26
Fletcher hurried into the jungle, his face burning. Pretending to need the toilet. Couldn’t he have thought of a better excuse?
He struggled through the tangled bushes, his skin itching as he brushed against a sticky cobweb. Around his head, the whine of mosquitos intermingled with the low buzz of common flies. Despite the abundant humidity in the air, the insects seemed attracted to the moisture in his eyes and mouth, and he spat and spluttered his way through until the others were out of sight.
Aware of his vulnerability so far from the others, he summoned Ignatius and Athena with two blasts from his palm. Immediately, Athena was fluttering to the top of the nearest tree, scanning the area for danger. Ignatius contented himself by scampering up Fletcher’s shoulder, giving his master a remonstrative thwack of his tail for keeping him infused for so long.
With a furtive glance over his shoulder, Fletcher crouched among the bushes and slowly opened his pack. Within, Blue stared back through wide, fearful eyes. He had somehow armed himself with a fishhook, one of the many tools that Uhtred and Briss had stowed in the leather satchels the dwarves had provided. It was a pitiful weapon, but the gremlin held it aloft as Fletcher stepped back, his arms raised to show he was no threat.
Slowly, his eyes never leaving Fletcher, the gremlin clambered out, until he was crouched on the ground, his scrawny chest heaving with anxious breaths.
‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ Fletcher said, and as he said the words, doubts began to plague him. Blue could go straight to his orc masters and tell them about the mission. But it was too late now, for the gremlin had shuffled out of reach. A flash of white from above told Fletcher that Athena had sensed his fears, and was ready to pounce. Then, the gremlin spoke.
‘Thank you,’ Blue trilled, dropping the hook to the ground.
He could speak! Fletcher’s mind reeled as Blue darted into the thick of the jungle. Half a second later, Athena’s paws thudded into the ground where he had been, and she hooted with frustration.
‘Let him go,’ Fletcher whispered, as Ignatius leaped down and nosed the bushes. ‘He won’t tell.’
He hoped.
As morning turned to afternoon, Fletcher was pleased that Malik’s team had shared their guide’s knowledge. Mason taught them to leave fewer footprints by avoiding the wetter ground and staying near the firmer soil beside tree roots. To remember, when they examined the prints of others, that wild cats walked with claws retracted and hyenas, the orcs’ preferred pets, did not. How a few days of wind or a single night of rain would wipe it all away.
He showed them how to mask their scent and keep off mosquitos by rubbing wild garlic into their skin and hair. He told them of the natural highways of the forest, made more pronounced by years of passing animals. Some of this, Fletcher knew from his own hunting on the Beartooth Mountains. But to hear it said and taught, rather than just relying on his own instinctual understanding, was fascinating.
As Mason spoke, Jeffrey rummaged around the forest edge, collecting plant-life and stowing various specimens in his bag. When it was his turn to speak, it was his knowledge of botany that was most impressive, rather than the spells he revealed at the end.
‘See here, the water vine,’ he said, pointing to an unassuming liana that hung stiffly from the treetops. He sliced it at the bottom with a slim knife and held it to his mouth. Water flowed out, as easily as water from a tap.
‘Fresh as a mountain spring,’ he grinned, wiping his mouth. ‘If you can’t get rainwater or coconuts, this is the next best thing.’
He moved on to another plant nearby, a palm tree sapling. With some gentle sawing, he removed a core of white from behind the bark and crunched down on it with relish.
‘Palm heart. Tastes like celery,’ he mumbled through a full mouth. ‘Nutritious though!’
He sliced the core into sections and handed them out. Fletcher found it to have a plain taste, with a hint of nuttiness he quite enjoyed.
Further out from the camp, Jeffrey showed them a flower with purple and white petals. He tore it from the ground to reveal a knobbly orange legume attached beneath.
‘Sweet potato,’ he grinned, shoving it into his pocket for later. For another hour he guided them around the jungle, all within one hundred feet of the camp. Papaya, guava, coconut and passionfruit hung from the treetops, only to be snatched down by the more acrobatic of demons. Malachi and Azura, Rory and Genevieve’s Mites, snipped the various fruits from their stems to bring them to the ground with meaty thuds. Verity revealed her demon to be a Damsel, a demon that appeared as an iridescent dragonfly twice the size of a Mite. It had a sting and sharp mandibles to add an element of danger to the multicoloured insect swooping in and out of the trees. A low-level demon for a noble summoner, and Fletcher suspected it was not the only demon she kept in her roster.
But it was not all fun and games. Jeffrey stopped at a large, single-stemmed plant with heart-shaped leaves that grew close by. It didn’t seem particularly impressive but for the translucent, bright pink berries that hung from it like bunches of grapes.
‘This is the gympie tree. See here, the fine hairs that coat its fruit and leaves?’ He held an arm out to keep them away, but lifted one of the leaves with his knife for all to see.
‘Each fibre is infused with neurotoxin that will cause the fiercest pain imaginable. Worse still, the pain will linger for months, some say even years. Keep an eye out for it. Sergeant Musher, you will know of it?’
The grizzled veteran who was Seraph’s guide shook his head sadly.
‘Young lad of seventeen was caught short on patrol one night. Goes into the trees, does ’is business. Wipes with one of them leaves there. The screamin’ could ’av woken the dead. Definitely woke some orcs, ’cos we ’ad to get out of there sharpish. Took ’im back to camp, ’ad a doctor look, even ’ad a summoner heal ’im. Didn’t make a blind bit of difference, the screamin’ went on and on. Poor lad shot ’imself two weeks later.’
The mood took a sombre tone and Fletcher shuddered. The plant had not been far from where he had released Blue. This jungle was both a paradise and a death trap.
Again, Jeffrey led them away, this time stopping beside a larger tree, just as unassuming as any other.
‘The manchineel tree,’ he said, pointing at its branches. ‘Burn its wood and the smoke will blind you. Stand beneath it when it rains and just one drop will blister your skin. Orcs coat their javelins in its sap to make the wound fester. They even tie runaway gremlins to the trunks for a slow death. Worse than burning, some say. The fruit is known as the death apple.’ He pointed at the large green berries that hung from its branches. ‘You can guess what happens if you eat one.’
There were many more revelations that afternoon. He showed them which woods would burn with the least smoke, so as not to signal their presence. He gathered sword grass with leaves so sharp that you could shave with them, the fleshy blades not unlike the spikes that lined Seraph’s Barkling’s back. There were even thorny vines that could be used as a rope-saw, so sharp and sturdy were the teeth of each spike.
Finally, Jeffrey held up diagrams of three new spell symbols. One, the leaf-shaped growth spell, could grow a seed into a plant within a few minutes, though none tried it out as Jeffrey warned them that the mana required was substantial.
The next symbol was a twisted line, which Jeffrey called the tangle spell. It would tighten and secure any knot or, by etching the inversion of the symbol, loosen it. The uses were limited, but Fletcher enjoyed testing it out on the lacing of Seraph’s boots when he wasn’t looking, much to the others’ amusement. More than anything, Fletcher was relieved to see that Genevieve and Rory treated him well enough, apparently having forgiven him for the transgressions of the year before.
The final symbol was perhaps the most exciting – one that Jeffrey described as the ice spell, found within the carcass of a Polarion. Shaped in the crisscross of a simplified snowflake, it sent out a gust of frost that took hold of all it touched.
‘A godsend in this heat,’ Malik proclaimed, blasting the nearest pool of water. The surface crackled and froze solid, the moisture in the air between falling to the ground in a haze of icy flakes.
‘A bit too powerful to cool yourself down with,’ he declared with disappointment, ‘but I’ll be adding ice to my coconut water from now on.’
Fletcher wondered why the spells had been kept a secret for so long, for they would be useful to all battlemages. Perhaps they were Electra’s only bargaining chips, and she had used them to allow Jeffrey to continue her research behind enemy lines.
Once the teams had tested the ice spell, it was Sergeant Musher’s turn to demonstrate his knowledge. This was just as well, for the sky had darkened and the first stars were twinkling in the night sky. They settled in, huddling close as the heat of the day faded, leaving only the jungle’s moisture to seep the cold into their bones.
Musher’s voice washed over them in the darkness, describing the constellations and which directions they would take the follower. The Elven Arrow, pointing due north, or Corwin’s Sceptre, which pointed east.
Nestled between the warmth of his friends, Fletcher dreamed.