“Tarfail Quag.” Well, that had been two words, and that was a little better than one.
“The quag?” The imp called Kaz stuck out his forked tongue. Even a creature from the infernal plane hated the place. At least he and Amma had that in common. “This will be slow going.”
The trees were bare, standing like lightning-struck trunks at awkward angles out of the murky water at either side of the path—more kalsepherus, but some bald cypress too, their roots climbing up out of the bog to form knees good for basking reptiles and long-necked cranes. From their leafless branches, a greying moss hung and swayed even in the stagnant air. Amma glanced up at the sky between the scraggly boughs, clouded over and grey, and then everything was blotted out as something wet plopped onto her face.
Amma shrieked and slapped at her eyes, making contact with a rubbery, slick mass stuck to her skin. Her vision returned to one eye as she pried at the slimy blob, and with a snap, whatever had landed on her came free. Pain seared through her face, and a splatter of blood rained down onto the knoggelvi’s thick hide before her.
Kaz’s worn and gurgly voice was already falling into hysterical laughter as Amma rubbed at her eye to free it of the thick mucus that had pooled there. In her hand, through her blurred vision, she began to make out what had fallen on her face, a thick band of what looked like snot, yellowed with a wisp of something crimson swirling across its middle.
“Probinum leech,” Damien’s voice droned as he pulled his mount alongside hers. “They feed on blood.”
“Ew!” Amma flicked her hand to toss the blobby parasite away, but it held fast. Her fingers twitched as a pulse thrummed through her, and the line of crimson in its translucent body thickened. Panicked, Amma swung her arm up and down, but it remained stuck, and Kaz devolved into even harder laughter.
Damien leaned across her mount and snatched her flailing arm. The knoggelvi shifted, and the two were bumped up against one another, Amma nearly losing her balance as she continued to panic, but Damien held her still. Through her clearing vision, Amma could see the dagger unsheathed in his other hand, then she felt the cool metal slide between the leech and her palm.
She gasped at the sting, but it wasn’t the knife’s edge that slid into her skin, just the suckers of the leech being pried off. It held fast for a painful moment and then was catapulted off of her to land in the sludge of the swamp with a splat.
A line of pin pricks ran down Amma’s palm, blood oozing up from them. She whined and rubbed it off against her breeches, then gasped, touching her face. Her vision had almost entirely come back, but her eyes still stung, and she could only imagine what had happened to her skin there. “What do I do? Does it look bad?”
As Amma’s sight cleared, she realized she was looking back at a man with a scar across his face much worse than what any leech’s sucking could do to her own. He scoffed, “You will recover.”
Kaz was, of course, still laughing. He had dropped off the knoggelvi’s head and fallen to the ground, rolling just to the edge of the water. As he lay there in the mud, a tendril slipped out and crawled toward one of his spindly legs. Amma had been glaring down at the rotten, little imp, but as she saw its doom crawling toward it, she opened her mouth to warn him.
Damien put up his hand to stop her. He stared down at the imp still wholly engaged with what he thought had been hilarious, and a smirk crawled up the side of his face just as the tendril crawled up from the water to wrap around the imp’s leg.
Kaz shot himself up from the ground, splattering mud everywhere as he tried to beat his wings. The tendril strained to hold him down, pulling him toward the thick, murky water. “Master!” he crowed, clawing at the air. Damien’s knoggelvi cantered a few steps backward.
“Yes, Kaz?” he asked, blinking down at the imp.
Kaz screeched, reaching out for him.
Amma’s sight now restored, she watched Damien watch Kaz, the blood mage’s boredom and the imp’s utter panic in vast contrast. The imp’s wings, still new and awkward, beat hard but uselessly, and the tendril pulled taut, a mound cresting the water as it tried to drag him in. There was a flash of smoke and dim light as Kaz moved his hands about, trying and failing to cast. “Please, Master, my powers are still unrestored since my resurrection!”
Damien nodded, tilting his head thoughtfully. “I see.”
The imp was suddenly jerked down an extra foot, slamming into the ground. He screeched again then valiantly tried to fly once more.
Amma’s heart beat a little harder. “Aren’t you going to help him?”
“You think I should?” Damien turned to her, brow cocked as if the suggestion were a brand-new idea he’d never considered.
Kaz was making all sorts of panicked noises now, and the head of something with a toothy maw was surfacing in the bog.
“Yes, of course.”
Damien shrugged. “I think he ought to learn to fend for himself. He used to be able to.”
Amma frowned, and then she huffed—so, it was up to her then. She threw a leg over the knoggelvi and slid off its back to the ground with a wet thump.
Damien’s voice was thick with boredom. “What do you think you are doing?”
But Amma ignored him, stalking up to the imp who was so panicked he actually rerouted himself to fly toward her. Amma hesitated, looking at the mound in the water, considering pulling out her dagger, but not wanting to reveal to Damien that she had it. Instead, she stomped down on the tendril with the heel of her boot and jumped back.
The tension on Kaz was released, and he slammed into Amma, knocking her backward into the mud. There was a splash from the swampy waters, and the tendril retreated beneath the surface leaving a trail of bloody muck on the path.
Kaz’s clawed hands were wrapped tight around Amma’s neck, and she choked out a cough beneath them. Then he retreated just as suddenly, stumbling backward and half-hopping, half-flying to land back atop Damien’s knoggelvi. “Filthy trollop,” Kaz growled, hunkering down low and eyeing her.
“You’re welcome.” Amma pulled herself up from the ground and shook out her arms. The swamp’s smell was significantly more intense now that she was covered in it.
