A Triumph of Souls (37 page)

With his arm restrained by the cloying, clinging mist, he could not slash and cut with his usual ease, but he hacked
away at the surrounding fog with as much strength and determination as he could muster. Results were immediate.

Bits and pieces of fog, cut off from the rest of the main body by the otherworldly blade, fell to the earth. Each squirmed
glutinously across the ground as if seeking to rejoin the rest of the hovering gray mass, before finally falling motionless
and evaporating. A louder moan surrounded him: a malign breeze off the mountain slopes wending its way among the rocks—or
something else. He found himself wondering if fog could feel pain. It did not matter. There was work to be done, and he was
the only one who could do it.

Patiently, wielding the sword with skill and care, he began to excavate a clear space for himself within the enveloping mist.
As soon as it was large enough and his arms and legs were free, he cut his way over to Simna and liberated the swordsman.
Hunkapa Aub and Ahlitah were next.

“Everyone all right?” he inquired. Looking at him, it was impossible to tell if the water pouring off his face and arms was
perspiration or amputated mist. Assured that they had suffered nothing more than fatigue in their own efforts to free themselves,
he turned and started work on chopping a path forward. Instead of wielding a machete against a wall of intervening jungle,
or a shovel against a rampart of packed earth, he hacked away with something that was not of the Earth at that which was little
more than nothing.

As he toiled, tendrils of fog strained to clutch at him afresh, reaching out with quivering slivers of damp gray for his arms
and legs. He slashed away mercilessly, ignoring them as they fell among the flowers and grass, trampling the condensed moisture
beneath his sandals. No more
maybe-almost words teased his ears, but the moaning continued without pause. The fog did not bleed beneath his blade—it simply
asserted its mastery of melancholy as it continued to do its utmost to detain him.

A man used to dealing daily with cattle and children was not about to have his progress denied by a recalcitrant mist. A tunnel
appeared behind Ehomba and his friends as he pressed forward, a cylindrical tube in the fog into which the occasional grateful,
sodden insect or arthropod found its way.

“Get off me!” he would shout from time to time. “Leave me be! I am near to my destination and will not be denied here. No
mere weather, no matter how tenacious, is going to stop me!”

There was no reply. Only the continuous moaning, and the persistent, repetitious attempts to restrain his arms and legs. Occasionally
he was forced to pause and hack clutching tentacles of moisture from the limbs of his friends. But for the most part, now
that they once more had room in which to move, they were able to keep themselves relatively mist free.

He hewed his way forward for more than an hour. If the retentive, obstinate fog thought it could outwait him, or discourage
him, it was more than wrong. It had never encountered anyone like Etjole Ehomba, whose arms rose and fell methodically, mechanically,
as he cut his way forward, dead dew dripping like transparent blood from his blade of crystallized nickel-iron.

Then, realizing that all its efforts were doomed to failure, the fog began to dissipate. Vast quantities of it drew back,
rising upward in the direction of the cold mountain peaks from which it drew sustenance, while isolated pockets
fled downslope to evaporate. A few persistent tendrils continued to clutch at the arms and shoulders of the determined travelers,
but these were soon cut away. As they ascended through the uppermost reaches of the fog bank, the sun returned, warming their
damp bodies. The clinging fog had soaked Ehomba to the skin, but in the thin air the unobstructed sun made quick work of the
lingering moisture.

A last gob of thick mist trailed him at a distance, darting and hiding behind one rocky outcropping after another. Used to
watching for prowling predators while tending to the village herds, he kept track of it for a while, wondering at its intent.
Perhaps it planned to drift down upon him when next he slept, covering his face, restraining not his arms and legs this time
but his heart and lungs. He would not give it the chance.

Whirling, he rushed past a startled Simna to challenge the compacted cloud. Finding itself discovered, it immediately attempted
to flee upward. The herdsman ran it down, catching up to it and dispatching it with his blade. Only the faintest hint of a
moan rose from the wad of condensation as the meteoric sword-edge cut through its center, scattering droplets and inducing
the rest of the gray blob to suicide beneath the unyielding rays of the morning sun.

Satisfied that he was no longer a source of interest to the vanished fog, or to any of its component parts, Ehomba sheathed
the weapon and resumed his pace. Grass and soil in equal measure slid away beneath his sandals.

Free of the constraining, intemperate mist, they once again began to make good time. They had to. There was
an obligation to fulfill, and a family and herd anxiously awaiting his return.

If anything else attempted to stop or slow them, Ehomba found himself musing, he hoped it would do so more openly and with
some substance. He had not enjoyed fighting the fog. Instead of anger, or evil, there had been about it only an ineffable
sadness, and he had found no satisfaction in slaying what was after all little more than a haunting melancholy.

After all, it had only, to its unfathomable, unknowable way of thinking, been trying to help him.

I
t was not long after they had left the inimical fog behind that they encountered the procession of humans and apes. Trudging
along a trail that crossed the river gorge from north to south, the procession was heavily laden with baggage, from household
goods dangling from stout poles supported by two or more individuals, to blanket-wrapped infants riding on the backs of females.

They shied in terror at the sight of Ahlitah and Hunkapa Aub, and Ehomba had to hasten to reassure them. Their accent was
thick and heavy, but with repetition and gestures each side managed to make itself understood. These were poor folk, the herdsman
decided, simple and unsophisticated. Judging from the expressions they wore, their burdens were more than physical.

“Ehl-Larimar?” he asked of several individuals. After a number of inquiries a long-faced macaque clad in heavy overcoat and
cap finally responded. Raising its long arm, it pointed westward up the canyon and nodded.

“Good. Thank you.” As Ehomba started past him, the ape reached out and grabbed his arm. Simna’s hand went
immediately to the hilt of his sword, while among the column there was an anxious stirring. Primate hands fumbled for axes
and clubs. Ahlitah growled low in his throat, his claws seeking purchase on the hard ground.

Ehomba hastened to calm his companions. “It is all right. He is not hurting me.” Glancing down, he saw that the macaque’s
face was fraught with concern, not animosity. “What is wrong, my long-tailed friend?”

It was uncertain if the ape comprehended the herdsman’s words, but he certainly understood his tone. Releasing his grasp,
he raised a spindly arm and jabbed a finger violently upcanyon. “Khorixas, Khorixas!”

“Hoy, what’s a Khorixas?” Simna’s hand had slid away from his sword, but his fingers remained loose and easy in its vicinity.
“Maybe an outlying town this side of Ehl-Larimar itself?”

“Possibly.” Smiling reassuringly, Ehomba stepped away from the visibly agitated macaque and retreated slowly, taking one careful
step at a time. “It is all right. My friends and I can take care of ourselves.” Even as he tried to explain he wondered if
the ape understood any of what he was saying: These people spoke a language different from that of old Gomo and the People
of the Trees.

Arm rigid and still pointing westward, the aged macaque rumbled “Khorixas!” one more time before lowering his hand. With a
sad-eyed shrug, he turned and rejoined his comrades. When he paused briefly for a last look back at the travelers, it was
to shake his head dolefully from side to side.

“Grizzled old fella must not care much for this Khorixas, whatever it is.” Striding confidently forward, Simna kept a careful
watch on the steep slopes that walled them in.
Nothing he saw or heard as they continued to hike upward led him to believe they might be walking into some kind of ambush,
or a trap. Silhouetted against the scudding clouds, a few dragonets and condors soared on the updrafts. Marmosets and pacas
scampered over the boulders and talus in search of nuts and berries. Thanks to the deep canyon, the travelers’ line of march
remained well below the tree line. The temperature dropped at night, but not precipitously so. When their blankets proved
inadequate to the task of warding off the cold, Ehomba and Simna simply moved their bedding closer to the radiant bulks of
Hunkapa Aub and the black litah.

They had just crossed the crest of the Curridgians, discernable by the fact that all streams now flowed westward instead of
to the east, when they heard the first roll of thunder.

“Hunkapa no see clouds, no see storm.” The hirsute hulk had his head tilted back while he squinted at the sky.

“It does not sound like that kind of thunder.” Holding fast to his spear, Ehomba strode along in front, maintaining the same
steady pace as always.

Simna ibn Sind cocked his head sideways as he regarded his tall companion. “There’s more than one kind?”

The herdsman smiled down at him. “Many kinds. I myself have been trained to identify dozens of different varieties.”

“Hoy then, if it’s not a far-off storm clearing its throat that we’re hearing, then what is it?”

“I do not know.” A brilliant black-and-green spotted beetle landed on the herdsman’s shirt, hitching a ride. Ehomba admired
its glossy carapace and let it be.

“I thought you said you knew dozens of kinds of thunder?”

“I do.” Ehomba’s smile thinned. “But this one I do not recognize.”

Whatever its source, it grew louder as they began to start downward. Its measured, treading rhythm was abnormal, suggesting
an origin that was anything but natural. Yet the percussive volume was too loud to originate with anything man-made.

Only when they came around a cliff and entered a small alpine valley did they see that both of their assumptions were correct.

It had not been much of a village to begin with, and now it was in the process of being reduced to nothing at all. The stately
thunder they had been hearing was caused by the concussion of hammer against stone. The stones ranged in size from small boulders
to chinkers light enough for a child to move from place to place. The head of the hammer, on the very much larger other hand,
was bigger than Ehomba.

It was being wielded by a giant—the first giant the herdsman had ever seen. The village elders knew many tales of giants,
with which they often regaled their attentive, wide-eyed children. While growing up, Ehomba and his friends had listened to
fanciful fables of one-eyed giants and hunchbacked giants, of giants with teeth like barracuda and giants lacking any teeth
at all who sucked up their victims through straws made of hollow tree trunks. There were giants that swam in the deep green
sea (but none that flew), and giants who lived in the densest jungles and never showed themselves (but some that were too
big to hide).

There were ugly giants and uglier giants, giants who cooked their victims in a casserole of palm oil and sago pastry, and
giants who simply swallowed them whole. Oura had once told of a vegetarian giant, and of another who was shunned by all others
of his kind for washing his hair. Sometimes there seemed to be as many different kinds of giants as there were storytellers
among the Naumkib, and that meant there were a great many varieties of giant indeed.

The one that stood before them using its great hammer to demolish the village was neither as horrific in appearance as he
might have been nor as good-natured. Shoulder-length red hair tumbled in tangled tresses down his back and the sides of his
head. Long hairs sprouted from pointed ears that stuck through the raggedy locks, and he had orange eyes. From his splotchety,
crooked nose hung a booger the size of a boulder. His teeth were surprisingly white, glaring out from the rest of a baggy
visage that as a face was mostly a failure. Dark and dirty treelike arms protruded from the sleeves of a vest comprised of
many sewn-together skins, not all of them overtly animal. His furry lower garments were similarly fashioned, and his sandals
with their knee-high laces bespoke the crudest attempts at cobblery.

He was three times the size of Hunkapa Aub, and when he swung the heavy hammer with its leather-clad head, the peal of disintegrating
rock reverberated down every one of the surrounding canyons and gorges. Sweat poured from his coarse countenance in great
rivulets, and even at a distance his stink was profound.

“Hoy, now we know what happened to the village of Khorixas.” Simna’s expression was grim. Another reverberant
boooom
echoed as the back wall of what had once been a fine two-story house came crashing down. “We also know why those hard-up
folk we met a while back were migrating across the crest with their kids and all their possessions.”

“We do not know anything.” Ehomba was keeping one eye on the giant while assessing possible alternate routes with the other.
The village lay directly athwart the most direct and easiest route westward and downslope. “We will go around,” he announced
resignedly. He started to turn away.

Hand on sword hilt, Simna all but jumped in front of him. “Hoy, long bruther, we have a chance to right a wrong here!” He
nodded sharply in the direction of the crumbling village. “Whatever transpired between those poor wretches and this brute
couldn’t possibly justify the total ruination of their homes.” He grinned knowingly. “Why, this great blundering ogre is
nothing
compared to the dangers you and I have dealt with these past months! Watch him work. See how slow he is, how ungainly his
movements? We should teach him a lesson about picking on those smaller and weaker than himself and send him on his way. It
will also earn us the undying gratitude of those simple mountain folk.” His expression was eager. “What say you?”