The latest arrivals were indeed cooks—Benin could tell from the size of their stomachs. After a quick assessment of the tent’s interior—including what he took to be a disappointed grumble at the sight of both Benin and Coll awake and alive—their eyes fell upon the spilled pills. The pair began to mutter excitedly among themselves, nudging each other with their elbows. With another shifty glance at the humans, the cooks hurriedly gathered up the blue spheres and scurried away to stash them with their other ingredients.
Eyebrows now raised as high as they could physically go, Benin glanced at Coll. The look on the big man’s face made him splutter, and then they were both laughing. A passing gnomish warrior leaned in and shushed them fiercely, as though they were in a library rather than a camp in the wilderness. It only made them laugh harder.
“I hope they don’t put Mr. Stiff’s magic pills in the communal stew,” said Benin, wiping his eyes.
“I dunno. Might be having three legs instead of two’ll help them walk faster.”
Benin chortled, stretching out on his bedroll. He’d been sleeping a lot better since Corey had started sending the scavengers out in the evenings to do… whatever it was scavengers did. It was nice to finally have his bedroll to himself again, though the scruffy little rascals still managed to sneak in during the night when they returned, determined to leech his body heat.
There was a crunch, and he looked over to see Coll crushing some of the blue tablets into powder, which he then rubbed into his weapon with an oil-stained rag.
“Don’t stay up all night rubbing your dagger,” he yawned. “Or your hammerhead for that matter. You’ll go blind, you know.”
The warrior nodded sagely. “Working in dim light’s bad for the eyes, it’s true.”
Outside, the loons continued their lament. The eerie cries were a stark contrast to the distant snigger of a third voice. The vague sense of someone else’s amusement he felt confirmed that the Core had been listening to the entire exchange.
Benin shook his head again, though he found he was still smiling.
Loons.
Forty-Three
Gno Man's Land
Corey
Time remaining for Exodus: 15 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes
“Will these marshes never end?”
I was getting more than a little tired of the mage’s complaints by now, but I couldn’t disagree with the sentiment. It felt as though we’d been slogging through the wetlands for months rather than days. The swath of low ground was represented on the humans’ map as a darker-shaded section of forest between us and our destination; nowhere had it indicated we’d face such impossible terrain.
What began as occasional wisps of ground mist eventually became a thick carpet, obscuring the uneven footing and making it near impossible to avoid the sucking bogs and flooded sinkholes it concealed. Our environment grew darker with every step, the atmosphere more oppressive.
Laughter was already a distant memory; adults and children both were confined to the wagons, trusting the badgers to find a path through the murk. Longshank and the four remaining scouts were each mounted atop a badger, helping to steer them through the murk. Gneil also sat astride Bruce’s back, murmuring encouragement to the badger alpha and to the acolytes huddled miserably on the chariot behind him.
I found myself missing the forest we’d left behind. The root-laden ground had played havoc with the wagons’ structural integrity, but at least it hadn’t tried to kill us with every step.
Even the flora here seemed out to get us. Everywhere I looked there sprouted some sort of carnivorous plant or murderous mushroom. Not the playful danger of ghoul’s beard and blackwort; these marshy monstrosities could dissolve bone and necrotize flesh. Judging by the expressions on my denizens’ faces, they reeked just as badly as you’d expect them to.
The badgers’ innate toxin resistance made them immune to the evil plants, as well as the marsh snakes and biting bog-skippers that Insight showed me lurked within the pools of water we had to cross. However, the dangers here didn’t just come from below.
The trees were getting sparser, each one’s sprawling roots pushing the nearest gray-black trunks away as though trying to hog all the space for itself. Despite this, the canopy was thick and tangled; the branches were longer, growing up and out from the trunk like the ribs of an umbrella and tangling with those of the surrounding trees. From it all dangled leafy vine-like branches.
I was watching one of the clothiers—an old man I’d dubbed Cotton—skilfully mending a holey sock when a sinuous shape dropped from one of those hanging branches and onto the wagon. Cotton cried out and collapsed.
Ris’kin was already pushing her way over to investigate when another clothier gave a shout, grabbed his knitting needle, and stabbed the snake. The force of the blow drove the bone needle through the snake’s body and into the wagon’s wooden bed, pinning it in place. It hissed and thrashed, but the gnomes had managed to back far enough away that the head could no longer reach them. The other clothiers were armed with their own needles now; a few more stabs and the serpent fell limp.
Just before it died, I recovered enough presence of mind to use Insight.
Tree Viper
Reptile
This venomous serpent makes its home in the swamps, marshes and jungles of Kelaria. As a member of the pit-viper subspecies, the tree viper possesses heat-sensing pit organs on either side of its face, allowing it to detect prey using infrared ‘vision’ even in the limited visibility of its typically mist-laden environment.
And I thought tiger owls were bad.
The dead tree viper was twice as
