by EM Kaplan
“Give it a try,” Ott said, losing his grip on his patience, which had been tenuous at best. Now, he got a slow, heavy look from Harro that told him only the man’s leg splints were keeping him from grasping Ott by the neck and giving him a brain-rattling shake. Ott cleared his throat and gave the man a conciliatory nod of the head.
“It was like this,” she began. “I’ve always been…gifted with clay. I made pots to keep my salves in when I was…doing that. I have a regular feel for it. But ever since we went into the pit, it felt stronger. It was…I don’t know how to describe it.”
Harro watched her, saying nothing. But his eyes were soft. She glanced at him and seemed to take strength from it.
“When he came into the pit to find me,” she swallowed hard here, and Ott had the sudden impression that no one had ever made a gesture such as that for her before. Maybe never in her life. He looked at Harro with renewed interest. So the man had a soft, fleshy, and tender underbelly after all. Under that great, fierce, black beard. “When he followed me, he got injured.” She gestured at his legs. “I couldn’t see him like that, but there was nothing I could do for him. I’m not skilled at setting bones or even splinting them, as you have noticed. I did the best I could with what I could find down there in the dark. But he was going to die, you see. I couldn’t let him die.”
She twisted her fingers together again, a gesture Ott was coming to realize as a show of her nervousness. He’d never seen her care about anything before. Not even her children, who were being tended to at the big house now along with his own rowdy nephews. To him, she’d seem callous, made hard-hearted by circumstances. A necessity for her survival. But now…he didn’t know what to make of her.
“I don’t know how it came to pass. I’d never been able to do such a thing before. I just took his hand and walked into the clay. We moved from yesterday to today in a blink of an eye.” Now, she dropped her eyes and wouldn’t meet Ott’s gaze. From that, he knew she was lying. But she was a hard enough woman that he wouldn’t be getting the truth from her this evening. Not now. Not in front of the man she was protecting.
“Was it being below ground?” Ott asked. “Did that change you? Being among the trogs, maybe?” The gods knew their stench alone could change a body. Even Ott had been…influenced by them. Their presence. The agamite. All of it together meant that the world was not the place he’d thought he’d known.
The combination of the warm fire, and food that filled Harro’s belly—though he had not been able to stomach much—were lulling him to sleep. His eyelids were beginning to droop. The flush on the his face worried Ott. The slashes of color across the man’s cheekbones and forehead seemed a sure sign that a corruption had set in someplace in his body. Infection, if that’s what it was, would kill him in no time. Without a genuine healer, Treyna’s feat would go unneeded. Whatever sacrifice she’d made to get them here alive would be for naught.
“Somewhat,” she said. “I’ve always had a feel for it. Maybe it’s the agamite. People say that your…that your…Mel. That’s how she fixed those trogs. By washing the green rock out of them. Right out of their bodies.” Ott noticed her eyes didn’t once move toward Bookman. Perhaps she didn’t know that she shared a campfire with a former trog. “I used to make pots. While I was…waiting for customers.” Her voice dropped low and became somewhat hoarse as her shame surfaced. Ott knew it was a rarity for her. She never let herself appear vulnerable, but for him…even before Harro, she sometimes let her brave face fall. “I always did like working with clay. Pots and cups, you know. Nice platters. Mortar and pestle for mixing herbs. I could make pretty things. Fine enough even for the big house.” Her sharp chin tilted up in challenge, and she went on for bit, describing the bits of pottery she was good at crafting. Between his full belly and the aftermath of his berserker rage, he may have drifted off as well for a moment or two.
After a while, when Harro had fallen asleep for certain, Ott roused himself asked her again, “What happened to you?”
The fire was dying down, the embers barely glowing, and the last of the bones had been buried or burned so as not to attract unwanted attention from trogs or other animals. Ott had never come across a bear this far south, but neither had he ever encountered a trog in the middle of the crowded streets of Navio.
She pushed away the hilt of her dagger as she sat by him—giving him wide berth. She was as skittish as ever, even more so now that Harro had his eyes closed and was breathing, even and calm.
“I never killed before,” she began and then looked Ott in the eye. “Even when I was beaten up inside that wagon where Jonas kept me and locked me up at night. Even when I thought I might kill myself, I never killed a customer. And I never killed Jonas, though I had plenty of reason to do it. I never even thought about it. Never even wanted to.” She sighed and folded her hands in her lap, keeping them still now. “I was in that pit maybe half a day before Harro came after me. The trogs took me from the camp.”
“They harmed you.”
She puffed out air and made a sweeping motion with her hand, as if it were no matter of importance. “I’ve been beaten before. I’ve been taken against my will. None of the things they could have done to me would have hurt me more than I had been.”
Ott rubbed his forehead, trying to erase the horrifying images from his mind. That someone so small and vulnerable had been subjected to such abuse by a cruel and uncaring fate…where was slippery, facile Lady Lutra in this girl’s life? Had she had only Dovay, the bear god of perseverance and no happiness or luck to be his partner?
“I was in the pit only a half day before I saw them bring in Harro,” she said again, with more insistence. “They didn’t harm me other than to knock me around. They…need females for breeding, but they didn’t have time to do anything while they were attacking the tent city. There was plenty of fighting though. Even among themselves.” She paused, gathering her thoughts, seeming to sort through the images in her mind. “There were bodies everywhere. People I knew from the tent city. A man who had come to see me because of his frozen shoulder. I had fixed him not three days before.” She was silent at that, perhaps realizing the man had had little time to use his repaired shoulder. A very short time for sure.
“To tell the truth, I nearly was…taken,” she said. “A trog had beaten me and shoved me to the ground.” She pulled aside the collar of her dress and showed him the fresh bruises around her neck. Which, if she spoke the truth, had been made more than a year ago. Ott’s mind spun at that. “He choked me, although I don’t know if he meant to. He was so much bigger than I—he was much rougher than he had to be. And…I thought I might die.”
She took a fortifying breath, which racked her small frame, and continued, “Another trog shoved him off. I thought they were going to fight over me. I’d seen that happen with men when drink was involved. Then the second trog dropped his dagger while they wrestled with each other, so I grabbed it. This dagger that I have now.” She touched the jeweled hilt at her waist. “When I picked it up, I could feel the soil. I know that sounds like I’m not right in my head, but it’s the truth.”
Ott nodded. He’d seen far stranger things since Cillary Keep. Monsters. Wraiths. A berserker, he thought wryly. It took a lot to surprise him now. He rubbed a finger across his brow right above his eyes and couldn’t tell, for a moment, which was the cause of soreness—his head or his fingertip. He examined his hand in the firelight but saw no blood, so he let it fall and concentrated again on what she was saying.
“As they were fighting, I took the knife and I killed the one that attacked me. Maybe I should have let them kill each other, but I wasn’t thinking straight.” She spoke in a low, fierce voice. “I’d never taken a life before. It felt…”
Ott didn’t know what she was going to say. Vile. Rotten. Sick-making. He thought back to the first lives he’d taken, and the contents of his stomach made a lurch for his throat. But still, he was too hungry to let his only sustenance go without a fight.
“How’s that?” Ott had to clear his throat a couple of times. No longer drowsy, he hung on to her every word, not sure whether he’d need to wrestle the weapon away from her or be murdered in his sleep.
“He had blue eyes.”
Chapter 31
At the river, Mel hauled Charl’s inert form onto the cycle using extra strength she pushed into her arms and back. Jaine pitched in a bit of assistance, then she sped them toward the riverbank of the once-rapidly flowing Uptdon River. Looking at the river now, Mel’s jaw loosened in shock. Instead of the vast expanse of cold, brown-green water she’d been expecting, the riverbed was a sludgy mud pit, devoid of water. Formerly green and lush rushes now hung limp and dying, dragging their tips in the mud. Without the cool air drifting off the water, the banks had become a swampy, heated mess.
Where were the fish? The remains of their river boat? The water, for heaven’s sake?
Mel looked up and down the river, but couldn’t detect a reason for the drainage. Had the maelstrom gulped all the water down and then swallowed itself out of existence?
“No wonder there hasn’t been more outrage at the lack of ferries,” Jaine exclaimed, pointing.
A footpath through the mud marked the roughly one-mile walk from the travel depot to Navio. However, though the footprints remained, the path was abandoned now. Perhaps it was the mid-day sun that discouraged people from crossing. Or maybe word of the Tooran fire had already spread across the river and stopped the flow? Though Mel didn’t think that was possible. As able-tongued gossipers as the Tooranans were known to be, none could have beaten Jaine and her to the river since the fire had started.
“Can this cycle get us across the mud?” Mel asked. She needed to get Charl to her friends, to Ott, and she didn’t think she could carry him all the way by herself. Not with the riverbed sucking her every step with its viscous grip like muddy lips.
Jaine looked at the wooden wheels and then at the muck, “Dunno, but it’ll be fun trying. Get your goggles on. It’s going to get messy.” With a grin, she snapped her goggles down tight, hiding her bright eyes, and grabbed the cycle’s steering handles. Mel lowered her goggle’s rounded lenses over own her eyes and tightened the leather strap that ran around the back of her head. Gripping the backseat with both hands, she gave Jaine a terse nod.
The girl maneuvered the cycle toward a section of the bank that sloped more gradually than the rest. Then, rather than mince forward with caution, Jaine drove full bore straight into the mud with a loud holler that only Mel, with her enhanced hearing, could discern over the roar of the agamite engine. Embracing the chaos of the moment, Jaine was in her element. A greenish cloud of agamite steam rose behind them along with a rhythmic splatter of foul riverbed mud as they made their way across the Uptdon.
Mel marveled at the cycle’s speed. In just a few minutes, they approached the mid-point of the riverbed, the wheels of the cycle throwing mud up behind them in grayish-brown gushes. If they’d gone on foot, it would have taken hours. Especially with a heavy body in tow. She was beginning to wonder what travel and trade would be like if more people had mechanized wagons and cycles. Would it be an orderly system or utter chaos? And what about the very poor? How would they be able to afford such transport? She was skeptical about the wealthy—like the man at the travel depot—wanting to help those who struggled. And what would Masks do with such machines?
Her mind churned with possibilities as she watched the muck pass underfoot. Or rather, under wheel. Just as they reached the center of the river, however, the cycle lost traction and churned hard in a deep patch of muck and halted. The wooden wheels spun. All of them were intact at least. But the cycle was good and truly stuck. Out of frustration, Jaine whacked the steering handles with her muddy, gloved hand. She pushed her splattered googles on top of her head, making her short, dark hair stand up further.
“That was fun while it lasted. Should have keep my mouth shut during that first bit. I think I ate a bug or two and swallowed about a pint of mud. And what is that disgusting smell?” She wrinkled her muddy nose. The only clean part of her face were the protected circles around her eyes. Mel suspected she might look identical though she had been riding in back. The seat of her pants was still vibrating from the shake of the machine, and Charl lay slumped against her shoulder.
“Hot sun on river bottom. Very similar to the odor of dead fish, only worse, I think because of the boiling slime and plant muck. Then there’s the rotting water creatures’ corpses and the decomposition fumes they emit, also the stench of the festering, minute particles they consume and the feces they expel as their bodies bloat and explode in the heat.” Jaine gave her a peculiar stare, so Mel stopped talking though she could have continued. She didn’t bother to explain that she could see all of this occurring if she focused her enhanced vision on the mud under them. Also, she was forced to shut off her nose and breathe through her mouth to prevent gagging. She lifted her goggles and questioned Jaine, “What do you think? Now, we push?”
Jaine sighed. “Now, we push.”
The two of them slipped down into the mud, the first steps made them sink to their ankles. The brownish gray goo sucked at their feet as they wobbled to position themselves behind the cycle. Jaine was in her knee-high buckled boots, but Mel was certain she was about to lose a sandal to the pull of the muck.
“When I count to three. Ready?” Jaine asked. But after she called out the numbers and they both heaved—Mel using her enhanced strength—the cycle didn’t budge the slightest. It adhered as if it had been pasted to the ground and nailed down. But the simple truth was that all the enhanced power in the world couldn’t help her when she wasn’t able to root her feet properly in the sludge.
They stood back for a minute, both panting, not bothering to wipe the newest layer of filth off themselves. It was going to get worse before it got better. And it would be a great while longer until they stopped stinking like river bottom.
“You get back on the cycle, start it up and drive, while I push,” Mel suggested. Maybe the extra turn from the engine would help the wheels find their grasp, though she was doubtful at this point. She imagined they’d be carrying Charl the rest of the way. Or dragging him, more likely.
Before long, Jaine was revving the steam engine, giving it full throttle, and causing a smoky green cloud to billow out behind them. Still nothing budged, except now Charl was also splattered with the river's dregs. This time, she was certain she saw the slimy remains of a catterfish strike the side of his face and ooze off. Even though they were saving his life, she felt the distinct need to apologize to him when he eventually woke up.
Mel gritted her teeth. “Again,” she shouted up to Jaine. Bracing her hands under the rear bench of the cycle, between its two hind wheels, she shoved up with all of her strength. The cycle wheels spun with an impotent growl, peppering Mel in the face and chest with bigger clumps of mud. Belatedly, she clamped her lips together to avoid getting more in her mouth.
The cycle lurched about half its length forward, sputtered, and lurched again as Jaine gave it more power. A holler came from the driver’s seat as the cycle gained another few feet. By now, it had slipped away from Mel, and she stood watching it pitch forward, weaving side to side as the wooden wheels took hold. Hands on her hips, she mentally pushed it forward. Though in this case, the only good her thoughts did were to hope her efforts worked. She didn’t have the power to actually move thin
gs with her mind—and had never heard of any Mask who could.
Then again, if she had been asked just a couple of years earlier if ogres existed, she would have denied it, with absolute confidence. And then trogs had sprung out of the ground.
A few more pushes forward, and they were clear of the worst mud. The cycle’s wheels found purchase in the ground and moved forward in spurts and starts that splattered Mel some more. Jaine idled the cycle while Mel slipped and slid her way toward them.
As she drew within twenty feet of it, Charl sat up in the back seat. Behind Jaine’s slender figure, he loomed large and dark, plastered with mud. His eyes blinked open, flashing white and stark in his darkened face, looking for all the world like a sombey, a lifeless creature that moved on its own without will or purpose. Without soul or spirit. Another magical beastie that populated the fairy tale warnings some parents told their children. Like ogres.
“Watch out!” Mel shouted, a shiver of fear racing down her spine. If Charl attacked Jaine, Mel wouldn’t reach her fast enough to help. Not through this mud, which slowed her to a znall’s pace.
Chapter 32
Mel’s warning shout was too vague. Jaine looked first ahead for more mud pits, then to the south, and missed the looming large man behind her.
Charl pushed himself up with effort and rubbed his muddy eyes, still in a state of muzzy twilight.
All the same, Jaine gave a squeak of shock and scooted forward on her seat. Charl was not a slim lad, but rather a broad-shouldered, intimidating presence, even looking as confused as he was.
“What happened to the boat?” he kept saying, blinking and rubbing his face as if one more swipe might clear the fog from his memory. The splattered mud transferred from his cheek to hand, and he looked at it with further confusion, his agamite family crest ring glinting. His dark blond hair was smashed down flat all over his head by mud and by sweat from the midday heat. Without water, the river was nothing but a steamy sauna, baking in the sun.
