Willen grinned down at her. “Come on. The Maiden’s waiting.”
Larissa jerked her hand away and assumed a defensive position. “What are you?” she demanded.
Willen stared at her. “Larissa, what’s the matter?” He took a step toward her.
“Stop right there or I’ll hurt you, whatever you are,” the dancer warned. “How did you know about the will-o’-the-wisps leading me into the quicksand—and why couldn’t you sense my thoughts?”
A slow, terrible grin began to spread over Willen’s face. As Larissa watched in horror, the youth’s features blurred and changed, reshaping into the visage of an ugly man she had never seen before. Then that face and body changed, too. He grew larger, the grin widening. His teeth, white even now, lengthened and sharpened to suit the reptilian muzzle that suddenly sprouted from the lower half of his face. Hands turned into claws, and a crocodile’s tail slid from its lower back.
“Oh, well done indeed, pretty dancer,” the monster commended her. It spoke with the voice of Anton Misroi. “You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
Larissa closed her eyes. She was no longer afraid, just furious. “Anton, you have toyed with me enough. Surely I have provided you with whatever amusement you need. Let me get to the Maiden’s island, that I may go about attacking that boat!” Her voice gradually rose until she was almost screaming.
The crocodile-creature laughed merrily. “You do indeed have spirit,” he admitted. “Very well. This ugly fellow here is a creature known as a lezard. He will keep you safe and take you to the Maiden’s island. After that—” the lezard shrugged “—the rest is up to you. And, by the way, bravo with the crop.”
Larissa opened her mouth to reply when the creature’s expression changed. The lezard surveyed the dancer with its cold yellow eyes. “I shall serve the whitemane,” he said finally. The voice was no longer Misroi’s, but a cold growl.
“Take me to the Maiden’s Isle,” Larissa ordered.
The lezard bowed. It changed yet again, becoming a huge crocodile, and slithered into the swampy waters. There, it waited, and Larissa hesitantly climbed aboard its scaly back.
TWENTY-ONE
The Maiden of the Swamp had rooted herself in the wet soil as soon as the pirogue bearing Larissa had disappeared from view. She needed periodic, undisturbed rooting from time to time to keep her energy high, and she knew that shortly she would be needing every bit of strength she could muster.
She dug her root-feet deeper, feeling the nutrients being absorbed and moving slowly throughout her body. She closed her green eyes, took a deep breath, let it out, then allowed her head to droop. Soon, she had stopped breathing. Her graceful features blurred and changed, until they were only ridges and hollows in the bark of a tree. Rest … rest …
“Maiden?”
The Maiden stirred in her deep trance. She did not wish to separate herself from the embrace of the soil just yet and tried to ignore the voice.
“Maiden?” Yes, it was what she was called, and she must answer. Slowly, as if she were swimming upward through a thick layer of mud, the Maiden became aware of her surroundings, became a thinking creature again.
Larissa stood before her, dreadfully pale. Beside her stood an enormous lezard in half-human form, regarding the Maiden coldly. “I have brought the whitemane,” he said. “She has told me of the need.”
“We will need the help of your people,” the Maiden said. “May we rely on you?”
The creature revealed deadly teeth. “It sounds like a feast indeed. We will come when you ask us.” Without another word, he dived into the river, assumed full crocodile form, and slowly swam off.
The Maiden returned her attention to the girl. She had clearly been through a terrible ordeal, but there was a hardness to her face, a determination that had not been there before. Fully awake now, the Maiden went to Larissa and caught the girl gently by the shoulders.
“Tell me what happened.”
Larissa licked her lips. “He will let us attack,” she murmured. “He taught … he taught me the Dance of the Dead.”
The Maiden gasped in horror. “What have I done?” she whispered. “No … oh, Larissa, no … You must never use such magic, do you understand? It is contrary to all I have taught you!”
“I know,” Larissa answered calmly. “He wants me to use it. That’s why he’s letting us attack. But I know it for what it is.”
“Do you know the danger? Did he tell you what risks you run when you perform such a dance?”
The dancer looked grim. “He didn’t tell me, but I found out.” There was no way, not if she lived forever, that she would forget the zombie hand on the end of her arm. To lose control of the dance was to become undead herself. But she had beaten the danger and had mastered the dance. It had not mastered her.
The Maiden of the Swamp embraced the weary dancer, placing a pale green hand on Larissa’s temple. “I am sorry you underwent such a terrible ordeal, but you are indeed the stronger for it. You are weary, child, and ought to rest before we do anything else. Will you let me send you to sleep?”
Larissa nodded. The one night at Maison de la Détresse had been far from restful, and she had been able to snatch only a few hours of sleep in the swamp. The dancer knew the dreams that the Maiden would send would be healing. She closed her eyes as a gentle fog clouded her senses. Gently, the Maiden lowered the sleeping Larissa to the earth, then resumed her meditative state.
Through her contact with the soil, the Maiden was dimly aware of everything transpiring on her island and the waters that touched it. She sensed the slow, silent growth of the mammoth cypresses and felt the flow of the muddy water as it eased sluggishly along. She sensed the vibrations of the creatures, small and benign, large and predatory, as they went about their business. She permitted herself to feed from the land for an hour, and then began to call.
Her range was not large—it was limited only to her island—but others would take the message elsewhere. The lezard was already telling his people. Almost as soon as she began to call, the few quickwoods on the island began to drum a message to their brothers elsewhere in the swamp.
Other sentient plants heard the rhythm of the quickwoods and stirred. Their branches waved, their flowers nodded, and their roots twisted in the soil. Slowly, almost painfully, the trees began to move, the rustling of their leaves a sigh of resignation.
Longears heard the Maiden’s call as well, and sat up on his haunches, listening. The loah nodded to himself and began pounding on the earth with a powerful hind leg, beating away in a code his people instinctively knew. One by one, the rabbits in the swamp heard their hero’s message and passed it along to other waiting ears.
Less ordinary creatures also heard the summons. Trees rooted near Maison de la Détresse stirred to wakefulness, their deep-set eyes burning with hatred and a desire for blood. Slowly, the evil treants moved like their gentler cousins to answer the summons. Creatures that dwelt in the bottom of the swamp came to the surface, filtered sunlight glinting against scaly, or slimy, or rock-hard skin.
A little over a mile downstream, Deniri and Kaedrin were busy building rafts for the attack. Kaedrin had been cutting logs from fallen trees. He raised and lowered the axe tirelessly, sweat pouring off him in the humid warmth. Deniri, with an obvious lack of interest, was securing the logs together with vines. Suddenly, she paused in her task. She tensed, listening.
“There it is,” she told her mate in a low voice.
He looked over at her curiously, not understanding. “The signal? I don’t hear it.”
She wrinkled her pert nose in mock disgust. “After all this time in the swamp, you can’t hear it? It’s coming through the ground!”
Kaedrin glanced at Sleek, the weasel. The creature was tense and alert. The wolf that had been with him for five years, who had followed him from Arkandale, was stiff and silent, her amber eyes focused on something Kaedrin could not see. Even the squirrel in his pocket poked his head out, curious.
Kaedrin dropped to all fours, digging his strong fingers into the mud for better contact. He listened for a while to the inaudible call, then rose and went to pull his floating house to shore. He entered through the open door and began to rummage in one corner. Deniri followed, silently watching.
Leather armor, stiff from disuse, emerged from a sack. There was also a rusted sword that he would have to grind back into usable shape, and a shield whose device had long since faded into unrecognizability.
As Kaedrin worked, a curious river otter pulled itself up onto the floating house. It ambled over to the ranger and poked its wet black nose into the sack, then glanced up at him with liquid brown eyes. Kaedrin stroked the silky wet fur.
“You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?” Deniri asked at last. Her voice was strained.
“I swore long ago I’d not use these again, not for love of man or woman. Still true—I touch these cursed relics of war for you, Deniri. You and every other creature here I have come to love and value.”
Deniri’s temper rose. “You don’t have to do this. You’re only one man. How much can they expect—”
“I am the only human, besides Larissa, who will fight,” Kaedrin retorted. “They need me. And they could use your help, too.”
Deniri hissed, her face lengthening into a pointed snout as hair rippled over her elongating body. Fully mink now, she slipped into the water and disappeared. Kaedrin grinned ruefully. She would be back.
Slowly, as the message was passed from tree to tree, beast to beast, various beings converged on the island. Reluctantly, the fox did not attack the hare, nor the deer flee the monstrous crocodiles. Their Maiden had called them, and they had answered.
* * * * *
Bouki was unharmed. Unless one slew a loah, and that was difficult, they healed rapidly. The large rabbit bore no signs of the atrocities that had been inflicted upon him. Bushtail, straining against his harness, had managed to edge close enough to the rabbit so that Bouki could rest his weight on the fox’s back. The wire noose around Bouki’s neck was thus loosened, and the rabbit could relax for the first time since he was captured. Now he slept deeply, safe with Bushtail, though he occasionally whimpered and kicked at his manacles.
Ah, Bouki, my friend, thought Willen wryly, looking at the odd sight of the fox and rabbit. You ought to have been a cat loah. You always land on your feet.
Willen, too, was unhurt physically, but his body remembered the pain all too well. Already, it tensed in anticipation of the next horror.
Lond was a master of agony. In that area, at least, his dark path had granted him success. There was indeed power to be found in pain and in the pleasure taken from inflicting pain, but Willen knew it to be a treacherous power and a false pleasure. Sooner or later, it would turn on the wizard. With his own misdeeds of the past, Lond would be undone. Willen hoped only that he could hold out until that time.
The door opened, and three zombies, one of them Dragoneyes, entered. One walked over to Bouki and unlocked the magical shackles. Another reached up to pull out the end of the wire noose.
“No,” begged the rabbit. “Please …”
Without warning and in predatory silence, Bushtail leaped to his feet and ripped the zombie’s throat out. As the body toppled to the floor, Bouki leaped on the corpse. Sharp front claws and even sharper teeth dug into the zombie’s chest. The ravenous rabbit loah rooted around in the decaying flesh for a moment, then Bouki’s face emerged. The rotting, pulpy flesh smeared across his face turned the animal’s visage into a grisly mask. In his teeth was the zombie’s heart. He devoured it at once.
Dragoneyes reached for the noose and jerked on it, and the loah gasped soundlessly. His bloody tongue lolled, and he hastened to keep up with the departing Dragoneyes so that the noose would cease to strangle him.
The other zombie came toward Willen, who didn’t even struggle. Protest was useless on these wrecks of humans, and fighting them only wore down what little energy he already possessed.
The zombies took the two swamp beings up into Lond’s chamber, and Willen gritted his teeth for another punishing round of pain. Lond, however, sat gazing at them quietly for a while. Near the door, Dumont, green eyes rimmed with red, also looked on.
“You are strong, feu follet,” the mage acknowledged. “Bouki’s pain has been severe, yet you are able to tolerate it. It is time for another tactic.”
Willen kept his face expressionless, but his heart sank. What had Lond’s warped mind come up with now? His first thought was of Bouki. Longears might have understood why he was being tortured and rationalized the pain. For Bouki, however, it was all senseless agony. The loah huddled as close to the floor as possible, trembling, his nose twitching.
Lond clapped his gloved hands. Brynn entered, carrying a sack in which an unseen creature struggled and kicked. Bouki started violently. He sat up on his haunches, nose twitching as he sniffed, and his eyes grew wide with dawning awareness and horror.
“No,” he whispered.
Lond did not answer. He opened the sack and withdrew a frantically twisting rabbit, holding the terrified animal by its ears. “Poor little fellow,” the wizard said in a tone that dripped sarcasm. With his free hand, he reached for a knife on the table. “He doesn’t understand what’s going on, does he? But you do.”
Coolly, as if he were carving a piece of wood, Lond drew the razor-sharp blade across the animal’s flank. The rabbit screamed shrilly as bright red blood flowed through brown fur.
The utter cruelty of Lond’s systematically torturing one of Bouki’s people drove the loah too far. With a cry of utter despair, he leaped up, kicking and flailing frantically. It took two zombies to hold him down. Willen, tethered to the loah, felt himself losing his already tenuous grip on his own sanity. He forced himself to focus on Larissa, envisioning her long white hair and her laughing blue eyes, but the image swam before the red haze of sympathetic terror that exploded from the rabbit.
“I’ll stop if you tell me what I want to know,” Lond promised.
“Anything!” the hysterical loah cried. Unfortunately for Lond, the rabbit possessed little real information, and his sobbing confession only underscored what Lond already knew: that the Maiden was still alive and strong, that Willen served her, that a rescue of sorts was being planned. Bouki knew nothing else.
The wizard turned his dark gaze upon the feu follet. “Your friend suffers greatly. A handful of words from you would ease his pain. And,” he added for the loah’s benefit, “that of his protected.”
Bouki turned to the feu follet. “Willen, you must make him stop hurting one of my people! He’s not using them for sustenance. Make him stop!”
Willen’s heart swelled with sympathy for the creature, but there was no way he would betray Larissa and the Maiden. His silence was the only chance of freedom the trapped creatures aboard La Demoiselle had left. He could not answer, and, instead, looked at the floor.
Lond’s rabbit still struggled, its hindquarters now saturated with scarlet. The wizard rose and went to the table. The large basin in the center was crusted with brown stains. “You can stop this, Willen,” he said as he positioned the knife at the panicked rabbit’s throat.
Willen shook his head mutely, closed his eyes, and steeled himself for the wave of shattering panic that would soon envelope him. Bouki’s wail pierced Willen’s soul, and he had little defense to set against the red haze of madness that the rabbit loah sent crashing down on him.
Willen stared stupidly at Lond, the feu follet’s intellect temporarily numbed by Bouki’s terror. He could no longer think or understand words. He could see that the wizard wanted something, but somehow Lond’s speech degenerated into angry rumblings and nonsensical shrieks. Willen and Bouki could only stare at him and whimper helplessly.
Lond snarled in disgust and ordered the two prisoners back down to the prison.
Once the physical contact had been broken, Willen slowly came back to his senses. On his second ni
ght aboard La Demoiselle, Tane and Jahedrin had gotten him thoroughly drunk. Willen didn’t recall much of the evening, but he had a perfect recollection of the throbbing headache, heightened senses, and listlessness of the following morning. The feu follet felt like that now.
Bouki shuddered and wept alone in one corner. Since the earlier attack, the zombies had separated rabbit and fox. Now, the loah looked over at Willen with huge, fright-filled eyes.
“Tell him,” he whispered. “I don’t know anything about any attack. He’ll stop hurting my people if you tell him.”
“Bouki, I can’t!” exclaimed Willen. “Our chance for escape will be ruined. Can’t you see that?”
The colorcat glared at Willen. The beast was intelligent, Willen had discovered, though it was unable to speak and had no telepathic skills. The look with which it fixed Willen, however, left little doubt in the feu follet’s mind that the now-purple cat felt there was no escape being planned at all.
“Willen …” Bushtail’s voice was strained. “We must stop Bouki from harming himself.”
Wearily the feu follet looked at the rabbit loah and saw a sight that filled him with horror. Bouki simply could not take any more. He was slowly, deliberately, gnawing on his foreleg to free it from the manacles.
“Bouki!”
The rabbit paused and glanced over at Willen. His own blood stained his mouth and whiskers, and there was the wildness of the mute beast in his liquid brown eyes.
“Bouki, don’t. It won’t work!”
The loah ignored him and resumed his grisly, single-minded task.
“Little friend, listen to me!” urged Bushtail, straining on his own manacles. He was tense and worried, and his voice lacked its usual nonchalant tone. “Suppose you chew all four of your legs off. It will be difficult to move, yes? How will you run away when you cannot hop? And you will still be bound by the metal noose!”
Bouki ignored all of their efforts to dissuade him. Willen, infused with grief and guilt, turned his face away. The rabbit’s actions were all the more painful for their futility—the gnawed-off limb would grow back within a few hours. Even Bouki’s desperate gesture therefore counted for nothing.
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