The canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.
I heard a noise behind me and looked around. Ahra the Nahali woman was standing in the mud with her arms up and her head thrown back, and her triangular mouth open like a thirsty dog. She didn't have anything on but her blue-green, hard scaled hide, and she was chuckling. It didn't sound nice.
You find a lot of Nahali people in side-shows, doing tricks with the electric power they carry in their own bodies. They're Venusian middle-swampers, they're not human, and they never forget it.
Ahra opened her slitted red eyes and looked at me and laughed with white reptilian teeth.
"Death," she whispered. "Death and trouble. The jungle tells me. I can smell it in the swamp wind."
The hot rain sluiced over her. She shivered, and the pale skin under her jaw pulsed like a toad's, and her eyes were red.
"The deep swamps are angry," she whispered. "Something has been taken. They are angry, and I smell death in the wind!"
She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight and cold. Bucky said,
"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump."