by Terry Brooks
The serpent hit them with its tail when they were still a hundred yards from shore, swinging it up into them from underneath, lifting the raft and the nine who clung to it clear of the water, spinning them into the air. They flew for a short distance and landed with a whump that knocked the breath from their bodies. Grips loosened, and people and packs tumbled away. Eowen splashed frantically, went under, and was pulled back to the surface by Garth. The raft had begun to come apart from the force of the landing, ties loosening, logs splitting. The Owl yelled at them to kick, and they did, frantically, furiously, for there was nothing else they could do.
The serpent came at them again, sliding out of the Rowen with a huffing that sprayed water everywhere. Its cry was a deep, booming cough as it launched itself, body flexing and coiling, huge and monstrous as it descended. Wren and Garth broke free of the raft as the beast struck, dragging Ellenroh and Faun with them. Wren saw Gavilan dive, watched the others scatter, and then the serpent struck and everything disappeared in an explosion of water. The raft flew apart, hammered into kindling. Wren went under, Faun clinging desperately to her. She resurfaced, sputtering for air. Heads bobbed in the water, waves generated by the attack washing over them. The serpent’s head reared into the haze once more, but this time Triss and Cort had hold of it, swords stabbing and hacking furiously. Scales and dark blood flew, and the monster cried out in fury. Its body thrashed in an effort to shake loose its attackers, and then it dove. As it went under, Triss buried his sword in the scaly head and broke away. Cort was still attacking, his youthful face grimly set.
The serpent’s body convulsed, scattering everyone. Stray logs from the shattered raft were sent spinning.
One flew at Wren and caught her a glancing blow along the side of her head. She had a momentary vision of the serpent diving, of Garth hauling Eowen toward the shore, and of Ellenroh and the Owl clinging to other stray bits of the raft, and then everything went black.
She drifted, unfeeling, unfettered, numb to her soul. She could tell that she was sinking, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. She held her breath as the water closed over her, then exhaled when she could hold it no longer and felt the water rush in. She cried out soundlessly, her voice lost to her. She could feel the weight of the Elfstones about her neck; she could feel them begin to burn.
Then something caught hold of her and began to pull, something that fastened first on her tunic, then slipped down about her body. A hand first, then an arm—she was in the grip of another person. Slowly she began to ascend again.
She surfaced, sputtering and choking, struggling to breathe as she coughed out the water in her lungs. Her rescuer was behind her, pulling her to safety. She laid back weakly and did not resist, still stunned from the blow and the near drowning. She blinked away the water in her eyes and looked back across the Rowen. It spread away in a choppy silver sheen, empty now of everything but debris, the serpent disappeared. She could hear voices calling—Eowen’s, the Owl’s, and one or two more. She heard her own name called. Faun was no longer clinging to her. What had become of Faun?
Then the shore came into view on either side, and her rescuer ceased swimming and stood up, hauling her up as well and turning her about. She was face to face with Gavilan.
“Are you all right, Wren?” he asked breathlessly, worn from the strain of hauling her. “Look at me.”
She did, and the anger she had felt toward him earlier faded when she saw the look on his face. Concern and a trace of fear were mirrored there, genuine and unforced.
She gripped his hand. “It’s okay. Everything’s fine.” She took a deep, welcome breath of air. “Thank you, Gavilan.”
He looked surprisingly uncomfortable. “I said I was here to help you if you needed it, but I didn’t expect you to take me up on my offer so soon.”
He helped her from the water to where Ellenroh was waiting to fold her into her arms. She hugged Wren anxiously and whispered something barely audible, words that didn’t need to be heard to be understood. Garth was there as well, and the Owl, drenched and sorry-looking, but unharmed. She saw most of their supplies stacked at the water’s edge, soaked through but salvaged. Eowen sat disheveled and worn beneath a tree where Dal was looking after her.
“Faun!” she called, and immediately heard a chittering. She looked out across the Rowen and saw the Tree Squeak clinging to a bit of wood several dozen yards away. She charged back out into the water until she was almost up to her neck, and then her furry companion abandoned its float and swam quickly to reach her, scrambling up on her shoulder as she hauled it to shore. “There, there, little one, you’re safe as well now, aren’t you?”
A moment later Triss stumbled ashore, one side of his sun-browned face scraped raw, his clothing torn and bloodied. He sat long enough for the Owl to check him over, then rose to walk back down to the river with the others. Standing together, they looked out over the empty water.
There was no sign of either Cort or Stresa.
“I didn’t see the Scat after the serpent struck the raft that last time,” Gavilan said quietly, almost apologetically. “I’m sorry, Wren. I really am.”
She nodded without answering, unable to speak, the pain too great. She stood rigid and expressionless as she continued to search futilely for the Splinterscat.
Twice now I’ve left him, she was thinking.
Triss reached down to tighten the stays on the sword he had picked up from the supplies they had salvaged. “Cort went down with the serpent. I don’t think he was able to get free.”
Wren barely heard him, her thoughts dark and brooding. I should have looked for him when the raft sank. I should have tried to help.
But she knew, even as she thought it, that there was nothing she could have done.
“We have to go on,” the Owl said quietly. “We can’t stay here.”
As if to emphasize his words, Killeshan rumbled in the distance, and the haze swirled sluggishly in response. They hesitated a moment longer, bunched close at the riverbank, water dripping from their clothing, silent and unmoving. Then slowly, one after another, they turned away. After picking up the backpacks and supplies and checking to be certain that their weapons were in place, they stalked off into the trees.
Behind them, the Rowen stretched away like a silver-gray shroud.
XVI
The company had gone less than a hundred yards from the Rowen’s edge when the trees ended and the nightmare began. A huge swamp opened before them, a collection of bogs thick with sawgrass and weeds and laced through with sparse stretches of old-growth acacia and cedar whose branches had grown tight about one another in what appeared to be a last, desperate effort to keep from being pulled down into the mud. Many were already half fallen, their root systems eroded, their massive trunks bent over like stricken giants. Through the tangle of dying trees and stunted scrub, the swamp spread away as far as the eye could see, a vast and fin-penetrable mire shrouded in haze and silence.
The Owl brought them to an uncertain halt, and they stood staring doubtfully in all directions, searching for even the barest hint of a pathway. But there was nothing to be found. The swamp was a clouded, forbidding maze.
“Eden’s Murk,” the Owl said tonelessly.
The choices available to the company were limited. They could retrace their steps to the Rowen and follow the river upstream or down until a better route showed itself, or they could press on through the swamp. In either case, they would eventually have to scale the Blackledge because they had come too far downstream to regain the valley and the passes that would let them make an easy descent. There was not enough time left them to try going all the way back; the demons would be everywhere by now. The Owl worried that they might already be searching along the river. He advised pressing ahead. The journey would be treacherous, but the demons would not be so quick to look for them here. A day, two at the most, and they should reach the mountains.
After a brief discussion, the remainder of the company a
greed. None of them, with the exception of Wren and Garth, had been outside the city in almost ten years—and the Rover girl and her protector had passed through the country only once and knew little of how to survive its dangers. The Owl had lived out there for years. No one was prepared to second-guess him.
They began the trek through Eden’s Murk. The Owl led, followed by Triss, Ellenroh, Eowen, Gavilan, Wren, Garth, and Dal. They proceeded in single file, strung out behind Aurin Striate as he worked to find a line of solid footing through the mire. He was successful most of the time, for there were still stretches where the swamp hadn’t closed over completely. But there were times as well when they were forced to step down into the oily water and mud, easing along patches of tall grass and scrub, clutching with their hands to keep from losing their footing, feeling the muck suck eagerly in an effort to draw them in. They traveled slowly, cautiously through the gloom, warned by the Owl to stay close to the person ahead, peering worriedly into the haze whenever the water bubbled and the mud belched.
Eden’s Murk, despite the pall of silence that hung over it, was a haven for any number of living things. Most were never seen and only barely heard. Winged creatures flew like shadows through the brume, silent in their passage, swift and furtive. Insects buzzed annoyingly, some iridescent and as large as a child’s hand. Things that might have been rats or shrews skittered about the remaining trees, climbing catlike from view an instant after they were spied. There were other creatures out there as well, some of them massive. They splashed and growled in the stillness, hidden by the gloom, hunters that prowled the deeper waters. No one ever saw them, but it was never for lack of keeping watch.
The day wore on, a slow, agonizing crawl toward darkness. The company stopped once to eat, huddled together on a trunk that was half drowned by the swamp, backs to one another as their eyes swept the screen of vog. The air turned hot and cold by turns, as if Eden’s Murk had been built of separate chambers and there were invisible walls all about. The swamp water, like the air, could be chilly or tepid, deep in some spots and shallow in others, a mix of colors and smells, none of which were pleasant, all of which pulled and dragged at the life above. Now and again the earth would shudder, a reminder that somewhere behind them Killeshan continued to threaten, gases and heat building within its core, lava spurting from its mouth to run burning down the mountainside. Wren pictured it as she slogged along with the others—the air choked with vog, the land a carpet of fire, everything enveloped by gathering layers of steam and ash. Already the Keel would be gone. What of the demons? she wondered. Would they have fled as well, or were they too mindless to fear even the lava? If they had fled, where would they have gone?
But she knew the answer to that last question. There was only one place for any of them to go.
They will be driven from their siege back across the Rowen, Garth signed grimly when she asked for his opinion. They walked together momentarily across a rare stretch of earth where the swamp was still held more than an arm’s length at bay. They will start back toward the cliffs, just as we have done. If we are too slow, they will be all about us before we can get clear.
Perhaps they won’t come this far downriver, she suggested hopefully, fingers flicking out the signs. They may keep to the valley because it is easier.
Garth didn’t bother to respond. He didn’t have to. She knew as well as he did that if the demons kept to the valley in their descent of the Blackledge, they would reach the lower parts of the island quicker than the company and be waiting on the beaches.
She thought often of Stresa, trying to remember when she had last seen the Splinterscat after the serpent’s attack, trying to recall something that would give her even the faintest hope that he had escaped. But she could think of nothing. One moment he had been there, crouched amid the baggage, and the next he was gone along with everything else. She grieved silently for him, unable to help herself, more attached to him than she should have been, than she should have allowed herself to become. She clutched Faun tightly and wondered at herself, feeling oddly drawn away from who and what she had once been, a stranger to everything, no longer so self-assured by her training, so confident in her skills, so certain that she was a Rover first and always and that nothing else mattered.
More often than she cared to admit, her fingers stole beneath her tunic to find the Elfstones. Eden’s Murk was immense and implacable, and it threatened to erode her courage and her strength. The Elfstones reassured her; the Elven magic was power. She hated herself for feeling so, for needing to rely on them. A single day out of Arborlon, and already she had begun to despair. And she was not alone. She could see the uneasiness in all of their eyes, even Garth’s. Morrowindl did something to you that transcended reason, that buried rational thought in a mountain of fear and doubt. It was in the air, in the earth, in the life about them, a kind of madness that whispered insidious warnings and stole life with casual disregard. She again tried to picture the island as it had once been and again failed to do so. She could not see past what it was, what it had become.
What the Elves and their magic had made it.
And she thought once more of the secrets they were hiding—Ellenroh, the Owl, Gavilan, all of them. Stresa had known. Stresa would have told her. Now it would have to be someone else.
She touched Eowen on the shoulder at one point and asked in a whisper, “Are you able to see anything of what is to happen to us? Do you have use of the sight?”
But the pale, emerald-eyed woman only smiled sadly and replied, “No, Wren, the sight is clouded by the magic that runs through the core of the island. Arborlon gave me shelter to see. Here there is only madness. Perhaps if I am able to get beyond the cliffs to where the sun’s light and the sea’s smell reach . . .” She trailed off.
Then darkness descended in a slow setting of gray veils, one after another, that gradually screened away the light. They had been walking since midmorning and still there was no sign of Blackledge, no hint of the swamp’s end. The Owl began to look for a place where they could spend the night, cautioning them to be especially careful now as shadows dappled the land and played tricks with their eyes. The day’s silence gradually gave way to a rising tide of night sounds, a mix rough-edged and sharp, rising out of the darker patches to echo through the gloom. Bits and pieces of foliage began to glow with a silver phosphorescence, and flying insects glimmered and faded as they skipped across the mire.
Aurin Striate’s lank form knifed steadily ahead, bent against the encroaching dart. Wren saw Ellenroh slip past Triss momentarily, leaning forward to say something to the Owl. The company was crossing a stretch of weeds grown waist high, and the fading light glimmered dully off the surface of the swamp to their left.
Abruptly the water geysered as something huge surfaced to snare unsuspecting prey, jaws closing with a snap as it sank again from sight. Everyone jumped, and for an instant all were distracted. Wren saw the Owl turn halfway back, warning with his hands. She saw something else, something half hidden in the gloom ahead. There was a flicker of movement.
A second later, she heard a familiar hissing sound.
Garth couldn’t have heard it, of course, yet something warned him of the danger, and he launched himself atop Wren and Eowen both and threw them to the ground. Behind them, Dal dropped instinctively. Ahead, the Owl wrapped himself about Ellenroh Elessedil, shoving her back into Triss and Gavilan. There was a ripping, thrusting sound as a hail of needles sliced through the grasses and leaves. Wren heard a surprised grunt. Then they were all flat upon the earth, deep in the grasses, breathing heavily in the sudden stillness.
A Darter!
The name scraped like rough bark on bare skin as she screamed it in her mind. She remembered how close one had come to killing her on the way in. Garth’s arm loosened about her waist, and she signed quickly to him as the hard, bearded face pushed up next to her own.
Ahead, she heard her grandmother sob.
Frantic now, forgetting everything else, she scr
ambled forward through the tall grass, the others crawling hurriedly after her. She passed Gavilan, who was still trying to figure out what was going on, and caught up with Triss as the Captain of the Home Guard reached the queen.
Ellenroh was half lying, half bent over the Owl, cradling him in the crook of one arm as she wiped his sweating face. The Owl’s scarecrow frame looked as if all the sticks had been removed and nothing remained but the clothing that draped them. His eyes were open and staring, and his mouth worked desperately to swallow.
Dozens of the Darter’s poisonous needles stood out from his body. He had taken the full brunt of the plant’s attack.
“Aurin,” the queen whispered, and his eyes swung urgently to find her. “It’s all right. We’re all here.”
Her own eyes lifted to meet Wren’s, and they stared at each other in helpless disbelief.
“Owl.” Wren spoke softly, her hand reaching out to touch his face.
Aurin Striate’s breath quickened sharply. “I can’t . . . feel a thing,” he gasped.
Then his breathing stopped altogether, and he was dead.
Wren didn’t sleep at all that night. She wasn’t sure any of them did, but she kept apart from the others so she had no real way of knowing. She sat alone with Faun curled in her lap at the base of a shaggy cedar, its trunk overgrown with moss and vines, and stared out into the swamp. They were less than a hundred yards from where the attack had occurred, huddled down against the vog and the night, encircled by the sounds of things they could not see, too devastated by what had happened to worry about going farther until morning.
She kept seeing the Owl’s face as he lay dying.