Complete starter chapter from "Foundling" - the first book in the "Realms of Kyre" epic fantasy series.
- Trevor Watts
- 7 minutes ago
- 7 min read
The Swamp Stirred
Instant blinding awareness from nothing. Stabbing pain.
Kyre! What is this? Where am I?
Gasping to breathe, the thing struggling in the pit of endless, heavy mud was close to panic. Mouth and nose blocked with slime, he knew he was failing, drowning.
Something writhed in his throat. Gagging at the foulness of it, his fingers clutched, couldn’t reach. Retching on the taste... the stench.
**
Already exhausted, sinking deeper, the creature realised its struggles were making things worse. ‘I need to stop; not fight. Rest. Let the pain ease; strength return. Kyre hresh…? What’s happened? Where am I? Near-buried in mud. Crawling things against my skin.’
Wait. Wait. Fading…
**
Aware again, the captive of the mire shuddered with shock and cold; scarce breathing in a world of glooping mud and zipping shrill insects. ‘Who am I? Ky-toin? What the fryke has happened to me?’
A single weak, choking cough escaped him; not enough to be rid of the worm that slowly squirmed in his throat. What am I? Is this pain I feel? I know nothing of pain; and yet, I feel it here as much as the mud.
Think back; I must know who I am… Where I am. Why am I here?
Wait… Wait…
Darkness settled again.
Voices! Loud and close! Crashed into his mind.
‘It’s a man. Brigand got himself in a mess—’
‘Hill bandit.’
‘Gerrim ahter there!’
‘He’s stark bollock.’
‘Gerrold ovim!’
‘Stop struggling y’ cunny.’
Voices so raucous. Forcefully grasped, he was jolted to new awareness, ‘Wha’s appnin…?’ as he was dragged through mud, branches and leaves, legs trailing, kicking feebly. Slimed and bloodied, he was dumped on a rotting log.
Kuit! I’m naked. This is me? This convulsing body? What am I? Can’t stop the shudders. Blood pouring down my chest and arm. Can’t cough… scarce breathe. Men hitting my back. Shouting, laughing all around me.
‘Right lads, get him breathing. Clean him up. See what we got.’
Black mud spurted out his mouth; blood splattering down him. He tried to reach to his side, where the flesh was split open in a huge rip, flesh straining out, blood pouring, a mud-worm squirming within, shrinking back.
His breath began to gasp almost steadily as he looked round at hard faces and drawn swords. Men in muddied, dull-green uniforms. ‘This is so wrong. The whole stinking place reeks of decay. You’re soldiers? Who are you? You odiousi creatures?’
In some awful guttural language, they demanded and sneered; laughed and poked at him, asking, pointing up into the trees, at broken branches. Huge splatters of mud adorning drapes of grey lichen.
Me? I fell through the trees? Where the kuit from?
**
A pair of troopers closed round him, peering and prodding at his head, muttering. Un-realising of his wrecked condition, he muttered in return. ‘Kyre rej? What’s wrong up there?’ And reached up, cursed, ‘Fryke!’ as he discovered a jagged split in his skull.
One of them, a scar across his face, grunted, and jerked the man’s hand away. Splashed swamp-water over his head, and began to tease fragments away, showing the swamp-man splinters of bone and wood. Their eyes met; both grimaced.
‘Yye froik. That doesn’t look good. Bone. And wood splinters? I fell through the trees?’ He stared disbelievingly at the bone fragments. My head’s shattered? I’m finished before I started. Started what? Why am I here?
Some of the men jabbered, pointing at his eyes.
‘My eyes? What about them? Gahi Kyre?’
One forced his fingers into the prisoner’s mouth, clawing, tugging out a long, flat-headed worm. Two more prised from his skin. They troopers poked and dug in distaste at his side, where the flesh was torn apart, fingers grasping at another writhing leech-creature deep within.
Trying to force the pain away, he demanded, ‘Na Kyre? What do you want? Who are you?’
No-one answered. Baffled shrugs from them. More incomprehensible muttering and head-shaking. One raised a sword over him, but Scarface pushed it away, rapping orders, ‘Bannerman Mink wants him. So does the captain.’ A rope slipped round the naked man’s neck.
He grabbed at it, protesting, ‘Kyre hruuki? What are you doing?’ Too late; too slow; no strength. He was dragged upright, swaying. Looking around at dark trees dripping with muddy growths. A great splatter-pit; a crater of mud. Filthy brown-green water oozing back into it. So that’s where I’ve been? I fell? From where? Blue sky showed through a gap in the trees.
One snapped an order. Another nodded, ‘Whatever you say, Jackto.’ And the prisoner was forced away with a sword thrust, and a jerk on the neck rope.
**
The trail, such as it existed at all, was a faint twisting torment of staggering through sucking mud and ensnaring vines.
The bleeding captive was in a near-blind blur of pain and confusion. Vicious little mud creatures snapped at his ankles, and swarms of insects plagued everywhere he bled. Compelled to keep going with incessant curses, sword stabs and jerks on his neck tether, he cursed his tormentors, every one. ‘Hateful maluki, these troopers; especially that one called Scoppo. He just loves using his sword. And that one who laughs so much. Him, Spagger, jerking the rope. Not one of them understands a word I speak. Voitugs! I give my word to the stars – they die.’
**
‘Grallator! Grallator!’
He looked up, wondering. Yelling, the troopers were scattering in all directions, into the swamp.
Standing alone, mud-caked and naked, his tether hung free, but he had nowhere to go. Breathing sparsely, he swayed, and fixed on the creature that blocked the trail a dozen paces ahead.
The same height as he, it was a thing of armoured scales, with a mouth to chew a man in half. Legs widespread, straddling the way, it rocked slightly, almost in time with his own movement. The body of a trooper was splayed at its feet. An instant’s study, and his heart drooped into the mud with the troopers. ‘So, you’re a grallator, hmm?’
Zutttt! A whipping, barbed tail twanged from behind it, like a straightening spring. He dipped, a trilth of a beat before it zizzed through the air where his neck had been. Fryke! So fast. He crouched lower, trembling, and watched it bite down at the uniformed corpse, now headless. Growling, its head rose, still shifting side to side, as though fixing on the unmoving figure. Staring back, he saw double rows of yellow-brown teeth as its mouthed in a silent roar, backed up by a mass of writhing worm-like tongues. Its tail lashed, and cracked again, shoulders tensing, This whole thing is a killing system; readying to come at me.
‘You want me, do you?’ Its balance changed again in readiness for its attack. ‘Not if—' He threw himself towards it, half-rolling, grabbing a fallen wayside branch. Stumbling off-balance, the branch out in front, he was at it.
Almost too fast to be aware of his own movements, he rammed the splintered end into the open mouth, deeper and deeper. Ranting at the monstrous retilja, forcing the branch inwards with all his weight and remaining strength, man and beast were both shot through in searing pangs.
**
Enclouding them in the hot stench of rotted stomach breath, it bellowed and flailed; dagger-teeth snapping into the branch, raking along the man’s arm. ‘Ky-yack!! – my hand!’ Deep score-marks spurted blood.
Half leaping, half-thrown by a wild swing of its armour-clad head, he was spun over backwards, scrambling away, hardly aware of what he was doing. Beyond the range of the frenziedly-lashing tail, he knelt low, reaching to a second part-buried branch. Careful… fingers grasping. Crouched, watching the grallator as it raged, head thrashing wildly; long, taloned legs clawing at the protruding branch in its jaws, until it fell free, heavily bloodied. A moment more of fury and tail-whipping; a final, blood-spraying bellow; and it stamped howling into the swamp, raising clouds of insects and noxious vapours.
‘Skoig oif!’ the survivor cursed after the vanishing grallator.
Exhausted, already on his knees, he sagged further, ‘Where the Jebem did speed and violence like that come from? In me? Kuit! I was fast.’
Barely aware of the drab uniforms floundering back from the quagmire and root entanglements; shaking with the pain, effort, and lost blood, he breathed again, but couldn’t even attempt to stop one of the troopers retrieving the neck tether, and adding a second one.
‘Kyre vai? What am I?’
Their expressions held the same question as they gazed at him, the mangled corpse on the trail, and the tail-slick that wound away through the mud. Silently, they pushed the remains of their former comrade aside.
‘Yordy,’ Scarface said, as the prisoner was hoisted to his feet.
Unfortunate enough to have been in the lead, was he? Tugging at his neck tethers, he detested them, men and creatures alike. Scarface is probably the only one who was not swamp-born scum. Their eyes met again, for a beat. Perhaps fellow-feeling, before the rope jerked, and he was dragged onward. The trek restarted as the body slid into the slime, dark blood seeping into the sucking ooze – the first wriggles of hidden creatures already homing in.
‘Shu gustya.’ He spat a mouthful of gunge and blood at the trooper grasping the rope, and bared his teeth at the one who held the new tether behind him. Both men flinched; retained their grips a little less confidently. That’s better – my first victory; my first smile.
**
A more urgent pace. The mass of gashes and grazes brought more pain. Ducking under low-hanging branches, constantly tripping over tangles of roots, the prisoner blundered through the mud and clutching vines. Unending, foul-tempered yanks at the neck leashes forced him on.
More and more, his hate concentrated on the ugly-grinning little voitug, Scoppo, with unending hilarious jabs from his delightful sword. ‘Just give me one chance, you vaahto.’
The cocky trooper grinned, full of confidence. Swung his vicious blade—
A piercing two-note sound stopped them. The troopers listened and conferred – that direction. The brutal speed picked up again. Then, soon after, a two-beat pause when the peal of notes sounded again, closer.
Must be nearing some destination. Feet stumbled around the umpteenth chaos of creepers and hanging mosses. The ground seemed firmer, drier. A clearing. Ahead, a high tower loomed, rising from a timber and wicker stockade wall. The troopers’ shouts were answered by sentinels atop the tower.
His neck jerked forward; Scoppo grinned, flicked his sword.
The captive spat blood at him, cursing. ‘You die, voitug.’ The words were lost on Scoppo, but the meaning carried.
Another wrench. Another curse. Heavy wooden gates swung ominously open.
‘By the stars, I need strength from somewhere.’
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