Son of the Hero (19 page)

“Did you come this far before?” I asked Annick. She shook her head.

“We could cut over to the coast and follow the beaches,” Harkane suggested. “We’d make better time and it would be safer riding.”

“Until we met the first patrol,” I said. I took a childish pleasure in seeing him lose a little of his habitual smugness. “We’re not here to fight, at least not until we’ve got the sea-silver.”

“How about we bear east for a bit?” Lesh suggested. “We get back to higher ground, it should be dry.”

I flirted with the idea. It was tempting. But I finally decided against it. I didn’t want to stray too far from the west coast while we were outbound. I could only find sea-silver along that shore, and I had to have that.

“We’ll try to follow what’s left of the trail,” I said. “The swamp should cut down on the number of patrols we have to worry about. With better routes around the swamp, I doubt that anyone’ll be in it—unless they’re looking specifically for us.” I gave Annick an annoyed glance at that. Far from giving us a “cloak of invisibility,” her deadly excursion might draw the elflord’s forces down on us faster than ever.

The swamp. It was the first one I had ever been in. My expectations came straight out of movies and books. I don’t suppose that I was disappointed. Mucking through a swamp offers few attractions for anyone but a masochist. The only good thing about it was that the path never completely disappeared. There was always a safe way, if we were careful. At times I couldn’t tell solid ground from mud soup just by looking. The vegetation wasn’t even a sure guide. Some of it floated on goop that could almost pass for solid ground. And there were vast pools of algae-filled water, slimy mud pits, pockets of gas that erupted with a stench as a hoof pierced them. Eventually, I had to more or less rely on my danger sense to pick a path through the worst stretches. And even that couldn’t keep a horse from an occasional misstep on a narrow track. Moss-draped trees and ground mist complicated matters. But the worst part was the swamp’s fauna. We saw sawed-off dragons like the ones I saw when I first arrived in Varay, larger crocodilians gliding through stagnant waters—one of those had to be fifty feet from snout to tail. A four-legged reptile that Lesh called a snake scuttled into a pond as we approached the rock it had been sunning itself on. I
hate
snakes, even if they have legs.

“I’ll warrant there’s worse in this swamp,” Lesh said after I mentioned my distaste for snakes.

“Much worse,” Annick said. “Any creature of the elflord could be here, and some as are even older—web-footed wolves, lowland trolls, maybe even a full-sized dragon come to wallow in the stinking mud.” From the prickling of my extra sense, I knew that Annick was right about those other hazards.

Finding our way took all of my attention in the swamp. In a way, I guess that was a good thing. I couldn’t dwell on the dead men we had left behind. I knew they would be missed sooner or later. And when the bodies were found, we would have a lot of people and other beings looking for us. Sure, I hoped to cause a bit of confusion for the elflord along the way, but I wanted to get my sea-silver first. Anyway, slitting the throats of sleeping men wasn’t the kind of confusion I had figured on spreading.

We didn’t take specific rest breaks. Finding safe pathways gave us plenty of idle minutes. Our progress was maddeningly slow. I doubt that we averaged even one mile an hour all day. The sky remained heavily overcast. Three times we were raked by short but furious rainstorms. I decided fairly early in the afternoon to grab the next substantial piece of solid real estate to make our camp for the night. I was exhausted and felt so cruddy from the swamp that I couldn’t stand it. We were all dragging.

The solid land we found wasn’t much, but no one argued when I said that we were done for the day. The ground was wet after the rain, but it was firmer than most of it we had seen.

We had just started to settle in when I heard a sound that made me think of a pig running from the butcher, and my danger sense kicked into high gear. I got out a quick warning and drew my sword. Then we had a pack of wild pigs grunting and squealing around us—only they weren’t quite pigs. Compared to this batch of creatures, Miss Piggy is the beauty queen she thinks she is. The faces were vaguely porcine, down to the flat noses, but on bodies that looked like something dredged out of a really bad science fiction movie. Hairy, bloated bodies with obscenely muscled arms and legs: call it
Attack of the Mutant Body Builders
and show it in 3-D and Smellovision. They seemed equally adept at moving upright or on all fours. Standing erect, they weren’t too much shorter than me, but they could scratch their knees without bending over. They looked and smelled as if they bathed in outhouses.

Somebody yelled, “Trolls!”

I don’t suppose that was the most critical piece of information just then. I already had my sword out. When I saw the trolls, I pulled my knife as well. None of us had much chance to get set before they were on us, rising right out of the muck that surrounded our little patch of terra firma. What followed wasn’t at all pretty. The fight wasn’t one of those precisely choreographed battles that you see in the movies, where every move is planned and rehearsed down to the last detail before the cameras roll. There were no niceties of fencing technique, no elegant combinations. We couldn’t drive the creatures off. They wouldn’t retreat, not a single step. All we could do was kill them and try to keep them from returning the favor. Butchery. Slaughter. But it wasn’t as simple as working in a charnel house. The trolls carried long knives, hatchets, and clubs. They could fight back—and did. But all they seemed to know of tactics was to run straight at one of us, screaming and waving their weapons. Maybe they thought they were ugly enough to scare us to death. No sense of order or tactics at all. Not much sign of intelligence either. They just charged out of the swamp screaming insanely, right into our weapons.

When they
did
get to us, they did fight, viciously, insanely, on the attack every instant. If there had been just a few more of them, they might have succeeded in putting us on their dinner menu. That, Annick assured me afterward, was exactly what they would have done. Annick did show that she could handle herself against enemies who weren’t sleeping, though. She was a berserker, howling as rawly as the trolls. Teeth bared, a blade in each hand, she waded into the fray as if she had been looking forward to it all year—like the prom. Maybe I looked like that too. There were no mirrors handy. Once I crossed blades with a troll, my training—and that strange directional itch that was the proprietary danger sense of the Hero of Varay—took over.

There’s really no way to fully convey what a fight like that is like to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It’s running into an airplane propeller with a blade of your own and hoping you’ll come out the other side in one piece. It’s a riot of food blenders, and if you make a single mistake, you come out pureed. It’s something Americans haven’t faced since Vietnam—hand-to-hand combat, deadly face-to-face fighting, win or die. The only alternative to gut-wrenching fear is insanity. You’re no longer a civilized being. You’re either a feral carnivore or you’re dead. Your mind and senses either get hyperactive, flooding you with sensory input, or they short out completely, leaving you to fight on mere instinct … or on training drilled in so thoroughly that it’s become automatic. Blood and sweat abound in incredible quantities. The smells become overwhelming. You wield your weapons. You try to look in every direction at once, watching for the next possible threat, the next blade or club coming at you … and you try to get your blade there first.

Hack and lunge. Knee an enemy in the groin, kick him in the shin, step on his foot, spit in his eye—whatever it takes to give you that little extra advantage, the millisecond or two you need to get a blade in to finish the job. Feel the tug of resistant flesh as your blade skewers a living being—but don’t think about it, not then. Drag the blade free. That can be difficult. Sometimes you have to brace your foot against the body to drag your sword loose of clinging flesh. The hafts of your weapons get slippery with sweat and blood. Your fingers cramp. The steel of your blades runs red. The ground gets treacherous underfoot.

The four of us met the blind charge of the trolls. Harkane and Lesh stayed close together, back to back, covering each other. Annick and I were more widely separated, so our “formation” was almost a triangle, with the corners just far enough apart that our swords wouldn’t catch on each other’s. We fought for an eternity or two—maybe ten minutes. When it was over, there were ten dead trolls on our little patch of land and at least two more had fallen back into the morass they had come out of. Even more may have dropped back into the swamp. There was no way to be certain.

When the fight ended, the four of us could do no more than stand where we were while we caught our breath and while the adrenaline of our battle frenzy faded from our systems. There was a numbness that came up behind the insanity to cuddle us, a paralysis that was more mental than physical. If there had been another wave of the trolls just then, I’m not sure that we could have defended ourselves. But there wasn’t. Slowly, we came out of our trances and looked around at each other, verifying that we had all survived. Everyone had minor cuts, scrapes, and so forth—though they almost escaped notice at first in the general bloodiness. We were all exhausted, especially Lesh, the oldest of us. After grappling with the trolls we were all covered with blood and sweat, and smeared with the muck that had coated them. We smelled at least as bad as the trolls, and there was no clear water around for us to wash in—not nearly enough.

Lesh looked around and found a piece of ground that wasn’t covered in gore or bodies and plopped down. “I hope there’s no more waiting their turn,” he said. “I don’t think I could handle it.”

“With a little luck,” I said, having trouble getting even that much out. I hobbled over to Lesh and took his spear. “Harkane, let’s dump these bodies.” Harkane nodded. We used the long weapons to lever the dead trolls back into their muck. Those dam trolls sank like lead, even in the thick gumbo of the swamp. We tried to push the bodies away from our tiny shore, but they sank too fast.

And one of them wasn’t dead.

I had already rolled three or four bodies into the bog—slow work. I was wedging Lesh’s spear under the next troll when he made a grab for my leg. My danger sense didn’t warn me soon enough to sidestep him. Maybe the exhaustion that came after battle was responsible for that. And I was a bit off-balance. I fell backward heavily, and the troll was on top of me before I could do anything. The spear fell away and I couldn’t get at my sword or knife soon enough. At least the troll wasn’t armed either.

He was strong, insanely strong, and heavy. His arms weren’t simply as long as a gorilla’s, he had the strength of a great ape too. he swung at my head, and even though I twisted away enough to keep him from connecting solidly, his fist scraped my face so roughly that it felt as if he had ripped the cheek off. I took a swing of my own, but I couldn’t get much oomph into the punch while I was on my back. His head was out of reach, and beating on his chest didn’t seem to affect him at all. I bucked, and we rolled to my left. I got a little freedom and managed to put a little force behind a knee to his groin. He grunted but swung at my head again. This time he stunned me with the blow. My vision went fuzzy and I started to flop over on my back again. The troll went for my throat, but he never got there. The point of a sword emerged from his neck as my eyes cleared. Annick was behind him, leaning forward.

When Annick pulled her sword free, blood gushed from the troll’s neck, over my face, clouding my vision again. I may even have blacked out for an instant. I know I was unsteady when I got up, and it was several minutes before Harkane and I could return to the work of dumping the rest of the trolls. But once burned was more than enough. We went around and made sure that the rest of the trolls were dead, poking them with the business end of the spears to make sure that we didn’t have any more possums.

After that chore was finished, we did what little we could to get the crud off us, particularly around our cuts. We didn’t need six kinds of infection.

13
The Mist

None of us slept much that night.

A bugle call at dawn heralded our next threat. The call was barely audible, smothered by another heavy fog. We got on the trail and pushed on as fast as we could, making more mistakes with the footing in our hurry. We heard horns several more times, tooting sometimes intricate melodies. One horn would answer another. It didn’t take too long to deduce that it was more than standard military calls. The music was a telegraph system, and I had no way to read the messages. I assumed that they were about us.

We aimed as close to north as the terrain permitted. If my dead reckoning was working, we would be level with the first of the beaches where the sea-silver grew early that afternoon—if we weren’t held up too long by the swamp or by the patrols looking for us. Every time I heard the horns, I cursed Annick silently. Once in a while, I couldn’t restrain an angry glance her way. She didn’t seem to notice.

Despite the inconvenience they caused, the persistent fog and intermittent drizzle may have helped us, may have concealed us from the hunters. The rain certainly washed off some of the stink remaining from the swamp and the trolls. We continued to hear horns, quite close a couple of times, but we got through the morning without seeing any of the musicians.

Near noon, a new force entered the hunt, a
presence
. It had to be the elflord himself, casting a magic eye about for us, quartering the land to find the intruders who had killed his minions. The first time I felt the probe, I tried to think a blanket of invisibility over us. We stopped, and I concentrated on making us the little people who weren’t there. Maybe I couldn’t put up an actual shield like Parthet, but I didn’t have anything to lose by trying. I felt the probe pass. My danger index lowered fractionally. But I didn’t know whether or not we had been spotted.