A Plague of Zombies: An Outlander Novella by Diana Gabaldon Page B

four maroons bearing torches and armed with the long cane knives called machetes.
    Accompong hadn’t told him it was a
hot
spring. There was a rocky overhang and what looked like a cavern beneath it, from which steam drifted out like dragon’s breath. His attendants—or guards, as one chose to look at it—halted as one, a safe distance away. He glanced at them for instruction, but they were silent.
    He’d been wondering what the
houngan
’s role in this peculiar undertaking was. The man was carrying a battered canteen; now he uncorked this and handed it to Grey. It smelled hot, though the tin of the heavy canteen was cool in his hands. Raw rum, he thought, from the sweetly searing smell of it—and doubtless a few other things.
    “… Herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye
must
have, is the liver of a
fugu
fish … They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains …”
    ‘Now we drink,’ Ishmael said. ‘And we enter the cave.’
    ‘Both of us?’
    ‘Yes. I will summon the
loa
. I am a priest of Damballa.’ The man spoke seriously, with none of the hostility or smirking he had displayed earlier. Grey noticed, though, that their escort kept a safe distance from the
houngan
, and a wary eye upon him.
    ‘I see,’ said Grey, though he didn’t. ‘This … Damballa. He, or she—’
    ‘Damballa is the great serpent,’ Ishmael said, and smiled, teeth flashing briefly in the torchlight. ‘I am told that snakes speak to you.’ He nodded at the canteen. ‘Drink.’
    Repressing the urge to say, ‘You first,’ Grey raised the canteen to his lips and drank slowly. It was
very
raw rum, with a strange taste, sweetly acrid, rather like the taste of fruit ripened to the edge of rot. He tried to keep any thought of Mrs Abernathy’s casual description of
afile
powder out of mind—she hadn’t, after all, mentioned how the stuff might taste. And surely Ishmael wouldn’t simply poison him …? He hoped not.
    He sipped the liquid until a slight shift of the
houngan
’s posture told him it was enough, then he handed the canteen to Ishmael, who drank from it without hesitation. Grey supposed he should find this comforting, but his head was beginning to swim in an unpleasant manner, his heartbeat throbbing audibly in his ears, and something odd was happening to his vision: it went intermittently dark, then returned with a brief flash of light, and when he looked at one of the torches, it had a halo of coloured rings around it.
    He barely heard the
clunk
of the canteen, dropped on the ground, and watched, blinking, as the
houngan
’s white-clad back wavered before him. A dark blur of face as Ishmael turned to him.
    ‘Come.’ The man disappeared into the veil of water.
    ‘Right,’ he muttered. ‘Well, then …’ He removed his boots, unbuckled the knee bands of his breeches, and peeled off his stockings. Then Grey shucked his coat and stepped cautiouslyinto the steaming water.
    It was hot enough to make him gasp, but within a few moments he had got used to the temperature and made his way across a shallow, steaming pool towards the mouth of the cavern, shifting gravel hard under his bare feet. He heard whispering from his guards, but no one offered any alternative suggestions.
    Water poured from the overhang but not in the manner of a true waterfall—slender streams, like jagged teeth. The guards had pegged the torches into the ground at the edge of the spring; the flames danced like rainbows in the drizzle of the falling water as he passed beneath the overhang.
    The hot, wet air pressed his lungs and made it hard to breathe. After a short while he couldn’t feel any difference between his skin and the moist air through which he walked; it was as though he had melted into the darkness of the cavern.
    And it
was
dark. Completely. A faint glow came from behind him, but he could see nothing at all before him and was obliged to feel his way, one