“Don’t touch one, the venom’s really bad. Stops your heart.”

“I wasn’t going to. How do they fly? Helium or hydrogen or hot air or something?”

“Nah. Just magic.”

They must have been getting close to the center of the swamp because the ponds were getting wider and deeper and darker and more still, and they were connecting up with each other, to the point where the swamp was on the point of just being a regular lake. A steamy mist was gathering around them. Here and there a lotus flower poked up above the surface, a rosy-white bulb the size of a softball on a thick green stem. Strange that something so pure and lovely could grow out of all that muck: one clean perfect thing distilled out of the filth.

Eliot had a hard time not thinking about the vast shape he’d seen last time he’d flown over the Northern Marsh. He hoped it stuck to deeper water.

Though that appeared to be where they were headed. The boardwalk rose high up above the marsh now on long spindly pilings, more like a narrow jetty, and it was taking them straight out over the lake. The banks vanished into the fog. Eliot felt disoriented, abandoned by the gods. If this adventure were working the way it should have been they would have learned something by now, he thought. Seen something, felt something. Instead they were nowhere, with nothing ahead of them and nothing behind them, suspended in midair, on dead wood, over a black mirror of dead water.

“How far are we—”

“This far.”

The boardwalk ended abruptly. If Janet hadn’t put her hand on his shoulder he might have walked straight off it. There was a rickety ladder leading down, in case he was overcome by the urge to do some recreational bathing.

“Got a question for an old friend,” Janet said. “Hey!”

She shouted it out over the water.

“Hey!”

There was no echo. She looked around.

“Should have brought a rock to throw. Hey!”

They waited. Something jumped in the stillness, a frog or a fish, but Eliot turned his head too slowly to catch it. When he turned back the water wasn’t still anymore.

The first sign of it was a broad, smooth bow-wave that rushed silently toward them, wetting the stilts halfway up. Eliot instinctively stood on tiptoe as it passed. Then a massive, ridged, warty olive shell broke the surface, fifty feet across, like a submarine breaching. It was a turtle, a snapping turtle by its beak, which was hooked like a falcon’s. Christ. The thing was a leviathan.