Making half a mile across the marsh took an hour of blind, aching labor.
Ashaun went first, holding Suth’s empty walking staff in her right hand and stabbing the iron ferrule three feet ahead at every stride. Two times out of three, what looked in the dusk like a solid bench of grey clay or a carpet of short sedge gave way with a soft, greasy sigh under the staff, revealing boiling black silt underneath. Only narrow, sunken ribs of ancient sinter—barely wide enough for two boots abreast—ran crookedly between the pools.
Behind Ashaun, Ysabet walked with her left hand under Pip’s belly fold to take half the weight off its trembling six legs, since every time its soft, leathery shell brushed a sharp reed stalk, the creature flinched and its interior lights pulsed brighter in the fog. Behind them came Osha, carrying Chaska’s folded glider frame so Chaska could use both hands to guide Lilt along the narrow stone ribs; the sandray hated the hot sulfur mud and kept trying to spread her broad fins to hop the gaps, which threatened to tip all of them into the mimic pools.
Darkness had nearly closed over the basin, and a freezing drizzle was beginning to mix with the steam, when a low, clear three-note whistle drifted across the bog from the east.
