The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (60 page)

“Yeah, I…I got the concept pretty good here.”

“You need to break that suction.  We’re going to give you a tube:  stick it into the mud right around one of your feet and blow into it as hard as you can.  You should feel the mud loosen—lift the foot up right away.”

Rodge looked at her in silent despair.  “Don
’t think I’m not grateful.  It’ll be great to die with one foot breathing clean air.  Do…do you think there’s something maybe a little more, well, comprehensive, like, whole-body, that can be done?”

“We
’re going to throw a log across the mudsink—you’ll step on to that.”

They were?  Looking around, Ari had to confess to some amazement.  It couldn
’t have been more than five or ten minutes, and the bog had been demarcated, with various Northerners and a Merranic standing at pertinent edges.  There was a cut and trimmed tree waiting at one side, with a long trail of ropes leading from one end of it into the bushy area on its unseen far side, and there was a science experiment developing rapidly into an air tube a few feet away.  Loren, looking around, said, “They’re…prompt.”

“Sylvar?” Dorian called.

“Almost…there!” came her disembodied voice.  Peering into the deepening gloom of dusk, Ari finally made her out.  She was up in a tree, swaying wildly as it was hardly thick enough to hold her, doing something with rope.  She shimmied down in a shower of leaves and called out merrily, “All ready!” as if the cart had gotten hooked up to take them all to the fair.

The rope began to move, drawing taut and lining up over Rodge
’s little mud plot just a scant foot or so from him.  He lunged for it, face lighting up, and Dorian said sharply, “Don’t move.  You’ll sink faster.”  Deflated, he relaxed, standing there obediently and sinking while the rope hovered in arm’s reach.  It grew even tighter, then the sapling the boys had felled began to move as the slack was taken up, inching across the ground toward Rodge.

“All right,” Dorian instructed.  “You
’re lined up—go!”

They must have sprinted, because the log zipped briskly across the slimy mud, missing Rodge with expert precision and coming to rest at Dorian
’s sharp call just where the rope had lain.  Ari stood on the branches left on their end, stabilizing it.  They all looked anxiously at the witch’s brew experiment, then at Rodge, then back to the air tube.

Finally, the seconds weighing heavily in the still air, Nerissa moved the hickory away.  There were chunks and thick black juice dripping out of the bottom of the branch Jordan was holding now, and Nerissa poured a water skin into it, flushing out the goo. 

The rest of the Whiteblades had come out of the trees back around to their side of the action, calling out encouraging things to Rodge like, “The black-heart sap will blister your lips when you go to blow on the tube, but, hey, it’s better than not having any!”

Nerissa, after flushing one more time, shoved the tube at Sylvar, who was prancing impatiently close by, and she set off in a sprint along the narrow sapling.  Almost skidding to a halt by Rodge, she balanced effortlessly, courteously handing him the tube like it was a glass of wine at a cocktail party.

He grabbed it, blowing frantically into it long before the other end even got close to the mud.  They plunged in together, his lips and the tube, never mind poisonous sap, and soon bubbles began to appear around his foot.  He yanked at his foot, bent over the tube, his body contorting rather oddly.  His leg would jerk, he would blow frantically, his leg would jerk and spasm, he would blow frantically.  But the foot came loose, to a great supportive cry from the onlookers, and Sylvar helped him balance it up on the log while he worked at the other one.

But the anxiety had just begun.  Ari had never seen anything so dramatically suspenseful as Rodge trying to walk the log out of that mudsink.  Trembling in every limb, face a mask of concentration, he very carefully would slide his foot a quarter of an inch along the log, then stop, breathing heavily and shaking like he
’d run a marathon.  Sylvar danced around him anxiously, trying to hold him from the front, trying to let him just take her hands for something to balance against, defying the laws of physics and somehow getting around behind him to support him from back there.

It was a little anticlimactic when he finally walked off the end.  Most of the Northerners were sitting down, bored and crashed from the adrenaline let down.  The Whiteblades had vanished back out into the Swamps except for Dorian and Sylvar, and it was full night.

Sweat was pouring off him, but even Cerise hugged him.  It was a night of Northern firsts.  He even apologized to Dorian.

He smelled atrocious the next day.  Clean water was limited, so of course there was no way to bathe, but it was his trousers that reeked so bad—like the foul mud he’d been playing around in.  Loren, who shared the canoe with him and Melkin, ran a steady commentary on it all day, clearly audible despite the pea-soup fog.

They were introduced to man-eating fish that day, but Banion only lost a little bit of the finger.  And Rowena, after he finally allowed her to touch him, pronounced he would recover and maybe even grow back a little of it, though it would be misshapen.

“It’ll match the rest of you,” Rodge consoled him.

It was pretty mild for a day in the Swamps.  They
’d all gotten to the point where they expected catastrophes.  There was no more solid ground, and the huge grey trees looming out of the silent stretches of water were all black now, bark scarred and slimy, strands of gauzy grey-green moss sticking in decomposing smears to their trunks.

They were in the canoes until late, and just starting to wonder if maybe for the first time Dorian was lost, when they saw a light ahead.  It was almost smothered by the mist, but still, it was a light of some sort.  Kai, after a confirmatory nod from Dorian, picked up their speed and headed toward it.  To their amazement, they were soon pulling up at a rough dock.  And there were
people
there.  Little people, smaller than Sylvar and Nerissa, even, with dark brown faces and big, solemn eyes and shaggy black hair.  They bowed when they saw Dorian, calling her “Lady of Light,” and welcomed them all into cramped little structures built on stilts up out of the water.

The Northerners looked around curiously as they settled in cross-legged at one end of one of the buildings.  At the other end, little persons—which may or may not have been female, it was hard to tell—moved busily around a fire, cooking something that smelled strongly of fish.  Dorian had disappeared.  

“Did you know about these people?” Melkin asked in an undertone of Traive and Kai.  Traive nodded.  “The Fox know of them:  Swamp dwellers, they call themselves.  They’re very simple, but have never failed to be hospitable to the Fox that come through.  They were chased out to such isolated places by the bullying and power struggles in Skoline, choosing seclusion and peace over convenience and strife.”

“Skoline,” Banion murmured.  Sitting down, he was still almost too tall for the huts.  “That
’s Swamp Town?”

Traive nodded.

“I don’t suppose they have running water and hot baths there?” Loren asked longingly, wrinkling his nose at Rodge.

“The only thing running in that town is the citizens,” Traive remarked drily.  “Usually for their lives.  It
’s got to be the most dangerous community in the Realms, controlled almost completely now by the Asps.”  Ari tensed at the name, meeting Melkin’s eyes.  “Through sheer ruthlessness and intimidation, over the years they’ve climbed to the top of the dog-eat-dog social ladder.”

“What does the town live on?” Banion asked.  “You can
’t tell me there’s any industry or trade that far into the Swamps.  I know Merrani has never traded with them.”

“Maybe not directly,” Traive said, exchanging a knowing look with Kai.  “But they do trade—not always by, er, traditional methods—and surreptitiously get their few goods on the market.  They
’re on a major inlet from the Western Sea—”

“Aye, the Goudget,” Banion said readily, not to be outdone in maritime knowledge.

“Mm.  But their main income is from
dasht
snuck through the Torques, and from contracts.”

The hairs crawled upright on Ari
’s neck.  “Contracts,” he repeated carefully.  “What kind of contracts?”  Traive looked at him quietly, but it was Kai who answered, “Anything that pays.”

Everyone
adopted gracious faces then, for one of the little people was approaching with an enormous tray.  He (or she) put it down in front of them, revealing a small mountain of rice littered with whole greyish-green fish, mouths open to reveal double rows of pointed teeth.

“Maybe one is the one that bit you,” the person offered shyly, gesturing at Banion
’s bandaged hand.  The Merranic forced a smile, muttering under his breath, “Isn’t he cute?”

“Please, eat.” He gestured with his little hands.  The Northerners especially noticed the lack of utensils, and to avoid the necessity unfolding before them, Melkin asked, “Do you know where Dorian went?”

He looked puzzled, and Traive reiterated quietly, “The Lady of Light.”

His face cleared.  “Ah.  She goes to see the other Light.”

“The other light?”

“The other Ivory,” Traive translated, experimentally lifting an oozing, mud-colored fish.

“Why do you call them Light?” Ari asked.

The person cocked his head.  “They are Light.  They shine in the Darkness.  Their Light is a light to all, a reflection of the Great Light which does not fade.”  His voice was practical, as if everybody knew these things.

“How long have you known her?” Ari asked curiously.

“Oh, very long time,” he assured them.  “She is a good friend, help us much, many years.  You know the one called
‘Nerissa?’” he confided proudly, and at their nods, continued, “Her mother was a Swamp Dweller.  Many hundreds of years ago, she was born right here, in a hut just like this!”  He beamed.  Nobody answered him, though he certainly had everyone’s attention.

“How illuminating,” Cerise remarked wryly when he left.  They all began to pick half-heartedly at the pile of…food.

“What if it’s true?” Loren said slowly, dreamily putting a single, safe grain of rice in his mouth.  “What if they really are hundreds of years old?”

“What if it were really true?” Rodge looked at him askance.  “What if you really did have a brain and just—no one could tell?”

“I’m serious—look at all the things they know.  Look at how they move.  How many girls in their twenties could have done, known, some of the things they have?”

“Dorian is no twenty-year old,” Cerise said cattily.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

“I am NOT agreeing with you.”

“What do you think, Banion?”

“Witches,” he muttered uncompromisingly.  He was the only one brave enough to try the fish—it didn
’t look like it was going very well.  There were tiny bones scattered all over his facial hairs.

“Traive?”

Traive looked up at them all.  “I do not think you could believe it if the incontrovertible truth were laid right in front of you,” he said in amusement.

“You believe it.” Loren pointed a greasy finger at him, grinning slyly.

“Cyrrhideans believe in
dragons
,” Rodge pointed out.

“They also believe in gryphons and centaurs,” Loren shot back.  Traive was still his hero.

One of the little people was back, a different one, they thought.  “You would like your lower clothes washed?” he (she?) offered Rodge.  “The Lady of Light said this.”

“Yes!” Loren agreed eagerly.

Rodge said, “Uh, thanks, but I don’t have another pair.”

“I won
’t look,” Cerise promised, with great emphasis.  Though truthfully, Kai smelled so bad by now, what with his repeated dunkings, that you could hardly stand to be around him, but no one had said anything to him.

“No problem,” the person beamed.  “Loaner,” he said, and held up a pair of pants that might cover Rodge
’s skinny shanks to, maybe, just above the knee.

Pleasant as it was to be in something resembling a house, no one wept when they left the next morning.

Jordan accompanied them for a while that day.  She came up, deftly pulling her boat alongside Ari’s with a wink and a sunshine smile, to tell Dorian that Sylvar had been darted by orchids.  Which on the surface you might think was serious, but since neither of them seemed to give it more than their cursory attention, Ari decided it must sound worse than it was. 

Rodge, who after his raving success with the Cyrrhidean ladies was under the mistaken impression that he was Quite the Catch, and who had been unfortunately rowed up on the other side of Jordan
’s canoe by an eager Loren, looked like he was ready to pounce on her.

Ari ignored him, elated to finally get a few words with this living memory, but when she said, “The light will get brighter and this fog lift the closer we get to the Tamarisks—” Rodge threw in, “I dabble around with light myself.”

She turned to look at him blankly.  “You know,” he elaborated, “wave theory, frequency gradient…”