Black Jade

quietly as we could through the trees, here mostly oak and chestnut. As we drew nearer to Gorman, we saw what he saw: that the forest seemed to give out a hundred yards ahead of us. He led on past a gnarled, old oak until he stood upon some high ground, beyond which the forest dissolved into a dense grayness. We joined him there. Below us, in a great, ill-drained depression for miles to the south, stood a great swamp. Drowned grasses and a few lonely trees poked above this still water. A green slime floated upon it, and pockets of mist clung to it like tattered garments on a leper.

'The mosquitoes are bad here indeed,' Berkuar said to Maram. 'But that is not why no one crosses the Gold Marshes.'

A man on stilts, he said, would have trouble finding the bottom of this stinking mere, through which swam lizard-like beasts that could bring down even our horses. And there were quicksands, too.

'Even the birds, I think, don't like to fly over it,' he told us. 'Our path lies around it to the north, butSeaving as closely as we can.'

'Ah, and cleaving close to these damn mosquitoes, too,' Maram said as he brushed at his ear. 'They will be worse tonight. Can't we at least put a few miles between us and this swamp?'

'A few miles,' Berkuar told him might take us into the Skadarak.'

'Well, then, we're damned to the left and damned to the right,' Maram said. He slapped a mosquito off his red nose. 'But better the demon we know, I suppose, than the one we don't.'

For the rest of the day we worked our way around the edge of the Cold Marshes. We could not follow a straight course, for in places the high ground above the Marshes was rocky and broken, and in other places swampy arms of water seemed to reach deep into the forest, blocking our way and diverting us farther to the north. We all grew irritable: from the constant whine and sting of the mosquitoes, from the chafe of our soaked garments and from the smothering gray air. And there was something else. At first no one articulated this, but I could feel something calling to my companions from far away, even as I could feel it in myself. It was like a voice murmuring intimations of great pleasure, and even more like a sick urge to waste gold coins in a game of dice. In its intoxicating hold on us, which worked its way into us like a perfume sweetening skin, was the promise that all our suffering would soon end and our dreams be fulfilled.

Pittock, as hard-looking and reticent as any man I had ever seen, was the first of us to remark on this. When we broke for the day to make camp, he stared off through the trees to the north and announced, 'We're close to it — I know we are: It's as if there is an itch in my bones that I can't quite scratch. I would like to go on that way, though I know that is madness. My uncle was lost to these woods, and now I know why.'

Berkuar stood near him, looking north, too. And he said, 'That thing of Morjin spoke truly, in this at least. The Skadarak has grown.'

He went on to say that on the morrow, we must try to hug the Cold Marshes even more closely lest we wander into it.

Daj, holding up a piece of firewood as he might a sword, thrust it out ahead of him and asked, 'But how will we know if we've entered it?'

It was simple question — the question of a child. And it was a good question, too, for it held the very essence of our predicament.

That night passed slowly, with no break in the great bank of clouds that pressed down upon the earth. As Maram had warned, the mosquitoes came out in greater numbers. So did the bats who ate them; they whumped through the air, as dark-shaped as any demons. But they were not the kind of bats that drank blood — at least not human blood. Pittock and Gorman, standing guard over us with their bows at the ready, looked out into the dark air for any sign of werebats, werewolves or even worse things.

As I was trying to sleep, I overheard Gorman grumble to Pittock: 'That droghul fooled you into thinking you saw a werewolf; just don't let your eyes fool you into mistaking a deer for a dragon.'

'My eyes?' Pittock said. 'There's nothing wrong with my eyes. It's your eyes I worry about.'

'I have the eyes of a hawk,' Gorman told him.

'Is that why you killed Jastor?'

'You blame me for that? It was your arrow that pierced him!'

'Was it my arrow?' Pittock said. 'At the Battle of the Drowned Oaks, I gave you five arrows to replace the ones you wasted. I know it must have been one of these that killed Jastor.'

'You know this, do you?'

'You've always been a wild shot,' Pittock muttered.

'At Oxfarm I put an arrow in the eye of one of the Crucifiers at fifty yards!'

'A lucky shot. At the Battle of Sleeping Lake, you put an arrow into poor Thorgard's belly.'

'How can you speak of that?' Gorman half-shouted. 'Thorgard came out of the trees before Berkuar's call, and it was deemed an accident of battle. No one else holds me accountable for this!'

'Well, Thorgard was my cousin, wasn't he?'

The two men argued on in a like manner for a while, until Berkuar rose up to put an end to their dispute. He sent them both off to their beds, standing watch in their places. But Gorman chewed at one of his barbark nuts for most of the next hour and muttered to himself, while Pittock lay awake by the fire staring into its red flames.

We all, I thought, slept poorly that night, even Estrella whose repose was usually as easy and natural as a spring wind. More than once, I heard her whimpering as if tormented by some dark dream from which she could not awaken. Even Liljana, singing a soft lullaby as she lay next to her, could not soothe her. The cool, gray morning brought no relief in the weather. We all moved stiffly, as if the drizzle had worked its way into our bones. I could hardly sit to eat the goose eggs and cakes that Liljana cooked for breakfast, so sharp was the pain stabbing into my back. Although Master Juwain redressed my wound and pronounced it free of infection, it seemed that hot acids were eating into my flesh. Kane, as usual made no complaint of any hurt, but the look on his face was of a bear disturbed from his den and ready to bite anyone who crossed his path.

We set out. west, edging the stinking marshlands. Soon, however, we came upon a great inlet of slimy water and had to circle north. Two or three miles farther on, some rotten, limestone hills blocked our way back to the Marshes and forced us to cut through the woods. It was there, in the oaks, elms and willows nearly a hundred feet high, that a mist came upon us. It sifted through the dogwoods and lesser vegetation, and enveloped us in a smothering grayness. In only moments, it seemed, it thickened, and we could not see the tops of the trees; a short while later we had difficulty making out the trees themselves.

'I can't see our way!' Berkuar called out to me as he held up his hand. I walked up close to him and his woodsmen, and everyone else drew up behind me. 'Perhaps we should wait here until the mist clears.'

I stamped my boot down into some wet old leaves. The ground about us was low and boggy. I said to Berkuar, 'We might have to wait days — and this is no place to make camp.'

Berkuar shook his head. 'The mist is too thick; we'll wander apart.'

'We won't wander,' I told him. 'If we must, we'll rope ourselves together as we did in the Black Bog.'

'A good plan,' Berkuar said, 'but I can't see ten feet in front of my nose, and so we'll still wander.'

'No, we won't,' I said pointing off ahead of us. 'West is that way.'

I was as sure of this direction as I was of the difference between my right hand and my left.

'I'm sure west is that way,' Berkuar said. 'But will you be able to keep us on course after another mile?'

'Val will be able to,' Maram said, coming up to us. Then his faith in me seemed to evaporate. 'Unless of course he loses his sense of direction, as in the Black Bog.'

'If I lose my way,' I said, 'I'll tell you and then we'll make camp on the spot. Now let's leave this place.'

None of us wished to spend another night as we had; we all told ourselves, I thought, that another ten or twenty miles of hard walking should take us well past the Skadarak.

'All right,' Berkuar said, 'but let us then set course west and south, that we can be sure to remain close to the Marshes.'

It took us a while to rope the horses together. Then I pointed my nose southwest into the mist and set out in the lead through the moist, still forest. Birds sang out to us unseen. We came upon a channel of reeking water, and that reassured us. After that I turned us almost due west. It was strange and unpleasant moving nearly blind through the silent trees, but did not seem particularly dangerous. The ground remained low and flat. The worst of things were the mosquitoes and the occasional dead tree or sharp stump that were difficult to perceive until we nearly tripped over them. But the forest floor grew clearer and more open as we proceeded, and that reassured us