‘Good. Thanks.’ The old man was asleep beside Churn and Hannah almost before he’d stopped talking.
THE SALT MARSH
Brexan’s foot came down in thick black mud that stank of salt and decay and she cursed as she pulled her boot out. It was cold this morning, made worse by the wind off the water. She was glad she had changed from her skirt, for the weather felt as though it had finally shifted from autumn into winter. The salt marsh stretched east and north, swallowing the Falkan coastline in a plain of wetlands. Rushes, most of them naked stalks this late in the season, dominated the coarse cordgrass and bog sedges which carpeted the ground in thick tufts of green, resiliently holding the vestiges of their summer colour despite the encroaching winter.
To her left, muddy flats sloped for several hundred paces to the lapping waters of the Ravenian Sea. The uniform expanse of low-tide mud was a monochromatic painting of the ocean floor and Brexan wondered if all the vast seas of the world were as boring beneath the surface. Far to the north she could just make out a stream meandering its way across the flats and into the sea.
As she scraped a clinging lump of mud from her boots, hundreds of tiny seeds exploded from the reeds and caught on her clothes and in her hair; Brexan imagined she looked frightful, splattered knee-deep in mud and decorated head and shoulders in marsh spores. She pressed on regardless, shouldering her way through the rushes using the patches of cordgrass as stepping stones to navigate a relatively dry path through the estuary.
It had been eight days since Sallax and Jacrys, locked in grim battle, had fallen into invisibility at the end of the alley behind the alehouse. She had spent every day since searching for Sallax, while checking in what she hoped were unpredictable intervals over her shoulder for the spy. Her daily explorations had been carefully planned; moving in concentric circles out from the alehouse, Brexan had searched, backtracked and searched again.
She had first seen Sallax in the woods south of the city, but when she found no sign of him there, she decided to search the salt marsh north of the city. The Ronan freedom fighter could find numerous places in which to hide in this beautiful – if inhospitable – territory. Brexan had seen no one out here all morning; it didn’t look like the Orindale inhabitants made a habit of visiting the estuary during the winter.
‘Or during the summer, for that matter,’ she said. ‘The rutting bugs and snakes would be thick on the ground – I suppose this is the best time to be slopping around in this muck.’ She kicked at the discarded bones of a dead seabird, once a hearty meal for a marsh fox or perhaps a wildcat.
As a child, Brexan had been enthralled and terrified in equal part by the horror stories her father told her on cold winter evenings. There was nowhere in the Eastlands where the weather was quite as bitter as it was in Malakasia, and to pass the time, especially those interminable dark spells that blanketed most of her homeland in mid-winter, her father would make up stories of lunatic madmen on killing rampages, and demonic, one-eyed beasts hunting the Northern Forest for wayward children. From the adjacent room, her mother would invariably bark unheeded warnings to her father: ‘She’s not old enough for such tales,’ and ‘you can be the one to sit up with her all night, you great buffoon.’ But Brexan hadn’t cared; sleepless nights were never her concern. She would squeal with delight every time an unsuspecting villager wandered too far into the forest or when one of their wagons broke down, losing a wheel or ripping a leather bridle when they were too far into uncharted lands ever to make it home alive. And at the moment when the one-eyed ogre reached a muscular paw out from behind a stand of evergreens or a pack of rabid rodents gnawed through the leather slats holding the barn door closed to overwhelm the hero in a flurry of tiny teeth and poisoned claws, Brexan would dive beneath the blanket her father had been using to keep the chill off his legs and shiver and cry, frightened to within a hair’s breadth of collapse – but still begging for just one more.
Later, when she had grown and enlisted in the Malakasian Army, Brexan had periodically run up against one of her father’s old stories. Sleeping alone in a foreign inn, walking back from guard duty in the overnight avens or visiting the facilities after twilight, she would sometimes catch a chill scent or detect an imagined whisper caressing the nape of her neck. She would turn quickly on her heel, shouting, ‘Who’s there?’ to the empty space. No one was ever behind her, no rabid rodents hunting her down; no ogres reaching out hungrily. Brexan couldn’t escape those stories; scores of Twinmoons later, her father could scare her witless, even from the other side of Eldarn.
He had been with her this morning; on more than one occasion she had checked the cordgrass with a stick, half expecting to find a marsh adder coiled up and waiting for a taste of human blood or a pack of wild dogs crouching in the rushes, eager to hamstring her and rip mouthfuls of flesh from her defenceless body. As she tromped through the mud Brexan had tried to shut out her father’s tales: it was a long walk back to the safety and anonymity of Orindale and she couldn’t conduct a thorough search for Sallax with her father’s ghosts leaping out from behind every clump of grass.
Periodically she stopped to stare out over the flats: if Sallax were on the marsh somewhere, she might catch a glimpse of him moving through the rushes or across the mud. Brexan figured he was still wearing the black cloak, but he should be easy to spot – even with the curious stooped position he’d adopted as part of his disguise as a beggar, he was still tall enough to stand out.
Sunlight gleamed off the stream; Brexan, certain she had spotted something out there, squinted into the blinding glare. There it was: a tiny indistinct hillock marring the perfection of the glass-flat stretch of mud. Brexan moved quickly, ignoring the marsh adders and rabid dogs, until she came to the edge of the cordgrass and started elbowing her way through the rushes once again. She groaned as she stepped back into the mud and began making her way towards the lump – it’s probably nothing, just a hunk of driftwood.
The hump was a little over a hundred paces out and she was almost on top of it before she realised it was a body. She stopped dead in her tracks, sinking until the wet mud was almost at the top of her boots, as the odour of rotting flesh hit her. Trying not to breathe it in, she turned slowly in a full circle, feeling alone and vulnerable. Fear gripped her, and she thought again of home. Curse you, father, did you have to visit me today?
Breathing through her mouth, Brexan kicked the body over, almost retching as waves of putrefaction washed over her. In a clatter of armoured joints, a dozen or so crabs sidled a safe distance away; others stayed put, reaching up at her with their claws as if daring her to try and steal their prize. One small crab the size of a silver coin scurried over what had been the face – Brexan still couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman – and into the open socket that had once held an eye. A translucent flap of seaweed covered the gaping mouth and with the sun directly overhead, Brexan could see straight through the empty skull. The face had been stripped of nearly all the exposed flesh, though a couple of lengths of striated muscle remained. That made things worse. Brexan looked away, unable to stand looking at it for another moment… this would be for ever waiting for her in the cordgrass, beside her father’s marsh adders and rabid dogs.
She couldn’t guess how long the body had been in the water; though the crabs and fish and who knew what other creatures had feasted on it, the torso and legs were pretty much intact, still wrapped in a tunic and homespun leggings. For the second time that morning, Brexan was glad winter was coming, because she couldn’t imagine how disgusting this discovery would have been at the height of summer. She guessed this must have been someone killed during the last Twinmoon and dumped in the river or off the waterfront – there was a strong undertow round here and anything dropped in the water in Orindale would have been dragged along the bottom and deposited out here once the Eldarni moons broke off their relationship for another sixty days.