“See for yourself.” Putting the remainder of his food down slowly and carefully, Ehomba nodded to his right. “Here comes one now.”
XIII
Simna paused with food halfway to his mouth. Sensing the approach of the burrow’s owner, the black litah growled a warning as it moved off to one side. Eyes shining, Hunkapa Aub put both hands together and murmured delightedly.
“Pretty, pretty.”
The adult tomuwog was bigger than any of the travelers, but it was only partially there. A glittering, roughly cylindrical shape, it entered the nesting chamber on noiseless feet of aquamarine light. One moment it stood out in sharp relief, the next it was reduced to a drifting cloud composed of splintered sapphires. With each step, portions of its supple, streamlined body slipped in and out of sight. Half solid, half illusion, it inspected them warily out of eyes that were pale blue mother-of-pearl.
It had a short tail that struck blue-green sparks from the air as it flicked nervously from side to side, and a narrow snout of a face that glittered as if faceted. Huge sparkling pads front and rear resembled flippers more than feet. The edges of these appendages caught the ambient light and bounced it back in clipped, prismatic jolts to the retinas of onlookers. The shimmering claws had to be sharp, Simna reflected, to slice a path between two colors.
Filtered blue-green light danced off the creature’s flanks, so bright that from time to time the entranced intruders were forced to turn their faces away from so much brilliance and blink away tears. Simna found himself wondering what a tomuwog that inhabited the space between red and orange might look like, or between purple and red. Certainly they would be no less colorful than the singular slow-moving one before them.