“We’re leaving the world of men behind,” she said, leaving him to wonder what other sort of worlds there might be.
It didn’t occur to him that there would be terrible dangers on this portion of the journey, at least not until he was brought out of his pleasant recollection by the sound of steel being drawn directly behind him on the river boat deck.
The huge Seawardsman, Greyber, swung his big sword in a wide sweeping arc slicing the abdomen of one of the deckhands open, and gashing into the thigh of another. Terror jolted through Gerard’s blood like ice. What was happening? Why? His eyes searched for Shaella, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. Not on the fore deck. Not down either side of the railed walkway that ran past the sides of the box-like pilothouse, sitting in the middle of the boat’s flat-topped deck. He didn’t see her inside the pilot-house either. He did see the boat captain’s head suddenly twist to an impossible angle, before he slumped out of view. Where was she? What was happening?
There! He saw her! A brief glimpse when the pilot-house door had swung open as Cole left it. She was on the rear deck. He started to go there, with this heart hammering in his chest, but his way was suddenly blocked.
From around the walkway, to the right, men were approaching. Greyber stepped in front of Gerard protectively, and took up a readied stance. Gerard was forced back into the triangular area formed by the side rails coming together in a point, and Greyber’s rippling tattoo covered back. From where he was, he could see Flick standing on top of the pilothouse. The black-robed mage was chanting and pointing a finger down at something on the rear deck. Gerard thought he saw tiny streaks of crimson light shooting forth from Flick’s fingers, but he wasn’t sure. The man’s back was to him, and the sun was bright. It could have been glinting reflections, but he was fairly certain that it had been some sort of magic.
One of the men in front of Greyber lashed out with a long dagger, forcing the big man to jump back. Gerard was pinned into the bow rails, and had to lean out over the water to see around his protector. Another man had appeared, making it three. This one held a crossbow, trained in their direction, but he was behind the others, so he couldn’t fire it yet. He was jostling to get past his mate at the corner of the pilot-house so that he might get a clear shot at Greyber.
What happened next was more instinct than decision. Had he thought about it, he might’ve curled up into a fetal ball. Instead, Gerard dropped down to his hands and knees, and crawled forward between Greyber’s legs. He felt them tense as the big man swung his sword. Gerard didn’t rise up immediately, for fear of the blade. When he was sure he was clear, he rolled to the right, and screamed into his mind for the crossbowman to fire into his fellow’s back.
Instantly, the rush of the ring’s magic filled his body. His senses grew sharper, and the fear was forced completely out of him. He rolled to his feet in front of the two men, just as the crossbow bolt flew. The face before him contorted in shock and pain, as the steel-tipped bolt tore into him from behind. He started to fall to the ground, and Gerard wasted no time making his move. He reared back, and swung his fist as hard as he could into the face of the bewildered man, who had just shot his friend. The man stumbled backwards, down the walkway, and fell in a tangle of limbs. Before he could recover, Gerard began to savagely kick him. Within moments, the man was a bloody, unconscious heap.
Leaping over the man’s limp body, Gerard charged to the rear of the boat. Shaella’s sword was glowing pale yellow, where it wasn’t streaked with blood. At her feet, Trent and three of the deckhands, lay dead or dying, and before her, a huge burly man seethed with anger, while clutching a severe gash in his side. A few hundred yards behind them, shouts erupted from the deck of a flat barge that was heavily loaded with crates.
“Go!” Shaella commanded.
Gerard looked up at where Flick was standing over them on the top of the pilot-house. The bald man’s image shimmered and sizzled into a misty, blue color. Then, to Gerard’s open mouthed amazement, Flick disappeared altogether. Cole stepped out of the pilot-house then. He glanced approvingly at Gerard, and then strode towards the back of the boat, fading into nothingness as he went.
“Look!” Shaella ordered the man before her. She pointed her blade tip towards the barge behind them. She looked fierce and beautiful. Her face was mottled red with rage and exertion, causing the tear-like scar on her cheek to stand out in its paleness.
She’s a force to be reckoned with
, Gerard thought proudly.
She’s a natural born leader, with a wicked magical blade glowing in her hand, and I’m her lover
. It was all he could do to pull his eyes away from her, to look at what she was pointing out to her wounded captive.
On the barge, Flick and Cole were stalking across the tops of the crates, blasting anything that moved with hot, crimson bolts of magical energy.
“Do as I say or you’ll die,” Shaella told the terrified man.
With a grim nod, he conceded defeat.
“As you wish,” he said, as he limped into the pilot-house.
Shaella flashed Gerard a triumphant grin as she followed the man. She was enjoying herself, he saw, and he found that he was too.
Of the men that had been on the boat with them, only her prisoner was moving about. He began doing something in the pilot-house that caused the boat to slow in the river’s current, so that the barge was suddenly coming upon them most swiftly. Beyond the barge, Gerard saw a huge, billowing plume of black smoke rising up into the air. He started to ask what it was, but the barge was coming at them so fast now that his train of thought was forced into preparing himself for the coming impact.
Just before the collision would’ve taken place, a handful frightened men, under Flick’s watchful eye, came down off of the crates, and bodily guided the river boat around the barge. Once they were beside the barge, Gerard saw the source of the dark smoke. A push-boat, or the flaming hulk of one, was drifting behind them in the current. A few men, and a lot of debris, were in the water around it. Some of them were cursing and splashing. Another was screaming horribly, and a few others were floating lifelessly in the flow. A rather large splash sounded, and the man who had been screaming, disappeared under the water. A large, rippling wake could be seen trailing towards the marshy side of the river channel. The others in the water suddenly grew very still.
It became obvious to Gerard what they were doing. They had pirated the barge. They were going to push it with the boat they were in. Gerard learned that the man Shaella had spared was a Water-Mage. Berda had told of them in one of her tales.
Water-Magi came from Highwander, and used some sort of elemental magic, Gerard remembered. They could make a boat move up or down a river, or in the case of Berda’s tale, across a stormy sea. Shaella confirmed this when Gerard asked her about it. She explained that the magi could only work their power on ships and boats fitted with transoms lined with Wardstone. It was the stone that held the power, she explained. The ability to command the stuff was a specialized skill though. One could only legitimately learn the art at the Port of Weir, in the Kingdom of Highwander. Willa the Witch Queen’s Castle, Shaella told him, was built on the only place where the magical rock could be found.
“It’s what gives her so much power,” Shaella said, with a teasing look in her eyes. “That, and the fact that she eats her soldiers after they die.”
“Don’t fill his head with old wives’ tales,” Cole said, with a grin. “He did too well today to get less than the truth out of us from here on out.”
Gerard felt a bit of pride after hearing this, but no one told him anything more. As the day wore on, things settled. The four men, who had been taken forcibly from the barge, had been told that they would eventually be paid and released if they served and obeyed. Mutiny, of course, meant death, so they really had no choice. The Water-Mage, however, knew better than to believe the lie. He knew he was as good as dead. He co-operated more for the sake of the four bargemen’s lives, than for his own. He had thanked Shaella sincerely after she had healed his gashed side, but she was no fool either. She caught him eyeing his possibilities, and placed Greyber in the pilot-house to watch over him, just in case he got any ideas.
Later in the afternoon things got tense. Ahead of them, the river split into a “Y,” and down either branch, there were people and buildings. To the right, was the Westland flow, and to the left, the channel that eased along the Kingdom of Dakahn. Several docks reached out into the river from each side, and hundreds of people could see them pass. Cole and Flick both pulled up their hoods and stayed where the barge men could see them. Shaella joined Greyber and the Water-Mage in the pilot-house. If any of them were going to attempt something foolish, this would be the best opportunity for it.
No one did.
They took the Westland branch of the river. Gerard saw that what spread out between the two channels wasn’t really land. It was shallow, marshy muck. Grass grew up out of it, thick, lush, and as tall as a man, giving the terrain the illusion of being solid underneath. The illusion was shattered though, when the rolling wake of the boat, made the grass dance and waver with the flow. The expanse of grassy marsh seemed to spread out endlessly to the south and east. The solid shoreline to the right of the boat though, was Westland.
Bright, green rolling hills, dotted here and there with rocky formations and small clusters of hardwood trees, filled the spaces between crop fields and grazing pastures. A hard-packed road ran alongside the river, boasting what might be considered a small town every now and then. Wooden docks stretched out to the edge of the main river channel’s flow. Some were empty, others held small fishing crafts tied to them. A few fishing boats could be seen out in the swamp grass. They looked out of place, like they had been washed up in a field.
Soon, they passed a stone building with armed soldiers standing on its crenellated parapet.
“An outpost of the Westland Marsh Patrol,” Shaella told him, as she studied the place intently.
Less than a mile later, they passed what could’ve been called a city. There, the docks and piers were large and sturdy enough to load and unload barges. To the left of them, the marsh was only growing thicker and deeper, as it filled the space between the boat and the horizon. Gerard could see places where the ground humped up out of the muck, and large droopy trees had taken root. Around each of these swamp islands, a plethora of birds swooped and swirled about like a cloud. Some of the birds were as big as men, with wingspans easily twenty feet across. Flick called them “dactyls.”
At dusk, after a long stretch, where nothing but farmland could be seen along the Westland bank, Shaella ordered them to turn directly into the marsh. Gerard could hear and feel the abundance of life out and around them as the boat was swallowed up. Like a horse-drawn wagon charging through a cornfield, they moved through the tall swamp grass. Several times, he saw patches of the grass shake as the surface of the water was churned by some huge thing underneath that was darting away from their passage. Chirps, humming buzzes, and distant splashes, along with bellowing croaks, and the occasional groan, filled the night. Eventually, they lit torches, which only served to make the swampy marsh seem that much vaster. A cloud of biting gnats formed around Gerard’s head, and a not so distant splash, which was so big, its ripples made the whole boat rock back and forth, caused a tremor of unease to run through him.
He decided to sit down and close his eyes for a while. He fell asleep against the pilot-house.
He woke once, when it felt like the boat had stopped moving. He heard foreign voices that had an almost animalistic hissing quality to them, but he was too tired to pull himself out of his slumber to investigate. After a while, Shaella joined him. She was silent, as she took his side and let her head rest on his shoulder. His sleep was deep and sound then.
The sudden lurching of the boat woke him again. Shaella was gone, and the sun was coming up off to the far left. He could tell that they were heading south. The barge that they had been pushing was no longer anywhere in sight, and the riverboat was moving swiftly.
The surrounding terrain was as much above the water level as below it now. It looked like they were in a scattered forest that had suddenly been flooded with grassy water. The places that were above the water level were dense and thick, with tall, yet drooping, trees, and even thicker, leafy undergrowth. The sounds of grunting land animals could be heard, and once, Gerard saw a dark shape swinging from a shaking tree. None of it seemed to take his attention fully away from the dominant feature of the deep marshes though. Far ahead of them, rising up like a mammoth fang to tower hundreds of feet above the swamp trees, was a sharp and slightly curved formation.
“That’s our destination,” Shaella said excitedly.
Actually seeing Dragon’s Tooth Spire, and knowing that Shaella expected him to climb to the top of it to steal the egg of a real dragon, made Gerard’s stomach roil. It was all he could do to keep from vomiting over the rail.
“Once upon a time, it was a fire mountain,” Shaella said, as she slipped her arm around Gerard’s waist.
They were still on the riverboat, leaning against the bow rail. She felt that she had gone crazy, allowing herself to feel for Gerard. It was stupid and unwise, she told herself over and over, but knowing it, didn’t make the feelings go away. “What is youth, for but to make mistakes?” A quote from some obscure text she had once read came to mind. The words somehow made her foolishness seem alright, like the words of a priest cleansing away a sin. Gerard pulled her closer to him, bringing her wandering mind back to the moment.
The afternoon sun made the air thick with humidity. The chattering, chirping hum of the insects around them filled the air. Occasionally, they found themselves in a cloud of pesky gnats or tiny little biting flies. A larger scarier looking thing, half dragonfly, half scorpion, hovered and buzzed about them menacingly, until Cole came out and zapped it with one of his sizzling crimson bolts.