by Rick Shelley
"Finish cutting off its head," Annick said. I didn't ask questions. I was short on air already. I kept hacking until the head rolled forward and came to rest a foot from the neck.
"What is it?" I asked as soon as I could. The wings were still flapping weakly, the body twisting. I wiped my blade on the moss and grass.
"Some creature of Fairy," Lesh said-as if that were all that mattered. No one rushed to be more specific, so maybe that was all that mattered.
I got out my flashlight. Looking at the creature in light didn't help me identify it. The face was a grotesque parody of a human face. Thick, wiry hair reminded me of a picture of the gorgon Medusa. The wings were leathery and ended in distinct hands-long, six-fingered hands with claws that were four inches long. The chest and shoulders were thick and heavily developed, but the body tapered off quickly behind the wings. Annick spitted the head on her sword and held it up. The jaw fell open to disclose a herd of pointed teeth. Annick studied the face for a moment, then used her sword to flip the head off into the forest.
"Best to get that as far from the body as possible," she said, bending to clean her blade. "Some of these creatures can put themselves back together if they're given the chance." I looked at the still-twitching body and fought back a rush of nausea. I turned off my flashlight and put it away. I had seen enough… too much.
"We'll leave as soon as it's light," I said. I backed away from the body just as its nearer hand made a weak grab for my ankle. I hopped farther away, in a hurry.
"What do we have to do, burn the son of a bitch?" I asked. My voice may have been a little shaky.
"That might help, or it might just rise whole from the ashes," Annick said "There's no way to know for certain."
"Leave it to me, lord," Lesh said. He went back to his stuff and got his battle-axe. He chopped at the creature, and I was glad to leave it to him. I turned away and started getting ready to leave. The sounds of Lesh's butchery kept my stomach on edge. I guess the others felt queasy too. Nobody suggested breakfast before we got back on the road.
It was a day for strangeness. The forest turned weird early on. Crazily deformed trees first showed up as an occasional oddity, then became more common until most of them were bent in strange shapes. Some were knotted like pretzels. Others rose a few feet, then bent parallel to the ground, with most of the greenery on the top half and squat branches below supporting the weight. The leaves and needles became gray-green. A bird with a call like a mocking laugh followed us through much of the day but stayed out of sight. The laugh was perhaps the eeriest sound I've ever heard. The trees and the birds-those weren't the only problems. The streams were far apart and never more than a trickle. Our horses wouldn't drink from the first three we came to. They sniffed at the fourth for minutes before they decided to chance it, and they had to be awfully thirsty by then.
Twice that day we left the road to hide from approaching soldiers, coming down from the north. The second band had nearly two hundred riders. We were close enough to hear talking but not what they said.
"Baron Resler's in for a rough go," Lesh said as we mounted up again after the second group of riders were out of sight. "A lot of new soldiers heading his way."
"My uncle won't have the rough time," Annick said. "It's the men he'll send out to fight. He hasn't left Arrowroot in years except to attend banquets at Basil, and then somebody always opens a passage for him."
For our second bivouac in Fairy, we found a place near the stream the horses were willing to drink from. A horizontal tree with heavy foliage was between us and the road. There were enough other trees around to shelter us from the eyes of anyone riding by or flying overhead. Sleep was harder to come by that night. Memories of our visitor of the previous night intruded. We kept the same rotation on our watches. Annick was on guard when I finally dozed off, but the last thing I remember thinking was that it must be about time for her to wake Lesh.
When my danger sense flared, I didn't leap straight up. There was nothing so compelling propelling me this time. The extra sense was more discriminating than a burglar alarm. I woke, listened for a moment, then got up on one knee. "Lesh? Harkane? Annick?" Lesh and Harkane answered right away. Annick didn't.
"Annick?" I whispered, a little louder. There was still no answer.
"Who was on watch?" I asked.
"She was, I guess," Lesh said. "She never woke me."
"I didn't hear anything," Harkane added.
I was sure that more than a few minutes had passed since I fell asleep. I had been dreaming, though I didn't recall the substance of my dreams, simply that they had been there, plural, apparently extending over some time. I felt rested, as if it were time to get up for the day.
"Annick?" I called, louder still. I got to my feet with my sword drawn. The feeling of danger was persistent but not immediate.
"Her horse is here," Harkane said.
"We can't look for her in the dark," Lesh grumbled. "Pardon my stubbornness, lord, but I did say you should have sent her back at the start."
I got out my flashlight and used it within the little nook where we had set up our bedrolls. Annick's bedding, saddle, and pack were there, but her weapons were gone.
"Maybe she heard something and went to investigate," I whispered-without any great conviction. "If anything had dragged her from camp, we would have heard the commotion." And, I would have known if anything like that had happened so close… at least, I thought I would have.
Lesh grunted. We waited in silence, for perhaps an hour, before we heard anything. My danger sense picked up a bit, but I had my sword in my hand, so there was nothing to do but wait-until Annick crept back into camp.
"Where the hell have you been?" I asked when I was sure it was her. My flashlight showed blood on her tunic, but there was no hole in the fabric.
"There's a patrol camped nearby," she whispered. "I became aware of it after you fell asleep." She bared her teeth. "They never heard me. I killed two of them and got away without waking the rest."
"The rest? How many others?" I asked.
"Three. I'd have done them too, but one was stirring." She cackled softly. "I wanted to kill all but one, let him wake to find himself the lone survivor. That would have boiled his brains down to molasses."
"We'll have the elflord down on us for sure now," Lesh said. He didn't have to add another "I told you so" for my benefit.
The elflord or somebody. "You pull another stunt like this while you're with me and I'll throttle you myself," I told Annick. I meant it, though I didn't fully realize that until the words were already out. "Lesh, Harkane. We can't leave survivors to spread the news. Annick, you'll have to lead us back."
"They left a fire burning. You only need to go fifty paces north to see it." But she turned and started walking that way.
I snagged up my bow and quiver, and we all followed her. I shoved the flashlight in a pocket and concentrated on staying right behind Annick. She picked out the trail without difficulty. Baron Resler had said that creatures of Fairy wouldn't be hindered by the dark. Apparently his halfelven niece had inherited that eyesight. The rest of us stumbled now and again. Things got easier once we spotted the campfire. As we got closer, we could see the ground more clearly, as much because of the approach of dawn as for the puny fire.
"They're all human, after a fashion," Annick whispered. "Renegades from the seven kingdoms, mostly from Varay, no doubt. Traitors."
It was easy to see which were already dead. The bloodstains looked black in the dim predawn light and fire glow.
"Lesh, Harkane, work as close as you can to the nearest man. I'll take the farthest and Annick the one in the middle. With your bow," I added in an aside to her.
The job was necessary but not pleasant. I had never aimed a weapon at a human before. The bow wavered in my hands for a moment. It wasn't until Annick loosed her arrow that I was able to shoot my man. Then Lesh got the third. It was over in seconds. This time, I did puke.
12 – The Swamp
/> My rage had a life of its own. For a time, the fury was so consuming that a part of my mind could only stand back and watch in astonishment. For the rest, I had to fight to hold back my temper-a rage far beyond anything I had ever experienced before. We got back to our camp without trouble and hurried to get packed and to saddle our horses. By the time the sky was light enough for us to guide our horses to the road safely, I had been stewing for a half hour. Standing on the road, ready to mount, I finally felt-almost-confident that I could speak my mind without losing control completely.
"I want you to know," I told Annick very quietly, "that I meant exactly what I said about what I'll do if you pull another stunt like that. Either do things my way or get the hell out of here right now." I had to bite off the next sentence that wanted to come out: I've got no use for mad dogs. Annick and I stared at each other for a full minute or more before she replied.
"I won't do anything like that again without your approval." There was nothing meek or repentant about her promise. I couldn't even be sure that I could trust it. I could only hope that my danger sense would warn me before she did anything else rash. But as the morning wore on, I noticed that Annick seemed much less tense than she had been during our first days on the road, as if the killings had satisfied some deep addiction-at least for the moment.
It was a little different for me. No, make that a lot different. No matter what else happened-ever-I would never be the same. I had killed another human being, intentionally, "with malice aforethought." I had stood there in the dark and killed. Simple as that. And blaming Annick for the need didn't get me off the hook. It was my choice, my decision. I had killed and I had ordered my companions to kill.
You can't turn back from that.
There was fog that morning. It started patchy, not far north of our camp. At times, our heads were above it, making it look as if our horses were swimming through the clouds. As we moved on, the fog got thicker, totally enclosing us finally, until we could scarcely see fifty feet. For a couple of hours, the road-trail-was particularly rough and hilly as it skirted the line of hills that defined the isthmus. On the high ground, we sometimes rose above the fog. Then the road would drop almost to sea level again, plunging us back into the damp fog. The map at Castle Basil had been woefully shy of detail for the parts of the isthmus it showed. The swamp came as a complete surprise. We reined to a halt as a road dwindled to an uncertain track through the first bogs.
"Did you come this far before?" I asked Annick. She shook her head.
"We could cut over to the coast and follow the beaches," Harkane suggested. "We'd make better time and it would be safer riding."
"Until we met the first patrol," I said. I took a childish pleasure in seeing him lose a little of his habitual smugness. "We're not here to fight, at least not until we've got the sea-silver."
"How about we bear east for a bit?" Lesh suggested. "We get back to higher ground, it should be dry."
I flirted with the idea. It was tempting. But I finally decided against it. I didn't want to stray too far from the west coast while we were outbound. I could only find sea-silver along that shore, and I had to have that.
"We'll try to follow what's left of the trail," I said. "The swamp should cut down on the number of patrols we have to worry about. With better routes around the swamp, I doubt that anyone'll be in it-unless they're looking specifically for us." I gave Annick an annoyed glance at that. Far from giving us a "cloak of invisibil-ity," her deadly excursion might draw the elflord's forces down on us faster than ever.
The swamp. It was the first one I had ever been in. My expectations came straight out of movies and books. I don't suppose that I was disappointed. Mucking through a swamp offers few attractions for anyone but a masochist. The only good thing about it was that the path never completely disappeared. There was always a safe way, if we were careful. At times I couldn't tell solid ground from mud soup just by looking. The vegetation wasn't even a sure guide. Some of it floated on goop that could almost pass for solid ground. And there were vast pools of algae-filled water, slimy mud pits, pockets of gas that erupted with a stench as a hoof pierced them. Eventually, I had to more or less rely on my danger sense to pick a path through the worst stretches. And even that couldn't keep a horse from an occasional misstep on a narrow track. Moss-draped trees and ground mist complicated matters. But the worst part was the swamp's fauna. We saw sawed-off dragons like the ones I saw when I first arrived in Varay, larger crocodilians gliding through stagnant waters-one of those had to be fifty feet from snout to tail. A four-legged reptile that Lesh called a snake scuttled into a pond as we approached the rock it had been sunning itself on. I hate snakes, even if they have legs.
"I'll warrant there's worse in this swamp," Lesh said after I mentioned my distaste for snakes.
"Much worse," Annick said. "Any creature of the elflord could be here, and some as are even older-web-footed wolves, lowland trolls, maybe even a full-sized dragon come to wallow in the stinking mud." From the prickling of my extra sense, I knew that Annick was right about those other hazards.
Finding our way took all of my attention in the swamp. In a way, I guess that was a good thing. I couldn't dwell on the dead men we had left behind. I knew they would be missed sooner or later. And when the bodies were found, we would have a lot of people and other beings looking for us. Sure, I hoped to cause a bit of confusion for the elflord along the way, but I wanted to get my sea-silver first. Anyway, slitting the throats of sleeping men wasn't the kind of confusion I had figured on spreading.
We didn't take specific rest breaks. Finding safe pathways gave us plenty of idle minutes. Our progress was maddeningly slow. I doubt that we averaged even one mile an hour all day. The sky remained heavily overcast. Three times we were raked by short but furious rainstorms. I decided fairly early in the afternoon to grab the next substantial piece of solid real estate to make our camp for the night. I was exhausted and felt so cruddy from the swamp that I couldn't stand it. We were all dragging.
The solid land we found wasn't much, but no one argued when I said that we were done for the day. The ground was wet after the rain, but it was firmer than most of it we had seen.
We had just started to settle in when I heard a sound that made me think of a pig running from the butcher, and my danger sense kicked into high gear. I got out a quick warning and drew my sword. Then we had a pack of wild pigs grunting and squealing around us-only they weren't quite pigs. Compared to this batch of creatures, Miss Piggy is the beauty queen she thinks she is. The faces were vaguely porcine, down to the flat noses, but on bodies that looked like something dredged out of a really bad science fiction movie. Hairy, bloated bodies with obscenely muscled arms and legs: call it Attack of the Mutant Body Builders and show it in 3-D and Smell-ovision. They seemed equally adept at moving upright or on all fours. Standing erect, they weren't too much shorter than me, but they could scratch their knees without bending over. They looked and smelled as if they bathed in outhouses.
Somebody yelled, "Trolls!"
I don't suppose that was the most critical piece of information just then. I already had my sword out. When I saw the trolls, I pulled my knife as well. None of us had much chance to get set before they were on us, rising right out of the muck that surrounded our little patch of terra firma. What followed wasn't at all pretty. The fight wasn't one of those precisely choreographed battles that you see in the movies, where every move is planned and rehearsed down to the last detail before the cameras roll. There were no niceties of fencing technique, no elegant combinations. We couldn't drive the creatures off. They wouldn't retreat, not a single step. All we could do was kill them and try to keep them from returning the favor. Butchery. Slaughter. But it wasn't as simple as working in a charnel house. The trolls carried long knives, hatchets, and clubs. They could fight back-and did. But all they seemed to know of tactics was to run straight at one of us, screaming and waving their weapons. Maybe they thought they were ugly enough to scare us
to death. No sense of order or tactics at all. Not much sign of intelligence either. They just charged out of the swamp screaming insanely, right into our weapons.
When they did get to us, they did fight, viciously, insanely, on the attack every instant. If there had been just a few more of them, they might have succeeded in putting us on their dinner menu. That, Annick assured me afterward, was exactly what they would have done. Annick did show that she could handle herself against enemies who weren't sleeping, though. She was a berserker, howling as rawly as the trolls. Teeth bared, a blade in each hand, she waded into the fray as if she had been looking forward to it all year-like the prom. Maybe I looked like that too. There were no mirrors handy. Once I crossed blades with a troll, my training-and that strange directional itch that was the proprietary danger sense of the Hero of Varay-took over.
There's really no way to fully convey what a fight like that is like to someone who hasn't experienced it. It's running into an airplane propeller with a blade of your own and hoping you'll come out the other side in one piece. It's a riot of food blenders, and if you make a single mistake, you come out pureed. It's something Americans haven't faced since Vietnam-hand-to-hand combat, deadly face-to-face fighting, win or die. The only alternative to gut-wrenching fear is insanity. You're no longer a civilized being. You're either a feral carnivore or you're dead. Your mind and senses either get hyper-active, flooding you with sensory input, or they short out completely, leaving you to right on mere instinct… or on training drilled in so thoroughly that it's become automatic. Blood and sweat abound in incredible quantities. The smells become overwhelming. You wield your weapons. You try to look in every direction at once, watching for the next possible threat, the next blade or club coming at you… and you try to get your blade there first.
Hack and lunge. Knee an enemy in the groin, kick him in the shin, step on his foot, spit in his eye-whatever it takes to give you that little extra advantage, the millisecond or two you need to get a blade in to finish the job. Feel the tug of resistant flesh as your blade skewers a living being-but don't think about it, not then. Drag the blade free. That can be difficult. Sometimes you have to brace your foot against the body to drag your sword loose of clinging flesh. The hafts of your weapons get slippery with sweat and blood. Your fingers cramp. The steel of your blades runs red. The ground gets treacherous underfoot.
