Cursed Bones

chapter 28



Isabel woke, sitting bolt upright and nearly screaming, looking about frantically and finding herself on top of a little patch of high ground just a few dozen feet from the water. She was wrapped in her blanket and shivering. Hector was sitting nearby, looking totally exhausted. Scales was wound around the limb of a nearby tree.

“What happened?” Isabel asked.

“Leeches,” Hector said, holding up a jar with one of the vile little creatures floating in swamp water. “I pulled several off each of you after I got you on solid ground. I’m pretty sure they knocked you out.”

Horace and Ayela were still unconscious but breathing steadily.

“How long?” Isabel asked, hunger suddenly rumbling in her belly.

“At least a day,” Hector said. “The only thing I know for sure is that at least one night has passed.”

“Dear Maker,” Isabel said. “No wonder nothing makes it out of this place alive.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Hector said. “Fortunately, it’s been quiet as a tomb since you lost consciousness.”

Isabel tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a few moments.

“Looks like late afternoon,” she said. “Get some rest, you look exhausted.”

Hector nodded. “I haven’t slept since I pulled you out.”

“I’ll keep watch,” Isabel said, getting to her feet and shivering anew. Her clothes were soaked and stuck to her skin, sapping her warmth.

She spent a few minutes walking around the camp in circles to get her blood flowing. When the penetrating cold didn’t subside, she decided that, while a fire was probably out of the question, she could still make some warmth. After gathering a pile of rocks, she cast her light-lance spell but deliberately reduced its power so she could heat the stones without burning them into vapor. It took a few castings, but she succeeded in heating the stones to a dull glowing red, producing much-needed heat.

Horace and Ayela both woke some time later, each shivering uncontrollably, each waking in a state of near panic.

“Come, get warm,” Isabel said to them. They didn’t hesitate to huddle around the glowing stones, soaking in the heat and trying to calm their chattering teeth.

“What did this?” Ayela asked, inspecting a welt on her forearm.

Isabel handed her the jar with the leech.

“What a terrible little creature,” she said. “But its venom may prove useful, if I can figure out how to extract it.”

“I thought you might find it interesting,” Isabel said. “Needless to say, we’ll be avoiding the water from now on. I don’t know how much of this swamp is infested with those things and I don’t want to find out.”

“That’s going to slow us down even more,” Horace said.

“I know, but those things will stop us permanently,” Isabel said. “Besides, our pursuers are bound to have the same problem, and there are a lot more of them to move across the water, so I’m hoping it’ll take them that much longer.”

They camped there for the night, drying their clothes and resting. Again, the swamp was nearly silent, save for the ubiquitous dripping of condensed fog on tree leaves. The place was cold and eerie, lifeless and desolate as if the light and the dark had fought a great battle here long ago and the darkness had won, slowly sapping the will to live from everything shrouded by the oppressive fog.

Isabel woke irritable and agitated. She nursed her anger for a moment before getting up, when Azugorath slammed into her. Isabel gasped, clenching her teeth and focusing her will in opposition to the invader, railing against her with all of the fury she could muster … and that was her mistake.

As Isabel loosed her rage, Azugorath slipped into her mind and seized control. Isabel saw herself get up and quietly draw her sword, eyeing Hector while he slept. Ayela was sitting watch. She cocked her head and frowned at Isabel’s odd behavior.

“Isabel, what’s wrong?”

At that moment, she broke Azugorath’s hold over her and regained control, deliriously happy to be sovereign over her own body again, but terrified at the implications of what just happened. Ayela was looking at her curiously and Isabel realized her sword was still drawn. She sheathed it quietly.

“I thought I heard something,” she said, sitting next to Ayela and yawning, worry racing around in her mind.

“I’ve been hearing things since we got here,” Ayela said. “Worse, I keep having this dream about an old hag in the swamp, beckoning to me, and then I wake up but I can never get back to sleep.”

“I imagine this swamp plays tricks on anybody who’s fool enough, or desperate enough, to trespass here,” Isabel said.

The light of dawn was just beginning to filter through the mist, gradually lifting the total darkness of night in the gloaming swamp and transforming it into a uniform grey. Slyder showed her that they were still a fair distance from their destination. Given the difficulty of the terrain, probably several days away.

Even though they’d managed to completely dry their clothes during the prior evening, the chill of the fog seemed to cling to Isabel like a damp blanket. She was eager to get moving, more for the warmth of exertion than anything else.

They carefully picked their way through the swamp, a new respect for the deadliness of the water fortifying their patience on the many occasions when they encountered water and had to double back to find another way around. Fortunately, there was enough ground above water for them to make good progress during the morning.

About midday, Alexander appeared in their midst.

“How’re you holding up?” he asked Isabel. “This place looks pretty bad.”

“We’re still alive,” Isabel said, more irritably than she would have liked.

Alexander nodded. “The Regency stopped at the edge of the swamp and sent one soldier into the water. She waded out over her knees, then screamed and tried to get back to solid ground before she fell into the water and went under. The rest decided that you couldn’t be stupid enough to go into the gloaming swamp, so they split their force in two. They’re busy searching for you along the banks to the north and south.

“The Sin’Rath and Trajan’s soldiers are about a day behind and making good time on six rafts they cobbled together. Have you had any trouble?”

“Show him,” Isabel said to Ayela. She dutifully held up the jar containing the leech.

“These things almost killed us all,” Isabel said. “We went into the water and barely made it out alive. Cost us the better part of a day.”

“It looks like a common leech,” Alexander said, inspecting the slimy little creature.

“Trust me, it’s not,” Isabel said. “I’ve had leeches latch on to me before, these are different. I had four stick to me and was unconscious in under a minute—didn’t wake for almost a full day.”

Alexander looked around. “No wonder this place seems so devoid of life.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“I scouted ahead,” Alexander said. “It looks like you should be able to stay on land for about half the distance to the mountain, then the water gets deeper again.”

“Thanks,” Isabel said with an apologetic smile.

“I’ll look in on you whenever I get a chance,” Alexander said, vanishing into the mist.

They traveled a confusing path, avoiding water at every turn. A few times they were forced to cross small sections of standing water. In each case they felled trees to use as bridges rather than risk the water itself.

Late in the afternoon, Hector stopped and signaled for silence, pointing at a form in the mist. Isabel stepped up beside him, trying to figure out what she was looking at. Deciding that the intervening mist was playing with her eyes, she started forward again, as cautiously and as quietly as possible.

Atop a little knoll almost a hundred feet away, surrounded by water and cypress trees standing like sentinels around it, was the remnants of a tree like nothing she’d ever seen before. It must have been huge in its time with a trunk easily thirty feet in diameter, but now it was just a husk of its former glory. Several stout limbs grew out of it at odd angles, ending in splayed-out branches that almost resembled fingers. Five wide roots raised the stump off the ground by about six feet, creating a space underneath that might have made for an excellent camping spot.

Then an eye opened on the side of the trunk … then another and another.

“I don’t like this,” Ayela said.

One of the stout root limbs pulled free of the earth as the thing came alive. The bark split along one side, opening a giant maw four feet wide that ran vertically up the side of the tree. Another root came free, revealing a base of splayed-out roots that served as a foot.

“We should leave,” Hector said.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Isabel said.

With two legs free, the tree thrust up and toward them, pulling its other three legs from the ground. The creature stood, turning in the mist, stretching its limbs like it had been sleeping for a very long time. Isabel counted five eyes, seven arms, and three giant mouths. Then it roared. A kind of gibbering, gurgling cackle that shattered the calm of the swamp, filling the deathly still air with madness.

“Run!” Isabel yelled.

And run they did. The swamp creature shambled behind them, splashing through the water, closing the distance with alarming quickness. Isabel looked over her shoulder, trying to reconcile the thing chasing her with everything she understood about reality. It was as if nature herself had gone mad … and the insanity was gaining on Isabel.

With a thought, she sent Scales to entangle the creature’s legs. The giant snake obediently attacked, winding itself around several of the thing’s stout root limbs, hobbling it and slowing its pursuit.

The swamp thing stopped, grabbing the snake with several of its branch-like arms and jerking it away from its legs, then unceremoniously thrusting a section of the snake into one of its giant vertical maws, clamping down so hard that Scales was torn in half, both ends writhing about in pain and panic. Isabel felt the link to her pet sever as he died.

The creature stopped its chase and started eating the snake with all three mouths, stuffing huge sections of the dead reptile into each maw with almost frantic hunger, barely bothering to chew before taking another bite.

Isabel and her companions stopped, staring with macabre fascination as the thing devoured the giant snake in less than a minute. When it was finished, it looked around with its five eyes, each moving independently of the others, but sensing nothing in the immediate vicinity, it started digging into the muddy soil with its roots as, one by one, its eyes began to close.

Isabel motioned to move away quietly. They traveled in silence for over an hour before Hector stopped, shaking his head.

“What in the name of the Maker was that thing?”

“I don’t know,” Isabel said, “and I don’t really want to.”

“I’m with Isabel,” Ayela said. “That was literally something out of a nightmare.”

“I kind of feel bad for Scales,” Horace said.

“Me too,” Isabel said, “but I think he saved us.”

“I had the same thought,” Hector said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start in a fight with something like that.”

“Can we just get farther away from it, please?” Ayela said.

Horace pointed at her and nodded.

The ground got firmer and higher as they traveled through the afternoon. There were still plenty of pools of standing water but they became much easier to avoid. Near nightfall, they found a shelf of exposed stone that was big enough for them to make camp. Isabel used her light-lance to ignite a damp log and give them some much-needed warmth and light for the night.

She was sitting her watch in the middle of the night when Ayela came awake with a start. She looked around wildly before taking a deep breath and calming herself.

“Nightmare?” Isabel asked quietly.

“Sort of,” Ayela whispered. “An old woman came to me, here at this exact spot, and told me the path we must follow. She showed me the soldiers coming through the night and said we would only survive if we did as she instructed.”

“That sounds pretty specific,” Isabel said, sitting up a little straighter.

“I’ve seen this woman in my dreams before,” Ayela said, shivering.

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing, she was just standing at the edge of the swamp, beckoning for me to come to her.”

Isabel leaned forward. “Have you had this dream more than once?”

“Yes, several times since Phane came and killed my family. I try not to think about it.”

“Magic can be used to speak to people in their dreams,” Isabel said. “Maybe someone is calling to you.”

“But why?”

Isabel shrugged and shook her head.

Alexander appeared a moment later. “They’re coming,” he said, urgently. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier, I could have given you more warning.”

Isabel came instantly alert, not from what he said but from how desperate he seemed.

“How close?”

“Seven or eight hundred feet,” Alexander said. “You have to go … now.”

She and Ayela woke Hector and Horace and they were up and moving within a few minutes. Ayela gave Hector her jar filled with lichen to light the way, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Then Alexander transformed into a bobbling sphere of pure white light floating above them, providing just enough illumination to guide their steps but not enough to penetrate the mist more than a few dozen feet.

Ayela stopped dead in her tracks. “I know this place … from my dreams.”

They heard a muffled shout in the distance. The Sin’Rath and Trajan’s soldiers had found their campsite.

“Lead the way,” Isabel said, hoping she was making the right decision.

Alexander re-formed a few minutes later, the glowing sphere floating over his head.

“Where are you taking them, Ayela?” he asked.

“I’m not sure, I’m following instructions I received in a dream.”

He turned to Isabel. “We have no way of knowing who cast the dream-whisper. You could be walking right into a trap laid by the Sin’Rath.”

“I considered that,” Isabel said, “but they’re so close to catching us that I don’t think they’d bother.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, transforming back into a bobbling light.

“Me too,” Isabel said, motioning for Ayela to continue.

The Princess of Karth wound through the swamp with unsettling confidence, seeming to know the path as if she’d walked it a hundred times, avoiding water at every turn, even to the point of guiding them across a rope bridge strung between two trees. They would never have found it on their own—it was hung above the mist and accessible only by climbing a tree that had notches in the side, forming the rungs of a ladder.

The bridge was sturdy and well kept, spanning fifty feet between two stout cypress trees at a height of twenty feet from the ground and two or three feet over the mist. Isabel smiled up at the stars when she broke free of the mist and sighed with resignation when she had to descend back into the murky air.

Not long after, Ayela led them to the concealed mouth of a cave, which turned out to be a tunnel leading through solid stone. They followed it for several minutes, winding through the earth until it stopped abruptly at a stone wall. Ayela stopped, placing her hand on the wall in confusion … then the wall vanished, opening into a little clearing. Alexander’s light disappeared when they crossed the threshold, and the mist shrouding the swamp was completely gone, revealing a clear sky above.

An old woman approached, smiling thinly. She wore a tattered robe over her thin and frail frame. Her hair was long and grey, her nose resembled a beak, several strands of jet black hair grew from the prominent mole on her cheek, but her slate grey eyes were clear and filled with intelligence and purpose.

“Hello, Child,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you, though I did not expect you to bring friends.”

She stopped a few feet from Ayela and her crooked smiled warmed, then she turned to Isabel and the coldness in her eyes gave the lie to her smile. Isabel felt every hair stand on end as the woman casually blew a handful of powder into her face and blackness engulfed her.