A Discourse in Steel (26 page)

Towering cypresses and dense undergrowth rose like walls to either side of the narrow waterway, green curtains that blocked out most of the daylight. But now and again Rusk could see far enough into the vegetation to spot ruined structures between the tree trunks and roots: toppled stones and obelisks, pieces of sculpture half-buried in the humus or sticking out of pools of stagnant water. A serpent motif appeared in one way or another on most of it.

A crash and splash from deep in the underbrush to their right brought the crossbows up, and Mors loosed a shot at nothing Rusk could see.

“There!” Mors shouted.

“Where?” shouted another man.

“Close your holes,” Rusk barked.

The sound faded and there was nothing more.

An animal, Rusk supposed.

“You saw something?” Rusk called.

“Thought I did,” Mors said, his high-pitched voice chagrined. “Must have just been a shadow or something.”

“Eyes sharp,” Rusk said. “Don't be edgy, though.”

“Aye,” said the men.

Trelgin leaned forward in the bow of the boat, the dowsing rod in his hands, its glyphs shining as it worked. He looked to Rusk like some kind of droop-faced figurehead and Rusk had to resist the impulse to crawl across the boat and push him headfirst into the dark, shite-stinking water. He could see the magic of the dowsing rod pulling Trelgin in the direction they were going.

“Still on 'em?” Kherne asked Trelgin over his shoulder. The big man, sweating with exertion, stank almost as much as the swamp.

Trelgin's receding chin vanished into his neck for the moment it took him to nod.

“Still on them,” he said. “And they're not far.”

All of the men, and not just Trelgin, had taken the bit for the chase. They wouldn't have stopped pursuit even if Rusk ordered it. Not now. He'd just have to play things out. He still held out hope that Channis would end up dead, but for the moment, the seven blades on his tat said otherwise.

The water deepened and the two boats maneuvered through a series of jagged dark stones that jutted above the waterline, Kherne and Varn cursing throughout. They broke through the undergrowth, and emerged into a wide lake, almost a league long and dotted with treed islets here and there, and stands of rushes. Rusk blinked in the late afternoon light.

Lilypads and weeds covered much of the surface of the lake but the structure at its far end drew his eye. What must once have been a grand bridge stood in ruins. Chunks of it had fallen into the shallow water and lay there still, like half-toppled grave markers. But the thick support posts that once had supported the span straddled the lake at even intervals, like the severed legs of giants.

Trelgin still held the dowsing rod, its glyphs still glowing.

“That way,” he said, nodding at the broken bridge and sucking at some wayward drool. “They're that way.”

A distant shout, faint but unmistakable, turned Nix around and spiked his heart rate. A man's voice, not a beast's growl—the guildsmen.

“I heard it,” Egil said, still rowing.

Nix wanted to shout, “We don't even have Channis anymore! He's dead!” but that would have done no good. The guild owed Egil and Nix payback and they wanted Rose dead. If they'd come this far, they'd keep coming.

“Stubborn bunch,” Egil said.

Nix nodded. “We should ambush them. Can't be that many of them.”

“We get Rose what she needs first,” Mere said, and her tone brooked no contradiction.

“Aye,” Egil said.

“Aye,” Nix agreed. “But then they die.”

To that, Mere said nothing, but returned to ministering to her sister.

Nix looked back across the lake, but the distance and trees and islets blocked his view. A shadow fell on the boat as Egil rowed them between the bridge posts, steering them around the remnants of the span that had fallen into the lake. Nix examined them as the boat passed by, noted the repeated appearance of serpents and snakes.

As they passed out of the shadow of the bridge, Mere gasped, grabbed her head, and exclaimed in pain. Rose whimpered, loosed an outburst of nonsensical guild cant.

Egil dropped the oars and crawled forward to Mere's side.

“What is it?” the priest asked.

Nix snatched the oars before they fell off the boat. “Mere…”

Mere looked up, blinking, her eye watering.

“I…something,” she said.

“Your nose,” Nix said.

“What? Oh.” She touched her nose with a finger, held it before her to examine the blood.

“Mere?” Egil asked. He drew her close.

“I think…he's near or…” Mere trailed off and looked at Nix across the boat.

“Who?” Nix asked.

“Odrhaal, maybe. He's near.”

Nix sat up straight. “Why do you say that?”

She closed her eyes for a moment and waved a hand. “There's a…regard in the air. It's hard to explain. But it's a mindmage. It has to be.”

Rose moaned and a trickle of blood leaked from her nose. Mere opened her eyes and dabbed it.

“Are you all right, though?” Egil asked her. She looked tiny beside him.

She patted his muscular forearm. “I'm all right. And this is a good thing, Egil. It means Nix was right. Now we just have to find him.”

“Wait,” Nix said. “Can you…contact him?”

“She's bleeding, Nix,” Egil snapped.

“It's all right,” Mere said, and patted his arm again. “It's hard to explain but the mental regard is…diffuse. It's like it's here but it's sleeping or not aware or…”

Nix didn't pretend to understand. He knew only that they must find Odrhaal and find him soon. But Mere's words had given him hope.

Egil kissed the top of Mere's head, gently touched Rose's pale face, and retook his place on the rower's bench.

The priest set to the oars with renewed vigor and Nix felt lighter by half. They kept moving the rest of the day, Nix kept an eye behind them for the guildsmen but saw no sign, though he couldn't see very far. The lake narrowed and grew shallower as the sun started to set, became more choked with trees, rushes, and ruins, and finally ended altogether. Egil pulled them up on the muddy shore as darkness started to fall. The priest ascended to the top of a rise and hurriedly came back down.

“The water picks back up just the other side of this rise,” Egil said. “We drag it over and camp for the night.”

“Aye,” Nix said.

Behind them in the distance, another hissing roar sounded. Birds burst from trees at the sound and the incessant croaking of the frogs temporarily abated.

“Following us,” Nix said.

“What is?” Egil asked, and Nix could only shrug.

Nix and Egil each took an end of the boat and lifted, leaving Rose in it, and pushed and pulled it over the muddy rise. They used broken statues for stepping-stones as they ascended. On the other side, the gentle slope of the rise descended to another lake, much larger than the other. Treed hillocks walled it in. Islets and fields of rushes dotted it here and there. The water looked black in the twilight. Nix figured if they could get across the lake and atop the far hillock, he could climb a tree and look around for the spire he remembered. They had to be close. Had to be.

“The guildsmen will have to camp, too,” Nix said. “They can't travel the swamp in the dark anymore than we can. We should be all right here.”

They couldn't risk a fire so they huddled in the boat. Stars glittered faintly in the vault above them, but the darkness was deep. Ordinary growls, howls, and slitherings sounded out in the darkness, an occasional splash of water from the lake, a shriek of a creature caught by a predator. The air was alive with buzzing and the insects bit and poked constantly. Inspired, Nix took one of the blocks of incense he kept in his satchel and lit it with a match. The smell granted them relief from the reek of the mire and the swarms of insects.

Merelda sat beside Rose with her arms wrapped around her knees. She turned sharply at this sound or that out in the darkness, obviously uncomfortable. It occurred to Nix that he and Egil had spent the last decade sleeping in tombs and other dark places. They were accustomed to it. Mere was not.

He reached into his satchel and took out the magical crystal eye he always kept at hand. He crawled over to Merelda, took her hand, and put it in her palm.

“Take this, Mere.”

“What is it?” she whispered.

The Deadmire seemed to demand whispers of those who would speak at night.

“A light,” he said. “A gewgaw, Egil would call it.”

“I'm fine,” she said.

“I know that.” He tapped the crystal and spoke a word in the Language of Creation. The etched eye opened, casting a beam of light. It glared at Nix, as if irritated to be awakened. Insects, attracted by the light, started to swarm it.

“Dim,” Nix said to the crystal, and the light dimmed.

“It's going to draw bugs,” he said to Mere. “It'll stay alight for a while.”

“How long?”

He shrugged and smiled. “It's temperamental so it's hard to say. Keep it close so the beam doesn't attract attention from anything but bugs. Try to rest.”

“All right.”

Egil nodded appreciatively at him. “I'll take first watch,” the priest said, and rose from the boat.

“No argument,” Nix said, and used his satchel as a pillow. He slept fitfully. Rose murmured restlessly through the night, occasionally blurting out a curse or name or cry of pain. When Nix took his watch, he climbed to the top of the rise and looked out on the swamp behind them. In the deep of night it looked like nothing more than a blanket of ink. The guildsmen, too, must have opted against a fire. Nix had no idea how much distance separated them from their pursuers, but he thought not a lot.

Cracking branches and a serpentine hiss from his right brought him to his feet, falchion and axe in hand. He saw nothing and heard nothing more. He descended the rise and took the remainder of his watch near the boat, near Rose and Mere and Egil.

“Are you sleeping?” he whispered to Mere.

“No.”

“How is she?” Nix asked. He could not see Mere or Rose in the pitch of the night.

“I think she's failing,” Mere said.

Nix did not reply, but the words stayed with him through the rest of the night.

Nix was on his feet the moment dawn lightened the sky. A mist rose from the lake and crowded the shoreline. Birds called; insects chirped. The wind rustled the trees.

They needed to get started before the guildsmen. He moved to Egil, snoring as always, and was about to shake him when he realized that Rose was awake and looking at him. Mere was asleep beside her.

Rose smiled at him. He smiled back.

She swallowed and whispered, “I feel like I'm disappearing.”

“I'm not going to let you,” he returned in a whisper.

“I know,” she said.

Egil grunted, stirred, and broke the moment's spell.

“Time to go,” Nix said to him.

“Aye,” Egil said. He cleared his throat, spit, and slapped his face a couple times.

Mere opened her eyes, saw that Rose was awake, and hugged her. She asked a question with her eyes, or maybe her mind, and Rose shook her head. Nix read the substance of the conversation in Mere's expression: Rose wasn't better. She'd just had a reprieve.

Egil slid the boat into the lake, leaped in behind it, and took his place by the oars.

“You still feel Odrhaal?” Nix asked Mere.

She nodded.

“I feel him, too,” Rose said.

“We have to be close,” Mere said.

Rose's face bunched with sudden pain. “I need to lie down.”

She lay back on her sister's lap, closed her eyes, and soon was asleep or lost in the swirl of her splintering mind.

Mere, her jaw set, stared out at the water.

Egil rowed them over the lake. He used the islets and rushes to block the line of sight from the shore, in case the guildsmen came over the rise. The mist lingered, cloaking the boat, and it was like Egil was rowing them through clouds.

Within an hour the sun had risen fully, dispelling the mist. Its light dappled the water and Nix saw that where most of the Deadmire's ponds and pools and streams had been stagnant and murky, the lake was unusually clear and deep. Nix leaned over the back of the boat as Egil pulled them quickly through the water. He could see fish swimming in the depths, long green fronds swaying in unseen currents, and stone obelisks, lots of them. The frequency with which the obelisks and other large, cut stones appeared increased until finally Nix could see entire structures sitting on the bottom of the lake. The water distorted his view, but he made them out as tombs, mausoleums, hundreds of them. Topiary featuring snakes and serpents appeared here and there.

“Look at this!” he said.

“What is it?” Egil said, leaning over the side.

“No, look at
that,
” Mere said.

Nix looked up and saw what Mere was looking at. “Shite.”

He'd been so preoccupied looking under the water that he'd missed the dome of a metallic tower, the view of it partially obscured by a small islet, poking out above the waterline. The body of the tower reached to the lake's bottom, a silver cylinder that descended thirty or forty paces down. A stairway made of the same metal spiraled around the exterior of the tower. Like a serpent, Nix thought.

Egil steered the boat around the smooth dome.

On the other side of it the stairway terminated in a landing and a smooth metal door. There was no handle on the outside, though there was a round keyhole.

“Enspelled,” Egil said.

Nix nodded. “The whole tower, probably. I've never seen metal like this.”

“You didn't see this last time though?” Egil said.

“No.”

Egil kept rowing and they left the drowned graveyard and its unplumbed riches behind them. When they reached the far side of the lake, they pulled the boat onto the muddy shore and prepared to trek up the tall hillock. Egil prepared a makeshift sling to bear Rose, a satchel almost, from the canvas cover that had come with the boat. When it was done, he carried her as one might a child.

“Your gewgaw is prettier than the ones I carry in my satchel,” Nix said. He touched Rose's face and she turned her cheek into his hand. She was burning up.

Frowning with concern, Nix started up the hillock.

With Egil huffing and sweating under the weight of his burden, the three of them picked their way through the undergrowth and cypress. The sodden landscape was choked with creepers, brush, and willow. Swarms of bugs were everywhere. Toppled and rotting trees blocked their way constantly. The air felt close, pungent with the Deadmire's reek. But the ground firmed as they ascended, and when they reached the top, Nix picked the tallest willow he could find and climbed it as high as he dared. From there, he looked out and down on the center of the Deadmire.