Warrior of the Wild(28)

Soren flings an arm behind him in the direction of the creature, an emphatic gesture.

Yes, I see his point.

I dare a glance back over my shoulder. Despite its large girth, the beast is fast, those legs taking longer, quicker strides than our own. What I had mistaken as the texture of bark, I now realize are actually tendons connecting to powerful muscles. The gunda doesn’t have any arms, just toned legs to carry it. The beast doesn’t have a neck, either. The main body thins toward the top, where all four eyes rest in a row. A tail snakes out behind it, balancing the gunda as it runs.

It doesn’t make a sound, no cackles like the ziken, and somehow, that silence is even more terrifying. Where is its mouth?

“It’s gaining on us!” I shout.

“We can’t outrun it. Watch your feet,” Soren says. Then he turns quickly, heading right into the thickness of wild.

Now I’m leaping over rocks and brambles and thick tree roots, running into low-hanging boughs and ferns. Snaketraps snap closed as we pass by them, our momentum enough to stimulate the plants’ natural response, even though we haven’t stepped into the leafy, teeth-clad mouths.

The gunda plunges in after us, but it has a harder time with its body. It can’t fit into places we can, and it must take a less direct path in order to continue following us.

“Can it climb?” I ask.

“No, but that won’t stop it from reaching us.”

I rack my brain for all the stories I’ve heard about the gunda, trying to fathom how a beast with no mouth could be dangerous. But in the stories told to me as a child, the sheer size and many eyes of the beast were enough to frighten me. It was a creature said to consume men whole. Hunters and warriors would disappear, never to be seen again. But no one from my village has seen the creature in a hundred years. It’s become only a myth.

And now it’s chasing me.

The muscles in my legs are screaming at me to stop. I’ve already exhausted them once today by fleeing the god. My arms don’t want to pump any longer. I’m not in good condition for the fight ahead.

Soren is spent, too. He slows considerably and barely catches himself when he falters on a loose rock.

“We need to stop,” I say to him.

“We stop and we die,” he says.

“Then where are we going? Do you have a plan?”

He doesn’t answer as he suddenly puts on a burst of speed. Somewhere, I find the strength to match it.

We break through the foliage. The rough rocks turn into smooth pebbles, which angle downward into a small lake.

On the opposite side of the lake, a rise—a small cliff—extends over black water. It’s a good ten-foot drop into fathomless water housing goddess-knows-what horrors.

“It—can’t—swim,” Soren says around heavy breaths. I want to ask him how he knows this, if he’ll stake his life on this information—

But the gunda breaks onto the shore with us. So close. Too close.

“Axes out. Now!” Soren stops running and turns to face the threat, but his gaze isn’t focused on those eyes up top. No, his attention is directed much lower. Toward the base, where the rough skin has started to move.

Tendons strain and muscles flex as a flap of skin rises directly at the front of the gunda, until it is parallel with the ground, just below all those eyes. Something falls to the ground from the interior—a tangle of white and red—

At first, I can’t make sense of what lies beneath. Some sort of fleshy pink skin, coiled like a snake and held tight against its side.

But then that pink skin lashes forward, like a frog’s tongue, and I realize that’s exactly what it is, a tongue, ready to strike and catch its prey.

Soren dodges that forked tongue, rolling off to the side. When the tongue meets the ground instead, rocks stick to it, and they’re drawn back into the gunda’s body. That flap of skin lowers back down, trapping it all in place.

And that’s when true horror washes over me. There were no teeth around that tongue, no mouth or throat. Just wet, sticky skin. If that thing catches me, it’ll enclose me in darkness, hold me tight to its body, and slowly I will decompose, absorbed through the gunda’s skin. I’ll likely die from the lack of air first, but the thought of being unable to move, encased in wet, sticky darkness—it has me backtracking, nearly tripping over my own feet.

My eyes lower to the white-and-red heap on the ground in front of the beast, and I realize now what it is.

A carcass—the remains of its last meal.

The gunda quickly realizes it’s captured nothing edible. The rocks and dirt clods tumble to the ground as that flap of skin rises once more.

I send a prayer up to the goddess. And when that tongue flings outward again, toward me this time, I throw myself out of the way.

Pain burrows into my side and clears my head as I strike the rough ground.

I’ve been cast out and rejected by my village. I’ve been sleeping on the ground in the wild. I have a ridiculous boy following me everywhere I go.

But I am a warrior!

I am Rasmira Bendrauggo, and I’m going to kill this beast.

I’ve made this decision, when someone else comes bounding through the trees.

Iric.

He already has his ax in hand.

“No,” Soren whispers from beside me, and I take a moment to wonder why he would protest more help, before Iric speaks.