by Terah Edun
That was the first time the mercenaries had encountered a creature of the swamp head on. Except the swamp leopard. Well, the leopard hadn’t attacked any of them. It had attacked their pack animal, lunging at the elephant’s shin in a calculated move. But this creature? This creature had eaten a human—a mercenary. The group had gathered their courage like a cloak about them. They may have been slowly starving for protein with glassy eyes and aching feet, but they still had segments of their pride. Their pride and their battle fervor. Here was an opponent worthy of the third division’s ire. They feared no monster, even one as big as this. And most of all? They were tired of being challenged and losing to unseen foes—human, creature, and kith alike. First, the Kades had ambushed them with not an enemy combatant to be seen. And now creatures—creatures she was half-sure were kith, but knew for a fact that they were at least beasts, if not magical ones—had been picking off mercenaries for days on end, like ghosts that haunted them under the cover of darkness. Now they had one fully in their sights. Now was their chance to avenge their fallen foes. So they did.
Their assault on the monster had been horrific. Not for it. For them. Their weapons were ineffective and bounced off its skin like dulled training swords on a wooden training dummy. Sara had briefly wondered if a mage attack would affect it. But she wasn’t going to waste her energy on the beast. The idea of hunting it had been discussed and quickly discarded, after all everything else they had encountered here had been either poisonous to the touch or noxious end to inducing vomiting upon consumption. This creature would probably be no different. As for the man he had consumed? He was already dead, after all. Apparently, neither were any of the other mages of the division, because none had bothered to engage it, not even the other battle mages.
In the end, the creature had casually bitten a man in half and slipped back into the deep waters like a specter that vanished in the side of the muddy strip of land they had been trudging forward on day in and day out. For a few minutes, Sara’s skin had tingled as she kept a wary eye on the still waters. She had known that even though they couldn’t see the creature, it was still there. Lurking. Waiting. But apparently it was full enough with its meal of one and a half humans that it decided to leave their presence shortly after. When she saw a v-shaped trail of water leading away from them, she and a good number of her comrades heaved an audible sigh of relief.
And they trudged on. That had been the first day. It had been twelve days since then, and the horrors they had seen had only grown worse.
That was half of the reason why no one had tried to save the war elephant. They had learned that these creatures were often more than they seemed and, quite often, seemingly invincible.
“The other reason no one else even bothers anymore? We’re damned tired,” Sara muttered to herself resentfully. “Tired of the attacks, and tired of defending ourselves without sleep. After all, how do you sleep when the very swamp itself is trying to kill you?”
Sara wasn’t joking about that last part. There was something about this land that made it treacherous for them all. The one time a land mage traveling with their division had remarked on the subject, he had said with a sniff, “The very land has been called upon to devour us.”
“By who?” Sara had asked.
He had looked over at her with a disbelieving look. “By the Kades, of course.”
Sara had shrugged, uncomfortable at arguing with him. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe the Kade mages weren’t perfectly capable of this assault. Look at the assault they had waged unfettered against them while the guard was on the road, after all. But it felt like a convenient excuse every time they encountered a problem to blame it all on the Kades.
Throwing caution to the wind, she had turned to the man and said, “And what if it’s not? What if it’s something else? Or someone else?”
“Who?” he had asked coolly.
Sara raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that your job? To find out who are our flora magic-wielding enemies?”
He straightened his shoulders with an eagle glare, “Mark my words, it’s the Kades, and this land will swallow us all at their very whim.”
He had been right about the last part at least. The next day, a sinkhole had opened up at his very feet and he had disappeared with nary a scream. The spooked soldiers around him had grown even more spooked with the vanishing man. Now it felt like Sara couldn’t turn around without a prayer being thrown in her face or a nervous man almost taking her eye out while he jerked his weapon. For the most part she didn’t lash back at the bumbling soldiers, they were afraid and they had a right to be. If moving out of formation and hacking at the vegetation made them feel more secure, then she wouldn’t stop them.
But the vegetation and the earth weren’t their only threats.
Creatures she wouldn’t dare call animals had risen and attacked them. They had lost forty good people to fierce one-on-one battles with the damn things. It wasn’t just one species. The whole bog was infested with birds, snakes, amphibians and shadow-like creatures with spiked feathers that walked along land and had drool-like yellow poison. It was that last shadow-like creature that had caused the most damage. It was fast and it only took a small bite for it to kill its prey. Slowly.
If you could call a paralyzing venom slow. Sara did because faster would have been a creature biting through a victim’s neck and severing a jugular artery. Fast and efficient. This was painful, debilitating, and unbearable to watch. Sara had nicknamed the creature the ‘razor-billed dragon’, because it looked like a land-bound dragon and had the beak of some of the more sinister avians she knew. It was certainly devious and deadly enough to be a dragon. Although she had a hunch that it bore no direct relation to the mighty Sahalian race.
From the way the creature poisoned its prey to the way it moved with an inhuman speed to bring about death, this creature was their most formidable predator. Not the swamp leopard, nor the swamp lizard that sank into the depths of the water. No, this creature that ran on land and disappeared like lightning was deadlier than either of those beasts.
Its razor-sharp teeth were able to pierce their armor, and its venom was fast-acting. After the poison set in, it caused the victim to succumb to fevers and shaking. The person was still mobile...for an hour or so. Then they couldn’t walk because their muscles would lock one by one, until finally they were paralyzed. Sara knew that that last stage was when the creature struck. Waiting to move in until its prey was helpless to defend itself. It was a coward.
So she used that to her advantage. The trick was to kill them before they had a chance to get within a few feet of you. Because even a drop of that venom on your skin was disastrous. The archers had been working double-time to combat them, paired with one or two soldiers who kept them guarded. Sara had been paired with Ezekiel.
She flashed back to when she had saved Ezekiel’s life in Sandrin and then once again in the skirmish. Well, he’s certainly earned his keep since then, she thought – her face darkened with pain.
Not her pain. His.
Ezekiel Crane had shot down ten of those creatures before one had slipped through Sara’s defenses.
Sara’s eyes turned to the right to take in the feverish and splotchy form at her side. Ezekiel had one hand latched unsteadily on her right shoulder and the other hand gripping a staff tightly as he struggled to lift one foot above the rising mud in an effort to keep going.
He had been bitten less than ten minutes ago.
They had fifty minutes until he was full paralyzed. Unable to walk. Unable to eat. Unable to drink. They had to reach safety before then.
He wasn’t giving up and neither was she.
Chapter 7
Every minute that passed was a minute lost in Ezekiel’s life. He didn’t have much time. Just like all of the sufferers of this poisonous creature’s bite. She could feel the energy draining out of Ezekiel as every step he took became harder. Mud clung to their legs, weighing them down, and Ezekiel was wheezing from the exertion
s. The effort to keep moving forward was taking a lot out of him, even though she bore the majority of his weight all while keeping her armor on.
“Let me go,” he managed to say through heavy breaths.
“No,” she said firmly.
“Sara...” His voice was fading out.
She stopped for a moment, ready to berate him. But the weakness in his voice halted her before sound could pass from her lips. For a moment, she felt compassion. So she softened her voice and counseled, “Catch your breath. We’re almost there.”
He chuckled through coughs. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” she said in a tone of voice that hinted at the violence she would inflict if he tried to contradict her again.
Ezekiel leaned away so he could turn and stare at her with weary eyes. His paralysis wasn’t traveling the same path as it had the other soldiers struck by the razor-billed dragon. For some strange reason Ezekiel’s paralysis was only affecting the left side of his body. She had originally thought he would be like the others, with his feet showing the symptoms first. She had been told that first the flesh along the soles of the soldier’s feet went numb. The first half dozen to succumb had probably seen the numbness as a boon. No more aching feet. But the numbness hadn’t stopped there. Slowly, the flesh along their ankles and legs had begun to tingle and then lock-up. With each passing step, it would become harder for them to move forward—like it now was for Ezekiel—and eventually the muscles would stop functioning altogether. Preventing movement. Ezekiel’s left leg had begun to lag long before his right leg had been affected in any capacity. She knew that the final step in the creature’s predatory plan hinged on its prey’s vulnerability, which was why Ezekiel’s left side was currently strapped to her right like a three-legged human. The mercenaries had quickly learned that it stalked its prey until they couldn’t move anymore and then swooped in to devour their defenseless forms. Sara wouldn’t let that happen. They had also learned that it was just as formidable as the creature which had surged from the waters like a demonic angel. Its skin was as dense as armor, it was fast as lightning, and it regarded their attempts to kill with an almost contemptuous air.
“Just like everything else in this damned swamp,” Sara said as she used her free arm to wipe sweat away from the corner of her eyes. She knew that creature always struck when the poison did its final work and the victim lay comatose as easy prey. Sara wasn’t about to let that happen. When Ezekiel’s right leg succumbed and he finally couldn’t shuffle forward anymore, Sara planned to beg a fellow soldier to lift Ezekiel in their arms like a babe and carry him. She knew it was a foolish though. Ezekiel wasn’t even a full mercenary, he was a curator drafted into the ranks of the archer because of her insistence. None of them would want to waste their remaining energy on carrying him. She knew they would sooner let him fall behind than kill themselves with the labor or danger of protecting him. But at that moment Sara wasn’t thinking of the logical conclusion of her pleas. She was thinking she would do anything to keep him moving one step further, including begging, bribery or outright threats.
Sara’s eyes flicked away from Ezekiel’s to take in the unforgiving swamp around them. The land was a verdant green—a tangle of moss, vines, and more mysterious vegetation erupting everywhere. The vines hung from the tree branches high above and crept around the thick trunks like snakes. In fact, the vines were so large and so well-mimicked by the cold-eyed reptiles of the swamp that sometimes she missed the subtle difference between ropy vines and thick coils of camouflaged muscles. They lay so still for moments, like a disguise, but eventually their creeping movements gave them up as living animals and not the flora they mimicked. This swamp was a treacherous place. Venomous creatures seemed to lurk behind every tree stump and in the deceptively still waters of the deep bogs. Sara turned her calculating orange eyes back onto her only friend in the company, and she became uncomfortable at what the left side of his face presented. The formerly normal features now looked as if they were slowly melting off like wax in the hot sun. Sara didn’t flinch for two reasons. The first was the fact that although Ezekiel’s face was an uncomfortable visage, it wasn’t a scary one. The second reason was that Sara was familiar with the effects that paralysis could have on a person’s body.
She remembered face of a former gladiator that she had known from childhood. His features, too, had looked like melting wax. But it had been much more severe, in Sara’s opinion. Severe and permanent. For as long as she had known him, the man had not been able to move his left arm or leg, and he spoke with a heavy speech impediment. But that hadn’t stopped him from being who he was. A kind man. A sane man. And a determined warrior. But he used his learned warrior skills in other ways after his ‘accident’, which had happened long before Sara was born. He couldn’t speak without long pauses and confusing enunciation, but his right hand had worked just fine. So he had drawn maps of the entire empire for her father and tutored Sara in the geography of the Algardis Empire, in addition to earning his keep at her father’s villa as a weapons sharpener.
That last task he had insisted on. In his slow and mangled speech, Sara remembered his explanation to her as to why, when being a mapmaker was just as good and steady a trade—an even better one, actually.
“My mind is sharp, girl, but my weapons must be sharper. I may not wield the sword anymore, but your father does, and those weapons must be sharp,” he said in a long speech that took twice as long for him to say as it would her or anyone else, “Ready to pierce a rib cage and cleave a skull. I know these blades like I knew my own. Therefore, I’ll prepare them for war and for combat.”
He had pinned her with a fierce glare then.
She had gulped and nodded, not really understanding the determination back then. He could have just set one of the squires to the task, after all. But she didn’t question him. Instead, she fetched the extra polish he had wanted for the metal and got back to the chore she had been punished with—shining two dozen swords until they gleamed.
Sara grimaced. She couldn’t remember what she’d done to deserve the punishment usually given to her father’s squires, but she knew whatever she had done to be assigned the task had to have been a troublesome quarrel. Luckily for her, she’d gotten to spend time with the monstrous man she’d stared at around corners from afar. She had also come to learn that perhaps he wasn’t so monstrous as his melting face made him seem.
After she had watched him silently sharpen the weapons using an ingenious foot-powered whetstone wheel for over half an hour, she had been so fascinated that she spent the morning half-polishing the swords and half-nicking herself with the blades because her eyes weren’t focused on her own task. There had been something fascinating, then and now, about the tiny bit of machinery crafted by the arms smiths that made its owner someone much more admirable than an ordinary warrior. He was different. Sara wanted to be different.
Sara had ended that day with enough cuts to her hands that she’d had to have them wrapped in salve and gauze that night under the watchful and glaring eyes of her mother, the dark-skinned Anna Beth, with eyes like the moon and a pinched brow. Her father had taken one look at her mother—with her arms crossed and a look of fury on her face—and hastily tried to explain why her only child had hands that looked like she lost a fight with a clawed cat. He had quickly lost that battle before the first sentence had issued forth from his lips and been banished from the healing room.
Her mother had explained, “I’ll deal with your father tonight. You I want answers from now! What in the gods’ names were you doing with those swords, Sara? Juggling them?”
Sara still remembered her righteous indignation as a child. She had tried explaining about the amazing knife sharpener-cum-mapmaker with his one hand that etched out landscapes as fast as her eyes could watch. She had done so with all the eagerness of a thirteen-year-old girl who had just discovered a new hero.
Her mother had relented with amusement flashing in her eyes. “Well, did you at l
east speak with him, or just spend your time gaping like a fish?”
Sara had hastily assured her that they had made introductions.
“He even told me why he is the way he is!” she had said in excitement.
Anna Beth’s eyebrows had raised as she listened attentively. Sara had been so eager to share her story that she hadn’t noticed as her mother wrapped another layer of gauze over her wounds.
“And why is that?” Her mother’s voice had been patient.
Sara had launched into the story of how the man had protected her father’s life in the arena and how he had come to live in their villa, as if her mother didn’t already know the story herself. But to a child, first-hand knowledge of an event was everything. Anna Beth hadn’t gainsaid her and had let her tell it with the enthusiasm befitting a youngster’s new tale.
The short form of the history between her father and the monstrous man was that they had been warriors together in the gladiatorial arena. When another gladiator had swung out a studded shield to catch her father in the side and knock him down to finish him off, the older man had stepped in the way. He had fought off her father’s opponent but had taken a strike directly to his spine. A blow from which he had never recovered.
He had had to be dragged out of the arena by slaves, half of his body useless and his sword fallen from his hand to lay in the sand, his enemy’s blood glimmering on the blade.
