A Perilous Pest

Chapter Two

It wasn't long before the trio came to a fork in the path. Fürgůïn made a show of checking which side of the trees the moss was growing on,* searching for 'tell-tale spores' and consulting the undersides of various toadstools. Next, he pulled some crumpled papers from a fold deep within his cloak. The renling shaded his eyes, pointed at the angle of the light piercing the leaf canopy and looked back at the papers.

Grimmbros looked unconvinced when the decision was taken to go left but acquiesced with an unconcerned shrug. A little further through the carpet of blooms and tangles of twigs and lichens, there was another path. The renling frowned, but this time the map reading and sign searching were dispensed with a bit more rapidly and less thoroughly and the group turned right. Subsequent choices were increasingly brief and casual with only a token glance at pocket or bark until it was obvious that Fürgůïn had no tangible orientation skills and nobody really had the faintest clue of the way to go.

* This was a skill that the renling had learned from Razzles, since the knohm had explained to him once that you could always tell where a knohm came from by noting which side his beard was growing on. Knohm beards didn't grow well in the shade and so a knohm with a northerly beard was most likely from somewhere south of his current location. Therefore if you followed a knohm he would lead you home.

"Why ever did that thing just fall right out of the sky?" Fürgůïn asked as he gave up tracking for a while and sat chewing on a toadstool. "Do you think someone knew we would be there? And what about when you came back and we kept changing places? That was really weird, and then that beest turned up!"

"Yeah, I'd been thinking about that. I'm not a great believer in coincidences. Something drew it to us. If we catch it and get our device back, maybe we can find out." Grimm was moving again.
"Our device? Wait a minute, we haven't decided whose it is." The renling jumped up and scampered behind. "It was Razzles who was..." he stopped, swatting at a flying insect, not yet ready to tell Grimm of their quest. Grimm, though, was no longer listening.
"Oooh, will you look at that!" he said in a hushed, clearly awed tone.

"Look at what?" puzzled Fürgůïn, eyeing the rocks and the small lake that lay in a clearing ahead of them. He scanned the murky green water and the whispering reeds swaying in clusters at the water's edge dotted with swarming mosquitoes. The big urgh-bane stood motionless, seemingly rooted to the spot. Beaming sunlight streaked the scene and birdsong echoed from tree to tree. It was a pleasant spot, yet the elbh and the renling wondered what it was about this pool of green water between the trees, that so enraptured the urgh-bane.

None of them, the urgh-bane included, had noticed, however, the one small, bright-red mosquito that had alighted on Grimmbros' neck. This one did not buzz. Its tiny feet had spread its minuscule load over the urgh-bane's skin without betraying its presence; the little creature carefully stepped its way into the urgh-bane's ear canal, painstakingly avoiding the impressive stalactites and stalagmites of wax until it reached a clear, soft spot, then it subtly, inserted its thread-like proboscis into the urgh-bane's flesh: the infection was almost immediate.

"It's beautiful!" Grimmbros breathed, staring at the water, its ripples meandering hypnotically.
"It's what now?" the renling asked, struggling to see what Grimm saw.
"Beautiful." Grimm paced down to the water's edge, off-loaded the elbh and lightly hopped onto a rock projecting from the water, then on to another and then with a final broad stride he sat down on a large boulder surrounded by water about fifteen feet out from the bank.
"What is?" Fürgůïn yelled. But Grimm didn't look inclined to answer, or to move any time soon.

The elbh limped off to sit on a rock of his own, back in the grass, whilst Fürgůïn watched helplessly. He began to feel uneasy in the face of this turn in Grimmbros' behaviour; he certainly had no inkling as to the influence of the mosquito to which the urgh-bane was now, subconsciously subjected.
"Let's stop here for the night," Grimm called back over his shoulder without turning his head.