Distantly Lillian feels them beginning to move again, cold water splashes upwards with each plunging stride, wetting her face and dragging her against her will back into full awareness. Reeds and mud flash by under her, until they reach a pool of stagnant water at the base of an unhealthy looking tree, whose dark roots twist into the stagnant soil, forming an overhang inches above the surface. Dale wades towards the tree on all fours and begins scooping out the mud beneath it with paddle shaped paws.
When he is finally satisfied the monster allows his head to loll again so that he can look his passenger in the eye.
“Done, and none too soon, beloved,” it leers, revealing rows of yellowed teeth.
Lillian closes her eyes to block out the sight of the grotesque face, but she cannot block out the feeling of something wet and damp trying to force its way past her lips and into her mouth. At first she thinks it might be the thing’s tongue but then she realizes that it is the recently removed breathing tube.
“She can hear me talking to her, can’t she?” Her captor’s voice suddenly breaks into her fractured consciousness. “I have no more time for games, you will need to breathe, beloved, I need you to breathe ….could crack your teeth if I had to,” the thing promises, thrusting the hollow tentacle against her incisors.
Somehow, despite all she has been through this night, Lillian cannot unclench her jaw. Even though only minutes before, she had been all but broken, the thought of that dead flesh in her throat, the revulsion at the idea of it once more reaching deep into her lungs and breathing for, her lends her the strength to refuse the monster’s increasingly urgent demands. Dale quickly tires of both pleading and threatening, instead something occurs to him which sets his blue eyes twinkling with malicious glee. He would not have dared such a thing with the girl, as she had been half an hour before for fear that she would not respond, now though...
“Very well beloved, I will not come where I am not invited, you shall not have it until you open your mouth and let me in of your own accord. Not until you welcome me inside you.”
The demonic visage raises itself out of her vision, distantly she hears the sound of the vertebra in the monster’s neck realigning, and then she feels the alien body tense around her.
“Keep your eyes shut, if you can.” Dale says, just before he launches himself into the foul smelling water, thrusting his body deeply into the soft earth and burrowing his way beneath the tree’s roots. For a few seconds Lillian tries to refuse his warning and keeps her eyes open, thin white tree roots like worms or hanging bits of flesh undulate in the murky water, then she is forced to close her eyes altogether as they wriggle deeper into the sticky earth.
To her credit Lillian keeps her mouth tightly shut as they slide through the ooze; she fights her panic and her shock at the temperature of the night-chilled water. Soon, though, it becomes warmer as the mud settles around her, filling her nostrils and ears, her already tortured lungs begin to protest at the lack of breathable air. Her attempts to struggle are feeble and instinctive and seem only to allow more mud and slime into her nose. Then she feels it brushing back and forth against her clamped lips, the tentacle waiting patiently for her to relent, for her inevitable surrender. Pride and revulsion last a matter of seconds, need takes over and all too soon she finds her lips parting, welcoming in the rotting mud and black water of the marshes and with them the carrion taste of the tentacle that resumes its place, sliding into her aching throat and beginning to suck air from the shaded darkness between the tree’s roots. The air is foul and dank but to Lillian it seems sweet as life itself, a few bubbles drift up and float out onto the still churning waters of the tiny pool, other than that there is no way to tell the two were ever there and no way to know if the large bubbles are caused by Lillian’s last desperate gasp or Dale’s mocking laughter.
*
By the time the sun has risen in the sky, Samuel Blake is travelling on the river, a pair of saddlebags hitched over his shoulder. He had left quickly, as soon as the train had come to a stop in the small hours of the morning, leaving behind Caroline and her besotted confessor; it gave Sam some small amusement to think that the padre would inevitably make a play for the very innocence that he believed protected her. Still he doubted that Caroline would miss it much and after decades of watching such pantomimes play themselves out, he had neither the interest nor the time to see how things resolved themselves.
It was not the importance that the Necromancer and his puppet had placed on the Carter girl, so much as the fact that
Pellan
had become involved that prompted such haste. Many images remained in his mind from vampires that he had consumed, but none featured the malformed Lord of the Marshes in person. That old spider was almost never seen but he spun his webs far and with care, if he had taken an interest in the girl her importance could not be in doubt. Of course, another part of himself warned, he had only the skeleton’s word to go on, this might even be a trap orchestrated by the old trickster himself. Whether it was the Necromancer or the Elder who had set him on this dangerous course though didn’t matter, he simply couldn’t afford to lose any chance to reach the Gate. He would just have to tread carefully and be quick, ascertain whether the girl even existed and then proceed from there. With luck, if it were a trap, he would be in and out before the bloated patriarch even noticed.
The craft he travelled on now was not one of the lazy barges that bobbed up and down the river, she was a sleek river boat with narrow lines and a low draught, since the wind
favoured
her she even had her sail up, that and the current meant that they sped along as fast as any horse could gallop. A fair exchange, since it had cost him his horse to book passage so early. The purse given to him by the Necromancer was still heavy enough to have allowed him to pay for the journey and he already deeply regretted the loss of a good mount but a boat like this would never have taken a horse and besides what good would a horse be in the marshes? Far better to have the money to buy a new mount, when he reached his destination.
The boat itself was more commonly used for mail and vital supplies, its speed meant that any space on board was at a premium so Sam has at least one night of squatting out on an open deck to look forward to. The three other people on board do their best to ignore him, but Sam has no objections, he is happy to keep out of the way and watch as the lush land on either side of the river flickers past. Having spent the last five years in the desert the sight of so much greenery seems nothing short of miraculous. It appears to Sam that they pass a barge carrying lumber up river almost every hour, an unimaginable wealth for those more used to living out at the end of the line, where having more than four wooden chairs and a table is considered wealth and paper is only used in bibles. He fades into the background so completely that none of the crew needs to speak to him even as much as to ask him to step out of the way until that evening.
“Want some grub, Mr. Blake?” The youngest of the crew, little more than a boy, asks him as he distributes food cooked over a small and constantly monitored brazier. Unlike most boats, which would take to shore during the night, the mail boat kept going. It was not yet summer and the middle of the river was deep and free of obstacles, since the captain’s bonus relied on how fresh his news or whatever perishables he might be transporting were, the crew simply rigged up two strong lanterns the bow of the boat and trusted to their knowledge of the river.
“Want some grub?” The boy repeats the question, proffering a bowl of steaming stew and waving a chunk of dark bread. Sam blinks, for just a second he can see the road map of veins and arteries running through the boy; he can follow the heat as it flows from his heart and stomach into his limbs, not quite so hot as the stew but far more appealing to the dark voices calling him from the twilight. His lip curls involuntarily as he looks at the bowl. Then, with an act of will, he nods his head and joins the boy and the captain around the metal stand and its collection of glowing coals.
Almost as soon as he feels the heat of those coals and the warmth of the stew in his throat, he loses some of the predatory desire that had stirred in him moments before and he is able to smile his thanks.
“I thought so,” the captain says raising his own bowl in acknowledgement, “the cold on the river creeps up on a desert man.”
“The nights are cold there, too,” Sam answers, looking west, past the horizon.
“I know my father used to be prospector before we earned enough to move to the river.”
“He must have been lucky, lots of folks spend their whole lives saving for that move.”
“He was very lucky, but he was a hard man, he did whatever it took to get here, had this boat made from the best timbers and started learning how to sail. I still say he never learned to use an oar half as well as a pick. He just never got used to the water or the river’s moods but I did and I don’t think I’d ever have got used to the dark and smoke of those mines. So he done alright by me, my pa. Any rate cold here’s different than out on the sands, it’s the water, gets into your bones they say. I could see something was creeping over you as the shadows lengthened, nothing like a good hot meal to bring a man back to himself.”
“Yes, thank you, it’s been a long time since I had good company at supper time.”
“Thought as much,” the boatman agrees amiably, dipping his bread into the meaty stew, “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your hurry to get down to
Olstop
?”
“I wondered why you didn’t ask that earlier.”
The captain shrugs. “You had the money and often people in a hurry don’t like being asked their business. I need the money and saw no reason to put you off. I thought that now that you are on board and we’ve shared a meal would be a better time to ask, just to satisfy my curiosity. Don’t bother to answer if you can’t tell me the truth.”
“The truth is, I’m actually headed for the other side of the river.”
The captain’s eyes widen slightly at this.
“The marshes? But why? There’s nothing in there and they’ve got a bad reputation for swallowing people.”
“I know their reputation, but I’ve got to get there quick. I won’t lie to you and I can’t tell you my reasons.”
“They must be unusual for you to go there, but if you want I can put you off on the right side of the river. It’ll save you having to back track from
Olstop
.”
“I’d be much obliged if you would.”
“I don’t know how much time it will save you though, at the rate we’re going we might reach the edge of the marshes before sun up, but you’d be a fool to venture in there before daylight.”
Sam grunts his agreement but pointedly does not comment on the captain’s last statement.
Nodding, as if having confirmed something, the captain returns to his own meal. “Beef,” he says breaking the silence, “you don’t get much of that out west do you?”
“No, even sheep are hard to graze past
Silverspring
, pork’s the staple meat and that’s not too common for most but a
pig’ll
eat most things, so they’re easier to keep.”
“When I was a boy some people even ate the bugs,” the captain comments, referring to the Bowl’s large population of insect life.
“I ate
gritter
once,” Sam muses, dunking his own bread, “the man who cooked it swore it was a delicacy but I certainly haven’t developed a taste for those sandy shelled monsters.”
“I’m surprised that he would give up such a valuable beast of burden, they’re the devil to train.”
“Its antenna had been mauled in an attack by an ant-lion,” Sam explains.
The captain nods sagely, the gritter is the second biggest insect in the Bowl and weighs about the same as a small horse, it is favoured by prospectors and civilians as a means of transport on the open sands since it can carry many times its own weight and is far more reliable than a horse in the deep desert, so long as speed is not your primary consideration. The biggest problem with gritters lies in overcoming their natural instinct to throw themselves under the sand at the first sign of trouble, an instinct developed to deal with the largest and rarest insect in the Bowl, the ant-lion. A series of stinging tentacles make up the lion’s ‘mane’ and the rest is a heavily
mandibled
insect, the size of a carthorse, that paralyzes and then masticates its victims.
“You’ve actually seen an ant-lion?”
The youth asks.
Neither gritters nor ant-lions came anywhere near the river, since both species were prone to drown in more than a few inches of water.
“Not that time but I have once or twice, they’re rare except in the hottest parts of the desert, something to do with the mating cycle.”
“Did you ever kill one? You ever seen a mutant?” The youth asks.
“Jason, why don’t you go and see if Randy wants a turn by the fire?”
Jason frowns at the prospect of having to leave warmth and company in order to take his turn at watch but he leaves without comment, taking the rest of his supper with him.