Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

I fell to my knees and fed magic into my mound of sticks and bones, recalling the appearance of my departed companions to shape the illusions of harried travelers, stopped to succor a fallen comrade.

The yowling Harrowers swept onto the flats without pause, and even the shouts of the first to flounder did not slow the rest. When the yellow glow failed—snuffed by mud or fear—their triumph turned to dismay.

Weary and mind-numbed, they did not think to stay calm and press through the muck to seek firmer ground. Rather, weighed down with mail coats and supply sacks and weapons, burdened with legends of bogwights and sucking ponds and trickster Danae, they felt their feet sinking and their clothes waterlogged, and they panicked, as I had gambled they would. I touched the charred stick and set wispy tendrils of flame adrift from my hand until the cold numbed my fingers and I could conjure no more of them. The gloomy landscape was dotted with winking flames, and the men in the bog started screaming.

Half of the Harrowers killed each other, trying to use their comrades for stepping-stones. Others drowned quickly, pulled down by panicked horses or tangled in dead vines and rotted trees swept down from the mountains in long-ago floods. Some wandered, crying for help in the neck-deep mud, climbing on hillocks only to have them sink under their weight. After a while I could only hear them, for the blizzard rose in full fury, and human eyes could not penetrate past the length of my arm. The cold and the mud would finish them. The memory of Luviar butchered, of Nestor and Boreas condemned to slow agony, of tar-clogged wells and villages burned to ash, crushed what glimmers of mercy blossomed in my soul. These gatzi would have ridden my friends to ground.

I huddled on my islet in the center of the bogland, a driftwood club ready should one of the lost find his way to me. Only when my ears assured me that neither man nor beast roamed the upland banks did I press my hands into the muck to seek the path back to firm ground.

I jerked them right out again, then bent double and retched bile until stomach, chest, and throat were raw. The terrors of dying men and beasts permeated the pools and hillocks, and I could not find my way. I sank to the ground, buried my face in my frozen cloak, and begged the earth’s forgiveness for the horror I had wrought.

Valen fiend heart! The mocking cry stung like a tutor’s rod on cold knuckles. Cold…what wasn’t cold? The world, all life, and certainly every part of me was frozen. No one ever listened when I said how I hated the cold.

I trudged onward. One step. Then a rest. Another step. Hip-high drifts covered the path that would take me away from the treacherous bog. Perhaps the insulting name, a relic from childhood, etched itself so vividly in my imagination because I longed so fiercely to believe that another living person existed in this wintry desolation.

Fiend heart… Soon I’d be imagining I heard iron skull or lead wit or gatzi prick, though the damnable girl would lob that last stone only outside adults’ hearing. I smiled…more of a grimace, I imagined, as I could not feel my face. Lassa, please be real.

My sister had once enspelled a connection between her favorite insults and my ears, so I would never fail to hear them. I’d never learned the skill, but on one precious occasion, I had managed to reverse her spell and bind one of mine to her. “Toad witch,” I mumbled into the folds of my cloak for the fiftieth time on this dreadful afternoon. If she were within ten quellae, she would hear.

“Magnus! Magnus Valentia!”

“Brother Valen!”

I paused and surveyed the gloomy distance. No one in sight. I pulled my hood tighter and fretted that these faint voices, too, were naught but wishing dreams.

Hellish dreams of mud and ice and suffocation had clung to me like draggle weed as I had crawled out of the bog hours and hours ago, too tired and too afraid to walk, unable to bear another route seeking lest I buckle under the weight of guilt and horror. That I managed to reach solid earth, that I was not drowned or dead, astonished me. I had dug a snow cave to wait out the blizzard and had drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of long limbs marked with blue sigils embracing me, choking me, setting me afire.

The wind mourned over the frozen fens. Did beasts feel this way after emerging from their winter sleep, as if ice crystals flowed in their veins? I feared the oncoming night. Find me, someone. Please. I hate the cold.

Lights moved around the hillside toward me. Torches. Spits of gold against a sky the color of ripe blueberries. I sank to the ground, closed my eyes, and rested my back against a boulder. Let someone else break the path through the drifts. Friend or enemy, wraith or bogwight, I didn’t care.

“Gracious Mother, Valen, what have you done this time?” My breathless sister’s painted eyes swam huge and worried from her fur-lined hood. “This Voushanti said you were facing fifty Harrowers alone in a bog, and that you’d saved Stearc and Gram and these Evanori lords. But they couldn’t find you in the storm. I called and called—No one believed when I claimed to hear you, but I knew. How is it you’re not frozen dead, fiend heart?”

“B-been thinking w-warm thoughts of you, serena toad witch. Whatever are you doing in the neighborhood? Did you bring them my boo—?”

She hissed, pressed her hot hand on my lips, and jerked her head backward. Several shapeless figures approached from behind her, one leading a donkey.

“Watch your tongue, Valen. And I do mean that. The answer is yes.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Listen carefully: I came to continue my negotiations over new sheep pastures for the Temple and was shocked to discover the shambles. Do you understand?”

“Shambles?” I croaked, wretchedly confused.

But she had squeezed her painted eyes shut, and her words kept flowing, so softly no one but I could have heard them. “Who or what is this Voushanti? I See naught but death about him—blood and fire and torment. He says he’s taking you to Evanore as soon as the weather breaks. Bound to the Bastard…Holy Mother, Valen, I cannot help you more. I must return to Palinur immediately. With Luviar lost, Victor captive, and what’s happened here, the lighthouse may depend on my office.”

The aura of her divination tickled my spine, as the newcomers joined us, their faces taking recognizable shape in dark wrappings. Indeed, Voushanti brought an ill odor with him everywhere. But I was more confused about her passing hints. “Lassa, I’ll be all right, if I c-can just get warm. But what shambles—?”

“Silos!” She snapped, jumping to her feet. “He needs hot wine! And get a mask on him before I report him to the Registry. Good monk, bring your linens. No diviner is needed to see to the pitiful whiner. Lord Voushanti, take up your charge, though even my scoundrel brother is unlikely to run today.” Excessive sisterly sentiment would never burden Thalassa.

Voushanti loomed over me like a frost giant, but he said naught as the others ministered to me. A somber Silos took Thalassa’s place and offered me a steaming wineskin. My fingers couldn’t grasp the leather, so he poured the stuff down my raw throat. O, great Mother Samele, grant my glorious sister a place at your side! Silos’s masked face drew up in disapproval as I hooked my elbow about his, preventing him from removing the skin until it was half empty. “Careful, plebeiu. You cause everyone trouble when you’re out of your head. Have you a mask with you?”

He pulled the half mask of purple silk from the pocket I indicated and slipped it on me. Cold, wet…it felt like fish skin.

Thalassa threw a blessedly dry cloak about my shoulders as Brother Anselm, the piebald lay brother from the Gillarine infirmary, examined my hands and feet. I despaired of ever being warm, shivering uncontrollably as he marveled that I showed no signs of true frostbite after crawling in the snow for most of a day. Voushanti refused to consider a fire, though I assured him that the dog-faced man and his Harrowers were no longer a threat. I could not bring myself to tell him why.