When he reached the trunk where the golden monkey had disappeared, Harp had a harder time climbing up the trunk, but he shimmied up and poked his head unceremoniously through the leaves. In front of him was a natural floor formed by a tight mat of branches interwoven as they sought the sun and tangled on the roots of canopy ferns. Holding onto a vine, Harp jumped up and down on the floor to see if it would break under his weight. But jumping on it did nothing but sway the branches and disturb a few birds.
The natural platform was surrounded on all sides by leaves, and on one edge was a white flower the size of a boulder. With the palm of his hand, Harp scooped up some of the water that had collected in the petals and refilled his flask. The sky had dimmed from blue to purple. As for places to camp in the jungle, the leafy platform was more comfortable than they deserved.
As he made his way back to collect his friends, Harp could see a band of blue river cascading down from the inland mountains. Based on Avalor’s information, he knew that the colony was less than half a mile from the river and only a mile inland from the cove. From his vantage point, Harp had a sense of where the colony should be. They must have taken the wrong path out of the grove. After a night’s rest they would make their way to the river and head up the northern bank. The colony should be easy to find from there.
“You got lucky,” Boult said, when he saw the treetop hideaway that Harp had found for them.
“Nah, I’m just smarter than you.”
“What did you do? Follow a monkey?”
“Shut it, dwarf,” Harp said. “You would have just shot it. And then where would we be?”
“Eating dinner,” Boult replied.
In the gathering twilight, they ate a quick meal of hard bread and dried meat. No one talked much as they stretched out to sleep on the springy branches. As the moon rose above them, none were prepared for what the jungle became after darkness fell. It was the noisiest night any of them had ever experienced. It seemed as if every creature in the jungle was agitated, angry, or just generally homicidal. Harp wasn’t sure about the other men, but every time he dozed off, a sound of crashing, hissing, or gnashing startled him awake. It happened so many times, it was almost amusing, except for the fear he felt when the treetop shook under the heavy footsteps of some night wanderer who prowled the jungle below.
At some point in the night, Harp dozed off and rolled on his side. Awakened by a growling noise that sounded inches away from his ear, he opened his eyes. Through the gaps in the branches under him, he could see a black shadow lumbering across the forest floor below. In the faint light from the moon, the creature looked like it was tall enough to reach up and grab him through the canopy if it wanted to. Ambling between the buttress roots, it suddenly stopped and took several raspy breaths, as if it were tasting the air. The dark shape twisted, and Harp could see two yellow eyes glowing through the gloom. Still half-asleep, Harp reassured himself that getting eaten by a forest beast wasn’t the worst way to go.
“Put me out of my misery,” he whispered to the monstrosity below him. “I haven’t had the guts to do it myself.”
But the monster seemed to lose interest and moved into the shadows. The way it vanished from sight made Harp wonder if it had been more spirit than flesh. In the last moment before dawn, the din of the jungle finally ceased. The nighttime chaos was banished with the dawning of the sun, and a serene quiet accompanied the first rays of morning light. Finally, Harp dropped off to sleep.
And then the screaming began. Harp jerked awake, as the high-pitched wails rang across the jungle, reverberated against the mountains, and echoed back across the valleys. A call of feral pain, it was loud enough to leave a ringing in his ears and primal enough to make his blood run cold. He heard the splintering of wood as something massive crashed through the undergrowth, followed by a thud that rattled the ground and jostled the branches under them.
“What is that?” Verran asked, his eyes wide and fearful. “What makes the ground shake like that?”
“Let’s get out of the tree before we’re tossed out,” Harp said. They hurriedly gathered their things and made their way back to solid ground.
They left the tree crown and climbed back onto the rocky plateau. As they climbed to it, two unseen adversaries faced off somewhere in the direction of the river. They could hear the sounds of ripping skin, snarls and gnashing, and giant bodies flattening the landscape as they fought.
“What’s that sound?” Verran asked. “Is it coming toward us?”
“Verran!” Boult snapped. “Why do you keep asking us? Am I not standing beside you? Do you see a spyglass in my hand?”
“You don’t need to bite his head off, Boult,” Harp chastised him. “What, a little rumble in the jungle makes you crabby before your morning cup of tea?”
“If I had a cup of tea in front of me, I wouldn’t be in the stupid jungle,” Boult shot back just as the sound of a bone snapping echoed across the clearing. As the thrashing between the beasts intensified, the birds in the trees screeched a harsh cacophony of warning calls. Kitto covered his ears as an unnatural screech of pain pierced the air. Then something very large fell very hard, shaking the ground again, and it was quiet.
“Did it die …” Verran started to ask, but he caught Boult’s glare and shut his mouth.
Harp motioned for the others to follow him and scrambled through the undergrowth and down a rocky slope in the direction of the river that he’d seen the night before. As they neared the river, the ground leveled out, and he could hear the rushing of water. They came out of the trees at the edge of a small valley and the place where one of the monsters had met its end in the morning’s battle. A gargantuan lizard, easily twenty-five feet long from the tip of its spiked tail to the front of its fanged maw, was sprawled across the ground. Its pebbly yellow skin had black stripes branching out from its spine, and given its muscular haunches and tiny front legs, it must have walked on its hind legs.
“If that’s not at the top of the food chain, what is?” Harp said as they walked down the slope to the corpse of the monster. The monsters had felled several of the large trees that ringed the valley, and as Harp crawled over one of the massive trunks, he saw claw marks slashed deep across the bark. When they reached the corpse, they stopped and stared in wonder at the massive creature splayed out in the crushed and bloodied underbrush.
“I thought they were nightmares,” Kitto said quietly.
“What were, Kitto?” Harp asked.
“The monsters I saw last night,” Kitto told him.
“No, I saw them too,” Harp said as he circled around the lizard. Bony frills stuck out around the base of its skull, which was twisted sideways on its neck. Gaping wounds bisected the lizard’s back, and thick blood still oozed out of the claw marks, although the creature was decidedly dead.
Verran was standing near the lizard’s head with a thoughtful look on his face and his head cocked as he inspected the lizard’s blank yellow eyes. Each was bigger than a man’s head and had a dark, vertical pupil that reminded Harp of a snake’s. In death, a thick, cloudy shroud covered the eyes, and buzzing insects were amassing along their edges.
“Whatever killed it had to be bigger,” Verran said. “Look at the way the neck is snapped.”
“And why didn’t it stay to eat it?” Boult asked, swiping an insect away from his face. Carrion bugs were moving into the sticky gashes and buzzing over the bloody ground.
“It could have been a purple worm,” Verran suggested. He sounded almost excited at the idea of seeing monsters he had only heard about. “Or maybe a basilisk. Did you know it can petrify you?”
“I know that I don’t want to spend another night in the jungle,” Boult said. “Let’s get going.”