In the Month of Cerberus Part 2

Tzanatlan Accounts from the Interior— Session One, Part Two

As recorded by the Lantern of the Thirteenth Word

I see many things. Some of them I have already told you.

When last I left them, the company was two days beyond the Wall. They had passed beneath an arch hung with teeth and blood, crossed a gorge on a bridge that had no business holding a horse, and made camp in the drowned forest, in an empty Tzanatlani camp left standing for whoever came next.

The first watch had passed without a sound.

Someone should have found that strange.

Sixteen

The second watch belonged to the hirelings.

A swamp at night is never silent. There are frogs, and insects in their thousands, and water dripping from leaves, and the slow wet shifting of things settling into mud. A man on watch learns these sounds in the first hour and then stops hearing them, which is why it takes him a moment to notice when they stop.

The frogs stopped first.

Then, at the edge of the dark, a sound like a hand sliding through wet leaves. Another, from the far side of camp. Then something in the water — not a splash, only a long ripple, a body slipping in and coming out again somewhere closer.

The hirelings fed the fire.

The light reached a little farther, and in that little farther there were eyes. Two, low to the ground. Then four. Then too many to count — a scattered constellation of red pinpoints at the height of a man's knee, perfectly still.

Then they came in.

Rats the size of dogs, three feet from nose to haunch, fur slicked flat with swamp water, long yellow teeth, and that hunched, hurrying gait every human being recognizes in the spine before the mind catches up. They came from every side at once. Sixteen of them.

The hirelings were already moving. The first rat into the firelight died on a longsword; the stroke carried through it into a second, and through the second into a third, and three lay kicking in the embers before anyone else had sat up. A fourth got its teeth in as the blade came back. Then the camp was awake, and the other thirteen were in among the sleepers.

They split the way pack animals do, onto whatever was nearest. Four went for Azech. Three each for Xavravio and the hirelings. Two for Sigwulf. One for Osbert, who would later come to regard this as an insult.

The first exchange went to the rats. They came in low, under the blades, at ankles and thighs and the backs of knees, and in that light their bodies were hard to find. One tore a deep wound in Xavravio's leg. Others savaged the hirelings and Azech, and one even found a gap in Osbert's guard. Only Sigwulf came through untouched.

The company struck back, and mostly missed. Xavravio killed one. The hirelings killed another and swung on for a second and found only mud. Sigwulf's blade went wide. Azech, with four of them on him, could not find room to kill any. Osbert missed.

Then came the moment every fight has, when the luck turns over like a card. The rats lunged again, every one of them, and every one missed — teeth on leather, teeth on steel, teeth on air.

Xavravio killed another. Azech killed one of the four that had him pinned.

And then Osbert.

The Eisenwalders do not consider a sword stroke finished merely because it has killed something. Osbert cut down the rat in front of him and did not stop. The blade went on, around, into one of the two worrying at Sigwulf. He brought it back and killed the other.

Then, with the swing still in his shoulders, he swept across to Azech and took one of his as well.

Four rats. One breath.

Sigwulf, freed, crossed to Xavravio and cut down the last rat there with a sweeping stroke of his own. Four left.

They did not run.

This is the part I would ask you to sit with. Animals run. Even starving animals, even cornered ones, have a point past which staying costs more than going. These rats had watched twelve of their pack die in a handful of heartbeats. The four that remained stood in the blood of the others with their teeth bared, and came on again.

Xavravio killed one of those on the hirelings. The hirelings killed the last of their own and carried the stroke onward into one of the pair on Azech. And Osbert finished the last of them — or what was left of it, which by then was about half.

Then it was quiet.

I keep accounts, as you may have guessed, so here is the ledger: six to the hirelings, five to Osbert, three to Xavravio, one each to Azech and Sigwulf. It was the long sweeping strokes that won the night, the fighters' blades that would not stop at one rat when they could reach two. Without them, this would be a shorter account, and a sadder one, with fewer names in it.

What Answered

Sigwulf was the only one the rats had not touched.

The others sat near the fire and counted their wounds. Rat bites in a swamp are not wounds a man shrugs off; they fester, and in that heat they fester fast.

Sigwulf put away his sword, knelt among them in the mud, and prayed.

You should understand what that means. I know sorcery, from closer than most people living, and I can tell you what magic is from the inside: craft. The practitioner reaches for a thing he understands, shapes it, pays for it, and it does what he made it to do. It is impressive in the way a good lock is impressive.

What happened in that camp was not craft.

Sigwulf did not reach for anything. He asked. He knelt in the month of Cerberus, in a camp where things had just come up out of the dark with teeth, and called upon the god who once went down into the dark himself and came back dragging its guardian on a chain. Of all the gods a man might call upon that night, he had the right one.

And the god heard him.

There was no light, at first. There was weight — the sense, which everyone in the camp felt and no one could afterward describe, of something vast turning its attention toward a very small place. The fire leaned toward the knight as if a wind had risen behind him, though nothing else stirred. The swamp, which had only just begun its noise again, fell silent a second time. Before the rats, it had been the hush of things hiding. This was the hush of things listening.

Then warmth through Sigwulf's hands — not the fire's heat, nor the day's, but the heat of sun on stone at the end of a long labor — and it went into the wounds, and the wounds answered. Torn flesh drew together. Bleeding stopped as if a door had been shut on it. Where there had been the ragged red mouths of bites there was new skin, pink and whole, months of healing passed through in a held breath.

He went from one to the next and gave what the god gave him to give. It was not without limit. A god owes a man nothing, and Hercules has never been in the business of making his followers' lives easy — only of making them equal to it. But where the knight's hand touched, so did the god's.

Then the weight lifted. The fire stood up straight. The frogs, somewhat cautiously, began again.

People grow used to miracles with astonishing speed, particularly miracles that close their wounds. So I will say it plainly, that it may be written somewhere: on the night of the sixth of Kerebosios, in a drowned forest beyond the Wall, a god laid his hand on a handful of bloodied travelers in the dark.

That does not happen often. It does not happen to everyone.

The Pit of Stink

On the seventh of Kerebosios the company rose to a light breeze and walked into the strangest country yet.

The swamp water darkened as they went, and grew a sheen, then a skin, and then it was not water at all. It was tar. Black pools lay among the trees, glossy where the sun found them, and now and then a slow bubble rose and broke with a sound like a smacked lip. The smell got into everything: clothes, hair, the backs of throats.

The ground rang hollow underfoot in places, as if the road ran over a cellar. Where the earth had slumped or split there was timber beneath it — great beams black with pitch and perfectly sound. Not rotten. Not even soft. Centuries old, and kept by the tar the way honey keeps a fly.

I will make three observations and draw no conclusions. Ground does not ring hollow for no reason. Sound timber does not lie beneath a tar swamp for centuries because a tree happened to fall there. And no one builds a road to run two days through the jungle and arrive at nothing.

Nonetheless, the road ended there. It ran down into the pitch and did not come out.

Osbert regarded it for a long while from the back of his horse — the tar, the bubbles, the place where the road went under. Then he delivered what I consider the definitive scholarly assessment of the site.

"This is no city of gold. This is a pit of stink."

And, for anyone who had missed the point, in the tongue of his fathers:

"Das es un stink groober!"

I have since read his verdict aloud to several learned colleagues. Not one of them has been able to improve upon it.

The company turned around.

It was the right choice. But I suspect they believed they were turning back toward country they already knew. They were not. Nothing on that island is the same the second time through.

I shall be watching.

— The Lantern of the Thirteenth Word