Book 4 Chapter 30: First Contact
Book 4 Chapter 30: First Contact
++The jungles of Asyran are notorious for their danger and savagery. To some extent this is true, but only insofar as they have not been heavily reshaped by human industry. If one is aware of the threats and respectful of the ecosystem, they hold little to fear. Little, but not nothing.++
- Unknown.
One cruel but perpetual truth Dave Blakely had long-since discovered of the world was that, whatever the situation, place or people involved, everything was always his job. Everything.
Keep some snot-losed little brats from getting kidnapped or murdered? His job. Accompany someone flying across the ocean fast enough to explode on impact? His job. Sneak ahead of a foreign jungle to investigate unidentified speech and figure out if the people responsible were a threat or not? Apparently, his job!
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he were in his comfort zone. Dave could move on sand or stone with barely a sound, and in an urban environment he was as close to undetectable as it was possible for a human to be. But this was not sand, not stone, and certainly not urban. This jungle was another beast entirely.
There was a logic to moving quietly and without notice that Dave had mastered long ago, but using it here, there were so many new complications that it felt as though he was merely half as adept.
He was still quieter and better at stealth than anyone else present, even that professor who’d spent the bulk of his own career moving through environments like this. Say what you would about Dave, he’d always had a talent for coming up behind someone without them knowing he was there.
It just wasn’t going as far as he would’ve liked right now.
And that made the unknown nature of his destination all the worse.
He resisted the urge to swear at the foliage rustling with every step, the snapping twigs and trembling branches and all the thousand other bits of jungle that seemed intent to snitch on him. Wouldn’t have this problem back in Cadnich. Back there, snitching got you killed. Got your balls cut off and nailed to your corpse’s head. Got you skinned alive or executed by so many scattergun blasts that the coppers were left to carry your corpse to the morgue with a mop and bucket.
This wasn’t Cadnich. Dave was fifty yards away from the noise now and he thought he could make out the individual words being spoken quite clearly. Only problem was, he didn’t know what any of them meant. You heard a lot of different dialects around the docks at Cadnich, and the different ethnic districts of the city itself for that matter, but apparently not this one. Or at least not enough for Dave. He had only a smattering of the ones he was familiar with in any case, mostly limited to phrases like “sorry mate, I didn’t know this was your turf, I’ll just be on my way so you don’t need to hang my disembowelled corpse from a street lamp as a warning for all the rest”.
That felt like the sort of fate that might be awaiting him here, for that matter. Humans liked to hang corpses when convenient, and it was hard to get more convenient than this place, what with all the sprawling trees everywhere.
But he was getting ahead of himself. If they wanted to disembowel and hang him—if they did at all—these people would still need to catch him first, and so far they didn’t even know Dave was there.
Thirty yards now. If only he could speak the language, he’d be getting an earful of their every thought. Other sounds were making themselves known in any case, rustling leaves and flexing wood. Odd, periodic cracks, wooshes and dull thuds. Something was falling? No, several somethings. Falling after being yanked out of place, broken up.
Dave didn’t bother theorising just yet, he knew he lacked the info to know with any certainty. He just closed in more. Twenty yards now, as near as he dared to get. It was near enough, because after twenty yards came the jungle foliage giving way to a big clearing, through which protruded the tallest tree he’d ever seen. Two hundred and fifty feet if it was an inch, big enough that a Demigod might’ve struggled to lift it.
But this size didn’t deter the people swarmed around it, not at all. They were climbing the damned thing in their twos and threes, holding out bags while their fellows higher up reached out and…yes.
Beehives. They were breaking off chunks of beehives and dropping them down, gathering honey. Dave almost started laughing, but of course didn’t on account of it might get him killed.
Just because they were doing something innocent right now, didn’t mean they wouldn’t turn violent if interrupted. After all, how many times had Dave’s own life been threatened by what had previously seemed like nothing more than honest, hard-working opium smugglers?
Dave took the sights in and committed them to memory, all the relevant information. Twenty people were at work, as far as he could see. Some of them were moving too fast to be normal. Warriors then. Definitely warriors, flitting around from branch to branch like gravity was taking its time with them. Others were doing nothing physically odd, but were hanging near the beehives and…singing to them. Dave noticed a distinct lack of people being swarmed by bees and screaming in agony, and figured maybe it was related to that. The rest seemed normal, and he didn’t notice any guns. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any, but they didn’t seem ready to use at least.
This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.
Dave didn’t think they needed to attack these people, but it was good to know that getting the drop on them would be easy if it came to that.
Their skin was all dark, though not quite the deep dark of the southern majority of Irucci, or those Garamon citizens who claimed descent from the people of that region. They had dark hair too. Weird eyes. Kind of…not exactly small, but interestingly shaped. Like they were halfway folded in on themselves. Would that make their vision worse?
Dave decided not to assume any advantage unless he had a more concrete way of knowing it was there. With nothing more to take in, he started the long shuffle back to Vornholt and regailed her with what he’d seen.
“Those sound like natives,” the professor said at last. “It matches the locals’ physical description perfectly, and I’ve known them to gather honey in just the same way you described.”
“Don’t they keep bee hives?” the Vornholt girl asked.
“Some do,” the professor replied. “Asyran is a big place, you’ll want to lose the habit of assuming everyone here acts the same way as everyone else.”
Dave happened to agree with that sentiment. Just on a purely practical level, assumptions of the sort Garamon’s nobby officers tended to make got you killed.
“They did not appear to be fighters?” Isabel Vornholt asked him.
“Not that I could tell, but a few were warriors,” Dave confirmed. “Lesser ones though. Nobody was jumping twenty paces up and ripping whole branches off by themselves or anything. If I’m right, and the singers were pacifying the bees, then it probably means bee stings can still go through their skin.”
“Not as big a limit as it sounds,” the professor added. “The bees here get bigger than your thumb.”
Dave shuddered at that, but again Vornholt just nodded, taking it in silently. “Should we make contact?” she asked the professor. “They could provide guidance through the jungle, if they live here I would imagine their knowledge of it is better than yours.”
“Much better,” the professor grunted. “The only question is whether they’ll try to stab us in the back. You never really know.”
“You can speak their language then?” Vornholt asked. “I was assuming before.”
The professor faltered. “I’m also assuming, but there’s surprisingly few languages spoken in this region compared to how many disparate tribes and cultures there are. I suspect the current groups are all splinters of some larger one from the past and…” he seemed to notice that most of his audience didn’t care.
The professor coughed once, then surmised. “Yeah, I say it’s a good idea to at least interact with them.”
Dave didn’t like that, but it was one of the cases where his not liking something was for reasons he couldn’t exactly articulate. Just a twist somewhere deep in his gut, a little shiv of fear driven down into the intestine. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe.
They set off as a group, forming up into positioning that was pretty obvious in its motive. Blakely on one flank, the professor on the other, Isabel Vornholt at the front while her brother was at the very back and her sister in-between them all. The squishy magician was the hardest to reach, of course, while the other child, physically powerful as he was, was relegated to guarding the flank.
They came out into the clearing with such a force of presence that you might’ve thought it had physically struck the natives. All of them froze and turned, staring with the widened mouths and postures of people caught entirely off-guard by a face in the dark. The professor raised his hands placatingly as he approached and started babbling in languages Dave didn’t understand.
What he did understand was postures and faces, the way hands were moving to weapons. Or weren’t. Dave was surprised to find these people were actually warming up to the professor. Certainly pleased, though that didn’t mean he let his guard down either. He only wished he knew what was bloody being said, it’d be just his luck if the damned professor was offering up the rest of them as human sacrifices for safe passage.
The Vornholts seemed, for once, to be sharing this concern too. Save for the eldest, who looked as completely unbothered as ever, they kept looking from one another to the professor. Dave couldn’t blame them, he was doing much the same.
But eventually the conversation ended, and one of the natives, a shorter woman who looked about middle age, peeled off from the rest to start heading through the jungle. The professor followed after her.
“What is going on?” Isabel Vornholt asked him.
“We have her assurance that we’ll be taken to the structure you’re looking for,” the professor replied. “Or at least a structure that matches the description I gave her.”
“Is that it?” she asked.
The professor shrugged. “There were other details, but I’ve given you the gist of it.”
Dave noticed the man shift somewhat as he said that.
“You trying to kill us?” he asked, managing to resist the urge to both draw his magic gun and remove the professor’s head, but barely. “Is that why you're not giving details?”
“I’m not giving details because there’s a lot of them and it’s mostly just minor grammatical translations,” the professor snapped. “Now back off, you fucking maniac.”
“We will see,” Isabel Vornholt cut in, before Dave could find out whether he would’ve backed off after all.
That settled it of course. They may have been thousands of miles from the closest Garamon authority or bank, but her authority was still unimpeachable on this little trek. It was the mastery of strength, and nobody here had more of it than her.
Everyone settled down for the time being, but Dave kept his eyes on the professor.