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Hack and lunge. Knee an enemy in the groin, kick him in the shin, step on his foot, spit in his eye-whatever it takes to give you that little extra advantage, the millisecond or two you need to get a blade in to finish the job. Feel the tug of resistant flesh as your blade skewers a living being-but don't think about it, not then. Drag the blade free. That can be difficult. Sometimes you have to brace your foot against the body to drag your sword loose of clinging flesh. The hafts of your weapons get slippery with sweat and blood. Your fingers cramp. The steel of your blades runs red. The ground gets treacherous underfoot.
The four of us met the blind charge of the trolls. Harkane and Lesh stayed close together, back to back, covering each other. A
When the fight ended, the four of us could do no more than stand where we were while we caught our breath and while the adrenaline of our battle frenzy faded from our systems. There was a numbness that came up behind the insanity to cuddle us, a paralysis that was more mental than physical. If there had been another wave of the trolls just then, I'm not sure that we could have defended ourselves. But there wasn't. Slowly, we came out of our trances and looked around at each other, verifying that we had all survived. Everyone had minor cuts, scrapes, and so forth-though they almost escaped notice at first in the general bloodiness. We were all exhausted, especially Lesh, the oldest of us. After grappling with the trolls we were all covered with blood and sweat, and smeared with the muck that had coated them. We smelled at least as bad as the trolls, and there was no clear water around for us to wash in-not nearly enough.
Lesh looked around and found a piece of ground that wasn't covered in gore or bodies and plopped down. "I hope there's no more waiting their turn," he said. "I don't think I could handle it."
"With a little luck," I said, having trouble getting even that much out. I hobbled over to Lesh and took his spear. "Harkane, let's dump these bodies." Harkane nodded. We used the long weapons to lever the dead trolls back into their muck. Those dam trolls sank like lead, even in the thick gumbo of the swamp. We tried to push the bodies away from our tiny shore, but they sank too fast.
And one of them wasn't dead.
I had already rolled three or four bodies into the bog-slow work. I was wedging Lesh's spear under the next troll when he made a grab for my leg. My danger sense didn't warn me soon enough to sidestep him. Maybe the exhaustion that came after battle was responsible for that. And I was a bit off-balance. I fell backward heavily, and the troll was on top of me before I could do anything. The spear fell away and I couldn't get at my sword or knife soon enough. At least the troll wasn't armed either.
He was strong, insanely strong, and heavy. His arms weren't simply as long as a gorilla's, he had the strength of a great ape too. He swung at my head, and even though I twisted away enough to keep him from co
When A
After that chore was finished, we did what little we could to get the crud off us, particularly around our cuts. We didn't need six kinds of infection.
13 – The Mist
None of us slept much that night.
A bugle call at dawn heralded our next threat. The call was barely audible, smothered by another heavy fog. We got on the trail and pushed on as fast as we could, making more mistakes with the footing in our hurry. We heard horns several more times, tooting sometimes intricate melodies. One horn would answer another. It didn't take too long to deduce that it was more than standard military calls. The music was a telegraph system, and I had no way to read the messages. I assumed that they were about us.
We aimed as close to north as the terrain permitted. If my dead reckoning was working, we would be level with the first of the beaches where the sea-silver grew early that afternoon-if we weren't held up too long by the swamp or by the patrols looking for us. Every time I heard the horns, I cursed A
Despite the inconvenience they caused, the persistent fog and intermittent drizzle may have helped us, may have concealed us from the hunters. The rain certainly washed off some of the stink remaining from the swamp and the trolls. We continued to hear horns, quite close a couple of times, but we got through the morning without seeing any of the musicians.
Near noon, a new force entered the hunt, a presence. It had to be the elflord himself, casting a magic eye about for us, quartering the land to find the intruders who had killed his minions. The first time I felt the probe, I tried to think a blanket of invisibility over us. We stopped, and I concentrated on making us the little people who weren't there. Maybe I couldn't put up an actual shield like Parthet, but I didn't have anything to lose by trying. I felt the probe pass. My danger index lowered fractionally. But I didn't know whether or not we had been spotted.
"Someone's using magic to find us," I told my companions.
"I felt it too," A
"We may have escaped detection, but we can't count on it," I said. A
"If the lore is right, sea-silver can't be seen in the ocean at night. We have to harvest it during the day." When it was most dangerous-but it wasn't something I could argue. A
"Then we'll have to make do," I said. "We'll get lined up near a patch of the silver and wait until the coast is clear." The phrasing was accidental, but I had never heard the cliché used so literally before.
We started bearing left whenever the swamp offered a choice. It was still slow going, especially since I knew that we might hit a dead end at any time. There was no way to swim our horses across open water in the swamp. Even the most placid-looking ponds were inhabited by the giant crocodilians and other nasty beasts. Once I judged that we were heading just a little north of west, I tried to keep us as close to that heading as possible. The sky cleared about noon, so I could get a better idea of the time and our course. The last of the ground fog evaporated. The temperature climbed. We continued to hear horns now and then, but farther off. And finally we heard the sea.