‘This is stupid.’
‘If you’re going to insist on complaining then at least find something new to say.’
‘We’re going to die.’
‘Everyone dies.’
‘Well, that’s bloody encouraging, thank you.’
‘Just keep walking, and try to look angry,’ I said. Fighting the urge to shout at him to go faster was at least distracting me from the lingering pain of my wounds, not to mention that it would ruin the mummery that had thus far seen us successfully pass by two pairs of sentries.
‘It’s hard to look angry when I’m trying not to fill my boots with something beside my feet.’
‘Keep walking. If the hounds find our scent all this will be for naught,’ I reminded him.
The sun had risen shortly after I’d ambushed the wizard and his bodyguard. They’d stared at me with wide eyes as I sprang from the ditch with outstretched arms; neither had a chance to scream before I bowled them over. It had torn my shoulder open again, but that small hurt had been a small price for the element of surprise.
The soldier had tried to draw his sword, a mistake given that I was already upon him. He’d drawn less than half of it before my hand closed on his neck. There was no time for finesse and I’d simply tightened my fist until I no longer felt any resistance. I’d been more careful with the wizard given how tricky they could be, and had angled my arm to catch him in the throat as part of my tackle, trusting to the pain and inability to breathe to divert his attention from trying to use any of his rings or bracelets. He’d been a feisty one though, leaving me with little choice but to kill him. I’d been careful to leave his head undamaged, and quickly cut it off and stowed it in an improvised sack while Crow stripped the soldier’s body.
As a result, I was now clad in the ill-fitting uniform of a Penullin soldier, and Crow in the robe and cape of the necromancer, the dark materials and poor light hiding the bloodstains. I was optimistic that the necromancer’s brain would yield its secrets once I was somewhere safer where I could bend my will to the task. If Crow noticed the bleeding sack I carried he made no comment on it, which suited me. So disguised, we had picked out a route that offered the largest gap in the sentries and begun making our escape from the camp, keeping to the lowest paths where the morning mist was thickest.
I steered us back towards the outlying guard-posts nearest the swamp, and was feeling quite optimistic when a party of four soldiers came walking through the mist, the vapours having hidden them as well as they were hiding us. They barked a challenge at us, but Crow had replied fluently in their own tongue, his tone brusque and conveying a sense of insult. They stepped aside to let us pass, but they were watching us closely and I’d have wagered gold that they were going to put a spear in our backs as we passed.
Nonetheless, I considered it an impressive feat on Crow’s part given how strong the scent of fear radiating from him was. We were close to the refuge the swamp offered now, but a glance over my shoulder confirmed that the guards were still watching us.
‘Heya, wizard!’ one of them called. ‘A word with you.’
‘What do I do?’ Crow whispered.
‘Don’t move,’ I said, closing my hands to aid my concentration.
The guard called again, and I heard the jingle of armour as they started walking towards us.
‘What do I do?’ he said again, louder this time.
I kept my attention on the swamps. ‘Look mysterious.’
What I was attempting was a risk, but one I thought worth taking. My wind construct was a familiar tool that came readily to mind, and I worked as quickly as I could. Reworking the potency was a relatively simple task, but moving the point of origin was harder than I thought given that I couldn’t see the ground I was aiming for.
Somewhere behind us a trumpet honked three times, then thrice more. It meant nothing to me, but the guards who had called to us now began moving with new vigour.
‘Come here, you two!’
I could hear the thud of their feet now; it was time. I released the construct and felt it ripple into being, hopefully in the right place.
‘Stand where you are!’ The guards were close now, slowed by the steep slope and the wet grasses.
‘Make up your mind,’ I called back at them, while next to me Crow’s fear was quickly curdling into terror. I grabbed his arm before he could bolt. ‘Trust me,’ I said, staring into the mist.
Even as doubts touched me I saw the heavy, milk white vapours of the low ground ripple and begin racing up the slope towards us in a thick, pearly wave. It first swallowed us, then the guards, and even as close as I was to Crow I could barely make out his outline. I held fast to his arm and woke my night-vision; it couldn’t penetrate the silvery mist but it did show me the ground as a darker strip, letting me lead us safely down the pockmarked and uneven slope.
There was no time to argue or explain, so I simply threw Crow over my shoulder and began to race down the slope. I stumbled into one of the screaming heads just as we reached the first thickets of tall reeds and rushes. There was no time for subtlety so I simply pushed it over and let the water muffle its scream. I kept wading, trusting my innate sense of direction to keep me heading in the right direction, that being a straight line away from both the Penullin camp and Falkenburg. We passed beyond the mist too early for my liking, but then I had used my wind spell to push as much of it towards the camp as I could, all but emptying the basin the wetlands nestled in.
‘I’m going to vomit’ were Crow’s first words since I’d picked him up, and I quickly set him down. We were in a pool that was only ankle deep, and thick with strings of slimy little eggs and rotten leaves.
‘Never thought I’d be so glad to see a swamp,’ said Crow, his hands on his knees as he stared at the far bank of the river we had just crossed, which in truth was little more than a wide, slow stream that oozed rather than flowed between the tussocks and sandbanks that stretched out towards the west. He waded a bit deeper in before squatting down and washing his face.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what do we do now?
I considered the bloodied sack tied to my belt. The necromancer’s brain wasn’t getting any fresher, and dragging it through a swamp wasn’t going to help either, but then neither was getting caught up in a fight I couldn’t win.
‘That way,’ I said, pointing deeper into the marsh. ‘Where the dogs cannot find our scent and we can stop for a while.’
‘Did you do that? With the mists?’
‘Yes.’
He scratched his beard. ‘You don’t look like a wizard. Not any sort I’ve ever seen.’
‘I’m not a wizard.’
‘Here now, you just said you were.’
‘No, I did not. We should go.’
He grunted. ‘Do you think they’ll be chasing us?’
‘The wizards might.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ Crow muttered as he finished blasting air and water from each nostril. ‘We’ll have to go slowly. The mud can be treacherous.’
As we soon discovered, that was something of an understatement. I led the way on the simple logic that anything that could take my weight could take his. The glutinous mud was greedy, and almost immediately sucked the sandals from his feet. It wasn’t satisfied with just his sandals though and with every plunge into its depths, another layer of it stuck to our feet and legs until it felt like there were chains wrapped around our ankles, forcing us to slow down now and then to scrape it off, which in places meant sinking up to our knees. Crow was not a young man, and however brief his captivity had been, it had taken its toll and we had barely entered the swamp proper before his strength gave out.
He barely protested when I hoisted him onto my back, something which I should have done sooner since he weighed less than my armour had, and it let me move at a much better pace, even if it came with the price of his breath on the back of my neck. The mists burned off sooner than I would have liked, and as the sun rose the heat brought out more of the stinging flies as well, forcing me to wrap torn strips of Crow’s robes around my face in a tattered veil. My skin was thick enough that they didn’t bother me overmuch, save that they all seemed intent on flying into my eyes, nose and mouth.
The afternoon came and went as I walked, and despite the flies’ best efforts, I found myself enjoying the simplicity of engaging in a purely physical challenge. My attention was fixed on what I could see and feel, and while it was taxing, by the time that the day softened into dusk my mind was clearer than it had been for some time. And, even better than that, I was now finding firmer ground under my feet more often than not as it began to rise from the depression that had fostered the swamps. The last hours of walking felt the longest, as they always did, but when I set Crow gently upon the ground again it was on firm grass.
‘It’s a shame you had to stop, I was just nodding off,’ he said as he rubbed his legs.
I fought the urge to ask what that meant. From what I remembered of our first meeting, trying to ask Crow questions was like telling the wind which way to blow. ‘There’s a stream beyond those bushes where the water is still sweet and good,’ I said instead. ‘We’ll take our rest and carry on at first light.’
‘Can you make a fire?’ He pointed at me and flexed his fingers and I took his meaning.
‘Yes. We should be safe enough to do so here. You gather some wood and I’ll see if I can find something to eat.’
‘Nothing too spicy though. I’ve a delicate stomach.’
‘If you don’t eat, you will die, and I will have carried you for nothing.’
He shook his head, then laughed wetly. ‘You’re a strange one, son. Strangest by a country mile for sure.’
I watched him as he wandered off, still shaking his head. I would never understand humans, nor why I was trying to in the first place. The sooner I was rid of this form and their infectious mannerisms the happier I would be. After a long drink from the stream I sat down and sent my sorcery rippling out from me, a gentle probe seeking anything edible. The water had helped still the gnawing in my belly but it was a temporary measure at best. I felt the light touch of the small creatures hiding and hunting around us and pulsed an urge to come to the drinking hole along those same strands of sorcery, then waited.
They came from all directions, startling Crow while he dug a shallow pit for the fire. After the horrors he had seen it was quite comical watching him scrabble back from rabbits and a young doe as if they were ravening beasts. I quickly snapped the necks of the ones I wanted, and dispersed the traces of sorcery fogging the minds of the others, creating a small stampede as they came to their senses and fled the predator looming over them. Crow’s initial protest at this ‘unnatural’ form of hunting vanished as the reality of the impending meal took hold.
‘There’s not much dry wood around here,’ he said, gesturing to the pitiful bundle of sticks next to the hole. I looked up as his voice trailed off. ‘What in name of Hel are you doing to that poor squirrel?’
I looked at the red thing in my hands. Using my sorcery had made me think of Tatyana, and I’d started seeking any trace of the connection without realising it. ‘Skinning it?’
‘Skinning it doesn’t mean that you squeeze everything out of its arse.’
‘If you think you can do better, do it yourself.’ I offered him the squirrel but he pushed it back at me.
‘There isn’t anything anyone can do with that.’
‘You skin the rest then,’ I said, tossing him my knife. ‘I’ll get the wood.’
‘I reckon that’s a better idea.’
I wasn’t one to waste a bounty and quickly devoured the squirrel before heading down the lee of hill where the bushes were more plentiful and the ground drier. It also gave me the opportunity to do what I’d been putting off the whole afternoon.
I sat down on a jutting slab of rock and upended the sack hanging from my belt, catching the necromancer’s head and weighing it in my hand for a moment. I needed to do it sooner rather than later, and then seemed as good a time as any. I prepared to crack it open with a rock but stopped just as I was about to bring it crashing down, my attention caught by my nails.
They were still as dark as my skin, but they now jutted from my fingers for almost the length of my knuckles, and tapered in a way that human nails could never be. I curled my fingers and experimented with willing them back to a more human size and shape, but unlike my teeth and the fighting talons hidden in my arms, , I felt no response at all. Their shift seemed to be a more permanent, physical sort. I stared at them a while longer.
Why was this happening, and when did it happen? I hadn’t paid attention to anything as mundane as my nails for some time.
I peeled the skin back from the skull as I considered what it might mean before cracking the bone against the rock as if it were a boiled egg. My thoughts remained elsewhere, at least until the gut-wrenching taste of his brain brought me back to the present. I fought the urge to gag and chewed the mouthful slowly, exposing as much of my tongue to the limp matter as I could. Ghostly images soon began to flash across my vision, glimpses into a life lived behind walls and in dark rooms. I choked more of it down, chewing through it until images of war and slaughter replaced those of books and bitter disappointments. I took another large mouthful and closed my eyes.