King Elric sat alone in his private study, the ornately paneled chamber feeling more like a gilded cage than a seat of power. The remnants of a barely touched supper lay cold on a silver tray.

  The assassin’s shadow still stalked the corridors of his mind. Tyrell was far to the north, overseeing the refortification of Woodhall and rallying the battered northern garrisons. The King’s Guard were with the Marshal. What remained in Alkaer to protect the Crown and the capital was a skeleton force of City Guard, supplemented by a collection of bewildered fresh conscripts whose primary skill seemed to be tripping over their own spears.

  He ran his finger softly over the edge of his letter opener—pleasantly sharp. The conspiracy was a venomous serpent coiled in the very heart of his kingdom. Lanza was under house arrest, but the man was a spider with vast webs of influence. What to do with him? A public trial risked inflaming his supporters, turning him into a martyr. A quiet execution, however tempting, was the act of a tyrant, the very thing his enemies accused him of becoming. He felt trapped.

  The royal decrees had been met with discontent. From the wealthy southern lords came howls of protest about economic ruin and infringements of feudal rights. From the common folk, burdened by a poor harvest and the rising cost of goods, came increasingly open defiance. Reports were filtering in of military-aged men fleeing south, to the Free Cities or even the uncertain sanctuary of Alsair, desperate to escape conscription into a war they barely understood. Local lords dragged their feet, offering excuses and delays instead of men and materiel.

  Only Archmage Falazar remained by his side. The mage, for all his eccentricities, possessed a clarity of vision and an invaluable depth of historical understanding. But even he seemed more strained than usual. He spent long hours in his tower, occasionally emerging with cryptic warnings.

  "You carry too much alone, Your Majesty," Falazar had said to him only this morning, with rare gentleness. "A king is but a man. And a man can break beneath a burden too great."

  Elric had merely nodded, too weary to argue. He felt the truth of those words in every aching bone, in every sleepless night. He was the King. He was supposed to be the rock, the unyielding center of his realm. The fate of Argren rested on his shoulders but, for the first time in his reign, Elric feared he might not be strong enough to bear it.

  * * *

  'The Mudskipper' trudged down the Lastwater River, its broad hull cutting through the murky brown water. Cultivated fields and orchards gave way to denser woodlands, then to increasingly tangled thickets of willow and reed. The heavy, damp air was alive with the buzz of insects and the distant cries of waterfowl.

  Snik was huddled near the barge’s railing, peering into the murky water. Sabine, picking scabs on her sore arm, idly watched him.

  "See… see that?" Snik croaked, pointing a small, clawed finger at a ripple near a submerged log. "Glimmerfin. Very tasty. Very… wiggly."

  Sabine, intrigued, leaned closer. "Wiggly? You eat them wiggly, Snik?"

  Snik’s eyes lit up with a fervent gleam, a passion Sabine hadn't seen in him before. "Oh, yes, Tall-One! Best way! Glimmerfin you catch gentle, with reed-net. Then… quick bite behind head-frill! Still twitching in throat! Very… zesty!" He made a series of delighted clicking sounds.

  Sabine, despite a slight queasy feeling couldn't help but be amused by his enthusiasm. "Zesty, huh? What else is good out here?" she egged him on, a mischievous smile playing on her lips.

  And so began Snik’s eloquent gastronomic tour of the swamplands.

  "Mud-Grubblers," he declared, his eyes shining, "big, fat ones, from the deep silt. You dig them up when moon is dark. Best part… the belly-sac! Full of rich, earthy… ooze!"

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  Gregan, who had been trying to quell a rising tide of seasickness from the barge’s gentle rocking, turned a rather alarming shade of grey. "Ooze? Gods preserve us, goblin, are you trying to turn my stomach inside out?"

  Snik looked at him puzzled. "Ooze is good, Big-One. Very nutritious. And the crunchy shell… good for teeth!"

  "Crunchy shells on a grub?" Sabine asked, trying to suppress a giggle at Gregan’s expression.

  "Oh, yes! And the River-Leech!" Snik continued, warming to his topic. "Not the little blood-suckers, no. The big ones. Arm-length. You find them clinging to the Slumber-Logs. You must be quick! Slice off sucker-end, then… slurp! Like… like strong, salty jelly-worm!" He made a slurping sound that made Gregan groan and clutch his stomach.

  "Jelly-worms," Gregan muttered with a grimace. "I think I’m going to be sick." He stumbled towards the railing, leaning over it precariously.

  Sabine, however, was finding Snik’s descriptions perversely fascinating. A glimpse into a world where survival was a raw, immediate thing, and the concept of 'food' stripped of all pretense. It was grotesque, but also... honest. In its own strange way. "What about the eyes, Snik? You mentioned Glimmerfin eyes earlier. Are all fish eyes good?"

  "Best part!" Snik exclaimed, his enthusiasm undiminished. "Eyes… pop in mouth! Like… like little flavour-bursts! Swamp-Pikers have very big, juicy eyes. And the Slime-Eels! Oh, their eyes are tiny, but so many! Like… like little black pearls of tastiness! And their bones… oh, their bones! So fine, so crunchy! You eat whole, head to tail-tip! No waste!"

  Masillius chuckled. "You certainly know your swamp cuisine, Snik. Perhaps you missed your calling as a Fenland chef?"

  Snik preened slightly, a rare expression of pride on his scarred face. "Snik learned much. From old scrolls. From watching. The Deep-Whisper did not care what Scuttlers ate. Only that they obeyed." A shadow crossed his features for a moment, then vanished as he returned to his culinary sermons.

  Artholan listened with a horrified academic curiosity, jotting down a note about "goblinoid dietary habits" and "potential alchemical properties of fenland fauna." The faint, almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of Ruthiel’s lips might have been the elven equivalent of a suppressed smile.

  The rest of the journey downriver towards the Silted Isle passed with Snik occasionally pointing out various edible—to him, at least—flora and fauna, much to Sabine’s continued amusement. And for a few hours at least, the most pressing concern for some of them was whether Snik would offer them a "zesty" Glimmerfin for their evening meal.

  * * *

  Two days into the murky, widening expanse of the Lastwater River, the riverbanks dissolved into an endless vista of reeds, marshes, and shallow, interconnected waterways. The murky brown of the Lastwater gave way to a darker, clearer tea-color, stained by the tannins of a million decaying leaves from the deep swamp.

  Masillius’ previous dealings with the Silted Isle’s inhabitants had been conducted on the mainland shore, in a twice-weekly market where the peculiar islanders would arrive in shallow-draft skiffs to trade their goods for Argrenian tools, cloth, and trinkets. From that shore, the Silted Isle was but a hazy smudge on the horizon. As 'The Mudskipper' advanced through the increasingly open waters of the marshy lake, the Isle slowly materialized from the mist.

  It was dominated by a single structure: a tower, its sleek dark surface fashioned from a material that absorbed the watery sunlight. It had no windows, no slits, no battlements. Only an imposing, enormous entrance at its base, an archway that gaped open like the mouth of a colossal beast, revealing darkness within. The tower rose up and up, its summit swallowed by perpetual haze.

  The island itself, little more than a rocky, muddy upthrust from the shallow lake bed, was almost entirely consumed by the tower’s footprint. A dozen fisher huts and workshops clustered around its base, looking like barnacles on a leviathan’s hide. Lingering plumes of acrid smoke rose from a hut where fish were being gutted and smoked over peat fires. The sharp tang of a tannery drifted on the breeze, mingling with the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer.

  The inhabitants of the Silted Isle drew closer to shore. No more than a hundred souls, clothed in a strange mix of patched Argrenian fabrics and items fashioned from K’thrall reeds and iridescent fish scales. They were nominally Argrenian subjects, but generations of isolation had forged them into a distinctly insular community. They watched the arrival of the barge with a quiet, unnerving intensity.

  A passing islander, pointed at a new crate on the barge and said to another, 'See-thing? New-new. Good-good?' in a sequence of clicks and rough-hewn Argrenian.

  A gaunt elderly man approached them as they disembarked. "Dry-Skins from—Shellwater-Place," he said with a raspy drawl, "K’thrall. Spawning-Speakers. They wait. In… in the Big Stone House." He gestured towards the colossal, open maw of the tower.

  Ramshackle tents of patched canvas and salvaged wood mushroomed in the chambers where polished, seamless stone walls and high ceilings spoke of a forgotten, far grander purpose.

  Artholan looked scandalized. "They live in it? Like… like termites in a fallen god’s skull? The sheer architectural desecration!"

  Masillius, on the other hand, was fascinated. "Remarkable. I always wondered where they went after the market. To think, this was here all along, just beyond the mists."