by Alex Irvine
The Crow Road wound like a snake through swamp and jungle after descending along the flanks of the last northeastern range of the Draco Serrata. The earth itself turned first to mud and then seemingly to a slippery tangle of root and rotten leaf, as if they walked on a pad of floating plant matter under which there was nothing but dark water all the way to the center of the earth. That was what it felt like when the skies lowered, and through the midday semidarkness they tried to keep to the road, feeling its algae-slicked stones under their feet until inevitably they stepped off and began to slide into the depthless muck. Biri-Daar nearly roped them all together, but at the last minute thought better of it; the threat was a little too real that they might all be reeled downward like a stringer of fish.
“Hey, Lucan, what do the crows have to say?” Kithri asked on their second day out of the mountains. The entire world was the drip, drip of water in the overhanging trees and the softly terrifying sounds of creatures unseen moving in the shadows.
“These are the Raven Queen’s watchers here,” Lucan said, looking up into the tangled canopy. Remy couldn’t even see the birds he was seeing, and even if he could have seen them, he wasn’t entirely sure about the differences between crows and ravens. “They are less willing to speak to me. The Queen, they think, is unhappy with our errand.”
“Why would that old bitch care about what we do?” Paelias spat off the road into still black water. “She’ll get her share of dead whether we ever see Karga Kul or not.”
“The Raven Queen has never concerned herself with getting enough,” Biri-Daar said. “For her, the only enough is everything. Every life we save is an affront to her.”
“Then let’s make sure we do enough killing to keep her happy before we start saving all those lives,” Kithri said, so brightly her voice was almost a chirp.
“The ravens say one thing,” Lucan added. “Ahead, the dead things buried under the road are not always dead.” He paused, listening. “And the live things are in commerce with the dead.”
Keverel, in a humorless mood, made a warding gesture. “Must the crows speak in riddles?”
The ravens cawed back and forth to each other. “Ravens speak the way ravens speak,” Lucan said with a shrug. “You don’t have to listen. They also said that in another mile or so, we were going to have to learn to swim. Then they laughed.”
In another mile or so, the Crow Road subsided below still black water. It was still visible, as a ribbon of open water winding between impenetrable walls of jungle swamp on either side, but as far ahead as they could see it did not re-emerge from the water. The horses stopped at the water and would not go forward no matter how hard they were spurred or dragged. They dug in their hooves, eyes wild and rolling, until the party gave up and stood apart from their mounts at the water’s edge.
“So the crows tell jokes as well as riddles,” Keverel said.
“Ravens,” Lucan corrected him again. “But the same is true of crows.”
They stood watching each other and looking out over the water for a long moment. “Does anyone know how to charm a horse?” Paelias asked. No one laughed.
“The horses know better,” Lucan said. “Too bad we don’t.”
“The only way is forward,” Biri-Daar said. “If the horses will not go, we will go without them. Salvage as much of your gear as you can.”
They loaded themselves with what they could carry, then drew lots to see who would go out into the water first. Paelias won, or lost. “Cleric,” he said. “Bless me.”
Keverel did, calling the power of Erathis to protect the eladrin. “Now we will find out what power Erathis has,” Paelias said, and he took a step into the water. It was ankle deep. He took another. “I can still feel the road,” he said. He stepped farther out. After ten paces he was knee-deep. After ten paces more, still knee-deep.
“All right,” Biri-Daar said. “Anything that can’t get wet, stow it high. We walk until we have to swim, and then we’ll see what happens.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kithri said. But she stepped into the water right after Paelias, and swallowed her pride when she needed to be lifted onto Biri-Daar’s shoulders as the water grew slowly but inexorably deeper.
They slogged through for the rest of the day, usually in knee- to thigh-deep water but every so often holding swords and packs over their heads as they negotiated stretches where the water deepened to their necks. Once they had to swim for a stretch. All of them expected at any moment to be snatched under the water by something formless and horrible. Keverel, Biri-Daar, and Paelias kept up a steady stream of whispered and gestured charms, to disclose the presence of malevolent creatures and to ward them away when and if their presence was discovered. It was only a matter of time. They knew it was only a matter of time.
In late afternoon shadows, the water held at thigh level. “Biri-Daar,” Keverel said. “We can’t do this all night. We’re going to need to camp. It’ll be dark soon and I don’t relish trying to build a treehouse in the dark with the local wildlife coming out to greet us.”
Biri-Daar stopped. “Agreed,” she said after a look around. “Lucan. What’s your feeling about the trees around here?”
“Most of them are dead. There are a few blackroots farther back off the road,” Lucan said. “If we keep fires burning, I don’t think they’ll come too close, but none of these trees are going to like fire very much. That means they don’t like you very much, Biri-Daar. But if one of them is going to let us stay, it will be one of these old willows. They soak up so much water that you can’t hardly burn them if you drop them into a volcano.” With a wink, he added, “And they’re just a bit more friendly than most of the trees you’ll find back here.”
“Do they talk?” Remy asked.
“Not exactly,” Lucan said. “But I can tell what they feel. Some of them remember this marsh before the Crow Road was built. They don’t like what it has become. One of those will let us hammock for the night.”
“Well, which one? Let’s find it,” Kithri said. Her usually invulnerable good cheer had been much tested by the amount of carrying and assistance she’d needed during the day. Pride was a difficult thing.
Lucan pointed ahead of them and to the left. “See the willow there? It’s willing.”
They sloshed toward it, keeping on the road until the last minute, when they had to leave the relatively stable footing of the stones for the treacherous swamp bottom. It was twenty yards perhaps to the long-hanging branches of the willow. As they made their way forward, the water started to boil around them, and Remy knew that the feeling he’d had all day—the feeling of being observed, awaited, hunted—had been justified.
They came out of the water all at once, yuan-ti malisons in a double circle around them, eyes gleaming black. “I should have known we wouldn’t get through a place like this without finding them,” Keverel said grimly. “Wherever there is poisoned water and dark magic, there will be yuan-ti.”
They started moving closer together, deciding whether to move for the safety of the tree or open space of the sunken roadbed. “Something in the trees, there,” Lucan said.
Keverel glanced over where Lucan had pointed. “Abomination,” he said. They could see its coils draped over a low branch of a live oak. Its only humanoid features were four arms and a head that had aspects of both man and snake.
Before he got his shield up, a spear hit Remy square in the pit of the stomach. Without his mail coat it would have punched straight through his vitals and he would have died before he could count to fifty. With his mail coat, the impact still punched the wind from Remy’s lungs and the strength from his legs. He went down, gasping in water and choking it back out. Hands caught one arm and in his hair, hauling him back to his feet. “Stay up!” Keverel shouted in his ear. Remy clutched at the cleric, gathering his balance. Another spear rang off Keverel’s shield.
“To me! The willow!” Biri-Daar’s voice rose over the sounds of the battle, and twining through it all, the rattle and hi
ss of the yuan-ti. It was a sound nearly like speech, so that Remy’s mind looked for words in it, but never quite found them. Hypnotic and dangerous to hear, the hiss of the yuan-ti was every bit as dangerous as the poison in their fangs or the blades in their clawed hands.
Paelias sent a blast of magical energy spreading out across the surface of the water, singeing the yuan-ti and gathering them a moment to get into a defensive position. More spears arced in, but they had shields ready. Lucan even flicked one aside with his sword. Above them, the incanter whispered, its almost-words buzzing in their heads, distracting them, keeping them off balance. Remy started to get his breath back, but something was wrong and he couldn’t tell what.
Lucan looked around as they knit themselves into a circle. Blades out, backs in. “Where’s Keverel?” he shouted.
Of the cleric there was no sign.
Paelias swore and dived underwater before any of them could stop him … and with a whistle and hiss, the incanter in the tree uncoiled and dropped down, disappearing with barely a ripple after him. A moment later the water exploded into foam near the base of the tree. Simultaneously the rest of the yuan-ti reappeared, closing in with spears and nets. Kithri, already neck-deep, said, “Try not to step on me.”
“What?” Remy said.
Without repeating herself, the halfling took a deep breath and ducked under.
That left Lucan, Biri-Daar, and Remy. Three swords against two dozen yuan-ti. “We fight,” Biri-Daar said. “They cannot gain what you have, Remy. If we must kill ten of them for each of us, or twenty, then that is what we must do.”
One of the yuan-ti, more aggressive than the rest, probed with its spear. Biri-Daar caught the barbed spearhead in one of the curls of her blade and jerked the malison off balance, close enough that both Remy and Lucan ran it through without having to take more than a step.
The others, seizing the opportunity, surged forward—but at that moment Keverel stood up out of the water, blood running from claw marks across his face and neck. In the crook of his arm dangled the lifeless form of the yuan-ti incanter. “There!” he cried, and brought his mace down on the incanter’s head. The blow forced one of its eyes out to dangle on the surface of the water. A concerted hissing whistle arose from the rest of the yuan-ti.
Paelias appeared, and he and Keverel backed toward the circle. “Where’s the halfling?” Keverel asked. He let the incanter’s body go. It sank out of sight.
“She went looking for you,” Remy said. He was still seeing double sometimes, and feeling weak in his hands and knees. “Too long ago.”
As if they were actors in a play, two of the yuan-ti between the circle of warriors and the inviting branches of the willow threw back their heads with a gargling hiss and sank into the water. Behind them, Kithri appeared, scampering up the hanging willow branches. Nearby yuan-ti stabbed their spears at her, but she quickly moved higher, out of reach. “Let’s go!” she cried. “How much of a path do you need?”
“Now you know,” Remy said.
Keeping the circle, they forced their way through a thicket of spearpoints, catching and killing any yuan-ti that drew too close, making a tortoiseshell of their shields when the yuan-ti drew back their arms to throw spears instead of thrust them. Little by little, they fought their way toward the safe haven of the tree.
“Where did you go?” Remy asked Keverel.
“Slipped,” the cleric said. “Paelias found me at the same time the incanter did. I couldn’t see, but they could. I think it bit him. Have to see to him when this is over.”
“See that you do see to me, holy man,” Paelias said. As he spoke he slowed the advance of the yuan-ti with a sheet of ice across the water. They started in breaking it apart with the butts of their spears.
It didn’t look like any of them were going to be seeing to anything when the yuan-ti were through. There were too many of them, even without the incanter. And there was nowhere to stand. Still they fought their way to the trunk of the willow and got their backs to it as the yuan-ti closed in. Kithri picked some of them off with throwing knives that snapped out of her hands faster than any of them could see in the failing light, but more arose from the water … and still more were coming through the jungle canopy.
Remy had been afraid but now was not. If he was going to die, he was going to die among comrades who had plucked him from the wastes and begun to teach him what it was to be a man, to fight for something worth fighting for. He would fight until he could fight no longer … as he had the thought he struck down into the water to his right, burying the point of his sword in the open mouth of a malison poised to strike at his thigh.
“Up into the tree,” Biri-Daar ordered. Lucan caught a branch and swung himself up, taking a glancing slash across his leg and returning with a blow that struck out one of the yuan-ti’s slitted eyes.
A net sailed from the shadows, its weights clattering against the willow trunk and its weave tangling the sword arms of Biri-Daar and Lucan straddling the tree branch above her. More nets spun in to catch at Paelias’s limbs and web the spaces between the branches and the water. Remy cut at them, but they were coming in faster than he could handle them.
Help arrived then, from a most unexpected quarter; a blizzard of short arrows swept across the yuan-ti from an angle back in the direction of the sunken road. Whistles echoed across the water as small shapes appeared in the trees, coming from nowhere to ambush the yuan-ti. Their closing circle suddenly became a sandwiched line. Remy worked furiously to free Biri-Daar and Paelias from the net cords that tangled them. Lucan was already free. From higher in the tree, Kithri shocked them all by whistling just as their shadowy rescuers had.
“Halflings!” Kithri cried out. “The Whitefall halflings!”
They struck out from the trunk of the tree, forcing the yuan-ti back into the teeth of the halflings’ barrage. Remy flinched as the arrows of the unseen halfling archers hissed by uncomfortably close. He sunk lower in the water—and saw that the sigils on the package from Philomen were glowing brightly through its wrappings. Anything under the water could see it.
And something did. Erupting from the swamp-bottom muck, two undead corruptions reached out for him. Their mouths fell open, spilling water and weeds and teeth. The sound they made seemed intended to be words but Remy could not parse them. He struck at one, his sword slowed at first by the water; still the blow landed and the creature’s arm snapped off just above the elbow with a crack of rotten bone. He swung around, staggering against invisible roots, and barely deflected a swiping claw. With a shock of recognition he realized what he was fighting, and just as he did Biri-Daar appeared, the righteous fires from her mouth incinerating one of the undead and her sword hacking the other back down into the muck from which it had come. “Apostate,” she said, the words smoking in the dusk. “Heretic.”
Dragonborn. They had once been dragonborn.
The yuan-ti were gone, driven back into the vine-draped darkness by the hail of halfling arrows. The halflings themselves were suddenly appearing everywhere, calling out to Kithri in a riverboat pidgin that Remy recognized but did not understand. The burning undead floated for a moment, the stinking water extinguishing the flames in puffs of loathsome steam. As it sank, Biri-Daar watched and spoke softly for only Remy to hear. “The builder of this road has much to answer for,” she said.
Their halfling rescuers were a river tribe that raided into the Lightless Marsh whenever the mood took them, it seemed. Few of them spoke a Common that Remy could understand, and the only one among the travelers who could understand their river pidgin was, of course, Kithri—and even she laughed at their odd colloquialisms. “We Blackfall halflings are a very different bunch,” she chuckled. “Intermarriage must bring some raucous festivals.”
“What are they doing this far into the marshes?” Keverel asked. “There’s nothing back here but abomination.”
“According to them, abomination and loot go together like bread and cheese,” Kithri said. She was about
to go on when the leader of the halflings spoke up in Common.
“The road is as much waterway here as anything else,” the halfling said, pointing back at the gap in the trees where the submerged Crow Road led on toward Tomb Fork. “So here we are. Would you prefer to dispute further, or shall we make our exit?”
“Exit sounds good to me,” Lucan said. “This is no forest. This is a cesspit.”
The halflings had stowed their boat in the lee of a dying cypress whose girth it would have taken six men linking arms to encircle. The boat was flat-bottomed and broad-beamed, designed to take weight over distance on quiet water. Currently it was empty of cargo save for what looked like a short pyramidal stack of muddy coffins. Remy asked if that was what they were, but everyone he asked pretended not to speak Common. The boat accepted the five adventurers’ weight with no trouble and its pilot Vokoun, at a bow tiller, waved at a half-dozen polers to get them moving.
“There are more yuan-ti than there used to be around here,” the pilot said as they poled their way through the swamp. Along the sides of the raft, archers stayed at the ready. Ahead, there was light—a patch of sky. Remy felt a weight leave his chest as he saw it. They had been closer than he’d thought; how terrible it would have been to die so near the goal … or the next stage in the goal, at any rate. “We run the tributaries all along here,” Vokoun went on, “and dip into the swamps as we hear about this or that ruin that might be worth a look. Usually whatever we find isn’t worth the fight to get it, especially the closer you get to the road. But today our shaman had dreams about the roadside near the fork, so we decided to come and see what might need our attention.” He turned to the group and winked. “Turned out to be you. Should have known you had a halfling with you. That’s probably what the shaman was really dreaming about. Half the time he’s chewed so much kaat that he can’t interpret his own mind.”
Vokoun paused for breath and Biri-Daar jumped in before he could get started again. “Can you take us as far as Iskar’s Landing?”
