D& D - Greyhawk - Night Watch (27 page)

Garett let go a small sigh of relief. He and Blossom started on again, but Burge stood his ground. “Do you hear that?” he asked, when, only a few paces on, they stopped and waited for him.

Garett knew how sharp Burge’s hearing was. The half-elf stood stock-still, listening, an odd, puzzled expression on his face. Garett listened, too. All he heard were the birds and the hissing of the rat and the rustling of the leaves in the breeze. “Hear what?” he asked quietly.

Burge frowned. “I don’t know,” he answered curiously, tilting his head. “It’s gone now.” He shrugged his shoulders and waved them on. “Maybe I imagined it. This place is getting to me.”

But Garett knew Burge better than that. The half-elf advanced through the clump of cattails, his senses more alert than ever. Every little sound made him stop and listen. The smallest motion, even the trembling of a leaf, caught his gaze. His left hand never strayed far from the dagger on his belt.

When they were through the cattails, another knot of mangaroo roots lay in their path. Garett scanned the water quickly for serpents that might be nesting under the roots, then climbed out first and helped the others up.

“It’s back,” Burge announced as he wiped sweat and moisture from his face with the back of his sleeve. Crouched on a particularly large root, he stared around, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound’s origin.

Garett stood up straight. He could still see the black water down between his feet through a gap in the roots. The footing was slick. He steadied himself by positioning the tip of his staff carefully and leaning on it. He strained to hear over the familiar sounds of the swamp. Just over the calls of the birds, the drone of gnats and mosquitoes, the croaking of frogs, he thought he heard something.

Thump.

It was faint, just loud enough to catch his attention. It came again. Thump. Twice more, then it stopped.

“I heard it, too,” Blossom affirmed, pointing with her staff. “Straight ahead.”

“An animal noise?” Burge questioned doubtfully.

Garett shook his head. “Not like any animal I’ve ever heard.”

“Lizard men,” Blossom whispered tensely.

Garett didn’t think so. “If the stories are even partially true, you wouldn’t hear them until their kill-wires were around your throat.”

They traversed the wide knot and slipped carefully back into the water again. It was shallower here, reaching only to their knees, but the muddy bottom sucked stubbornly at their boots. The shadows were growing darker all around them, and the spears of sunlight that penetrated the leafy canopy came in now at smaller angles.

Thump, thump.

They stopped in their tracks and stared at each other. “That was a lot nearer,” Burge muttered nervously. Blossom didn’t say anything. Instead she drew her large knife from its sheath and swiftly shaved one end of her staff to a sharp point.

When the sound stopped, they waded forward again. A tangled blanket of green leaves and tiny white flowers floated on the water before them. Bees hummed and buzzed happily around the sweet petals, and the trio, deciding wisely not to disturb the insects, detoured around. The silty bottom began to rise abruptly. Soon they found themselves on a muddy bar where only a few bushes and a pair of mangaroo saplings grew.

Then something moved among the bushes. The branches shook, and the leaves rattled. A fat crocodile, its toothy jaws gaping, eyes gleaming with hunger, charged them. With a shout, Garett leaped back, but his boot stuck in the soft, sucking mud, and he fell awkwardly sideways, his arm sinking halfway to the elbow as he tried to catch himself.

He felt the hot rush of the massive predator’s breath on his face. Then, with an angry, desperate cry, Burge drove the steel point of his sword down into the beast’s thick neck. The toughness of its hide, though, stopped the thrust before the creature was seriously hurt. Turning toward its attacker, it snapped its jaws savagely. Burge jumped clear, but the monster’s clawed feet dug into the mud, and it scrambled with agile swiftness after him. Again Burge moved, but the slimy muck played him false, just as it had Garett, and the half-elf fell backward.

Blossom put herself instantly between her comrade and the crocodile. The huge reptile opened its jaws wide. There was nothing womanly or beautiful about the watchman’s face as she drew back with her makeshift spear and slammed the sharpened point down through the beast’s exposed lower palate. Startlingly, the beast emitted a sharp, hissing growl of pain, the first sound it had made. Its scratching claws hurled mud into the air, and its tail clubbed wildly back and forth. Blossom gave a savage growl of her own. With all her might, she leaned on the spear, pinning the crocodile.

Then its jaws snapped shut, and wood splintered. But Blossom and Burge were up and out of its way. Hissing, the beast turned, blood spraying from its mouth with every exhalation.

Garett drew himself up out of the mud and charged again. He barely had time to get his sword out of the sheath. He leaped sideways, more respectful of his footing this time. With all his bodily strength, he swung his sword downward, not at the crocodile’s armored head, but at a more vulnerable foreleg, catching it just above the clawed foot, chopping completely through it.

Again the monster screamed its pain, and the mud roiled as it thrashed around. Burge rushed forward, his sword raised to strike, but in the thrashing, the crocodile’s unpredictable tail clubbed him across the shins, sending him tumbling. He rolled awkwardly in the mud, but found his footing and came up with his blade ready.

The crocodile, though, had had enough. With a massive sweep of its tail, it glided over the slick muck and disappeared into the water. A faint trail of red lingered on the black water, then diluted away.

Blossom came forward with the shattered end of her staff, bent down, and picked up the creature’s severed foot. She eyed it with smug satisfaction before she offered it to Garett. “The claws will make a fine adornment,” she told him.

Garett shook his head. “"You keep it, then,” he told her. “I’ve never been one for jewelry.” He wiped the blade of his sword on his mud-splattered tunic and returned it to the sheath on his back. That done, he bent down by the water and rinsed his hands and face.

Blossom crouched down beside him. With her knife out again, she proceeded to whittle another point on her shortened staff. Her face was streaked with dirt and sweat, and the leather-wrapped braid that hung over her right shoulder was half undone. Wisps of blond hair gleamed about her forehead in a stray sunbeam.

“We go back now, Captain.” It was not a question, but a statement.

Garett shook his head as he rose. He lifted his sword belt over his head and set the weapon down, then stripped off his tunic. The short coat of chain mail was too heavy and too hot. He shrugged it off and cast it aside. To hell with the expense of replacing it, he thought. The quilted jerkin underneath also was too hot, but at least its thickness offered some protection from the mosquitoes and flies. He slipped it off long enough to wring a heavy stream of sweat and water from it, then put it back on. His tunic was utterly ruined anyway, so he crumpled and tossed it beside the mail coat.

“You can’t mean to go on,” Blossom protested, slamming her knife back in its sheath. She glared at him, no matter that he was her captain, and she didn’t bother to disguise or temper her anger. “Where there’s one croc, there’s always more; you know that. Look at us! We’re not prepared for this! I mean, you’re in mail, for pity’s sake, and we don’t have a lantern between us! It’ll be dark soon. What are we supposed to do then?”

“She’s right about that,” Burge commented as he, too, stripped down to his jerkin and cast his armor aside.

Blossom fell silent and slunk off to the side to remove her own garments and add her own coat of mail to the pile. She gave a low groan of despair when she found two more leeches on her stomach and called for Burge to remove them with his salt.

Garett crouched down again and drank water from a cupped hand. Indeed, he wasn’t prepared properly for this kind of journey. The whole idea had begun with a dream, and he had followed it with a dreamlike certainty of success. In doing so, he had put his friends in danger. Blossom had every right to be mad. He was mad at himself.

“All right, we’re going back,” he announced, standing up and turning toward his comrades.

But Burge held up a finger to hush him. “I don’t think so,” the half-elf said in an alert whisper that immediately put Garett on his guard. “Something’s up.” Beside Burge, Blossom also stood tensely alert, listening.

Garett noticed it at once. The silence. He glanced up at the trees. The birds sat there, on the limbs, in the leaves, but unmoving, nervous.

Thump, thump.

As if reacting to a signal, the birds scattered across the swamp, shut off from the safety of the open sky by the dense canopy of vines and ivy and mangaroo limbs that covered the highest treetops. Like colorful streaks, the birds darted off, vanishing into the deepest shadows and recesses. For an instant, the air was aflutter. Then silence again. Not a croak from the frogs, not even the buzz of an insect.

Thump.

Somewhere close by, a thick branch gave a loud crack. The sharpness of the sound lingered in the air before the echoing crash and splash that told of its fall.

“Oh, damn,” Burge muttered under his breath. He drew his sword and gripped the hilt in both hands. “It’s big.”

There was still nothing to see in the marsh gloom, at least nothing that Garett could see with his human eyes. But the tension crawled on his skin like the power from a lightning flash. He drew his own sword and jerked free one of the throwing stars from the band around his right biceps.

It rose up out of the brackish water on the far side of a clump of mangaroo roots, a gray, amorphous shape that continued to rise until it brushed the branches of the trees. Then it fell, sinking below the water until it emerged again and slithered over the knot of roots. It came toward them, sensing them somehow, staring toward them with glowing green eyes, a great, horrible wormlike thing, or a leech of enormous size, with gill-iike appendages on either side of its gaping maw.

Thump. The immense gills expanded, like thin, membranous wings that glistened translucently as the late sunbeams touched them. Thump. They flattened again, folding against the monster’s smooth body as it fell upon the shallow water and glided swiftly toward the mud bar.

Blossom threw her handmade spear at the creature and ran, slipping in the mud and falling with a loud splash, full-length into the water at the bar’s edge. She scrambled up and shouted for them to run. Garett waited just long enough to watch the spear dangle in the soft flesh and fall out. Then he slapped Burge on the shoulder, and they followed Blossom as fast as they could.

Plainly, though, that wasn’t fast enough. Garett glanced over his shoulder. The worm slid easily over the water, rising above it occasionally with an almost graceful contraction, as if to keep them in clear view, while the silt sucked at their every step and they splashed noisily, crashing through cattails, almost becoming tangled in the net of white flowers they had detoured around earlier.

The worm suddenly towered over them. When it crashed down, its bulk sent a shock wave through the water and the land that nearly toppled them.

“Up there! ” Garett cried, pointing to the nearest knot of mangaroo roots. While the others scrambled up, he turned and hurled this throwing star with all his strength. The silver missile bit deeply into the worm’s flesh, to no discernible effect at all. Garett hurried up to join his comrades.

The great maw thrust up from the water at them suddenly, and, for an instant, Garett saw into a blackness beyond description. Reflexively, he swung his sword, drawing a deep incision through the gelid, bloodless lips of that horrible mouth. At the same moment, he flung himself against his friends, hurling them all backward off the knot of roots and into the water.

They ran furiously, fearfully, half-swimming through the swamp water, unmindful of any threat from snakes or crocodiles or quicksand. Upon another knot of roots, Burge planted his staff, taking no more than a single thrust to push it deep and set it. The worm crashed down upon it, impaling itself, and thrashed itself free an instant later.

“I wish I had a bow! ” the half-elf shouted as he splashed through a patch of tall saw grass.

“You could sink a hundred arrows into that thing,” Blossom answered breathlessly, right behind him, “and it wouldn’t matter!”

Garett stared back desperately over his shoulder. The saw grass hid them somewhat, and the creature stopped momentarily, raising its great head high to seek them. The eyes! he thought. Green and glowing, glowing like Mor-denkainen’s sword! “The eyes!” he shouted aloud with sudden certainty. “That’s where it’s vulnerable!”

“How do you know?” Burge demanded. They were out of the saw grass and heading for another knot of mangaroo roots. A serpent glided over the water between them and the knot, and Blossom used her hand to launch a wall of water at it, sufficient to drive it away.

“I know, that’s all!” Garett shouted back.

They scrambled up onto the knot of roots. The worm spotted them instantly and came charging across the saw grass. “Well, the knowledge doesn’t do us much good,” Burge answered as they scurried precariously across the knot and leaped into the water at a run again. “Anyone’s a meal for sure who gets close enough to stick a sword in that thing’s eyes!”

“Maybe we don’t need to get close!” Blossom cried.

But before she could say more, she gave a sudden yelp and plunged under the surface. Burge did the same. Both rose almost instantly, spitting water and coughing. Burge went under a second time and came back up with a curse on his lips. Garett, trailing just slightly behind so he could keep an eye on the worm, realized they’d found a deep trench. It wasn’t more than a few yards, but it was enough to tell him they were lost. They’d encountered nothing like it on the way in. That was the least of his worries, though, he thought, as he planted his feet on the bottom again and glanced back at the worm. The beast was gaining on them again.