What else indeed? Clay knew a few things about trying to escape your past. He was remembering the look on Raff Lackey’s face as the snake in his fist had pumped poison into his veins.
I’ll be waiting for ya, Cooper, the old merc had told him, along with all the rest. Whatever vengeance Raff’s ghost had planned, it would be standing at the rear of a very long and disgruntled line. Just now, though, he was imagining Sabbatha being greeted in death by her own host of accusing wraiths, the first of which would be three ruthless, empty-eyed children …
“You seem nice enough to me,” he said after a while.
Larkspur twitched her broken wing in what Clay recognised as a shrug. “Yeah, well, I suppose that’s what matters now. Taino said my memories might never fully return, or they might come back little by little, or else suddenly, all at once.”
Broadly ambiguous prognoses were exactly the reason Clay didn’t put much faith in doctors—witchdoctors in particular. In this case he hoped the former supposition was accurate: that the woman who had glared so hatefully at him in Conthas and then dive-bombed them during a lightning storm was gone for good. He couldn’t exactly tell her that, however, and so was about to offer something clichéd and conciliatory when he heard the sound of a footfall behind him.
Glancing over his shoulder, Clay was dismayed to find the tip of a sharpened stone spear hovering scant inches from his nose. A face floated in the gloom behind it, skeleton-pale, and a word wriggled into his mind like a worm in an apple’s rotted core.
The word was cannibal.
The cannibal’s name, it turned out, was Jeremy. His grasp of the common tongue was limited, but he and Moog were able to communicate through a combination of frantic gestures and words repeated very loudly and very slowly.
“He’s actually quite a nice fellow,” the wizard told them, as Jeremy and Taino wandered off among the tall plants in the yard. The troll could understand the tribesman’s guttural pidgin, and they had evidently met each other before. “He’s a forager from the Boneface Clan. Hence the skull painted on his face, I guess. Their village is very close to here, he says.”
Matrick whistled quietly. “Good thing we didn’t land there. You’d have been lucky to find our bones. And maybe L—” he caught himself before uttering the name Larkspur “—maybe Sabbatha’s wings.”
“I didn’t even know cannibals were a real thing,” she admitted. “Do they actually eat people?”
“They do, yes,” Moog told her. “Though they aren’t fussy about it. They’ll eat chicken, beef, pork—anything that bleeds, really. Often they’ll just skirmish with neighbouring clans and eat whoever is unlucky enough to die.”
“That’s mad,” said Larkspur.
Moog shrugged. “Perhaps, but in Grandual we kill each other all the time, for all sorts of stupid reasons. The Ferals, as we call them, use the bones of the dead for tools, the teeth and ears for jewellery, the skin for tents and clothing, and eat pretty much everything else, including the eyeballs. It’s all very efficient, if you ask me.”
Matrick put his arm around the wizard’s slim shoulders. “See, now that’s mad.”
“They don’t eat vegetables, or fruit,” the wizard continued. “They deem plucking your food off a tree as cowardly. Consequently, a great many of them have scurvy.”
Larkspur looked bewildered. “Scurvy? Is it contagious?”
“Gods, no,” said Moog. “But I wouldn’t go kissing one if I were you. Eating people gives you bloody rotten breath, as you might imagine.”
She did imagine, and made a disgusted face that Clay, despite himself, found utterly adorable.
“So what is he doing here?” asked Gabriel.
Moog smoothed the silky length of his beard against the front of his robe. “Their chieftain is very sick, apparently. Jeremy was sent to ask Taino for a cure.”
“Well, he’s the man to see,” said Matrick. “That mudweed of his is magic, like he said. All my bruises disappeared, all my cuts scabbed up, and my arm feels good as new.”
“My wing feels better,” Larkspur mentioned. “Not great, but better. Can someone remind me why I was flying in a thunderstorm again?”
“We should get moving,” said Gabriel, ignoring her question. “We’ve wasted enough time already. I still think we should have walked through the night. We’d be back in the sky by now.”
Jeremy and Taino returned from their stroll. Besides the skull painted on his face, the cannibal’s whole body was riddled with scars and covered with a chalky green powder that served both as camouflage and to make his flesh taste terrible if he fell in battle with the enemy. He used his spear like a walking stick and carried a bundle of mudweed stalks in a sling on his back.
Taino gave them each a gangly hug farewell. “Walk gud, y’ear?”
“We hear,” said Matrick.
Jeremy, who was staring at Larkspur with what Clay hoped was lustful (as opposed to literal) hunger, nearly jumped out of his skin when Moog began yelling in his face. “US GOING,” the wizard told him, accompanying the words with elaborate hand-motions. “BACK TO SHIP. NICE MEETING YOU. GOOD LUCK CURING CHIEF.”
The Feral responded in his own incomprehensible language. “KI TOBARA. IK OOKIBAN DONO GARUK.”
“He said he will come with us part of the way,” Moog translated—unnecessarily, since Jeremy had pointed at them and used his fingers to indicate walking.
“IKKI DOOKA PUBARU. KOO PASSA PIKAPA.”
“Also, we’re invited to the Boneface village for lunch.”
“Lunch with cannibals?” scoffed Matrick. “Over my dead body.”
Clay clapped him on the shoulder as they headed out. “I think that’s the general idea,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-four
Hope in Flames
They parted ways with Jeremy an hour later. If the cannibal was worried about being in the forest by himself, he showed no sign of it whatsoever and waved merrily as he set off southward.
The five members of Saga, with Larkspur in tow, backtracked the way Gabriel and Moog had come yesterday, so that Clay was treated to a whole new host of the Heartwyld’s numberless horrors. The first of these was a maze of winding gullies spanned by webs inhabited by spiders the size of dogs.
They ran into an ettercap at a fork in the path. The creature, which looked something like a scrawny old man with bulbous black eyes, snapping mandibles, a distended belly, and a forest of long, quivering spines on his bent back, had chased something into a hollowed log and was desperately trying to ferret it out one side or the other.
It froze in a crouch at their approach, and appeared ready to attack or flee should the opportunity for either arise.
“Do you understand me?” Gabriel asked it.
The ettercap nodded, regarding him warily with those glossy black eyes. Its fingers and toes were unnaturally long, Clay noted, and very sharply pointed.
“Which of these paths will take us west?”
The creature tilted its head, then slowly raised one of its wiry arms and pointed to the way behind it.
“Thanks,” said Gabriel, and took off at a stride in the opposite direction.
Ettercaps had a reputation for lying, and a habit of hissing right before they attacked, which this one did as it lunged at Gabriel, grasping with those long, sharp, spindly fingers.
Clay had been waiting for it; the fingers scrabbled harmlessly against Blackheart’s face, and Ganelon, who had also been expecting treachery, chopped the wretched thing in half with his axe.
Once the ettercap stopped thrashing, its quarry scurried out of the log. It was white-furred and red-eyed, and it looked to Clay like a weasel with eight legs and heads on either end of its body. He’d seen one just like it in a cage in Moog’s tower, Clay remembered. Both its heads squealed angrily at them before the thing ran off at a lope.