Laburrn lifted his foot from the clinging muck, slogged it forward, and set it again into the sticky stuff. One foot at a time that was the only way to traverse the marshes. So he had been warned when he set out on this dangerous journey, and so he had found it to be.
The heat that simmered over the swamp all day was dying with the light. The midges that rimmed his eyes and crawled into his ears were giving way to other, less bearable insects. They zinged and shrieked in his hearing, making his brain hurt with their noise. And, to make his predicament worse, a mist was thickening about him, turning the already dim reaches of the place into ghostly guesswork.
Had his errand been one whit less urgent, Laburrn would have turned his back upon the risky reaches and found his way to firm ground again. But he knew that worse than death now approached this continent from the sea. His people would perish, if he did not bring the doubtful aid of those beyond the marsh. And those who thought their seaward borders well guarded by the swamps would perish, too, in time. Given the dreadful word he brought, Laburrn thought that they might well reverse their old rule and come to the aid of their despised neighbors.
Now all light had leached from the patches of sky visible above the overlapped fronds and branches. Only an eerie glow from rotted clumps of dead stuff gave him, very stingily, a dim illumination. By its light he staggered onward, avoiding the pools, whose dark waters looked little different from the dark mud that surrounded them. When he went in above his knees, at last, he felt panic rising in his throat. Beneath his boots he could feel nothing solid.
Sweat started upon his skin, though the night was now chilly. He had been warned and triply warned of the quagmires of Gellorn. Desperately, he clawed at the skimpy foliage of an overhanging limb, trying to find purchase to draw himself up from his perilous position. But the rotten stuff went to tatters in his hands. He was now sunk to his thighs. Nothing loomed at hand, nothing was among his scant possessions that might give him aid.
"At least, you will not have my blade," he said aloud to the mire, struggling with his sword-belt. "The weapon of my fathers was not forged to lie beneath the slimy mud of Gellorn!" He conquered the buckle and flung the blade, belt and all, onto the firm knoll that he could see ahead.
Atop that knoll stood a pale mass of stone, though he was hard put to understand how stone had come into this unlikely spot. As the metal clanged against it, a wispy figure that he had taken for a wreath of fog rose from its rocky sitting-place.
"And do the Sons of Men still come into Gellorn? I had thought that they would have given over their mad ambitions, long since. Yet there you stand or sink. Such is the reward for such foolishness as yours. The treasures of the Inland People are not for such as you!" The voice was as wispy as the shape, yet it permeated all the damp air, and Laburrn could hear quite plainly what had been spoken.
He held his arms outward, for now the muck had reached his chest. In his hopeless state, still he could feel anger toward those who had refused to understand that a people can give up the foolishness of childhood and become men. His eyes felt hot, and he forgot, for an instant, his predicament.
"Enjoy your arrogance while you may!" he said to the bright-eyed shape on the knoll. "You thought us unworthy of your teaching or your aid, in years long gone to dust. You spread your marshes to keep us from your lands. Yet we learned, despite all, for you are not the only source of wisdom on this world, nor are you as wise as you think yourselves.
"Now we are no longer a rash young folk, given to rapine and adventure. We have grown cautious and take care that our deeds match our words. Those who came to us from the North taught us well the things that you might have told us, for they were old even beyond your great age. They taught us and went onward toward their destiny, whatever that might be.
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