The door to the inner sanctum, one that was supposed to be guarded by a dozen soldiers, burst open, apparently struck by an invisible battering ram. A violent breeze swept through the room, ruffling hair and displacing several score sheets of paper.
His mouth locked in a scowl so stony it might have been etched onto his face, Ananias duMark stood in the doorway. The hem of his robe flapped in the fading wind, and one fist was clenched, white-knuckled, on his thick wooden staff.
King Dororam breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “DuMark,” he said in greeting, “we were just—”
“Everyone else out!”
Most in the room were generals and kings, and certainly unaccustomed to being ordered about. Nonetheless, within two minutes, duMark and Dororam stood alone. The sorcerer crooked a finger, and the door slammed itself shut behind the last straggler.
Dororam's expression deepened into a scowl to equal the wizard's. “I give you substantial leeway, duMark,” he said softly. “But you will not barge into my castle—my home—in this manner. You will not order about my guests, particularly royal visitors. And you will not—”
“Dororam, shut the hell up.”
It was sheer astonishment, more than anything else, that compelled Dororam to comply.
“Good,” the half-elf continued. “Tell me, then. Is it true?”
The king frowned. “Is what true?”
“Don't play games with me! Rumor has it that you sent a scouting party into Kirol Syrreth! Is it true?”
This, Dororam had not been looking forward to. “Yes,” he said. “It's true.”
DuMark collapsed into the nearest chair. “Dororam, when did you become such a fool? I asked you not to take any action. I told you that I have my own source of information, and my own efforts under way to hamper the Charnel King's efforts. Why would you risk interfering with either?”
The king shrugged. “You yourself told me that your source is less than reliable. I needed to confirm that you can count on his information now, before the war effort begins to depend on its veracity.”
“As I recall, I also told you that my source would probably vanish completely if you acted too soon. If the Dark Lord figures out that we've an informant in his lands, he'll take steps. And despite my magics, a dead spy is of little more use to me than he is to you.
“Besides, I can assure you that even with his army's ongoing training exercises, the Brimstone Mountains are guarded well enough to repel any attack. You needn't have sent a party to learn that.”
Dororam dragged over a chair and sat beside the wizard. “I’m not looking for a hole in his defenses, duMark. I simply want my men to corroborate for me that those exercises are, in fact, ongoing. If I can confirm that your source is accurate on this, I'll feel better about trusting it later, when it matters.”
DuMark closed his eyes. Gods, but the man can be such an idiot! Ever since his daughter died, he hasn't been his old self. The half-elf had to stop himself from shaking his head in despair. It's not as if Dororam's too old to make another one….
Well, what was done was done. “Your scouts understand their orders?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Dororam assured him. “They are to observe enemy activity near the borders only, and determine if the patrols are indeed less numerous than before. No incursions, no contact, and certainly no combat. Trust me, the Iron Keep will never even know they were there.”
The trees—twisted, half-dead monstrosities groaning beneath the weight of mosses and fungi—obscured and even absorbed the sunlight far out of proportion to the amount of cover they provided. Even at the height of noon, the swamps of Jureb Nahl were brightened by little more than a diffuse, sickly gray luminescence.
Here and there the waters rippled as some animal moved beneath the ubiquitous layer of green scum. Rats clambered on clicking claws across the boughs. Huge spiderwebs lay draped over and around the trees, sometimes three or four at a stretch. And always, always lurked the alligators and constrictors, some big enough to be easily mistaken for logs until they opened maws bristling with dagger-sized teeth.
A constant drone jiggled within their ears, tickling at the fringes of consciousness. Insects sang mindless paeans to the world; the waters lapped and gurgled; birds hooted in the distance, falling silent only briefly as the goblins drew near. All were deadened and mangled into a single dreary tone by the weight of the air, still and humid despite the chill, giving the entire orchestra an eerie, dreamlike feel.
Then, of course, there was the constant miasma: the scent of dead and stagnant things, so pervasive that even the most bestial members of the squad struggled not to gag and resolved to burn their outfits once they'd returned to civilization.
But all of this, all of it, would have remained tolerable if they hadn't lost the bloody damn skiff!
It had been just after dawn on their third day in Jureb Nahl. They were debating the merits of stopping off on a small, moss- and peat-coated hillock and having a quick breakfast when the “hill” decided it had plans of its own.
Enormous tentacles rose from the water, lashing and pummeling, seeking prey for this strange wetlands predator. The goblins, save Belrotha, found themselves tumbling pell-mell into the water. Struggling to their feet, coughing pestilential gunk from their lungs, they'd found themselves facing what they could only refer to later, in Cræosh's words, as “a huge fucking hard-shelled swamptopus.”
They'd succeeded in killing the damn thing—or, in other words, Cræosh and Katim had distracted it while Belrotha drove her massive sword through its body and then pummeled it into paste with a log, while the others danced around in the water and the clinging muck, trying to contribute and failing miserably—but not before the flailing tentacles had reduced the skiff to what would, in drier conditions, have been kindling.
And after all that, Jhurpess had pulled a face and announced that the thing didn't even taste very good.
That was three days ago, and since then, lacking any other recourse, they'd walked, waded, and (in the cases of the shorter members) swum through Jureb Nahl.
Hell no longer held any fear for the soldiers of this particular Demon Squad. After slogging through those green-scummed, vermin-infested waters, any or all of them would have cheerfully chosen an eternity in the worst depths of the Pit over one more night in the Ancestors/Stars/gods-damned swamp! The insects used the lot of them as an endless buffet of flesh and blood. The filthy, stinging mud had coated them (albeit, in Belrotha's case, only from the knees down), and the two shortest goblins had finally been forced to hitch a ride. Gimmol sat perched upon one of the ogre's broad shoulders; the kobold stood inside her backpack. Where he could, Jhurpess traveled via the branches above, but even he could not avoid the muck entirely.
Only Fezeill, in his scale-covered form, had escaped largely unscathed. The faux troglodyte had taken to scouting, and finally, finally he returned with the news they'd all been dying (and in some cases, very nearly killing) to hear.
“The ground ssslopesss upward jussst a mile or ssso from here,” he said, his head poking up just a few inches from the surface. “I sssaw a few sssections of what appearsss to have been a ssstone wall. I believe that we've finally reached the ruinsss.”
Cræosh's first instinct was to fall to his knees and thank the Ancestors, but he decided that such an act of obeisance could wait until it wouldn't submerge him completely.
The wall indeed proved to be one length of a larger ruin. Even better, it was constructed on a stretch of land high enough to stand completely out of the water. Sure, the air itself remained so choked with moisture that breathing and drinking were damn near synonymous, but still, it was something. Cræosh allowed himself a moment's respite, leaning back against the moss-covered stones and making some token gestures at wiping the worst of the sludge from his armor. “I am not,” he announced, “looking forward to the trip out.”
Katim, glancing about with narrowed eyes and flared nostrils, nodded absently. “Perhaps we can find
…an old boat, or the materials…to construct another skiff. But I wonder…if we shouldn't first concern…ourselves with what we have here.”
Cræosh righted himself and meandered over to stand between Katim and a thick cypress. “Oh,” he said, peering past one furry shoulder. “Yeah, maybe we should, at that.”
Portions of the wall, most of which were so dilapidated that they barely reached the orc's elbows, stretched into the haze in both directions. Great gaps revealed where over half of that fortification had long since crumbled into the wet and malleable earth. Copious grasses spouted from what had once been tightly mortared cracks. Molds and fungi coated the stones like a light dusting of snow.
Yet enough of the wall remained to show that it had once been a solid bastion. Surely these ruins must indeed be ancient Jureb Nahl itself.
The once-great town beyond that wall was equally pathetic. Some of the main roads remained visible, barely, as lighter stripes wending through the foliage. Walls and parts of walls were tombstones, marking the corpses of homes and shops and temples. One or two of the ruins retained their roofs, but most were nothing but sporadic bricks hidden among the weeds or trapped in the branches of ancient trees.
From where they stood, Cræosh and Katim could see the remains of the once-proud keep that had dominated the town's center, its four watchtowers piercing the sky above, allowing sentinels a clear view over what, at the time, had been open fields of crops. Several of the buildings actually looked to be in halfway decent shape, but heaps of craggy, broken stone were all that remained of two of those towers, while a third had been sheared down to a height of about ten feet by the rigors of past centuries. The northwest tower still stood, but open wounds gaped in the brick, and powdered mortar sifted earthward at the slightest breeze. The entire thing leaned subtly toward the sunset, and Cræosh didn't trust it to support the weight of a corpulent owl.
“If this dead wizard's tower is in the same prime condition as this one,” he said, “I think we can count on going back to Queen Anne empty-handed.”
“Or at least…empty-headed,” Katim said. “I’m not going…to be the one to tell her…we failed. If she says…it's here, perhaps we should at least…look?”
“Okay, fine. So where in the name of my green and crusty orifice is it?”
The troll looked again at the watchtower. “If it were somewhat…sturdier,” she mused, “it would provide…an excellent vantage point.”
“Swell. And if Grandpa had been an ogre, Grandma would be hollow. You think your ‘if’ will support our weight?”
“Not at all,” Katim told him. “But it might…support a kobold's.” Cræosh began to smile.
It was perhaps not all that surprising that Gork himself was less than anxious to test that idea.
“Hell no,” was his actual response.
“Look, Shorty,” Cræosh told him, “you're the only here who can do it.”
“Then it doesn't get done.”
“I'd ask Jhurpess, but he's too heavy to pull it off!”
“I'll pull something else off if you don't get off my case about—”
“Gork,” Katim said, “try to be…reasonable.”
“Okay, wait. You and the Great Green Pig want me to climb that…that death trap, and I’m the one being unreasonable? I think that squid-thing held you underwater too long, Katim. The only falling I plan to do any time soon is asleep.”
“But—”
“Ask the doppelganger. He can be a kobold—sort of—and he can climb the damn thing.”
“You're a far more ssskilled climber,” Fezeill said smugly. “Regardlesss of form.”
“So turn into something with wings and take a look around that way.”
“Such as what? A giloral?” The troglodyte shuddered. “Even if I wanted to—and I'd rather bed an elf—it'sss a far cry from having wingsss to knowing how to ussse them. Not happening.”
“Think of this as an opportunity to learn new skills, then.”
Katim smiled, not precisely the reaction that Gork would have hoped for. “Listen, kobold, and…listen well. We cannot leave here…until we've found Trelaine's…tower.”
“So we find another way to do it.”
“We'd have to search…hundreds of square yards, perhaps…miles of swamp. Do you…want to go back in there?”
Little kobold teeth gleamed in the dim light. “I’m riding an ogre. You're the one getting wet and sticky.”
“Precisely my…point.”
Gork saw it coming and tried to duck away. Unfortunately, Cræosh had slinked around behind him during the argument, waiting for precisely that. The kobold screamed, thrashed, and bit down hard on Katim's arms; nothing helped. Shrieking and spitting troll fur the entire way, Gork sailed through the air toward the top of the leaning tower.
Oddly, though, his only coherent thought was, If I hear so much as a single chuckle from Gimmol, I'll drown the useless turd.
Even he had to admit—later, when he could think clearly—that it'd been a good throw. Katim arced him up and over the crumbling crenellations, rather than tossing him directly into the stone. (He didn't pretend it had been for his sake; she just didn't want to risk knocking the teetering thing over.) His landing was surprisingly gentle, and though the rock grated beneath him, sending more powder sifting out over the swamp, nothing actually fell.
For long and aching minutes, Gork lay spread-eagle atop the rickety stone platform, waiting for his heart to return to something resembling a healthy pace. Then he waited a few minutes more, until he could force himself to think about something other than slowly feeding Katim to a hive of rock spiders. Then he rose to his feet, taking mincing little steps, and examined the lands beyond.
He saw, first and foremost, that the trees and other growth thinned considerably to the north, until only an occasional gnarled and knotted trunk protruded from the marsh. Beyond them, a wavering phantom in the low-lying haze, stood a circle of great, rectangular stones—some standing on end, others lying horizontally atop them. The circle was incomplete, broken where the earth had eroded away and allowed part of the henge to topple into the swamp. Enough remained, however, for Gork to identify it—from tales he'd heard, and even a charcoal sketch he'd once seen—as a druidic circle, an altar to some god or power forgotten since before the rise of the Charnel King.
All of which might've been fascinating to a historian, but was useless to the kobold, since the circle was neither a wizard's tower nor of any immediate monetary value. And of that tower, there was no trace. Other than that henge of stones far to the north, he saw nothing but the thick trees and foul waters of the swamp.
“Fuck!” he shouted at the uncaring expanse. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“Problem, Shorty?” Cræosh asked from somewhere below.
“Yeah, there's a problem! The problem is I hate this place! I hate this place, I hate this whole mission, and I’m not real joyously fond of any of you right now, either!”
There was a brief pause. “I’m gonna go out on a limb, here,” the orc finally said, “and guess that you haven't found anything?”
“‘Out on a limb,’ he says,” Gork murmured savagely. “Why doesn't he climb up here; I'll show him out on a limb….”
Still muttering resentfully, the kobold began the arduous climb back to earth. It was certainly a near thing; more than once, he felt his grip giving way as mortar and stone crumbled beneath the pressure of even his tiny hands. Finally, however, he was low enough to drop onto the ogre's head—eliciting an abbreviated bleat—and from there to the top of one of the broken walls.
“So what now?” he asked, not giving Cræosh time to spew whatever smart-ass comment was assuredly forthcoming.
“I'd say we've got two choices,” Cræosh said instead. “One, we comb this entire ruin, top to bottom, and hope like hell we find some clue as to where this goat-fucker Trelaine might have shoved his tower.”
“That could take sssome time,” Fezeill said. Then, as the weight of their disd
ain crashed down upon him, “I’m jussst sssaying…”
“The other option?” Katim prompted.
“Right. Option two is that we wander back out into the swamp and search aimlessly until we stumble over the damn thing or drop dead.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then, “I'll search what's left of the keep,” Gork volunteered. “Hell, I've already seen most of it from up top, anyway.”
The troll nodded. “I'll go with…him,” she said. Then, at the naked hostility in the kobold's expression, she added, “We've already seen what…sorts of things live in…this swamp. It would be…foolish for you to wander off…on your own.”
“Of course,” Gork said through grinding teeth.
“Nature-boy can check the trees,” Cræosh continued, gesturing vaguely upward. “I somehow doubt there's anything useful up there, but maybe he'll spot a building or something we can't see from the ground.”
The bugbear smiled. “Jhurpess like trees.”
“You don't say. Fezeill, you get to check under the water, see if anything's sunken but intact. Me and Belrotha—and Gimmol, I suppose—are gonna look through whatever other buildings are still standing.”
He was off before he finished speaking, tromping through the broken walls. Belrotha followed a moment later, Gimmol trailing behind. Jhurpess and Fezeill headed toward the back end of town. Gork and Katim stood alone, by the dilapidated walls of the ancient fort.
“You try to toss me again,” he told her, puffed up as big as he could, “you're going to lose a finger.”
He anticipated a threat, a sarcastic remark, something, anything other than the knowing smile that crept almost sensuously across the troll's twisted snout. Shaken and not entirely sure why, Gork turned and moved toward the cracked walls of what had once been Jureb Nahl's beating heart.
Initially, other than rotted sludge that might once have been furniture, and a whole lot of vermin, the keep's main structure didn't provide much. While the outer walls had survived, the same couldn't be said of most of the interior.