That's sort of what worries me."
The second day of hunting started with scorpions in their bedrolls. Chainer took his into dementia space, and Kamahl crushed his beneath a heavy boot. The further they went into the Krosan forest, the more creatures they encountered. The more creatures they encountered, the more they captured.
Chainer picked up a coal-bellied razorback near a rocky ridge, and then killed a second for its meat. Kamahl cooked his share immediately. In a marshy riverbed, Chainer took on a huge snapping turtle, a small, blue, poisonous frog, and a six-foot freshwater alligator. A deadfall yielded a sharp-clawed badger, a three-foot beetle that emitted clouds of choking spray, and a two-hundred-pound wildcat. But it was the snakes that interested Chainer most.
This section of Otaria was thick with both venom hunters and constrictors-from the small but lethal jade adder to the medium-sized razorback rattler to the enormous rock python that could swallow a man whole. Chainer's face lit up every time he saw one, and he abandoned less interesting prey the moment he spotted a forked tongue. When Kamahl asked him about it, Chainer said he admired their speed and their grace, their aim and their muscular control. He felt some kind of kinship for the sleek reptiles, and Kamahl had seen Chainer fight often enough to know that it wasn't just a flight of fancy. Like the snakes, Chainer often waited until his prey was within range, then struck so quickly that the contest was over before his victim realized it had begun.
Chainer took one of each type of snake into dementia space. The rest he killed and shared with Kamahl. Kamahl wasn't sure what his friend was doing with the half-dozen rattles he had taken from his kills, but he seemed almost reverent about preserving them in his satchel, so Kamahl left him to it. There was much he didn't understand about this trip, but at least Chainer wasn't so intensely morose anymore.
The Cabalist was sitting against a fallen tree, counting the rattles in his collection. Kamahl sniffed the air, and for the fiftieth time felt that something was going wrong. "We're not very deep in, are we?"
"No," Chainer continued to count, transferring the rattles from his hand to a neat line he had arranged on the ground beside him. "Don't you think it's odd that we're seeing so many creatures this far out?"
"It's odd," Chainer agreed, "but not remarkable." "But there are tribes in the forest," Kamahl said. "Druids and Nantuko. We should have seen more of them and less of the things we've been hunting."
"Maybe they heard we were coming and fled," Chainer said. He began to put his rattles back into his satchel.
"That gargadon wasn't fleeing. It was milling around, lost, as if it had just been put there."
Chainer cinched up his satchel. "So?" "So who put it there? And why?"
Chainer stood up. "You're never happy, are you? Either there are too many creatures or not enough. Things are either too close to the edge of the woods or too far in. Don't get all anxious on me now, Kamahl. We'll start seeing the really big stuff soon, and I'll need you at your best."
"I'm always at my best," Kamahl said. "And when you say big, do you mean bigger than a gargadon?"
"I mean bigger than a wildcat or a crocodile. Centaurs and wurms. Maybe even a pack of monkeys." The eager look in Chainer's eye did nothing to address Kamahl's concerns. "I still say this feels wrong. It feels like a trap." "It feels like a trap because you barbarians are constantly pouncing on each other. If I got jumped every time I went to the privy, I'd see traps everywhere, too." He threw a handful of dirt on the embers of their campfire. "Come on. We've got one more day to get to the heart of Krosan. If we don't see any leaf-eaters or dirt-farmers by then, we'll ask the First about it when we get back."
Later that afternoon, they heard more rumbling in the distance, as another elephantine creature stomped through the forest.
"Could be another gargadon," Chainer said. "Which we already have. Even if we were able to kill this one, we don't have time to butcher and eat it."
"So we're letting it go?"
"Hells no. Not until I see what it is." Chainer smelled something familiar, and his heart began to quicken. Kuberr, he thought, smile on me now. They jogged for a while, until they came across the thing's tracks in the loose dirt and mulch that covered the forest floor. The prints were deep, but narrow, as if the creature were walking on the balls of its feet. There were extra tracks scattered alongside the regularly spaced ones where the creature had either gone down on all fours like a bear or propelled itself forward with its arms like an ape. Chainer followed the tracks as he ran, scanning ahead to make sure of his footing and behind to make sure Kamahl was keeping up. From around a thick copse of trees in the distance, Chainer heard a terrifying but familiar roar that made the blood pound in his ears.
"It's a grendelkin," Chainer said. He stood still, staring at the copse of trees. As Kamahl came up behind him, Chainer said, "This one's for Skellum. Ready?"
Before Kamahl could answer, the rampant grendelkin burst through the trees. It was even bigger than the one Chainer had seen in the alley outside Roup's, and this one's legs were whole and healthy. With a tree in each massive paw, the grendelkin spied Chainer and Kamahl and roared a challenge. It threw one tree at them, then another, missing by a wide margin but impressing them nonetheless. It thumped its chest and then the ground.
Chainer handed the loaded censer to Kamahl, and with a snap of his fingers, the barbarian ignited it. He tossed it back to Chainer, who lashed a chain into it as it flew. He immediately began spinning it around his head, spreading Dragon's Blood smoke all around them. Kamahl readied a throwing axe.
Then a strong gust of wind blew out of the copse, carrying a wave of greenish-yellow pollen. Chainer was breathing shallow and was partially protected by the smoke from his censer, but Kamahl took in a huge lungful of the pollen and immediately doubled over in a fit of uncontrollable coughing.