by Kari Cordis
Dorian nodded in acknowledgement and strode out of the clearing, leading off into another unknown day. Only Kai followed her, though…everyone else paused, trapped by curiosity as the little blonde continued to stand there. She only had eyes for Ari, for her part, shooting him a smile like pure sunshine. Her eyes were all blue and green and gold, like summer sky and spring grass and sunshine all mixed together. And full of laughter.
“I’m Jordan,” she said conspiratorially. “You probably don’t remember me…but we’ll talk more later…” Ari stared at her, oblivious of the darts of envy from his friends, windows slamming open in his mind, memories flooding in. He did remember, suddenly, with that one look right into his eyes. He remembered playing tag, being tossed in the air, meals and bowing his head to pray, being tucked into bed at night…and laughter. Always, smiles and laughter. He sat there, stunned by the rush of images and feelings and afraid to move lest he lose that frolicking sense of happiness.
She slipped back into the woods. Most of the rest of the party, shooting him a last look, followed Dorian, and he was left sitting there, staring at the empty spot where she’d been.
He was vaguely aware he had a stupid grin on his face. “She used to tickle me,” he said faintly. Traive, the only one left in the clearing by now, nodded as if that was the most natural thing in the world to say.
“You’re a lucky man, Ari.”
That magical feeling didn’t last long. The forest around them grew steadily darker and danker and more dangerous. The trail lost all trace of packed dirt, becoming a variable thickness of mud, sometimes so deep and strong that the horses stumbled, anxiously yanking their hooves out of its sucking clasp as their momentum propelled them forward. Strange cries and calls had made them nervous already, and their riders grew more and more on edge the more the horses started and shied.
The big, grey trees had roots sticking up in knees now above ground, and dark, foul-smelling pools of water appeared on either side of the trail. The scraggly, soggy underbrush was thinning, and once it gave way completely for almost a hundred yards, revealing an endless series of dark trees and darker pools for as far as the eye could see. It was a haunting, grey-shrouded landscape, the color leeched out along with everything else normal about a forest. Midmorning, they all about jumped out of their skins when an enormous black heron lifted up out of the water right next to the trail, winging his ghostly way through the gloom.
The day seemed interminable in the unchanging landscape, and there was no lessening or firming of the viscous, foul-smelling mud. It grew increasingly more pervasive, until it seemed a minor miracle to find a spot of solid ground big enough to camp that night. Dorian, who’d been the only Whiteblade they’d seen since that morning, led them unerringly to it. And in the center of the precious raised hump of dry earth, tending a blessedly cheerful campfire, was Adama.
“The Whiteblade from Merrani,” Loren said in surprise.
“Oratrix,” Dorian said formally as they walked up, and the girl rose, crossing to greet her. She was just as Ari remembered. Tight coppery curls, face freckled, eyes full of light and mischief. Not wanting to miss anything, he dismounted hurriedly, and found everyone else crowding in close with apparently the same idea.
They were speaking quietly, but the travelers caught Adama’s comment at the end.
“But it won’t matter,” she was saying in her strong voice. “If we succeed, it will be irrelevant, and if we don’t…well, there’ll be a lot more loose ends than just a Coffer of Souls out there floating around.” Dorian nodded slowly and Adama’s gaze left her face to sweep over the little crowd around them.
She glanced back at Dorian with the same look Vashti had given her. “All of them?” she asked in an undertone. She got a shrug for an answer. “They wanted to come.”
She turned back to them, pasting on a bright smile. “Well, dinner’s almost ready.”
It was the best they’d had since their fresh chicken almost a week ago, but no one paid it much mind. Adama sat with them for a few minutes, her conversation so much more engaging and playful than the austere flow of information presented by Dorian that they pushed aside the fatigue and vague sense of depression and pursued the exchange of information.
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this in Merrani?” Melkin asked her accusingly. He had not shown himself to be as charmed by her conversation as the boys. She spread her graceful hands.
“What shall I say, Wolfmaster? That you would not have believed me? That I should have told you that you had to be in Cyrrh regardless of where the Statue was? That I should have said you must continue on a difficult and dangerous journey in which you hardly believe even with a reason?”
“So you manipulated us to get us here?” he said flatly.
“I told you the truth,” she shot back unhesitatingly. “That your answers lay in Cyrrh. Are you any happier for the knowing of them? Would you have pushed on as hard if you had known everything up front? The Paths of Il are not the paths of men. There were things you all had to go through before you got here, things that have changed you.” The twinkling amber eyes glanced briefly into Ari’s. “There is just no sense in crying about it now.”
“CRYING about it?! Crying?! We’ve faced untold dangers, hardship, ambush, deadly beasts, poisonous plants, obstuctionist kings, all in a desperate search for an object that didn’t exist and wasn’t important even if it did—sped along our path,” he almost spit it out, “by the machinations of a bunch of meddlesome, arrogant females that think they have the answers to everything under the sun—and you blame me for wanting to know what was going through your brainless skulls?” He was seething, eyes snapping, stew forgotten on his plate.
“You misunderstand,” she said placatingly. “I do not blame you for asking; it is your refusal to give up the subject that is so senseless. You will not admit that there are forces greater than your own will at work here.” She smiled pleasantly.
Melkin, whom the Northerners were afraid would have a seizure, he looked so apoplectic, fumed, “Would you rest as easy if it weren’t you and your twisted cohorts moving all the pieces around on this game board?!”
“My dear Wolfmaster,” she affected surprise. “You forget, I am a Follower. I have happily submitted to the Will of Il for centuries. Neither I nor my twisted cohorts are in charge of anything.” She looked at him wide-eyed and he, utterly disgusted, went wordlessly back to his dinner, shoving the stew in with such vengeance that Rodge whispered, “It’s already been killed.”
Cerise, unable to let this pass, said with her own air of innocence, “And just how old are you, exactly?”
Adama frowned, thinking. “Mmm. Fifty, carry the one,” she murmured, working at it for several seconds before finally announcing with a faint sense of accomplishment, “Nine hundred and eighty seven.”
“Don’t believe her,” Jordan called invisibly from the perimeter of the camp. “She always forgets that year imprisoned at Czagaroth.”
Adama snapped her fingers. “Nine eighty-eight,” she corrected.
There was a moment of pregnant silence, then Cerise asked with quiet scorn, “Do you really expect us to believe that? That you’re almost a thousand years old?”
Adama looked at her with huge, serious eyes, the reddish freckles seeming to dance over her pale skin in the flickering light.
“No.”
She slipped a wink at Traive. “If you cannot believe in gryphons or centaurs, I would hardly expect you to embrace the idea of divinely extended longevity.”
“’Dama,” Dorian said in firm warning.
Adama gazed at them, unrepentant. “How is steel sharpened if it is never challenged with a whetstone?” she asked, low and enigmatic. Melkin and Cerise both gave her notably hostile looks in return.
“A blade beaten on river rocks can lose its edge forever,” Dorian answered dryly. “Perhaps you should join the guard roster,” she added, in a voice that made it clear it was not a suggestion.
Melkin
stalked off to his blankets, which weren’t very far in their tiny camp, and soon everyone followed. And Ari, glancing around in excited disbelief as Dorian also rose, realized his chance may have come. He dashed after her as she headed out of their small area, running up to her and gushing out in a whisper, “Why did you take me from the Tarq and raise me like a Realmsman? Why didn’t you tell me I had Enemy blood?”
She turned to fix her glowing, calm eyes on him, unperturbed by all his intensity. “You were brought to us,” she answered quietly. “And you were far too young when you left us to understand such empty classifications.”
“Brought by whom?” he asked, wonderingly, hardly daring to believe he was at last discovering who he was.
“By Il,” her voice dropped, so that the words seemed to shiver through his breastbone.
He stared. Like, physically by Il? What did she mean? “That is why you made me Illian?”
In the dim, flickering gloom at the edge of the campfire’s light, he thought he saw one of her brows twitch. But her voice was quite prosaic when she answered, “Il is not a collar, Ari, that someone can put on you or take off. He is a God that is part of your soul—the best part. You can either ignore that and live a life of senseless, searching selfishness, or embrace it and know the utter freedom of redemption and love—”
“Uh, excuse me,” Rodge said ingratiatingly at their elbows. “I noticed you were still here, and I, uh, well I was wondering if you know about any plants for bug-bites. I’ve got this really nasty one, right here…”
He literally faded into the background. Ari had no idea what he was saying, he just knew that Dorian gave him one last, deep look out of her luminous eyes, and turned away.
He didn’t sleep any better that night. It had been a draining day—the Swamps seemed to suck energy out of you, but you didn’t wake up feeling particularly rested. Especially if you had a tortured and murky past you were trying to make some sort of sense of.
It got worse before it got better. The trail virtually disappeared under a thin layer of water the next day, and mist lay heavily, obscuring vision for more than a couple of yards. A few lanky, mud-spattered ferns uninterested in photosynthesis were all that was left of the underbrush, growing limply in spots here and there around the base of knobby trees. Tattered vines and great sweeps of a blackish, gauzy plant draped almost everything in sight. A tangled net of the stuff disgorged a whole shrilling mass of bats early in the day and Cerise screamed, the echoes fading hauntingly off into the grey distance.
How Dorian knew where the path was—if there was one—Ari didn’t know, but they’d only been on the trail a few hours when she turned to face them, saying soberly, “You’d better clean off the horses. There isn’t much grass here for them to begin with, and those leeches will just draw more energy out of them.”
Glancing down at the horses’ feet, the party saw their pasterns and fetlocks were covered with black globs. There was more than one exclamation of revulsion as everyone rushed to dismount and get the things off. Traive’s white mare was grey with mud, and Tekkara’s flashy white stockings were filthy, but they looked even worse with blood dribbling down onto their hooves after the leeches were removed.
They continued on.
They had to repeat the process every couple of hours, whenever they came to a spot of higher ground, and they had just remounted and headed off again when suddenly Kai plunged in almost to his waist ahead of them. You would have thought from his face that he’d simply walked into the next room. Calmly, searching for firm ground as he came out, he explored until he’d found a path that had him in water mid-calf.
Dorian nodded, striding onto the ridge he’d found, and they all moved reluctantly into line to follow. Most of them were across when the horses began to nicker nervously. Their heads began to toss and eyes to roll. Tekkara pranced fretfully in her temperamental way, side-stepping herself right into the deeper part of the pool.
“This is not the place to dally,” Dorian warned, coming back quickly.
Cerise, a look of disgust on her face, was trying expertly to coax the mare up out of the deeper water when suddenly the horse screamed, throwing her head frantically and lunging up the bank. The other horses were obviously frightened, too, and Ari felt cold fingers of dread creep around his collar.
“Look!” Rodge shouted, pointing deeper back into the pool, where the water was rippling madly. The ripples were heading right toward the two in deep water, and whatever was causing them was moving fast. Several people began to yell, urging Cerise out. Tekkara had pawed herself into an even deeper hole and Cerise was so low in the water now that her legs were covered to her knees, black, gooey water sloshing up into her lap. She had seen the ripples.
Then, the water parted here and there, revealing a water serpent the diameter of Ari’s leg, propelling itself through the pool so fast that Ari realized the two were never going to be able to get out before it reached them.
“Cerise!” Ari yelled, adding his desperate warning to everybody else’s, and Dorian’s voice cut sharply across the din in a freezing command, “Stay out of the deep water!” as he nudged his gelding instinctively toward the two trapped in the pool.
Cerise herself was screaming, white face turning in panic from the snake to her horse, then back to the oncoming monster. Tekkara, half-maddened with fright, could not get enough purchase in the slippery mud to get back up on the ridge of firmer ground. The whole pool for yards back into the trees was roiling now, whether because there was more than one snake or, terrifyingly, because this one was so big. A quick, frantic look showed segments of grey-green coils surfacing out of the water as far back in the gloom as the eyes could see, a seething mass of undulating, perpetual waves.
Suddenly, there were Whiteblades everywhere. Bows snapped and arrows sang so fast it seemed like the trees themselves were firing. The snake blossomed with arrows, the water turned reddish with blood from dozens of wounds…but it still sped on, not even slowing, bristling like a porcupine. Tekkara had lost her mind, whirling Cerise around in a circle as she plunged madly in an attempt to escape the horror hurtling towards her. Barely two yards from the mare, the snake’s triangular head erupted from the oily black water, big as Banion’s outstretched hand, mouth yawning open in a silent song of horror. There was a sick, lethal kind of beauty to it, that sleek-scaled face, the curved fangs almost a foot long, the slit pupil of its eye gleaming with a dead, intent light. Ari had time to study it at length, it as it made gratuitous entrances into his dreams for the next several nights.
Cerise, barely hanging on in the churning water, saw the open mouth and screamed with such terror that it pierced Ari’s heart to the quick. For years, whenever a woman screamed, the picture in front of him now blazed into his mind, the sound the essence of every unthinking fear of every diabolic happening of their journey.
It was the worst nightmare Ari had ever been awake for. And though it was happening at what seemed like the speed of light, time seemed to slow. So clearly that it might as well have already happened, they all could see the inevitable assault, that point when the water snake would reach either Cerise or the mare. Some of the Whiteblades had waded in, rushing toward it and still firing, but it was as if the serpent was propelled by evil itself, an invincible speed denying the laws of physics, unswerving and implacable. Kai, too, ignored Dorian’s warning and plunged back into the pool. He reached Tekkara just as the snake did. Momentarily protected from it by the mare’s pivoting body, he reached up and grabbed Cerise, paralyzed by her terror despite the hysterical screams. He yanked her off the mare just as the hideous thing rose up and struck—sinking the entire length of its fangs into the floundering neck of the mare.
Someone threw a beautifully aimed axe at that exposed head, biting deep into the snake’s body just behind it. Immediately, it gave a great spasm, releasing its hold and wallowing around in a tidal wave of slopping black water. It had happened so fast that waves almost engulfed Kai, who’d already been knock
ed aside by Tekkara and almost gone down. A dozen hands reached out to him, pulling him up the slippery bank, taking Cerise from off his shoulder.
Tekkara, within seconds, was strangely, utterly calm. She was abruptly motionless, the wildness completely gone from her, head beginning to droop despite the heaving waters and the thrashing coils of snake brushing up against her.
Cerise was lifted up to Banion’s saddle. She was sobbing uncontrollably, staring wide-eyed into space and shaking so badly she could hardly get a breath. They gathered worriedly around her, trying to soothe, but she seemed beyond them, her terror so real and raw that Ari felt his eyes water.
“We must move,” Dorian said, her voice carrying clearly over the other sounds. Melkin whirled on her, glaring furiously, and Ari quickly interfered, pleading, “Can we give her just a few minutes? She can’t even ride like this.”
“There are many more predators than prey in the Swamps, and they will not waste opportunity. Do you want to be around when the things that eat that come to feast?” she answered gravely.
Ari looked out at the pool. The serpent had stilled, its body wound over and around itself in such a tangled mass of coils as it floated on the surface that it must have been endless yards stretched out. He gulped. As he watched, Tekkara, very peaceful, sank down to her knees in the water, her muzzle disappearing beneath the surface, her eyes gazing blank and calm at nothing.
“She’s already dead,” Dorian said gently, following his gaze.
“And so was Cerise almost,” Melkin spat, splashing over to her. “Is this the price you’re willing to pay to save a few extra days? Is it worth this?” He flung his hand out at the scene.
She looked him steadily in the eye, articulating clearly and firmly, “You are not under my authority.” She turned and walked away, pausing to look back and add, “You have chosen this trail; know that on it, we do not have the luxury of regrets.”
Melkin, breathing hard, spun on his heel and crossed back to his ugly blue roan, flinging himself up on its back. They moved out, Cerise cradled protectively in huge Merranic arms.