Nightside 11 - A Hard Days Knight

deep here, up to my waist, and things circled slowly round us, leaving long, slow trails in their wakes. Human hands and heads bobbed slowly up through the mud’s surface, rotten and corrupt and partially devoured, brought to the surface by what moved below. I still couldn’t see anything, nothing had broken the surface yet, but I could follow their progress through the deep mud. Suzie followed the wakes with her shotgun and pumped shells into position, the sound loud and carrying on the quiet. She tracked one particularly heavy wake, took careful aim directly ahead, and gave the creature both barrels.
    The blast was shockingly loud but almost immediately drowned out by a vicious, angry screaming, as something large and twisted thrashed back and forth just under the surface. Blood spurted up through the mud, which flew spattering in all directions. Something that might have been a clawed hand briefly showed itself, and a set of massive snapping jaws, then they were gone again. Suzie aimed and fired a second time, and the screams shut off abruptly. The thrashing grew still, and the mud settled down again. A great pool of blood spread across the surface of the mud, but there was no sign of the creature itself. Slowly, the other wakes moved away from us, heading off into the mud. Suzie sniffed loudly, and we set off towards the castle again. Suzie has always favoured the direct approach to dealing with problems.

    We moved on, ploughing stubbornly through the rotten and corrupt land, heading for two ranks of trees that formed a corridor, leading out of the mud and towards the base of the hill. I was really tired now, fighting the growing ache in my legs and back with every movement, breathing through gritted teeth to try to keep the falling ashes out of my mouth. As we drew closer to the trees, I slowly realised none of them had any leaves. The branches were twisted and gnarled and completely bare. The bark was a dull matte black, split here and there by some internal pressure, with thick red blood leaking out—as though the tree roots had spent so long in this corrupt ground that the trees no longer had sap in them, only blood. And perhaps no longer had any use for leaves in this world that knew nothing of sunlight.
    The mud grew steadily more shallow as Suzie and I approached the corridor of trees, and we finally hauled ourselves out onto something very like proper ground. It was hard and flat and deeply cracked, almost volcanic. It felt good to have solid ground under my feet again, and I walked up and down a while for the pleasure of it. Then I spent some time slapping the hell out of my trench coat, trying to dislodge the caked-on filth; but it clung like tar, and I really didn’t want to try to prise it away with my bare hands. I finally gave it up as a job for later, and, hopefully, somebody else. Suzie, typically, hadn’t even bothered. She was looking thoughtfully about her, shotgun held at the ready. I followed her gaze, and quickly made out a whole bunch of creatures lurking in the shadows of the trees. Whatever they were, none of them wanted to get too close to us. They watched silently as Suzie and I moved cautiously through the corridor of trees. A few emerged from the shadows long enough to snarl briefly at us and retreat. They were cowed and broken things, with no spirit. What little I could make out of their forms looked rotten, decaying, malformed. Carrion feeders, not predators.
    “First trees we’ve seen,” I said, just to be saying something. “Wonder what happened to the great forests here?”
    “Cut down, set fire to,” said Suzie, sweeping her gun slowly back and forth before her. “Probably for the fun of it.”
    “You know, you can be really depressing sometimes, Suzie.”
    “Just trying to fit in.”

    We came at last to the foot of the hill and stopped to lean on each other for a moment, to get our breath back before we tackled the hill. The dusty grey surface had given way to the first real road we’d seen, a dull yellow clay, winding round the hill on its way up to the castle. It wasn’t a yellow brick road, and that that certainly wasn’t an Emerald City, but it would do.
    A bare wooden door-frame stood at the side of the road, containing no door, merely thick swirling mists that only existed inside the door-frame. Strange lights came and went in the depths of that thick, churning fog. Flames flickered sullenly all round the wooden door-frame, burning and blackening the