Quickly, I fashioned the vine into a lasso.
“Galen, for the sake of Paladine and Majere and Mishakal and Branchala . . .”
His voice trailed off. Alfric had always been poor at theology; he had run out of gods, evidently.
“What do you expect me to do?” I shouted out across the quagmire.
“Throw something out on this mud or quicksand or whatever it is, something I can grab onto and pull myself out.”
“Alfric?”
“What, Galen? Hurry up! I’ve stopped sinking for now, but I’m up to my waist in soil!”
“What’s in this for me, Big Brother?”
Silence across the quagmire.
“But, of course,” I continued, “there is brotherly affection, which I so deeply cherish . . .”
“Stop toying with me, you damn Weasel, and cast out a life line!”
“A little more . . . respect out there, Alfric! All right. There’s a vine set to come in your direction. Now, I don’t know if I can throw vegetation that far, or if it’s long enough to reach you, or even if you can see it in the dark, but I’d say that once I cast it out there, your odds will leap from nothing at all to just this side of slim.”
I cast the vine in the direction of the voice.
“Be of good faith, Brother. Things grow quickly in this swamp, as you said yourself. If the vine doesn’t reach you, maybe it will grow in your direction.
“And if that fails, surely you’ve found the bottom of the quagmire. Just stand there until someone comes along.”
I turned, walked off into the darkness, unsure of my direction, but filled with a deep and satisfying sense of poetic justice.
The things Alfric called behind me I should not repeat. I suppose that I deserved the new names he was inventing. After all, I relied on trust—and on trust only—that he’d eventually be able to wade his way out of the fen in which I had left him. If it turned out that he was a little worse off than I had foreseen, that Father’s armor was a little heavier than I had thought . . . well, it calmed me to realize that if the vine and the darkness failed Alfric, if it turned out I deserved worse than simple name calling, my punishment wasn’t likely to arrive soon. At least not by his hands. I walked confidently off into the darkness, away from the sound of Brother’s curses and shouts and, finally, his screams.
Darkness, though, does all kinds of terrible things to confidence. It was the kind of night with* nothing to offer the traveler, the kind you should sleep through or wait out. Around me, Alfric’s shouts and curses faded, to be replaced by other noises less certain, more threatening: the sounds of quick scuffling and quicker movement; of things I could not see splashing and swimming in waters I could not see; the sound of those waters themselves moving; and the occasional, threatening laughter of some marsh bird. I was good and lost. After about an hour, the trail I had been following dwindled into nothing but a snakelike crease through the reeds. I stopped on the rapidly narrowing path, wondered at what kind of creature had made the trail in the first place, and then, faced with no other choice, continued in the same direction, though soon entirely without direction or even the sense that someone or something had been here before me. Remembering a fragment of the advice Father had hurled at me when we left the moat house, I crouched and checked the bole of a cypress tree. Moss grew on all sides. North, it seemed, was everywhere. A snorting sound brought me to my feet, clutching my sword and expecting mayhem. I gripped the trunk of the cypress, eager to get behind it if I could figure out where “behind” was—where the sound had come from in the first place.
A louder snort followed, and a strange stirring that seemed to come from somewhere off to my left and below me. Cautiously I moved to my left, prepared for centaurs or satyrs or the legendary carnivorous birds that were supposed to infest this swamp. Down on my hands and knees I went, crawling toward the source of the noise. But not slowly enough, evidently. I had not crawled ten feet before the ground in front of me gave way under my hands. For a moment I stood over a yawning incline of mud and flattened reed, looking below me into a clearing darker still, where something large and indefinite glistened as it moved. Just when it dawned on me that I did not want to go down there, I had no choice, sliding rapidly face first over the mud and the slick, leafy surface down into a puddled depression.
Where something monstrous splashed and snorted.
I lay still for a moment, having heard the old story that predators will not harm you if they think you’re dead. I hoped devoutly that the predator would think that my fall had killed me.
For a long minute I lay still, hearing nothing but the breathing and slow movement of a large creature. Then I felt warm breathing on my neck, and a wet snuffling that was anything but predatory. It was like a dog or a calf .
. .
Or a horse.
I turned onto my back quickly, and stared into the wide-eyed face of the pack mare.
We had been traveling for some time, wrestling and kicking at one another, as I tried to steer the stubborn pack mare through the dense undergrowth and she, burdened by my weight and that of the armor, struggled to leave one of us behind on the soggy ground of the swamp. I was clinging for dear life when the darkness finally began to break ahead of us. It was nothing like morning, which was still hours away. Nor was the green light in the trees anything like sunlight filtered through leaves and through the needles of evergreens—that fresh color I was to remember fondly in the darker times up the road. Instead, this green was a timid and unhealthy one, fading to a yellow or an off-white I had never seen in nature, unless it was the color of a snake’s belly. The color was that of phosfire. I can tell you that now, though at the time I had never seen the lights in the wilds.
Phosfire was what the elves call “midnight blaze,” the burning gases that rise from the scraps and remains of the dead things a swamp consumes. Phosfire gives off heat only when it has been condensed, when it drips from the tubing of the still (like the one in Gileandos’s library, which of course he seldom used to distill phosfire, but which could be used in any way an enterprising student cared to use it, as his incandescent farewell from the battlements had proven).
As a liquid, phosfire is highly flammable, burning within minutes after contact with air. As a gas, it is only a harmless source of light, not unlike the luminescent powder found in a firefly’s abdomen, though it does become more thick, does look more bright and fevered, the closer you travel to the center of a swamp and the center of all the death it has swallowed through the years.
At the time, I was encouraged by the light, as was the mare, and we both followed it eagerly. I urged my mount on, sure that the light had a source somewhere on drier, safer ground—a dwelling, perhaps, or the campfires of a surviving Bayard, Brithelm, and Agion.
Of course, I did not notice (or refused to notice) that the green light gave off no warmth, moved nervously ahead of me, and illuminated nothing but itself. It was only when the phosfire gave way to firelight, when the green faded into the friendlier glow of reds and of yellows, when the smell of woodsmoke greeted me, and finally the warmth of actual campfires, that I began to recognize that the light which had led me farther and farther into the swamp had been something unpleasant and lifeless.
I dismounted and led the mare into concealment behind a small cluster of laryx bushes. I surveyed. Below me now, probably at the lowest point of the swamp, lay a small rise, as though having bottomed out, the swamp intended to take heart and return to sea level. Lowlands these were indeed, but surprisingly dry from the looks of it; dry enough to support what appeared to be a circle of smudges, small campfires designed to provide light and warmth and also drive away the last insects of the season. Piles of unlit kindling lay strewn from one fire to the next, completing the sense that whatever lay within the band of flames was protected and encircled.