"Of course!" Ruha did her best to sound astonished.
"And if you will me tell more about these ylang blossoms, perhaps I know someone who can be tricked into leading us to the lair."
Eleven
Tang's punt came to another fork in the slough. His boatpushers jammed their poles into the black water, the butts angled forward to halt the little dugout while he guessed at the way to
Cypress's lair. Behind him arose a gentle sloshing as his men struggled to stop their heavy log rafts. Save for the unremitting hum ofmosquitos, no other sound broke the silence of the swamp. The evening light lay upon the glassy waters as sinuous and wispy as smoke, yielding no hint of the sun's location. Along the banks of the chan- nels rose tangled webs of prop roots, supporting thickets of vine-choked bog cane as impenetrable to the eye as walls of stone. Even the sky itself was hidden from view, concealed behind a murky canopy of moss-draped boughs.
Somewhere nearby loomed the Giant's Run Moun- tains, a chain of high peaks lying half a day's canter southeast of the Ginger Palace, but Tang could not find the way to their steep slopes. Though he had commanded his men to remain confident, he could feel their trust ebbing with every minute he remained lost, and even he was losing faith in his abilities. The swamp was so small that it had no name-indeed, few outside the Cult of the
Dragon knew it existed at all-and twice the prince had come to Lair here with fellow cult members. It seemed impossible that its meager maze of waterways should
disorient him or anyone else, yet Tang had been trying to locate Cypress's hole for more than two hours.
The punt rocked beneath the prince's feet. He glanced back to see the commander of the palace garrison, Gen- eral Fui D'hang, stepping into the dugout from a wagon- sized raft of lashed logs. A squat, flat-cheeked man with an unwavering scowl and granite eyes, he wore a helmet of silver-trimmed brass and an oversized battle tunic over leather armor. Most of the men behind him were dressed in a similar manner, save their helmets were steel with brass trim.
The general bowed. "May it please the Prince to hear
me."
As with all Fui said, the statement was a command,
not a request. Prince Tang nodded, but looked away to emphasize that he would not allow the general to bully
him.
"Night falls soon, and men are uneasy at being lost-"
"Do I say we are lost?" Tang whirled on the general so fast that, had his boatpushers not had their poles planted on the bottom, the punt would have capsized. "We are not lost. Dragon uses Invisible Art to confuse honorable sol- diers. They may eat another lasal leaf."
Fui did not turn to issue the command. "Since you are not lost, perhaps you guide us to dry land. It is better to camp outside swamp."
"No. We must rescue Lady Feng tonight."
The general's eyes remained stony. "If we perish in dark-"
"Tonight."
Fui's Ups tightened. "Surely, Wise Prince knows it is inauspicious to attack eminent dragon at all, but to attack at night…"
"This dragon is different!" snapped Tang. "Cypress does not have favor of Celestial Bureaucracy!"
"Perhaps Wise Prince explains why it takes so long to reach dragon's palace?" Fui insisted. "This swamp is size of peasant village. By now, we should find dragon's home
through tenacity alone."
"It is question of patience, not 'finding!' " Prince Tang turned away from General Fui, silently cursing the absence of a wu-jen. A little magic would go far toward helping him find his goal. "Tell men to be ready. Not far now!"
Selecting a direction at random, the prince pointed down the fork on the right. General Fui barely had time to leap back to his own raft before Tang's boatpushers guided the punt into the channel. As they traveled down the curving slough, the mosquito hum became a madden- ing drone. Though the Shou berry juice the prince had rubbed into his flesh protected him from bites, clouds of the insects dragged across his skin like chiffon.
Tang began to sense an enormous, dark presence ahead. The canopy arched higher above the water, and the swamp grew steadily murkier and more forlorn. The beards of moss vanished from the branches alongside the passage, replaced by the curtainlike webs of brilliantly striped spiders with abdomens as large as a man's fist.
Ahead of the punt, dark chevrons appeared in the water as startled snakes swam for cover. The ends of sub- merged logs sprouted eyes and watched the flotilla pass.
A half-remembered murmur echoed through the trees from somewhere ahead: the purl of water trickling down some steep slope.
Tang felt butterflies fluttering in his stomach and beads of sweat sliding down his brow. He withdrew a handful oflasal leaves from a basket in the bottom of the dugout and distributed them among his boatpushers, then placed two into his own mouth and chewed. As the protective fog arose inside his head, he began to regard the impending battle with increasing giddiness. Soon, he would have vengeance on his enemy. After his men destroyed Cypress's new body, he himself would find and smash the spirit gem. Then, when Yen-Wang-Yeh's ser- vants came to drag Cypress's wayward spirit down to the
Ten Courts of the Afterlife, Tang would recount all the
dragon's crimes against himself and Shou Lung, thus insuring a stern verdict that would condemn his foe to ten thousand centuries of torment in the Eighteenth
Hell.
The rancid stench of rotting fish began to waft through the air. The channel widened into a broad basin of black water strewn with mats of bog scum and studded by the naked gray trunks of a bald cypress stand. On the far side of the pool, a steep, green-blanketed scarp rose abruptly from the murky water and disappeared above the swamp's gloomy canopy. Down the face of this slope snaked a tiny ribbon of silver water, the same small brook casting its purl throughout the slough. To the left of the stream, barely visible through the whirling clouds of mosquitos, was a huge, half-submerged grotto, the moss curtain that dangled over its mouth tattered and frayed by the constant passage of some huge body.
Tang ordered his boatpushers to stop. Though the area had been darker and more crowded on the two occasions the prince had visited it before, he recognized it instantly.
Just outside the cavern lay a toppled cypress where the dragon roosted during Lair, with the entire cult arrayed before him upon the same rafts now occupied by General
Fui and his men. Rising from the waters around the perch were heaps of large fish skeletons, some with bits of gray, gritty hide still clinging to the thick bones, and hanging in the limbs of nearby trees were hundreds of long-toothed jaws.
Tang was most distressed to see that Cypress had already devoured so many sharks. From what the prince had learned during his brief association with the cult, when a dracolich's body was destroyed, he lost the ability to speak, cast magic spells, and use his terrible breath weapon. Unfortunately, he could regain those capabilities by consuming a mere tenth of his previous body, which he could always locate via a strange mystical bond-even if the corpse had been burned, shredded, or eaten. Judging by the number of skeletons lying in the water, Cypress