– King Arconus
As he rode his horse through the forest, Gastious squeezed a fist with his left hand, as he had a dozen times that hour. It was an invisible mannerism, as he had no fist to squeeze. He still had the ability to send a signal to his hand to clench, and relax, clench, relax; but the signal got lost just below the elbow. Still, he was certain he could feel it moving. He imagined it was still alive, but lost in another world; Asmulak, perhaps, where the Bok go to await paradise, or Chantra, the Æhlman deathworld. He imagined his arm awaited him in one of those places, and there it lay, clenching and relaxing, obeying his signals. Sometimes it gave him comfort that he might one day be whole again. Sometimes it felt a bitter fantasy, as he looked down at the gnarled stump that hung from his shoulder.
The King’s Prime snorted at his riding companion, the little man with dark eyes. The man ignored him, as he had done since leaving the capital. Gastious stared at the strange creature, and was only now learning to do so without fear. He resented Argus for suggesting the Mikraino accompany him, but his King had insisted. Gastious supposed the little man might eventually be of some use. He snorted again and reached for his pack.
Before sending him on this mission, the King presented Gastious with a number of gifts, which he now carried in a kit on his back. A broadsword, an axe and a strange coiled wooden tool; all designed with a threaded nub at the base instead of a handle. These he could screw into the apparatus which fitted over his arm at the point where it had been severed. The apparatus was held in place with a leather harness that wove around his arm and then his torso. As he rode, he practised with his prosthetics, as his King had directed. He realised that once he had learned to use them, they would be great weapons. The sword would no longer be an extension of his arm. The sword would be his arm.
Gastious recognised the skill with which these weapons had been devised and created. The balance was perfect. The metal light and the harness secure. He also realised they must have taken quite some time to develop. Work had started on them long before he embarked on his mission to Anderath. Gastious had seen the admiration and pride in the King’s eyes as he presented Gastious with the gifts. Gastious had obeyed the King when asked to demonstrate his new invention, even though the wound had barely had two weeks to heal. He had tried not to wince as he swung the axe back and forth, smashing some selected bits of fruit laid out for the purpose, as blood dripped from his arm. Gastious understood his role. He was the King’s enforcer, his savage weapon. Now the King had fitted his most valuable tool with accessories. As a soldier might consult with a metallurgist on how to make chain-mail more impenetrable, or a mace more manoeuvrable, Arconus had consulted with the smith on how to make Gastious more deadly. Their solution had been to remove one of his arms, so that it could be replaced with a weapon of choice.
Gastious clenched his invisible fist and relaxed it again as he donned his harness. A month had passed, and the wound was no longer painful. The Bok healed quickly and the process had also been aided by some concoction cooked up by that warlock, Argus. He screwed in his broadsword and swung it lightly back and forth. Gastious reasoned that if the King wanted to improve his greatest weapon, then he was happy to oblige. He was to be fearsome, both to the King’s enemies and to his friends. Now Gastious was about to meet the King’s new friend and his own old enemy, Oktook, the leader of the Bok.
He could smell them now. He knew they were just around the bend by the river. He resented that stench. He knew people looked down on the Bok for their smell and their looks. Being half-human, he was able to understand it. Being half-Bok, he was unable to escape looking and smelling like a Bok. He was hated by both halves of his heritage because he represented the other. But now he represented the King. He swung the broadsword that was now his left arm, hacking away a thick branch that blocked his path. He could see Oktook and his entourage ahead. There were about forty of them, with only their leader on horseback. They looked on in curiosity and uneasiness as Gastious approached with his arm of flattened steel. Gastious could sense the fear he instilled in his half brethren, the beasts that had raped his mother.
As he and his Mikraino companion approached, he unscrewed the sword. He slid it into the scabbard strapped to the side of his horse, and pulled out his utility prosthetic, as the King called it. It was a finely carved and painted wooden apparatus, the length of a normal forearm, that seemed to twist elegantly into a claw-like appendage at the end. It was a beautiful piece of work, but quite unnerving to the unsuspecting eye.
He had done his part to intimidate the Bok as the King’s killing machine; now he must speak to them as the King’s ambassador. He dismounted, as did the leader of the Bok. He stretched out his real arm and put his hand on Oktook’s shoulder. Oktook did the same in the traditional Bok greeting.
“Oktook, thank you for meeting with me,” he said with as much conviction as he could.
“Gastious, I hope you are well. I heard of your trial. You have shown strength,” Oktook said with some admiration.
Gastious released his grip from Oktook’s shoulder. He would be professional, but there was no need to be friendly. “I am here to monitor your progress.”
Oktook was offended and irritated. “We have lived up to our bargain. Santaque is dead. We lost ten men attacking his camp. We lost five more in our village fighting those children and the Sha’grath.” Oktook looked at Gastious accusingly. “You never told me there would be a Sha’grath. But beyond what we had agreed upon, we chased them for days, and were almost upon them when your King diverted us to chase the Sha’grath. When you sent those two little creatures with their eyes of black, we still obeyed your King, and went to Endrin, knowing more of us would die. How much further do we have to go before your King will keep his promise?”
Gastious remained stern, but did not raise his voice. “You will receive your reward when your obligations are filled. You were diverted to kill Foster, and he is still alive. The young rebels must be caught, and Liam Foster must die. When this happens, your people will be freed of your duties, and protected by the King’s laws. Until then, you will follow my orders. The King has lost confidence in your ability to stop this Liam Foster ...”
“You demand the impossible,” Oktook interrupted. “You demand we stop the wind.” Oktook growled. Then he turned his back to the Mikraino.
Gastious smelled fear as Oktook continued, softer now, “And you know we don’t like to mix with magic.”
“You must overcome your superstition,” Gastious scolded.
Oktook tried to speak to Gastious so that the Mikraino could not hear, though the Mikraino did not seem to be listening. “Superstition? Tell me, Gastious, how those little men found the Sha’grath so quickly in Endrin?” Oktook asked and spat on the ground. Spitting on the ground was a Bok custom when speaking about magic, so as to avoid summoning any.
Gastious’s patience was waning. “You need not worry about magic, Oktook. As I was saying, the King does not trust you to capture Liam Foster, as you have already failed twice in that duty. He has instead ordered me to lead you in hunting the Talons of Freedom. We leave at dawn.”
XX
The swamp is a creature all its own. The life of the swamp is composed of the life within it. Some it nurtures; some it devours for sustenance.
– Fedora’s tales
“Help,” cried Rhoie, as loudly as he could. He fought back the panic and tried to breathe deeply and evenly. He was in one of the swamp’s sucking pits. He tried not to move. He knew movement had the certain effect of digging into the swamp bottom, hastening the descent into whatever hideous end the pits might lead. He could feel the cold swamp water against his ribs and the sucking mud up to his knees.
“It’s another pit!” screamed Dilano. “It’s got Rhoie.” He carefully threw a rope to his brother Talon. Rhoie reached for the rope, but it did not uncoil as hoped.
“I can’t reach,” he told them. He resisted the urge to lunge for the rope, and waited patiently as
Dilano gathered his rope for another try. The mud at the bottom of the swamp sucked at his feet, patiently it seemed, in tiny, intermittent gulps. The water was up to his chest now. Soon his face would go under. He cursed himself. He had wandered too far from the group. They were told to spread out as they trudged through the swamp, in hope that someone would always find a way through if others reached an impasse, which happened often, but Rhoie had found himself further from the group than he was supposed to be.
The swamp bottom took another gulp. His legs were now sunken up to his thighs in mud, and the water level was at his armpits. Another rope landed near him. This one was almost within reach. He tried to lean towards it, and the movement sucked Rhoie in another foot. He fought back hysteria. The water completely covered his mouth.
He breathed through his nose, and tried to remain calm.
‘Breathe. Breathe,’ he told himself. He knew he would sink under the water any moment and might have to hold his breath a long time. Then he felt the rope in his hand. He wrapped his wrist around it, ready for a hard pull. The action aroused another gulp from the pits, and his head was sucked under the water completely. The rope pulled, but only dragged him parallel to the surface. He felt himself being pulled free of the mud, however, and relief rushed over him. Dilano let the rope slacken so that Rhoie could rise above the surface. Rhoie sucked air greedily as his head emerged. He knew he would be going under again in a moment, as they pulled him sidelong towards them, until he was out of the mud.
He felt the yank on the rope again, but he was unprepared. The rope pulled him under again before he was ready, and the surprise made him loosen his grip. The rope burned his hand as it slid. He grabbed at it, but too late. Another mistake, and now he knew with cold certainty that it might cost him his life. His head popped above the surface again, and he could see the rope. He lunged for it. The action stirred the sucking pit to pull him in. He had already made a deep depression in the mud from his previous struggles, and it seemed as if the swamp remembered. It gulped at his legs, but now the gulps were deep and long. His rapid descent finally halted, but only when Rhoie had sunk in mud up to his armpits, his head totally under water. He reflexively pushed his arms desperately against the muddy bottom. Now his head was starting to submerge into the mud.
There was nothing he could do. Struggling would only hasten his descent. He doubted there was anything any of his brethren could do either. He was trapped in mud, and running out of breath. He cleared his mind. He could vaguely hear the muffled cries of his brothers. Moments passed, enough for Rhoie to wonder how long a man could live without air. A calm swept over him. He was bemused by his own feelings at his time of death. He was touched by the Talons’ screams. He realised they genuinely cared. Dying wasn’t so bad, he thought. Perhaps he would see Brandi soon. He said a silent prayer to Atai, the Goddess of Death. He introduced himself. He felt warm, and watched the stirring of the water above him. The ripples, plants and soil in the water seemed to briefly coalesce into the face of a beautiful woman, and then into Brandi.
The sucking pit gulped again. His nose was in the mud now. The end must be near. He was grateful for the Talons efforts, but he knew it was too late. He could still feel Brandi’s presence. He imagined she was coming to him and reaching out to kiss him.
~Æ~
Brandi focused.
She had been woken a few minutes earlier, and was immediately aware of Rhoie’s spirit approaching death. It felt as if another presence were shaking her shoulders awake. Atai. She could see the beautiful face of the Goddess who embodied a human’s concept of death, and then Rhoie’s presence was with her. He was suffocating. She pushed back her instinctive panic, and tried to think of what to do. She reached out for him. He must not fight. He must conserve his energy, relax. His brothers were his only hope, and the only thing she could do was to help him conserve whatever air he had left in his lungs. She embraced and soothed him. Through her contact, he became aware of the deathworld. She opened it up to him and through comforting him, found comfort herself. Death was nothing to fear. It was a beautiful place, and by living, by doing their part to make the living world better, they would improve Eternity. This realisation gave both of them strength.
~Æ~
“So, are we ready to go then?” someone asked.
Rhoie blinked his eyes, trying to focus.
“You’re okay, Rhoie. You told us you were okay.” It was Blade. “Don’t you remember? Look, it will take you some time to get your wits about you, but we have to keep moving. Can we count on you?”
Rhoie nodded. He shook his head to wake up. He groaned.
“You’re going to have a pretty bad headache for an hour or two,” Blade explained in a business-like tone, then his eyes softened uncharacteristically. “We thought we had lost you back there. Dilano threw a rope over that branch,” he said, pointing to it. “He tied it around himself and dove in after you. It took four us to pull you both out. You were down there so long, I thought we might lose both of you, but Dilano didn’t let go. When we finally pulled you out and laid you down, Dilano breathed air into your lungs, and you woke up, at least, for the most part. You were passed out from lack of oxygen. That always gives a headache. The best thing for it is to keep moving. Are you with us?”
“Yeah, of course I am,” Rhoie answered, more defensively than he intended.
“Good,” Blade said. “Let’s go. We should be pretty near the rendezvous point. The sooner we meet with Maurious, the sooner we dry out and get some food.”
Those words bucked Rhoie up considerably. He found he was seated on the root of a Foganta tree, clear of the swamp water, save for his feet. He hopped off the root and into the water. A moment of panic struck him as his feet sank into the swamp bottom, but only as far as he had become accustomed to before his encounter with the sucking pit. He took a tentative step forward, and did not sink too deep. He did not want to, but took a few more very deliberate steps forward.
He looked up to see Dilano in front of him. The young warrior wore a crooked, kindly smile. Rhoie nodded to him. It was all the gratitude he could muster for the time being. Dilano nodded back. “Just follow my path for a while. You’ve had your turn, and another, in the sucking pits.”
Dilano turned and sloshed off through the swamp water. Rhoie nodded gratefully, and followed behind.
Rhoie’s head throbbed, as Blade had promised. He felt disorientated, trying to reconcile his current surroundings with the strange place he had just come from at the bottom of the swamp. The water now seemed to be a portal. Down at the bottom was a terrifying world without air, waiting to close around him; but there was also a passageway into another world, a comforting place full of gods and lost loved ones. He felt somehow certain that Brandi was down there.
But there was work to do.
After an hour the drudgery of their trek had resumed its familiar monotony. They were covering less than a half league every hour. The swamp water was a steady depth, always somewhere between their knees and hips. It was too shallow to swim through, and it would be impossible to navigate any sort of boat through the dense foliage. Dominant among the thousands of species of plant life was the Bonrun, whose leaves were three times as big as a man and seemed to flow out of the water like giant green fountains, thirty-feet-high. Wispy yellow Scadme leaves hung from overhead. These leaves were thin and sharp enough to cut as deep as a sword, and sometimes they did. And the Foganta trees, with trunks as wide as a small house, burst from the swamp bottom and surged up, so high that their upper branches could not be seen.
Rhoie could barely make out the grey evening sky through the dense trees and thick swamp brush above. He focused on Dilano, and forced himself to follow. It had been a week’s journey to the swamp’s edge, and then another week through the swamp, sleeping awkwardly on low branches for a few hours each night. Now they were nearing their meeting point with Maurious. Blade had told him the swamp became even more treacherous deeper in. Maurious was to meet them befo
re they travelled into the heart of the quagmire, where the great underground river fed the swamp from beneath. The concentration of minerals in certain pockets provided nourishment for some extremely nasty plants that could kill a man by touch, and for creatures that were particularly ravenous. Rhoie just hoped he could keep his wits about him that much longer. They had already endured countless hours of torment by swarms of flying insects, some stinging, some merely agitating. Several times they had pulled men out of the sucking pits which seemed to be randomly strewn across the bottom of the swamp, and twice they had been attacked by crocodiles.
Many swamp crocodiles had been spotted during their journey. Only two had posed a threat, but the threat had been assessed long before the attack. In an organised, precise effort, the crocodile’s target would accept his role as bait, while the other Talons swept around swiftly to position themselves for the attack. Both crocodiles had been killed quickly, without injury to the group. The Talons hated to leave a dead animal behind. It was wasteful, but there was no way to salvage most of it. They did, however, take as much meat as they could from the tails. Apparently this was the tastiest portion of a crocodile, though Rhoie couldn’t imagine who might have studied the matter extensively enough to arrive at this conclusion. He chewed on some as he walked, trying to keep up his energy. It tasted like the swamp smelled; wet and stagnant; but his hunger helped him overcome his aversion, and after a few bites, he found it agreeable enough.
He chewed on a piece of skin, and found it too tough to get his teeth through. He gave up on it and spat it into the warm water flowing around his legs. Immediately it was devoured by a swarm of little black worm-like creatures.
“Everyone stop!” Rhoie called urgently.
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