Hell or High Water Read Free Page A

languid expression, blinked.
    “You can’t speak when you’ve turned yourself into an animal?”
    Blink.
    “Oh.” Ameyanda stepped forward—less gingerly than she felt—looped the vine around the reptile’s chest, and climbed aboard. Not the most comfortable mount, but it must beat walking.
    After hours of being tossed about by the beast’s wriggling swim, her arms and legs bruised raw against its knobby hide and savaged mercilessly by vermin both above the water and below, she wasn’t so sure of that anymore.
    Early the following day—not that one could tell it was day, given that the pounding rains still hadn’t moved on—Seyusth apparently scented or detected something. With an abrupt twitch that nearly unseated his partner, the crocodile shot through the swamps on a new course.
    Ameyanda, who knew that asking him what they were doing was a waste of time and breath, instead wasted that same time and breath in a litany of curses.
    A reed-covered hillock was their destination. Seyusth had barely climbed atop the rise before shifting back into his natural shape. Anyone with lesser reflexes than the huntress would have been sent sprawling.
    “You have some steed etiquette to master,” she groused at him. “Why—?”
    “There.” Black talons pushed a tuft of reeds so she could see. “Are those White Leech?”
    In what amounted to a wide corridor of swamp hemmed in by cypress walls, a pair of skiffs moved sluggishly across the water. The wood of the haphazard vessels was stained with old blood—old and dry enough that the rain washed absolutely none of it away. The men aboard were clad in tatters and leather scraps, held together by everything from cowhide straps to sodden twine, and armed with roughly hammered and sharpened scrap metal. One man poled each of the skiffs, while the others argued over the choicest cuts of… something that had once drawn breath.
    “Difficult to tell,” Ameyanda told him, struggling to peer through the downpour. “We’re in their territory, but I wouldn’t know how to tell the White Leech by sight. They… No,” she said with sudden certainty. “They’re not White Leech.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because,” she said, pointing at the ominous shapes suddenly looming from the corridor of trees, or rising from beneath the swamp to surround the skiffs and their frantic crew, “I’m fairly sure those are the White Leech.”
    They seemed no more than phantoms, obscured by the downpour. Some of the silhouettes that formed from within the trees, or from deep within the murky waters, appeared humanoid. Others were most assuredly nothing of the kind.
    That the first group they’d spotted were thrown into utter panic by the arrival of the second was clear enough, but precisely who the newcomers were, or what about them was so horrifying, neither the brown-skinned huntress nor the green-scaled shaman could see.
    The feeblest remnants of what might have been shouts or screams drifted through the downpour.
    “We must get nearer!” Seyusth yelled in her ear.
    “How wise of you, great shaman,” Ameyanda retorted with bitter sarcasm. “And how do you suggest we…” But the lizardman had already dived into the choppy swamp.
    “Spirit-damned lizard,” she hissed at the fading ripples. He’d retained his natural shape, but even so, Ameyanda knew she couldn’t match his speed in the water. Still grumbling under her breath, she hung her quiver of spears across the thickest reeds—the weapons would just float away anyway—checked that both mambeles were snug in their sheathes, and waded reluctantly into the waters.
    Even over the course of only a few dozen paces, the treacherous mud, the submerged and rotting logs, and the abnormal waves conspired to constantly alter the depth of the swamp. At times she was submerged to the waist; at others, the crests of those waves passed over her head, slapping her across the face with filthy water and reeking algae. Still, she