Cursed Bones: Sovereign of the Seven Isles: Book Five (33 page)

The first soldier nodded and they started for the brush line. Hector looked to Isabel; she shook her head slowly. A few moments after the soldiers slipped into the darkening jungle, Shadowfang leapt to the ground.

Ayela woke not long after. “Did I hear screaming?”

“It was nothing,” Isabel said. “Try to rest.”

***

Isabel stretched, trying to work the stiffness out of her back from sleeping in a tree. Dawn broke over an overcast sky, but it didn’t look like rain, a small thing that she reminded herself to be grateful for.

Ayela was nearly healed but still stiff and tender from her wounds, yet she was determined to press on. Then she saw the dead soldier. “What happened last night?” she asked, looking around warily.

“The soldiers arrived and the lizards killed them,” Isabel said.

“Most of them, anyway,” Hector said, looking at Shadowfang who was busy cleaning his face by licking his paw and rubbing it along his snout.

“They didn’t even notice us?” Ayela asked.

Isabel shook her head and said, “We had Alexander’s help.”

“I can’t believe I slept through the whole thing,” Ayela said.

“The healing potion we gave you has that effect on people,” Isabel said. Then she turned and looked at the dead chameleon lizards. “I wish we had time to skin them.”

“What for?” Horace asked.

“Remember Jack and his cloak?” Isabel said. “What do you think it was made out of?”

“Really?” Horace said, appraising the two dead lizards, then looking at his brother. “With a pair of cloaks like that, we’d be dangerous.”

“You’re already dangerous,” Isabel said. “Besides, we’d have to get the skins to Mage Gamaliel and he’d have to take the time to enchant them. We have more important things to do right now and I suspect he does too.”

“Pity,” Hector said. Horace nodded.

“I just hope we don’t run into any more of those things,” Ayela said, tenderly touching her nearly healed wound and grimacing.

“On that count, I agree,” Hector said.

“The swamp shouldn’t be far,” Horace said.

Isabel tipped her head back for a moment. “It’s a few hours that way. I see why they call it the gloaming swamp, the place is completely shrouded in mist. It won’t be easy to navigate in there.”

“Hopefully, Lord Reishi will provide us with guidance,” Horace said.

“I’m sure he’ll be there when we need him,” Isabel said, cinching down the straps on her pack.

They set out cautiously. The chameleon lizards had them all a little spooked. Isabel used her link with Slyder to guide their course and watch for any sign of danger while keeping Shadowfang out in front several dozen feet to meet any threat they might encounter. He had proven to be an invaluable ally in the jungle.

Ayela stepped up next to her while they walked.

“I think I understand what you said about surprise better now,” she said.

“Tell me,” Isabel said, taking on the mantle of teacher.

“When you were able to surprise the enemy, they fell quickly,” Ayela said. “When the chameleon lizards surprised us, we barely survived, or at least I barely survived. I always thought that battle was supposed to be like the stories I heard as a child around the campfire … until now.”

“And now?”

“It’s terrifying and it all happens so fast … then it’s just sad and ugly once it’s over.”

Isabel nodded. “Good, you’re starting to understand.”

They walked on for a time while Ayela thought about Isabel’s words. “Not all battles can be won by surprise,” she said.

“No, but surprise is just a small part of the lesson. Surprise is simply your enemy’s belief that they aren’t about to be attacked, thus they aren’t prepared and thus they’re at a sudden and often decisive disadvantage. The greater lesson is about belief.”

“Belief about what?” Ayela said, frowning.

“First, about your circumstances,” Isabel said. “Believing that your enemy is wounded when they’re actually feigning an injury, believing that you outnumber the enemy when they in fact have soldiers hidden from view, believing that an enemy is really an ally, believing that your enemy is more powerful or less powerful than they really are … these are all factors that can decide the day. The most important thing in any fight is knowledge, knowledge of yourself and knowledge of your enemy. If you accurately understand both your own capabilities and those of your enemy, you’ll carry the day because you’ll know how to use your strengths to exploit your enemy’s weaknesses.

“Second, and far more importantly, believing in the rightness of your cause will give you the strength to persevere even when it seems that all is lost. This is the greatest power of those who fight for the light—we’re on the right side and we know it.

“Those who ally themselves with the darkness are selfish and greedy, seeking power and dominion over others for their own glory, but those qualities are inextricably linked with cowardice and an inability to trust others. Evil people can only lead through fear, intimidation, and deception, so their allies will inevitably betray them, either because they’re selfish and greedy themselves or because they’re secretly good and can’t stomach the wrong they’re being asked to do.

“Belief is the key to everything.”

“That’s a lot to think about,” Ayela said, falling back behind Isabel as they trudged through the jungle.

They reached the edge of the swamp about
midday
, solid ground abruptly giving way to algae-covered stagnant water. A pall of fog hung over the water, stretching out under the branches of sparsely spaced, ancient cypress trees, their trunks flaring just before they reached the water, looking like a hundred roots clustered together, all wrapped tightly with a single outer skin of bark.

Hector found a branch and reached out into the water, searching for solid ground under the thick, bright green algae.

“It’s only about two feet deep.”

“Right here at the edge,” Horace said. “There’s no telling how deep it gets farther in.”

“Or what’s in the water,” Ayela said. “It’s said that the black waters of the gloaming swamp are deadly.”

“We’d better get to work,” Isabel said.

It took the better part of the afternoon to build a small raft capable of supporting their weight. They found three relatively large limbs that had broken from nearby trees and used them for the base, lashing smaller branches in the eight-foot span between them, forming a platform. It wasn’t pretty and it was far too heavy to carry over much distance, but it floated even with the four of them aboard.

When it came time to push off, Shadowfang simply sat down at the edge of the water. Isabel smiled at her friend. She knew she could force him with her magic, but she also knew that it would take greater effort to control him and he would be far less useful within the confines of the swamp than he was in the jungle.

“Goodbye, Shadowfang,” she said, releasing him from her will as they shoved off into the murkiness. He roared once and disappeared into the jungle.

Hector and Horace used stout poles to propel the unwieldy raft through the water, leaving a trail of disturbed algae on the surface, marking their passage.

“That’s unfortunate,” Isabel said. “I was hoping we would vanish without a trace, as far as the enemy was concerned anyway.”

“Hopefully, the Regency won’t arrive until the algae has had a chance to cover our passage,” Hector said. “But I don’t think it matters much to the Sin’Rath.”

They poled their way through the mist until darkness started to fall.

“I haven’t seen a scrap of dirt big enough for a camp,” Horace said.

“Me neither,” Hector said.

“I guess we’re sleeping on the raft,” Isabel said. “How deep is the water?”

“Three to five feet,” said Hector.

“We should tie off to a tree for the night,” Isabel said.

“What was that?” Ayela asked, pointing off the side of the raft into the water.

“I didn’t see it,” Horace said.

“Looked like a snake to me,” Hector said. “And it was big.”

Isabel reached out with her mind and found it, imposing her will on the reptile and finding it to have a distinctly different, and quite distasteful, mind. At her command, it rose up out of the water, displaying itself to them.

It was glistening black, easily a foot thick in the body and probably twenty-five feet long. Its fangs looked long enough to pierce completely through a man’s forearm.

“Well, what shall we call you?” Isabel said.

“Ugly?” Ayela said under her breath.

“More like terrifying,” Hector said.

“How about Scales?” Isabel said. “Yes, I think I like that. Scales it is.”

“You aren’t really going to keep that thing around, are you?” Ayela asked.

“Of course,” Isabel said. “What better guard dog could we ask for in this place?”

The snake slipped back into the water, leaving only disturbed algae to prove it was ever there.

“Scales will stand guard, but we’ll all take our turn at watch as well,” Isabel said.

“I don’t like this place,” Ayela said. “I’m starting to understand why nobody returns from here. Without your magic, that snake could have easily taken one of us underwater and disappeared.”

“Probably,” Isabel said. “Unfortunately, this is the only way to get where we need to go. Hopefully, we won’t encounter anything more dangerous than a giant snake.”

Hector and Horace nodded, looking at each other.

Night fell, shrouding them in darkness so void of light, Isabel might have imagined that this was what the netherworld looked like … if she didn’t know better.

Ayela left her jar of glowing lichen with Horace, who drew first watch. The lichen didn’t provide much light, but it was enough to prevent them from accidentally stumbling off the raft into the murky water.

No one slept well. The swamp was eerie and foreboding, occasional sounds of small animals moving about were muted by the heavy mist hanging over everything like a burial shroud, only serving to make the sounds more haunting and forcing one to strain to hear what might be coming through the dark waters.

Isabel woke tired and irritable. It was impossible to tell what the weather looked like above the swamp. Within, it was a dull grey in every direction, limiting visibility to less than a hundred feet, the world beyond fading into the unknown.

“Well, at least we know the algae will cover our tracks,” Hector said, motioning to the uniformly green water as if presenting an act on a stage.

“Unfortunately, we also have no idea which way we came from or where we’re going,” Horace said.

Isabel tipped her head back and closed her eyes. Slyder was perched in the high branches at the top of the cypress tree they were tied to. She could see that the day was clear and bright above the swamp, the winter sun climbing gradually into the southern sky. Off in the distance, a craggy stone mountain jutted abruptly from the swamp, a lone
high point
in a sea of level green.

“We have to go that way,” Isabel pointed, her eyes still closed.

“That way it is,” Hector said, unlashing the raft from the tree trunk. As he and Horace shoved off, Scales broke the surface and started out ahead of them. Ayela shivered, but held her tongue.

It was cold under the cover of the fog and the air was so still, they left a wake of swirling eddies in the mist, momentarily marking their passage. Isabel guided them with Slyder’s help, keeping them moving in the general direction of the mountain. The algae covering every inch of the swamp gave way about midmorning, revealing inky black water that stank of rot and decay, but the thick mist persisted.

The water grew shallower, revealing patches of land covered in thick vegetation that obstructed their path. Isabel found herself relying on Slyder more and more to get her bearings as they wound through the confusing maze of passable waterways. By midafternoon the water grew so shallow and the vegetation so dense that they were spending more time working to free the raft from entanglements than they were moving forward … until they came to a place where they ran aground, the raft sinking into the thick mud and becoming stuck.

“Looks like we’re on foot for a while,” Isabel said.

Scales slithered out of the water, his tongue flicking the air.

“We should probably disassemble the raft and take the rope with us,” Hector said.

“I agree,” Isabel said. “There’s no telling how far this patch of high ground goes.”

It wasn’t long before they were trudging through the muck. The ground was coated with a thick layer of mud and the vegetation was dripping from the heavy blanket of fog. Isabel found her feet growing heavier by the step, mud caking to her boots. Within a few hundred feet, they all needed to stop to scrape their boots clean.

“We haven’t seen much life,” Horace said. “I’m starting to wonder if the biggest danger in this place is just disorientation.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Hector said.

“Nor I,” Ayela said. “I’ve heard stories of terrible monsters living within the gloaming swamp. Things that occasionally wander into the jungle to hunt before disappearing back into the mist with their prey.”