| |
The Uloan Islands writhed beneath a carpet of moving plant life. With the demise of Jass Imbiah and the huangi, and the defeat of Legaba by Almovaar, the ashuma that had kept the mwiti-plants at bay had subsided, then disappeared. Unfettered, the plants had soon begun to expand their movements.
Ubia-vines crawled out of the forests like a legion of grotesque serpents, overwhelming outlying villages and farms, attacking anything that moved or stood still. Grasses turned into lethal webs that enmeshed the unwary. Single blades grew higher than a man’s head, and they wove ominous patterns in the air, and they danced with a disquieting frenzy in the absence of wind. Fruits throbbed like beating hearts, with poisonous ichor beading like perspiration on their skin and dripping onto the ubia-infested ground.
The petals of flowers large and small opened and closed like hordes of groping hands. Clouds of noxious fumes wafted from blooms that unexpectedly shifted their colors and shapes. The roots of trees erupted like tentacles from the ground, whipping spasmodically in the air and ensnaring even the largest animals foolish enough to blunder into their reach.
When the first few Uloans were swarmed by ubia-vines or smothered in deadly snares of grass, the others were too concerned about the return of the Retribution Time fleet to take much notice of the mwiti. But as the toll of death mounted and the infestation intensified, the Uloans retreated, abandoning their homes and moving closer to the beaches ... closer to the sea.
Slowly, but inexorably, the mwiti were forcing the Uloans out of all their settlements. Large cities – even Ompong, on Jayaya – were being overrun and deserted. Even the cities of the dead, from which the jhumbis had marched to join the invasion of the mainland, were not immune to the incursion. Vines crept across the walls of the empty house-tombs, and trees sprouted inside them. Their rapidly growing branches split the structures apart from within.
With no means to protect themselves, the surviving Uloans could do nothing other than retreat, giving ground grudgingly, but inevitably. It was as though all the mwiti-plants had developed a conscious purpose: to expunge human life from its midst. And there was a reason for that purpose ... a reason the Uloans had long ago allowed themselves to forget.
The islands’ beaches were the Uloans’ final refuge. Beyond the edge of the sand, the islands’ interiors had become seething masses of mobile, lethal vegetation. By day, the plants of the mwiti blotted out the horizon like a writhing green wall; at night, they slithered and crept closer to their prey. Soon, even the beaches would not be a haven for the Islanders. They would either have to find a way to defeat the mwiti, or die on the blood-red sand ... or in the sea itself.
And still, the Uloans waited for the ships to return.