The Ring of Winter (14 page)

“But we—”

“But we what?” Artus asked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Is there a reason we need to camp here?”

Judar’s fear-filled expression softened. “N-no, master. It is just… the swamp is very dangerous. I know of many men who have died trying to cross it.”

“Well, you’d better prove to be a better guide than the ones they trusted,” Artus replied coldly. To the bearers he snapped, “Hurry up, then.”

They marched for a few hours more, until night and the jungle itself stopped them. Clouds of biting insects followed the expedition relentlessly. Artus soon found the exposed parts of his arms and hands covered with welts. He must have been bitten by a hundred mosquitoes; he couldn’t count how many more he’d inadvertently swallowed or inhaled.

The more immediate concern for the explorer was the terrain. The ground grew more and more soggy as they trudged on. Pockets of thin, watery mud lurked beneath the carpet of fallen leaves and vines, and it wasn’t long before everyone’s boots were covered in the fetid stuff. Judar had taken to testing the ground with a long stick, but the bearers were less methodical. Soon, their haste proved deadly. As night fell, one of the natives disappeared into a hidden sinkhole. Before anyone could react, the weight of the pack pulled him under, with only a swirl of disturbed mud to mark his passing.

Artus leaned over the edge of the small pool. His arms were soaked from reaching into the murky trap in a vain attempt to rescue the man. “That’s it,” he said, stunned. “We camp here.”

For a moment, everyone watched the leaves settle back over the mud. Then the bearers lowered their burdens and knelt around their fellow’s grave, bowing their heads. Their murmured prayer was lost in the calls of night-stalking birds and animals crying out a farewell to the setting sun. Finally one of them took a broad, verdant leaf. With a stick of charcoal he produced from his own small pouch, the bearer wrote his companion’s name. One by one, the others spoke a single word of praise for the drowned man, all of which were added to the leaf.

“Just like the tombstones in port,” Artus said. “They’re writing his introduction to Ubtao.” He turned to Judar, but found the guide crouching in the dirt. With his fingers he traced something on the ground.

Artus crouched down, too, his attention drawn away from the solemn ceremony around the pool. Judar ran his fingers around the deep imprint again and again. “It is a footprint,” the guide hissed.

Drawing his dagger, Artus held the glowing hilt over the print. It had been made by something very heavy. The tri-clawed foot had to be twice as large as a human hand. “What made this?”

“Ubtao Zazqura,” one of the bearers said. Their ritual complete, they had formed a silent ring around Artus and Judar.

“Ubtao’s Children?” the explorer translated. “These are dinosaur tracks?”

Trembling, Judar closed his eyes. “Most of them hunt during the day,” he said in his high, grating voice. “Most, but not all. We had better pray whatever made this print is sleeping right now.”

Once they had cleared a patch of ground large enough for the tents and built up a small fire, the expedition discovered many such tracks. Some were smaller than the first, most were larger. Judar and the bearers spent much of the night staring into the jungle, snatching up spears and clubs at every nimble in the darkness. Artus, too, watched, but not in fear. For years he’d heard tales of dinosaurs, huge, ancient reptiles that once bad roamed the entirety of Toril. Some claimed they were the ancestors of modern-day dragons. Other scholars dismissed such theories as nonsense, stating serenely that the great lizards were only mammoth, plodding brutes that had become nearly extinct thousands upon thousands of years ago.

Nearly, but not entirely.

Chult was the one place on Toril where dinosaurs still flourished, though the forbidding jungles kept all but the heartiest explorers from ever seeing one. Artus could hardly contain his excitement. He leaned against a tree trunk that night, lost in imagining how wonderful and intriguing the dinosaurs might be.

The next morning, he and the rest of the expedition learned only how terrible the elusive giants were.

Seven

The first dinosaur appeared with the sunrise. The creature walked on four thick legs, moving with steady ease over the dumps of turf and shallow pools of swamp water. Its head was broad and rounded at the snout, with large glassy eyes that carefully scanned the area for a likely source of breakfast. Almost eighteen feet of barrel-like torso and stiff, twitching tail lagged behind the dinosaur’s head. Spines of bone stood erect along its back, connected by a thick webbing of skin. This sail was mottled with greens and browns and even more subtle strands of dark blue, though the rest of the creature’s body was the deep green of the jungle vegetation.

From what he considered a safe vantage, a dozen yards away and halfway up the trunk of a partly toppled tree, Artus studied the creature. It obliged his careful surveillance by perching atop a large cluster of boulders. For a time the dinosaur remained still, head held up to the rising sun, eyes closed.

Artus made a few notes on the creature’s coloration and size, using the back of Theron’s map. From his studies in the Stalwarts’ library, he guessed this to be an altispinax. Little was known about them, save that they were often sighted in Chultan swamps like the one in which the expedition was currently mired.

A gentle tap on his boot made Artus start and nearly lose his grip on the tree. Judar stood below, a long pole in one hand. The guide had discovered a stand of hearty bamboo near camp, from which he and the bearers had harvested walking sticks. “Here is your dagger, Master Cimber,” Judar said softly. “We are ready to go.”

After one last look at the altispinax, Artus slid to the ground. He took his dagger from Judar, then looked at the tip of his bamboo staff. The end was as sharp as any metal spearhead. “Obviously, this did the trick,” he said, slipping the dagger into his boot. Judar had borrowed the enchanted blade because the bamboo had proven too tough for any other knife.

A sound cut through the jungle then, unlike anything Artus had ever heard before. It was the deep bellow of a lion’s roar, but trilled like birdsong. Artus spun around. There, atop the cluster of rock, the altispinax sounded out again. Its mouth was open wide, enough for Artus to see it large, sharp teeth.

“The wind is blowing the wrong way for him to scent us,” Judar hissed. “What is he doing?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should stick around to find out.”

Artus and Judar hurried back to camp. The bearers had already shouldered their loads, and Artus quickly slid his smaller pack onto his back. He had a pretty clear idea where their path lay, but he checked their bearings with his dagger anyway.

“That’s odd,” Artus said as the blade stopped moving. “I thought north was more in that direction… .” He glanced at Judar, but the guide’s face was expressionless. “Which way?”

“South-by-west,” the guide said, pointing. “Is that still the way you wish to go?”

The explorer checked the dagger again. It agreed with Judar’s directions. “Er, yes,” he mumbled. “Lead on.”

The bellowing of the altispinax unsettled Artus. It rang through the jungle, silencing all the other animals. He wondered if the dinosaur was declaring its territory. At least he hoped so. Those teeth most definitely identified the altispinax as a carnivore, and one in the area would be dangerous enough.

Judar, too, seemed frightened by the creature’s cry. He shifted his pole from hand to hand, even as he used it to test the ground for sinkholes like the one that had swallowed up the unfortunate Tabaxi the night before. As Artus watched the guide nervously push on at the head of the group, he noticed the young man stumble now and then. The trek was taking a toll on Judar; fatigue had made him clumsy and drained the life from his eyes.

For their part, the bearers showed no fear of the sounds. They knew the roaring of the dinosaurs well. To them, the monsters were the Children of Ubtao, the most spectacular creation of the great Chultan god. Unlike many of the other gods in the Realms, Ubtao had little traffic with those who believed in him. The Tabaxi did not plead to him for boons or ask for visions of the future; they went about their lives, secure that events in the jungle unfolded as Ubtao wished.

Artus never learned how the bearers interpreted what happened next, whether they believed Ubtao had revealed his anger through his children or the dinosaurs had been acting upon instinct.

It started when the lone altispinax ceased its roaring. The silence lasted an instant, then the rolling call of other sail-backed dinosaurs came from every direction. Artus looked from right to left and scanned the trees and tangles of vines for signs of movement. Though the creatures sounded close, he couldn’t see anything. Then he remembered the coloration of the altispinax on the rocks. In this overgrown part of the jungle, it would blend in with the vegetation.

“Judar,” Artus said, “get the bearers to form a circle between those two large trees.”

Another roar, close at hand. Artus stared hard at a cluster of frond-heavy plants. The sound seemed to come from there….

The dinosaur opened its mouth to roar again, and the flash of hundreds of daggerlike white teeth gave its location away. Gods, Artus shouted in his mind, they’re close! They’ve probably been lurking around us since we left camp!

The altispinax turned, and its sail caught the sunlight bleeding through the canopy. The dinosaur growled, rolling its red-rimmed eyes. Artus dropped his pack, stepping slowly backward toward the bearers. He could hear the worried murmuring of the Tabaxi as they propped their packs around their position in a waist-high defensive wall. “Should we climb the trees?” Judar asked, gripping his bamboo pole with trembling hands.

Artus glanced at the closest trees. Their trunks were too fat around, their bark too smooth. The lowest branches lay hundreds of feet off the ground. The men would never be able to climb fast enough or high enough to avoid the dinosaurs.

“We’re going to have to make a stand here,” Artus said, stringing his bow. “Let’s just hope they’re not very hungry or—” he nocked a blue-fletched arrow “—that we can prove we’re not an easy meal.”

The red-eyed altispinax moved forward cautiously, testing the air with its wide nostrils. It casually kicked Artus’s pack. The three claws on its foot tore a hole in the sturdy canvas as if it were gossamer. With two gulps the dinosaur devoured the rations Artus had carried there, along with the rest of his clothes, a spare pair of boots, his canteen, and the remains of the shredded pack itself. That meager fare gone, it looked once more at the explorer and his trapped party.

All around the makeshift fort, the bearers faced sail-backed monsters with equally ravenous looks in their eyes. These were smaller than the one that had devoured Artus’s pack, but they also seemed more anxious to get at the men. The Tabaxi held their bamboo poles out like spears, prodding any altispinax that got too close. That only seemed to irritate the creatures further, especially since the sharpened points did little more than scratch the dinosaurs’ tough hide.

The brute in front of Artus roared, then started forward at a jog. As he went to draw the longbow, Artus saw Judar reaching for him. More precisely, the guide seemed to be pointing at the now-useless Mulhorandi amulet hanging around his neck. The white paste that damped its magical energy shone dully in the perpetual twilight beneath the canopy. “That can’t do anything for us,” Artus snapped, elbowing the slight youth aside.

He fired at the dinosaur twice before it crashed into the packs. One arrow struck a shallow wound in its wide forehead, right between its eyes. The shaft bobbed as the creature ran. The second arrow went right into the altispinax’s mouth. Blood drooled from the beast’s jaws as it chewed the arrow to pieces.

The altispinax almost leaped high enough to clear the pack standing between it and Artus. Luckily, it didn’t quite succeed. As it scrambled for footing, the pack fell to bits beneath its claws. More supplies tumbled onto the ground, only to be gobbled up by the smaller sail-backed monsters.

The bearer closest to Artus dropped his pole and gamely hacked at the beast with his machete. Artus himself was forced to use his bow as a club. He slammed it again and again across the beast’s skull, waiting for the wood to break. The bow never did shatter, though most would have. The sailor who had sold it to Ibn had been telling the truth; the weapon had been crafted by the servants of the elven court on Evermeet. Such bows, though not created by sorcery, always proved amazingly resilient.

With one snap of its powerful jaws, the altispinax bit through the bearer’s bamboo spear. Another snap, and the Tabaxi was dead. The man’s scream excited the dinosaurs into a frenzy, like hungry sharks spurred on by blood-filled water. The smaller creatures tore at the packs, while three or four larger beasts tried to climb over the crumbling barricades. Another bearer was pulled from the circle and immediately set upon by a half-dozen dinosaurs.

The red-eyed altispinax turned back to the embattled men, its snout and jaws crimson with blood and gore. It was then that a brilliant flash lit the area, followed by a roar of thunder louder even than the dinosaurs’ growling.

For an instant, everything stood still. Artus had the wild, irrational thought that Pontifax was trying to save him, reaching out from beyond the grave to extract him from one last impossible situation. Or maybe Ibn had summoned the Harpers. Then he saw Judar, crouching at the center of the baggage circle. A shiny stone and a handful of gray powder slipped from his fingers.

“You’re a mage?” Artus gasped.

But the guide was already on his feet and running, As he passed Artus, Judar grabbed him by the hood. “Quick!” he shrieked.

Drunkenly the dinosaurs stumbled about, shaking their heads or working their jaws in stunned silence. At least it seemed to Artus they were silent, though his ears were ringing too badly to tell for certain. The remaining bearers took advantage of the confusion to escape, too. They ran off in a different direction from Artus and Judar. Before the explorer could signal the surviving Tabaxi to follow, they had vanished.