Rimelion: The Exploiter

I went first, because of the seven of us, I was the only one who could take it without getting wet.

My amazing wonderful heels found the surface of the black water and held it like a polished floor, and I walked out across the drowned swamp on water that took my weight and gave back nothing, dry to the ankle, crossing a flooded haunted ballroom as if I’d been invited.

For me. Only ever for me.

Behind me, the others sank. Llama put one boot down and went into the shin, and the look he gave the swamp could have curdled it. “This,” he announced, “is not a floor.”

“It’s about to be.” And I pulled the cold up out of the water.

The ice came eager, grateful for the work, and I laid it out ahead of them, a causeway a meter wide, pale blue and solid, riding the surface of the black. I didn’t need it. I walked the open water beside my own bridge like a fool with something to prove, and kept the ice growing forward, step by step, on into the dead trees, while the rest of them climbed up onto it and followed.

Llama took point on the ice itself once he’d bullied it into proving it would hold, shield up, back to the one job he understood, calling the hazards as we reached them. “Branch, underwater, left.” “Soft ice here, Charlie, thicken it.” “Do not look at the lights.”

Luminaria came onto the causeway behind him, immaculate and silent, and stopped to consider the black water sliding by on both sides. “I want it noted,” she said, “that I cannot use lightning in here. Not with all of you on a frozen path over open water; one strike and I'll cook the whole party.” Her jaw was tight. “So if it comes to a fight, I will be holding the second-most-useless staff in this swamp.”

“Second?” said Lucy.

“The first belongs to whoever brought a hammer to a place with no floor.”

NightSwallow I lost almost at once.

The drowned trees gave her the cover the open water never could; angles, shadow pooled thick in the hollows of the dead trunks, and she went into it without a word and came back twice, each time a little flatter than before.

Her second report was four sentences long. “Lights aren’t random. They thicken toward the middle. There’s a center; everything bends toward it.” She paused. “I don’t like the open. Too many directions for eyes.” She folded back into a trunk-shadow and was gone.

And Lucy went quiet.

That was the part that got under my skin. Lucy, who had not stopped talking since the day I met her, who narrates her own breakfast, walked the causeway with her hammer down and her mouth shut, and her eyes moving, saying nothing at all.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“Don’t like how it’s listenin’,” she said, and that was all she said.

We’d gone maybe three hundred meters in when the swamp decided to introduce itself properly.

It came up beside Luminaria, pale and slow and almost lovely, a soft drifting shape the dim light turned into something you might lean closer to see. She leaned closer to see.

That was when the pretty came off it.

The surface peeled away like wet paper, and underneath was a bloated translucent gut you could read the dark of its own organs through, a ring of mouth crowded with too many teeth all pointing the wrong way, and a cluster of eyes that couldn’t agree where to look. The whole of it tipped up toward Lady Luminaria’s immaculate boots and gulped, wet and hopeful.

[Lurefin Lv.33]

Type: 2-uncommon | HP: 980/980

Luminaria has held her face through battles and never once snapped. A fish was where she drew the line.

The spark left her staff before any part of her had agreed to it; small, blue, the magical equivalent of a flinch. It caught the Lurefin square, and it caught the water, and the water turned out to make an excellent host.

The current ran the black surface, ran the wet skin of my ice, ran up seven pairs of boots at once, and the entire expedition performed a single synchronized, full-body, profoundly stupid jolt. Llama let out a sigh. Lucy said a word the shouting ring mercifully declined to carry. Phèdre’s flinch was the most graceful thing in the swamp, and she was plainly furious to have produced one at all.

I’d have liked that to be the worst of it.

Out in the dark, every pale drifting light under the water turned, all at once, toward the woman who had just rung the dinner bell.

Silence, except for the water.

“I want it noted,” Luminaria said to the middle distance, jaw set, each word rebuilt out of wreckage, “that it was hideous.”

“Ye said the staff was the second-most-useless thing in the swamp.” Lucy was delighted beyond all bearing. “Wrong on both counts, Yer Ladyship. Works lov—”

The first one came up over the edge of the causeway, and she stopped being delighted.

They surfaced from everywhere the water was, which on a bridge a meter wide amounts to everywhere. Dozens of them, the pretty sliding off each as it rose, and the dead-tree dark filled up with wet gulping and the slap of bodies hauling themselves onto the ice.

The Floaters on the river had been an inconvenience. This had opinions about us.

Llama set himself at the front of the causeway and became the wall it needed. “Hold the line. Do not spread. Nobody goes in the water.” His shield came around and folded the first three back into the swamp without ceremony. “And do not swing at the front of them. The front of them is a lie.”

He was right, and it cost the rest of us a moment too long to believe him. Lucy brought the hammer down on a Lurefin’s leering face and passed clean through a smear of pale light, the real mouth half a meter to the left and already closing on the haft. She wrenched the hammer free, swore, swung again at where the light wasn’t, and connected, and the thing got slung into the water.

“NOT useless!” she informed the swamp.

Then two more latched onto her boots from the open water and pulled, and Lucy, who had, as advertised, brought a hammer to a place with no floor, went down to one knee at the very edge of the ice with her whole leg sliding toward the black. She got the haft crossways and stopped herself a hand’s width short of going in.

Phèdre stepped down the line without hurry.

She gracefully got closer, took Lucy by the collar, and set her back on the solid center like a dropped glove; the two Lurefin gone somewhere in the motion. “Dégueulasse,” she observed, flicking something off her sleeve. “Mind your footing, mon capitaine. The water has assumptions, and they are bad ones.”

NightSwallow worked the edges out of the trunk-shadows, her daggers finding real bodies the rest of us couldn’t pick out of their own glamour, and for a while she was the deadliest thing on the water. Then the swarm thickened past the trees and out onto the open ice, and there was nowhere left for the shadow to take her, and she got slow. Three of them surfaced under her at once with nothing around her to dissolve into.

I created more ice for us to fight on, but still we were strung single-file along ice over open black water, hemmed on both sides by more of these things than I’d troubled to count, my lightning mage holding the most expensive broom in the world and my assassin running out of dark to spend.

The causeway I’d been so smug about had turned into a tightrope with teeth at both ends.

Right.

“Yuki.” I kept my eyes on the water. “The light trick. Not the Torks this time.”

She was the second most effective fighter after NightSwallow. She nodded at me, her ears were already flat, her new sword already rising, and for once she didn’t talk her way through the fear; she’d found a question she could answer. “Oh—yes, give me—there—”

Light came off her, a low gold wash this time, nothing like the noon-flood she’d loosed in the treeline.

It ran flat across the whole surface of the swamp and caught every Lurefin in it at the same instant, and the lies fell off them, all of them, everywhere, the pale glamour sloughing away to leave only the gulping translucent truth of the things, ugly and exact and finally, blessedly, where they actually were.

“They’re doing it wrong,” Yuki said, half to herself, delighted. “The illusion’s crude; it’s just laid over the top, it doesn’t move with the body. Something down here does this properly, and these are only copying it badly—” She caught herself. “Later. Sorry. Hit the left ones.”

We hit the left ones.

With the glamour stripped the melee stopped wasting itself. Llama folded them by threes. Lucy, on solid footing and able to see what she was hitting, was having the finest afternoon of her career. But sight didn’t thin them, and they kept boiling up out of a swamp that held a bottomless supply, and NightSwallow was still stranded out on open ice with no dark left to spend.

So I quit being clever and did the obvious thing.

“Llama,” I called. “You said this wasn’t a floor.”

I felt him work it out a half-beat before he answered. “Then make it one.”

I let the causeway go, stopped feeding it forward, stopped being precious about the neat wide path, and put everything I had down into the water in every direction at once.

The cold went out of me in a sheet, more than I’d spent all day. Moving water resists the freeze, and then all at once it stops resisting, and a hundred square meters of black swamp went white and hard and silent, the Lurefin caught mid-lunge and set into it like flies in pale glass, the lights beneath the surface frozen to still bright beads.

The wet gulping stopped. NightSwallow stepped off the spot she’d been about to die on, into the shadow of the nearest dead trunk, and was gone, and somewhere in that dark I heard her breathe out.

Solid ground. Everyone up out of the water, the swarm pinned, the swamp turned for thirty meters in every direction into exactly the floor Llama had been demanding since we left the ship.

I turned to Luminaria, who stood on the ice with her staff in both hands and nothing to do with it.

“Lumi.” I nodded at the field of trapped, twitching, thoroughly conductive bodies, frozen now into water with nowhere to send a current except through them. “You wanted to be useful.”

She looked at the ice. She looked at the staff. The understanding came up through her face and took the last of the wreckage with it, and what surfaced underneath was close to joy.

“Off the metal,” she said. “Off your blades, back from the water’s edge. Now.”

We got off the metal.

Lady Luminaria planted her staff, and the porcelain slid back over her like a closing door, and the woman who had electrocuted six of her own friends over a fish was simply gone, replaced by the lead actress of a divine opera consenting to a final scene.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her there weren’t any cameras this time.

“This one has a long cooldown,” she said, and the lightning poured into the frozen field and found every trapped body at once, leaping white from bead to bead to bead through ice that held them all on a single wire, and the whole swarm lit up blue-white and died together in one long crack of sound that rolled away through the dead trees and came back smaller than it left.

The light died. The ice steamed.

“Ugly things,” Luminaria said.

The swamp took its time settling. The ice kept its dead in glass a moment longer, and then I let it go, and the bodies slid down into the black and were gone, and the surface closed over them smooth and dark and, inside a minute, pretty again; the false pale lights drifting back up out of nowhere as if the last five minutes were something the swamp had merely dreamed.

Lying. The whole place, top to bottom, lying.

I looked south, past the steaming wreck of ice, to where the lights hung thickest among the drowned crowns and the dark ran on without an end. They were closer than they had been. They’d been getting closer the entire time, while the swamp kept us busy meeting the help.

“That,” I said, “is where we go.”