Published at 1st of December 2023 10:40 am

Chapter 32 Draining the Swamp

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Kelvun woke shortly after midnight with a start. Despite the warm night and the sweat stains on his night clothes, he was shivering with cold and when he lit the lamp on his bedside he could still see his breath fogging. After all this time, the darkness had finally come back to pay him a visit, and it had not been gentle. While Kelvun lay in bed paralyzed, he had felt the shadows rifling through his mind for anything of interest.

He swallowed hard, worried at what that dark spirit might have found.

It had been almost a year since the day that the fear and the pain had shot through him. One moment he was celebrating how easily they’d taken the mine, and the next he was overcome by fear and nausea as pain shot through him. He’d thought his vile master was going to kill him for his seditious thoughts, but after a few minutes, it passed like their connection was ended. The doctor they’d brought with him decided it was nothing more than a fever that had already been sweeping through his men, and bled him to cure it, but even though Kelvun knew that wasn’t what it was, he stayed silent.

That silence had started out perfectly natural, after all, who could he tell? Even if he had someone he could talk to, what would he tell them? I made a deal with a devil in exchange for power, and now my family is dead, and my birthright is in ruins? There was no priest he could confess that to. Now that he was 18, they’d just execute him and install one of his cousins in his house. It wouldn’t matter if the death was a punishment for evil deeds or a mercy killing because he’d gone mad. Either way, there would be no more Garvins, and a Gerwin or a Geldin would rule over Greshen county in his place.

Kelvun would never accept such a travesty. This was his birthright, and he’d let no one steal it from him. He’d not only defended the region against the goblins and crushed them, so they could never rise again to threaten him, but he’d made a huge gold discovery that would be more than enough to finance all his future plans.

Without the dreams and the other little reminders that he was chained to a larger power, it had been easy enough for him to believe that he’d accomplished all of this himself, and after he’d lied to himself long enough it wasn’t even really a lie anymore. Everywhere he went, his people agreed - he was the hero his father never was, and had been sent by the gods to save them. Between that and the fact that there hadn’t been a single report of a new attack by goblins or zombies, it was easy to believe that everything he thought he remembered about that grinning golden skull were just fairy stories from his childhood.

He couldn’t anymore, though, because it was back, and even after all this time, he’d been powerless to resist it even a little bit. Kelvun wiped the sweat from his face with a sheet and then leaned forward, covering his face in his hands. It had been so tempting to believe that this was over, but that pleasant delusion was gone.

Kelvun stood and walked across the tent to where the heavy chest lay, and opened it. In the near dark, it was hard to see the lumpy bags that hid the lustrous metal, but Kelvun knew what was in those bags just as much as the spirit that had visited him tonight.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered, certain the spirit hadn’t left completely. “Ten bags of gold, and one of them will ‘disappear’ when we reach the river, just as I promised.”

Even when he’d been certain the swamp had been part of some desperate fever dream, he’d still planned on tithing the river just in case. The toll income had been excellent, but the geomancers that he’d hired to plan and dig the canal had told him that the river was ailing for reasons that they couldn’t understand. The swamp itself apparently had terrible energies about it, but they expected that to get better once the water was flowing, and it was dr—

Kelvun cut off his thoughts forcefully there. That was the very last thing he wanted to think about. He tried never to talk about it, and to avoid thinking about it wherever possible, but tonight it would be especially bad. If the darkness that he’d sold his soul to thought that its pawn was double-crossing it, then he had no doubt that his life would be forfeit.

Kelvun repeated why he was here. First in his mind, and then out loud, as he forced his mind to believe that this and only this was the reason he’d come all this way. “I’m here to ensure the first delivery of gold bars from the Leo mine, and on the way back I decided that I wanted to see how the third phase of the canal was going.”

He said it with conviction, but his mind rebelled against it. It was all true. They’d dug a trench clear through the swamp and were gathering rivers to keep the upland stretches full, so they could use it, but that was hardly the only reason it had been built.

Kelvun gritted his teeth. Trying to focus on what he could and could not think about in light of tonight’s events was going to make it an especially long trip back to Blackwater landing.

In the morning, he reviewed the plans with the mages' apprentices, as humiliating as that was. He hadn’t come all this way or paid so much gold to be talked down to by boys his own age. He’d paid good coin for elementalists from the Magica Collegium in Abenend, but they were off studying the leylines and weaving the spells that would make the whole thing possible, and were not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

Kelvun scowled as he studied the map again. “So then these two streams and this river will be redirected to the channel here and here," he asked pointing to the map, "and that will get the channel to the mine?”

He’d helped draw two of these already, and he would have thought that would make them easier to read, but all the small lines the mages used just made the whole things swim before his eyes until they glazed over.

“Unfortunately, no,” one of the apprentices answered, though Kelvun couldn’t remember if it was Fredek or Lancel, and didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking again. “As my master’s missives to you have stated, given the terrain a canal all the way to your mine will not be possible, but he can—”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Kelvun interrupted. “To make it possible. I’m not paying a king's ransom for ‘most of the way.’ Do you understand that?”

“But sir… your Lordship, be reasonable,” the other one pleaded. “If you look at the lines of elevation, you will see we’re not lying. No magic can make water run up hill. The best we can do is to flood this valley and steer the canal to there. At only ten miles away, it will—”

“Still be very susceptible to attacks by goblins and bandits now and in the future,” Kelvun yelled, slamming his fist on the table. "I need you to do better, or I will find someone who can!”

After that, despite his best efforts to explain himself, the meeting devolved into a shouting match, and Kelvun eventually stormed out of the tent and told his men to begin packing up. This had been half the reason for the trip, and it felt entirely wasted because these supposedly smart men couldn’t understand his vision!

Once he calmed down, and the servants had started loading the barge, he realized it was all to the good, though. Even though it hadn’t ended as he’d hoped, his annoyance would make good cover for the shadows inside of him. If he couldn’t be bothered to remember every detail of a meeting like this, then why would the darkness that watched him pay any attention at all to it.

Before the young Lord had even made it back to the landing, the dreams returned. They were hazy things filled with dread at first, as he wrestled with a woman who was also a rotting sea serpent, and he slept very poorly as a result. By the third night down river, though, those dreams had resolved into something even more vicious. He was torn to pieces by workmen that bet his teeth and fingers over games of dice. At first, Kelvun worried that the swamp had discovered that he was double-crossing it and was taking its time to torture him. It came to him only very slowly that in the dream, the pieces of him were metaphors for real theft that was going on in his mines. It was a gold rush, and it was far more lucrative to smuggle out a few nuggets than it was to break your back for a few coppers every day.

None of this stopped Kelvun from dropping a five-pound bag of gold into the river on their first night on the Oroza, but it was only when he decided that something needed to be done that he stopped. He’d meant for it to be a more solemn occasion, but in the end, he’d just chucked it over the side between rounds of drinking with some of the mates.

“So, if they’re really gambling away your gold then why don’t you cut off their fingers?” a sailor asked as Kelvun returned to the warmth of the candle lit cabin.

He’d been talking about his problem while they diced the night away, and he’d probably said more than he should have, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

“If I cut off the fingers of every man that cheats me, then there’d be not one man in a hundred left to wield a pickaxe to mine the gold in the first place,” Kelvun answered as he picked his drink back up and smiled.

Everyone laughed at that before they helpfully chimed in on everything he could do to stem the tide of the theft, which, if the dreams were to be believed, was abominable. Flogging, hiring more overseers, and paying better were the options that tonight’s drinking partners suggested the most, but the one that stuck with him the longest was the strangest by far.

“You could invite the priests to oversee the mine for you. They’re the real penny pinchers, they are, and they have no qualms with flogging a man until he’s seen the light.”

As odd as it seemed, eventually Kelvun decided that was the best response, if the darkness would let him get away with it. Not only would they be happy to provide some incorruptible oversight for a healthy tithe, but their influence and protection against the swamp in the future would be welcome as well.

In the end, it took Kelvun weeks to draft the letter, but that was only because he had so many balls to attend to celebrate his successful return to Fallravea. The only darkness that intervened to prevent him from writing the missive sooner was the sort that occurred in the bedrooms of all the women that wanted to personally thank him for saving the city. The shadow that haunted his dreams didn’t seem to care that it had invited the servants of the divine to shepherd the idle and wayward souls of red hills. It wasn’t the response that he would have expected, but if the dread golden eyes were busy looking at something else besides him, then he was hardly going to complain.

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