Kane sat staring at the little black gelstei resting in his palm. Estrella and Daj edged up close to him, waiting to hear if he might say anything more. Maram took a swallow of tea, while Berkuar spat yet again into the fire. I listened as the wood there popped and hissed.
'Perhaps,' I said, 'we should find the Black Jade and destroy it.'
'No, Val,' Kane murmured to me, 'that is not possible.'
I went to bed that night telling myself that fighting through Morjin's forces to the north or wading through the Cold Marshes to the south would be much riskier than facing whatever darkness we might find in the Skadarak. But in truth, I didn't really know. And a deeper truth whispered like fire in some far corner of my mind: that I desired to look upon the darkest part of the world and know that the light I held inside would be bright enough to guide me through it.
We set out the next morning toward the west. Although it was late in Ashte, no hint of summer's warmth worked its way into this southern wood. It grew even colder, and the drizzle thickened into a sort of semptiternal gray cloud that enveloped us like a wet blanket. I blinked my eyes against the moistness there, while Maram licked beads of water from his mustache. We plodded along, yard by yard, through the dripping bracken.
Berkuar took the lead, with me close behind, followed by Atara, Master Juwain, Liljana and the children. Maram accompanied Kane, who, despite his wound, insisted on guarding our rear. Berkuar deployed Pittock and Gorman far out in the woods, to our right and left, to cover our flanks. Gorman, on our left, was also to look for sign of the Cold Marshes and give warning if we were about to wander into boggy ground or even quicksands. I led Altaru, the better to keep pace with Berkuar — and to feel solid ground beneath my boots. Then, too, the pain that sliced through my back with every step was slightly less in walking than in having to sit up straight in a jolting saddle.
According to Berkuar's reckoning, we should reach the Cold Marshes after only ten or fifteen more miles, and so it proved to be. We smelled this vast expanse of stagnant water and rotting vegetation long before we saw it. Through the trees wafted a stench that recalled the fetor of the Black Bog. The cloying air seemed to make it worse. Particles of drizzle caught up the reek and deposited it in our nostrils, in our hair and upon our garments. It made breathing itself a nasty trial.
'Whew!' Maiam said as he fanned his hand before his face. 'If it smells this bad here, in the woods, I don't want to know what it would be like to cross these damned Cold Marshes.'
Berkuar called out to him: 'No one crosses the Cold Marshes. Now be quiet, lest you call down a demon upon us!'
Berkuar believed, as did his fellow Greens, that the souls of sorcerers and other evil beings were doomed to linger in the cursed places of the world such as the Cold Marshes. These demons could even take form as werewolves and other beasts that might devour a man or suck out his blood.
'Demons!' I heard Maram mutter from behind me. There came a slap of a hand against flesh. 'That's the fourth mosquito I've sent on in the last half mile, and I've hardly seen one in all of Acadu. Ah, I'm getting a bad feeling about all this. Does no one else remember the Vardaloon? The mosquitoes there were worse than any demons.'
The closer we drew to the pungent reek of the Marshes, the more numerous Maram's least favorite insect grew. They did not descend upon us in clouds and choke our nostrils, as in the Vardaloon, but it seemed that every bush we brushed past disturbed dozens of the little black beasts. They winged through the air as they found their way unerringly to us and settled soft as snowflakes on our hands, brows and hair. Their whine was a torment in our ears.
'You didn't warn us of this,' Maram grumbled to Berkuar as he slapped at his neck. 'Now I know why no one crosses the Marshes!'
Berkuar only smiled at Maram, and then he spat into his hand. He rubbed this juice of the barbark nut over his cheeks and forehead. This vile, red substance seemed to drive away the mosquitoes.
A sudden trill from our left alerted Berkuar that Gorman had found something. We veered off toward Gorman, whose green cloak rendered him almost invisible against the green leaves of a bearberry bush. We walked as quietly as we could through the trees, here mostly oak and chestnut. As we drew nearer to Gorman, we saw what he saw: that the forest seemed to give out a hundred yards ahead of us. He led on past a gnarled, old oak until he stood upon some high ground, beyond which the forest dissolved into a dense grayness. We joined him there. Below us, in a great, ill-drained depression for miles to the south, stood a great swamp. Drowned grasses and a few lonely trees poked above this still water. A green slime floated upon it, and pockets of mist clung to it like tattered garments on a leper.
'The mosquitoes are bad here indeed,' Berkuar said to Maram. 'But that is not why no one crosses the Gold Marshes.'
A man on stilts, he said, would have trouble finding the bottom of this stinking mere, through which swam lizard-like beasts that could bring down even our horses. And there were quicksands, too.
'Even the birds, I think, don't like to fly over it,' he told us. 'Our path lies around it to the north, butSeaving as closely as we can.'
'Ah, and cleaving close to these damn mosquitoes, too,' Maram said as he brushed at his ear. 'They will be worse tonight. Can't we at least put a few miles between us and this swamp?'
'A few miles,' Berkuar told him might take us into the Skadarak.'
'Well, then, we're damned to the left and damned to the right,' Maram said. He slapped a mosquito off his red nose. 'But better the demon we know, I suppose, than the one we don't.'
For the rest of the day we worked our way around the edge of the Cold Marshes. We could not follow a straight course, for in places the high ground above the Marshes was rocky and broken, and in other places swampy arms of water seemed to reach deep into the forest, blocking our way and diverting us farther to the north. We all grew irritable: from the constant whine and sting of the mosquitoes, from the chafe of our soaked garments and from the smothering gray air. And there was something else. At first no one articulated this, but I could feel something calling to my companions from far away, even as I could feel it in myself. It was like a voice murmuring intimations of great pleasure, and even more like a sick urge to waste gold coins in a game of dice. In its intoxicating hold on us, which worked its way into us like a perfume sweetening skin, was the promise that all our suffering would soon end and our dreams be fulfilled.
Pittock, as hard-looking and reticent as any man I had ever seen, was the first of us to remark on this. When we broke for the day to make camp, he stared off through the trees to the north and announced, 'We're close to it — I know we are: It's as if there is an itch in my bones that I can't quite scratch. I would like to go on that way, though I know that is madness. My uncle was lost to these woods, and now I know why.'
Berkuar stood near him, looking north, too. And he said, 'That thing of Morjin spoke truly, in this at least. The Skadarak has grown.'
He went on to say that on the morrow, we must try to hug the Cold Marshes even more closely lest we wander into it.
Daj, holding up a piece of firewood as he might a sword, thrust it out ahead of him and asked, 'But how will we know if we've entered it?'
It was simple question — the question of a child. And it was a good question, too, for it held the very essence of our predicament.
That night passed slowly, with no break in the great bank of clouds that pressed down upon the earth. As Maram had warned, the mosquitoes came out in greater numbers. So did the bats who ate them; they whumped through the air, as dark-shaped as any demons. But they were not the kind of bats that drank blood — at least not human blood. Pittock and Gorman, standing guard over us with their bows at the ready, looked out into the dark air for any sign of werebats, werewolves or even worse things.
As I was trying to sleep, I overheard Gorman grumble to Pittock: 'That droghul fooled you into thinking you saw a werewolf; just don't let your eyes fool you into mistaking a deer for a dragon.'
&nb
sp; 'My eyes?' Pittock said. 'There's nothing wrong with my eyes. It's your eyes I worry about.'
'I have the eyes of a hawk,' Gorman told him.
'Is that why you killed Jastor?'
'You blame me for that? It was your arrow that pierced him!'
'Was it my arrow?' Pittock said. 'At the Battle of the Drowned Oaks, I gave you five arrows to replace the ones you wasted. I know it must have been one of these that killed Jastor.'
'You know this, do you?'
'You've always been a wild shot,' Pittock muttered.
'At Oxfarm I put an arrow in the eye of one of the Crucifiers at fifty yards!'
'A lucky shot. At the Battle of Sleeping Lake, you put an arrow into poor Thorgard's belly.'
'How can you speak of that?' Gorman half-shouted. 'Thorgard came out of the trees before Berkuar's call, and it was deemed an accident of battle. No one else holds me accountable for this!'
'Well, Thorgard was my cousin, wasn't he?'
The two men argued on in a like manner for a while, until Berkuar rose up to put an end to their dispute. He sent them both off to their beds, standing watch in their places. But Gorman chewed at one of his barbark nuts for most of the next hour and muttered to himself, while Pittock lay awake by the fire staring into its red flames.
We all, I thought, slept poorly that night, even Estrella whose repose was usually as easy and natural as a spring wind. More than once, I heard her whimpering as if tormented by some dark dream from which she could not awaken. Even Liljana, singing a soft lullaby as she lay next to her, could not soothe her. The cool, gray morning brought no relief in the weather. We all moved stiffly, as if the drizzle had worked its way into our bones. I could hardly sit to eat the goose eggs and cakes that Liljana cooked for breakfast, so sharp was the pain stabbing into my back. Although Master Juwain redressed my wound and pronounced it free of infection, it seemed that hot acids were eating into my flesh. Kane, as usual made no complaint of any hurt, but the look on his face was of a bear disturbed from his den and ready to bite anyone who crossed his path.
We set out. west, edging the stinking marshlands. Soon, however, we came upon a great inlet of slimy water and had to circle north. Two or three miles farther on, some rotten, limestone hills blocked our way back to the Marshes and forced us to cut through the woods. It was there, in the oaks, elms and willows nearly a hundred feet high, that a mist came upon us. It sifted through the dogwoods and lesser vegetation, and enveloped us in a smothering grayness. In only moments, it seemed, it thickened, and we could not see the tops of the trees; a short while later we had difficulty making out the trees themselves.
'I can't see our way!' Berkuar called out to me as he held up his hand. I walked up close to him and his woodsmen, and everyone else drew up behind me. 'Perhaps we should wait here until the mist clears.'
I stamped my boot down into some wet old leaves. The ground about us was low and boggy. I said to Berkuar, 'We might have to wait days — and this is no place to make camp.'
Berkuar shook his head. 'The mist is too thick; we'll wander apart.'
'We won't wander,' I told him. 'If we must, we'll rope ourselves together as we did in the Black Bog.'
'A good plan,' Berkuar said, 'but I can't see ten feet in front of my nose, and so we'll still wander.'
'No, we won't,' I said pointing off ahead of us. 'West is that way.'
I was as sure of this direction as I was of the difference between my right hand and my left.
'I'm sure west is that way,' Berkuar said. 'But will you be able to keep us on course after another mile?'
'Val will be able to,' Maram said, coming up to us. Then his faith in me seemed to evaporate. 'Unless of course he loses his sense of direction, as in the Black Bog.'
'If I lose my way,' I said, 'I'll tell you and then we'll make camp on the spot. Now let's leave this place.'
None of us wished to spend another night as we had; we all told ourselves, I thought, that another ten or twenty miles of hard walking should take us well past the Skadarak.
'All right,' Berkuar said, 'but let us then set course west and south, that we can be sure to remain close to the Marshes.'
It took us a while to rope the horses together. Then I pointed my nose southwest into the mist and set out in the lead through the moist, still forest. Birds sang out to us unseen. We came upon a channel of reeking water, and that reassured us. After that I turned us almost due west. It was strange and unpleasant moving nearly blind through the silent trees, but did not seem particularly dangerous. The ground remained low and flat. The worst of things were the mosquitoes and the occasional dead tree or sharp stump that were difficult to perceive until we nearly tripped over them. But the forest floor grew clearer and more open as we proceeded, and that reassured us even more, for Berkuar had told us that the undergrowth should thin out along the western reaches of the Cold Marshes. I felt my sense of direction sharp and strong inside me; it was as if the iron in my blood pointed our way unerringly like a weather vane in the wind. I had no doubt that soon we would put both the Marshes and the Skadarak far behind us.
'This isn't so bad, Daj,' I heard Maram call out. It seemed that he was trying to reassure the boy — or himself. 'You should have been with us in the Black Bog. Ah, perhaps you shouldn't. There, Val disappeared like a wraith, and I thought I'd lost him forever. There, too, time ate up the moon — a whole month of moons in a single night. There was a dragon, too, I think. Kane later told us that for a few moments out of time we were walking on the Dark Worlds, perhaps even Charoth. I have to believe him. That night was ten times longer than this day, and I thought it would never end.'
'I wish this mist would end,' I heard Daj say to him. 'It's nearly as dark in day here as it was in the mines of the Dark City.'
'Do not speak of that place,' Maram said to him as he slapped his neck. 'At least there were no mosquitoes there. As for that, though, I haven't been bedevilled by them nearly so badly this last hour, and so we must be drawing near the end of these damn Marshes — mustn't we?'
Maram's question alarmed Berkuar, who called for a halt. He stood beside me sniffing the air. Then he said, 'I can't smell the Marshes.'
'Neither can I,' Maram said. 'Hurray, hurray!'
Berkuar looked at me through the mist and said, 'We can't have come that far. The marshlands should still be to the south.'
'Perhaps a shift in the wind has carried off the stench,' Master Juwain offered.
But there was no wind — only the stillness of the silent wet woods. 'Are you sure of our course?' Berkuar asked me. 'Perhaps we've veered to the north.'
'Does one of your arrows veer,' I asked him, 'or does it fly straight?'
Gorman, who had walked off a dozen yards to look for mosses growing on trees or other sign of north, suddenly straightened up and called out to us, 'Look at this sapling Oak, it is, and white oak at that. Its bark has gone black, and it's as twisted as an old man!'
We noticed then that something was wrong with the trees around us, for their trunks, too, were blackened and twisted as with some disease.
'This is a bad place,' Gorman said. 'Let us flee it as quickly as we can.'
'And flee into a worse place?' Berkuar asked him. 'Let us remain here until the mist clears so that we can see what is about us.'
He cast no more aspersions on my leadership, but argued strongly for waiting, whatever my sense of direction might say. We finally reached a compromise: if the mist did not clear by noon or soon thereafter, we would push on to the west.
'But how will we know when it's noon?' Daj asked, looking up into the blinding mist.
Although my sense of direction, I thought, was nearly inviolate, my sense of time was not. And so I said to Daj, 'We'll have to guess.'
And. so we waited. Maram and Berkuar built up two little fires, around which we all gathered to keep warm. An hour passed, and then another, and I was sure that noon had passed as well. Daj was the first of us to notice a soft wind blowing through
the woods and thinning of the mist. Maram cried out that we were saved, but his celebration proved to be premature, for as the wind sucked away the mist and the air began to clear, we had a better view of the woods all around us: in every direction, the trees grew all stunted and twisted, with blackened bark and a brownish rust that blighted their leaves. Old oaks, which should have been as tall and stately as kings, grew only twenty or thirty feet high. Many were, as Gorman had said, bent like crippled old men. Few bushes and no flowers grew out of the forest floor; I put my hand to this dark gray ground, and it seemed too warm, as if the earth itself were burning up with fever.
'The accursed forest,' Berkuar said, looking at me. 'We've surely wandered into it.'
I said nothing because I could no longer deny that I had led us into the one place that Abrasax had warned us we must not go.
Chapter 16
For a while, as we waited near the fires and the mist grew thinner, Berkuar stared at me. Maram, I knew, did not like the accusation in his eyes because he came to my defense, saying, 'It's not Val's fault.'
'Did I say it was?' Berkuar asked him. 'The Skadarak might well have grown so that it would be impossible not to wander into it. All that matters now is how we will find our way out.'
This proud woodsman did not say what was obvious: that he had become lost in the mist, and could not tell north from south. Neither did his sharp eye for mosses and the like give hint of direction, for none such grew on these diseased trees.
Above us the clouds still gathered so thick and gray that no glow of white marked the position of the sun. Gorman told us that it was often this way in Acadu, in late Ashte, for weeks on end.
'That way is west,' I said, pointing straight ahead of us. I drew my sword, which glowed faintly when I pointed it toward my right. 'Do you see? Argattha should be to the north of us here, and Alkaladur confirms this.'
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