Patterns in the Dark (Dragon Blood Book 4) (12 page)

Not everyone is so special.

Tolemek grunted and raised his hand higher.

“Jaxi says that she might be willing to lighten our loads,” Sardelle said. “For those who recognize and are properly appreciative of her virtues.”

With great reluctance, Tolemek lowered his hand. He had his microscope case, as well as a box full of testing equipment. Carrying all of that, along with his share of food and water, would be a daunting load.

Good lad.

“I’m not real sure what to think about talking swords, but I’ll take the lead. This wilderness is a mite more crowded than my woods back home, but I’m not afraid of it. Much. I’m a brave feller.” Duck waved his machete overhead, looked around, and said, “Anyone seen a trail?”

“I think you just volunteered to make it, brave feller,” Zirkander said. “The plants probably grow so fast that trails get swallowed up in a few days. It’s a good thing you’re young, strong, and bold.”

“Not quite sure about his boldness after that incident with the leech,” Cas murmured.

Duck glowered at her. “We’ll see how bold you are when you’re the one being plucked instead of the one doing the plucking.”

“I’m not quite sure what that meant,” Zirkander said, “but I don’t want to know, either.”

“Nope. Some details shouldn’t be shared with one’s commanding officer.” Duck pushed aside some thick leaves, cut through a vine, and climbed over a log, choosing a route that would very slowly take them toward Mount Demise.

The jaguar roared one more time. Tolemek didn’t know if it was a farewell roar or an I’ll-see-you-people-tonight-for-dinner roar.

Chapter 6

A distant jangle woke Cas from a light sleep, and she sat upright, cracking her head on a branch before she remembered where she was. She crawled out from under the leafy tree “skirt” the entire group had collapsed under the night before. It had been pouring, and Cas was amazed that the thin tarp they had laid on the muddy ground to keep them and their gear dry had worked. As soon as she slipped out from underneath the branches, a river of rain funneling off a broad leaf splashed her in the face, and she decided that more than the tarp might have been keeping them dry. Perhaps Sardelle or her sword had provided some protection.

She squinted into the gloom around the campsite, searching for whoever was on guard. She thought morning might be approaching, but it wasn’t much brighter than it had been during her shift in the middle of the night, so she wasn’t positive.

“I heard it,” came Zirkander’s soft voice from the shadows of a tree.

“My alarm?”

“Either that or the monkeys found a few tin cans to practice their drumming on.”

“Maybe Duck and I should go back and have a look.” Even as she made the suggestion, she hoped Zirkander didn’t take her up on it. She wasn’t afraid of the predators—animal and otherwise—but the thought of backtracking wearied her. It had taken them four hours the afternoon before to slog this far; it was depressing to think that they were still close enough to hear her trap go off. Granted, she had designed it to be loud, but she feared they had only come about a mile, even if they had traveled four times as far on foot, circling gullies and ravines, not to mention impenetrable stands of cane plants that grew in dense clumps all through the area.

“I don’t want to split up the group,” Zirkander said.

Snarling yips arose nearby, followed by a yelp of pain.

“We’ll need to move soon, anyway,” he added. “Duck shot something on his shift, and it died over there. It’s drawing scavengers, large scavengers by the sound of it.”

“I heard.” In the middle of the night, the gunshot had woken her, making her bolt upright. That had been the
first
time she bonked her head on a branch. Duck had assured everyone that he had taken care of it, and the camp had gone back to sleep, but Cas had only dozed for most of the night.

“Maybe we can find a place to set a trap for our pursuer,” Cas said. “With us breaking the trail, he’ll likely reach us today.”

“
Pursuers
.”

“Sir?” Cas thought of the single man from the dirigible.

“Jaxi says there are several people back there, several armed people.”

“Jaxi? It—she, uh, talks to you too?” In the hopes of finding shelter from the rain, Cas pressed her back to the smooth bark of the tree next to Zirkander—the thick bole was wide enough that the entire group could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder around it and maybe the porters too, if they had still been there. If anything, this new position was damper, with rain running down the tree’s bark in sheets. “Sir, aren’t you getting soaked?”

“I haven’t been dry since we got off that raft, so I don’t think it matters at this point. Yes, Jaxi talks to me. And yes, you’d better call her a she if you don’t want to irk her.”

“What happens if you irk her?”

“At the least, you probably won’t experience the dry zone that everyone else slept in last night.”

Cas had nothing to say to that. She would have liked to do some quick maintenance on her rifle, but if the powder inside the bullets wasn’t already damp, she didn’t want to risk causing it to become so. Between the rain and the muggy warmth, the air was as humid as soup.

“There are people out there,” Zirkander said softly.

“Out there? In the trees?” Cas hadn’t seen anything moving, but the foliage dropped visibility to a few meters in any given direction, if that.

“Literally, yes.” He shifted, fishing something out of his pocket. Was that his lucky dragon figurine? For a moment, he seemed like he might say more, but colonels didn’t confide in lieutenants. Apparently, they confided in sentient swords instead. He walked over to the tarp and tapped the boots sticking out of the shelter with his own boot. “Wake up, troops. We may have company coming.”

The squawks and chirps of the jungle stopped abruptly. Cas shifted uneasily, keeping her back to the tree. What predator did those animals sense that had alarmed them into silence? Neither carnivorous octopuses nor yipping coyotes—or whatever that was tearing into the animal Duck had shot—had caused a stilling of the ambient noises before. Soon, only the sound of the pattering rain filtering down from the canopy remained.

A faint
zzzippt
came from the trees. Something thudded into the bark above Cas’s head. An arrow.

She returned fire, almost on instinct. She couldn’t see her attacker, but she judged the angle of the arrow and made a guess as to its point of origin. A scream erupted from the jungle, not a scream of pain, but a high-pitched
yi-yi-yi-aye-yi
that sounded human, but barely.

Her back still to the tree, Cas readied another round. She considered ducking beneath the skirt of leaves they had slept under, but the foliage wouldn’t stop arrows. Besides, Sardelle, Tolemek, and Duck were in the middle of scrambling out from under the trees.

Brilliant light appeared over their heads, a miniature sun pushing back the gloom of the jungle and stealing the shadows from the trees. Sardelle crouched beneath it, her sword in hand. Another arrow sped out of the trees, this time toward her. She cleaved it in half before it could strike her.

Cas fired back in the direction of the attacker, though she had yet to see anyone out there. Leaves rustled, and twigs snapped, the sounds coming from numerous spots around their tiny camp.

“Ridge,” Sardelle said, “do you want a shield around us, or do you want to be able to fire back?”

Another high-pitched scream erupted, this time from less than twenty feet behind Cas’s tree.

“Nobody asked for your opinion,” Zirkander grumbled, then replied, “Shield us,” to Sardelle. “Cas, Duck, don’t fire.”

“Wasn’t going to, sir,” Duck said. “Can’t see through these trees enough to spit and hit the ground. Hate to waste my rounds too.”

Cas’s cheeks warmed. She shouldn’t be wasting ammunition, either. They didn’t have an unlimited supply. But she was used to her instinct-driven shots working much of the time.

More arrows shot out of the jungle, all zooming toward Sardelle’s light, but they bounced off an invisible barrier before striking it. Cas lowered her rifle, lest she be tempted to shoot. The last thing she wanted was for some bullet to ricochet off the shield and hit one of them.

Tolemek strode to her side, putting his back to the tree next to her. “What are we dealing with?”

Cas plucked the arrow out of the tree and held it up to his face.

“So not the jaguar, eh? I thought that cat was considering me for dinner.”

“Maybe he was jealous that your mane is bigger and fluffier than his.”

“You’re thinking of lions,” Tolemek said. “And my mane isn’t fluffy.”

“No argument with big?”

Tolemek pushed his ropes of hair away from his face and glowered at her. “Any chance our ammo is dry enough to use? I tipped my pistol upside down earlier, and river water and bits of octopus dripped out of the barrel.” He dug the weapon out of his holster.

“Should be fine. Those are Iskandian bullets.”

“I’ll ignore the implication that Cofah bullets are inferior.”

“Good.” Cas smiled and bumped her shoulder against his arm.

“Can you keep that around us while we travel?” Zirkander waved to indicate Sardelle’s barrier. “In case we need to—”

A scream burst out from the branches overhead, and a figure leaped down toward them, arms and legs outstretched, bone daggers gripped in both hands. Cas jerked her rifle up and almost fired before remembering the shield. She released the trigger a split second before the man landed. He thudded chest first onto the invisible barrier, bounced back up a couple of feet, then dropped down again, appearing to hang suspended, flat on his bare stomach, ten feet above the ground.

“That’s bizarre,” Duck said.

The man must not have been injured, because he jumped to his feet, the pads of his moccasins visible from Cas’s spot almost directly under him. He didn’t wear a shirt, but he fortunately wore a breechclout that kept his nether regions from displaying themselves. Black and ochre paint swirled across his body in waves and circles that appeared more random than significant. He glowered down at the team, jumping a few times to test the barrier, then he screamed again, a long undulating cry that hurt Cas’s ears. Other cries came from the surrounding trees, and she felt like a fighter in some old-fashioned gladiatorial event, part of a show to entertain the elite. Or in this case, the crazy.

“There’s another one.” Zirkander pointed toward a high branch a few trees away.

A second man crouched up there. As soon as Zirkander pointed at him, he leaped from his perch. He landed on the barrier a few feet away from the first man, dropped to his knees, and tried to drive a dagger into the barrier. Cas had assumed they were allies—they wore the same skimpy clothing and were painted in similar manners—but the first man saw the second, pointed with his daggers, and launched himself at the newcomer. They smashed together, grasping and slashing, then tumbled off the rounded edge of Sardelle’s barrier, leaving a smear of blood hanging in the air. Leaves shook and rattled, raindrops flying from them as the men wrestled and thrashed around the edge of the barrier.

“I’m beginning to see why tourism isn’t a big industry here,” Zirkander said. “This jungle is…”

“Bizarre, sir,” Duck said. “Most certainly bizarre.”

A great cat roared somewhere nearby. The jaguar from earlier? Even with Sardelle’s light brightening their surroundings, the plants were still too dense to see far.

Whatever it was, the roar caused the thrashing to halt. The cries coming from the trees also stopped. A twig snapped, someone retreating at top speed, and then silence descended on the jungle, only the patter of rain continuing.

“Cross out that idea,” Zirkander muttered.

“Ridge?” Sardelle asked, her face tight with concentration.

“While I was on watch, I was thinking that if we could befriend some of the natives, we could hire them to be our new porters.”

“Their actions were not normal,” Sardelle said.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Zirkander pointed at the blood smearing the barrier. “Aside from the fact that they started out attacking us, then turned on each other?”

“Those men were highly agitated, scared, and confused.” Sardelle took a breath and lowered her arms. The light faded, leaving that dim grayness of dawn. The barrier must have dropped, too, because the rain resumed pattering onto Cas’s head. “Tolemek,” Sardelle said, “do you have any thoughts as to what might cause that?”

“Some drug perhaps?” Tolemek said. “A hallucinogenic compound ingested as part of a ceremony? Perhaps they were on some hunt and stumbled across us instead.”

“Is it hard to engage in a group hunt when you’re trying to stab your buddy at the same time?” Duck asked.

“What if it’s something else?” Cas asked. “Could it be related to the dead men in the river?”

“Without examining those bodies, we have no way of knowing if the natives in the river were killed by trauma, by something they ingested, or by some illness,” Tolemek said. “Nor can we guess at their state of mind before their deaths. I don’t believe there’s any evidence yet to suggest these two incidents are related. Granted, there might have been plenty of evidence that we were unable to gather. My studies were admittedly brief.”

“Can you really call it a study when an alligator steals your subject before you’ve gotten close enough to touch it?” Cas asked.

“A valid point. If we come across another body, one that’s not guarded by a malevolent octopus, I’ll perform an autopsy.”

“I’ll take a closer look too,” Sardelle said, “to see if I can detect anything. I had assumed the Cofah had simply cracked those porters on the backs of the heads and left them to die, so their secrets wouldn’t be spilled, but that may have been a premature assumption.”

“What I’d like to know,” Zirkander said, waving to the jungle, “is if we’re in any danger of catching the crazy.”

“Catching the crazy?” Tolemek arched his brows. “Not if they ingested something.”

“What if it’s a disease?”

“That causes craziness?”