Clayton Emery: Jedit

The tiger crept along comfortably on two feet or all fours as needed. The humans stumbled behind, heads bowed, ankles and calves throbbing from the treacherous tilted footing. Gray-stone tunnels intersected at odd angles, as if the original inhabitants had crawled on every surface like ants. Not every passage was tunnels. They found several six-sided rooms full of nothing identifiable. One room held miles of spun floss like spider webbing. Another sported gadgets like lead water pipes all jumbled and crumbling. One held big empty vats oddly spaced. One held hundreds of cells, each big enough to hold a man. In a few holes they found desiccated husks like cocoons. Every room only confused them further.

"Tar and blisters," muttered Adira. "This building has more holes than a sponge and holds just as little! If we don't find- Ulp!"

Jedit halted so suddenly that Adira trod on his tail. In garish torchlight, the tiger's eyes glowed, and his whiskers twitched. Signaling to wait, the man-beast crept ahead without a sound. Adira and others watched his striped back slither over a threshold where the passage forked and angled down.

In a moment he returned, striped face peeking over the edge, curled claws beckoning.

This room was larger, fifty feet across, but still six-sided, with each wall broken into facets like a fly's eye and several holes leading to more tunnels. More gadgets and junk projected from the walls: crumbling pipes, a stonelike trough big enough to bathe in, a bed of points like stalactites. Yet what took the explorers' breath away were amber crystals that sparkled in torchlight like jewels-thirty or more as big as bushel baskets.

"Right then!" Adira broke the spell. "Everyone fetch a jewel, or crystal, and let's breeze out of-"

"Adira…" Jasmine swayed on her feet. "I… feel…"

The woods mage pitched on her face as if shot by an arrow. In the gaping hole behind her, a ghastly green headless body loomed from darkness.

"The spuzzem!" bleated Magfire. "Kill it!"

Yet the alien monster had already attacked, invisibly and silently. Victims dropped like tenpins. The two kobolds crumpled first. Jedit Ojanen took a flying leap but crashed on his belly, out cold. Heath wavered and crumpled to his knees, pitching his torch away lest he bum himself. Others staggered and succumbed.

Succumbed to what? wondered Adira. Sleep? Fighting panic, she studied the approaching enemy wildly for a clue on how to assault it.

The green beast walked with a stiff up-and-down motion like an upright insect. The limbs were smooth as plant stems. The feet and truncated arms bore backward hooves. A tail with veins like a maple leaf jutted behind. Most alarming, the thing had no head, just a rounded dome atop its moss-green body. Lack of a head made it seem a slimy headless corpse seeking revenge on the living.

Adira Strongheart got fresh worries as the spuzzem's queer backward hooves shot streams of cobweb. Magfire squawled as gunk struck her hair and face. Clawing only tied their hands with gummy strands. Adira dodged but was slapped by a ropy cobweb. Repelled, she swiped at it. The stuff tore easily but stuck like honey. As Adira wrenched glop from her chin, she stumbled, clumsy as a cow, and went to one knee, struggling to keep her torch high.

Panic swelled in her bosom until Adira felt as if she were a sparrow trapped by a hawk. Why clumsy? Struggling with gummy strands by spitting firelight, she misjudged the floor and flopped on her bottom. Weakly she cursed and resisted the urge to cry.

Clumsy. Fearful. Dizzy. Despairing. Why?

Adira's head swam as if drunk. Her brain felt muzzy as the cobwebs in her hair. Part of her wanted to He down and nap. Yet horrid images swirled in her skull. Ghastly visions of desiccated corpses gutted and hung in cocoons from the ceiling. Bodies dried like peat, eyes sunken into black pits, cheeks drawn so tight teeth showed through skin, ribs and breastbones jutting starkly, hair fallen out or reduced to stringy fuzz. Adira saw herself worse than dead, swaddled in a cocoon, unable to move, barely able to breath, knowing she was food stored for the nightmarish Spuzzem. A fiend that attacked with strands of webbing, but something fiercer, a gnawing assault on the mind.

Weak as a blind kitten, Adira felt more slimy rope slap her ear. The pirate queen didn't bother to mop it off, just struggled to think. She was still awake and fighting while others had collapsed. Jasmine, closest to the fiend, had dropped right away. Heath had staggered and dropped his torch. Murdoch had flopped. Simone had almost stayed on her feet.

Shaking her head, trying to claw back to full consciousness, Adira went over details again. Why did some of her crew collapse but others only wobbled? Sleepy, sinking, Adira knew she'd collapse and set her hair on "Fire!" snorted the pirate queen. Cranking her eyes open,

Adira confirmed her suspicion. No one had been touched, but people without torches had collapsed immediately. People with torches only staggered, unless they dropped their fire, whereupon they blacked out. And hadn't the spuzzem killed those lovers in the dark?

"Fire keeps off… poisonous vapors… like those that suffocate dwarves in mines! Magfire… uhh! Simone… Wave your torch before your face!"

Heedless of igniting her wild curls, Adira lifted her torch and almost singed her eyebrows. Breathing smoke, sniffling and coughing, Adira found her head cleared. Through rippling flames she saw the spuzzem stump toward Simone, who crawled blind as a mole.

Adira jiggled her torch to make it flare. Fire was life here, same as if they still froze on those cruel wave-swept rocks. Shouting to encourage her crew, Adira scurried across the tilted floor to Simone. Jamming her head against Simone's black curls, Adira sheltered both behind the protecting flames. Woozy, Simone fought against stupor.

"Simone!" Adira shouted across five inches. "Wake up! We'll die if we don't attack!"

"Kyenou! Ply fire! Get up! Stay together!" From another side, Magfire goaded her scout. Magfire squatted over one woodsman and tore off shreds of his woolen shirt, then wadded the shreds around Kyenou's odd double-ended spear. Igniting the rags, she and Kyenou advanced on trembling legs against a lifelong terror.

From their side, Adira and Simone attacked. The lieutenant's face shone from the heat of the torch, but her eyes bulged with anger. Stepping carefully, Simone tore off Jasmine's blue skirt and spiked it on her black sword blade. Together Adira and Simone crabbed four-legged toward the spuzzem.

The creature swiveled slowly as four desperate people advanced with fire. Adira laughed grimly as the spuzzem back-stepped on plant-stem legs.

She barked, "Stick it!"

Magfire and Simone rammed spear and sword into the spuzzem's torso, easy as puncturing a cactus. Fire scorched, stinking like burned cabbage. The spuzzem's body proved no denser than a flower. Simone and Kyenou sliced away a flap like green leather with an inner core of white cottony threads.

"Fire its insides!" called Adira and Magfire together. Makeshift torches were shoved into the body cavity. White threads sizzled and charred black. Smoke spewed from the spuzzem's vegetable body. The women punished the monster with steel and fire. The spuzzem's supple arms thrashed weakly. Chitinous hooves drummed on the floor.

"That's deuced odd!" Adira twisted her black sword from the monster's body. "It's changing?"

Indeed. Rather than grow weaker, the spuzzem kicked and flailed with more animation, as if feeling pain for the first time. Knees grew supple. Arms elongated and sprouted hands, then fingers. The green body deepened to brown. From the smooth hump of charred torso popped a head with black curly hair.

Kyenou and Simone jumped back, their attack forgotten. Adira felt queasy and knew her face blanched.