tread, or the ground slid aside and gave way. Her progress was a series of stumbles that must be announcing her presence to every Denlander in the swamps. Elise, behind her, was even louder.
Emily reached a wall of arching roots that rose almost to her waist and took her bearings. Some kind of amphibian, slick and black, slid its four-foot length away from her into the water, and was gone.
There was a shot.
Elise, behind her, stopped still at last. The muted echo of the report died into the dank air.
Mallen whistled again. Attack!
‘Attack? Attack what? Attack the water? Attack the flies?’ Elise demanded.
‘Just attack!’ Emily knew the drill, and she hauled herself one-handed over the roots and splashed forward, hoping that she was still going the right way, that she had not been somehow turned around.
Another shot rang out, closer, and then a third in return fire. Aside from Elise, gamely blundering on behind her, there were no human beings in sight. It was a war between ghosts, a war in the next room. She wanted to shout at those unseen combatants: Where the hell are you?
Another two reports came from within the mist. Somehow she picked up her pace, despite the water and the mud, despite the weight of gun and pack and helm. Suddenly she was desperate to see this fighting, desperate not to be the one left out. Her comrades were shooting and dying somewhere amid this murk, but somehow she had broken the line. Now she had a loaded gun and the fighting was somewhere else.
She lurched on, tripping and stumbling and slipping, wrestling with footing that was constantly trying to betray her. There was a silver flare within the mist: she heard, through the dense air, the shrill searing scream of one of the Warlocks attacking, the hissing explosion of water turned instantly to steam. That moment’s incinerating light served as her beacon, for the enemy had no wizards of their own. She pushed on, fell to one knee – holding her musket up to keep it dry, just as she had been taught – and forced herself back onto her feet through sheer willpower. Simply moving was becoming an intolerable burden to her, each breath of the muggy air harder to inhale, every motion sapping the strength from her limbs.
She finally burst out into a cleared space where the ground was baked hard, where the crooked trees had been seared black all around her, the convolutions of their trunks and branches turned into rigid death agonies. A Warlock had been here only moments before, unleashing his incendiary magic. The fog was just now oozing back in, the water welling up to reassert its dominion. She put a hand near the fire-split wood of the nearest tree, feeling the heat radiating from it like an oven’s open door.
At the edge of that fire-scorched clearing where one of the King’s wizards had stood, she saw a twisted shape. The mist had begun shrouding it already; it might have been a contorted human body or simply a fallen tree – either way it was half ash now.
There was another flash and report from deeper within the swamps, and she lurched on into the fog, desperate to regain her own people and not be abandoned in this green purgatory. The swamp closed about her like a bad dream, clogging her throat and squeezing her heart with its thick gluey air. Attack, the whistle had insisted, but she had been pressing forward and then forward again, and had seen no enemies other than those conjured by her own fears from the mist.
And then she stopped, because she had taken seven steps, now, since she had last heard a shot, and she had no idea where she was. The walls of the swamp rose up on all sides. She was utterly alone. Even Elise was gone, left behind somewhere in that impenetrable murk.
The world seemed to spin all around her and, whichever way it spun, it was the same: the darkened air, coloured by the leaves that the light forced its way through; the twisted agony of the trees; the hundred thousand insects with their whine and buzz.
She took one slow step forward, already knowing that it was pointless for, no matter what direction she moved in, she was still lost.
Then she saw him. Between two trees and beyond a stand of fern, no further away than ten yards: the Denlander. A small bareheaded man with a bowl-cut of dark