Finna catches herself and makes a disgusted sound. “When she failed to conceive, Gilea whispered that the girl was barren. Nechtan ought to dispose of her and choose a more fertile wife. Nechtan murdered his queen and dumped her here in the swamp. Along with a thousand others he took from his lords, his neighboring kingdoms, and even his commoners. And finally, from corners of the world where no one knew his horrors.”
“And discarded them all here.” I stop and take in the swamp, seeing it through different eyes. It dizzies me. My stomach convulses and the pounding in my head grows.
“When Nechtan discovered his parents’ deception, he de-souled Hagge by tricking him into lying with a Sluagh disguised as a woman. He brought Gilea to the edge of the Tiste - it was a clear lake then- and captivated her with her reflection, then drowned her. In revenge, she reanimated all the wives Nechtan had murdered, and they devoured his body, trapping his demon soul in the shrine.”
“How do you know the legend?”
“Nechtan’s temple sits on the edge of his city. There was a great library once, before the buildings crumbled and the pages blew away. No one cared for the books, when the people were gone.”
“Where did they go?”
She puffs, a sharp burst of air. “Gone. There were a few, at the beginning of my memory. And then, a single man was all that remained. His hair and beard were white, like his tunica. His body seemed old but his soul...I thought he was one of the ancients, or immortals.
“I would hide and watch him; the others were not so kind to strange creatures, thanks to Nechtan’s legacy. The man swept the streets, tended the books. He kept a rosebush outside the city temple, with beautiful pale purple blossoms. One day, he wasn’t there. I don’t think he left. I never saw his corpse. If the mara got him…” She hmm’s. “He never came down from the city. I have no idea.”
I don’t hear this last part. Something Finna said is stuck between my thoughts. “What color was the rose?”
“Purple,” she sighs softly. “A pale shade, like a precious stone. I would slip up after sunset when the air was still warm and inhale it. Absorb a little of its essence and keep it inside to savor all night.”
“Here…” I creep to the next stone, trying not to draw attention. “Come to me quick, before we make more friends.”
Her trail zips over the water in a line that somehow radiates curiosity.
This is madness. Sliding off my pack, I thrust in a hand. Rose extract.
A small cool glass shape strikes my palm.
I raise the bottle for her. “Does this look familiar?”
Her gasp sounds like rain drops on a breeze. “Where? How?”
“Could you drink it? Absorb it?” I have a hunch.
“I...have no idea! I can’t absorb anything in the swamp beyond moisture from the air. Nothing else has any benefit. But something from beyond the Tiste?” She ripples, uncertain.
“I could be totally wrong but-” I pull the small glass cork and pour it over her silhouette. It drips like water over glass and most of it pools on the stone.
Worth a shot. “Well, I guess I’ll never-”
A sweet oily musk of roses barely overlays the stench. And suddenly, feet. A small-toed pair of amethyst feet. Slender calves. Full hips and a tiny waist that blossoms to full tits and slender arms. I watch the ink stain her, stamp her into reality, marveling. Her face fits her voice perfectly, pert nose and full lips, big eyes that make her look innocent and a quirk to her brow that is anything but.
“Oh! Oh my-”
Finna looks down at herself, shaking her head. She palms her hips. “Look at these!” Her soft stomach. “And this!” Cups her breasts. “And these and- oh!” Finna’s tits are buoyant like Meridiana’s, but more pert. Not just well made but...made differently. Her nipples are little buds that quiver in the cool air, and I swallow, dry mouthed, at the realization she’s completely naked. And...still mostly transparent.
She sees me staring, laughs. “Oh, that’s…” She pokes a finger into each nipple. They disappear, melt into her body, and her breasts are smooth globes. She’s still naked but...it’s less lewd. Barely. Just barely.
She looks like a goddess carved from a jewel. But a jewel that flows, reforms, thick like slime. “You’re...like this? What are you?”
“What did you think I was?”
Like my brother’s silk-sheet ghost but less substantial. I know better than to say this. “Um, just less…” I hover a finger over her heart. Where her heart would be. She doesn’t have any organs – I’d be able to see them. My fingertip touches the damp surface of her skin. Her flesh? She doesn’t have skin. She quivers beneath my touch. Her flesh parts and my finger gloves inside her without warning. “Oh! Oh godsdammit. I’m sorry. Does that hurt?”
Finna laughs, and her body trembles in way that’s...tempting?
“You can stick it anywhere. It won’t bother me.”
Oh, great. I have to fight a lot of terrifying creatures and now I can’t focus on a damn thing. “What are you?”
“The mortals, when there were some, used to spit and chase me and call me slegge. Slime girl. But I’m a nymph. This was my lake before Nechtan; it created me with water and primordial essence and an ethereal soul.”
“That’s amaz-”
The swamp churns like it heaved a massive sigh. Detritus-strewn water raises and floods out in a rush that partly covers my stone.
“Oh no…” Finna shakes her head, spinning weightless on one toe to take in the change. “Not this again!” She darts out ahead, beyond a gnarled embankment of mangrove.
“What!”
“They’re coming! We should have kept moving!” I can see her now that she has pigment, her shape against the drab sunken wood. She points behind me.
“Stay away. I’ve got this!”
“No, I don’t think you do…”
The mara sprout like eager, evil seedlings, splashing from the water in every direction and dragging through the swamp.
“I’ve cut them down no problem.” Both blades are already in my hands.
“They just keep coming. It’s not strength; it’s numbers.”
It’s impossible to imagine these things, hideous as they are, ever overpowering me.
“You can cut them down, fight forever, but they keep coming,” warns Finna, rippling beyond the unholy congregation of creatures. “Just one; if just one gets you down, she’ll crush you as they pile onto you, suck you into the swamp.”
This is the horror of the mara, the scary story told over low fires to frighten children; the mara or alp came in the night and sat on your chest, growing heavier by the second until it had crushed the air from hungry lungs.
And then, they’re on me. My blades sing as I back away, trying to watch my feet and them all at once. They move slowly, lurch toward me, nightmare faces split by knife cut mouths. Every time my swords swing, I cut down more, sometimes two or three at once, but they’re relentless. More are rising as I cut down those in the first rank, and I know in that moment Finna is right; I can cut down nineteen, but the mara will make a sacrifice and swamp me to the ground for the twentieth to climb over me.
It’s getting hard to see them. The pain in my temples has become a drumbeat in the center of my skull that underscores each swing. My arms are already tired. I’m slowing, and my head feels wrong, foggy. For a flash I see blonde hair and red; ebony skin and gold. For a flash I feel like a murderer.
Shaking my head, I dance upon the stone.
And that’s when they almost take me. There’s one behind me, low, arms spread. I trip over it, fall heavily into the murk, and it’s on top of me. Pushing me down. Oh Gods, it’s so heavy.
I swing blindly, taking it through the head. It melts over me, dissipating into the swamp, and I lurch upward, spinning wildly.
The others are almost on me. If they’d been closer when I’d fallen, I’d be dead. I cut, my blades rending them. Their screams aren’t chilling; they’re soul-crushing.
<
br /> “Finna, help! Help me!” My will thins, and my reason for fighting grows threadbare.
“I can’t! You know I can’t!” Her voice is distant; she’s been driven further by the green-gold ripple of essence in the water. But I can hear the tones, helplessness and a strong note of disappointment.
Arms slack, my blades fall to my sides. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”
A figure hovers out in the open pool of the swamp, smoke-black and tall enough to blot out the sad, faint sunlight. Eroded wings, cold beautiful face like a mask.
Gilea. Deceiver. I reach back, thrust my hand into my pack as she glides forward, nightmare made real.
Flint and steel.
Nothing.
Dammit, Cocidius.
Matches.
Nothing.
Cimmerian tonic, then! Fuck.
Fragile glass jumps to my hand, crisp paper wrapping a tactile alarm bell that snaps me to.
I cut one last swath, charge forward and land on the mangrove, head-high and ivory, piled like a mountain of discarded bones. It bows, bounces. The gnarled lengths shift and cave into hollows made by slow decay. It’s not till after I throw the tonic and hear it shatter that I discover my foot is tangled. The mound goes up in an instant, hungry tongues of flame licking wet, dry, and moss covered indiscriminately. My boot tears a branch and my leg pulls free. I tumble, spring from the tensile roots and land on a small island, the first real land I’ve seen in the Tiste.
Shrieks and wails mingle with the eager pop of elfin flame. The mara slide back into the swamp and for the moment, retreat from light that, to dead black eyes must be like a thousand suns at dawn.
No sign of Gilea.
There’s respite, but my head’s no better. In fact, panting from exertion has made it worse. Half laying on the ground, I consider the sickly fog and wonder. Is it poison? But I felt fine when I came into the swamp, and for the first few step stones.
“Finna?”
No answer.
“Finna!”
“What do you want?”
Her voice is so quiet, and my head so loud. She could be close or far away. I feel she’s far and growing further.
“Come here,” I pant. “I have some questions.”
“No. Absolutely not. You’re going mad, just like the others.”
“I am.” Voices murmur beneath the water, pitiful moans demanding my soul as tribute, as reparations for the evils of men. But the voices come from inside my head, too. “I am, but I want to figure this out, for me and you. I don’t want to die, here, Finna. Help me.”
She slips from beneath the gnarled roots of a tree, little more than a puddle before she takes shape.
“Did the others go mad the further they went into the Tiste, or the more mara they fought?”
“That’s-” She stops, brow dipping. “I don’t know. I assumed it was distance. One camped on the edge of the Tiste for a day and a night trying to puzzle the place out, and he never attracted the mara and he never showed madness, now that you mention it. Not until…” She winces and glances around us. “Until here, the midpoint. So I don’t know for sure, but...maybe the fighting.”
I drop to my knees and clutch my ears. The screams. By Heijl, the screams. “Not the fighting. Their essence is a poison. For me and you but for me...it’s madness, not sickness.”
I’m sure this sounds reasonable. Well-considered. Not the fucking lunatic rambling it sounds in my brain.
She gasps. “What do we do? How do we fix it?”
Hope. I hear hope in her soft words. It spurs me on and dispels some of the buzzing that scrambles my thoughts. “The mara don’t notice you. I need you to hide me. But…” What?
“I can’t wrap you. It’s been tried. The skin of your face. The dead seconds of your mortal timepiece counting down your days when you exhale…”
Is this a real thing or just raving in my mind?
“They would smell you. They will know.”
“Cover me.” Lunacy and desperation surge. “Could you envelope me?”
“I...Perhaps? I’m air and water and base elements. Primordial essence.” She dares toward me a step at a time.
“Hurry. Hurry.” Water laps the island’s edge. So hypnotic. Inviting. It’s where I belong. Crawl to the edge and fall into the soothing dark…
Finna’s wet, gelatinous form is cold against my fevered face, like a slap. She thins; her features disappear, and she flows over me like water.
“If I’m wrong,” she warns in a watery voice, gloving me to the neck, “You’ll drown. You’ll die.”
I can see the faces of the mara, in splinters of my thoughts, and I can’t tell if they’re real, anymore. “It’s better than the alternative.”
I barely finish the word before she slips over my head. I’m covered. She’s my armor, my protection. It’s like plunging my face into a pool. I hold my breath.
“Breathe.” I hear her words inside me. “You have to breath me in, or the mara will know.”
I shake my head. Insulated from the noxious air, my madness has begun to pass, and this restores my instincts and reason.
Mara come tentatively from the water, stalking slow and confused. But they are coming, converging.
“Lir.”
I hold my breath. Spots explode at the edge of my vision.
The mara sniff, hunched and beckoning with their finger claws.
It’s not a brave choice on my part. My lungs simply spasm on a primitive demand. Cool slime flows into my nose and mouth. I writhe, trying to claw free. The spots recede. My lungs raise like furious bellows. A mara looms a finger-length away, staring into my face with her spongy, slack, horrifying visage.
She flails left, right. When her prey doesn’t materialize, and her confusion yields no answers she turns and with a last signaling scream, calls the others into the water with her.
“Oh! Almat, Heijl, and Vigga! I can’t believe it worked.” Finna sounds breathless, as disbelieving as I am.
That’s only the half of it. I’m inside her. There’s no explaining how surreal this is. How her flesh flows over mine, solid but fluid. A living being. I can feel her, flowing around me, across me, inside my clothes, inside my body. When I breathe, she flows in and out of my lungs.
It’s bizarre, and incredible. She’s a part of me, and me of her.
More shaking? She’s moving. I’m not in control of our movements, not totally. My boots sense the spongy ground beneath us, but I feel tumbled along by Finna’s momentum like a twig tumbled along in a stream.
“Is this strange to you?” Her voice is a muffled hum.
“No.”
She stops moving.
“Yes. Yes, it is.” I can’t play the hard-worn adventurer this time.
Finna is silently, moving between the fingers of trees reaching into our boggy path. It sounds impossible, but I can feel what she’s thinking. Impressions, anyway. I wonder if its Meridiana’s gift at work.
What is it?
Finna tightens around me. You can do that?
Guess so.
She’s silent again a moment. I feel stupid for never thinking of this. No offense to you. Just…
Hey, I only thought of it because I was on the edge of insanity. Not like a puzzled it out on a stroke of genius.
If I’m completely honest...She contracts around me with a sigh. I don’t know if I cared.
This might sound cruel from someone else, but I hear faint regret beneath her thought.
I resent Cocidius for making me part of his menagerie. And I resent Nechtan for corrupting my lake and spoiling the Great City. I resent the man in white for leaving, although…She ripples, and for a moment my vision is that of water over a windowpane. It seems he didn’t forget me.
Have you ever been to the garden? In the center of Cocidius’s temple?
No. Not one aspirant survived here. She sounds unimaginably sad.
There’s a Gardener. She gave me the rose extract.
She?
> It? It appears female. I guess I don’t know for sure. Anyway.
Gardener in the temple. A gardener in the city. Interesting. Warmth radiates from her, genuine curiosity and delight.
Anyhow, so many of the men who came were ruthless, impatient, cruel. And when they began to lose their minds, I suppose there was already an unwillingness to help. Silence stretches a moment. When she speaks again, her voice is almost too quiet to hear, even in my head. I sound like a monster.
No. But I am amazed at the number of bollock-bags who pass through this place.
Her chuckle vibrates cool goo where it lays against my skin. That’s what it takes to win, I’d assume. Brutality and a willingness to sacrifice anything.
Mm. I can’t agree. Haven’t done a whole lot of that and so far, despite getting in my own way from time to time, I’m still alive.
A ripple of happiness travels through her and over me. The scent of roses fills my every breath, magnified.
Ahead, I can see the shrine, still a hazy blot against the darkness. Mara wander past us, and more than once we have to halt as one shambles across our path. They shriek to each other, and now that they’re not attacking, their voices are mournful. Considering who they were, how they died, I don’t blame them.
I hate this place.
We reach the edge of the last of what can be called land. Ahead, the water is open on both sides, and ripples ahead to a low, tangled cliff with uneven steps cut into rock beneath the overgrowth.
Nechtan’s shrine tops the staircase. In the swamp air its little more than a hazy illusion, small and circular and ringed with columns like Cocidius’, but taller, narrower and capped with a domed roof. Once, it must have been bright stone, but after more than a century in the poisoned air it sticks cracked and yellowing from the ground like a decayed tooth.
I don’t see a way across the water. How do we –
On a reflex, I gasp when Finna steps from the bank onto the water, brace to hold my breath and plunge into water that’s clearly much deeper than the rest of the swamp.
Water spins beneath our feet in a tiny vortex. When the spinning grows fast enough, it flows along her skin in a cold jet, levitating and propelling her all at the same time. We flow over the lake without moving a limb.
Temple of Cocidius Page 10
