by K. J. Coble
The expedition trudged into the Frigid Fens.
Overhead, the sun peeked through swirls of mist, a pale orb wandering without warmth towards its apogee and noon. The forests of the lower Valley receded behind the column in banks of fog, left no detail but the shifting gray from which occasional trees appeared like gaunt wanderers, lost in the wilderness. Grunts and dwarven curses contested the slosh of boots in the murk and all-too-frequent splashes as stout figures planted feet in unexpectedly deep pools and flopped in up to their chests. The mammoth’s groans increased in frequency and the lash of its driver’s whip grew more and more savage. Progress ground towards near-immobility.
Sarcha’s temper began to fray. She stood up in the gondola and leaned out to glare at Clegg, slogging along at the head of a column whose tail was now lost in the haze. “We won’t even make five miles a day, at this rate!” she snapped.
“Five miles would be good time,” Clegg answered, somewhat distracted, lowering his axe into a two-handed grip while his eyes tightened and scanned his surroundings.
“I’m not paying you for five miles a day!” When the dwarf said nothing, her last nerve snapped. “Damn you, do not dare to ignore me!”
“Quiet!” Clegg snapped. He turned and made hand signals to the dwarves behind him. The column split, the dwarves drawing their weapons and coming to stand in twin lines, back-to-back. Clegg wiped mud clots from his beard and with eyes still on the mists said to Sarcha, “With respect, my lady, but we are being watched.”
Sarcha’s blood chilled. She raised her gaze to the fog, searched for whatever it was that had her henchmen spooked. Every sound suddenly became an alarm, sent quivers of tension through the arrayed dwarves, sent them through her too. She crouched back into the gondola, noticed the mammoth-driver edging close to her, an unconscious need to feel someone close that would have earned him pain under other circumstances. The mammoth, sensing its master’s unease, let out a low grumble.
Vortices spun in the mists, stirred by wind or by movement, Sarcha could not say. A rotting bulk of ancient tree loomed ahead, its craggy boughs creaking. Had she seen something shift behind its mass? A thousand eyes seemed to stare unseen at her from the cloak of the marshes, set her skin to crawling, set her to praying to gods she no longer believed in—and to new ones she now gave homage. Eredynn and the warm fires of old Vennitius’ palace were a dream of paradise and for the first time, Sarcha Urkaimat wondered just what she had gotten herself into.
“All right,” Clegg said without relaxing. “Just move ahead a bit. We’ll see...”
“See what?” Sarcha asked. But the dwarf didn’t answer. She nudged the mammoth-driver, who practically jumped from his saddle on the beast’s neck. Another nudge got the fool moving, twitching the reins and prodding his monstrous mount forward.
The dwarves moved in their wake, slowly, weapons clenched as they kept their two-lined formation and eyed their surroundings. Ahead, the ten-dwarf screen reached the dead tree.
Sarcha saw a bow-legged shape emerge from the hollowed-out trunk, beady eyes flashing yellow as it raised a horn to its face. She opened her mouth for a scream.
The mammoth pitched forward with a bellow. Sarcha clutched the edges of the gondola as its weight hurtled forward. She heard the driver howling as he sawed back on his harness. The mammoth’s spine bent beneath them, its bulk shifting sideways as it tried to correct halfway into a fall.
Sarcha finally did scream as the marsh rushed up to meet her. She hit in a splash that jarred her with pain and a rush of terrible cold. For a moment all was dark as she thrashed about in the tangle of her blankets and belongings and the wreckage of the gondola.
A shriek like rocks rent asunder came from the trembling mass of the mammoth. The creature began to roll. Screaming without shame, Sarcha tore free of the gondola, dragging her pack—the one with the precious map—after her. She got clear just before the mammoth’s tumble finished, legs pawing the air, sinuous trunk flopping, its tusks painted in pinkish-red gore frothing from its mouth.
Sarcha stumbled and fell on all fours in bog water, shivering with chill and terror. A dwarf came running towards her, shapes scurrying from the mists at his back. He staggered the last couple yards to her and turned to face them. She gasped. A pair of arrow shafts quivered from his back.
Red-black figures in tufts of animal furs and pieces of obviously stolen armor swarmed towards them, fanged mouths gibbering cries of feral glee, yellowy eyes wide with frenzy. The closest one hurtled for Sarcha’s defender with a crude spear. The dwarf batted it aside with the flat of his axe and reversed the stroke, plunging its edge into the brute’s midsection. He hurled the gurgling creature aside to parry the tulwar blow of the next attacker. A second later the beast flopped in the muck with its sword arm cleaved. The rest of the creatures slowed and hung back. Short bow strings twanged and the dwarf jolted backwards a couple steps, two then three arrows protruding from his chest. He sagged to one knee and lashed about as the attackers closed in.
More goblins flanked away from the doomed warrior, towards Sarcha.
A deep-throated cry sounded from behind and above her. She turned and looked up in time to see Clegg Greatclub leap from the top of the now-still mammoth. He landed with an overhand chop of his axe that cleaved one of the creature’s torsos from sternum to crotch. Shoving aside the disemboweled brute, the dwarf waded into the midst of the swarm, axe slashing half-circles of metallic brilliance.
“Goblin swamp-scum!” Clegg roared. “Your sneaky tricks are nothing next to dwarven steel!”
Dwarves flowed by Sarcha, splashing knee-deep through murk to reach their foreman and the goblins. Battle raged about her, axe and war hammer crashing through goblin blocks and parries to rive red-black meat and shatter bent, malnourished bones. One dwarf’s hammer blow blasted through a goblin skull, splashing it over Sarcha like rotten fruit. She flinched and stumbled away. Something caught her foot and she tripped, went down in the mud. She looked up and saw the mammoth driver’s dead eyes staring skyward, half his body pinned beneath the mass of his mount.
Horns sounded and the surviving goblins scattered, vanishing into the protection of the mists, their maniac chatter fading under the triumphant war-cries of the dwarves. Goblin dead lay in heaps about dwarven boots, their broken forms beginning to sink slowly into the bog, their gore staining the water’s surface black.
Clegg trotted up to Sarcha, concern shining out from muck- and blood-speckled features. “Are you hurt?”
Sarcha took a long breath to cleanse herself of hammering fear and disgust. Trying to ignore the dead driver’s eyes, she rose and shook her head. “I’m fine. But our pack animal...” She turned and saw what had felled the monster. Swamp water ran into a hole in the mammoth’s intended path, sharpened stakes planted in its bottom by crude goblin ingenuity. Mist and a false cover of reeds and scooped swamp peat had disguised its presence. “They led us into this?” she asked.
Clegg shrugged. “Perhaps they did. I told you; this is unfriendly territory.”
“They will hound us the whole way,” Sarcha said, wiping goblin spume from her face.
“That route to the east is still open,” Clegg replied, a hint of hope in his tone.
“And it is still two weeks out of the way,” Sarcha snapped, regaining some of her composure. “And who knows what we’d encounter along that route?”
“My lady...”
“Salvage what you can from the mammoth,” Sarcha ordered. She clutched her pack and its priceless contents close. “We continue.”
Clegg bowed. “As you say.” He glanced at a fallen dwarf, be-feathered with goblinoid arrows. “We bury our dead first.”
“Time runs away from us.”
Clegg turned and gave Sarcha a glare that told her this was one place from which he would not yield.
Sarcha hid a reflexive swallow. “Be quick about it then.” She watched the dwarves gather up their handful of slain and tend to each others’ wounds. When none lo
oked her way any longer, she opened her pack and pulled out the ivory tube containing the map, breathing a sigh of relief that the damp of the swamp had not touched it. Shoving it back into hiding, she tried to remember the glories promised at the end of this road.
Chapter Six
Delivered from Darkness
Vohl stepped to the bow of the River Imp and put his boot to the gunwale to look out across the surface of the Talos. He wrinkled his nose at the sour scent of death as he scanned corpses bobbing in the water. One drifting facedown bounced against the ship’s hull as it passed, wide gashes like blackened lips in the dead man’s naked back.
At Vohl’s side, Muddle grunted through clenched fangs and continued to pole the river bottom for depth. Piggish eyes scanned side-to-side over either forested bank. Dodso joined them, leaning out, then cursing as he saw what had cast the pall of silent dread over the Imp’s crew.
“They were attacked?” the gnome asked, glancing over his shoulder at Tev and the boys, standing pale-faced and idle as they watched the dead drift by.
“You don’t miss anything do you, Dodso?” Vohl said, tension making the comment harsher than he had intended.
“Wreckage ahead,” Muddle said in a low tone.
A curve of capsized hull protruded from the water in a bend in the river. Planks littered the surface, as did more corpses, some of them in pieces. The Talos’ current rolled one body over as it dragged shallow silt near the left bank. Vohl hissed and looked away, but not before he saw that the face was missing. He heard retching and saw one of the young crewmen vomit over the side. Dodso’s features whitened as he made a vague sign, fist to his lips and then his forehead, a plea to the Green Mother for safe passage to the afterlife for the butchered men.
“Fishermen,” Muddle said, pipe moving from one corner of his mouth to the other. “This is too far north for them to be from Koen.” He glanced at Vohl. “This lot is probably out of Edon Village.”
Vohl tried not to think too hard about what that might mean.
“Bandits?” Dodso asked.
Vohl shook his head. “They wouldn’t waste time on fishermen, especially a group this large; too much risk for too little profit. And even if they had, they wouldn’t have wasted time on the...mutilation.”
The sun passed behind one of the whorls of cloud that had blotched the sky all morning, casting Muddle’s face in shadow as he prodded the river bottom with his pole and said, “We’ve got shallows ahead.”
“How far out from Edon Village are we?” Dodso asked.
“We’ll be there tonight,” Vohl replied, forcing himself not to watch the last of the dead recede behind them. He turned and met Tev’s gaze. “Break out the weapons.”
The young men of the crew began to babble amongst one another until Tev silenced them with harsh whispers. He and one of the youths strolled aft to the cabin.
Vohl put his hand on Muddle’s bulging arm, as much for a moment of comfort as to get the half-breed’s attention. “What do you think?”
Muddle shrugged. “Could be rogue goblinoids. It has the mark of their sadism.”
“This far north?” Dodso said incredulously.
“Well, I’m just telling you—” The half-hobgoblin tensed, eyes on the river.
Purls across the water at a particularly narrow point caught Vohl’s eye. The sun glimmered through clouds to light the water and pick out something just beneath the surface. It twitched and cast ripples in parallel patterns, outlining what became suddenly obvious as a length of rope.
Vohl’s heart flopped against his ribcage as movement flickered through the woods to the left, the western bank. He turned and bawled to the crewmen at the oars, “Back water! Reverse, now!”
“Too late!” Muddle barked, casting aside his pole and ducking.
Something hissed through the air Muddle’s head had occupied a moment before and suddenly the air was sizzling with projectiles. One glanced off the gunwale in front of Vohl, dashing splinters loose. Vohl spun and dove, carrying Dodso with him to land facedown on the deck. A moment later he was back on his feet, sprinting aft for the pile of packs by the cabin and their weapons. The air warbled around in him, a stone brushing the back of his neck like a cat’s tongue.
“Forget the oars!” Vohl bellowed as he reached his pack and clenched the grip of his sword, tore the thing loose of its sheath with a metallic ring. “Arm yourselves!”
A horn sounded from the woods beyond the western bank. Wild cries rose like an animal pack scenting blood and the forest boiled with motion as half-naked men erupted from undergrowth to charge into the water. Tree boughs groaned as more attackers swung from ropes out over the river, some missing the ship altogether and plummeting into the water, others with courses more precise reaching the ship to drop onto its deck.
Muddle reached up and caught the ankle of an attacker who’d swung too high over the bow. The half-breed yanked the man down, smashed him broken-backed across the gunwale. He then lifted the bent form and spun like a sportsman working a shot-put in the hippodromes of the Thyrrian south, swinging the body with him to smash a second attacker clear off the ship. Two broken forms splashed into the Talos and did not come to the surface.
A sling-stone glanced off the shoulder of one of the young oarsmen, knocked the boy to the deck with eyes wide in shock. A swinging attacker landed behind him and raised a badly-notched sword for the kill.
Vohl sprinted forward, roaring, his muscles singing with reflexes long-unused but not forgotten. He vaguely noticed Dodso bolting past him in the opposite direction. He reached the attacker just as the man was bringing his blade down, blocking the blow with a crash of Thyrrian steel.
The man looked up, eyes shining with frenzy through a rot-purple mask of mismatched, poorly-stitched leather. He growled as he leaned into Vohl, grinding his blade up the narrower Thyrrian sword towards the guard. Patches of hair that had been another man’s beard speckled the death-mask.
Skinners! Vohl’s nose wrinkled in disgust. Cannibal degenerates!
The barbarian’s bloodlust-fueled strength was greater than Vohl’s and, rather than continue the uneven contest, Vohl leapt back a step, disengaging. The Skinner’s brute force carried the man stumbling forward to plant his blade in the deck planking. Vohl slashed into the barbarian’s flank as the brute tried to drag his sword loose. The man howled and tore his weapon free, brought it back to some semblance of a guard, oblivious to the blood slicking his side.
“Get out of the way!” Vohl yelled at the injured oarsman, who crawled past him.
The Skinner lunged, sword point first, typical barbarian brashness that would have locked the two combatants together again, had Vohl fought like the barbarian adversaries the Skinner had earned his scars against. But Vohl backpedaled instead, a quick parry batting the point away as the barbarian lumbered forth, lost his balance on the shuddering deck and his own blood, and crashed face first to the planking. Vohl planted his feet and brought his sword down on the brute’s back, the edge plunging through flesh to catch on bone. Vohl thrust deeper, felt the man tremble once, and ripped his blade free.
The Imp lurched, threw everyone on the deck forward as the ship’s bow caught on the rope-boom across the river and groaned to a halt. A new howl rose from the attackers, seeing their prey now completely at their mercy. The crew fought with their oars, hammering barbarian heads as the Skinners who’d leapt into the water attempted to scale the hull.
Tev emerged from the after cabin, flailing about with a quarterstaff, crunching bones with every pin-wheeling sweep. Muddle held the bow alone, without a weapon, dodging past weapon-strokes to grapple hand-to-hand, sinewy forearms blood-splashed to the elbows as he pulped skulls with his bare fists.
A Skinner swung over the gunwales to land behind Vohl. Vohl stepped back to make room for himself. Another Skinner surged over the gunwale at his back, a dripping hand clamping down on Vohl’s forearm. The first barbarian moved in on Vohl with a triumphant roar.
Dodso
erupted from the after cabin with a shrill scream, beard flowing like white flames, a carpentry hammer in his fists. The Skinner began to turn then crumpled as Dodso struck his kneecap with a wet crackle of shattered bone.
Vohl pulled free of the barbarian at his back and thrust his blade into the Skinner before him, steel punching through ribs into the soft organs behind. A wet gasp left the Skinner’s mouth as Vohl yanked his sword free and turned to hack the second attacker’s fingers, now fumbling desperately to retain a grip on the gunwale. The Skinner dropped into the river with a bleat.
At the bow, Muddle caught the forearm of an attacker in mid-swing, his iron grip forcing the barbarian’s fingers apart to drop a flint-bladed axe to the deck. With his free hand Muddle punched the man once, twice, a third time, knocking him senselessly over the side. He picked up the axe and mounted the ship’s prow, the weapon held high. Sling-stones zipped about him, one glancing off his side. With an ear-stunning roar, Muddle hurled the axe down, spinning to slash through the rope barring the Imp’s passage.
“The oars!” Vohl tried to cry, though it came out a croak. “Get us moving!”
The barbarian horn sounded again, repeating its call with sudden urgency. With howls and gutturals promising the worst torments, the Skinners fell back from the fight, leaving their wounded to flail pitifully in the water until the river current overcame fading strength and they slipped under the surface in bubble-froth and slicks of blood.
Tev began barking orders, getting the boys back to work and those worst hurt out of the sun. Oars cut the water again and the River Imp shuddered forward, battered, blood-streaked, but still very much alive.
“Bit off more than you could chew, huh?” Vohl bellowed into the woods beyond the western bank. But the cry seemed to drain him and he sagged to the deck, ignoring the tackiness of gore on the planks and the bodies of barbarians still littering them.
Dodso stepped to his side. Wheezing for air, he dropped the hammer and asked, “Are you all right?”
