by Unknown
Rhyn knelt by the hands. Shreds of muscle and skin, dried and withered, still clung to the bones. These had been stripped, he saw, and knife marks in the bone showed precision and ritual. He stood again and took a better grip on the hilt of his sword. Slowly, carefully, Rhyn followed the path around a copse of thin young trees.
A small hut squatted atop the hillock, draped with vines and caked with white clay. Standing before the hut, waiting for him, was a woman.
Her skirts hung heavy with streaks of mud and moss, dragging on the marshy ground. Over her shoulders she wore a short cape covered with the feathers of a dozen swamp birds, all gray and dreary. She held a staff in one hand. A curtain of knotted hair covered her face.
Rhyn stopped and angled his sword defensively across his body.
“So you’re the one. Setting your pet on innocent travelers? Stealing their hands? I suppose you summoned that creature in the fen. What for?”
The witch lifted a hand and pushed her hair back from her face. Rhyn did not move, did not speak. The lantern light, the insect hum, the whisper of wind on the waters behind him—all dimmed, leaving him momentarily in a world of black.
Then his voice returned, hoarse and small, enough to gasp, “Cara?”
“It’s good to see you again.” Her voice was just as he remembered, low and soft with a hint of the northern drawl common in Nirmathas. “I’ve been dreaming of you.”
“How did you survive?” His voice came out strained, aghast. “After the storm let up we took boats out. We searched for hours. Two more trees came down on us. I kept going back.” His throat closed up and he had to force the words out. “I went back every day.”
“The swamp witch saved me,” Cara said. “She brought the storm and then plucked me out of the water. She was very old, and it took most of her strength to conjure a storm so large.” She let one eyelid droop, a grotesque wink on her drawn, mud-streaked face. “She used the rest of it training me. Now I live here, carrying on her work.”
“Why didn’t you come back?” The claw marks in his chest pulsed with pain.
“My mistress taught me that the swamp is our true home. Others, like you—” She waved a hand and took a step forward, and Rhyn shrank back. “—you preach the Green Faith, but you don’t understand the swamp. Life stirs in the dark and you hide from it and shine lights from your windows.” Cara lowered her hand. Her face shone with a fevered sweat. “This is the true faith. Reverence for the life born from these waters. It is our duty to embrace it and protect it.”
“What did she do to you?” he whispered.
Cara’s eyes narrowed. “I sent the alligator out to fetch you. You who have styled yourself protector of the town, that interloper in the wild. The swamp cannot be tamed. It cannot be civilized. Abandon it. My mistress spent her life researching a way to bring a true guardian forth, a new type of creature born of the swamp and dedicated to preserving it.”
“I saw it. I killed it.”
“What you killed was a failure. It was weak and small compared to the potential of a true guardian. But now—now I know where I went wrong. I can summon it anew, properly.”
“You need more hands for that, I guess. That’s what they were for, right? This ritual?”
“In a way. They served as a foundation, a base of power from which to conduct my trials. Now the ritual is much simpler. If you helped me…” She gazed into his eyes. “You could join me. Drive the others off. Let the swamp claim their buildings. Live in harmony with all that exists here in the dark.”
“If you knew me at all, you’d know better than to ask me that.”
She shrugged, a slight motion, but one filled with danger as she lifted her staff just off the ground. “Then you may assist me in death.”
Rhyn only got a step forward before the ground erupted with writhing tentacles of vine. They lashed around his calves, almost toppling him. He grunted a curse and tried to wrench his feet free. Cara laughed and chanted strange, sibilant words as Rhyn hacked at the vines with his blade, stumbling sideways as they loosened.
Cara’s chant reached a fever pitch. The ground shuddered and then erupted beneath Rhyn in a torrent of crawling insects. They scrambled and undulated as they clawed up his boots. Rhyn gave a repulsed cry and lurched forward, shaking his legs in an effort to dislodge the swarm. As he moved he hurled the lantern, half by instinct, toward Cara. He heard the shutters rattle and Cara cried out, her chant stuttering into silence.
He raced to close the distance between them, sweeping his sword down. The mud streaked on Cara’s skin and clothes hardened into bark, and Rhyn’s blade sliced down through wood, not flesh. He flinched from the shower of splinters.
The swarm of insects followed, and Cara scrambled back from them. Rhyn tackled her and they slammed into the mud together. He scraped painfully over a root as he slid forward. Cara scrambled for purchase in the mud, trying to rise, and Rhyn grabbed at her ankle as the insects flowed over them. She fell, kicking, and caught him in the jaw with one foot. They rolled apart, crushing bugs into the muck. Their tiny bodies sank back into the ground as the swarm dissipated.
Rhyn slid his hands through the muck, looking for his sword. Nothing but silky mud met his desperate grasp. Cara snatched up her staff and slammed it into Rhyn’s side with a triumphant yell. He rolled with the blow and abandoned the hunt for the sword, hauling himself up to his feet instead.
A cold wind rushed across the hillock, bending the trees and whipping Cara’s hair against her face. She raised her hands above her head, her fingertips glowing a sickly yellow. Her words were garbled, a shriek of some sibilant language and snatches of prayers to her twisted faith, reverence of scales and swamps and darkness. Rhyn charged, slick fingers finding the hilt of the fillet knife in his belt. Cara brought her hands down on Rhyn’s shoulders just as he drove his blade into her gut.
They stood locked together for an instant. The yellow light sank into Rhyn’s skin and nausea rolled through him. He broke out in a cold sweat, and that roaring laughter echoed once more in his ears. Then he steadied himself and shook off his fear, though he still felt weak and sickened. Cara hung on his knife like a fish on a hook. She had cupped his chin in her hands, and her sharp nails had torn the skin so that his blood dripped down her fingers.
He let her slide to the ground. She gasped and curled her hands convulsively over her chest.
“I’m sorry I stepped on your feet,” he said.
“It’s alright.” Her eyes closed. “Leave me in the swamp.”
Then she died. Rhyn knelt by her body for several minutes, dizzy, shattered. He stood and wiped clumsily at his face.
He kicked down the hut and tossed his lantern atop it. It took time to catch fire and burned slowly, with a green flame from the wet wood and vines. He sheathed his sword and knife and picked up Cara’s body.
A few steps past the shore he paused, knee-high in the swamp. His dim reflection twisted in the ripples, shadowed by the distant fire behind him and the moon above. Cara’s hair trailed in the water. He bent his knees and eased her into the murk.
A few drops of blood fell from the scratches on his face, mixing with Cara’s as her body sank. The wounds in his chest flared with sharp pain. Rhyn doubled over. His gut churned, and the terrible weakness swept through him once more. He tried to stand but his knees gave out, plunging him into the water.
He flailed his arms, struggling to find something solid with which to pull himself up. The pain in his chest spread to his limbs, suffusing his body with unbearable pain. He screamed and choked as swamp water washed into his mouth. His fingers grasped something—Cara’s hair. The tangled strands bobbed and twisted away from him as he floundered.
All vision fled. In the blackness of his mind he saw an image, a snake splitting into three parts with a man’s head atop each branch. Cara’s voice whispered in his ear.
Now—now I know where I went wrong. I can summon it anew, properly. Now the ritual is much simpler.
More w
ater flooded his mouth and he inhaled, sputtering, but did not choke. The water flowed into his lungs like air. The swamp around him was brightening, coming into focus, as if lit from within. He lifted a hand to his face and saw pale, frog-belly skin and long black claws.
When he tried to scream again, all that emerged was a rasping growl, like the roar of an alligator.
∗ ∗ ∗
“I saw it!” A child ran up the pier, stumbling over his own feet in his haste. “It’s out there again! I saw it!”
Mart hustled over, one hand on the knife at his belt. He put his other hand on the child’s shoulder. “You sure?”
“Sure!” The child pointed into the darkness. “Out there!”
Mart stared for a time, but it was hard to see beyond the lantern-light. The ripples could be a skulking beast—or a leaping frog. The glow of yellow could be a baleful eye or an errant firefly, the hiss a sound of hunger from a gator-toothed maw or the movement of wind through branches.
“What is it?” the child whispered. “What does it want?”
Mart shook his head. “No way to know,” he said. “The things out there—they’re not like us.” He turned them back toward the warm light and safety of town. “Fear the scaled ones.”