Tenebroum

Chapter 25: Laying the Foundations

Kelvun hated it in the swamp. Even though the heat had dramatically decreased over the last few weeks as fall started to set in, and the biting flies and mosquitoes left him strangely untouched, he was still miserable.

There had been nothing to do here for weeks besides watch other men work. Once the rains had started, things had somehow managed to become even more deadly dull, if such a thing was possible. In the evening he’d found a few soldiers to play cards with, but that was it. Anything else his tutors quickly put a stop to, and with the rains he couldn’t even leave the pavilion to escape them. It was truly his version of hell.

Even the dreams had stopped, he thought glumly as he pushed away the grammar book he was supposed to be memorizing.

He had no idea why it would be important to walk out into the swamp in the middle of the night to retrieve a guttering torch and use it to light the forge fires of their newly constructed smithy, but once he’d done so, even the strange dark dreams he had so often finally stilled. That probably meant that he was doing exactly what the swamp wanted of him, of course, but all of that added up to a fate worse than death as far as he was concerned.

Like a condemned man, every day he would listen to the smiths forge a few more links in the three hundred foot chain they were making. Meanwhile, any number of saws and hammers that were creating the timbers that were used in the construction of the tower added to the racket. In time, it would become the tax authority for the whole southern reach of the river. It was a shabby little building of timber and stone, and a poor start for what would inevitably become a village, at the very least as far as he was concerned. If it were up to him, he would have commissioned something more beautiful and imposing to represent his family’s authority.

A keep, perhaps. Anything was better than the little drum tower they were building. Because they were mostly using the older stones of a tower that had been erected here previously, it was doomed to be an ugly, squat little structure. Some of the workers wondered about that, and rumors spread through the camp about the old stories. The fact that they hadn’t been devoured by a ravaging horde of undead seemed to disprove that this was the site of the swamp dragon massacre.

It was though. That was the only bright spot for Kelvun in all this. It was the secret he couldn’t tell anyone. They were helping the Lich that they hated and feared by rebuilding the very tower that haunted his nightmares as a child.

If not for that secret, Kelvun probably would have drowned himself in the river just to have something to do.

He had no idea why the swamp would want a tower or a forge in the heart of its domain, or why it seemed perfectly okay for them to build a pair of sturdy docks, even knowing that those docks would doubtlessly bring more people. It wasn’t his job to know why, though. His job was to do as he was told for another year, and then when the title and the lands were his, he could do whatever he wanted to again.

Well, within reason, he corrected himself, as he looked upriver at a small barge heading their way. You couldn’t exactly double-cross the devil after you’d made a deal with him, but once he gave Kelvun what he promised, it wouldn’t be such a one-sided relationship between them, where the swamp commanded, and Kelvun did as he was ordered.

He wondered if they had the paperwork and the stamp showing they’d already paid the toll or not. If Tom or Denny had been around, he would have bet them ten obols that they’d never find out. The Lich wanted them to finish this chain for the same reason his father did: to get their cut of the river’s wealth. Every day the fishermen took a piece of the Oroza’s infinite bounty, and his father collected some duties at the docks in Fallravea. Everyone that chose to deliver their goods a village or two upriver dodged the taxman completely, and Lord Garvin was tired of not getting his due.

The chain would stop all that. Everyone would have to pay to use the waterway to pass this single point, and whoever that unlucky tax collector was, he would have a small garrison to keep him safe from his unhappy customers.

Kelvun had no idea what the Lich in the depths of the swamp would want a garrison of soldiers for, or what it would do with the brewers and bordellos that would surely follow, but as long as he was known as Count Kelvun Garvin the first by his next name day, he really didn’t care. He would—

The cane of his letters tutor suddenly slammed down hard on the table in front of Kelvun startling him.

“And what is so interesting, Lord Garvin?” Temonen asked, peering down at him through his spectacles.

Kelvun didn’t answer. There wasn’t a point. He just pulled the book close to him and went back to memorizing the conjugation for irregular verbs he doubted he would ever need, like obnubilate and impignorate.

The Lich watched the barge carrying steel ingots and other contraband beneath the thin layer of lumber as it passed down the river along with its young minion. The difference between the two was that the swamp would have its payment though, one way or the other, and since the boat had chosen not to pay in coin, it would send the swamp dragon to capsize the vessel and devour its crew instead once night fell.

The steel, it could use, but everything else would wash down the river as a warning to the other sailors who might try its patience in the future.

The swamp wasn’t too concerned with such things, though, and had noticed its passage only by accident while it focused on the hidden currents beneath the water's surface. In the weeks since it had laid its first traps, it had learned much about the water spirits that practically infested the river. It teemed with life, which had turned out to be the real reason why it was always slipping out of the swamp's grip.

But it had their number now. It could see the way they moved invisibly in the form of currents and waves.

The first traps it had used were crude brass things, and hardly fit for purpose. Most of the spirits they’d managed to trap had suffocated in the tiny vessels and passed away before it could send a servant to retrieve them. After a little trial and error, though, a few living samples had been brought back to the depths alive.

Despite the fact that they were creatures of water and not of fire, they shared a great deal with Krulm’venor, and the swamp had enjoyed devouring them once it had finished studying them. They weren’t quite as delicious as raw and bloody man flesh, but each one had writhed and fought until the end and been full of a surprising amount of magical essence.

Each one of them had also claimed to be called Oroza.

All of them seemed to think that they were the one true spirit of the river, no matter how big or small they were. It was an interesting question as to whether that was true for all or any of them, but not one that the darkness planned on focusing on right now. It didn’t care what they were, beyond the fact that they were prey. Instead of trying to understand them, it was figuring out how it could use the chain that the humans were building to anchor a series of larger spells across the breadth of the river.

The only problem with that plan was that it would need to rely on Krulm’venor to burn the runes into the iron once the chain was in the water, and outside of battle, it had no faith in that miserable godling to do what it was told.

If the net spell was successful, then it could feast daily on a whole new source of energy to fuel its underground army and their constant efforts to dig its circle. There would probably be some ecological cost to this for the villages and the fishermen down river to have so much energy removed from the world, but that was hardly its problem.

If that didn’t work, well, it had two other ideas to try.

Now that it knew what to look for, the first was to stitch a few souls into the corpses of animals and build mobile hunting traps. It could make such things fairly easily from the preserved corpses of crocodiles. They would lurk beneath the waters waiting to see things that should have been invisible to them, and then bring their fresh quarry back to its lair through the new river entrance its zombies had built on the first floor before it closed the surface entrance, so the humans could build their tower in relative peace.

That would definitely work, but those minions would only ever be able to catch the smallest spirits, and never huge quantities the Lich thirsted for.

The second option was far more ambitious, and a great deal more rewarding, but it would involve poisoning the very headwaters of the river itself. It would have to be done at the watershed far up in the Wodin Spine mountains, to the north of here where the river first took shape. If it could possess the river from the first moments it trickled to life, then it should be able to seize all of the energy that was within it for its own use and starve every other spirit in the river of life.

That would require the distillation and use of the unwater element cholerium, in ways that were similar to how it had used stygium to trap Krulm’venor. The only thing that held the Lich back from this plan was that it might have unforeseen effects on it. The river was a powerful force and introducing that much water energy into the dark heart of the Lich might only serve to dilute its darkness, at the same time it poisoned the water.

It was a conundrum that would take more study before it was willing to try even a small test. The swamp wanted to consume the river, not be shattered into a thousand petty little spirits that each thought they were the swamp.

Time was on its side, though. It could study the problem by day while it watched the goblins burn their way across the plains by night. In the weeks they had been on the move, they’d burned a bloody swath to the west. News had only reached Fallravea a few days ago that his son's army had been massacred, and Count Garvin hadn’t been sober since.

In time, they would formulate some sort of defense, the swamp was sure, but for now all they could do was mourn and despair as they hid inside their homes in fear of what was coming next.