Quag Keep

by Andre Norton

  The fat body smashed under his blow. However, the jaws did not open, keeping fast their hold. Milo had to slash and slash again with his dagger, his hands shaking with a horror he could not control. Though he so rid himself of the flattened body and of most of the head, he could not even then loose the jaws.

  Those he carried with him as he hurried on, moving from one leaf to the next. Voices sounded ahead, there was a calling of his name. He took a deep breath and answered, hoping that his present state of mind could not be deduced from his tone. Then, as his pulse slowed and he mastered the sickness that threatened each time he glanced at that thing deep set in his boot, he had another fleeting thought.

  The bracelet! Milo swung up his arm, almost believing that he must have lost it. There had not been the slightest warning of any peril ahead such as he had come to rely upon. The dice were fixed. He prodded one with a finger—immovable.

  Did that mean that they had lost the one small advantage they might have in any struggle to come?

  Leaf by leaf he won ahead. The mist did not thin. All he could see was what lay immediately around him. Luckily, though he skirted two more pools, neither had to be directly crossed.

  “Take care.” Another warning from the curtain of mist. “Bear right as you come.”

  The leaf before him was set straight. Milo hesitated, looked to the bracelet. It remained uncommunicative. Voices—illusions? If he bore right as ordered would such a shift take him directly into disaster?

  “Naile?” he called back, determined for identification before he obeyed.

  “Wymarc,” the answer came. The mist, Milo decided, played tricks with normal tones. It could have been anyone who mouthed that name.

  Sword in hand, Milo teetered back and forth. He must chance it. To do otherwise might not only endanger him but one of the others. He moved on, across the leaf and to the right, skirting the very edge of it and causing it to tilt.

  So he came through the mist to where figures stood half-unseen. There was a line of leaves laid out here, so each one had a firm platform of his own. Before them stretched a wide spread of water. Perhaps this was the lake they had been able to view in the first gray time of light before the mists gathered. As he moved up even with the others, he saw that his neighbor was indeed the bard.

  “What do we wait for?”

  Wymarc made a gesture to the sweep of dark water. “For a bridge apparently—or something of the sort. I could wish that we did it in a less populated place.” He slapped at his face and neck, hardly disturbing the insects that buzzed about him in a cloud of constant assault.

  “Gulth?”

  The lizardman had solved one problem for them. Would he have an answer for this also?

  “He was gone when we reached here. But we are not the first to come this way. Look.”

  It could only be half seen in the mist, but what the bard pointed to was a post made of a tree trunk, its bark still on and overlaid with a thick resinous gum. Caught in it were layers of the insects, so that it was coated above the waterline with the dead and the still-struggling living. But on each side of it, well up above the water, were two hoops of metal, dulled and rusty, standing away from the wood.

  “Mooring of a sort.” Milo was sure he was right. And, if something had been moored here in the past. . . . Still that did not signify that any such transportation would be available to them.

  “Something coming!” Naile, beyond Wymarc, gave them warning. Milo could hear nothing but the noise of the insects which, now that he was not occupied with leaf-crossing, was maddening.

  Out of the mist a dark shadow glided across the surface of the lake, heading straight for them. Afreeta, who had been in her usual riding place on Naile’s shoulder, darted out to meet that craft.

  It was a queer sort of boat and one that Milo could not accept at first as being any possible transportation at all. It looked far more as if a mass of reeds had been uprooted and was drifting toward them. Still, no mat would move with such purpose, and this move steadily if slowly, plainly aimed at the shore at their feet.

  As it at last nudged the mud, Milo could see that the raft was indeed fashioned of reeds, at least on the surface. They had been torn from their rooting, forced into bundles, and tied together with cords made of their own materials. The bundles did not dip deeply in the water, plainly they rested on another base. Now, below the front edge of this unwieldy platform of vegetation (it did not even promise the stability of a raft) something rose to the surface.

  Gulth drew himself up and collected from among the reed bundles his swordbelt with its weapon.

  “Come.” In the mist his voice took on some of the croaking intonation of the frog things. To underline his invitation-order, he gestured them forward.

  There were extra rows of the reed bundles forming a raised edging about the platform. But seven of them on that? Milo, for one, saw little hope. Yet Yevele was not going to lead this time. Since by chance he was the closest, the swordsman jumped, landing on the other side of the low barrier. The raft did bob about, but it remained remarkably buoyant. Milo scrambled hastily to join Gulth. Perhaps with their weight on the other side to balance, the others would have less trouble embarking. One by one they followed Milo’s lead, Naile coming last. The raft did sink a little then, some of the water forced in runnels through the raised edge. At Gulth’s orders they spaced themselves across the surface in a pattern the lizardman indicated, which, they deduced, had something to do with maintaining its floating ability.

  Then, dropping his swordbelt once more, Gulth slid easily into the water and the raft slowly moved out from the shore.

  Milo turned his head. Wymarc lay an arm’s distance away.

  “He can’t be towing us, not alone!” the swordsman protested. Magic he could swallow—but this was no magic, he knew.

  “He is not,” Ingrge, instead of the bard, answered. “Direction he gives—but to others. The scaled ones have their own friends and helpers and those are born of swamps. Gulth has found here such to answer his call. They swim below the surface—as the horses of the land pull a cart, these will bring us across the water.”

  Their journey was a slow one. And it was, as the mist gathered around them and they could no longer see the shore from which they came, a blind voyage. Nor was there any sign of what or who drew them on. Milo rose cautiously to his knees once to peer over the barrier. He saw lines of braided reeds showing now and again at the meeting of raft and water. They were drawn taut. Save for those and the emergence of Gulth at intervals, his head rising so he might check on the raft, there was no proof they were not alone.

  17

  Quag Heart

  IMPRISONED BY THE WALLS OF MIST, SURROUNDED BY CLOUDS OF insects which even the forays of Afreeta did nothing to drive away, they were caught in a pocket of time that they could not measure. They only knew that the crude raft on which they balanced continued to move. And, since Gulth controlled that journey, they guessed that the lizardman must also know their goal.

  “I am wondering,” Yevele said, “if we have already been noted and there are those awaiting us . . .” She raised her head, propping herself up on her extended arms, and looked directly at Milo. “Such ones as this shape-changer you have already fronted, swordsman.”

  “She’s no shape-changer,” Naile cut in. “An illusionist needs to reach into the mind to spin such webs. And another can break them, when he realizes that they are only fancies.” He appeared aggrieved that Yevele equated the stranger with him in such a fashion.

  “I am wondering why she came to us.” Wymarc shook his head vigorously to try and discourage the attentions of a flying thing nearly as long as his own middle finger. “It argues that we have been discovered, thus we may indeed meet a welcome we shall not want.”

  “Yes, the open jaws of another dragon,” commented Naile, “or the sucking of a mud hole. Yet there is something about these attempts against us—”

  “They seem to be not very carefully planned,” Wy
marc supplied when the berserker paused. “Yes, each attempt possesses a flaw, does it not?”

  “It is,” Ingrge spoke for the first time, “as if orders are incomplete, or else they are not understood by servants.” He rolled over on his back and held up his arm so that the bracelet was visible. “How much do these control our way now?”

  “Perhaps very little.” Milo gained their full attention. Quickly he outlined his battle with the frog things and how then there had been no warning spin of the dice.

  “It may be because we approach at last the place in which those came into being, that they can operate only beyond its presence,” Yevele said slowly, her hand rubbing now along her own bracelet. “Then, if that is so—”

  “We are without warning or any aid we can gain from a controlled spin.” Deav Dyne finished her thought. “Yet, do you feel released from the geas in any fashion?”

  There was a moment of silence as they tested the compulsion that had brought them out of Greyhawk and to this place of water, mud, and mist. Milo strove to break loose, to decide to turn back. But that force was still strong within him.

  “So, we learn something else,” the cleric pointed out. “Wizardry still holds us, even though the other, this,”—he tapped fingertip against the band about his wrist—“does not. What are we to gather from such evidence?”

  “A geas is of this world,” Yevele mused aloud. “The band which we cannot take from us perhaps is not. There are many kinds of magic; I know of no one, unless it be an adept, who can list them all. This foul quagmire is magic-born. What kind of magic, priest? There are many fearsome odors here, still I have not sniffed yet the traces of Chaos leaves when dark powers are summoned. Alien forces?”

  “So said Hystaspes,” Milo returned.

  “We are slowing,” Ingrge broke in. “Those who tow us want no part of what lies ahead, they protest against Gulth’s urging.” He raised to look over the edge as Milo had done. More water seeped in and his cloak showed patches of wet.

  “How many of these swamp dwellers can be allied for us or against us?” Naile wanted to know. “None answer to my were-call.”

  So the berserker, without telling them, had been trying to use one of his own talents.

  “Who knows?” Ingrge answered. “None have I touched who were not life as we of this world recognize it. Though this swamp has been populated arbitrarily. In some minds I have found fading memories of living elsewhere—in the rest there is only consciousness of the here and now.”

  “A slice of country transported with its dwellers?” hazarded Deav Dyne. “That is wizardry beyond my learning. Yet all things are possible, there is no boundary of knowledge.”

  “Something there!” Milo picked a dark shadow out of the mist. It was fixed, not moving. Toward that the raft headed, far more slowly now.

  “Gulth holds them, those who pull us,” reported the elf. “They protest more, but his control continues. He has agreed to release them when we touch that which we see ahead.”

  The shadow grew and became not just a dark spot in the mist, but a tumble of rocks spilling forward to form a narrow tongue. They looked upon the promise of that stability with divided minds. To the credit side, the solid look of the rock promised firm footing, a refuge from the swamp. On the other hand, firm land would also hold other dangers.

  Gulth crawled out of the water, climbing carefully over the side barrier.

  “We go there—” He gestured to the tongue of rock.

  It loomed high above, its foot water-washed and covered with green slime. The raft bumped gently against it a moment later.

  “Push—that way—” Gulth stepped close, leaned over, to set his taloned hands against the rough surface of the rocks, obeying his own order, to edge the unwieldy craft to the left.

  Only Naile, Milo, and Wymarc could find room to stand beside the lizardman and add their strength to this new maneuver. The stone was wet and their progress was hardly faster than that of the fat leechslugs that clung to the rocks and that they tried to avoid touching. Little by little they brought the raft around to the other side of that jutting point. There, in an indentation which made a miniature bay, they worked their way closer to some smaller stones that rose from the surface of the water like natural steps.

  One could only see a short distance ahead, but Naile had a method for overcoming that difficulty. Afreeta took off, spiraling up, then darting into the mist at the higher level to which that stairway climbed. Milo and Gulth found fingerholds to which they clung as Naile swung over, setting his feet firmly on the first stone.

  The berserker climbed up out of sight while they still held so. One by one the others passed between them to follow. Then Milo clambered over, and the lizardman was quick to follow, leaving the raft to drift away.

  Here fog enfolded them even more thickly. They could not see those they followed. However, the mist did not muffle a sudden shout or the sound of steel against steel. Milo, sword in hand, made the last part of that assent in two bounds. Nor did he forget a quick glance once more at his wrist. The dice neither shone nor moved. It would seem the phenomenon on which they depended still did not work.

  Gulth, moving with more supple speed than the swordsman had seen him use since their quest began, gave one leap that surpassed Milo’s efforts and vanished into the mist. The swordsman was not far behind. With a last spurt of effort he broke through the fog, into open space. This lay under a gray and lowering sky to be sure, but one might see his fellows as more than just forms moving in and out of eye range.

  What he did witness was Naile, axe up to swing, as if the berserker had fastened on Milo himself as the enemy. Yet—there was Naile, further off, confronting a shambling, stone-hided troll!

  Illusion! Milo lifted the hand wearing the ring, half-afraid that, in the atmosphere of this alien setting, it, too, might have ceased to possess its spell-breaking quality. But, like the geas, it still served. The Naile about to attack him changed swiftly, in a flicker of an eye, to a man he had seen before—the animal trader Helagret. His axe was a dagger, its upright blade discolored by a greenish stain. Milo swung at this opponent with the practiced ease of a trained infighter.

  His sword met that dagger arm, but did not sheer deeply for the edge found the resistance of a mailed shirt beneath the other’s travel-stained jerkin. But the force of the blow, delivered so skillfully, sent the dagger spinning from the other’s hand, rendered him off balance. Milo tossed the sword to his other hand, caught it by the blade and delivered with the heavy hilt a trick stroke he had learned through long and painful effort.

  As the pommel thudded home on the side of Helagret’s head, the man’s eyes rolled up. Without a cry he slumped to the rock. His huddled body lay now in the way of Naile, retreating from the lunges of the troll, for no matter how skillfully the berserker wrought with his bone-shattering axe strokes, none of them appeared to land where he had aimed them.

  “No.” Milo threw up his ring hand, dodging past Naile, stooping just in time to escape one of the berserker’s wider swings, and touched the troll.

  There was again that flicker of dying illusion. What Naile faced now was not an eight-foot monster toward the head and neck of which he had aimed his attack, but rather a man, human as Milo, and well under the berserker’s own towering inches. Knyshaw, the thief-adventurer, his lips drawn into a snarl, dove forward, stretching forth both hands as the troll had earlier threatened Naile with six-inch talons. Strapped to his digits were the wicked weapons of the soundless assassin, keen knives projecting beyond his own nails. The tips of two were stained and Milo guessed that the lightest scratch from one would bring a painful death.

  The axe arose and fell as Naile voiced a shrill squeal of boar anger. There was no mail here to stop that stroke. Knyshaw screamed, stumbled. The hands with their knives were on the ground. From the stumps of his wrists spouted blood. Again Naile struck. The thief, his head beaten in, fell, the hands hidden beneath his twitching body.

  Milo leaped
over that body, heading for the rest of the skirmish. Deav Dyne crouched by a spur of rock, his belt knife drawn, but his other hand cradled his beads, and he chanted, intent on keeping his attacker from him while he wrought some spell of his own calling. That attacker slunk, belly to the ground, a scaled thing that might well have issued from the quagmire. Its body was encased in a shell, but the head, swaying back and forth, was that of a serpent, and the eyes, staring fixedly at the priest, were evilly wise.

  Milo brought the ring against its shell. This time there was no change. He swung up his sword, only to be elbowed aside by Naile. His axe flashed up, then down, with an executioner’s precision, to behead the monster. Through the air spun viscous yellow stuff that the creature had spat at the crouching cleric just before its head bounced to the rock. A few drops fell on the edge of Deav Dyne’s robe. A wisp of smoke arose and the cloth showed a ragged hole.

  “ ’Ware that!” Naile cried. He had turned and was already on the move.

  Wymarc and Ingrge stood back to back, alert to those who circled them. A little apart the druid Carlvols paced around and around the beleaguered two and their enemies. The latter were black imps, spears in hand, their coal-red eyes ever upon those they teased and tormented, flashing in to deliver some prick with their spears. To Milo’s surprise neither the elf nor the bard strove to defend himself with a sword, though trickles of blood ran down their legs unprotected by mail.

  Naile roared and leaped forward, swinging his axe at the prancing demons. The steel head passed through the bodies he strove to smash as it might have through wisps of smoke. Milo, seeing that, understood the strange passiveness of the two in that circle.

  Carlvols did not look at either Milo or the berserker. His body was tense, strain visible on his face. The swordsman guessed that, though the magic worker had had the ability to summon these creatures from whatever other plane they knew as home and keep them tormenting the two they encircled, it was a dire energy drain for him to hold the spell in force. None of the demons turned to attack either Naile or Milo. Thus there was clearly a limit to what the druid could order them to do. Yet they were well able to keep up the threat against both elf and bard, and their spear attacks were growing stronger, the circle narrower.