“Me too,” Alexander said, fading from sight with a helpless shrug.
Isabel pressed on. The water became deeper, claiming more area, but she was able to stay on solid ground by following the trail Hazel and her friends had made. The old witch seemed to know exactly where she was going, a fact that made Isabel wonder even more about the mountain that once housed Siavrax Karth’s most secret laboratory. Clearly, Hazel knew much more about the place than she’d let on. Isabel only hoped her assertions about the Goiri were either wrong or just lies. The more she thought about it, the more she reasoned that Hazel would have felt threatened by the bones. After all, she was an old woman. Without her magic, she was helpless. If the stories were true, the Goiri’s bones were nothing but a threat to her.
This part of the swamp was nearly as dead as the parts covered by deeper water, except for the birds living in the treetops. From the sound of it, the trees were teeming with them, probably all of the variety that ate insects, which were becoming quite abundant.
When Isabel came across a different set of footprints, she stopped to examine them. A closer look told her that it was two men, walking in each other’s prints. Soldiers from Karth had found her friends’ trail and were following them. She wondered at the meaning of it. Were they lost or were they scouts? Did they have some means of communicating with the bulk of their forces? And how close were the Sin’Rath witches? Isabel was far more concerned about running into them than she was about the soldiers. Her shield spell made her all but invulnerable to normal weapons, but the witches were something else altogether.
She slowed her pace, taking more time to stop and listen for the enemy in the mist, but the fog had a dampening effect, muffling sound and limiting visibility. After some time, she decided the dampening effect worked both ways and started moving more quickly again, still stopping to examine the trail from time to time, but not as often.
Before long, she thought she heard a voice up ahead. She froze, listening intently, caution mixing with trepidation. She heard it again and started moving, swiftly but quietly closing with the soldiers.
“We’re lost,” one man said.
“All we have to do is follow these tracks and they’ll lead us right to the rest of the men,” another said.
Isabel could just make out their forms in the fog ahead. She stopped, crouching down behind a stump, and considered her options. They were soldiers of Karth, either controlled by the Sin’Rath or acting on orders from someone who was. Ultimately, they were innocent, undeserving of the swift death that Isabel could have easily delivered. But that inconvenient fact presented a dilemma. While they were innocent, they were still after her. What’s more, they were going to wind up at the boathouse just ahead of her and discover that they were following the wrong set of footprints. Lost and alone in the swamp, it was hard to say how they would react to her arrival.
She had to subdue them or lead them astray … but how? She decided to follow at a distance, even though they were traveling slower than she would have liked, while she waited for Alexander to check in on her. She didn’t have to wait long.
“How long have you been following them?” he asked quietly, appearing next to her.
“Half an hour,” she whispered. “I don’t want to kill them, but I need them out of my way.”
He smiled at her and winked before vanishing. She crouched in the mist, waiting. A few moments later she heard them shouting.
“Stop!”
“You’re our prisoner!”
Then she heard running, muffled by distance and fog. She waited until Alexander returned.
“They should be off chasing ghosts for a while,” he said. “You can get ahead of them for now.”
“Keep an eye on them for me?”
“Of course,” Alexander said and then he was gone and Isabel was again moving through the swamp, remaining vigilant but focusing on covering ground as quickly as possible. She knew they would probably double back when they lost Alexander in the mist. If they got back on the trail, they might reach the boathouse before she could build any kind of decent raft, and given the death leeches in the water, Isabel wasn’t willing to cut corners.
Then she stopped dead in her tracks, blinking in wonderment, remembering that one of the jars of powder in Hazel’s workshop was labeled concealment. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was certainly worth a try. She found the jar of dust and carefully sprinkled a pinch on the ground behind her. The trail left by her friends’ passage as well as her own vanished for twenty feet. Smiling fiercely, she raced forward another twenty feet and sprinkled more powder, erasing any evidence of her passage for forty feet. Satisfied with the effect of her vial of magical powder, she forged ahead. Even experienced trackers would be thrown by the sudden disappearance of tracks that were so clearly evident before. At a minimum, they’d have to circle to reacquire her trail and that would take time.
It was late in the day when she reached the boathouse, which was really no more than a shack with a little dock jutting into the black and murky water of the swamp. The trail had become more circuitous as she neared the deeper water, winding around pools and bogs to stay on solid ground.
Alexander appeared when she arrived.
“They’re half a day ahead of you and moving steadily toward the mountain. The water stays pretty deep between here and there, so once you’re floating, you probably won’t set foot on solid ground until you get there. Those two men have picked up your trail again but I don’t think they’ll get here before dark.”
“Good,” Isabel said. “If I’m quick, I can have a raft in the water with an hour to spare.”
Isabel worked steadily, tearing down support beams and wall struts from the boathouse to use as the foundation of her raft and wall boards to use as the floor, tying them all together with rope until she had a simple raft about eight feet long and five feet wide. She cut a board into a paddle and then found two long, straight branches to serve as poles. It was nearly dark when she shoved off. As the mist and coming night swallowed the silhouette of the skeletal boathouse, she heard two men complaining that they’d followed the wrong trail. Then their voices were swallowed by the gloaming swamp as well.
She poled her way through the cypress trees until it was too dark to continue, then tied off to a tree and lay down for the night, calling Slyder to her for company and comfort. It was a fitful night. Isabel wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she was wary of what might be lurking in the swamp. While the dangers she’d faced since entering the mist weren’t what she’d expected at all, they were deadly in the extreme. Anything that upset her raft and tossed her into the water would be the end of her, so every little ripple brought her fully awake and alert. By morning she was exhausted and sore from trying to sleep on bare boards.
She sent Slyder into the treetops, above the mist, to get her bearings and then set out, pushing herself through the water with one of the long poles. The water was nearly four feet deep in most places, but occasionally much deeper. She worked steadily through the morning until her shoulders burned from exertion. Over ground, Hazel was much slower, but on the water in a boat, with Hector and Horace to row, they would be moving much faster than she could. Isabel had no expectation of gaining on them, but she was determined not to fall too far behind.
From the absence of waterfowl, she assumed that this part of the swamp was also infested with death leeches. It was a frightening thought: nothing but murky water in every direction and all of it hiding death. She shuddered, trying to focus on her goal, on what she intended to do once she arrived. That was much simpler. She was going to burn a hole through Hazel.
Alexander appeared near midday.
“This part of the swamp looks as devoid of life as the rest of it,” he said.