Chapter 27
Mums reigned Barge to a halt and studied her surroundings. Behind her, the sky was turning a faint blue as the sun began knocking on that end of the prairie. On either side of her, the captain and the halfling sat wrestling their steeds, and out beyond that, the pastures of the Sway rolled out into forever.
What she could not see, however, was the area directly ahead of her, the area that seemed to drop beneath the coming rays of sun as though to hide its ugly face.
If she strained her eyes, she could see various parts and points of the terrain—the squiggle of a vine here, the bulge of a hummock there—but for the most part the western horizon was a sheet of darkness pulled over the Sway.
But that will soon change, she told herself. Very, very soon.
Barge, possibly seeing the beginnings of that change, snorted disapprovingly and pawed at the ground, eager to be away from the place. Mums patted Barge on the sweat-lathered neck and made reassuring noises in her ear.
Truth be told, the titan didn’t like this place any more than her equine companion. The very thought of entering its foul borders chilled her to the core. It might be a necessary evil to save their skin, but it was still an evil. She and Barge were in agreement on that much at least.
Mums patted the animal on the neck three more times, then glanced at the other two horses. On her right, Bloodhair was yanking her head continually to the right in a not-so-subtle hint for Reetsle to lead them to the north and on her left, Quinlin—or, Winner, if you ask Iman—was not so much pulling at the reigns as he was prancing in place and snapping his tail.
Mums moved her great brown eyes to Iman and watched as he leaned over the saddle horn and whispered in his horse’s ear. He was telling his steed that they were perfectly safe now and that all would be well. Quinlin didn’t appear to be buying it, and neither did Mums.
She turned her attention to the thing in the shadowy west, the thing that smelled like cloying rot and looked like a lunatic’s bad dream. Even now, as dawn continued to warm the edges of the monstrosity, she could see where the grassy soil of the prairie met the sloping banks of an immense black lake. Cattails and whip-reeds sprang up like fencing in a few places, but most of the water’s edge was matted with mud and offered no obstruction.
I don’t want to do this, Mums thought, voicing in her mind the collective feelings she saw reflected in the horses. She glanced behind her in the direction of dawn and felt some of that needling reluctance subside, felt it being overwhelmed by the crushing desire to leap into the dripping darkness and get it over with.
It was the sight she had seen last night that made her feel this way, the impossible event she had witnessed at the edge of Eastpost just before riding west into the Sway…
…it was driving her mad.
She drove the awful memory from her mind and drew a breath, waiting for it to steady her nerves. To enter the place now would be as suicidal as turning Barge around and galloping back the way they’d come. Better to sit here a while longer and let the sunshine do its thing.
So she did—they all did—and before she knew it, the moments had passed, the sun had risen, and the evil scene before her had become a playground for the eyes.
She could see the line of misshapen trees on the far side of the lake, their trapezoidal trunks rising from what appeared to be a sheet of glaring black glass, their meager boughs sprouting knots of gray moss and ropes of pink vine, the former the spitting image of a mildewed wig, the latter a perfect imitation of fresh entrails.
Mums quickly lowered her gaze and focused on the large wooden stalactites sticking up from the water. In one spot, a giant lily pad floated in the center of the pyramidal nubs and she found herself looking away once more. The sight engendered in her mind the image of a great leviathan rising from the deep, its brown fangs jutting, its green tongue at the ready.
This isn’t a swamp, she thought. This is madness. This is what happens when nature goes mad and the Fates allow it, when evil runs rampant in the—
“Well?”
Mums turned to the speaker, expecting to find a cantankerous halfling glaring a hole in her face. What she found instead was a cantankerous halfling glaring a hole in the east. It was almost as if Reetsle had started his tirade and then remembered something behind him.
Mums had a good idea what the something might be, but a quick glance over the shoulder revealed that he’d remembered it too soon. The Sway behind them was nothing but rolling green hills beneath a glowing blue sky.
But it’s still there, she thought. And if we wait long enough, it’ll roll right up to greet us.
As if to draw attention to this fact, Reets said, “We’re still waitin, woman.”
“I know,” Mums said, thinking the halfling sounded tired and worn and running on empty. He probably was. They’d had a long and sleepless ride from Eastpost—which came close on the heels of a long and sleepless ride from Onador—and if the lack of sleep hadn’t gotten him down, the stress of being hunted was probably a factor.
And if that isn’t it, she thought to herself, being run over by Barge and dragged into the Southern Sway probably hadn’t helped.
Reets wasn’t looking at her, but she didn’t need to read his expression to read his mood. From within the fatigue and exhaustion, the animosity was pouring out of him like puss from a wound. It was festering like a sore.
She might have gotten away with running him down and ruining his battle, but when she led him away on Bloodhair like some child on a pony (refusing to give him the reigns until he agreed to hear her out), the proverbial bridge had been burned and there was no going back.
She remembered the way he’d glared at her, then looked down at the grass. She expected him to jump from the saddle and go rolling through the thistles, but it must have occurred to him that, in so doing, he would be stranded in the Sway with no means for revenge.
He’d agreed to listen, but he’d done so grudgingly…and the grudge was still there.
Switching her gaze from Reetsle to Iman, Mums said, “Before I share this idea, I really need to know what happened last night, I need to know that we…Iman? Iman dear, can you hear me?”
The captain was now spinning in circles and kicking his heels into Quinlin’s flank. He managed a spasmodic nod and a halfhearted grunt, then went back to shushing his steed.
Seeing this, Mums gave Barge another stroke and said, “How would you say you fared last night, Iman, with the creature?”
Still spinning in circles, Iman shot her a curious look. “I’d say I did all right,” he said. “I hit it every time I shot, if that’s what you mean.” He made another revolution. “I did my job. The arrows did theirs.” He glanced to the east, whirling. “It was that thing that was the problem,” he said. “It didn’t want to die.”
Mums held his gaze. “Do you think it can die?”
Iman ran a hand through his hair and some of the tension washing out of him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. After what I saw last night, the way it kept coming no matter what, never slowing, never flinching…,” he trailed off, his head shaking weakly, “…I don’t know.”
Still rubbing Barge, Mums waited in case there was more, then realized the captain was through. She nodded in reply and turned her liquid eyes to the halfling.
“What are your thoughts?” she asked. “After hearing Iman’s report, do you still wish to confront the creature?”
Reetsle tried to look her in the eyes, but it was difficult. Bloodhair wouldn’t stop jerking her head to the north. “Everythin dies,” he told her, hauling back on the reigns. “Imps’ll die too, if’n yeh know how to do it.”
“And do you?” she asked. “Do you know how to kill the thing behind us?”
Reetsle let Bloodhair yank two times against the reigns and said, “I might.”
Mums exhaled sharply. “No,” she said. “You do not. And before you scurry off to get yourself killed in the process, let me remin
d you of your pledge to king and kingdom to remedy the ails of the Mela River, a pledge that has nothing to do with hunting the local wildlife.”
“But what if—” Reetsle had to stop as Bloodhair stopped yanking her head and reared up on her hind legs. When she came back down, he said, “—what if it’s tied to the river?”
“Then my plan will untie it,” Mums said. “Unless of course you really do know how to kill it?”
Reetsle glared at his steed, seemed to be on the verge of giving her and Mums a good cursing, then leaned to one side and spat in the grass. “What’s your plan?”
Mums opened her mouth to tell him, sat there with her jaw open, then closed it. Right before she spoke, she had heard the words floating about inside her head and had decided to change her method. The reasonable arguments she had concocted while riding across the pastures no longer seemed reasonable, not in the face of the swamp she saw taking shape before her. She put diplomacy to the side and decided to be honest.
“This will sound ludicrous when I begin,” she said, still peering into the morass, “but please let me finish before rolling your eyes or calling me mad. It will seem more plausible once I finish. At least, it did to me.”
She sighed wearily and said, “I’ve wrestled with this idea since leaving Eastpost and it is the best I could do. I mean…I hope that I’m wrong. I hope the two of you will see the error of my way and talk me out of it, because I still hold reservations myself abou—”
“Would yeh get on with it?”
Mums turned and gave Reetsle a rather undiplomatic look. She thought to tell him off, then realized she’d been rambling and let the interruption slide. On some level of consciousness, she didn’t want to give voice to this lunacy any more than Reetsle wanted to hear it.
Staring straight at the twisted little halfling, speaking just as quickly as her thick lips would allow, Mums said, “I’m thinking about luring it into the Dell.”
Neither Reetsle nor Iman said anything, no laughter, no snorting, no assertions of titan-madness or early-onset senility.
“When I say the Dell,” Mums clarified, “I mean the creatures that call it home. The ones that took Elnor.” She studied the counselor from Erinthalmus on her right, then the Jashian captain on her left. She waited for one of them to start grunting or chuckling or shaking their heads with dismay.
Reetsle merely stared at her, his head nodding ever-so-slightly as Bloodhair continued to yank on the reigns. Iman, on the other hand, had the look of an atheist who hears whispers from the grave. She could see the look of incredulity on his face even as he spun tiny circles in the early light of day.
“The boggen?” he said, speaking over his shoulder. “You’re talking about boggen?”
“Yes,” Mums said, feeling childish and ashamed as she spoke the word aloud. “I know what that sounds like,” she said, giving a weak nod. “It sounds ridiculous, does it not?”
Iman did not say. He went right on spinning in the short grasses, first right, then left, then back the other way.
From behind her, she heard Reetsle Baggershaft say, “Lure it how,” and turned around to face him. He had stopped glaring at her and was now glaring at the Dell, his face cold and calculating.
“We’d have to lead it,” Mums said, swallowing hard. “Like I said, it sounds insane, I know that, but I’ve thought it through time and again, all the way from Eastpost, and it’s the only option I could come up with. I thought about trying to lose it in the Shun, but it—”
“It’d find its way out,” Reetsle said, still glaring at the mud and the moss and the gut-like tendrils.
Mums felt something like shock as she heard herself say, “Yes…That’s what I thought.” She paused, waiting for the halfling to realize he was agreeing with her and retract his previous statement, but he never did.
“I can’t explain why,” she went on, “nor do we have time for me to try…,” she glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the sun, “…but this creature knows where we are. It knew where we were last night, knew we had stopped at Eastpost, and knew when we were leaving.” She stopped patting Barge and let her shoulders drop. “We can’t outrun it…we can’t hide.”
She checked her audience and was shocked to find they were still with her: Reetsle still analyzing the swamp, Iman still holding his tongue.
“I considered leading it to the city,” she said, quickly pressing on. “I thought we might use the siege equipment and castle defenses to dispose of the beast, but…,” she trailed off, her eyes drifting north, “…most of our castle guard has already been deployed to Westpost and I am not certain we could use the battlements alone.”
She checked her companions for any sign that she was wrong in this assumption, a captain in the king’s army and a halfling with ages of war experience under his belt, but neither of them made a sound or gesture. So far, so good.
“Then there are the royal subjects,” she said, turning her eyes to the swamp. “Between the city’s border and the castle, there are many frightened and hungry people who might not reach the castle in time.” She paused to give weight to her words. “If any of them were to succumb to the creature as it tracked us to the castle, well…,” she shook her great head, “…I couldn’t live with that.”
Especially after what I saw it do, she added to herself, taking the momentary respite to relive the horrid scene.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the shadowy reeds of the Sway spilling past her leg, the dark blur of Iman streaking this way and that as he loosed his quarrels at the slithering beast, the thunder of hooves roaring beneath her, the screams of her fellow adviser from just to the right, his mouth so biologically obscene that she almost drew her eyes from the sight behind her and did as he ordered, almost looked away from monster by the corrals as it rose from the grass and prepared to give chase, almost missed it doing something so unsettling that the sight would haunt her for the remainder of the night, staying with her even as she assured herself that she was too big for that to happen to her, her head too large to fit up there in that grea—
“Mums?”
Mums jumped, brought back from the waking nightmare. “Yes?” she said, unsure who had addressed her.
“Are you okay?” Iman asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine. Where was I?”
Iman hesitated, then said, “The Dell.”
“Yes, the Dell.” She was speaking swiftly again, nervously. “Obviously, timing will be crucial. We’ll need to keep track of the sun. No matter how far we go and no matter what the creature does, we must be moving in the direction of this shore by midday. I’m sure I don’t need to tell either you what happens after nightfall.”
As she watched, Iman tore his eyes from hers and poured them over the swamp. When she checked the halfling, he was doing the same.
“When yeh say lose it,” Reetsle said, glaring at the bog, “wha’s that mean?”
She continued staring at the adviser, but it came at a cost to her pride. “I don’t know,” she said at last, speaking in a humble tone of voice. “I was hoping one of you might have an idea.”
Reetsle leaned to the right and spit off the side of his steed. Mums watched this as she had on a hundred previous occasions and decided to seek help elsewhere. She couldn’t blame the halfling for being angry with her. She had known the price even before she plucked him from the pasture and led him from the fray.
She turned to the captain, the one who’d been nodding as she spoke and who’d never been cross with her for any reason she recalled. She opened her mouth to ask his opinion, but before she could do so….
“False trial’d do.” The voice came from behind her.
Mums spun back to face the twisted counselor and caught him punctuating his words with a spit at the bog.
Without so much as a petulant glance at her or the captain, Reetsle said, “We lead it out there a ways, double back on our trail, hide off to the side, then wait fer it to wander by.
” He cleared his malformed throat and spat phlegm at swamp. “Reckon tha’d do.”
Mums opened her mouth to speak, ages of diplomatic training telling her that this was the part where she replied, but she found her tongue paralyzed by shock. In all the ages and in all the debates, Reetlse had never made an effort to cooperate.
Speaking as deferentially as she could, she said, “That—That would work…would it?”
Reetsle sneered at the swamp, then cocked his head on the side and shrugged. “Doan’ see why not.”
Mums would have smiled if her face would allow it. She gave nodding a try, and said, “Then that is what we’ll—”
“Hey!” Iman cried, speaking so loudly and suddenly that Mums jumped in her saddle. “Hey, you know what,” he said again. “We could hide at Elnor, at one of the mansions.”
Mums craned her head around and found the captain looking from her to Reetsle, his blue eyes bright and his mouth turned up at the corners, each pearly white exposed.
Meeting her eyes, Iman said, “Jaysh and I used to go there all the time when we were kids. We can reach the colony long before midday, and there’s plenty of places to hide.”
For the second time in a matter of moments, Mums opened her mouth to acknowledge one of her companion and was promptly interrupted by the other.
“That’s true,” Reetsle said, seemingly oblivious to the fact he had just agreed with the infamous fancyman captain.
Mums spun to face the halfling and watched as he exchanged a stern look with Iman, their eyes meeting over the blondish strands of Barge’s thick mane. She blinked and felt lightheaded. Not only were her companions ironing out the wrinkles of her plan, but they appeared to be getting along with each other.
“And the horses?” she asked. “That’s the only other obstacle I can’t seem to resolve. Obviously, they’d sink to their bellies if we took them inside, but I can’t see—”
“They’ll be fine,” Iman said, pausing to look down at his continually-spinning steed. “Winner knows his way, and from the look of her,” he pointed to Bloodhair as she went about jerking her head at the reigns, “I’d say she does, too. If they go, I’m sure yours’ll follow.”
Mums stared at the place where her huge hand patted Barge’s neck. “Are you sure?” she asked, still thinking about the slithering monster and the horrible thing it had done at Eastpost.
“Sure I’m sure,” Iman said, giving a chuckle, his mood having drastically improved. “Even if she didn’t go home, she’s already proven she can outrun the thing. And I don’t think it’ll be sneaking up on her. Last night, when I got to the corrals,” he turned east, as if to stare at the place he’d once been, “every horse in the pen was going crazy.”
Mums nodded, still staring at Barge’s butter-tinted coat as she stroked her. Everything Iman said resonated as true, but the fear refused to budge. She could feel it extending its thorny tendrils and choking off her reason.
“Ain’t after the horses,” Reetsle said. “It come fer us.”
Mums looked over and found the halfling with his back to the swamp and his heterochromian eyes squinting at the east. As she studied him, she could hear the groan of leather stirrups as Iman dismounted. She lowered her eyes to Barge and patted her neck. On the other side of her, Reetsle was sliding off his steed and landing in the reeds. Then, from both sides of her at once, the sharp zip of rawhide ties and the clumsy jingle of steel clasps, water skin sloshing with fluid, a quiver rattling with bolts.
Are we really going through with this? she thought, the words in her head sounding like someone else’s. Are we really going in there?
As if inhabiting someone else’s body, she felt her leg hiking over Barge’s back and felt the feather grass rising to engulf it. She was gathering her things now, but it still felt like she was using someone else’s hands and someone else’s fingers.
She pulled her cudgel from a loop and stood there staring at the rear of the saddle where her mug and brew dangled from a strap. It seemed important to take the cudgel, but she wasn’t sure about the brew. It was the most effective means for calming her nerves, but it wouldn’t work without fire, and if they were trying to elude this killer, there could be no fire.
She left the mug and brew where it hung and peeked around Barge’s head at the captain, then over her shoulder at the halfling. Both of them stood staring back at her, one hand on their weapons, the other holding tightly to the halters of their steeds, the bridles having been removed and tucked inside the saddlebags, ensuring the animals wouldn’t trip on the reigns.
She made to reach for Barge’s bridle and saw that someone—at some point during her fugue—had removed it for her. She turned to the saddle bags and saw one of the reigns sticking up from inside.
When had that happened?
She gave Barge’s halter a tug to the north then gave her rump a kind, but forceful swat with her hand. On either side of her, Iman and Reets followed suit, and soon she was watching the horses as they went trotting for Onador, Quinlin in the lead, Bloodhair in the middle, and Barge bringing up the rear.
In the direction of the Dell, someone was splashing into the water. Probably Iman, if she were hazarding a guess. He’d seemed rather eager since the mention of Elnor.
From directly behind her, Reetsle said, “Yeh comin, Mums?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m coming.” But it was a long time before she drew her eyes from the horses, even longer before she moved to the water’s edge and stood staring at its surface.
Somewhere up ahead, Reetsle called her name one last time, a distant whisper beneath the churning of the water.
Mums drew a breath and stepped inside.