Gamori

Part 8

After eleven days we came upon the thing. It had no right to be in this world, yet there it was, laying on its side, half buried in a dune, eerily cloaked in the waxing evening shadows. In overall size and form, the titanic quadruped badly approximated an extinct earthshaker of aeons past. It still had most of its dark gray hide, pulled taut over its bones. If there were ever lips those were long gone, exposing yellowed fangs. Its head seemed much too heavy to have been supported by its neck, which was appreciably shorter than that of an earthshaker. Spindly legs ended in splayed, quintuple blunt claws. Forward-facing, empty eye sockets stared out at eternity.

How it still had skin and flesh, I could not say.

As we made camp, our cartographer, Umbreen, unrolled a map and marked an "X" on a blank spot.

The carcass seemed aware of our presence. I had a nightmare wherein it stirred, and began to get up from its resting place.

At sunrise, I awoke to much gagging and retching as a charnel mephitis wafted over the camp. Bursting out of my tent, I saw Jezrin, whose sanity was now very much in question, drying a gray hunk of skin and flesh over a fire. No one could dissuade her, so we could only light incense and hold cloths to our faces. She took the dried hunk and reduced it to a powder with a mortar and pestle. This powder was combined with various ingredients to make a potion.

When the awful miasma finally dissipated, I asked the madwoman one question.

"Why?!"

The former assassin was unsurprisingly cryptic. "You shall see eventually, as through a glass darkly, but you'll see clearer and sooner if you join Miss Wentletrap and I at sundown. There are methods of navigation not widely known."

As soon as Zjun's disc sank below the horizon, I approached Umbreen's luxurious tent, which bordered on being a regal pavilion. Thok stood at the entrance and nodded for me to go inside.

Umbreen seemed more spellcaster than mapmaker as she sat in an elaborately designed occult circle made of bone powder, consulting "The Fire Nymph Prophecies" by flameless lantern light.

Smoking her pipe in the corner, Jezrin warned, "Watch your step. She hates it when bumblers mess up her circles."

Turning the page of another book, a grimoire written in a script I did not know, Umbreen said words I had never heard.

After completing her inscrutable incantation, the cartographer addressed me without coldness for the first time, "The purpose has been accomplished, and now this is just so much mundane crushed bone. Mess it up as you like. Allow me to offer you some seaweed wine. Jezrin, pour some for our lovely guest while I wake up my compass."

When Jezrin got up, grumbling, I noticed several snuffed out black candles where she had been.

"Damned snooty Thoolians, thinking they can order anyone about. 'Fetch this.' 'Get me that jar of weird goo.' 'I can't be bothered to perform general tasks yet I'm too cheap to bring along enough slaves and servants to attend to my exhaustingly extensive demands.' Razzafrazzit, roggafriggit...."

"I gave them the night off, you petulant sluggard. They're no iquolo, but they passably perform their duties, so I rewarded them."

On a low table in the tent's center, Umbreen set a large bowl or basin made from shell and coral. She filled the bowl with saltwater, then retrieved a small viridian box, decorated with unfriendly denizens of the deep. Opening this, she took out something beige and damp, about the length of a middle finger.

Gently blowing on whatever it was, the whatever-it-was began to undulate and wriggle in her elegant hand. Umbreen soothingly spoke to it in an arcane language. It was horrendously ugly, simultaneously reminiscent of a grub, a tadpole, a mudskipper, and, gods help me, a human embryo.