The green of the foliage that grew beyond the red sand was so bright the plants appeared to glow even on a sunless day. Pink and yellow mwiti flowers grew amidst the grass, and multicolored mwiti fruits festooned the branches of the trees that abounded in the background. But the plant life was far from ordinary, for the petals of the flowers opened and closed like fingers, and the fruits pulsated like beating hearts. The grass moved like ocean waves, yet there was no breeze blowing to stir its blades.
Then the grass moved in a different way, impelled by a volition other than its own. And a serpentine form emerged and wriggled onto the sand. It was dark green and about four feet in length. Despite the surface resemblance to the ophidian-kind, however, it was not a snake. It was an ubia-vine, a mwiti-plant that was capable of independent motion. Ubias could not move quickly enough to be dangerous to people or animals mobile enough to evade them. However, a stationary object like the gede was another matter.
Small leaves sprouted at random intervals on the narrow tube that constituted the ubia’s body. There was no discernable head at its anterior; only a mouth-like stoma encircled with thorn-like barbs. Its tail end was pointed like a spike.
The ubia-vine moved closer to the gede, which remained inert. When the vine reached its quarry, its mouth fastened onto the gede’s side, and the barbs began their work, cutting into the viscous flesh and channeling the pieces into the ubia’s gullet. The lapping waves drowned out the sound of the ubia’s cutting and chewing.
The lifeless gede had no defense against the ubia’s determined assault. Its poisonous flesh and sorcerous aura had protected it well from the predators of the sea as it swam from the mainland. But those defenses had no effect on the predatory plant life of the islands, which had been altered by the uncontrolled magic unleashed during the Storm Wars. And with its charge completed, the gede was now only an inert lump of tissue, and it could do nothing to save itself as the ubia burrowed its way ever-deeper into the construct’s motionless form.
Soon the barbs reached the wooden tube ... and sank into it.
Then footsteps rustled in the bright-green, waving grass. And an Uloan stepped onto the beach. The grass-blades pressed down by his feet sprang upright – and continued to move long after they were standing straight again.
The Uloan, whose name was Bujiji, uttered an exclamation of dismay and rushed to the gede. He reached down and ripped the ubia from its prey, easily avoiding the teeth-laden mouth that whipped toward him. He cut the vine in half with the long, broad-bladed knife he carried, then hurled the pieces into the sea. The severed sections of the ubia continued to thrash as they sank beneath the surface.
Muttering bitter curses, Bujiji reached deep into the gede’s mouth. Despite grimacing in disgust at the touch of the construct’s gelatinous substance, he closed his fingers around the message tube. Then he yanked the tube out, pulling pieces of the gede with it. At the sight of the marks the ubia’s mouth-barbs had made on the wood, he cursed again. He knew those marks would soon make trouble for him – trouble he could not avoid.
As the Uloan turned and strode away from the beach, the torn gede lay in the sand, dead eyes staring up at the gray sky. Within moments of Bujiji’s departure, another ubia came out of the grass and wriggled toward the construct to finish the meal the other had begun.
3
As he strode through the seaside forest, Bujiji glared again at the marks on the message tube. Those marks were clear evidence of his late arrival at the beach, and the near-disaster his tardiness had caused. Bujiji had only himself to blame for whatever happened next. Jass Imbiah had told him the gede would be waiting for him to pick up, but he had stayed too long with Awiwi, his current love, before going to the beach to retrieve the message the construct brought.
It was worth it to I, Bujiji thought, remembering the sensation of Awiwi’s sweat-slicked skin sliding against his as they made love. Well worth it.
The ubia-vine had not broken the tube; the message inside remained intact. That was the most important thing. Bujiji knew Jass Imbiah would berate him, and that would be an ordeal, never mind the far worse punishments the woman who was the ruler of Jayaya, and first among the Jassi of the other islands, was capable of inflicting. Those other punishments were not likely to happen ... he hoped.
“It was still worth it to I,” he said aloud, not caring that there was no one close enough to hear him.
Bujiji was a sturdy, sienna-skinned man of medium height. His only garments were a multicolored cloth knotted around his lean waist with ends that hung halfway to his knees, and a pair of leather boots that warded off the grasping strands of grass that adhered persistently, and painfully, to whatever flesh they touched. His knife, which he had sheathed again, bumped against his hip as he walked into the mwiti-forest.
In contrast to spies like Sehaye, Bujiji could never pass unnoticed on the mainland. His head was shaved, and he allowed no hair to grow on his face. His scalp was covered with lines of raised scars that stretched from the beginning of his forehead to the nape of his neck, giving the effect of a spiderweb. A series of straight, vertical lines were incised into the rest of his face.
His upper body was decorated with a stylized spider-cicatrice. The outline of the spider’s bulbous thorax had been carved into the middle of his chest, and its eight legs reached across his entire torso, meeting in the middle of his back, as though the arachnid had trapped him in a lethal embrace.
The scarification patterns were symbolic of Legaba, the
