Chapter 32: O, Green World¶
Prologue — Dravyn¶
The world here is green, and the green is hungry.
I have come to understand the wilderness as a single creature wearing many shapes. A turtle the size of a war-cart, its shell a fortress, its jaws a gate that opens only inward. A tree that was no tree at all — weeping tendrils and a serrated mouth where bark should be. A swamp that breathes rot and waits with the patience of a thing that has eaten before. Each of them reached for my companions. Each of them tried to fold them into the dark. Each of them learned, in its turn, the geometry of refusal.
Twice I watched the green world close over Elroy, and twice he tore his way back into the light through teeth that were not, this hour, a man’s. Once the world closed over me. There was mud, and there was the cold arithmetic of a single heartbeat left to my name — and there was the old whisper my master taught me to fear, rising to fill the silence. Step no further, it said. Burn it all to ash and call it justice.
I answered it as Xin would have me answer. Wrath is not a fire to be spilled; it is an angle to be held. Nethys did not let the dark have me. I rose. The line held.
And when the day was nearly spent, six laughing things crept from the hedgerows wearing the voices of weeping children, and they spoke aloud a name I have come to hate. Hargulka. The troll-king knows our faces now. He has set his hunters on the open road to find us.
Good. Let them come. The angle belongs to me.
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I. The Turtle’s End¶
The Tuskwater cliffs — a hidden pool below the nettles
The rain had not let up, and the legend had not let go.
They were still knee-deep in the secluded pool below the Tuskwater cliffs, where a hidden trail through the stinging nettles dropped to a circle of dark, deep water at the river’s edge — and Elroy Jenkins was still clamped in the dripping maw of Old Crackjaw, the half-mythical snapping turtle that had drowned fishermen and swallowed boats since before any of them were born. The acid Perry had seeded the evening before was already eating at the great shell, smoke threading up from the wet hide. None of that troubled the turtle. It hauled itself toward the shore, ignored the knot of fire Dravyn had set burning against its back, and bit down with the unhurried certainty of a thing that has never once gone hungry.
The strike landed with appalling, perfect force. Jaws meant to crush a boat’s hull found the gap in the General’s guard and very nearly folded him in half, stripping away better than half his vigor in a single chomp; the water around them bloomed dark. The turtle dragged him fully into its mouth, though it had not yet swallowed him, and there it held him — wedged between teeth the length of daggers, the cold reek of mud and old rot closing over his head.
Elroy, undaunted as ever, declined to panic. He strained to wrench himself free and found the legend’s grip far beyond his strength; a clamped snapping turtle does not unclench for shouting or for steel. So he did the only sensible thing a man in a monster’s mouth can do. He hammered loudly on his shield, bellowed a challenge no beast could ignore, and raised his guard, drawing every ounce of the creature’s attention onto himself and away from his friends.
“Easy now — this’ll set you right.” From thirty feet off, still mounted on Dog’s back, Rust let a warm surge of life pour across the water and into the General, the worst of the bite knitting closed even as Elroy hung in the teeth. Then the oracle slid down from the wolf’s back; and Dog, for all his courage, circled at the water’s edge with his hackles up and his tail low, plainly unnerved by a reptile the size of a wagon.
Perry studied the thing with the cool patience of a man reading a ledger, and the ledger told him nothing he wanted to hear. There was no soft seam to pry at, no flinch of fear, no weakness to exploit — only a mountain of meat and a jaw that opened in just one direction. Dissatisfied, he looked again, harder, and the answer did not change. So he loaded his repeating crossbow with the acid-tipped bolts he favored and put one clean through the webbing between shell and limb, opening a fresh bleeding wound and seeding the burn deeper into the creature’s flesh.
Then it was Dravyn’s turn, and the wizard made wrath into geometry. A great greasy hand of green acid-light erupted from his staff and seized the turtle so completely that the beast reeled, its hide smoking, its limbs dragging suddenly slow. Dravyn used that grip the way a lever is used: he hauled Old Crackjaw bodily backward, and the wrench of it finally tore the jaws off Elroy and spilled the General free into the shallows. The wizard sustained his hovering flame, and the fire found the shell again.
“Heat answers,” Grotdor said, and drew his aura up around himself like a second skin of light. He lanced the turtle with a controlled lance of flame, then — judging the angle clean enough — loosed a cascade of fire across the shallows. The wave caught both the turtle and poor Dog; the wolf twisted aside from the worst of it, singed and yelping, but Old Crackjaw took the full wash of heat and sagged at last, badly hurt.
Free of the jaws and back on solid footing, Elroy answered the way he answered everything — with his sword and his whole heart behind it. His first swing went wide; a flash of bloody-minded determination sent the blade back around to bite home through the soft white flesh of the underbelly. He waded the last stretch of churned water to dry land, banged his shield, and taunted the creature again, happy, as he put it, to burn the beast’s movement on chasing him.
Old Crackjaw clambered after the General, snapping. Its first bite missed by a hair against the raised shield; the second connected for a solid, grinding mouthful, blunted to a bruise by the shield’s timely turn. But now the patient poison was doing its quiet work. The acid and the bleeding gnawed at the legend from within, and try as it might, the turtle could not shake them — its own venomous wounds proving as dangerous as anything the company had thrown at it.
With the General clear of the immediate jaws, Rust judged offense the better part of mercy and let a benediction settle over the company, every hand a fraction surer for it; then he drew a shield of divine force around himself for safety’s sake. Dog, fur smoking and ears flat, trotted back to his side, wanting no further part of the reptile that had nearly cooked him.
Perry, meanwhile, was done waiting. He called on the blessing of Erastil he carried in his stag-helm to fix Old Crackjaw in his aim and leave the creature exposed, then drove a bolt through the gap between shell and limb. The shaft sank deep, and the turtle shuddered.
Dravyn loosed three darts of solidified force that streaked unerringly across the pool and hammered the wounded beast down toward its last — close, but not quite closed. Grotdor needed only a finishing blow and could not buy one for love or money; his fire kept finding the water instead of the shell, every burst striking the pool and rising as a hiss of steam while Old Crackjaw stood firm in the rain, its ancient, ill-tempered eyes fixed on the General.
It did not need to be bought. With the turtle bleeding and burning on borrowed time, Elroy stepped in and drove his sword home one final time, the blade sinking into the soft underside of the terror of the Tuskwater. The great turtle screamed. Asked how he meant to finish it, the General answered in the only way Elroy ever could.
“Now, we eat you.”
— Elroy Jenkins
He cut clean through the legend’s jaw, and the blood spilled out into the dark water, and a horror that had haunted the river-country for a generation was simply, finally, gone.
Elroy’s draught of swimming was still in him, and so the company searched beneath the surface for whatever the turtle had been guarding all these years. They found a striking sickle half-buried in the mud — the last earthly trace of some overconfident druid the beast had eaten long ago. They found a strange purple cord, every thread of it inscribed with amethyst carvings and elven runes, that could lengthen to any need a traveler might have; Grotdor took charge of carrying it. They found a pair of finely worked elven boots, which Grotdor also claimed. And there was a charm of returning besides, owed them for laying the legend to rest — Perry took it into safekeeping, though Elroy laid immediate claim to the thing for his shield, taken with the notion of a guard he could hurl and have come spinning back to his hand.
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II. Rest, and a Year Turned¶
The wilds of the Tuskwater shore
The kill earned them rest, and they took it in the wilds: a long, well-deserved pause beneath dripping trees, far from any hearth. Elroy set to mending his battered shield; the others restored what the fight had spent and shook the grueling weariness from their limbs. In the quiet, each turned to the slow business of growing into what the year had made of them. Perry sharpened his eye for the land and its hidden signs. Elroy worked at a roar he could now hurl a great distance across open ground — fitting, he noted dryly, for a man with a wolf’s howl already living somewhere inside him. Dravyn deepened the devotion to Nethys that had answered him in the dark. And the company, between them, came up from the pool a little harder and a little surer than they had gone into it.
It was, by the reckoning Perry kept so carefully, a little more than a year now since the charter had been sworn. The founding of Athanor fell on the second of Gozran (Apr), and that first anniversary lay only a handful of weeks behind them — the young nation barely turned a year old, its markets finding their feet, its second-generation timber rising along the Thorn, its borders still ragged and provisional at the edges. The spring rains came down on all of it the same, on the capital at Stormfire Reach and on five wet, weary Pentarchs camped at the lake’s eastern shore.
There was the question of where to go next, and the answer had two parts. First the mushrooms — the black rattlecaps owed to the Old Beldame, that crotchety, fey-touched hermit of the western marsh who had promised, in exchange for a decent haul, to tell them very nearly anything they wished to know of the Stolen Lands, the troll-king’s stronghold foremost among it. And then the trolls themselves. For all the kingdom’s civic business could be set aside for a season, the troll raids could not: Hargulka’s warbands had been sowing a low, grinding disquiet through the outlying marches, settlers uneasy and patrols stretched thin, and the council’s instinct, spoken plainly in the field, was to cut the root of that trouble before another month’s strain set into the realm. The governance of a year-old nation could wait a few weeks more. The thing eating at its borders could not.
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III. The Mud Bowl — Black Rattlecaps and the Thing That Was No Tree¶
The Kamelands, south of the Tuskwater
South they went, along the Tuskwater and out into the Kamelands — broad, flat, rain-soaked plains where a traveler could see for miles in every direction once clear of the treeline. The land rolled away barren and grey under a low sky, and somewhere ahead, in a pit between the hills, grew the prizes they had come for.
It was a grim, boggy spring day when they reached it. The air thickened as they came — not merely with moisture but with rot and old petrichor, the reek of decay rising on warm steam off a wide bowl of slowly lurching, bubbling mud. Vast mounds of fungus thrived on its banks, some towering ten feet and more; and there, growing in clusters among them, were the rattlecaps themselves: tall, black, egg-capped mushrooms barely ten inches high, named, it seemed, for their thick hollow stalks. The vapors alone were a hazard. The company breathed shallow and pressed on, the stench stinging eyes and throat until, by main stubbornness, they grew used to it.
Then Elroy did a thing he had until now only suffered: he reached for the curse he carried and used it on purpose. The change came over him — the wolf-touched hybrid shape, all hackles and hard muscle, the bandit Kundal’s bite turned for once to deliberate ends — and he drew a long breath of the foul air and read in it what the others had not yet named. Perry studied the same shape: one of the towering fungus-trees, its willow-like tendrils curling slowly in and out like a waiting hand. It was no plant at all. It was a vast, ravenous, ambush-feeding thing, rooted only loosely in the mud, that grew where careless travelers came too close and never left.
The plan was simple. Perry would vanish and pick; Elroy, the most obvious morsel on two legs, would take a wide berth and draw the creature’s notice; the rest would whittle it down. The investigator drank a draught of invisibility and faded from sight. And the moment the General closed to within twenty feet, the thing that was no tree lurched upright to its full twenty feet of thrashing vine and serrated maw, and the green world reached for them again.
A vine lashed out and chewed into Elroy’s shield; the thing wrapped him and tried to reel him in and found, to its evident frustration, that the General was very heavy and did not come. Dravyn answered with cold, his hovering fire and a gaze of icy malice setting the creature shivering in its roots. And here the company made the one mistake of the fight: what they thought they learned of the thing, they learned wrong. The reading told them fire would slide off it like water off wax — and so, believing it, they held their kindler back and resolved to do this the hard way, Grotdor’s flame banked behind clenched teeth while the rest of them hacked and froze and bled.
Perry, unseen, plucked his first black rattlecap clean from its stalk. Rust lanced the creature with a shaft of cold moonlight; Dog kept close at his heel. Elroy, held fast, strained against the vines and found them rubbery and supple, his blade sliding off without purchase. The fight settled into a grind — and the dice of the thing, so to speak, turned cruel: blow after blow went wide of the writhing mass, and the creature would not fall.
Then it surged forward, crushing three of the precious rattlecaps to pulp beneath it, bit the General, and — in a move he knew all too well — simply swallowed him whole. Down the gullet went Elroy, into the second monster to eat him in as many outings, with the weary patience of a man who had been here before. Inside, in the dark and the wet, holding his breath against the digestive venom, he shrugged the poison off entirely and observed, with grim humor, that the thing was built like a cow: four stomachs to it, and him in one of them.
Perry kept picking. Mushroom after mushroom vanished into thin air, and Dog — who could see his master’s quarry disappearing one by one into nothing at all — grew thoroughly, comically baffled at the sorcery of it. And it was the invisible investigator who at last read the creature true. Fire had never been its ward. That had been a phantom, a thing misremembered; the truth was that the monster was weak to the killing energies of decay, that acid could not touch it, and that it was slow, for all its reach, to turn aside a blow.
By then the thing had nearly undone them. It crushed Dravyn low with a sweep of vine, and when the wizard reached for his magic a lashing tendril answered with terrible, surgical timing — a blow that drove the breath and the will out of him at once and folded him senseless into the mud, a single heartbeat from the dark. But the dark did not keep him. Nethys, by the wizard’s own oath, would never let it; the strike claimed only his consciousness, not his life. Rust would haul him back from the edge before the day was out.
Elroy, swallowed a second time — a champion’s ward now blunting the worst of the acid bath — set to hacking at the thing from the inside. And in the end it was the element they had spent the whole battle fearing that finished it. Resolved at last to test the fire-ward that had cost them so much caution, Grotdor sent a darting shape of flame through the creature, and it burned full and unmitigated, more fiercely than anyone had let themselves expect, because the ward had never existed. The thing that had eaten Elroy twice erupted into flame and died, and the kineticist watched it burn with the grim, vindicated satisfaction of a man who had been right all along, and named himself, over the pyre, the Burninator.
The bitter irony was lost on no one. They had held their fire the entire fight on a false reading and won the slower, bloodier way, only for a single stroke of flame to end the thing outright. Dravyn, hauled back from the dark and dusting mud from his plate, allowed that he should simply have kept his fire ready from the first.
Rust set to mending in the long minutes that followed — a heavy surge of life pulling Dravyn whole, a sea-blessing from Grotdor, careful tending all around — until the battered company stood sound again. The harvest, in the end, was a generous one: more than enough black rattlecaps gathered under cover of invisibility to satisfy the Old Beldame’s bargain, even counting the several the monster had trampled. Among the muck the creature had hoarded they turned up a worked emerald grasshopper and a curious burr-edged shield, both claimed by Elroy — though he doubted he’d use the shield, allowing that if he ever needed something pierced, he’d just bite it — and a loose topaz that went into Perry’s pocket. The Mud Bowl had given up its prize. The road to Hargulka ran, somehow, through a hermit’s tea.
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IV. The Crying Voice — Hargulka’s Hunters¶
The eastern Kamelands — a creek crossing
The Old Beldame’s hut lay across the water to the north, but there was no urgency to reach her and a river crossing stood in the way, and so the Pentarchs resolved to claim a few more Kameland marches to the east first — the next crossing lay that way, and the troll raids that gnawed at the kingdom’s edges were reason enough to push the survey outward — before doubling back to the hag. There was talk, too, of the day when they might simply send hired adventurers out through the kingdom’s offices to walk the endless map for them, rather than tread every march of it themselves.
So east they went, across miles of flat, barren, rain-dulled plain, the kind of country that swallows days. A stray mountain goat here, a distant horse or a rare bird there, the cart rolling and rolling beneath a grey, weeping sky, every footstep plodding in the wet. The marches passed without threat, one after another, until the monotony itself became a kind of lullaby — and then it broke.
Ahead lay a shallow creek, easily forded, and a scatter of recently felled logs. Pinned beneath one of them, fallen into the mud, was a small figure, crying out in raw and desperate need — a leg trapped, a voice cracking, a plea for anyone, anyone at all, to come and help. Near at hand lay the long-dead corpse of a druid, his cloak bare and caked with filth. Elroy sloshed forward to help.
It was a trap, and it sprang. The hedgerows disgorged the ambush: vile, hyena-bodied things with the faces of badgers and cruel cloven hooves, horse-sized and razor-toothed, their eyes flashing crimson in the grey light. There were six of them, masters of an uncanny vocal mimicry — the pinned, weeping figure had never existed; the cry had been bait, woven from a stolen voice. And these were no mere wandering beasts. They spoke aloud as they came, in the common tongue, laughing the wrong-pitched, decibel-sick laughter of their kind, and what they said turned the whole long campaign on its hinge.
“I think this is the folks that our Hargulka was talking about. They smell like shit and they look like idiots.”
— one of the hunters
The troll-king’s hunters. Hargulka knew the Pentarchy’s faces now, and had loosed his pack onto the open road to find them — the first direct, hostile reach of the troll-king’s hand, and an end to any pretense that he was merely a rumor seen in the wreckage of burned hamlets.
They opened with mimicry and menace. One of the pack threw out a plaintive, cloying cry — a child begging coin to buy shoes for a dying mother, the most manipulative sound a cruel throat could shape — meant to bewitch the company and draw them stumbling into the teeth of the rest. But the Pentarchs had grown, this hard spring, far beyond the reach of such a snare; the cry slid off every one of them, and the hooves had to do what the voices could not. One stamped at Grotdor, who twisted aside from the first strike before the second found him; another seized Elroy and held him fast, off his footing, in the churn of the creek.
Dravyn answered with fire. Rays of heat and flame lanced from his hand and one of them struck the lead hunter with terrible, perfect precision, searing it where it stood — and yet the creatures proved astonishingly tough, for even that scorching, devastating blow left the beast merely scuffed and snarling, a measure of just how much punishment the pack could absorb.
Elroy stepped in and brought his sword down on the nearest hunter in a single ruinous arc, the blade biting so deep that the blood squelched out of the thing in a dark rush; then he hurled his far-carrying roar at one of the rearmost of the pack, dragging its wrath the whole width of the battlefield onto his shield. Perry studied them with a cold eye and laid them bare — their flanks exposed, their footwork slow, the chaos and cruelty plain in them — then loaded acid and put a bolt into the wounded hunter.
“Let’s show them who the real beastmaster is,” said Rust, and sent Dog tearing into the bleeding hunter; the wolf’s jaws found their mark and bore the creature down toward its end. And then the oracle did a thing he rarely got the chance to do — he waded in himself, the heavy hooked blade of a horse chopper in his hands, and finished the beast outright. It was his first kill with the unfamiliar weapon, and the hook very nearly lodged in the carcass; he had to set his heel and wrench it free, unpracticed and grimacing, before he turned and laid a guiding word on Grotdor.
“Clean and quick,” the kineticist said, and stepped to the General’s side, and unleashed a cascade of fire across the pack. One hunter was caught full in the heart of it, seared and knocked flat to burn in the mud; another weathered the searing edge of the wave and came on snarling. The flames cost Grotdor the aura that wreathed him, but the angle had been worth it.
And there, with the rain coming down and the creek running grey, the day’s long work reached its pause. The pack stood bloodied and the company stood strong — one of the troll-king’s hunters slain outright, another sprawled in the mud and burning, several more wounded and snarling in the common tongue about the heroes their Hargulka had warned them of. But five of the laughing things remained, fast and clever and full of stolen voices, and the troll-king who had sent them now knew exactly whose faces to hunt. The Pentarchy held the upper hand in the creek. The road behind them ran back to a year-old nation gathering itself in the wet spring dark. And the road ahead ran straight to Hargulka.
The fight was not finished. The storyteller only drew a breath — and the rest waits on the turning of the next page.
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