In the Month of Cerberus Part 1

Tzanatlan Accounts from the Interior — Session One, Part One

As recorded by the Lantern of the Thirteenth Word

I see many things. Not all of them with my eyes.

A great many are reported to me — by sailors and smugglers, by fortune-seekers, by men who come back from the interior with fewer companions than they left with and a pressing need to tell someone. A great many more reach me by other means, and those means are — well. It is enough for you to know that I know them.

Here is one journey I know of.

It began on Hēmera Aphroditēs, the fifth of Kerebosios, 3476 — the fourth of Nelach, 1067 of the Ascension, for those who keep the Miritharin count — under a waning moon. Kerebosios is the month of the twelfth labor, when Hercules went down into the Underworld and hauled Cerberus up into the light: the darkest and most perilous season of the year. The rains had not come. The trade wind pushed dry heat in from the east, the haze on the horizon smelled of smoke, and every waterhole on the island was quietly shrinking. It is the killing heat before the rains, when sensible people stay home.

They set out regardless, through the Wall and into the interior, in this order.

Sigwulf walked first, as a knight of the Order of Hercules ought to: an Eisenwalder paladin who believes, as his god did, that the front is where the work is. Behind him came the hirelings, whose names are their own affair. Then Xavravio, a Santa Carlino half-orc and a thief by trade, which is to say a man who notices things for a living. Then Azech, a Khemur half-orc and a gish — one of those who carry both blade and spellbook, and are not entirely trusted by the practitioners of either. Last came Osbert, another Eisenwalder, a fighter, and the only one of them mounted. He had brought a horse into a jungle full of things that eat horses.

I want to be clear that I admire this.

Teeth in the Bark

They were barely past the Wall when the path offered its first opinion.

Lianas had grown across the narrow trail into a low green arch. Hemp rope was knotted through the vines, and animal teeth had been driven into the branches so long ago that the bark had grown up around them, until they looked less placed than grown. Dried blood was smeared along the whole of it, brown-black in the heat.

The company read it as a warning from the villagers: here ends the safety of the settled lands. That is a reasonable reading, and I will not tell you it is wrong. I will only tell you that bark does not swallow a tooth in a single season, or in ten.

They passed beneath it. People generally do.

A little farther on lay a dead lizard — ten feet of it, built like the great monitors of the coast, without a mark on it anyone could find. Osbert climbed down from his horse, drew his dagger, and opened it up to see why.

The urge to find a dead thing and look inside it is nearly universal among adventurers, and very rarely rewarded. This time it was. Lodged in the lizard's gullet was a rainbow quartz, a stone that holds light the way oil holds color on water, worth a good fifty in gold. The likeliest explanation was that the beast had choked on it. The lizard was no longer taking questions.

Nearby, the ground dropped away into a small sinkhole, and beside it stood the ruin of a wall, crumbled unevenly and nowhere much above three feet. But the stones were fitted with a precision no living mason manages — the same art as the great Wall the company had passed through that morning. Only older. Ancient, even by the standards of the Wall.

They did not climb down into the sinkhole. I mention it only so that you know they did not.

The Larder

Deeper in, a great tree stood above the lesser growth, and in the fork of two limbs, well above any man's reach, someone had wedged the fresh body of a jungle deer. Beneath it, a pack of small hunting dinosaurs — quick, narrow, sharp-toothed things, chicken-sized to man-sized — was trying very hard to get it down. Whatever else they are good at, they are not good at trees.

One saw the company and whistled, a thin rising note, and a slightly larger animal came out of the brush in answer. It turned its head and studied the travelers with one bright eye: the knight, the half-orcs, the hirelings, the man on the horse.

Then it decided they were not worth the trouble, and went back to the tree.

There are few experiences in life as instructive as being appraised by a predator and found not worth it. The company returned the compliment and walked on.

I will point out, since no one else did, that the dinosaurs did not put that deer in that tree. Something else did. Something that climbs.

They traveled a few hours more, made camp, and slept the night through undisturbed.

The next night would not be like that.

The Bridge

They broke camp at sunrise into a cooler morning, and before long they came to the gorge.

You do not see a gorge like that coming. The jungle runs right to the lip and hangs over it, and then the ground simply stops: thirty feet down into green shadow, the cleft running away in both directions farther than anyone could see. Across it hung a rope bridge of plank and cord, sagging in the middle, older than anyone would have liked.

A gorge like that is not merely a gap in the ground. It is a border, and everything living on either side knows which side it belongs to.

The company was still regarding the bridge with the suspicion it deserved when Sigwulf saw the watchers. Sixty feet past the far end, low in the brush: small green shapes, goblinish, thin-limbed, very still, lying exactly where a sensible ambusher would lie, beyond a bridge that can only be crossed one at a time.

Sigwulf drew his sword and called across the gorge.

I do not know precisely what he said. I know how he said it, because of what happened next. They did not answer, and they did not stand. They went backward into the jungle on their bellies, flat and slow and silent, until the brush closed over the last of them. No one saw them again. I would not take that to mean anything.

Xavravio crossed first, because someone had to and a thief's feet are the best in any company. A rope ran from his waist to Osbert's horse, on the theory that if the bridge gave way, the horse would not. He tested each plank before he gave it his weight, and when the bridge swayed he stopped and let it finish. He made the far side. One by one the others followed, until only Osbert and the hirelings were left on the near bank.

Here I must ask you to picture a horse on a rope bridge.

The first hoof went down on the first plank, and the plank bowed. The second hoof, and the whole bridge sank — only a hand's breadth, but every rope on it groaned at once, a long fibrous sound like a ship's cable taking strain. The horse laid its ears back. Osbert spoke to it. It took another step.

By the middle, the bridge had begun to swing — a slow, patient sway, the horse's weight riding the bottom of each arc. The planks flexed under every hoof and came back up a moment late, as though thinking it over. One cracked, a dry report that went off the walls of the gorge like a snapping bone, and held. Back at the anchor posts the knots drew tighter, and the old fibers creaked as they took up the load.

Thirty feet below, the shadows did not move.

Everyone on both banks stood very still, which helped nothing. Osbert kept talking to his horse, low and steady, the way Eisenwalders talk to animals they mean to keep, and the horse kept putting one hoof in front of the other, because it had decided — as horses sometimes do — to trust the man rather than the ground.

Then there was earth under it, and the bridge swung back empty and creaking, as if relieved.

The hirelings crossed last, on a bridge that had by now been asked one more favor than any bridge should be. It granted it.

Whoever Came Next

Beyond the gorge, the island changed its mind. By afternoon the company was walking through drowned forest — trees standing knee-deep in black water, roots knuckled above the surface, the road picking along whatever ground would bear it. Nothing troubled them there, which in a swamp is a kind of luck no one notices.

Toward evening they found the camp: two lean-tos of lashed timber and a stone-ringed fire pit, properly built by someone who knew the country. A season old, perhaps.

Tzanatlani, by the look of it — and the Tzanatlani do not, as a rule, go beyond the Wall. Someone had, and built well, and left it all standing, deliberately, for whoever came next.

The company came next.

It must have felt like a gift. Ground already cleared, shelter already raised, a fire pit that drew. The horse was picketed, supper eaten, watches set. The fire burned down to embers, and the swamp beyond its light went from green, to grey, to black.

The first watch passed without a sound.

Someone should have found that strange.

The second watch belonged to the hirelings. That is a story for another night.

— The Lantern of the Thirteenth Word