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"Did you come this far before?" I asked A
"We could cut over to the coast and follow the beaches," Harkane suggested. "We'd make better time and it would be safer riding."
"Until we met the first patrol," I said. I took a childish pleasure in seeing him lose a little of his habitual smugness. "We're not here to fight, at least not until we've got the sea-silver."
"How about we bear east for a bit?" Lesh suggested. "We get back to higher ground, it should be dry."
I flirted with the idea. It was tempting. But I finally decided against it. I didn't want to stray too far from the west coast while we were outbound. I could only find sea-silver along that shore, and I had to have that.
"We'll try to follow what's left of the trail," I said. "The swamp should cut down on the number of patrols we have to worry about. With better routes around the swamp, I doubt that anyone'll be in it-unless they're looking specifically for us." I gave A
The swamp. It was the first one I had ever been in. My expectations came straight out of movies and books. I don't suppose that I was disappointed. Mucking through a swamp offers few attractions for anyone but a masochist. The only good thing about it was that the path never completely disappeared. There was always a safe way, if we were careful. At times I couldn't tell solid ground from mud soup just by looking. The vegetation wasn't even a sure guide. Some of it floated on goop that could almost pass for solid ground. And there were vast pools of algae-filled water, slimy mud pits, pockets of gas that erupted with a stench as a hoof pierced them. Eventually, I had to more or less rely on my danger sense to pick a path through the worst stretches. And even that couldn't keep a horse from an occasional misstep on a narrow track. Moss-draped trees and ground mist complicated matters. But the worst part was the swamp's fauna. We saw sawed-off dragons like the ones I saw when I first arrived in Varay, larger crocodilians gliding through stagnant waters-one of those had to be fifty feet from snout to tail. A four-legged reptile that Lesh called a snake scuttled into a pond as we approached the rock it had been su
"I'll warrant there's worse in this swamp," Lesh said after I mentioned my distaste for snakes.
"Much worse," A
Finding our way took all of my attention in the swamp. In a way, I guess that was a good thing. I couldn't dwell on the dead men we had left behind. I knew they would be missed sooner or later. And when the bodies were found, we would have a lot of people and other beings looking for us. Sure, I hoped to cause a bit of confusion for the elflord along the way, but I wanted to get my sea-silver first. Anyway, slitting the throats of sleeping men wasn't the kind of confusion I had figured on spreading.
We didn't take specific rest breaks. Finding safe pathways gave us plenty of idle minutes. Our progress was maddeningly slow. I doubt that we averaged even one mile an hour all day. The sky remained heavily overcast. Three times we were raked by short but furious rainstorms. I decided fairly early in the afternoon to grab the next substantial piece of solid real estate to make our camp for the night. I was exhausted and felt so cruddy from the swamp that I couldn't stand it. We were all dragging.
The solid land we found wasn't much, but no one argued when I said that we were done for the day. The ground was wet after the rain, but it was firmer than most of it we had seen.
We had just started to settle in when I heard a sound that made me think of a pig ru
Somebody yelled, "Trolls!"
I don't suppose that was the most critical piece of information just then. I already had my sword out. When I saw the trolls, I pulled my knife as well. None of us had much chance to get set before they were on us, rising right out of the muck that surrounded our little patch of terra firma. What followed wasn't at all pretty. The fight wasn't one of those precisely choreographed battles that you see in the movies, where every move is pla
When they did get to us, they did fight, viciously, insanely, on the attack every instant. If there had been just a few more of them, they might have succeeded in putting us on their di
There's really no way to fully convey what a fight like that is like to someone who hasn't experienced it. It's ru