Chapter 31: Teeth in the Water¶
Prologue — In the Field Notes of Perry Marlowe¶
Field notes. The twenty-first of Gozran, by the local reckoning — a reckoning I long ago gave up trying to square with my own. Weather: rain. The persistent variety, the sort that finds its way into the mechanism of a crossbow if a man is careless, and I am not careless.
Observation: the Stolen Lands are, before they are anything else, a catalogue. Each new march of country hands you a fresh specimen and a short, urgent window in which to decide whether it intends to eat you. I confess I have begun to find the work almost restful. We delivered our gnome safely to the capital — a Narthropple, loud, insufferable, and precisely the sort of man one is glad to have on the payroll — and I spent good coin on a sigil that renders me harder to see, which the evidence suggests is the soundest investment a small person can make in this country. Elroy, for his part, purchased runes calculated to make trolls regret their existence, and renamed his sword after himself. On the latter I have elected not to comment.
Hypothesis: preparation is the difference between a difficult day and a fatal one. The day proposed to test it. There was a river that hid teeth, and after the river a thing in the water that hid a great many more. I will say only this, and let the record carry the rest: when something the size of a house decides you look delicious, no quantity of method spares you the indignity. It merely improves the odds that you climb back out.
Curious creatures, the lot of them. Let us proceed.
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I. Homecoming at Stormfire Reach¶
Sunday (Sun), 21st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR — a day of cold rain
The Stormfire Reclaimers came home to their capital under a low grey sky and a steady, soaking rain, a gnome expedition trailing behind them and a cart draped in dire-wolf pelts and other grisly trophies — the kind of caravan that persuades the lesser predators of the Greenbelt to remember pressing business elsewhere. The Thorn ran high and brown past the new piers, swollen with the last of the snowmelt, and Stormfire Reach received its five rulers the way a frontier town receives anyone who comes back alive: with a few raised hands, a few shouted greetings across the mud, and the unspoken relief of people who had wagered on the living and won.
It had been a little more than a year now since the charter was sworn on the Thorn, the kingdom’s first Founding Day barely three weeks behind them. In that one turning of the seasons the capital had thickened from a scatter of canvas and green timber into something with streets and chimney-smoke and a name the settlers said with a touch of pride; and beyond it, the realm had grown enough to hold proper towns of its own, with all the small machinery that towns require. The rain that day fell on roofs that had not existed the spring before, and ran off them into a river the kingdom now thought of, quietly, as theirs.
Jubilost Narthropple and his explorers settled into Stormfire Reach without ceremony and without delay. The alchemist was already itching to ply his craft for the glory of Athanor; his mappers were already eyeing the unmarked country beyond the borders, hungry to set every ridge and watercourse of it down on parchment. Both, it was plain, would earn their keep many times over as the nation grew — a kingdom built on learning is never poorer for another loud and capable mind, however insufferable its owner.
Then came the unglamorous, vital business of outfitting for a war. A kingdom grown enough to keep towns is a kingdom grown enough to keep a royal runesmith, and the man was only too privileged to set his sigils to the gear of his lords. Anticipating the trolls that waited to the west, Elroy laid in runes meant to make giants and their kin rue the meeting, and had them worked into his cold-iron flaming blade — which he rechristened, with no apparent embarrassment, in his own honor.
He set the new sigils to the steel and named the result Jenkins Honor, and that, as far as Elroy was concerned, was that. He retired the old gauntlet he had fought with for so long; he had a finer set of jaws now, and meant to use them. Perry layered a fresh shadow-sigil and new potency into his worn leathers, and quietly repurposed a diplomat’s badge as an inspector’s badge — on the sound theory that a small man who looks official is a small man left alone. A handful of draughts were kept against need: resistances against fire and cold, a few healing tinctures, a vial that lent the drinker a swimmer’s ease, an invisibility, a single feather token. The rest of the accumulated treasure was sold off for a healthy purse and split evenly five ways, with a modest reward collected besides on an old promise — coin for a tomb they had emptied in a previous season, enough to stand a round and little more.
With steel newly runed and silver in their pockets, the company turned south. Two errands waited for them down the long grey reach of the Tuskwater. The first was the legendary man-eater that had been smashing fishing boats and swallowing careless men across that water for longer than anyone could rightly say. The second was a crop of black rattlecap mushrooms from the Mud Bowl, which the Old Beldame — the hundred-year, hag-blooded witch in her crooked house — wanted in trade. The mushrooms were the true prize, for the price of them she would surrender the one thing the Reclaimers needed above all others: the hiding place of Hargulka, the troll-king they had drawn a clean line toward on the map of the realm and meant to follow home.
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II. The Tuskwater Ford¶
They rode south through the wet of the day, and the rain did not let up. The country gave way slowly from the worked land around the capital to the wild margins beyond it, and the Tuskwater, when they reached it, lay grey and wind-chopped under the weather, its far shore lost in the haze. For the better part of an hour the company worked its edge, looking for a place to put horse and cart across without drowning either.
They found it at last: a narrow ford where the water ran no more than four feet at its deepest, shallow enough to wade. Someone had passed this way before them. A rickety wooden pier stood out into the current, half-rotted and grey with age, and a single guide rope had been strung the whole way across; a second hung snapped beside it, its frayed end trailing in the water like something drowned. It would carry horse and cart, with care. Elroy studied the crossing and the pier and pronounced it, in his way, a sound place for a bridge or a ferry, should the kingdom ever stretch this far south — the General was forever seeing the future of a place in the bones of its present.
Perry, who had no intention of slogging chest-deep through cold river water if a better option could be mixed, drew a briny tincture from the kit at his belt and drank it. Webbing grew taut and translucent between his fingers, and the water lost its menace, or most of it. Rust solved the same problem with rather more dignity and rather less alchemy: he climbed up onto Dog’s broad back and let the wolf do the wading, keeping his own boots out of the river entirely.
The crossing began. Hooves found the gravel of the ford; the guide rope took the weight of careful hands. They were perhaps halfway across — picking among the slick, shifting stones where the water ran knee-high and cold — when the river itself began to move.
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III. The Reeds That Walked¶
It began as a wrongness in the water: green-and-brown shapes rising and writhing among the rocks, tangles of vine and root and black bog-muck heaving themselves upward where there had been only current a breath before. Three of them came up out of the ford — towering, sodden masses the Reclaimers had brushed against once before in another country and had not forgotten. They had timed the ambush with a patience that did not belong to mindless things, and they seized the first moves before anyone could so much as set their feet on the streambed.
The nearest mass lashed out of the murk, a viney tendril cracking across the company like a whip — and Elroy threw himself bodily into its path, taking the blow meant for someone smaller and softer. It was the first of a great many he would eat before the river was done with them. A second tendril found him and closed, dragging him half off his footing, and for a moment the big man stood snared in the slow water with the rain sheeting off his beard, hauling against a grip of living rope.
The thing about a fight in a river, Perry understood at once, is that the water does not take sides — and it punishes the short above all. He pulled back toward the shore on his swimmer’s webbing, moving through the current with an ungainly grace that would have been comic under gentler circumstances, and from solid ground he began to work. His first read of the creatures came clean and certain: these were drinkers of lightning, storm-fed things that any stroke of it would only feed and strengthen, and their armor of matted vine carried one mercy folded into it — a slowness of mind that a sharp enough mistake could pry open. He set a bolt to his repeating crossbow and put it smoking into the nearest mass, and the acid of it kept eating long after the bolt had struck, hissing against the wet vine in defiance of the rain.
Grotdor had reached, by instinct, for fire. The first lance of ice he loosed skidded wide of its mark and found nothing; the sweep of flame he washed across two of the things barely caught at all, guttering and dying against the soaked vine and giving back almost nothing for the effort. Heat, for once, did not answer the way it liked to. He marked the lesson without a word and set his stance to learn from it.
Rust, mounted high and dry on Dog, murmured a benediction over the clustered company — a few plain words that settled across them like a steadying hand, each blade a fraction surer for it — and sent the wolf snapping in. The first bite closed on nothing but air and rain. The blessing would matter more than the miss.
Elroy wrenched himself loose of the grasping tendril with a roar, brought Jenkins Honor around in a flat, biting arc that opened the nearest mass to its sodden core, and then hammered his shield-boss in a clanging challenge that dragged the creatures’ attention off the softer targets and onto the one thing in the river built to take it. Beside him Dravyn drew a quick sigil and quickened his own limbs; the world seemed to slow a half-step around him, and the glaive came on with borrowed speed, carving a clean runic line through vine and root. He had already understood what Grotdor was learning the hard way — that fire was the wrong tool against drowned things — and he answered instead with a pulse of searing cold that flared out of his draconic gaze and rimed the vine where it struck.
Then the fight turned vicious.
One of the masses gathered itself and unfurled into a single sweeping lash, every tendril it owned flailing outward at once, and the arc of it caught Dravyn squarely. The blow landed with a weight all out of proportion to a simple strike of vine — it folded him nearly in half, drove the breath and very nearly the life clean out of him, and left the runelord swaying at the brink of going down into the cold water. The same sweep raked Grotdor and battered at Elroy; another of the things flailed across Rust and snapped at Dog; and for a long stretch of seconds the whole company stood bleeding green into the ford while the rain washed it away.
They answered with discipline rather than panic, which was the only thing that had ever saved them. Grotdor abandoned fire altogether and shaped his power into a reaching lance of cold instead — the one element these waterlogged things truly felt — and drove it deep. Perry kept the bolts flying from the shore, found the seam in a creature’s guard and held it open, and stole an extra step from a flicker of borrowed time to keep his angles true. Rust poured a heavy surge of warmth into Elroy, the worst of the big man’s wounds knitting shut beneath his hands, and then — to the surprise of everyone, perhaps himself most of all — drew the little dogslicer he so rarely troubled to carry and brought it down in a clean, devastating chop. Through the hunting-bond he shared with his wolf the cut carried more than its own weight; the stricken mass sagged and floundered, suddenly slow and graceless in the difficult water, and Dog tore in alongside to widen the ruin. Dravyn, lucid again and still quickened, mended his own hurts with a brief light at his palm, then spoke a single word of compulsion that bent one of the creatures face-down into the river and pinned it there gulping muck, while a touch of his cold left another newly brittle to the next hard blow.
Through all of it, Elroy was the line. He intercepted what he could and bellowed at what he could not, and he turned the slow water against the very things that had chosen to fight in it — baiting them into spending themselves hauling upright and wading forward, wasting their strength against a wall that simply would not move.
It was a grind after that, several long exchanges of chipping at creatures that refused, stubbornly, to fall quickly. The first to go was the one Perry had been burning; the clinging acid finished what a bleeding bolt had begun, and the mass at last deflated and sank back into the mire it had risen from. Rust was quick to it, drawing a flicker of borrowed vigor out of the thing’s unmaking. The remaining two were isolated and managed — one of them held face-down and choking on river water by Dravyn’s word, both of them set reeling by a jarring, discordant keening that Rust raised in his harsh goblin tongue, both of them shedding the last of their resilience under Grotdor’s patient cold.
Elroy ended it. With Dravyn’s frost having left the final mass rimed and glass-brittle, the big man swung the shield that bore his own boss up over his head and brought it down with everything he had on the creature’s frozen core. The blow was flawless, doubled in its violence, and the thing came apart all at once — a vast sound of glass breaking into a thousand tiny pieces as the last shambling mound crackled and shattered and was simply gone, scattered into the current to be carried off downstream.
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IV. The Far Bank¶
It had been a genuine trial — a fight pitched well above the company’s own measure, the kind that does not care how clever you are — and it had nearly taken two of them; Dravyn and Elroy had both walked the edge of it and looked over. But none of the five had fallen, and on the frontier that was its own kind of victory, and not a small one.
With the danger past, Rust moved among them and gave back what the river had taken, his hands warm where the rest of them had gone cold to the bone. One older hurt cleared as well, almost as an afterthought. The dullness Dog had carried out of the ichor beneath Candlemere — the slow fog that had clung to the wolf since that grim morning — finally ran its course and lifted. The animal shook the water from his coat and stood clear-eyed and whole again, and Rust’s hand rested a moment on his great head before they went on. Then the company put the ford behind them and stepped, at last, onto the southern bank of the Tuskwater.
The land there did not welcome them. The sun was sinking now behind the rain, throwing what little light it had left low and red across the water, and the southern lip of the lake gave onto a long stretch of muddy, crag-broken shore — three miles of crashing rock and bright stinging nettle, the kind that clings and burns where it brushes bare skin. And through the muck, plain as a signature, ran the drag-marks of something enormous: a great four-legged bulk, perhaps twenty feet across, that had hauled itself through the mire and left behind a furrow a man could lie down in.
Perry read the trail without needing long over it. There was only one thing it could be. The old monster of the Tuskwater — scarred, ancient, and by every story ever told of it indestructible — the boat-breaker and man-eater that the fisher folk spoke of the way children speak of the dark under the bed. The marks led down to the water’s edge and into the black beyond it, where the beast had gone to rest out the wet evening in its own element. None of them said aloud what all of them were thinking, which was that following it in there was a very poor idea indeed.
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V. The Thing in the Water¶
Nobody much wanted to follow it in.
They weighed the obvious caution — luring the thing out onto the shore, where five could ring it round, rather than wading into its own black depths to find it on its terms. But caution, in the end, lost out to expedience, and to Elroy, who had been waiting the better part of a year for precisely this sort of opportunity. He drank the vial that lent a swimmer’s ease, and then he reached for the older thing that lived in his blood now and let it answer. The change came over him in a roll of thickening muscle and lengthening jaw, the wolf rising up to meet the man halfway; and when it was done he bared a mouthful of teeth, raised his shield, and waded out into the dark, fishing for a fight. He had, he allowed, his reasons for going in wearing the beast’s shape.
“Hybrid form has extra protein.”
— Elroy Jenkins
He found his fight. Out where the water ran deep and the rain hammered the surface to a hiss, the silt bulged and roiled, and a dome of carapace heaved up from the depths — rocky, spiked, hung with the moss and algae of uncounted years, broad as a house and crowned with a scarred old face out of which two cold yellow eyes fixed on Elroy with a low and hungry keening. The thing rose a full twenty feet out of the mire and regarded him the way a man regards a laid table. Whatever passed for thought behind those eyes, it was thinking of supper.
The strike came on a long, snaking neck before anyone on the shore could close the distance. The bite caught Elroy full on — his shield rose to meet it and the jaws simply broke through, splintering the shield’s face and driving past it into the flesh beneath with a force that would have ended a lesser man outright. And then came the horror of the thing: the same jaws seized and held, and in one sickening, unhurried motion the great turtle gulped the warrior down whole. The wolf-shaped shield of the company vanished into the dark of the throat, snared and slowed and swallowed, the storm and the world shut out above him, and the beast turned its yellow eyes lazily toward the shore as though to choose its next course.
Elroy refused, flatly and furiously, to be a meal. From inside the gullet he set his claws into the wet walls of it and wrenched and tore and forced his way upward against the dark, and he ripped himself back out of the maw and into the open water — bloodied, slowed, half-drowned, but no longer swallowed — and had his battered second shield up and braced before the rain had finished sluicing the muck from his shoulders. The wolf in him, it seemed, did not care for being eaten any more than the man did.
The others were already in motion. Rust, still ahorse on Dog at the water’s edge, surged a great wave of healing across the water into Elroy and knitted back nearly all the beast had torn from him, then pressed a small steadying word onto Perry for good measure. Perry read the monster from the shore — its armor was formidable, the heaviest he’d measured in some long while — and found the angle that left it open regardless, and put an acid bolt into it, the clinging burn hissing and steaming against the streaming shell. Dravyn called a hovering mote of fire into being beside the brute; it flickered against the thing’s vast bulk and did very little, and the runelord — fire-blooded himself, and no stranger to the precise limits of what will and will not burn — marked the result and reached for other answers. Grotdor washed a sweeping sheet of flame across the carapace, and here at least the fire found something to bite, for the beast was in the end only an animal and owned no special defense against heat: the moss and algae caked thick across its shell caught and crisped to acrid black dust in a heartbeat. But the turtle beneath was a mountain of raw, scarred mass, and a mountain does not trouble itself over a grass fire. It barely slowed at all.
And there, with its great shell smoldering and steaming in the storm and the acid of Perry’s bolt still eating quietly into it, the beast gathered itself to move again — first of all of them, fastest in the water despite its monstrous size, those cold yellow eyes never once leaving the warrior who had refused to go down its throat. It loosed a bellow that rolled out across the lake and over the drumming rain, lurched forward through the churning black water, and came on for a fresh kill.
The hunt was not finished. It had, in truth, only begun.
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