The Magehound

by Elaine Cunningham

  “This way,” she guessed and darted in the direction of a waterfall that disappeared into the air, only to resume its fall a few dozen paces to the south.

  It proved to be a good choice. In moments they stood before a door—a real door, one that opened with a latch and led into the solid, staid reality of the villa beyond.

  As the door swung open, her mother’s amulet started to glow.

  Never had this happened before, and the fearsome novelty of it froze Tzigone’s feet to the floor. In the span of a heartbeat, the shining bit of electrum turned rosy with heat. Her mother let out a pained gasp and tore off the amulet, breaking the slender chain.

  Instantly the courtyard was alive with verdant magic. The questing vine, fragmented into an impossible maze, writhed and twisted like a titanic snake that had been many times severed, floundering violently about in its death throes.

  But apparently someone could make sense of the magical path. A shout came from beyond the villa’s walls, and a door crashed open. Footsteps thundered through the building toward them.

  Tzigone turned to dart back into the insane courtyard, plucking at her mother’s skirt to indicate her intent rather than risk speech and discovery. But the woman gently pried the small fingers loose.

  “Go,” she said quietly. “My magic is nearly gone. The amulet is broken. They will find me soon whether I run or stay.”

  “I won’t leave you,” Tzigone said stubbornly.

  “You must It is you they seek.”

  She only nodded. Somehow she’d always known that. But knowing was not the same as doing, and she couldn’t bear to leave.

  The footsteps came closer, and the heavy tread seemed to move the ground. Tzigone rocked back and forth, shaken violently by the terrifying approach. But she would not run. She had to see.

  “Tzigone! Come back!”

  It was not her mother’s voice, but still filled with fear and concern. Instinctively she turned toward it. With difficulty, her eyes focused on Matteo’s face.

  He was kneeling in front of her, grasping her shoulders and shaking her, and his face was drawn and pale.

  “I’m back,” she said faintly. “You can stop rearranging my spine any time now.”

  Matteo released her but didn’t move away. “What did you see?”

  She averted her eyes. “Did I say anything?”

  “Nothing I could make out. A word here and there. I did catch something about jasmine.”

  “I’ve always hated the bloody stuff. Now I remember why. I’m going back,” she said in a stronger voice.

  Matteo’s lips thinned. “Tzigone, that would be most unwise. There are many layers of memory, and what you are doing goes far beyond anything most jordaini could dream of achieving. I’ve seen two other people fall into a memory trance. It seemed more taxing than a footrace or an afternoon’s practice at arms. You should rest.”

  “I saw my mother!” she said. “I remembered the night we were separated. I escaped, but she didn’t. You brought me back before I could see who took her away. I have to know! It’s the only way I’ll ever find her.”

  Matteo hesitated, his eyes searching her face. “This is so important?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. You’ve never had any family but the jordaini. But I have to find her.”

  He nodded slowly, then rose and walked to a polished table. He took the cork from a full decanter of wine and poured a bit in a goblet. “Take a few moments to calm yourself. Then we will try again.”

  Tzigone took a single sip and placed the goblet aside. Once again she stilled her mind and sank deep into the dark, hidden depths.

  Suddenly an image leaped before her, more vivid than a dream.

  She was in a forest, one as lush and thick as a jungle. Never had she seen such trees. They struck her as watchful and somehow wise. Next to them, the bilboa trees of Halruaa seemed as lifeless as furniture. The trees were massive, big enough to hold small kingdoms of birds and beasts in their branches. Insects and flying creatures that were not insects filled the air with a soft hum, and tiny toads dressed in bright patterns of red and blue and green and black sunned themselves on the branches, not fearing the birds that flitted and called overhead.

  Suddenly the forest went still. Silence, immediate and absolute, hit her with the impact of an arrow to the heart. A piercing scream would have stunned her less. Tzigone jolted a second time as an invisible hand thrust into her mind and fisted itself around the threads that bound her to life, and to magic, and to this place.

  No, not her mind. Tzigone was seized with the sudden conviction that she was experiencing memories that belonged not to her, but to some unknown other. And the companion that crouched at her side was certainly no creature that she had ever seen. It was a four-legged bird with a curved, rending beak and eyes bright with an intelligence more alien than an elf’s. Its wings unfurled with a snap as it prepared to launch itself toward some unseen foe.

  Tzigone most emphatically did not want to see the source of this danger. She dragged herself back up through the darkness more brutally than Matteo had done. Panting for air, she opened her eyes and willed the memory—the memory, not her memory—back to whatever place forgotten nightmares fled.

  But the image remained, as visible to her eyes as it had been in her memory trance. The forest and the guardian beast were suspended in the center of the room like a ghostly vision. The color was almost as vivid as Tzigone had seen in her mind, but it was rapidly fading, and the image was growing more and more translucent. She could see through the memory, like looking through the arch of a low-lying rainbow, but it was no less fearsome for its seeming delicacy.

  Tzigone scrambled away from the terrible vision, crab-walking frantically until she bumped into the far wall. Matteo also retreated, but he circled the vision and studied the ghostly bird thoughtfully.

  Suddenly a vast clawed hand flashed in from nowhere. It slashed toward the avian guardian, a force too fast to evade and too powerful to stop. The bird exploded into a flurry of feathers and gore.

  And then the image was suddenly, mercifully gone.

  “What foul sorcery was that?” Matteo said softly, looking at Tzigone with the same horror that she had felt upon beholding the dream. Apparently he could bear the magic far more easily than he could stomach the magician.

  “It wasn’t mine,” she said desperately. “Not my magic, not even my memory.”

  “It couldn’t have been your memory. That much is true. That species of griffon has been extinct for nearly three hundred years. You couldn’t remember what you have never seen.

  “Or could you?” he said, his tone bleak but thoughtful. “A diviner can glimpse the future. I have never heard of a wizard who could look into the past, much less recall it in so vivid a fashion, but perhaps it could be done. But you are a wizard, Tzigone, no matter what tales you choose to tell.”

  For once Tzigone had no rejoinder. Too shaken to care about such fine distinctions, she bolted for the window. Before Matteo could say a word, she disappeared out into the night.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dawn was nothing but a fond hope when the small band of warriors waded into the Kilmaruu Swamp. Andris went first, wading through the knee-deep water and carefully testing a path for the men who moved silently behind him. There were forty of them, some jordaini, some commoners, some of foreign blood. According to the magehound, none of them knew Mystra’s touch.

  Each man carried a pack on his back fashioned from sharkskin, and another, smaller bag hung on each side of his belt. These were filled with rations, for Andris did not trust any food or water they might find in Kilmaruu. The bags also carried an odd assortment of weapons. No magic could be used in the swamp, but Andris knew of natural substances that in certain combinations produced nearly magical effects. Each man carried several small bottles, each firmly stoppered with cork and sealed with a thin film of wax.

  As he shifted his weight carefully to his next step, Andris tried not to th
ink too much about the source of this relatively firm footing. Many years ago a terrible war had raged in this place. Hundreds had died fighting in a battle that lasted through the three days and nights of the full moon. It was said that entire villages had been emptied by the battles. Two villages had been all but swallowed by the swamp, and their ruins provided a haven for the undead creatures that haunted the land. Even Kilmaruu’s quiet dead were very much in evidence. The bones of long-dead warriors provided a frame that held the silt and sand and kept Andris and his fighters from sinking into the muck.

  Mist rose from the water, swirling through the already thick fog. Andris watched closely for patterns. Many of their foes were creatures that could hide in the mist, blending in like dryads in a grove of trees. Ahead and to his left, a particularly thick land-bound cloud brooded over a sleeping heron. The jordain noticed that it didn’t touch either the bird or the water.

  Andris nodded to one of the forward scouts—Quon Lee, a small, slight man with hair the color of polished ebony and almond-shaped black eyes so sharp that they could perceive shadows almost before they were cast. Quon Lee was a conscript, stolen from his homeland by pirates. Kiva had paid his slave price so that he could join this endeavor.

  That was something else Andris tried not to ponder. True, the man stayed willingly enough, for he was eager to win his freedom. Kiva had promised that her magic could remove the ugly scar of the slave brand from Quon Lee’s forehead once the battle was over. Andris would have preferred to lead into battle men who chose to fight, not men who fought because they had no other choice.

  He watched as the scout broke away from the group and slipped down into the water, half swimming and half crawling toward the cloud, keeping his movements slow and fluid and doing his best to stay submerged.

  Andris nodded in silent approval. He wouldn’t have thought of this precaution, but he saw the wisdom of it at once. Quon Lee had been born and raised in haunted jungles far to the east. If a spirit guardian lurked within that cloud, it would be roused by the heat of a living body moving through the still morning air. But the water was as hot as blood, and it was full of darting creatures and unpredictable currents. The warm, restless water would mask the scout’s approach.

  The call of the heron, sudden and shrill, startled them all. Some of the men jumped, but all were too well trained to make any noise. The long-legged bird burst into awkward flight. It rose into the strange mist and immediately faltered, its wings locked into place as if frozen. Like a child’s wooden toy, the bird traced an awkward nose dive and crashed into the water. The impact seemed to revive it somewhat, and it began to flail about in a wild panic.

  Almost at once, the waters around the heron started to churn. In a heartbeat, a pool of deep red surrounded the bird. Frantic flashes of silver leaped and glittered in the bloody water.

  Andris abruptly motioned his men to a stop. The swamp teemed with schools of silvery, delicate fish, not much bigger than a man’s hand, that could strip the flesh from an ox more efficiently than a butcher. Andris didn’t have to remind the men to keep perfectly still until the frenzy abated and the fish swam off in search of other prey.

  One of the men lifted a hand to his heart to trace a sign of warding, a silent petition to some foreign god. Although Andris had been raised to believe that none but Mystra or Azuth were true deities worthy of veneration, he didn’t begrudge the man his devotions. Jordain were taught to respect the gods of magic, but from a distance. Still, Andris suspected that all the men were calling upon every god whose name they knew. A trip into Kilmaruu, Andris noted wryly, might even make a devout man of Matteo.

  He quickly thrust aside the thought of his friend and the pain that came from knowing he would likely never see Matteo again. In the eyes of his brothers, Andris was dead. Unless he kept his focus, that fiction might soon become truth. This was no time to think about what might come after Kilmaruu.

  Quon Lee glided smoothly back toward the group. He rose from the water, caught Andris’s eye, and gave him a single grim nod. The man’s lips were blue, and under the brown of his face lay a sickly pallor. Even in the water, even without touching the cloud itself, he had been chilled by the ghostly presence.

  Andris motioned the men away from the lurking mist. They moved cautiously through a narrow strip between two seas of reeds, into a lagoon shaded by leaning trees draped with moss and vines.

  Andris studied the shore, looking for a likely route among the thick and seemingly impassable tangle of underbrush. As he watched, a shrike dived in, its flight awkward due to the heavy weight it bore in its talons. A long, limp brown form hung from the small raptor’s grasp—a weasel, most likely. The shrike tossed its prey into the brush. It fell onto a wicked thorn, neatly impaled on a spike that was longer than Andris’s thumb.

  He studied the brush more closely and noted that the shrike had left several similar meals scattered among the bushes that lined the lagoon’s edge. The result looked grimly like a miniature butcher shop, and Andris quickly decided against attempting a land passage. Jungle shrikes chose only the most secure sites for their larders, places that could not easily be penetrated or despoiled. Better to risk the water than attempt passage through those rending thorns.

  Even as the thought formed, one of the scouts suddenly disappeared beneath the water. Andris stooped and plunged both hands into the dark water, groping about until he seized a handful of hair. He dragged the man up, unharmed and wearing an expression of chagrin. The scout pantomimed a ledge with a sudden, quick drop. They moved as close to the shore as they dared and kept to it, testing for ledges with each step.

  “Ledges,” Andris said softly, remembering what he had read of such formations. Ledges of submerged rock or roots offered ideal places for underwater storage. Some water monsters were known to drag their prey into the water, drown them, and leave them wedged under a rocky ledge until they had softened and aged. Ledges, he concluded grimly, were not a good omen.

  The crocodiles appeared so suddenly that Andris had the uncanny feeling he’d conjured them with a thought. One moment the lagoon was limpid silver, as still as a mirror beneath the rising mist. The next, a semicircle of reptilian eyes regarded the men with a cold, incurious stare, and over a dozen snouts pointed toward the scent of living meat.

  Andris nodded to Iago, his second-in-command. The thin man quickly pointed to six of the quickest fighters. Andris chose seven more. Each man took a coil of rope from his belt and tested the noose at the end. Then each man silently chose a partner. They moved in pairs, spreading out to face the approaching crocodiles.

  The fighters readied their nooses while their partners cupped their hands, as if to give their comrades a leg up onto a horse. When the crocodiles were near, the men tossed the chosen fighters up and over the approaching creatures. The men twisted nimbly in the air and came down to straddle the crocodiles’ backs.

  Instantly the water exploded into churning foam. Some of the crocodiles reared up, jaws snapping at the air, and then splashed down hard. The men riding them lunged forward at once, struggling to get the nooses around the fanged jaws.

  The crocodiles instinctively dived and went into furious spins, trying to dislodge the men or drown them. But the men had trained too well, and they knew their opponents. Once a crocodile clamped its jaws down, the strongest four men among them couldn’t wrench them open. But the muscles that opened these massive jaws were not strong at all. Holding the jaws shut and tying them required not massive strength but timing, dexterity, and nerves of tempered steel.

  In moments the crocodiles were muzzled and floundering about, tossing their heads and pawing at the ropes. The men struggled back to the ledge. They fell back into formation and quickly left the lagoon, fearing that the struggles of the helpless crocodiles might draw even worse creatures.

  They walked throughout the morning, sometimes splashing through water, sometimes walking on narrow strips of spongy land. The mist faded as the sun rose, but the air remained thick an
d damp. Insects, some of them larger than birds of prey, darted across the water or skimmed its surface. Once a giant wasplike creature dipped low over the water and flew off with a large eel, snapping and writhing in its grasp.

  Andris hadn’t expected the Kilmaruu to be so noisy. Birds called and shrieked and laughed in the trees overhead. An occasional snarl of a hunting cat echoed through the trees. Grunts and whuffles spoke of the great wild pigs that roamed the jungles, swifter and deadlier than wolves. Insects chirped among the ferns or whined around his head. Giant frogs groaned and burped, bull crocodiles roared. Monsters whose voices Andris had never heard added to the cacophony.

  Despite the noise that surrounded them, the men didn’t talk. They moved along in silence, marking the swamp’s every rustle and cry. Many of them kept their hands resting on their weapons. Their faces became increasingly drawn and tense, their muscles as tight and ready as a wound crossbow.

  Even so, they failed to see the giant dragonfly until it dropped among them, fast as a striking hawk. Barbed, sticky talons drove deep into the shoulders of Salvidio, the smallest man among them. Two pairs of iridescent blue wings beat furiously as the creature changed direction. The reeds along shore bent under the sudden onslaught of air, and the small man was jerked from the water before he could reach for a weapon or form a startled oath. The dragonfly darted off with its struggling prey, heading for the dark, deep waters to the west.

  For a moment the sheer size and speed of the creature stunned Andris into immobility. He quickly gathered himself and turned to Danthus, another jordain and the best archer among them. “Use a tethered arrow, and quickly!”

  Danthus snatched his bow from his shoulder and fitted to it a stout arrow. He took aim at the dragonfly and let fly. The bolt rose, trailing a length of rope. Five men darted to the archer’s side, each taking a two-handed grip on the rope’s end and bracing his feet wide for the coming jolt.