Two miles south of the raised stone road, the green reed-beds and willow copses vanished, swallowed by a world-ending landscape of choking sulfur haze and silent, underground fury. The midday sun was reduced to a dull, blood-red copper disk hanging in a sky of greasy, yellowish-black murk.
Tomas Reed adjusted his vinegar-soaked linen breathing mask. He pulled the damp cotton tight against the bridge of his nose. The sour, acidic sting of the vinegar bit sharply into his sinuses, a harsh but life-saving barrier against the choking stench of burning thick tar, ammonia, and decomposing sphagnum moss. Beside him, Nessa Vale’s sound horn hung around her neck, its polished brass bell wrapped in damp wool to keep soot from fouling the sound chest muscle.
“Watch your footing!” Tomas shouted through his mask, his voice muffled by the triple layers of cloth. “Don’t step on the gray moss! Probe every yard before you put your weight down!”
Peat doesn’t burn with tall, roaring forest flames. It smolders with a stealthy, underground hunger. On the surface, the fen appeared almost intact—a flat expanse of heather, dry gorse, and brownish-green moss. But beneath that paper-thin crust of living roots, four to six feet of desiccated peat turf was undergoing smoldering pyrolysis at six hundred degrees.
