Free In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe

things, most of them very foolish, talking to the Vanished Goddess of purity about his task, his sons, his wife, and his home across the abyss.
    When he rose again, the man of the Vanished People had vanished, but a light gleamed on the Vanished Goddess's cold altar. The man with the black sword reached out to touch it; he could not feel it, yet the pressure of his fingers moved it as if it were a pebble or a stick. He closed his hand around it, and all was dark; but when he opened his hand the light shone as before. When he turned toward the water, the green and yellow eyes that had gleamed from it sank beneath it, and when he turned toward the land, the green and yellow eyes that had watched him so hungrily winked out.
    How much farther he walked after that, I cannot say. He was tired already and stopped often to rest, the way was hard, and each time he took a hundred strides it seemed to him that he had traveled very far.
    At last he came upon a naked old man who was gnawing on a human foot. The old man looked up at the sound of his approach, and the man with the black sword saw that he was blind, his eyes as white and blank as boiled eggs. "Get back!" this old blind man shouted, and he snatched up a rusty knife and flourished it.
    "I must go past you," the man with the black sword told him, "but I will not harm you."
    At the sound of his voice, the blind man stopped slashing the air with his knife. "You, you're alive," he said. And he groped for the man with the black sword, although he was well out of reach.
    "I am," the man with the black sword said. "Are you afraid that I'm an inhumi? I'm not."
    "Same thing happened to me," the blind man told him. "Lost every drop of blood. They thought I was dead and threw me down here."
    "Was that long ago?" the man with the black sword asked, and the blind man replied, "I think so."
    He no longer knew his name, or the name of the city that had sent him and his companions to Green, only that he had believed someone who had told him that they must go, and that they had fallen into the hands of the inhumi as soon as their lander set down. The man with the black sword ordered him to stand, and when he stood tried to make him straighten up, because he wanted to see how tall he was; but he was no longer able to stand straight.
    "I can't help wondering whether you are Auk," the man with the black sword told him. "Auk, a man I used to know, murdered another man called Galada. I never saw Galada but he was very much like you, except that he was not blind."
    "I'm not blind," the blind man protested.
    "The gods do such things. Does the name Auk mean anything to you?"
    "No." The blind man seemed to think for a time.
    "Chenille. Do you recognize that name?"
    "Chenille?" The blind man turned it over and over in his mouth, muttering, "Chenille. Chenille." At last he said, "No."
    The man with the black sword explained his task.
    "I can show you," the blind man told him eagerly, and shuffled ahead of him. "It's bad. Very bad." He cackled to himself, and the man with the black sword recalled the mad laughter of certain animals he had known in a similar place. ones." Abruptly he halted. "You want to get at the good ones, "Bad," the blind man repeated. "You can't get at the good don't you? The nice fresh ones?"
    The man with the black sword held the light he had been given so that it shone on the blind man's face then, hoping to read its expression; but it had been gnawed by cancer and evil, and was so hideous that he closed his fist around the light at once.
    The bodies of men and women and children filled the waterway to the top, which was much higher than a tall man could have reached. Some were swollen with decay, others rotted almost to skeletons. "They drain them and I take them," the blind man muttered, "but there's no life in them."
    The man with the black sword swung it at the leg of a dead woman, and the black blade severed it cleanly at the knee; leg and foot fell at his feet, and he kicked