He lay still beneath it, all he could do with its heft atop him and his own paralyzing surprise. Then he saw a shadow moving behind the body, tensing at the possibility of yet another werewolf, but it was only her.
She was standing there, wide-eyed, hand hovering near the back of the beast, seemingly unable to move. Damien shifted the body to the side with a huff and slid out from under the heavy thing. A hilt was sticking out from just under the werewolf’s shoulder. A black ooze bubbled out around the impalement, and its skin was already cracking, the fur burning away as if she had cast some spell through the weapon when she plunged it in.
Damien glared at her, still unmoving, eyes focused on the fallen beast: she had given off no arcane aura at all, and yet—he wrenched the weapon out of the werewolf’s back, and as it came, the cursed blood burnt itself off, leaving the blade perfectly clean.
“Silver,” he said with a huff. “You had silver on you this whole time, woman?”
She blinked, looking at him like he had just appeared, then shrugged.
“By the basest beasts, with all the talking you do, how didthisnot come up?” He turned the weapon over, admiring it. It was small, a better fit for her hand than his own, but masterfully crafted. With a good weight, the handle and hilt were intricately hammered and poured to resemble bark with a twisting vine running up it and delicate leaves jutting off. It would have been quite expensive, perhaps exorbitantly so, if she had actually paid for the thing. “Impressive plunder. I suppose you actually are a capable enough thief.”
“I didn’t—” She cut herself off with a swallow.
He waited for her to go on and plead her innocence, what all thieves were wont to do, but when she didn’t, he sucked his teeth. “I shouldn’t return this to you lest you try and slit my throat with it, but it seems you’ve decided to use it to prolong my life instead, so.” He flipped the hilt toward her, and offered the dagger up.
She hesitated, then in one quick movement grabbed it back, and he watched as she sheathed it in a holster on her thigh hidden behind the tear in her breeches.
He kicked at the body beside them. “Still, strange choice. You were almost free of me.”
“And alone in this swamp with them,” she said, glancing around at the near blackness of a falling night.
“Fair point.” Damien ran a hand through his hair and swept it back out of his face. “And I suppose some gratitude is in order, so thank you…you.”
“My name’s Amma.”
“Yes, I know,” he snapped then blew out a long breath. “Thank you, Amma.”
CHAPTER 9
THE FABRICA OF SWAMP ALCHEMISTS
Kaz proved himself useful enough to bring the knoggelvi back to them after an hour or so, shockingly uneaten if spent, and Damien identified the driest hut to bed down in. The Brotherhood had supplied them with blankets that remained tied along the sides of the knoggelvi, and they stopped for the night. Damien rationed out some cheese and bread to Amma, and considered confiscating her dagger while she ate, but ultimately decided not to renege on his word—that would, perhaps, set a bad precedent, and while he was decidedly discourteous, he wasn’t dishonest. Not when it counted, anyway.
Damien did, however, bind her to the spot and order her to do no harm nor to run in the night by way of the talisman’s Chthonic word. She might have aided in keeping him alive, but she wasn’t trustworthy by a long shot, and he needed his sleep. With an imp around who required very little rest himself and could keep watch with heightened senses, Damien was looking forward to lying down but was unprepared for how fitful the night would be.
Like at The Brotherhood’s temple but worse, Damien was restless until he fell into a vivid and exhausting dream of releasing demons, stabbing men and wolves, drowning in muck, and perhaps most upsettingly, being pressed up against a woman. That last element wouldn’t have been so terrible had he been with someone who could satisfy that desire, or even on his own, but when he woke in the middle of the night he was simply frustrated, especially with the suspected source lying so close. Amma was curled up into a ball against the opposing wall, her face soft under the shaft of moonlight that streamed in through the hut’s lone window, and now it was annoying him in a whole new way.
After a few more hours of attempting to sleep, Damien got himself up before the sun rose, ordered Kaz to wake the girl—a mistake as the imp did it by pelting her with stones and starting her off prickly first thing in the morning—and the three were off again, decidedly less enthusiastic than the day before. Likely still rattled, neither Amma nor Kaz spoke much, which was perfectly fine with him, but then evening began to fall and Kaz’s reincarnated mind finally put the pieces of their detour together upon seeing a tower atop a hill in the distance.
“Oh, no, Master, not him.” Kaz turned back, a wretched little frown on his face.
Feigning ignorance, Damien tilted his head. “What qualms do you have with Anomalous?”
“Well, he doesn’t think I exist, for starters.”
Damien snorted, oddly mirthful, and a grin threatened the corners of his mouth. “Oh, yes, I had forgotten about that.” He hadn’t.
The tower rose up from the fog, a muddled amalgamation of stones and wooden boards and metal plates. It leaned slightly to the left, perhaps a little more intensely than when Damien had last visited, but an ever-sinking swamp will do that to buildings.
Near the tower’s top, a ring of spikes jutted out perpendicularly from a walkway that encircled it, a bevy of crows resting there, calling out to one another above the constant buzz in the swamp, and at the very peak, a pole extended skyward, longer than last time, the place where an addition had been welded clear even from this distance as if Anomalous had reattached it a few times after failed attempts. Damien twisted his lips at the thought of the man clambering up the side in some dangerous, metal rig and being nearly impaled multiple times just to gain a few more feet of height, but then a flash of light from one of the tower’s windows followed by a puff of green smoke told him the man hadn’t managed to accidentally off himself yet.
As they ascended the hill to the tower, there was a scurrying in the brambly bushes, and a crocodile climbed out from under them covered in a strange contraption. When it opened its mouth and hissed, Amma yelped, pulling on her knoggelvi’s reins, but the beast didn’t respond, only glaring back at her.
The crocodile cut them both off, swinging around, and the contraption on its back sprung outward, many metal legs jutting off of it to plant into the wet ground and extend, pushing the reptile up onto its back feet. Long jaws now level with the knoggelvi’s head, it craned them open.
“Who’s that, who’s there?” called a frazzled, quick voice from deep in the creature’s gullet.
“A traveler in need of assistance,” said Damien, eyeing the black box dangling from the back of the crocodile’s throat.
