The Magehound

The call of the heron, sudden and shrill, startled them all. Some of the men jumped, but all were too well trained to make any noise. The long-legged bird burst into awkward flight. It rose into the strange mist and immediately faltered, its wings locked into place as if frozen. Like a child's wooden toy, the bird traced an awkward nose dive and crashed into the water. The impact seemed to revive it somewhat, and it began to flail about in a wild panic.

Almost at once, the waters around the heron started to churn. In a heartbeat, a pool of deep red surrounded the bird. Frantic flashes of silver leaped and glittered in the bloody water.

Andris abruptly motioned his men to a stop. The swamp teemed with schools of silvery, delicate fish, not much bigger than a man's hand, that could strip the flesh from an ox more efficiently than a butcher. Andris didn't have to remind the men to keep perfectly still until the frenzy abated and the fish swam off in search of other prey.

One of the men lifted a hand to his heart to trace a sign of warding, a silent petition to some foreign god. Although Andris had been raised to believe that none but Mystra or Azuth were true deities worthy of veneration, he didn't begrudge the man his devotions. Jordain were taught to respect the gods of magic, but from a distance. Still, Andris suspected that all the men were calling upon every god whose name they knew. A trip into Kilmaruu, Andris noted wryly, might even make a devout man of Matteo.

He quickly thrust aside the thought of his friend and the pain that came from knowing he would likely never see Matteo again. In the eyes of his brothers, Andris was dead. Unless he kept his focus, that fiction might soon become truth. This was no time to think about what might come after Kilmaruu.

Quon Lee glided smoothly back toward the group. He rose from the water, caught Andris's eye, and gave him a single grim nod. The man's lips were blue, and under the brown of his face lay a sickly pallor. Even in the water, even without touching the cloud itself, he had been chilled by the ghostly presence.

Andris motioned the men away from the lurking mist. They moved cautiously through a narrow strip between two seas of reeds, into a lagoon shaded by leaning trees draped with moss and vines.

Andris studied the shore, looking for a likely route among the thick and seemingly impassable tangle of underbrush. As he watched, a shrike dived in, its flight awkward due to the heavy weight it bore in its talons. A long, limp brown form hung from the small raptor's grasp-a weasel, most likely. The shrike tossed its prey into the brush. It fell onto a wicked thorn, neatly impaled on a spike that was longer than Andris's thumb.

He studied the brush more closely and noted that the shrike had left several similar meals scattered among the bushes that lined the lagoon's edge. The result looked grimly like a miniature butcher shop, and Andris quickly decided against attempting a land passage. Jungle shrikes chose only the most secure sites for their larders, places that could not easily be penetrated or despoiled. Better to risk the water than attempt passage through those rending thorns.

Even as the thought formed, one of the scouts suddenly disappeared beneath the water. Andris stooped and plunged both hands into the dark water, groping about until he seized a handful of hair. He dragged the man up, unharmed and wearing an expression of chagrin. The scout pantomimed a ledge with a sudden, quick drop. They moved as close to the shore as they dared and kept to it, testing for ledges with each step.

"Ledges," Andris said softly, remembering what he had read of such formations. Ledges of submerged rock or roots offered ideal places for underwater storage. Some water monsters were known to drag their prey into the water, drown them, and leave them wedged under a rocky ledge until they had softened and aged. Ledges, he concluded grimly, were not a good omen.

The crocodiles appeared so suddenly that Andris had the uncanny feeling he'd conjured them with a thought. One moment the lagoon was limpid silver, as still as a mirror beneath the rising mist. The next, a semicircle of reptilian eyes regarded the men with a cold, incurious stare, and over a dozen snouts pointed toward the scent of living meat.

Andris nodded to Iago, his second-in-command. The thin man quickly pointed to six of the quickest fighters. Andris chose seven more. Each man took a coil of rope from his belt and tested the noose at the end. Then each man silently chose a partner. They moved in pairs, spreading out to face the approaching crocodiles.

The fighters readied their nooses while their partners cupped their hands, as if to give their comrades a leg up onto a horse. When the crocodiles were near, the men tossed the chosen fighters up and over the approaching creatures. The men twisted nimbly in the air and came down to straddle the crocodiles' backs.