Riss held her breath as Geetsha passed through the colorful, fluttering curtain… but nothing happened. The strange multicolored fibers didn’t sink into her flesh, or twist around her threateningly, or any of the other split-second nightmare scenarios Riss’ mind had conjured. She moved to follow Geetsha through and took a deep breath.

When she breathed in deep, she smelled it: the unmistakable rank stench of decay. The same scent that had curdled her guts when they confronted that tree.

“I smell another one of those things,” she said for the others’ benefit. Then she hurried through, swishing the threads aside with a hand and shouldering her way through the brambles. Stray thorns trying to retake the trail dug into her armor, but she paid them no mind. Like hell was she going to leave her guide alone with one of those trees. Whoever Geetsha was, however much she could or could not be trusted, she was the one who knew the way out.

Riss stepped free of the brambles, then nearly lost her footing. The trail crumbled a little as the plateau dissolved into swamp once more, the ground mucky and wet. She spotted Geetsha near another firepit, more evidence in the lantern-lit dark that someone had once camped here. But why this spot? Back among the fetid standing water and the thorns? On the low ground? Though the thorns might have provided some cover, it was hardly a prime position…

Her lantern’s light caught a glitter of gold. A fan of threads like wool all strung through a loom, or strings of lanterns through the trees at a wedding. And at the foot of it all, the gnarled branches and trunk. A crawling tree and the remains of a lone human victim slumped against its base.

“Geetsha,” Riss whispered. “Help me understand. I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing.”

It looked like the shiny golden thread had erupted out of the man’s back.

“I believe it is rejecting something it ate,” said Geetsha. The words came out slow and flat, as if she were thinking aloud. Lacking her usual sense of cryptic omniscience, Geetsha too just stared. The moment suffused Riss with a sort of strange, tense relief: it was comforting to see their awkward, otherworldly guide expressing the same confusion and horror that she herself felt.

Behind Riss, the rest of their caravan arrived. She held up a fist, warding them back. She didn’t need to shush them; as soon as their eyes fell on the strange tableau strung through the tree’s branches, the mercenaries all fell into stunned silence.

Unlike the tree they’d engaged prior, this one appeared… shriveled somehow. Unhealthy. Its roots had curled in against themselves, tangled and dry, flaking bark in places. Several branches lay upon the muddy ground. Riss couldn’t tell if they’d been severed or if they’d fallen off.

Was it… dying? Or like Geetsha said, just suffering from indigestion?

As if it sensed her curiosity, the tree gave a little shudder. Riss’ hand flew to the hilt of her machete, an immediate reflex. But the tree didn’t move toward them. It just shook, like an animal ridding its coat of dust.

The man tangled through its roots let out a pained whimper. Riss froze.

“He’s alive,” Adal said from behind her, voice low with restrained horror.

“Must have been what Geetsha heard,” said Vosk.

But what, if anything, could they do about it? And even if they could help, should they? Riss squinted through the gloom. It was tough to make out anything through the roots and the dark, but the man didn’t appear to be wearing Adelheim’s colors.

“Does he look like one of yours?” she asked Vosk, swinging her lantern toward him.

Vosk studied the man, his mouth pursing. The man’s face was sunken and tight with dehydration, wrinkles edging his eyes and mouth. Despite that, Riss thought he looked young. His hair was long, not a military cut. She couldn’t see much of his physique, but the hair alone edged her away from assuming he was one of Tarn’s.

“He doesn’t look familiar,” Vosk said at length.

The tree gave another quiver, its dry and spindly branches shaking. The hundreds of filaments–mostly gold and deep red–shimmered with its movements.

“Does that mean we aren’t gonna lend a hand?” Torcha sounded dubious, unconvinced.

“Not necessarily.” Riss didn’t want this to turn into some sort of moral debate. She ran through possible scenarios: delays, potential injuries to her men, whether or not the man would just die anyhow. They didn’t have enough light to judge the severity of his injuries, or how… absorbed… he was.

“I could give him pain relief at least,” said Calay after a moment. “If I could get close enough.”

“It’s possible he knows something,” said Adal, ever her compass.

That part was hard to ignore. Whether the man was one of Tarn’s or not, he may have seen or heard things. The swamp didn’t exactly suffer from an excess of human through traffic.

“Adal, Torcha, Vosk, guns on the tree.” Riss crooked a finger to Calay, then took a few steps forward. The medic, light on his feet, crept behind her. “Gaz, keep the birds back. I don’t want them getting spooked.” She didn’t have to tell him twice.

Calay and Riss halved the distance between themselves and the tree, finding the ground drier and drier with each step forward. Was the tree merely lacking water? That seemed like such an impossibly simple ailment.

Closer up, the survivor’s status did not appear any better. In the flicker of her lamp, Riss could see the sunken shelves of his cheekbones, the way his eyes were low in their sockets. He resembled more than anything the mummified remains she’d once glimpsed in a funerary procession as a child. A trio of mountain climbers had disappeared while attempting to summit Santieze Peak. They hadn’t returned, and for five winter seasons their bodies were lost among the glaciers. When their remains were finally brought home, the entire town had celebrated. But Riss had been unable to tear her eyes from the too-wide grins, the peeling gums, the strange jerkylike texture of their flesh…

“It’s possible we could cut him free,” Calay said at her flank. “I don’t like it and I don’t want to do it, but it’s possible.”

At that moment, the man groaned lowly, as if he’d heard Calay’s words. Riss was wary of making too much noise, but the tree seemed sickened and dormant. She had gunners at her back. She weighed the risks, then gave a little whistle, attempting to catch the injured man’s attention.

“… Hello?”

Loth’s teeth, the man was conscious. Riss glanced at Calay sidelong.

She made her decision then and there: regardless of the risk, regardless of the delay it might cause, she would attempt to cut him free. If he’d been hovering unaware at death’s door, like that wheezing horse, she might have been able to walk on past. But if he was alert? If he could feel what was happening to him? If he had heard a potential rescue walk by without stopping…?

Years of hunting living things with her father had hardened Riss. So too had the Inland Army thickened her calluses. But there were some things she simply couldn’t allow.

<< Chapter 19 | Chapter 21 >>

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“Someone’s alive out here.”

Geetsha’s words fell on a silent crowd. They all stood there in the clearing, surrounding her in a half-circle, exchanging quiet looks between one another. No one was sure exactly what to say. Adal didn’t hear a thing. He looked to the moa. They stood with rigid back and necks, eyes alert and surveying the foliage beyond the clearing. But they’d been acting agitated since the gunfire, hadn’t they?

“You said someone, not something,” Torcha said, pointing out the obvious. “Does that mean a survivor?”

“Well we found a horse,” said Riss. “Horses need riders.”

That much was true. Adal squinted past the edge of the torchlight, toward where the clearing continued. The last traces of twilight were fast fading from the sky. Something tugged at his subconscious, a shape barely registered in the murk. He narrowed his eyes yet further, but the shapes refused to resolve.

“I’m going to take a look further across the plateau,” he said to the others. “I think I see something.”

And it wasn’t a something that got his hackles up. Only a few paces away from the others, he saw it: a metallic glint upon the ground. Half-buried in dirt, something man-made. He jogged the last few steps regardless of his exhaustion, powered forward by intrigue. He dug his toe into the earth, kicking soil aside, and crouched down.

A belt buckle. Still attached to a torn shred of leather that had yet to rot. Whoever had left it, they hadn’t left it long ago.

“I’ve found a buckle!” He flipped it over to Riss when she arrived at his side. “Geetsha’s right. There’s someone out here.”

Riss gave their wispy, white-haired guide another of those sideways looks. She was so obvious with her distrust. Again, Adal tamped down the urge to tell her to at least be subtle about it. But Geetsha didn’t seem to notice.

“There’s a trail down the other side of this plateau,” she said, her voice a contemplative whisper. “Perhaps someone fled up it. Or down it.”

They combed the clearing and found further evidence. It was laughably obvious once they put their torches to ground and covered a bit more area. Had they walked into the clearing at full daylight, Adal imagined they would have spotted the signs immediately: a few discarded torches, scattered piles of ash. A copse of normal trees–he hated that he had to qualify that–which had been partially felled for firewood. And at the far end of the clearing, a great central firepit.

Normally they might have taken some time to explore, to see what clues might be gleaned, but Riss trained her focus on Geetsha.

“All right,” she said. “You heard something. Where?”

Geetsha closed her eyes for a moment. She cupped her hands to either of her ears, just standing there. It went on long enough that Adal cast a sidelong look to Torcha, whose mouth scrunched up in skepticism.

Finally, Geetsha spoke up:

“Down the back side of the plateau. Further down the trail.”

Riss looked to Vosk and Adal, sizing them both up with a quick head-to-toe.

“Here or there, you two?” she asked.

“I can’t speak for Vosk, but I’m not keen on splitting up again.”

“Rather not,” Vosk agreed.

The night around them was pitch dark, only scraps of occasional starlight filtering through the tree cover. Though their lanterns burned brightly, it didn’t feel enough. Something about the darkness was pervasive. Adal couldn’t put his finger on what. Perhaps he was merely so tired that he was starting to… not quite hallucinate, but starting to tread that line, that border between fully alert and not.

They descended a steep, fungus-riddled slope, and as they climbed lower, the trees grew… colorful.

Adal had to blink a few times. He had to be certain what he was seeing was real. Perhaps he was more tired than he thought.

But no, the startled gasps from the others–and Torcha’s soft coo of delight–confirmed that what he was seeing was real.

The bottom of the path intersected with a thicket of twisted, sharp-thorned brambles. Someone had hacked a path through them, and the uppermost thorns were draped with strands of gauzy, colorful filaments, delicate as a multicolored spider’s web. It looked as though someone wearing many silken scarves had run through the thorns and left shreds in their wake, yet there were no disturbances in the growth, no broken branches and no signs that anything living had passed through in some time.

The soft, colorful threads draped over the path through the brambles, an undisturbed curtain. By torchlight, they looked maroon and orange and a ruddy green-brown that Adal suspected would shine emerald in sunlight.

It was beautiful.

“It looks like silk,” Torcha whispered. “Like spider silk. Or like they weave up in Patalban.”

Shuffling her way to the front of the queue and stepping between Riss and Geetsha, Torcha held out a hand. Riss reached aside and touched her forearm.

“Torcha!” she hissed, her voice low. “Careful. Stuff… melds to other stuff here, remember?”

Torcha tipped her head back and pulled down her hood, red curls rustling. She stood on her tip-toes, examining the strands of thread with a doubtful frown.

“Anyone have a hen bone?” She glanced back toward the packbirds. “If that stuff melds with bones and meat, we should be able to test it.”

Instead, Geetsha stepped forward and parted the thin, translucent curtain of threads with a hand. A bare hand, Adal noted.

“This is safe,” she promised. Riss’ back was rigid as she watched.

Adal and Riss locked eyes. Torcha scowled. For all of Geetsha’s confidence, nobody seemed in a hurry to take her at her word.

Geetsha slipped beyond the curtain into the darkness beyond. The threads fluttered in her wake like fringe on a dancer’s skirt.

<< Chapter 18 | Chapter 20 >>

The looks Riss aimed toward Geetsha were anything but subtle. Adal shared her suspicions, but he wondered if it might be worth asking his commander to tone it down for the sake of diplomacy. Then he thought about the shit-storm that might stir up and the completely inappropriate timing of such a shit-storm given their present predicament. He opted to keep his mouth shut.

Not that Riss never listened to him, or that she considered her behavior beyond criticism. Hardly. She relied on Adal for just such advice. But Adal knew how Riss operated. If he broached the subject, there was a high chance she’d decide the best way to deal with her suspicions would be a direct confrontation. She was much like the machete she carried: a heavy, blunt blade that saw to cut to the bone of whatever ailed her. It was just not the time or place for that.

Marching along on foot beneath tendrils of wispy moss and high, straight-stalked trees, Adal tried to keep his mind off the possibilities of what could be lying in wait beyond the reach of their lanterns. The flickering lantern glow deepened every shadow, lent some shadows a writhing, living quality.

He also tried to ignore the exhaustion that weighted his boots, made his every step an act of effort. His body had fought hard to rid itself of that venom–with Calay’s help, of course–and he was now paying the price.

If he turned his head and glanced behind him, he could see the same exhaustion writ on the tight, tired lines that framed Harlan Vosk’s eyes and mouth. He walked with the same heavy, deliberate steps that Adal took. Perhaps the painkiller he’d been given was some sort of sedative.

Adal decided to try to take both their minds off it.

“So tell me,” he said, conversational. “You’re a logger. You work with a crew of other loggers. Clearly we don’t practice the same methods of tree disposal given you require the wood to be usable afterwards.”

Vosk glanced up. He nodded along as Adal spoke, then grunted out a semblance of a laugh after.

“That is true.” He took a deep breath and adjusted the strap of his bag so that it fell lower across his abdomen. Adal caught the faint wince that tightened his features.

He’s still in pain, he thought. Good to keep him engaged.

“So how do you do it?” He pressed.

Vosk made a small gesture, lifting a hand and then letting it fall.

“Same as you kill any tree, at least in the end. With an axe. Metal blades, that’s the important part. They seem to have difficulty absorbing metal. But first you light a fire near them, if you can. Smoke bothers them. Seems to settle them down, makes them move slower. Hells if I know why, or how it works.”

Adal slid his tongue across his mouth, pursing his lips in thought. Perhaps that explained the dozens of campfires dotted all along the crossroads. If fire kept the trees at bay, it could be the locals lit excessive fires even outside their territory. A sort of just-in-case. Adal could hardly blame them.

“I see,” he said, still thinking it through. Vosk continued talking. Apparently Adal had struck a vein of conversation worth mining. The man had certainly softened some since they’d first met. He’d radiated a sort of military chilliness when first speaking to Riss. But a few days on the trail together and he’d loosened up, spoke more readily.

“Ideally you get one alone. Hack down everything near it so it can’t absorb more wood. Then burn what you’ve cut down until the smoke puts it to sleep. That’s why we travel through here in crews of seven to ten. You have to move quickly if you want to kill them quick enough to keep them in one piece.”

“It sounds less like logging and more like hunting to me.” Adal cast a look forward, his eyes falling onto Riss’ back. She walked ahead, speaking quietly to Geetsha, and while it could have been his imagination, she seemed to be walking a little taller, her shoulders held high, her chin up. The fight had invigorated her. As fights always did.

“You know,” he said to Vosk, pointing at the woman in question. “Riss here was a hunting guide some years back.”

Vosk let out a grunt that could have been faint surprise or just acknowledgment. Before Adal could speak again, a flurry of activity on the trail before them stunned the walkers into jittery silence.

Suddenly, up ahead, fluttering. Movement and the patter of wings in the air, just beyond the reach of their lights. Riss jerked back in surprise. Geetsha beside her smiled cautiously, then pointed at something. A fraction of a second later, a small flock of crows erupted from the ceiling of trees, spiraling upward, sleek black bodies outlined against the faint starlight.

“Look,” Geetsha said. “Birds. Birds are a good sign.”

Adal tilted his head, unsure for a moment what that meant. He put two and two together at the same moment Vosk chose to explain:

“Because birds won’t land where the tree branches absorb their feet. They tend to steer clear of the crawling groves.”

Helpful elaboration or not, the mental image sent Adal’s heart quickening for a few beats.

###

They walked for what felt like half a day but was likely only a few hours. Adal had more than a few zero-energy, dead-straight marches under his belt. There was a place in his mind he could recede to, letting his feet do all the work. Every soldier had it. Even the ones who’d been brought up in the Academy and sidestepped most of the harder work of soldiering.

When his mind receded to that distant, rhythmic marching place, he thought of Riss. How much better she seemed to be doing. How it warmed him to see her lead again. To see her trusting her instincts and her capabilities. She was healing. They all were. But her wounds had been carved deeper than his. A glimmer of quiet affection warmed him from the inside out at the thought. She’d be all right. He’d known it all along, of course, but it was good to see the evidence before his eyes.

They were, he thought, like the land itself: rebuilding after conflict. Picking up the pieces. Shoring up what had been damaged. Saying goodbye to the things they’d lost for good.

Geetsha led them up the steep side of a crumbling plateau, twisted roots protruding from its eroded hillside. Fragile white puffball fungi dotted the exposed root structure, reflecting their torchlight like sea jellies brought to the surface.

Were it not for the fact that Adal had resigned himself to the belief that every single thing in this gods-forsaken swamp was primed to kill them, he might have paused to appreciate their beauty.

Even if he had, he was interupted shortly after.

“Adal? Calay? Everybody up here,” Riss hollered. “We’ve found our camp spot, but Geetsha’s pretty sure she hears something. Can any of you hear it?”

Adal couldn’t hear a damn thing beyond the usual: the stomp of their feet, the huff of his exhausted breath. Everyone poured out into a flat, ash-dotted clearing to see what was the matter.

<< Chapter 17 | Chapter 19 >>

 

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Riss took a moment to appreciate the team she had put together. She had read Calay and Gaz right. They’d leapt into action immediately; their level of training was in fact on par with what they claimed it to be. In the mercenary world, that wasn’t always a given. Both had conducted themselves well. Even Vosk, the odd man out, had stepped up and made himself useful, even going so far as to get between her sharpshooter and the creature.

It was paradoxical to most. To those who hadn’t been there. Stepping into a firefight like that and walking out the other side with blooming confidence in your men, that was a more addictive sensation than the effects of anything Riss had ever smoked or snorted or imbibed.

Despite the fact that she was slathered with foul-smelling ichor and the sights she’d seen inside that tree would haunt her for weeks, she felt better. She felt newly confident. On the walk back to their campsite, she had to fight to keep the simmering beginnings of a grin off her face.

Their campsite was, thankfully, unmolested upon their return. But no one was in the mood to settle down and cook dinner just yet. And where was Geetsha?

Adal had hurriedly tied the moa down before rushing to their aid, and now the birds stalked in agitated circles, heads tugging sideways, pulling at their leads. Was it the gunfire that had upset them, or was it something more? Could they hear something beyond what Riss’ human ears could measure? Who could say. Riss gave one of the birds an awkward pat on the flank while she pawed through a satchel of provisions.

“Geetsha will have heard us,” she said to nobody in particular. She received scattered grunts and nods in reply.

Adal crawled into his tent, then emerged a moment later with a hefty rectangular bar of soap. He offered it to Riss with a grim smile.

“Scrub while we wait?”

“You always know just what to say.”

Riss shucked off the outermost layers of her armor–flexible, layered panels of leather studded with brass–and snatched up a water jug. Up on the steppes, in the scraggy forests of her home, wasting water on hygiene would have been unthinkable. Despite how foul it was, the endless puddles of standing water in the swamp were in some ways an asset. If they started to run low on well water, they could always break out the filtration kits. It took time and tasted a little gunky, but it was perfectly drinkable.

She set to working up a lather, scraping and scrubbing the worst of the caked-on gore away before it could dry.

Geetsha arrived before she’d even finished her chest piece. Hurrying in on foot, pale and ethereal as a ghost, she scurried into camp and straight up to Riss’ side. She took a moment to catch her breath before speaking.

“You found one,” was all she said, not even a question. Riss’ hand paused in its scrubbing. She turned a look to the younger woman, then inclined a silent nod.

“I didn’t see any others.” Geetsha lifted a satchel off her hip, unbuttoning the flap to let Riss have a glance inside. “Plenty of mushrooms. No birds.” She paused momentarily. “Although where the trees grow there are often few birds.”

Riss didn’t spend too long dwelling on that. Again, those flicker-flutters of suspicion rose to mind, but she wasn’t sure how to address them. Geetsha had said some pretty alarming things, but how exactly did one bring that sort of thing up in conversation? Riss was halfway to just asking her so if you aren’t human, what the hells are you? but that seemed counterproductive. And was now, when they appeared to be deep in the most dangerous thickets of their journey thus far, a good time?

Gaspard would have known what to do. He had a knack for people. Both people-people and things that masqueraded as people. Things like whatever Geetsha was. What Geetsha maybe is, she corrected herself.

A pained groan stole her attention away from her private thoughts. She glanced over in the direction it came from and found Vosk holding his arms overhead. He stood still, grimacing while Adal and Calay both scrubbed lather-soaked armor brushes over his torso. The sight was so startlingly ridiculous that Riss couldn’t help but laugh. And she was surprised at the depth, the volume, the warmth of her own laughter. Damn, it felt good to laugh like that: with a competent crew at her muster and a foe dead at her feet.

“I think I’ll take some of that what’s-it-called after all,” Vosk said through a clenched grimace. Calay whisked the armor brush off him for a moment, then dug around in his belt.

“No shame in it,” he said, selecting a small glass vial. He slapped it into Vosk’s palm. Vosk twisted it open, extracted the eye dropper from the cap, and gave the concoction within a curious sniff.

“Up to four drops at a time,” Calay instructed. “I’d start with two and see how you go.”

“Two little drops?” Vosk hiked up an eyebrow, studying the vial while Adal continued to scrub blown-apart bits of tree goo off his back.

“My work is potent, darling.” Calay even went so far as to give him a wink. “Trust me.”

So Riss was’t the only one still riding that post-gunfight high, then. She wiped her armor down and whistled for Adal, tossing his soap back.

When she next set eyes on Geetsha, she felt less agitated, soothed by the antics of her mercs.

“Our packbirds seem antsy,” she said to the girl. “Do you think there’s a chance more of those things are lurking nearby?”

Geetsha’s face gave a little twitch and her lips thinned, as if she were slow to process the required facial expression, so deep was her thought.

“… They are drawn to noise,” she said after a moment, with the customary delay that often prefaces bad news.

“How far away should we get?”

Riss realized again that despite her misgivings, she still trusted the information Geetsha gave her.

“You shouldn’t measure it in distance,” said Geetsha. She closed her eyes, features calm and meditative. A strand of her wispy white hair fell into her eyes. Riss noticed a twig tangled up in her bangs. “You should measure elevation. They have difficulty climbing.”

Riss thought back to the tree slowly lurching up the river bank, pushing up its rumpled curtains of mud.

“That makes sense. Where’s the best high ground?”

“You are on it.” Resigned, Riss glanced down to her boots. They sat atop a mild slope, hardly an obstacle.

“Is there anything better in walking distance?”

Riss trained a look toward the pair of moa, who still hadn’t settled from their agitated tugging. One paced in a slow, repetitive figure eight. The other stood at the perimeter of their torchlight, staring off into the blackness as if its sharp avian eyes were fixed on a threat only it could see.

“Perhaps three or four hours from here, at our current pace.”

Riss toothed at her bottom lip in thought, then nodded in assent.

“We’ll go there,” she said to the girl. Raising her voice to the others, she shouted: “Let’s pack up. Geetsha says more of those things will be drawn by the noise, but there’s higher ground to camp on further down the trail. Apparently they’re bad with hills.”

Despite how efficiently they’d all pitched camp less than an hour ago, nobody seemed to mind being asked to pack down. Riss observed in their faces the faint, edgy lines of tension: they didn’t want to be sleeping if a whole flock–or would it be called a copse–of those things descended on the clearing en masse.

In short order, the tents were packed and lanterns were lit and everyone was ready to go. Riss juggled up their marching order somewhat: one moa at the front and one at the back. Torcha up ahead with her and Geetsha, Adal and Vosk at center, Calay and Gaz still bringing up the rear. She wanted to ensure their party’s wounded members–and yes, she still thought of Adal as wounded–had as much protection in the dark as possible. It wasn’t much, but it was what she could offer, and they had earned it with their conduct in that fight.

<< Chapter 16 | Chapter 18 >>

Rifle fire was loud. So much louder than he could have anticipated. He was slightly more used to explosions, being capable of causing such through his magicks, but in the aftermath of that gunfire and explosion both, he was left dazed and dumb. In the rare event that the thugs of Calay’s childhood could afford firearms, matchlocks were as good as it got. He hadn’t even acquired his first cartridge pistol until he and Gaz went on the run. The sheer noise rendered him briefly mute.

Breathing hard through his mouth, he took a moment to focus his senses.

The first sense to return to him in full was, unfortunately, smell. He took a deep breath and stifled an immediate retch. The gore-stuffed hollows of the tree now littered every available surface and it reeked. Calay felt along his hip and dipped a finger into his belt-pouch, seeking through some vials until he found what he was looking for: amirin cream, commonly used to stave off the smell in the autopsy room or when working with unsavory body fluids in less medically sanctioned contexts. He dabbed a smear of the stuff beneath his nostrils, then snorted in a breath. The cream possessed a minty menthol aroma, eye-wateringly strong, but blinking back those tears beat smelling what had to have been years of liquefied corpses.

Once he could breathe through his nose again, he closed his mouth and looked over his shoulder. He offered the vial to Adalgis first, a conscious show of respect.

“Impeccable timing,” he said to the man. “Here, this will take the edge off.”

Adalgis wasted no time in applying the cream, then passed it on to Torcha. It made the rounds. Calay didn’t care if they finished it or not; he had loads. Next on his mental to-do list while the adrenaline in his system boiled itself off was to make himself useful. Riss had hired him on as a medic, after all. Time to inventory the wounded.

Gaz and Riss had done the brunt of the hands-on damage to the creature, but they were up and about; their wounds were superficial. Both waved him off. He noted with quiet, well-concealed discomfort that Gaz had a cut across his cheek, but the amount of minor rends in Gaz’s tough-guy hide that he’d stitched closed over the years… Calay knew his number-one patient well. It could wait. He passed the man a cotton pad, then turned his attention to Vosk.

He’d been reloading when Vosk had gone down, but he’d heard the impact. A crushing injury of some sort. Calay approached with a lift of his hand, finding Vosk sitting upright in the mud, his expression a familiar one. Calay could empathize with the tight-browed, tight-mouthed expression a soldier’s face adopted when something hurt like a motherfucker and he was determined not to show it.

Crouching, he looked the man up and down. Vosk had a soldier’s understanding of the role he played in the patient-medic relationship, as well. He sat there silently and lifted his chin and arms, letting Calay do what he would.

“Anything feel busted?” he asked. Vosk was well-armored and he hadn’t fallen far, but Calay wasn’t entirely sure what kind of strength a tree packed.

“My pride,” said Vosk through a wince. “Perhaps a couple ribs, but only when I breathe.”

“Well avoid doing that, then. Here. I’ll have a feel.” Calay waited while Vosk unlaced his cuirass up the sides, then lifted the whole thing up and over his head. His movement wasn’t too bad, nothing stiff or spasming in the back and shoulders. Calay then palpated his ribs in turn and found them satisfactory. If any were cracked, there wasn’t much to do beyond wear sturdy armor and treat the pain. He had Vosk take a few deep breaths just to be sure, but nothing sounded worrying.

“I think your initial diagnosis was right on the nose,” he said. “Let’s get you on your feet and see how you feel.”

He offered Vosk a hand down. The man took it and rose slowly, moving with the air of an injured man attempting to conserve energy rather than the jerky, spasmodic motions of someone with debilitating injury. Calay gave his hand a fraternal squeeze, then clapped him on the shoulder.

“You had good instincts to get between Torcha and that thing,” he said. Perhaps it was unkind of him, but he wouldn’t have expected it. Possibly not from Riss, or from the others. Certainly not from Tarn’s man, who had his own motivations and his own loyalties.

“She was hurting it the most.” Vosk hitched his shoulders up in a modest, diverting shrug.

“All the same,” Torcha chimed in, “we worked well together.”

Calay turned a little look over the group, a small, thin smile touching his mouth. “That we did.”

He set his eyes on Riss, who was picking over the tree’s remains. And the… remains-remains. Calay wasn’t sure what to make of the mess. Riss flipped a meter-long shard of greyish trunk over with the blade of her machete, regarding it coolly. After a moment, she shrugged.

“None of these pieces are large enough to bother carting back,” she said. “As gratifying as it was to blow that thing all to shit, we can’t sell it now.”

Torcha’s young, freckled face crumpled with disappointment. She blinked it away, then cleared her throat.

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “Next time I’ll ask.”

Riss seemed caught off-guard by that response. She tilted her chin to one side, then after a hesitant moment, a warm laugh chased the last traces of mercenary cool off her face. She walked up to Torcha and thwacked the flat of her machete’s blade to the woman’s boot.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said. “You did fine.” She lifted her voice just a touch. “You all did. Selling anything we find out here is an afterthought, unless we stumble over some of Tarn’s fancy trees and they don’t try to eat us first.”

Calay left Riss to her mercenaries and, satisfied nobody was in the process of bleeding to death, stole over to Gaz’s side. He stood more or less where Calay had left him, looming over the wreckage of the tree, battleaxe replaced upon his back. His cheeks were still flush with exertion and his shoulders rose and fell with each breath, his body slow to cool down after the wind-up of engagement.

“How you feeling?” Calay asked. “And I gave you that rag for a reason. You going to mop that cut up or not?”

Gaz glanced down to his hand, which still gripped the little square of cotton Calay had handed him. Pristine and bloodless, it clearly hadn’t been used. Calay snatched it back.

“Ungrateful little…” he started, then crooked a finger to beckon Gaz downward. Gaz bent a little at the knee. Calay spat upon the cloth and, finding his patient’s face at a more amenable level to reach, wiped the half-clotted blood clear of Gaz’s cheek. He dashed some antiseptic on the cloth, then cleaned the wound out. Gaz just crouched there silently, enduring it all, no stranger to this treatment.

“I’m still trying to figure out what to make of what we just did,” Gaz mumbled, studying some broken shards of bark down by his boots. “What we just saw, even. What sort of magick can even create something like that?”

“If it was even magick at all.” Calay concluded his fussing, then dabbed the wound dry one last time. He had a serum he could paint over the top, scab it over more or less instantly, but that would be overkill. No need to waste his supplies on minor scratches.

“You don’t think so?”

Calay held his tongue. Exactly what magick was and wasn’t capable of, that was a subject of spirited debate. A subject he held rather strong opinions about. But he’d sooner hand himself over to the Vasile Guard than delve into magickal philosophy around this lot. The less they knew about his opinions–and knowledge–on the matter, the better.

“Well,” he said instead, “all the local legends and such. People have been avoiding this swamp and occasionally pilfering its spooky wood spoils for years upon years. That’s a bit much to be the work of some wayward sorcerer.”

Gaz grunted, as much of a reply as Calay was going to get. He stretched up to his full height; Calay’s hand dropped away. He folded the bloodied rag away into his belt, a force of habit. There was barely enough blood on there to be useful, but…

“The root cause of it may be magick, far far back, sure. But I think Vosk was right when he told us back when that sometimes, in some places, the natural world just goes… a little bit less natural.”

The last of their precious sunlight dwindled, but despite their bolstered camaraderie, nobody was quite in the mood to set up camp. While walking back to their intended campsite, they reached a murmured consensus that pushing on through a few hours of dark might not be a bad idea, depending on what Geetsha said.

If Geetsha even turned back up. She had yet to resurface from her supposed mushroom gathering.

<< Chapter 15 | Chapter 17 >>

Riss moved, pure instinct. She brought her machete up and hacked it downward, body leaping and twisting sideways before her brain caught up. Gaz at her flank moved similarly: he shed his knife and hefted his battleaxe, swinging it in a wide arc in anticipation of a collision.

When the creature caught up to them, their blades were already flashing, and Riss juddered with the impact as her machete bit bark.

Lurching forward, eerily quiet save for the hiss-slither of its roots and the dreary, asthmatic whinnies as its equine head breathed, the creature seemed to move almost without purpose. Its branches sought out with the same blind groping as the roots had; those branches showered splinters in all directions as Riss and Gaz met it halfway.

Behind her, Riss heard Torcha calling, “Down!”

She ducked. The whole movement–leap, chop, pull, chop, duck–took mere seconds, flowed smooth as water. Riss pressed herself into the muck and the resounding, chest-thumping boom of Torcha’s rifle punctured the stale swamp air. The trunk of the tree blew bark in all directions. Someone followed up with a volley of pistol fire, Vosk or Calay, and Riss squinted through the muzzle smoke and watched the horror above her as it tilted precariously…

The creature staggered to its side, its horse legs clawing blindly. The horse issued forth a panicked wheeze, then Gaz was thundering toward it, heaving his axe up with all his strength. He cleaved the horse’s head clean off in a single strike, showering Riss with a gout of foul-smelling brackish liquid that wasn’t quite mammalian blood. The head fell into the mud with a wet, sad thwuck and for a moment, all was still.

Riss swallowed her raspy breath, then rose up, glancing behind her. A shard of bark protruded from the front of her padded leathers; she yanked it free with a grunt. Gaz smeared blood from his eyes and likewise patted himself down.

A silent look passed between them before both set their eyes upon the monster. The two hoofed front legs that protruded from the tree trunk still spasmed with  purposeless motion even as the neck stump bled freely. Though neither Riss nor Gaz had voiced it, there had been an understanding that had manifested in both their minds, a logical conclusion based on years of felling both beast and man: cut off the head and the rest will die.

This proved not to be the case. Thick, twisting ropes of root lashed out from the base of the trunk as the tree began to crawl forward. It didn’t seem to care that it had toppled sideways, nor did it take care to right itself. It just dragged itself to Riss’ left, toward Torcha and the others, labored now by its blown-apart bits but crawling just as determinedly forward.

“Fucking hells,” Calay hissed from behind her. “How is it still alive?”

“I don’t think the horse had much to…” Riss started to speak, but the smell hit her in a wave. Her words drowned in a retch and gag as she smeared at her face, attempting to wipe the creature’s blood from her skin and clothing. However, after a split second, she realized the foul, stomach-churning odor seemed to emanate from the tree itself, not from the blood it had spilt on her.

“Hold it off!” Torcha scampered back some, hands working at the bolt action of her rifle. “I’m reloading!”

Vosk leapt up from behind her, putting himself between the sharpshooter and the creature. He had one pistol in hand and pulled another from his belt. Riss hauled her machete up and slashed downward just as Vosk fired. He pulled both triggers at once and the front of the tree’s trunk blew open, grey-green bark cracking and chipping away.

A half-rotted humanoid face, glistening and wet, peered at Riss from the newly-opened fissure in the bark. A human’s arm tumbled free from the hollow in the tree, dangling lifelessly, dripping sick-sweet decay. It swung like a pendulum when the tree crawled forward. Riss forced herself not to look too long, noted with slow-rising terror that behind the dangling corpse were the tangled, twisted appendages of yet more bodies. She caught a glimpse of more hooves, more tangled skeletons, and then she tore her eyes away and flailed her machete downward with all she had.

“It’s using the roots and branches to drag itself!” She bellowed to the others between harsh, heavy breaths. “Cut them off! Even if we can’t fucking kill it we can cripple it!”

Gaz rounded to the tree’s other side. She couldn’t see him, but she heard the chunk of his axe digging in.

Riss’ ribs rattled as Torcha blew another heavy round into the tree’s trunk, sending cracks shuddering through its root base. It toppled yet further, laying all but horizontal in the muck. Riss sidestepped the thrashing roots, neatly severing them with swipes of her blade, and kicked writhing tentacles of root off into the distant mud.

“Calay? Vosk?” Torcha squinted at the two men through the haze of muzzle smoke. “Which of you’s the better shot?”

We don’t have time, Riss thought. Don’t let this turn into some pissing contest.

Vosk, bless him, defied her expectations. He deferred to Calay while reloading, nodding aside with a simple, “Probably him.”

Calay sniffed sharply, then looked to Torcha for guidance. She drew her duster open, then fished around in one of the many pouches that hung from her belts and bandoliers. Just meters away, the tree thrashed and writhed in the mud. Gaz continued hacking at it with abandon, sending meter-long chunks flying through the air.

“I’m gonna chuck this bomb in it.” Torcha unpacked a fist-sized glass sphere from her belt. “But I don’t have time to set a fuse. You think you can pop it?”

Calay popped his hat off and tossed it carelessly behind him, taking a knee half-behind Vosk.

“I can certainly try.”

Torcha popped the cork off the small glass bomb, then tipped a shimmering powder from another vial inside. The concoction looked inert to Riss’ eyes, but she trusted Torcha’s judgment. Torcha stoppered up the bomb again, then pointed toward the corpse-stuffed fissure in the tree’s trunk.

She wound up, then threw. Her aim was a damn sight better than Riss’ would have been. The glass sparkled as it sailed through the air, seemed to hover in slow motion, and landed straight inside the tree’s trunk.

Calay’s pistol cracked a split second later. Shards of bark erupted from the creature’s flank, several inches wide. In a sudden, sweeping grab, the tree lurched up one of its last remaining branches, lashing out in the direction the pistol fire kept coming from. It slammed squarely into Vosk, knocking him sideways with a worrying crunch. Riss knew better than to leap into the path of where her gunners were firing, so she went low, trying to slice the branch off at its base.

“Riss! Fall back! Incoming!”

For a moment she didn’t recognize the voice. Her brain spit up an inane, confused Gaspard? and she staggered backwards, ducking away from whatever was–

A rifle shot screamed past her. The tree exploded in a shower of bark and gore. Bones and liquefied tissue and twigs in equal measure rained down from the sky in the aftermath of Torcha’s bomb. Riss curled her arms over her head, wary of the larger chunks as they impacted the wet ground around her.

Her ears ringing, she lifted her head and glanced back to the others.

Adal stood at the rear of the party, rifle still at the ready. He lowered it slowly, staring at the blown-apart tree with round, surprised eyes.

The tree wasn’t moving anymore.

<< Chaper 14 | Chapter 16 >>

If Riss wasn’t on high alert before, she certainly was now. She instructed half the crew to light their lanterns, even though dark was falling slowly. They had plenty of light for the time being. There was a method to her madness, though: if there were something out here mimicking humans, perhaps it was so used to the swamp’s natural gloom that its trickery might be more obvious in artificial light.

She could hope, at least.

And she was going to have words with Geetsha once they had made camp. Something about the girl had been odd from the get-go, but the things she’d said back there were downright bizarre, even if they’d been helpful on the surface.

Still, though: Tarn had mentioned her. Tarn had negotiated with her. So clearly she couldn’t be some swamp apparition. Swamp apparitions didn’t have the ability to leave the swamp and waltz up to Adelheim to strike deals. Surely. Not that Riss even believed in apparitions or ghosts. A creature of some sort imitating a human to lure prey didn’t qualify as a ghost, not in Riss’ mind. It was arguably worse than a ghost.

Heading up the party, she slid her machete free from her belt and walked with it at the ready. The trail’s overgrowth was negligible, but the heft of it felt comforting in her hand. The others didn’t take it as a call to arms, but Gaz had unslung his battleaxe some time ago. They were well past that point. And if they happened upon some harmless swamp-dwellers who wondered why they had their weapons drawn, they had a damn good reason.

As soon as they left the mangled woman behind them, the shrieking stopped. It didn’t taper off; it just ended, severed abruptly, forgotten.

That, more than anything, convinced Riss their suspicions were correct. It was as though the source of the moaning realized they weren’t taking the bait and called it a night. That spoke to a level of intelligence Riss didn’t want to tangle with.

“Geetsha,” she asked while they walked. “Are we coming up on a suitable campsite soon?”

She realized with some surprise that despite her reservations about Geetsha’s character, she still assumed the girl would more or less tell the truth. Or at least she was consulting her. She straddled a line there, skepticism ready in-hand just like her machete.

Geetsha carried on as though she were entirely oblivious to Riss’ concerns.

“Yes,” she said. “There is a little hill. Dry.”

“Good.” Riss gazed up the trail, past the spindly thickets of trees that stretched their bony arms toward the twilit sky. There did seem to be a slight hump on the horizon, a hillock where the tree growth clustered a little thicker. She noted leaves still stubbornly clung to some of the broad-trunked trees in the distance, a different varietal to the dead-looking, skinny ones.

“We’ll be making camp upon this hill ahead,” she called to the group. “I don’t know about you lot, but I’m not keen walking through the dark with whatever we just encountered back there.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Calay.

“Sure thing, boss,” said Torcha.

Gaz just grunted, giving a little tug on the lead of the moa he was minding. The bird picked up the pace, looming at the rear of their little procession.

They reached the hill without incident, but the prospect of setting up camp in this place left Riss wary. Rather than looking forward to resting her aching feet and enjoying an evening meal, she kept looking over her shoulder, expecting to see something vaguely humanoid waiting just beyond the shine of her lantern.

*

By now, everyone made and broke camp with a fuss-free, well-oiled synchronicity that reminded Riss of the war. March, pack, rest, pack, repeat. They had space for the tents this time, and the trio of tents clustered tight around the fire like lonely old friends glad to share a meal together once more. Geetsha said there were edible mushrooms to be found, and though Riss had her reservations, she let the kid scamper off to forage. Despite her concerns, nothing Geetsha had done thus far had endangered them. In fact, she’d been a valuable asset. What did Riss stand to gain from ordering her to remain within camp?

Their campsite was a flat patch of earth, a smaller section of a broad clearing. Evidence of old logging dotted the fringes: a few sad leftover stumps that had once been a copse of thick, sturdy trees. Smaller shrubs and scrubby vines had moved in, providing what Riss hoped was at least something of a barrier against the local wildlife.

Glad to shrug her pack off, Riss took one of the moa for a forage at the camp’s perimeter. She tried to spend a little time each night with the birds. Tried to acclimate herself to them. While the sensation of eyes on her back still left her fleetingly disconcerted, she was forcing herself to grow accustomed to their presence.

The big bird at Riss’ side shoved its face down into the underbrush, searching for something to snack upon, and she kept one eye on it, one eye on the others while they made camp. Calay and Torcha set to work on the fire. Vosk had disappeared into his tent. Adal’s ass was visible hanging out of his tent as he set down his bedroll. Gaz, still in possession of the other moa, walked the perimeter like she did. She gave him a little wave when he glanced her way, and he upnodded in return.

She still wasn’t certain what to make of the pair from up north.

Vasile, Calay had said. Riss had only been once. She held no prejudices toward the city or its population.

They’d performed just fine when needed, she supposed. Adal’s health was evidence of that. With how Gaz had readied his axe when the shrieking started, she was glad to have him on her side. He had a brawler’s instincts. He wouldn’t hesitate if the worst happened. She watched his big, broad silhouette stir the mist as he walked the moa to a patch of brambles. He peered down and studied the ground, then reached up and rubbed at the back of his bald head. His heavy brow wrinkled.

Riss read his body language and started walking over before he even called out, “Hey boss?”

“Something interesting?” she asked, gazing down at the ground where Gaz stood. He waved a hand through the air, parting the thin gauze of mist, and gestured downward.

“Would you look at that,” he said. “Hoofprints.”

“Shoed hoofprints no less.” Riss pointed to the imprints in the earth, fresh enough that their edges were still crisp. She crouched and put a fingertip to the mud. It was wet to the touch.

“Geetsha,” she started to call out, but then remembered their guide was off digging for mushrooms. She’d ask if there was another path nearby later. It seemed prudent to investigate. If there was another logging party out here, or bandits, or anyone on horseback that could come upon them in their sleep, that took a more immediate priority over the threat of any distant, lurking monsters that may or may not engage a party their size.

She rallied the others in a matter of minutes. Adal volunteered to keep guard at camp, and Riss saw that for what it was: he’d worked hard at sweating that snakebite from his system. He’d be more good to them with his ass on a seat and a rifle in hand than tangling with whatever they might find in the bush.

The hoofprints took a winding trail through still-drying mud, occasionally sinking in deeper as the rider apparently struggled to keep the animal from straying into too-soft ground. Riss spotted no other tracks and definitely no sign of any other horses. The tracks ran astride what appeared to be an old creekbed, though the water running through it had long since turned stagnant, the same patchy puddles that composed most of the swamp’s floor.

“Looks like a solo rider,” she said. “Barring two people sharing the same saddle, I think we’re looking for…”

She trailed off and raised a finger to the others to quiet them. Had she just heard something? Cocking an ear to the open, swampy air, Riss waited.

The sound came again: a whuff of breath snorted through big nostrils, the sort of snort a bull might make. Or a horse. Riss pointed to her left, creeping away from the tracks and onto the gnarled roots of a grey-barked stump. Mindful of where she placed her boots, keeping free of the muck, she tilted a look around the jagged crown of the stump and toward the direction of the noise.

A puzzling shape loomed in the murk.

If she’d spotted the mauled woman’s silhouette by virtue of some pattern recognition, the thing before her now had the exact opposite effect on her brain. She stared at it, recognizing that she was seeing something, but the specific features of the beast were so baffling that for a moment it felt as though her mind refused to register she’d seen anything at all. She blinked. When she opened her eyes again, it was still there.

A great, heaved heap of mud was slouched up against the base of a nearby tree, as if the tree had bent to lap it up. From the tree, a horse protruded. That was the simplest way to describe something that utterly defied explanation. It was as though the tree had been hollowed out and some great giant had grabbed a horse by the ribcage and stuffed it inside, backend first. Its body was tilted at an acute upward angle, so that its forelegs dangled awkwardly, knees and ankles still taut with a tension that suggested that somehow it was still alive.

“What the fuck,” Torcha hissed from behind her, and Riss put her hand up again, signaling her gunsmith to shut it.

A slow undulation of movement curled through the tree’s branches and roots. As they watched in stunned silence, the tree-horse amalgamation tilted to one side, toward the mud that was bunched up along the creekbed. Riss realized with a start that the mud was slopped that way by the force the tree exerted. It was shoving its way up and out of the creek and onto dry land. Inexorably slow, but yes– it was moving.

Vosk had been right all along. She understood the term crawling wood now, watching the tree drag its mammalian burden slowly upward. Each of the horse’s snorted breaths sounded more laborious than the last, yet it made no sounds of a creature in pain. Watching it move sent bile rising in Riss’ throat. She fought it down, breathed slow and steady through her mouth, despite the visceral disgust that crawled along her palms.

Something tugged on the drape of Riss’ cloak. She started, jerked a look sideways, but it was only Calay. With wide eyes, he beckoned her wordlessly over to her right, pointing. Just beyond the gnarled tangle of the dead stump, where Gaz crouched, a snakelike tendril of root emerged from the muck, seeking out blindly, feeling its way along. Gaz remained frozen with saucer-huge eyes. He’d lifted his boot-knife, clutched it ready, but his eyes sought hers for guidance.

Silently, Riss shook her head. They had to keep things quiet. Had to fall back. She gestured, jerked her thumb over a shoulder, and started to creep back toward the hoofprints.

The crack of a pistol rang out, ear-shatteringly loud in the silence.

Riss spun, had a split second to take in the sight of Torcha and Vosk both kicking tangles of viney plant growth from their boots. Smoke twisted in a thin trail from the muzzle of Vosk’s pistol as he drew his sidearm. At her other side, Gaz lunged, slashing his knife through the root beside him as he scrambled away.

In the same instant, a ponderous creak rose from the trunk of the horse-tree as it pivoted, ceasing its slow crawl up the bank.

When it turned and lurched toward them, it moved much faster.

<< Chapter 13 | Chapter 15 >>

Riss was the first to spot the mangled woman.

The water on either side of their narrow trail was boiling, sulfurous muck. It stung the eyes and nose, and every one of them wound a scarf or bandana across their nose to stave off the worst of it. With as much as Riss’ eyes were watering, it was a wonder she saw the figure at all. Yet something about the lay of a particular set of shadows and debris caught her eye, some subconscious sense of pattern recognition that drew her attention and said to her is that a person?

Riss held up a hand, urging those behind her to slow, then stop. She squinted off to the right of the path, past a patch of bubbling swamp water, through the veil of mist that hung in suspended patches about a meter off the ground. She gestured to the silhouette, which appeared at first to be no more than a series of curved slopes, vaguely suggestive of a human body laying on its stomach, legs stretched out of view.

“Do you see that–” she started to ask, but a choked, wretched wail rose up from the body, and soon everyone was seeing what Riss saw.

They’d found the source of that screaming.

Her eyes adjusted only a smidge more to the murk, so it was tough to pick out more details. Evening was beginning to fall, though, and soon visibility would fade yet further. Riss hurried to light a lantern, hitting flint to the strikeplate and lifting it overhead as soon as the flame flickered to life.

The lantern barely helped.

Sprawled nearly face-down in the muck, a woman lay with her cheek in the mud. She’d fallen in a patch that was blessedly free from the bubbling, but judging by her pitiful wails, she was injured in some way. Perhaps she’d fallen into the boiling water from some other patch of dirt? Riss scanned the trail for tracks aside from their own and saw nothing fresh.

“Hells,” whispered Vosk, his voice softened to a whisper.

“She look like one of yours?” Riss asked, glancing over.

Vosk drew a hand down his face, thumbing along his jaw as he gazed off into the distance. He squinted, tilted his head a touch, seemed to be thinking something through.

“I can’t possibly say,” he said. “We had a couple women with us, both had long hair like hers, but that’s the fashion around here. I’d need to see her uniform or her face.”

Riss took in a short, foul-smelling breath and then pitched her voice across the bog.

“Hello there!”

The woman’s head lifted a little in response, and a twitch went through one of her arms. She’d fallen as if something had struck her down while fleeing toward the trail, a thought which sent a little twitch up Riss’ spine.

Despite the fact that her vocal cords plainly weren’t damaged, the woman didn’t holler a reply. Instead, she just groaned again, a low note uneven with pain.

“She’s clearly hurt,” said Vosk, lips curled down a hint. Riss couldn’t quite peg the expression–was it an empathic wince or merely distaste?

“Geetsha?” Riss glanced behind herself.

Summoned, Geetsha stole up to her side. She walked up to the very edge of the trail, staring outward. She was short enough that Riss could just peer over her shoulder, continuing to observe the injured woman from a distance of a good ten meters.

“Are there any other trails near here?” Riss asked. “Somewhere she could have stumbled in from?”

“Not quite trails.” Geetsha made a little gesture, flapping her too-long sleeve about. “But plenty of solid ground. Roots to climb on. It is possible to traverse this place without a trail. Just not easy.”

A new worry lurked in the rear of Riss’ thoughts: what if she wasn’t one of Vosk’s, but instead one of Geetsha’s? Her settlement or tribe or whatever they might call themselves. A local. With the mist and the distance, Riss couldn’t pick out any identifying details at all beyond a mess of dark-colored hair and the sloped profile that suggested a woman’s waistline.

“Could she be one of yours?” Riss asked of the girl, posing the question gently.

Geetsha stilled for a time. She lapsed into what almost looked like a short trance, her pale eyes foggy with thought. After a lengthy silence, she heaved her narrow shoulders up.

“She isn’t one of mine,” she said at last. “I’m not sure she’s even one of yours.”

Riss blinked.

“One of mine?” Riss cocked her head. A creeping cold seemed to chill through her as she considered the ramifications of what Geetsha might mean.

“One of yours.” Geetsha waved her sleeve again. “A person.”

Before Riss could press her further on exactly what the fuck that meant, another series of broken wails warbled up from the injured woman’s throat. She lifted her head, voice a roughly-choked sob. Her shoulders quivered as she tried to lift herself up, pressing down on her palms, but she didn’t seem to have the strength. When she fell forward once more, Riss caught a glimpse behind her: she seemed to be half-submerged in one of the puddles, her legs below the waterline. At the sight, Riss recoiled.

“Fuck me.” Riss was going to be sick. “She’s fallen in one of the pools.”

Riss wasn’t sure of the exact nature of the foul-smelling water that surrounded them, whether the source of the hiss and bubble was acidic in origin or due to the temperature. When the options were being boiled alive or being eaten through by acid, did it even matter which?

Adal curled a fist and held it to his mouth, averting his eyes, even though the mist hid whatever gory details there were to see.

Behind them, Torcha and the others seemed to come to the realization at around the same time. She heard Calay mutter a soft curse. For a moment, she felt a fleeting impulse to shield Geetsha’s eyes. She was a little too young to be…

But then she remembered Geetsha’s words. One of yours. A person.

Again she needed to confront that, but again she was interrupted. She took a step forward, attempting to put herself directly in Geetsha’s line of sight, but someone grabbed her by the arm.

She yanked hard on reflex, whirling to the side to see who’d grabbed her, but she stilled when she saw it was Adal. He gripped her firmly by the wrist, and when she glared at him in preparation to ask what exactly he was doing, she saw his attention wasn’t even on her. He was staring off into the muck, eyes cut in a shrewd narrow.

“Don’t go any closer,” he hissed, releasing Riss’ arm. “Look.”

She turned, gazing back toward where the woman’s body lay, but nothing looked any different. Just the tumbled limbs of the figure, the spread of hair, the backdrop of gauzy off-white mist and spindly trees.

“I don’t understand.” The words came out in a whisper, though, so on some level she was certainly heeding Adal’s warning even as her brain searched for reasons why.

Adal lifted a gloved hand, pointing levelly toward the woman. Or, if Riss followed the gesture exactly, slightly behind her.

“Look at that log behind her back,” he said. “It’s submerged in the same puddle.”

“So?” asked Vosk, not getting it. Riss wasn’t quite following either.

“Look at the bit that’s up on land.”

It looked like a regular log, hollowed out and dried like many others they’d passed. Riss raised questioning eyebrows at Adal, waiting.

“If that log’s the same thickness all the way through, like logs tend to be, that water is at most a few inches deep. Look. You can see it continuing on behind her, and it’s not even a third of the way submerged.”

Riss traced the outline of the fallen tree, noted the water level, acknowledged all that. Something about the scene did prick at her, the way patterns sometimes leapt at the eye if one looked too long at those woven Vasa rugs.

“… So where’s the rest of her?” Vosk’s words cut, blunt and ominous, through the silence.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Adal swallowed audibly. “There can’t be a rest of her. At least not down there.”

Perhaps she was laying on her legs somehow. Or perhaps it was a trick of the eye, some sort of perspective game. Riss searched for an explanation.

“Yes,” said Geetsha at last, speaking up after a prolonged silence. “I do not think that is a person.”

The contents of Riss’ stomach did a little flip. She shifted her boots in the slightly-muddied ground, focusing on the weight of bootsole to earth. She anchored herself that way, showing nothing, just listening until she’d arrived at her conclusion.

“Either way, what we are all saying is that body can’t or shouldn’t be alive.”

Adal nodded near-imperceptibly. He’d begun to sweat a little, his cheeks shining in the glow of Riss’ lantern. It lent depth to the subtle lines upon his features, the fear that tensed through his expression.

“What is it then, Geetsha, if it’s not a person?” Riss asked the question pointedly, direct.

Geetsha lapsed into another one of her pauses, then shook her head after a few seconds passed.

“I don’t recognize it,” she said.

“I think it’s a trap,” said Adal. And in the end, regardless of what precisely was causing the illusion or whatever it was, Adal was right. Nobody–or no thing, a voice in the back of Riss’ mind suggested–would imitate a person who needed help unless it was trying to lure them closer.

Riss shook her head, turning back to face the others. She made deliberate eye contact with Torcha, then gave her head a small shake.

“We’re going to keep moving,” she said.

At that same moment, the body behind her groaned again, a burbling sound half-strangled by the mud. Riss didn’t even look back.

“Whatever that is–” She gestured behind herself for emphasis. “–It’s bad news. If it’s really a girl, she’s sustained severe injuries and we can’t help her.”

Gaz worked his jaw, discomfited.

“What do you mean if it’s really a girl?”

Beside him, Calay lifted a stilling finger and shook his head, a quick snap of motion.

“If Vosk was right, if this is one of those places with those… energies, where things get a little strange? Then there could be all sorts of stuff in here that mimics human life.”

For some reason, Riss’ eyes were drawn toward Geetsha when Calay spoke. Beside her, the girl appeared normal enough, her gaze somewhat vacuous, wandering from person to person as they spoke. When her stare fell upon Riss, she didn’t startle or look away beneath the scrutiny. Instead, she brushed her stark white bangs aside from her face and turned a look up the path.

“We should keep moving,” she said. “It can probably hear us.”

<< Chapter 12 | Chapter 14 >>

Discomfort gripped Calay by the bones, slowing his every step. He and Gaz were no stranger to bizarre, life-threatening situations, but the swamp had a way of evoking a rarer type of fear that he was less acquainted with. It wasn’t the dark; jail cells were dark, the slums were dark, he could handle darkness. It wasn’t the shrieking, which continued to plague them as they walked, ringing out at irregular intervals and–if his nerves weren’t deceiving him–growing fractionally closer.

“I hate this,” he hissed toward Gaz, walking much closer to him than he had yesterday.

Gaz had done away with the hand-at-the-belt posturing. He’d unstrapped his battleaxe from his back and carried it openly, tilted up at his shoulder, attention divided between his flank, Calay, and their backs.

“I shouldn’t be this freaked out.” Calay squared his shoulders and huffed an indignant little breath, irritated with himself. Gaz ticked up a half-smile at him in sympathy but didn’t say anything. Some of their most productive conversations over the years had consisted of Calay just speaking at Gaz until he arrived at his own conclusions.

Geetsha led them up and over a small rise, then down the other side. The backside of the small hill was dotted with flat-topped fungi, their edges curled and dried. They grew in great heaping piles against the bases of almost every available tree, and Calay wasn’t quite certain, but he thought he could gauge a difference in the temperature. The air grew tangibly humid, thick and murky as the puddles of swamp water that blotted the ground.

“Sure is getting warm,” Torcha said up ahead.

“I’d hoped I was finished sweating,” Adalgis muttered.

They came to a stop once the path flattened out again. This section of the trail was broad and hard-trampled. Calay swept a look around the clearing, but nothing stood out as dangerous or noteworthy. The trees that flanked the path were skinnier, more jagged, and after staring at them for a moment, he realized they were dead. He was staring at the hollowed-out trunks of trees that had turned to dry, flaking bark a long time ago.

“Grab fresh water if you need it,” Riss said, unpacking a couple waterskins from one of the birds. “Geetsha says our filters won’t work on the hot spring water up ahead.”

Ah. Hot springs. That explained the heat. A hot spring sounded positively relaxing, but Calay had a feeling that the waters here were nothing like the steam baths at Colimar.

While Calay topped himself up on water and dried fruit, Vosk–the Baron’s man–approached he and Gaz with a little nod of greeting. Or rather he approached Gaz. When Calay returned the gesture with a little upnod of his own, Vosk didn’t even glance at him. So Calay busied himself with making a show of sorting through his medic’s kit while he eavesdropped.

“You see anything behind us?” Vosk asked. “I’ve been keeping a lookout up ahead.”

Gaz shook his head and drummed his fingers on the haft of his axe.

“Ain’t seen a thing,” he said. “Heard plenty of that weird screaming, but nothing’s come that close.”

Vosk let out a grunt that could have been agreement or just acknowledgment.

“We heard screams like that,” he muttered sourly. “When we were on our way out of here. Never did see what was making ‘em. I assumed at the time that it was someone the trees were eating.”

Gaz’s nostrils flared as he took a sharp breath. “You keep saying that. Trees eating folks.”

“Aye.” Vosk carried on. “I don’t really know a better word for it. I don’t know if they’re eating people for sustenance exactly. So ‘eating’ might not be the word. It’s real tough to describe until you’ve set eyes on it. You’ll see once we get further in.”

“I hope I don’t have to see. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Gaz didn’t even try to hide the distaste in his voice. Calay supposed there was no point playing tough in a place like this. If something horrible leapt up out of the swamp at them, they’d all likely shit their pants in unison and any posturing would go out the window.

Vosk looked between Gaz and Calay then, acknowledging Calay for the first time. He tilted a curious look over Calay’s satchel. Was he angling for a peek inside without quite trying to look that way?

“That was some work you did on Riss’ boy,” he said, and Calay got the strange sensation that it wasn’t quite meant as a compliment. More that Vosk was surprised, somehow.

“They did bring me along for a reason.” Calay smiled thinly. “And it isn’t just my companion’s large axe.”

Vosk chuckled. “Of course not. Though I notice you aren’t so laden with weaponry yourself. Just a sawbones, then?”

In the back of Calay’s mind, the skinny street kid he’d grown up as rose from a sort of slumber, paced around the interior of his consciousness. The kid who’d grown up having to gauge whether any stranger met in a back-alley was sizing him up as game. There was a certain instinct he’d honed, a feeling that stirred inside him when he’d looked other kids in the eyes and realized they saw him as prey.

“I’m handy with a few things beyond the bonesaw.” Calay spoke easily, demurely. He coupled the words with a modest shrug.

Instinct told him that maybe it was better if Vosk didn’t know the precise location and capabilities of his pistols, punch-daggers, and other, more arcane bits and pieces he’d picked up over the years. Instinct also told him that Riss ought to know he was feeling this feeling. As far as foreboding feelings went it was among the more minor Calay had ever felt, but the degree of trust he put in his gut was second only to the degree of trust he put in Gaz’s gut.

“Either way,” said Vosk. “It’s good to have you with us.”

Calay put on a smile. “Likewise,” he said. “You’ve been deeper in this muck than any of us. I imagine your expertise will be invaluable.”

Was he laying it on too thick? He couldn’t quite tell. Vosk seemed genuinely placated by the statement, though. He gave them a quick smile of parting and ambled off.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Calay glanced up to Gaz, who was busy staring at Vosk’s back.

“Was that odd to you?” he asked. Gaz shifted a look his way and puckered his lips inward, wordless for a time.

“I can’t pinpoint why that was weird, but that was weird,” he said.

“I get the distinct sensation he’s feeling us out.” Calay took a swig from his waterskin, licking his lips after. His lips had gone dry and cracked when they’d traveled through the mountains, but he was pleased to find his skin was recovering in the lowlands.

And that’s when it hit him, a minor epiphany of sorts: his discomfort with the swamp stemmed from how wet and alive it all was. He’d grown up in an environment shaped almost wholly by man, a jungle of cobblestones and cutpurses and bricks. Just as dangerous in its own ways, but inert. Predictable.

In a place where even the trees crawled with life, anything could be a threat. Any aspect of the flora or fauna could veil some lurking horror.

The longer he thought on it, the more Calay considered it a testament to his own fortitude that he was only tense and wary rather than borderline terrified. The swamp itself felt like a living, breathing, unsettlingly-organic enemy and he didn’t know which of its weapons it would draw first.

###

They made good progress once they set off again. The trail narrowed and grew sodden, each footstep producing a wet shlup, the mucky earth clinging to Calay’s bootsoles. Riss sent the birds to the rear of their little convoy, and Calay and Torcha took their leads. Gaz maintained guard at the rear.

Calay had never led a moa before. He anticipated it might set him further on edge, however once he took the creature’s lead in his hand, he found it conveyed a little safety. The giant, domesticated bird paced him harmlessly, towering over him and peering alertly all about. He held no illusions about the thing defending him should something leap at them from the shadows, but if nothing else he imagined having it at his side made him a far more intimidating target.

The bird walked along slightly behind him, its wide footsteps oddly quiet given the size of it. A faintly acrid smell wafted past his nose, and for a moment he thought it must be the moa’s feathers or its birdshit or something, but then Adalgis was asking up ahead, “Do you smell that?” and everyone murmured their uncomfortable agreement.

A gradual haze built in the air as they walked, and Calay’s sharp eyes spotted hints of motion out in the puddles of dark, muddy water beyond the trail. The motion, he realized after a moment’s observation, was bubbles. The hot spring, then.

On either side of the raised earth that made up their trail, the swamp began to bubble. It wasn’t the excited, frothing churn of something thrashing toward them in the water. It was more the slow, sludgey boil of a pot of too-thick gruel, viscous and unappealing. The waist-high mist that hung in the air appeared to be the source of the smell, a corrosive tang like some acid from a smithy. Calay reached down to his throat and untied his scarf, then wound it over his mouth and nose, securing the knot at his throat.

Beside him, his moa chirped irately, ruffling its long, scalelike feathers.

“I know,” he said aside to the creature, sympathetic. “This place stinks.”

The joke didn’t help his mood any. All the constant, bubbling motion in the background of the swamp drew his eye this way, then that, giving his instincts little false starts. Every time he thought he glimpsed threatening motion in the distance, all he saw upon further study was swamp bubbles. He noticed absently that the boughs of the spiny, thin-trunked trees that dotted the bubbling swamp were absent of spiders. In fact, apart from scattered bird calls and the buzz of insects, there were few signs of animal life at all.

That was far from reassuring. It just made Calay wonder whether the lack of swamp hens or stoats or wild pigs meant that something worse called this stretch of trail home.

Riss was the one who set eyes on it first.

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