Multiple sliders had gone by as we made our way to the edge, but I knew already that none of them would help. Even if they weren't going too fast to see anything, people didn't interfere with men entering Von Ras, even if they weren't wearing black hoods.
I forced myself over, wrapping my arms around one of the mud spattered yellow tubes and began to shimmy down it, but gripping with my recently shot hand was impossible, and almost immediately I plummeted to the floor, bashing one of my legs on a pole before hitting the wet ground. Both Fache and Lisbold found it hilarious, following with ease.
"Seems almost cruel to kill two people so pathetic," said Fache, but Lisbold shook his head.
"Nah, it's natural selection; nothing cruel about nature."
On that, like a great many things, we disagreed. There were a plethora of cruelties about nature, not least of which was my current predicament.
Fortunately, the swamp floor was soft and absorbed much of my fall. I made no attempt to shield my bleeding hand as I picked myself up. The bandages were already soiled with corpse-smelling organic matter, stinging as it mingled with my blood. If the degodiles didn't kill me then the micro-organisms would warp me into a mass of swelling and necrosis until my body finally gave out.
Fache helped the pimp out of his mud hole just as his words gained some clarity. "You don't need to do this. I hate him as much as you do."
Lisbold punched him in the gut. "But I bet you don't feel too rosy about us either."
The pimp bent with the impact, but as the effects of the poison dissipated, the strength that had allowed him to break his restraints was returning. He rose after the impact as quickly as he'd bent, and for the first time I saw uncertainty in Lisbold's eyes. It was a bully's recalculation after a victim showed resistance, cowardice driving him to find a weaker target to serve his purpose better. He grabbed me by the neck and pushed me into the closest tree trunk, forcing my face to rub against the bark. Turning back to the pimp, he said, "You hate him so much then let's see you kick him right now."
A thousand protests flashed across my mind as Lisbold held me against the tree, but they were no better than cries for mercy, as effective as my bandage was at keeping the swamp away from my wound. The pimp trudged over, pivoted, and flicked his leg into my side with enough force to wrench me out of Lisbold's grip into the mud.
"Good," said Lisbold. "A bit more like that, and we might be able to trust you. Do it again."
"I won't be able to walk," I groaned from the mud. "He's too strong, and I'm too weak. You'll have to feed him to your degodiles instead."
The pimp stepped up, ready for another round, but Fache moved between us. "I'm not carrying him, Kevin, so either we beat him to death here or we take him to the degodiles."
Lisbold looked enraged, even as I squirmed in the mud. "Get up."
The pimp looked almost as disappointed. Any hopes I'd had of a temporary alliance were looking to have backfired as badly as my emergency stop.
"I did what you asked, now let me go," Oldan said, spitting on me and kicking wet mud in my face. "Whatever you do to this piece of dis is ok by me. You won't hear a word said against you."
As the two captors looked at each other, I felt strongly that I should have let Lisbold cut his throat.
"We'll think about it," Lisbold said, in probably the first clever statement of his life. It meant no, but offered the pimp hope that if he did what they said he might survive. Oldan's nod suggested he might even be stupid enough to believe it.
"Get up," Fache said.
I obeyed, putting all my weight on the leg which hadn't just been kicked by a man twice my height and probably three times my weight. At least it wasn't broken and I could walk, keeping my chances of survival above nil.
"Stop faking," shouted Lisbold, "or I'll kick your other one."
I tried to straighten up, not wishing to spend any more time in the mud, but I couldn't lose the limp. The leg was too damaged. It couldn't hold my weight for more than half a click, forcing me to move the other at an uncomfortable speed.
Von Ras was one of the five remaining great swamps of The Kaerosh, home to a host of lethal creatures. But there was no need for the larger animals to come close to the edge where they were at risk of hunters and traps. It was going to be a long walk before we found degodiles, and there were plenty of things that could happen between now and then. Of greatest importance, I needed to remember which way we were going so I didn't end up running further into the swamp if I managed to escape.
Admittedly, I was less hopeful of escape now that I was limping. Anything that attacked us would go for me before the others, which made it difficult to use as a distraction without being eaten.
Chapter 24
Even with two intact legs it was impossible to run anywhere in Von Ras. The ground was more water than mud. Sometimes a thin layer of ice coated the pools, but each time my foot would sink right through it with a snap. Only by stepping into it would the depth be revealed, and some of them were deceptively deep. Despite my slow and careful walk, twice I sunk almost to my waist, jumping quickly to the side before I disturbed anything living beneath the surface.
The others were mostly dry above the knee and would fare better against attacking fauna, but none of us were equipped to survive these swamps. Von Ras was full of animals, plants, and fungi evolved to navigate the muddy pools the way we traversed our bedroom floors. There were reptiles here that could swing through trees and amphibians that could swim through mud or walk on water. Bigger animals had webbed feet and streamlined bodies capable of sliding from pool to pool. Even the trees would eat us here if we gave them the opportunity. One wrong step, and vines hidden beneath the water would drag us to our deaths, or branches would contract like a whip and swing us into the tree tops.
The air was as stagnant as the water and almost as wet, catching in my throat as if I were breathing smoke. My upper body was sopping wet despite not coming near a pool. The zeolate beads in the strips across my rib vest, designed to dispel moisture, sagged under the weight of the wet fabric so that I could feel the pouches rubbing against the hairs of my chest. I pulled each leg out of the thick mud as if walking through glue, unable to make sufficient pace to keep warm. At this rate, I would freeze to death long before we saw a degodile.
With his hands behind his back, the pimp was not fairing much better. Twice he stumbled head first into the mud only to be kicked by Lisbold laughing loudly enough to stir every creature in Von Ras.
Leaning on things was a bad idea in the great swamps. The narrow trunks could be stranglers activated by touch, and some of the larger trees could open up and engulf men whole. Not that falling to the floor was any better. If we landed in a pool, chorionix could emit a powerful electric shock stunning us as badly an injection of vansetomia, drowning us in a fist's depth of water. On the mud, swamp nets waited for an organism to trigger their touch sensitive pads, before two mets of serrated fungal walls would spring up on all sides slicing even degodiles into bits of meat. If Lisbold imagined Von Ras was going to be like the smaller swamps we played in as kids, then he wasn't going to survive this trip any more than I was.
Fache was cautious enough, forcing me and the pimp to lead the way and then following the same trail. Lisbold followed me while Fache followed the pimp. Both of them gripped their guns like the sides of a life raft, pointing them at every noise that echoed through the trees. The weapons were undoubtedly a lifeline, but they did not save people in the great swamps. Here, there were things that ran towards gunfire.
My current strategy was to keep as far away from the pimp as possible and wait for him to make his move. When he ran, and Lisbold turned to deal with him, I would make my exit.
It had its flaws, but the cold was turning my blood vessels to ice, taking more of my strength every moment.
When I saw bones of amphibious animals floating in pools or crushed into the mud, I gave the area a wide birth. The bigger the bones, the further I walked around, but it co
uldn't be that easy. If all the prey had to do was spot the bones then the predators would have died out long ago. Even the trees were capable of movement. Huge trunks could simply uproot and pull themselves to a new patch of swamp, ready to catch fresh prey or find better soil. The apparent lack of living creatures was evidence of their camouflage, not their absence. Survival here was all about hiding and waiting, unseen and unheard.
We could do little but crash our way through like a herd of bree beast running from a pack of vixon. Lisbold was even singing at one point. The urge to tell him to shut up was only eclipsed by the consideration that if nothing happened between now and the degodiles, I was dead anyway. It couldn't be far to the nearest river. Swamps such as this didn't exist without rivers, and The Kaerosh had almost as many as Gys.
When Libold's tablet started beeping like a fog horn, I reached into my pocket. My nose filter was gone. Lisbold clipped the little box to his mouth and inserted a tube up each of his pancaked nostrils. He would never tell me which spores I was breathing, so there was no point in asking. I just had to hope it wasn't any of the lethal ones.
I took my mind off it by watching the ground and trees for signs of life. Most of the branches bent and swayed with the wind, but there were a few whose motions could not be explained by anything external. Some twitched like muscle fibers or coiled around the branches of other trees like snakes. A branch above me suddenly snapped, a dim creaking that ended with a whipping sound resonating through the canopy like a groan of pain. A blackened log crashed down just behind me, the conclusion of a war between two trees competing for territory.
"We should have come to a river by now," said Fache, once we'd walked for longer than I expected to be alive. "If we go much further, then anyone who comes looking for him might find us on the way out. You made sure to complete the 10 kims once you saw me?"
"Yeah," said Lisbold, either not understanding the question or ignoring it. I considered telling Fache the truth. If they fought maybe I could get away, but the more cautious man might insist on shooting us and leaving; taking his chances that something would find our bodies before the police.
Lisbold looked at his tablet. "Let's go a bit further, and if there's nothing then we'll have a think."
The number of trees around us was increasing. Trunks of all sizes contorted into unnatural shapes and sprouted a canopy of web-like branches that darkened the sky. Fache was beginning to look nervous, his lips creeping downward into a scowl. When for the first time his knee went below the waterline, he stopped and looked back the way we came. "I don't think we should have come this far. All the maps we looked at suggested we should have passed a river by now. We should just kill them and go back."
Before he finished the sentence, Oldan ran. Fache fired two shots at him, but both of them were absorbed by branches, one of which bent away like the limb of an injured animal.
"Go after him," shouted Lisbold.
I didn't look back. I ran the other way as fast as I'd ever moved on flat ground with a good breakfast and healthy limbs. Shooting pain coursed through my leg as if I were on fire, but I didn't stop.
Run or die.
Becky's smile, her laugh, her naked body, all went through my head in the five clicks of freedom it took for Lisbold to catch me. He hadn't even felt the need to shoot me.
I struggled, but another smack from Lisbold sent me sprawling into a puddle the size of a small pond. I tried to stand, but my feet didn't touch the bottom. Blind panic hit me as something long and thin rippled through the water. I thrashed wildly against the side, but I wasn't getting out in time.
I reached forward and grabbed the animal, but a thick layer of slime allowed it to slip right through my fingers. Its brown eyeless head emerged from the water as it sank two long fangs into my chest.
I screamed. Desperate to grip it, I ran hand after hand down its body attempting to gain some kind of hold. Knife-like teeth buried themselves further into my flesh, and I screamed again. Ripped to pieces by an animal no longer than my arm.
Suddenly, I felt a tightness in my bad leg, warm and strong as the blood supply was cut off from my foot. In the next instant I was under, no time to inhale before gunge drained down my windpipe.
I drank deep as the panic took me. Eaten! Drowned! DEATH.
It pulled again, turning me over. Legs above head and all the time being eaten.
Air entered my lungs and I screamed and spluttered as the waxy creature thrashed against my body, chewing all the time. I was being pulled along the swamp floor by a vine.
Separate from the wriggling slime, it belonged to a plant or a fungus. Suddenly Von Ras was fighting for my flesh, pulling me by the leg over mud and ice, branches and pools.
I ran my hands along the ground looking for something to grab, but only mud slipped through my fingers. I grabbed a branch which snapped in my hand as I slid further, dodging a rock before grabbing a root dug deep into the ground. As the vine pulled me taut, my spine was on the cusp of snapping before my strength failed.
Again I was moving, still being eaten.
I pushed up against a thick root with both legs. No pain, numbed by adrenaline. The vine started to thrash and whip at me when it could not pull me off.
I tried to unwind it from my leg, but it was too strong, too thick, too hard. The slime dug further into my chest, and I bashed at both, damaging neither. Again, I screamed.
The vine pulled so hard against my leg I feared it might rip it off, but that was nothing compared to the rending of flesh at my chest.
I twisted on my bad foot so that I could pin the brown slimy thing between chest and floor. Then grabbing a fresh stick I jammed it through its long body, using my breast plate as a wall to stop it sliding away.
The creature let go instantly, writhing away, almost pulling the stick out of my hand. No time for relief, a second vine weaved its way across the floor towards me.
Less than ten mets from my legs, leaves and mud were sliding away as something rose from the ground – a huge fungal body, armored in stolen bone, surfacing from its hiding place to engulf me, crush me, and degrade my corpse. Eyeless and brainless, its vines would drag me to my death as surely as Lisbold or any degodile.
I pinned the stick between my legs and began trying to get a decent grip on the slimy creature's body as it writhed. Trapped and dying, it failed to slip through my fingers. Finally, I had both hands around its neck and dug my fingers in until its flesh tore, and the creature went still. Both hands gripping it by the mouth, I began to saw at the vine holding my leg with its teeth. Nothing. The fangs weren't sharp enough.
As the second vine neared my foot, I jammed the two long front fangs into the vine on my leg, and they sank deep through every protective layer like ripe fruit. I jabbed again, and again, until it loosened its grip and both began to retreat.
Exhausted, I lay back, only to see Lisbold looking down at me as if he'd just watched a remake of his favorite movie where they ruined the ending.
"I was enjoying that, dwarf, but I guess you're not as pathetic as you look." He shrugged. "The good news though is that I've found the river, and it's full of degodiles." He edged round a deep looking pool towards me, dragging me to my feet. "So I guess we're going back to the original plan."
I tried to bite down on his finger but he pulled his hand away in time. "Vicious little thing aren't you?" He pushed me forward, but I was too lost to know which way we were heading. I was caked in mud, but I suspected that beneath the layer of brown was red and purple. As the adrenaline drained, numbness and pain fought to conquer my body.
A crunching noise from behind us caused Lisbold to stop and point his gun. Fache came running into view. Above the knee, neither man looked as if they'd set foot off the sliderway. "Big one's dead," Fache said. "What happened to him?"
Lisbold grinned. "He went for a swim and made a few friends, but he isn't finished yet."
I was ready to die now. I had been cold too long, and my survival instincts were drowning in
the apathy of exhaustion. I understood why men simply lay down in the snow and died. Numb flesh, numb mind. Everything was shutting down. The huge crocs would prove something of a relief. Death by degodile wasn't quick, but Lisbold wasn't about to let me choose. All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and wait for destination's end.
The river ate deep into the ground making the two banks look more like slides. The water looked as brown and stagnant as the rest of Von Ras and not much deeper. The only difference was on the far bank sat a degodile looking the other way.
Around four mets long and a met wide, the thick mud-brown armor made it an unstoppable killing machine. Bullets might penetrate it, but hand guns wouldn't get far enough below the surface to do much damage. Shards of reinforced bone protruded to great length from its back, and its long jaws of teeth could tear a man to shreds with a single bite.
I walked towards the bank trailed by the two men. Fache came up beside me and said, "Our informant told us to tell you something before we killed you."
I was barely listening, totally focused on the animal that was about to eat me. He lent forwards and whispered in my ear. "Ruby says, this is for Hobb."
I was so resigned to my death that it took me a moment to comprehend; she had been following me and was using these fools to get rid of me.
This was Ruby's doing!
Something in me awoke again, a will to not be undone by the girl who had so clearly outwitted me. In the advent of my death, she could kill Loshe and escape, compounding her victory. I couldn't let that happen. Frantically, I searched for something that might save me.
Fache and Lisbold pushed me toward the bank. A few mets then a sharp drop, and I would be in the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a pad not too far from the river's edge. It looked like little more than a pile of mud, but I'd seen enough nature shows to recognize what it was. My instinct was to move away from it, but that was a mistake. Instead, I walked right by it and clambered down the bank towards the river. Three steps and I slid the rest of the way until my feet were in the water. My toes were as dead as the surrounding detritus, but the icy water stung the soles of my feet like acid. The river didn't even reach my knees, and in further good fortune the degodile hadn't noticed me.
The Iron Swamp Page 30
