With a callous chuckle, Cecil mimed shooting the infantrymen that walked alongside. Alfie contemplated saying something, but his position within the crew was precarious enough. Fortunately, Jack clipped the lad round the back of the head and Cecil stopped.
The jungle landscape outside passed as every landscape did, whether picturesque French countryside or shell-pocked hell, in a series of bumps, jolts, lurches and shocks, sending kaleidoscopic patterns of colour through the compartment. In the gloom of the tank, the only beautiful landscapes were the ones that passed by smoothly, without hindrance.
Alfie longed for a road. He began to feel faint from the mounting heat. The engine was running hot, hot enough to fry bacon. The sweat began to trickle off his forehead, making his eyebrows itch, before trickling into his eyes, which began to sting. He pulled a knuckle across each of his eyelids to wipe them clean.
The compartment of the tank was beginning to waver, and seemed to expand and contract as though he were looking at it in a funfair mirror. Feeling a familiar cold flush, he flung open the sponson hatch beside him and vomited. One of the Fusiliers walking behind the tank stepped neatly to one side as he came to the splatter of puke. He looked up and grinned at Alfie, who was too intent on his own body to care. He took advantage of the open hatch to take in some untainted air before wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coveralls and pulling the door shut, entombing himself in the iron hull again.
STILL UNDER THE influence of the euphoric mist with which they had sprayed him, Atkins felt quite content walking along beside his captors, as if he were on a Sunday afternoon walk, even though the pace was more akin to a forced march. His new companions were silent as they marched along beside him. He wasn’t chained or tied, but felt no desire to dive headlong into the undergrowth either side of him and escape. He was in more danger out there than he was here. He was more than happy to let the chatts lead him wherever it was they were going. He was beginning to feel hungry, however. He hoped there would be food soon.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked, politely.
He received no answer. He heard nothing but the deep bass groan and clicks of the jungle about them and the soft rhythmic rubbing click of chitinous armour as his captors walked on. But that was all right; they probably didn’t speak English. The scentirrii he’d encountered barely knew enough to communicate to urmen in anything but the most brutal of ways. The two chatts leading the procession, though, were taller, less bulky and more regal, similar to the chatt Atkins once saw carried in a litter in Khungarr. Like Chandar, each wore a length of silk, worn thrown over the shoulder and tied around their abdomens, allowing their vestigial mid limbs to poke through, though hung with many more tassles. These were their priest class, he assumed. They looked similar to Chandar, but it was a poor broken specimen, a reject, a factory second compared to them. They carried themselves with a sense of entitlement. Their carapaces were smoother and a weathered ivory in colour, like something that crawled under rocks and stones in the dark and damp and hadn’t seen the light in a long time. Atkins experienced a mild shudder of revulsion, but it passed as quickly as it came.
Atkins lost track of time as the chatts drove them on, down small tracks, switching this way and that, whether along their own or fortuitous animal tracks, he didn’t know, but there was a sense of purpose to the journey. He watched their antennae moving. They were following a scent trail.
There was a crack and an agitated chittering from behind, as one of the scentirrii guards hit Chandar on the back in order to speed it up. The crippled Khungarrii was having difficulty keeping up with the speed of the group. It was cowed and walked in a submissive stoop, trying not to antagonise them.
The effects of the euphoric mist began wearing off and Atkins’ thoughts slowly started to gain speed. “Where are they taking us?” he asked Chandar.
“Back to Zohtakarr? This One does not know. But this One fears,” the chatt replied, through gulps and belches of air. It looked at the two red-clad chatts leading them, the priest chatts with their headbands of metal. “If those Ones are what this One thinks they are, then this One fears we have strayed too far. We should not be here. We should not be here at all.”
“Why, where are we?”
Chandar looked at their guards and clicked its mandibles. “This One cannot say. This One must not say. It is Dhuyumirrii knowledge. Not for urmen.”
Atkins knew that there was only one thing Chandar was afraid of talking about, an idea that petrified it. But it was also a lodestone that would swing and point to Jeffries. Croatoan.
“I’ve told you, we’re not urmen.”
Chandar hissed, its mouth palps caught in the brief spurt of air like tiny windsocks. “So you say. It does not help your case. This One would advise you not to repeat it. Scentirrii might not speak urmanii, but Dhuyumirrii may. Say no more.”
Atkins couldn’t let it go. “Why shouldn’t we be here? What is it that we aren’t allowed to know?”
“If this One’s suspicions are correct, they are guarding something that does not exist. We should not have come here. No One is permitted. No urman is permitted.”
“Why?”
Chandar didn’t answer.
“Chandar?”
But the chatt had sunk back into silence and wouldn’t be drawn.
The trail they were following broke into a glade. There, among the scab trees, the chatts broke their march. Two of the scentirrii circled the glade, their antennae waving in a frenzied manner, as if they were looking for something. Another trail? Atkins didn’t know, but they seemed lost.
The Zohtakarrii chatts hissed and chattered in their own tongue and they sank down on their legs, not in submission, but tensed, ready, as if expecting an attack, gathering the three Dhuyumirrii behind them.
Atkins noticed again the loud bass sound that resounded through his chest cavity. It felt as if someone was thumping his chest — from the inside. It was very unsettling. Had this just started or had he not known or cared before now, thanks to the mist of the chatts?
Fine, white diaphanous shrouds hung from the surrounding scab trees like mouldering bridal veils. They moved and billowed in the slightest air movement. At first, Atkins thought them ghosts or spirits. Maybe even the evil spirit for which they had been searching. Passing close by one, they seemed to be only a collection of fine white filaments, like a fungus.
Beyond, the vegetation began to move and shake as though something large was lumbering through the undergrowth.
A scentirrii with a clay bioelectrical pack on its back and electric lance in its hands hissed and leapt, springing into the engulfing shadows beyond to challenge whatever lay there.
It was then, through the clearing fog of euphoria, that Atkins recalled the ‘devil’ of the urmen that the tank crew had been seeking, and wondered if the lurking menace ahead was the thing they sought.
Without warning, the scaly leaves of the scab trees were silhouetted against a brilliant blue-white electrical flash that died just as quickly as the high-pitched chatt squeal that pierced the leaden air.
Shreds of roiling, greasy black smoke slipped through the low bushes, easing across the ground. A chatt fired its electrical lance at it to no effect. They all fell back before the stygian cloud’s advance.
The fog lapped around the legs of several scentirrii and from within it things coiled around their feet. On gaining a grip on its prey, they recoiled rapidly into the jungle, like taut rubber suddenly released, dragging their victims away with them at tremendous speed, cracking them carelessly against tree trunks as they retreated.