The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) Page 51

  The horror hung over them like a cloud, impossible to forget with Cerise’s dry, heaving sobs sounding out hour after hour. Finally, thankfully, she fell into exhausted sleep, but the tense vigilance didn’t fade. Every pool was a potential snake pit, every vine and drapery a malignant evil ready to drop and snare.

  Kai continued, with amazing unconcern, to plunge into the water, making Ari shake his head in wonder. What was it about the Dra that could ignore something as deeply repulsive as that thrashing pit of water full of serpent? Ari’s admiration for him grew the longer he rode the trail with him. He wanted to be down on the ground, too, bearing more of the burden of dragging his friends into this cauldron of peril. How could Dorian be so calm?

  Dark thoughts swirled restlessly in his unhappy brain as they pushed on. But, then the scenery around them began to change and he looked around with dread, paranoia doubled. Downed trees rose in enormous, tangled, ghost-like piles around them. It must have been a huge storm, a windfall, because they were everywhere. For once, their trail lay very clear in front of them. Others had used it, for it been cleared, the sharp ends of cut logs showing dark and slimy as they passed through what was little more than a narrow corridor between them.

  Almost an hour they trod carefully, warily, between the haphazard lengths of colossal trunks, their branches and roots wound and crushed and enmeshed together like an impassable fence of vegetation. It was worse than the endless vista of gloomy pools; at least there they’d been able to see what was all around them. Here, the cleared path was barely wide enough for two horses to pass, the maze of trunks and branches rising sometimes over their heads—and capable of hiding all sorts of imagined terrors.

  As the afternoon dragged on, mist began to filter in, making the passage even more creepy. Half-seen phantoms and half-heard sounds came spookily to brains whose eyes and ears had never registered them. Then they came around a corner of brush, and Dorian and Kai both slowed warily. There was something solid up there. The mist was getting thick, but not that thick…and it didn’t resolve as they drew closer. They came to a stop within a few seconds, able to make out the shape of a huge fallen tree trunk. It was so big around that resting in the boggy water it still rose high over their mounted heads. Blackish mud coated everything nearby, and the surrounding tangled landscape showed marks of recent trauma, freshly broken branches jutting sharply in the air, others in crushed splinters beneath the giant’s own.

  In despair, several of them looked back over their shoulder. It was a long way to backtrack around this maze, with no idea of how far around they’d have to go to find another route. But to cut this, clear it…it would take days even using every bit of steel they had with them.

  Dorian stood, musing, while Kai worked his way to the top of the trunk, standing up to report, “The trail goes on.”

  Nobody wanted to say what was in their minds. To leave the horses not only seemed a desperate step, but positively cruel if you considered what they’d be leaving them to. But they were all wary of Dorian by now—her judgment was proving alarmingly harsh.

  It was the silence that was so uncanny, Ari decided, hunching down in his saddle while they waited. In the jungle there’d been a cacophony of sound, so unrelenting that strange ones didn’t really have the chance to affect you before a hundred others had replaced it. Here, there was just the occasional burst of noise, each one alien and disturbing. He was looking around, trying to pierce the dense, spectral landscape, and that’s why he saw her. She oozed out of the grey mist between two logs, making everybody else jump, and walked up to where Dorian stood.

  “It’s Nerissa!” Rodge said in hushed amazement. Looking closer, Ari thought he might be right. The rippling waves of black hair were in a thick braid, but the face was the same that the Sentinel’s picture had brought to Ari’s memory.

  She was talking quietly with Dorian, and they saw her put out a slim brown hand and touch the log. She was tiny, coming only to Dorian’s shoulder, but she had that same easy-moving confidence of the other Whiteblades.

  “It is black-hearted hickory,” they heard her say with a touch of excitement, “freshly downed. There’s a chance, but we’ll have to move fast, while the heart still beats.”

  This didn’t seem particularly clear to the party following. While they were trying to makes sense of it, Dorian nodded as if it was all perfectly logical, and stepped out of the way. Immediately, Nerissa began to feel along the log, running her hands rapidly along the smooth grey trunk, her dusky little face held close and attentively to the surface. She came to the edge of the cleared trail, logs rising up like a twisted, impenetrable wall in front of her.

  She frowned, telling Dorian hastily, “I need Sylvar.”

  Sylvar. The boys exchanged looks in recollection. This was turning into a veritable re-creation of Cyrrhidean storytales.

  Without waiting to be called, another tiny little person wormed her way through the log barrier—a rather shocking person. The mist didn’t help, but she was disconcertingly colorless. Her hair was flat out white, pulled off her temples with a leather thong, and her skin didn’t have an ounce of pigment. Light grey eyes dancing with life glanced at the group, stopping when she noticed Traive.

  “Hello, Lord Regent,” she said gaily.

  His tanned face broke into an amused smile and he bent courteously over his arm. “Lady Dancer,” he drawled.

  “Can you pay attention for two minutes?” Dorian asked her, a little touchily, and she wiped the smile off her face and hurried over to Nerissa.

  “They found a replacement quick,” Loren muttered. She was unexpectedly lively for a corpse thrown up on a wall of fangvine.

  She and Nerissa muttered for a second, bright white and silky black heads looking strange bent together, then she took off like a stream of smoke through the obstructing branches, writhing so lithely through the gaps that she seemed almost to flow.

  Everyone waited nervously back on the trail. The place seemed to eat things up, to consume like it consumed hope and light. But in a minute, a happily disembodied voice called out, a little muffled, “Got it ‘Rissa. Just chop right over the top of it?”

  Nerissa called back, “Yes, but carefully—and be ready to move out of the way!”

  The little white wraith had left her bow and quiver behind, but the rest of her load of equipment had gone with her, and they began to hear the muffled sound of an axe biting into wood. And then something stranger than anything they’d seen yet began to happen.

  The tree began to moan. There was no denying it. It was coming right out of the big log and it was accompanied by the unmistakable signs of trembling. Mouths dropped open, eyes went wide, and they all backed the horses (who needed no encouragement) up a couple paces.

  Kai still stood boldly up on top of the thing, his corded body riding the agitated log like surf. Nerissa spared him one worried glance, but her attention was almost completely on the tree. It was becoming impossibly mobile, writhing around enough to lift itself out of the few inches of water it lay in.

  “A little more, Sylvar!” Nerissa cried encouragingly. The dull, bass moaning grew louder, the movement more pronounced, until the trunk literally leaped out of the water. Then, surpassing even that astonishing act of arboreal agility, it threw itself wildly to one side, almost pinning Nerissa. Dorian yanked her back so swiftly the eye couldn’t even follow it.

  Again, then again, the tree rose, jerking out of the water, the crashing of the surrounding branches making riotous background music to its bass howl. But it was getting weaker, the jumps not as dramatic, and it finally quit altogether, its cry rising eerily into an unearthly, almost human, scream.

  When it finally fell silent, the group waiting on horses were shaking almost as bad as Cerise had been.

  “No way,” Loren had been muttering for several minutes. “No way.”

  “Anything, Kai?” Nerissa called up to him. He nodded quickly, easing down the length of the now quiet log to where a mass of roots burst out
like spokes on a wagon wheel. Warily, he jumped down into the space left by all of those unlikely contortions, which had separated it from the surrounding clog of brush. He appeared in a second between two massive roots, looking out at them. “We need just a few strokes here.”

  Immediately, Traive jumped down. He handed Kai one of his crossed axes and they went to work. Meanwhile, Nerissa was calling into the disturbed mass of limbs at the other end of the log, “Are you okay? Sylvar! Can you hear me?”

  “I’m fine,” came a distant reply, and within another couple minutes she popped back out between two logs. “I guess I hit the black heart,” she said ruefully. Her hands and front had dark, tarry looking stuff on them.

  “Get that poisonous sap off,” Dorian cautioned her.

  She shook her white head, murmuring blithely, “Black-hearted as a Sheelman’s whor—” before clapping her hand over her mouth, wide eyes flying to Dorian and then the group of northerners.

  Dorian, stern as they’d ever seen her, gave her a look so utterly Imperial that Ari almost laughed. She said nothing, just pointed rigidly back the way Sylvar had come, and the smaller girl went without another word, face besmeared now, grabbing her bow on the way. Services for the sake of the group apparently forgotten.

  Ari urged his brown up to the now quiescent tree and jumped down, relieving Kai of his axe and setting to work with a passion on the cage of roots. Loren was right behind him, spelling Traive. It felt really good to whale away on that wood, and they fell to it with an almost visceral relief at having something to do. Distantly, over the noise of axes, Ari heard Rodge and Nerissa talking, he making a fool of himself, she calmly explaining what had just happened.

  “They’re some of Raemon’s attempts to out-create Laschald. They’ve got a limited mobility—they can’t move from where they’re rooted…he wanted something to help him control the Swamps. That’s part of what this thick, evil feeling in the air is—the Swamps are full of his creatures.”

  She had a soft, velvety voice, thick with Cyrrhidean accent. He couldn’t remember her origins or her story from the Book of Ivory, but he’d never seen black hair on a Cyrrhidean.

  He tuned the two out, pouring his energy into the multiple root branches that needed the attention of the axe and shrugging the Dra away when he came back to take a turn. Soon, there was a narrow passage hacked through the root system, oozing with weird, nasty black sap, and he and Loren made quick work of heaving aside the lopped wood. He led the brown through, and everyone did the same except Banion, who was still propping up the unconscious Royal Handmaiden and stayed mounted.

  Despite all the delays, it wasn’t even dark yet when Dorian stopped at a rise of ground large enough for all of them and the horses. Around them, the downed forest had been slowly fading out, the landscape highlighted by the occasional vertical tree. Melkin pulled his horse up to her, saying quietly, “Should we push on?” All trace of hostility had vanished since their altercation by the inky poolside where Tekkara had been bitten.

  Dorian responded the same whether he was spitting enraged insults or politely asking about sleeping billets. She turned to look up at him, saying, “It is not healthy to spend the night anywhere in the Swamps; it’s pure foolishness to bypass the very few safe spots along the trail. We’ll travel until we reach them—no more and definitely no less.”

  It was amazing to have firm ground under their feet again, but their enjoyment of a camp and hot food was dampened by Cerise. She was awake, but just sat, staring into nothingness, looking scared and shattered and fragile. The boys felt helpless. Dorian, after watching her all through dinner, moved over to her and knelt gracefully in front of her.

  “Cerise,” she said, in a voice none of them had ever heard before—a rich, warm, persuasive voice that made you limp, made you want to roll over and have her scratch your belly. “Cerise, it’s all right.” The topaz eyes shone like jewels in the thick grey air, full of life and love and all that was sweet and true—Ari had never seen such a transcendent look on anyone’s face. A lump of longing swelled his throat...no one had ever looked at him like that, ever.

  It was all wasted on Cerise. She just sat, unresponsive, with that blank, horrified stare in her icy blue eyes. Dorian tried gently shaking her, touched her face…but after a few minutes, had to sit back in defeat.

  “How far out is the Healer?” She asked, in that disconcerting way, of thin air. Even more disconcerting, someone almost always answered. This time it was Jordan, standing with soaked leggings on the outskirts of the camp.

  “A couple days,” she said quietly.

  Dorian’s eyes scanned once more the tragic face in front of her. “Send ‘Lanta for her.”

  No one woke with anything resembling enthusiasm the next morning. The Swamps stretched drearily, ominously, out all around them, and the day never seemed to end. They could have been wandering for years under that sunless blanket of grey, so disassociated did everything become. Ari put Cerise, barely aware enough to sit a horse, up on his brown before anyone could make a decision about her. Loren and Traive hemmed her in on each side and Banion and Melkin each followed and led close around her.

  He was so glad to be on the ground, fixing his mind on the intricacies of finding their watery path, that he didn’t even mind the oily water, or the leeches, or the bugs, which were much worse close to the water. The distraction was almost welcome. His mind had begun to plunge into guilt beyond his ability to stop it. What if Cerise had died? What if she never recovered? What if someone was to never come back from this trip? Why had he not tried to stop any of them? He wasn’t sure he could handle it if one of them was killed because of him. Prowling back and forth across the morbid landscape, his mind couldn’t shake that one thought, lodged like a hot dagger of dread in his chest. The road wasn’t exactly going to get any safer the closer they got to the Sheelshard.

  The hours dragged by. Once, he saw bubbles rising from the pool in front of him. He pointed it out, and felt a small surge of ridiculous pride when Dorian nodded and led the group around another way. It was nothing, but it felt good to be of some use. Especially if they were going to risk their lives for him.

  They could see their campsite from far off that evening; someone had started the fire, and it made for a merry beacon in the dank melancholy of the Swamps at dusk. Nothing remarkable had happened that day, but Cerise’s unchanging condition made it seem like that whole nightmarish incident had been just a few hours ago. More than one person let out a disappointed sigh when they came up onto the dry ground of the camp; there was no one there. No one tending the fire and certainly no healer.

  Last night’s camp had been little more than a hummock covered with sickly grass. Tonight, several of the great-trunked trees encircled the place and there were even a few spiky bushes and faintly green ferns. No one was much in the mood for talking, even though there was fresh meat from someone’s bow and Ari had made a pretty tasty potato stew. Only Dorian seemed unaffected by the despondency that seemed to spread like a miasma over the group. The greyer the air, the brighter she seemed, as if she was somehow out of reach of the colorless world closing in on them all.

  She bowed her head and prayed that night, which she had never done, and which nobody, not even Banion, objected to.

  “Lord Il, great is the darkness that presses in around us…but greater still art Thou. Give us surety in your Strength, peace in your Will, and a light to shine on this, Your Path. Thy will be done.”

  They were glumly finishing up the meal when several birdcalls sounded simultaneously from the quiet swamp around them. Dorian, in a desultory conversation with Traive, looked up quickly. Ari and Loren shared suspicious glances, and sure enough, within minutes a faint splashing could be heard. Then a new Whiteblade came out of the trees, and to the man, they rose eagerly to their feet.

  You could tell even from across the clearing that this was the healer. It seemed to roll off of her in waves, a gentleness, a sort of physical aura of nurturing that shon
e from her big eyes. She was also, incidentally, stunningly beautiful. Piles of fluffy blonde hair, the softest blue eyes Ari had ever seen, a blushing, curved cheek—she was the most feminine creature any of them had seen in a long time.

  And she looked at absolutely none of them, not even Dorian. She entered the clearing, took one look across it to Cerise’s traumatized figure, and walked straight to her. She helped her to her feet, led her a little ways away, and resettled, talking quietly and earnestly to her.

  Dorian gave a little sigh. “She’ll bring her back to her own mind,” she said reassuringly.

  “Is she telepathic?” Loren said eagerly, active mind alive with possibilities.

  The ghost of a smile curved Dorian’s mobile lips. “No,” she said evenly. “But Healing is her Gift.”

  A forceful panting interrupted them, and they all turned in surprise to see another Whiteblade coming out of the trees. She stopped, hand on her side, gasping, when she saw them.

  “We ran,” she wheezed. “All day.” This was followed by several seconds of ragged breathing. She leaned against a tree. “I was sure someone was dying,” she managed to get out all in one breath.

  Dorian frowned at her and in the first playfulness any of the group had seen out of her, said in amusement, “You’re out of shape.”

  “My shape,” the girl gasped, moving away from her support and closer to the light of the fire, “you’ll remember…was meant for the water.”

  The boys didn’t know what that meant, but their eyebrows went up as the firelight revealed the shape under discussion. If they hadn’t just seen the Healer, they would have said this was surely the loveliest woman ever created. Thick waves of blue-black hair framed a flawless face. She had sparking blue eyes fringed with lashes so dark she looked like she was wearing eye-black. Soft, full, red lips were responsible for all that rapid exchange of air. Curved in every possible appropriate place, her shape was enough to do dangerous things to a young man’s temperature.