‘Kimiko!’ he exclaimed, his mouth stretched wide in a grin of joy. ‘It’s been far too long, far too long my old friend.’
‘That it has,’ she said, her voice soft, lilting and almost hypnotic. ‘I hope I’m not too late for the party,’ she added with a grin.
‘I think you arrived just on time,’ William said. ‘Come, have a seat.’
‘What were you saying about this age of cockroaches, Awang?’ she asked the shaman.
Awang squatted down next to the rock and sipped on his coffee, his eyes seeming to stare through his companions at some far-off, unseen vista.
‘On my people’s ancestral lands,’ he began, not talking to any of his fellow beastwalkers in particular, but rather to the silent trees and plants that swayed and rustled in the mountain breeze, ‘there was once a great rainforest. Ecologists estimate that it was over one hundred and thirty million years old, and as such was one of the oldest forests on the planet. Was, you see. I grew up there as a boy and saw such a density of life, such an infinite spectrum of wonder, that one could hardly believe it. Birds of all kinds abounded, as did all manner of insects and reptiles and amphibians and mammals from great to small, and all kinds of fish and aquatic creatures in the rivers. As a boy it was not unusual for me to see elephants, rhinoceroses, leopards, tigers, and even creatures that are now extinct, or on the verge thereof.’
He paused and his voice dropped in register, the words almost bursting into splinters as the invisible fingers of deep, merciless emotion wrapped themselves around his windpipe.
‘Now … now it is all gone. My people have long since been torn from the forest in which countless generations before them had been born, grown, lived, loved and died. Millions of square metres of what was one of the oldest ecosystems on this planet have been razed to the ground. Trees that stood for thousands of years have been hacked down and burned to ash. Animal, bird, insect, amphibian, fish and reptile populations have been decimated, with many having become extinct, and this theatre of life, this brilliantly colourful symphony of pure wonder … it has all been wiped out. The one who made me one of us, she was a wise woman of the forest who could heal many wounds and illnesses. Her animal form was that of a clouded leopard. Huntsmen troops hunted her down, cornered her, trapped her … and then cut her up alive with a chainsaw, one of the same chainsaws they used to tear the forest apart. As they destroyed that network of life with such vicious abandon, so too did they destroy her and her body with that awful machine.’
Zakaria slammed his fist into the trunk of a nearby tree and growled. William and Kimiko both simply sighed, exhaling slow, gentle breaths of crushing sadness, and shook their heads.
‘Monsters! Demons!’ Zakaria rasped, both his blind eye and his seeing one bulging with wrath.
‘She was fifteen hundred years old, one of the oldest of our kind who still lived,’ Awang said, a sadness seeping into her words and curling them like sheaves of paper in fire. ‘Yes, for fifteen hundred years she spread peace and compassion throughout the world. Yet in a mere fifteen minutes, the Huntsmen turned her into nothing but a pile of hacked-up meat and fur.’
‘It is a profound tragedy,’ Kimiko interjected, her eyes moist with sadness, ‘that one as beautiful in spirit as her met with such a horrific end.’
‘And her kingdom was decimated, turned into palm oil plantations,’ Awang continued, ‘for Huntsmen-owned snack and fast food corporations. And they continue to burn it all down, as their corporations do in Brazil, razing the Amazon rainforest to the ground for beef cattle. They will not stop, not while such obscene profits are to be made from destruction, and not while the vast mass of humanity slavers and drools over the products of this destruction, the spoils of which they consume like zombies.’
‘That is why we will make them stop,’ Zakaria rumbled. ‘We will strike them at their core and stab our lances deep into the blackened heart that drives the whole body of the dragon that is the Huntsmen Corporation.’
‘Ah, Templar, still a dragon-slaying knight at heart, I see!’
The others, in whose bones the electricity that indicated the presence of another beastwalker was sizzling, turned around at the sound of the intruding voice, which was soft, husky and almost effeminate in tone.
Walking into the camp was a tall, lithely built man with an Arabic look about him. He wore a cavalier smile on his long, handsome face, and close-set, mischievous eyes of onyx regarded the other beastwalkers with an odd blend of arrogance and amusement. His high cheekbones would have been the envy of any catwalk model, and in the centre of his face sat a hooked beak of a nose, the skewed slant of which marred an otherwise impressive symmetry. The organ was perched above a wide, thick-lipped mouth, which seemed to be perpetually curled, like a strand of hair that stubbornly resists even the most persistent attempts to straighten it, into a cheeky grin. His cheeks were rough with black, curly stubble and his coffee-coloured pate, shaved to the skin with a cutthroat razor, gleamed as it passed through a frozen javelin of sunlight. Unlike the others, he was hardly dressed either for the jungle or the sauna-like heat; he wore an impeccable Italian suit in light khaki, with a mauve shirt beneath it, a purple satin tie, diamond-studded cufflinks and gleaming black and white wingtips … which were caked with mud.
‘Sharaf!’ Zakaria boomed in his sonorous voice, his grim frown buoyed into a smile that radiated an infectious warmth from
