The four pursuers paddled a long way back until they found a weaving path through the low hills. Over land, their long canoe was a liability. They had no choice but to shoulder the burden and lug it uphill.

Sters and Hat cursed Revel’s excess with every step. His provisions felt impossibly heavy, and his useless mail might as well have been made of lead. Revel made some jape, and Sters snarled at him. El Sha La threatened to blast them both to bits, which diffused the feud, but the mood curdled completely.

They chafed each other for the rest of the haul. Even Yellowhat was in a sorry state. Exertion burned the last remnants of smoke from his system and left him a shivering mess. His pleas for cane became desperate and incessant. He looked so pitiful that El nearly relented.

Just as she was about to reach into her robe, El Sha La noticed Sters was watching. She changed course and refused. She couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of the wharf rats. Yellowhat begged on. The bard claimed the dearth of cane made him feel every pain threefold, and El Sha La was inclined to believe him.

His yellow hat was black with sweat, all the way to the brim. His face was bloodless as chalk. Still, she held out. They’d found no sign of Rigel or Fish on the long climb. If the fugitives came this way, night rains had erased all trace of their passage. They toiled on until El felt her arms might fall off.

At last, they found their way back to the Rakkar. They laid their canoe on the clay beach with great relief and stopped to catch their breath. The path had brought them northeast and hooked back to the wide basin before the Rakkar funneled into the falls.

The way they’d come was untamed wood, ancient white pines that would have been logged long ago if anyone lived close. The opposite bank rose sharply in boulder-strewn hills backed by mountains. A few cave mouths yawned in the distance. Revel opined they ought to row over and look. He was sure one must be a secret way down to the lake. The others ignored him.

Yellowhat scowled upriver at the swift current. The water was a muddy red-black that frothed as it swirled past razored ridges of rock. Their task had barely begun. Long days of rowing in the hot sun lay ahead.

Sters stared back, toward the Mouth of Madness. His jaw sawed back and forth as if he chewed the idea of leaping in and letting the river crack him apart on the rapids.

Suddenly, he raised his deck hook and pointed ahead. What seemed like a string of stones protruding from the basin’s surface moved. The mass snaked back and forth and sent waves racing across the basin. Close to it, the surface of thew water bulged.

Something huge and unseen moved below.

Yellowhat stood dumb, frozen by fear. El Sha La tried to recall a spell, but she was afraid, and the sigils came jumbled out of order. Sters fled without a word, and Yellowhat ran after him.

Revel alone was ready. He stepped onto the shore with his blade bared and all but dared the beast to come upon him. The waves lapped at his ankles and subsided. For long moments, they waited for the monster, but the basin fell still.

“Must not be hungry.” Revel shrugged.

El Sha La was astonished. Revel seemed almost disappointed.

“What was that?” a hushed voice came from above. Sters and Hat peered down from the bushes, way up on the riverbank.

Revel looked up at them and shook his head. He raised one brow with a vicious smirk.

“Lucky for us, there’s no such thing as dragons.”

“That’s no dragon!” Sters spit back.

“Whatever it is, let’s get far away from it,” El Sha La insisted.

Revel and Sters bickered under their breath as they carried the canoe along the bank, though neither had a clue what the beast really was. It might have been the body of a serpent, the tail of a drake, or the tendril of some gargantuan devilfish. El Sha La hissed at them both to shut up, lest they draw the beast.

Her failure to recall the spell ate at her. How could she have grown so rusty in a summer! She was useless, frozen in terror. Sters and Hat cowered off. Only Revel was prepared to act, as brave as he was brainless. She was inflamed at the thought, ashamed of herself.

They carried the canoe a long way before they dared to embark. Even then, El Sha La expected jaws to rise and swallow the whole boat the moment they shoved off. They clung close to the shore as they rowed upstream, getting the measure of the river.

It was almost an hour before anyone spoke, and that was only Hat, pestering her for more cane. For the tenth time, she refused him. As the day burned on, his eyes narrowed into reptilian slits. The fiend stirred. Revel ordered Hat to the bow so they could all keep an eye on him. At the head of the canoe, Yellowhat shivered and hissed poisonous little mutters upriver. The Rakkar babbled along with him.

Behind the bard, Sters the Hook was forever alert. The landscape changed as the canoe climbed north. They left behind the riverside willows and water chestnuts. A wall of tall pines took their place. They were in a real forest now.

The big man tensed at every rustle on the riverbank and got lost peering into the darkness between the trees. In Tinkerton, he was a seasoned veteran. Upon the Rakkar, he was green at all but rowing.

Luckily, there was plenty of rowing to be done. Yellowhat and El Sha La contributed what they could, but the real work fell on Sters and Revel. With tireless strokes, the two men worked against the current and drove the canoe upriver.

Eager to forget her aching shoulders and the failed incantation, El Sha La drifted her eyes across Revel’s broad shoulders. Salacious thoughts swept her back to Arath’s bedchamber.

There, the daydream foundered. She rowed harder to drive desire away, but it became a terrible cycle of rumination. She would redouble her efforts, tire, and slip back into fantasy. The worry was always there, ready to pounce. Each time she envisioned telling Arath the Gate Orb was gone, the confrontation grew darker in her mind’s eye. After a dozen repetitions, dying on the desolate river seemed mild by comparison.

Yellowhat twisted to face her, breaking the cycle.

“What is that?” he asked.

El Sha La scowled. Yellowhat had interrupted a particularly lurid phase. She raised her oar, ready to brain the bard if this was another lame ploy to wheedle cane.

This was no act. The day grew dark, and an unsettling hum rose above the river’s rush. Sters pulled in his oar and grabbed at his hook. Revel drew his sword. With no one rowing, the strong current pushed the canoe back downstream. The four travelers scanned the riverbanks, searching for the source of the strange sound.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

A bee landed on the blade of El Sha La’s oar. She flicked it away and another came, then another, then there was a dozen. The drone grew louder, and the air filled with darting streaks.

“Ack!” El cried. Her voice was drowned out by a million buzzing wings.

Bees!

In an instant, the canoe was engulfed by a cacophonous swarm. Bees blotted out the sun and obscured the landscape. Sters clapped hands over his ears and sunk low to the planks. Revel rose to his feet and flailed his sword at the brood, impotent as if he’d attacked his own shadow. His efforts only rocked the boat.

“Stop it!” El Sha La shouted. She choked as a wayward bee flew into her open mouth. A living hail of insects bounced off every surface. Sters released his death-grip on the gunwale and yanked Revel down by his shirt. El Sha La sputtered and spat out bits of bee.

While the others thrashed about, Yellowhat sat still at the bow and stared into the swarm. The bees were most concentrated near the bard. Droves of them landed on him and crawled on the brim of his shapeless hat. He didn’t seem to care.

Somehow, no one had been stung yet. The swarm encircled the canoe, trapping them in the noisy eye of a bombinating cyclone. Now, El Sha La could hear a shift in the pervasive drone. The swarm’s pitch rose and fell in a senseless song. Yellowhat seemed to understand. His mouth moved, but his words were lost in the dirge.

Before Yellowhat, El Sha La could faintly make out the outline of a woman’s face. A quiver ran through the teeming air as if the brood was considering the bard’s words. The droning built into a furious roar. Yellowhat had angered the swarm.

Sters the Hook was the first to be stung. As he swatted the back of his neck, another stinger pierced his palm. In the next second, he was stung a dozen more times. That was enough for the Hook. Sters leapt overboard with a wild howl and sank into the Rakkar like a stone.

Revel batted at the air like a madman as the swarm attacked him from every angle. Yellowhat stayed frozen at the prow, covered in bees. El Sha La’s henchmen were undone. It fell to her to save them all.

Under immense duress, El Sha La worked an incantation. She dismissed the bolts of pain that shot through her body and hissed crackling dicta through clenched teeth. Arath had trained her for this since she could walk. Pain was power. Fear was focus. The spell surged into existence.

The river rose around the canoe in a frothing ring. El Sha La bent the wall of water into a roiling dome. Thousands of bees were caught and drowned in her swirling ward. Inside, the mad drone was squelched down to the confused buzzing of individual bees. The stinging stopped. She felt a moment of triumph. She hadn’t forgotten after all. Then, it began to rain.

In her haste, El Sha La made the watery ward too thick. Her will was not strong enough to suspend so much weight for long. The spell cracked and pissed gouts of dead bees into the canoe. El tried to split the dome and push the two halves aside, but her strength was spent.

The dome collapsed and slammed into the canoe, sinking it instantly. El Sha La tumbled in darkness beneath the river, too spent to swim. Before the void could swallow her, strong hands fished her from the Rakkar and dragged her to the shore. She spent a long time coughing up silt and gasping for breath.

“El. El. El.”

Yellowhat kept saying her name. She tried to shut her eyes, but he would not relent.

“El!”

El Sha La rose and gasped at the sight of Yellowhat. The hard-bitten bard’s face looked like a swollen raspberry. He’d been stung a hundred times or more. Somehow, the bard had held onto his namesake hat. He wrung it out between two hands like a rag.

“Hat! Are you all right?”

Yellowhat blinked at the inane question. He motioned to himself with the old fishhook he’d been using to dig out stingers.

“Need cane,” he reminded her for the hundredth time.

“Yes, of course!” she agreed. Hat sat in the sun on a flat ridge of stone, and she climbed up to join him.

The pouches inside El Sha La’s sodden robe were sealed by spells. She kept the cane in a tiny glass bottle. Yellowhat eyed her hungrily as she hunted for it and breathed a deep sigh of relief when he saw the bottle was intact.

The cane threads were delicate as saffron, iridescent black and dappled with minute beads of violet sap. Yellowhat had his clay pipe out and blew into it absently to dry out the cone-shaped bowl. His eyes were locked on the tiny bottle, the most important thing in the world.

“What was that?” Sters asked.

He tossed an armload of dripping salvage on the riverbank to dry in the sun. Most of their supplies had been swept downriver.

“Bees, Sters. Don’t interrupt her,” Yellowhat hissed.

The cane cap had a little set of silver tweezers built into it. El Sha La drew a long thread and spiraled it around the cone of Hat’s pipe.

“Light, please,” Hat begged.

With her right hand, she flicked out three fingers, then two, then one, a bright flame flared on the tip of her index finger. Hat leaned forward and inhaled until not even a mote remained. He held the smoke for a long time, then expelled an acrid yellow plume at the sky.

“Ahh!” Yellowhat sighed in ecstasy. El and Sters watched with keen interest. Each felt a pinch of envy and a twinge of disgust. How complete his joy. How wretched his need!

“Why did they come after us?” Sters pressed.

“I have no idea,” she admitted. A twinge of alarm stopped her short.

“Where’s Revel?”

Sters jabbed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the river. Revel’s head popped up mid-stream. He swam to shore and heaved a sealskin bundle onto the bank beside his clothes.

“Shant’s gotta have his precious armor,” Sters gripped under his breath.

“You’re covered in stingers, Sters. Stand still.”

El Sha La used the cane-cap tweezers to pluck the pulsing barbs from Sters’ neck and arms. She looked over her own welts and found no stingers. They’d been flushed away by the torrent. The worst sting throbbed directly on the knuckle of her left middle finger. It was swollen to twice the size of the others.

“Hat?” El Sha La offered the tweezers to Yellowhat, but he waved her away.

“It’s barely poison,” Hat said, beaming a saintly smile. The swelling on his face was receding with uncanny speed.

“Cane’s good for bee stings?” El Sha La wondered. Hat’s welts shrank fast enough to watch them disappear.

“A universal panacea!” Hat proclaimed, fluttering the lids of his jaundiced eyes. “Get your own,” the bard growled at Sters’ sudden interest.

“I’m good.” Sters shook his head.

“Did you pull me out of the river?” El Sha La asked Sters.

“That was your boy.” Sters tilted his head at Revel. “I don’t swim so good. He fished you out, too, Hat.”

On the shore below, Revel had collected all the pieces of his armor and retrieved his backpack from the bottom of the river. He was uncoiling a length of rope.

“Sters! Get your slack ass down here and help!” Revel shouted.

“Still a shant, though,” Yellowhat chirped.

“Yeh,” Sters agreed and trudged down to the shore.

Sters held one end of the rope as Revel dove down with the other and tied it to their sunken canoe. Working together, they strained to dredge up the boat.

Hat and El Sha La watched them from the stone ridge.

“Hat. Did you see a face in the swarm?” El Sha La asked.

A ripple passed across Hat’s placid expression.

“You saw her?”

“Yes. What did she say to you?”

“Told me I didn’t belong and to begone.” A singsong quality crept into his voice. “I laughed, and she got mad. Bee-gone. Get it?”

Hat cracked up; the others watched with concern. He was barely there. El Sha La wondered if she’d given him too much. Oblivious, he stripped off his tattered clothes and laid them out on the rock to dry. Then, he stretched himself out to dry with them and basked in the sun like a lizard. The cane had no shame.

El Sha La was shocked, not by Hat’s nakedness, but by his gauntness. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the bard. He’d smoked away everything that wasn’t required to procure more cane. Hat didn’t notice he was being gawked at. He was far, far away.

Lying wasted in the sun, Yellowhat pursed his lips and whistled a song. It was the only instrument he’d never pawned.