In other places on the many corpses the skin had been flayed and muscle torn away so the narrow bones could be split in place and drained of marrow.
So the victims might live to be fed upon another day.
The track and trail of the crippled ape had led nowhere farther, only telling Gazda that Omag had not been to his cave for weeks.
After one last look around Sip-sip’s butcher house, Gazda had smiled, hoping that his next visit would coincide with the crippled ape’s.
He swore to bring vengeance against Omag—delayed or not—and it would come, as he would punish Magnuh should the jungle giant return. Still, the bull elephant had not been seen within Gazda’s lands, and any of his tracks had been long lost to rain or trampled over by other beasts.
Death might have caught both his enemies in its jaws, for such was the way of the jungle, and yet if both lived, then they would feel the King of the Apes’ wrath!
With this rage boiling in his mighty chest, Gazda bared his fangs and snapped them at the branches overhead for he could not utter the challenge that gathered in his mouth.
Gazda struggled at such times for he was the greatest hunter and fighter that the jungle had ever known. His roar could set the world to trembling, and none in all his land dared to challenge him.
He was King of the Apes, and master of beasts, and he would master Omag and Magnuh if only he were patient.
Patient! How could he be patient?
Such annoying delays left him prey to boredom, and in that lull his spirited mind would shift to the questions of his life, and without answers he would be left conflicted yet again.
And the discord that gathered in his breast strained for release.
Even his hate for the Bawaniri brought nothing but more frustration as his desire for vengeance was denied.
His interaction with the bone-faces had always been terrible and cruel, and yet, part of him pined for enemies that were as strong and fast as he. And had the Bakwaniri been more challenging prey, then more easily could he believe that they shared blood and ancestry with him.
But when Gazda would have bared his teeth and fought to the death, the bone-faces jabbered and squeaked like infants in a thunderstorm. He had no stomach for their weakness, so as they keened he tore their throats and drank their blood.
A wry grin tugged at his handsome features as he remembered leaving the dead creatures on the trail, jokes for Harkon the huntress.
Gazda liked the black female because she did not fear him, and had a mind that worked much like his own. He had learned this at the same time he discovered a strange new ability.
Once he had approached Harkon as she slept in her hiding place, and as he crouched over her in the shadows to study the fluttering eyelids, he’d been shocked to feel his crimson gaze burn past her dark lashes to see what shapes moved inside her dreams.
Those came to him as feelings, sights and sounds experienced much as his own thoughts and memories were. There he saw other night apes like Harkon carrying weapons like Gazda’s long knife and her spear. They were gathered around a central fire by huts like his tree-nest.
And as the night apes shared a bowl of liquid, bone-faces had come into Harkon’s dream, and they screamed as she killed them.
Gazda had been shocked that these things came unbidden to his mind as pictures, and he wondered if Harkon also shared the ability to see beneath the skin. He decided it might be another difference separating them from his tribe of apes.
So, Gazda had gone from there to look at the dreams of old Baho only to find them either disorganized tangles of sensation and distorted recollections of bloodthirsty predators or calm and happy shapes and warmth mixed with desires for mother’s milk, fruit or mating.
It was very different to what Gazda had seen in Harkon, for in her, the night apes were tall and graceful in bearing, and their actions were...majestic.
Gazda had no interest in seeing the dreams of Bakwaniri, though studying the bone-faces had convinced him they were different from the apes in the same ways he was.
However the differences were more about appearance in the bone-faces. They were marred by sickness and decay, but their limbs and hairless skins were shaped like his own, though unlike Gazda, they were much weaker than the apes and so, he had decided they were a different tribe again.
He had yet to test his strength against Harkon the huntress, but with her black skin, he had already reasoned that she also was of a different tribe of night apes.
So Gazda decided that while he, Harkon and the bone-faces were like apes, they were much more.
All three used physical adornments and garments—a desire that the tribe of apes did not share. Nor did the apes use tools or weapons other than Omag’s murderous axe-head cane.
Gazda had never seen an ape fight with more than fang and claw.
Which meant that Gazda and Harkon were different from the Bakwaniri that they killed—and all of them were night apes similar but different to Gazda’s adoptive tribe.
But knowing this had only increased his frustration.
He supposed that was why he enjoyed his time away from the apes. While they all did many of the same things, as life slowed down for them, Gazda’s mind seemed to speed up.
He was king but he was discontented.
Since Ooso, Kagoon and his mother had gone in death, he had recognized a distance growing between himself and his tribe. He still loved them, and would do his uttermost to care for them; but he was away often, and remained distracted whenever he returned.
The king always checked on tiny Yulu’s progress in her grandmother’s care, and found her as smart as Ooso, and she liked to tease—even the new king; but he had been too pleased by
