Into the Woods
You come down with the Tox, and if you’re lucky, you recover. If you’re less lucky, you die. If your luck is bad, you change, and maybe you go mad. How do you change? Hard to say. You might grow wings, or horns, or breath fire, or all of them. You might turn into a plant, or a genius, or an idiot. But you WILL be left with a craving for Warp, and a hunger for another mutation, and another… Pretty soon there won’t be any YOU left, and if you meet your best friend, you might kill him for food, or just to see the interesting colors as you tear him apart. But you WILL kill him; that’s what madspawn do.
–Leod, the Storyteller of Freepost
I stowed the sword in my cellar room and received a scolding for my truancy from Brindle the kitten, who had decided to adopt me. I tangled her up in the blanket, which she seemed to take as an apology, because she followed me up to the forge.
I told Perrin everything I had learned the night before; about Philo and his relationship to Sojourner, about Chalice and her dagger, and about my strange meeting with the Hungry Ghost. Perrin made no comment except those relevant to the forge. When I had finished, he just stood and looked at me for a while.
“And what are you going to do about that promise, boy?” he asked; I couldn’t tell if he approved or not.
“Get your advice, of course. What else?”
He laughed at that. “Did you manage to hold onto your winnings?” When I nodded, he continued, “Then see Jasmine about getting some leathers made up; you’re going to need them. I’ll talk to Whisky about the details.” I nodded again, and then we went on about the day’s business.
Ten days went by. I knew Perrin well enough that I didn’t remind him of my promise to Chalice, but the wait was beginning to wear on me; I felt as if every conversation was based on NOT discussing Chalice and her dagger. A beautiful suit of hunter’s leathers was hanging in my room (much to Brindle’s amusement), but the topic never came up. And then one afternoon Whisky walked into the smithy.
I hadn’t met Whisky before. If ‘Bacco looked like a cross between a rat and a plowhorse, Whisky looked like a cross between a rat and a pine tree. He wasn’t just tall for a vermite, he was tall in any company, and so thin that one assumed his leathers were holding his bones together. He looked at me for a moment, spat a stream of something noxious at my feet, and turned to Perrin.
“He’s going to die, you know that,” he said. “We ought to strip him naked first, for all the good his hardware will do him. Then it won’t be a total loss.”
Perrin just shrugged and turned to me. “Have you met Whisky, Quill? He’s probably the most cheerful person you’ll ever meet.”
I said, “No, I haven’t,” and offered Whisky my hand; he stared at me a while, and then shook my hand about a heartbeat before I decided to withdraw it. He showed me just enough teeth to let me know that it was a trick that he practiced and was proud of.
“It’s like this,” Whisky said, sketching a circle on the dirt floor with his spear. “First you climb the base of the mountain, which takes you up above the clouds, where the air would be hard to breathe even if there was no warp burn. It’s not a hard climb, but the warp burn is the worst I’ve ever seen; you don’t need any magical training at all to feel it eating at you. There’s no fallen tree like your whore described anywhere there, and you can’t see Goldentooth from the top, anyway.”
He sketched another circle, just inside the first one. “So once you get up to here, you’ve got yourself a moor. Swamps and sinkholes and standing stones and fog that never, ever goes away. And anything that you see that’s alive is so Tox-twisted it wishes it wasn’t. And in the middle of THAT…” He drew a third circle, about half the diameter of the second one. “Here you have another mountain. Don’t know much about it; I’ve never been stupid enough to try to cross the moor. Figure that’s where your tree is, though. I was high up on the north side of Goldentooth, once, and I could see Blackwater’s Fang, so I imagine you can see Goldentooth from the side of the Fang, too.”
“So how are we going to get there?” I asked; I was too excited to actually LISTEN to what Whisky was saying.
“WE are not going to get there at all. I am going to get you onto the moor, and then YOU are going to wander around until you get yourself killed, and then I am going to come home.” He grinned at me.
Perrin shook his head. “Just bring back the dagger, boy. And try to be careful.”
We left with the dawn the next morning. Whisky was a better companion than I expected, and he seemed to have memorized every rock and tree we passed. I asked him how long he had been hunting in these woods.
“Ten, twelve years, maybe more,” he said. “Depending on how you count, as to when I stopped be a noisy kid that tagged along and started to pull my own weight. My Uncle Barley would probably tell you that happened later than I would.” He grinned again. “I KNOW I was worth the trouble before I was full grown, probably by the time I was eight or so.”
I looked at him; in human terms, I would have thought him a well-weathered 40. “How old are you? If I may ask?”
Whisky shrugged. “Nineteen. Two years older than ‘Bacco, ten years older than Pepper. I don’t think you’ve met my other two sisters.”
That startled me a bit; I searched my memory for knowledge of vermites, and found little; the rat folk were just part of the background, which I think is the way they liked it. “Pepper is NINE?”
“Nearly ten. Why, what’d you think?”
“As an elf, I’d say mid-twenties; human, 15 or 16. But… NINE?”
Whisky shrugged again. “Momma was only 11 when I was born; there’s plenty of bucks around wish Pepper would get in the game and have pups of her own. She’s in no hurry, and no one-no rat folk, anyway-is going to push. Not when she’s ‘Bacco’s sister, and not now that she’s your friend. We tend to hide from trouble,” he said, and gave me another of those smug grins. “Our mommas teach us to avoid the stomping foot, and if you can’t avoid it, make sure you bite it good and hard.”
I shook my head and laughed at that; there didn’t seem to be much else to say.
Whisky kept us walking until nearly sundown, when he led me into a nicely sheltered hollow with a cache of firewood already gathered. I commented on this, and Whisky just shrugged; he said that it never hurt to have something stowed away for a bad time.
“It’s no fun to search for firewood when you’re bleeding, and there’s a dragon storm on your heels. And it’s not much trouble to stock a decent spot by daylight, particularly when you’ve got fresh meat and nowhere to go.” Whisky looked at me, as if waiting for me to pass judgement; I didn’t. “I put more into the clan than I take out, and then some. I don’t mind someone else getting fat on my work, as long as I get to get fat, too.”
Whisky soon had a fire going, and a pot of stew bubbling away. I laid out my bedroll and watched Whisky work while I thought about the day’s events, and the day’s conversation.
“Whisky, why would it matter to the other vermites that Pepper is my friend? They don’t think I have a claim on her, do they?”
Whisky snorted at that. “Not if you don’t want it. But it’s not an issue; we don’t keep much track of fathers, pups just belong to the clan. I think Uncle Barley sired me, but it doesn’t matter.” He stopped to stir the stew. “But you… What happened to the last fellow who didn’t listen when Pepper said, ‘No’?”
“So they’re afraid of me?”
“No, they’re afraid of Pepper.” He chuckled at that. “You, it’s more like awe.”
“What about you?”
Whisky snorted. “I don’t do awe much. You’re a good fighter, and you seem to be a decent person. It’s a shame you’re going to be dead so soon.”
My eyes widened. “You’re that sure?”
He shrugged. “I know what I know. Perrin, he talks to the dead, and he talks to the Lady herself, sometimes, so when he says to take you out and let you lose yourself on Blackwater, I do it. But that doesn’t make it make any more SENSE.” He shook his head. “Grab a bowl of this before the company gets here.”
The stew was excellent; I had just taken a second helping when Whisky’s “company” arrived; an enormous yellow she-wolf and an even bigger black male. Whisky gave them each a bowl of stew, which they ate greedily. Whisky introduced them as “Light” and “Shadow”, and I couldn’t help but feel that the female rolled her eyes at the introduction.
“These two are the reason this stretch of woods is so pleasant,” Whisky said. “Five years ago, there were drakkels all over. Then Lady Light showed up, and a while after that Shadow, and they went to war. And now there are no drakkels at all, and the hunting is almost TOO easy.” He flipped a piece of jerky at Shadow’s ear, and the huge head snapped around to catch it with terrifying speed. “Shadow is a fiend for salt. Lady Light is MUCH more polite.” He waved a piece of jerky at Light, and she came forward to take it from his hand.
When supper was done Whisky banked the fire and we bedded down. Shadow took a position outboard of Whisky, and Light was outboard of me. I rolled that way and looked at the firelight reflected in her eyes. “You could talk if you wanted to,” I said quietly; Light just cocked her head to one side. I shook my head and said, “Amazing.” Light slowly rolled her head back upright, and then gave me one short nod.
The wolves stayed with us the next day, and by sunset we had reached another of Whisky’s caches. This one was at the base of the south face of Blackwater, and it towered over us. “This is where you want to come, if you do manage to ever get off of the moor,” Whisky told me. “Even if I’m not here, there’s water, and firewood, and I’ll show you where I hide emergency rations. And then wait; Perrin will know if you’re still alive, and as long as you are, I’ll come and look for you every week or so. So just wait.”
The following day we climbed up to the moor itself; the wolves left us as soon as they saw where we were going. About mid-day we crossed a small pass, and could see the moor spread out a few feet below us; as promised, it was covered in thick fog.
“I’ve had about as much warp burn as I want already; time to part company,” Whisky said. “Try to remember everything, every last rock and crevice. Go slow, and be careful.”
I nodded. “Care to give me odds?”
Whisky looked at me. “Sure. Ten to one against you. Easy.”
I fished a coin out of a pocket and handed it to him. “I see you again, you owe me ten.”
He looked at the coin and grinned. “Done. But hauntings don’t count.”
I nodded. “Hauntings don’t count.” And I headed down onto the moor.
By the time I made my first night’s camp I was hopelessly lost, and wondering what had possessed Perrin to send me on this fool’s errand. I had plenty of supplies, and could live on the foul water and stunted vegetation that lived on the moor, if I had to, but the warp burn would kill me in a fortnight.
The land seems to like orcs, for some reason, even horribly warped land like Blackwater Moor. I did my best to listen to whatever was orcish within me, and tried to stretch my supplies by foraging; I was awakened more than once by various small ambushers, but they always ducked out of the way before I could add them to my menu. My journal for that period is almost amusing; it consists of the word “lost” as an entire entry for eight consecutive days.
On the ninth day I met a pair of rats, each of which outweighed me. They thought that I looked like an easy meal; I tried to convince them otherwise. I tried to keep them far enough apart that I would only have to deal with one at a time, but it was miserable, nerve wracking work; I could outmaneuver them easily, but I could not hope to match their four-legged gallop when it came to covering ground. Still, I managed to hit each of them three times and only took one bite in return; I was beginning to feel I might survive the encounter when I fell into a hole.
I almost quit. If my sword hadn’t been tethered to my right wrist, I probably would have just lain there. But I could hear the rats experiment with ways to follow me into the hole, and I knew where my weapon was; I staggered to my feet.
Killing the rats was amazingly easy; they were unable to defend themselves as they climbed down, and I didn’t give them the chance to finish the climb. That done, I looked up at the miserable gray mess that passed for sky on Blackwater Moor and offered my soul to Elethay. I could climb out, with some effort, but there didn’t seem to be much point; between the rat bite and the fall, I was only a day away from death by warp burn.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I found a shelf on the side of my pit that led to a fairly dry alcove; I climbed into it and made what was certain to be my last camp. I did my best to dry out my clothing, which had become drenched in the course of my flight from the rats; by sunset I was warm, fairly dry, and as comfortable as my warp-ravaged body would allow.
I wrapped myself in my blanket, and prepared to die.