Pazel leaped at him, quite out of his mind. It was all Neeps and Thasha could do to hold him back. Fulbreech watched them gleefully. “Arunis is no different,” he said. “He’s been a student for three thousand years.”
“How many lies do you need, Hercol?” said Bolutu, furious. “Arunis has been torturing this world for three thousand years. The North. The South. Kingdom after kingdom, war after war. Tell me he does not hate Alifros, Mr. Fulbreech. Say that, if you dare.”
“He does not hate Alifros,” said the Simjan. “He has no time for love or hate. He is a student, in the school where Gods are made. And those wars, those perished kingdoms, this last, total extermination-” Fulbreech’s body shook with mirth. “They’re his exams.”
In the appalled silence that followed, Thasha knew suddenly that there were great regions within her where her mind dared not go. In one of them a woman was screaming. Thasha heard the scream like an echo from the depths of a cave.
“He promised to take me with him,” said Fulbreech. “All the way out of Alifros, to the realm of the Gods. He lied, of course: that was the best way to ensure my services. There was never anything personal about it. How could a mind that old have feelings for the likes of us? A dead world. That’s his project. Nothing else will suffice. He has to offer it up for inspection by his betters, you see. He called it a difficult school.”
Ildraquin slipped from Hercol’s fingers. No one moved but Fulbreech, giggling in his madness. Then Ibjen crawled forward on hands and knees, lifted the sword and stabbed down, through Fulbreech’s stomach, into the earth.
Fulbreech gasped but did not scream. Thasha rushed forward to pull the blade free, but Hercol stayed her with a hand. Too late. Removing the blade would only speed the Simjan’s death.
Of course the wound gushed all the same. Fulbreech tried and failed to lift his head. “I can’t feel a thing,” he croaked.
“But you are dying, all the same,” said Hercol.
“And your soul is damned,” said Jalantri.
“Who knows?” said Fulbreech, drooling blood now, and yet somehow still amused. Then his eyes found Thasha’s once more. Through hideous expulsions of bile and blood, he said, “You’ll… fight?”
“Fight Arunis?” said Thasha. “Of course we will.”
Suddenly Fulbreech screamed. He convulsed, his paralysis ending with his life. But through the torment his eyes blazed with sudden defiance. With a terrible effort, choking on his own fluids, he spat out a last word.
“What was that?” said Bolutu, starting forward. “Did you say Gurishal?”
Fulbreech nodded. Then he raised a hand, shaking as with palsy, and Thasha took it, and held it as he died.
No one else made a sound. When Fulbreech was still at last, Thasha turned and looked blankly at Hercol.
“You asked for the truth,” she said.
All of this had happened by the light from the pool alone. But the strange ooze was draining away, and the purple light was dying. “In a few minutes we’ll be blind again,” said Alyash, his voice shaking. “We need a plan, Stanapeth.”
“The plan has not changed,” said Hercol. “Come, let us be off.”
“But friends!” cried Bolutu, “didn’t you hear his last word? Gurishal! The River of Shadows touches death’s kingdom on Gurishal! Fulbreech has given us the key. Gurishal is where we can send the Nilstone out of Alifros forever.”
“And before he came here, Arunis did not know,” said Dastu. Thasha and Pazel turned to face him, and for a moment there was no hatred between them, only wonder and amazement.
“Gods,” said Pazel, “you must be right. He’s been doing everything he can to get the Shaggat there, with the Nilstone in hand. And yet it’s the one place in Alifros where we want the Stone to go.”
“He was being used,” said Dastu. “Arunis the sorcerer was being used.”
“No wonder he was furious,” said Thasha.
Ibjen looked up at her, blinking back his tears. “Fulbreech may have helped you in the end,” he said, “but he betrayed you a moment before. He was calling out to Arunis, trying to get his attention, to tell him we stood by this pool. He started the moment you declared you could not heal him, Thashiziq. The voices told me: ‘Come away, come away, you’re doomed, you’re in the sorcerer’s trap.’ ”
“You did well to kill him,” said Neda. “Don’t weep; there is no shame in your act.”
Ibjen shook his head. “It’s not because of my oath,” he said. “It’s because I waited, hoping one of you would do it for me. That is worse. That is meaner.”
Hercol looked up: the darkness was descending like a black fog. “No more delay,” he said. “We must get away from here, away from those bats, before we try again with the torch.”
The elder Turach gazed at him heavily. “And then?” he said.
“Then we backtrack to the trail we were marking,” said Hercol, “and resume the search.”
“Resume!” laughed Alyash. “Begin it, you mean! Only this time we’ve got piss-all to go by. Stanapeth, it’s over. You can fool yourself that you might find a needle in a haystack-no, in a blary barn-if you’ve got a lodestone to drag around through the hay. But our lodestone was a cheat.”
“We must find the place where the River of Shadows breaks the surface,” said Hercol. “What else would you counsel?”
“To follow our own trail back to the vine, that’s what,” cried Alyash. “And the vine to blessed daylight.”
Several of the soldiers, human and dlomic alike, nodded approvingly. Hercol looked at them in alarm. “You know that to concede the Nilstone to Arunis means death to us all,” he said. “Surely Fulbreech made that clear once again?”
“Let’s just start walking,” pleaded Big Skip.
A furtive movement caught Thasha’s eye: Jalantri was squeezing Neda’s hand in his. She pulled away. Jalantri whispered something in Mzithrini that unsettled her even more. But before he finished there came a loud pop, like a child’s toy cannon, and Jalantri howled in pain.
Something black and amorphous had struck the back of his head. He stumbled, groping at it. The thing slipped through his fingers again and again, and yet one end of it seemed embedded in his skin. At last he ripped it away, leaving a coin-sized wound.
Pop. Pop. Thasha felt a blow to her arm, and a sharp stab. An identical creature was there, wriggling, burrowing into her flesh. “Leeches!” cried Dastu, as another struck his leg. “But they’re coming like cannon-shot!”
Pop. Pop. Pop. “The globe mushrooms!” said Ensyl, pointing. “They’re bursting out of them! Great Mother, there could be thousands.”
All at once the air was thick with the foul, biting creatures. Thasha felt them strike her again, in the shoulder, in the neck. “Out of here!” bellowed Hercol. “Get beyond the globes, beyond that ridge we descended! But then stop and regroup, for the love of Rin!”
Humans and dlomu were bolting in all directions. Neeps tripped over Fulbreech; Jalantri, his chest thick with leeches, shouted for Neda as he ran. Alyash was waving his pistol, of all things. Then Pazel slipped in the slime from the pool, and cried out as his wounded leg was wrenched. Thasha dived for him, grabbed his arm and dragged him, leeches and all, out through the fern-fungi, and under the fallen tree, and then “Cover your eyes!”
— right up the slope, the wall of exploding fungi, and on among the towering trees until she was sure nothing else was striking them.
Twenty feet from the pool, and it was nearly pitch black. “Tear them off, Pazel!” she shouted.
“I am! I am!”
Gods, but they hurt. Eight, nine of them-and another in the small of her back. She was still trying to get a grip on it when she felt Pazel’s fingers. He groped, squeezed, ripped: the leech was gone, along with a barbed mouthful of her skin. Then a match flared in the blackness, somewhere off to their left. It died, and Alyash bellowed in rage. Another match glowed, and this time Alyash managed to light the torch. “Here, here, to me!” he bellowe
d. “You heard Stanapeth! Regroup!”
Thasha and Pazel stumbled toward him. Others, by the sound of it, were doing the same. Then Alyash screamed as a flickering, flapping darkness took his arm. The torchlight disappeared. Thasha caught the stink of burning flesh.
“The bats!” cried Alyash. “They attacked the torch! Devils in the flesh, they’re suicidal!”
“Light it again! Light it again!”
“Ain’t but half a dozen matches left-”
Another flared: Thasha saw Alyash’s crazed eyes by its light-and then sudden motion, and darkness. “Damn the mucking things!” cried the bosun. “It’s impossible! They dive on the flame!”
“Strike no more matches,” came Hercol’s voice, suddenly. “We must get farther from their roosting-place; there are simply too many here. Do not run, do not separate! But tell me you’re here! Turachs! Where are you?”
“Here!” shouted the younger of the soldiers. “Undrabust is with me. We’re all right, we’re just-”
“Vispek!” shouted Hercol. “Jalantri! Neda Ygrael!”
Only Neda answered him-and from a surprising distance. Thasha heard Pazel’s frightened gasp. “Neda!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Over here! Hurry, hurry!”
This time there was no answer at all. The bats flowed about them like water. Nothing was visible save the fading glow from the pool.
Footsteps crashed nearer, and then Neeps and the younger Turach found them, their blind hands groping. From farther off, the dlomic warriors shouted, drawing nearer.
“But the sfvantskors!” cried Pazel. “I can’t hear their voices anymore!”
“Forget them,” said Alyash. “They ran the wrong way.”
Furious, Pazel turned in the direction of Alyash’s voice. “She’s my Gods-damned sister!” he shouted.
“She’s a fanatic, a monster with a womb!”
A sword whined from its sheath. “Pathkendle! No!” cried Hercol.
“You drawing a blade on me, Muketch?” snarled Alyash. “Come on, then, I’ll have your blary head!”
There was a horrible scream. But it came from neither Pazel nor Alyash. It was the Turach who was screaming, and his voice came from above them, rising by the second.
“It’s the worms!” Pazel shouted. “I’m fighting the mucking worms!”
Then there was no order of any kind. Every voice rose to howling; no one could see anyone; bodies smashed in all directions; Hercol’s shouts for order fell on deaf ears. Thasha felt a tentacle graze her hand, then whip around her leg. She was rising; then her sword flashed and cut the tendril and she fell headfirst, and barely missed dying on her own sword. Up she leaped, stumbling, whirling, blind as death. The voices were already fewer, and all farther away. She cried out for Pazel, for Neeps and Hercol, but no one answered. From somewhere a fitful light appeared; she whirled toward it, a strange, pulsing, indistinct sort of light, but there were figures in it, struggling “Oh Gods. Oh sweet Rin.”
Not struggling. Making love. It was herself and Pazel she saw, naked under their cedar tree, her hands on the branch above them, her legs on either side of his thrusting hips.
It was Syrarys and Sandor Ott. The concubine looked at her suddenly, over the assassin’s shoulder. “Daughter,” she gasped.
Thasha fell to her knees. Not real. Not true. But she was weeping; it was a physical attack she was suffering, it was the spores, the darkness, the world that stabbed and stabbed again. She forced herself to her feet and pushed on, toward nothing, and then she heard Alyash and Hercol behind her, and they were fighting, and she turned and floundered toward them with the last of her strength.
“Idiot! Put it down, put it down!”
That was Hercol. Thasha tried to quicken her pace-and fell down the slope, back among the leeches, not stopping to fight them, not stopping for anything. There was the dying glow from the pool. And there was Hercol, collapsed against its rim, dragging himself after Alyash, who kept leaping out of his reach, and fumbling with matches, and something else “Fool! You can’t shoot whatever’s up there!”
“I can mucking well scare the bastards!”
“Don’t do it, Alyash!”
A match flared. The bats descended on it immediately, but Alyash was quicker. He forced the tiny flame into the ignition chamber of his pistol, thrust it straight up through the mass of creatures and fired.
Bats erupted from the clearing in a boundless swarm. Alyash stood unharmed among them, laughing, triumphant-and then came a sound like a great sail ripped in two.
The flood lifted Thasha like a matchstick. The light was gone, the clearing gone; she flailed, helpless, borne away by the onslaught of water. Disarmed, nearly drowning, rolled head over heels through the fungi and leeches and drowning bats, grabbing at the larger growths only to find them ripped away, smashing through trees, tearing at roots with her fingernails. And still the water thundered down, as if a suspended lake were emptying into the forest.
A bladder-fungus, dangling over them, a monster of a growth. The trap had been sprung.
Her strong limbs were useless; her body struck tree after rock-hard tree. A part of her had always wondered what it could possibly feel like, to go down with a ship in storm. This was the answer. Pain and blindness and sharp blows in the dark. She thought of Pazel and wished they’d made love long before.
Just let me see something (she was begging Rin like a schoolgirl). I can die, we can fail, but let me see something, anything. So many ways they might have died before, but not this way, in this pit of a forest, this unspeakable, dark hole A thought burst inside her. She stopped fighting, stilled by wonder. An insane, a delirious idea.
Look for me But hope was like that, wasn’t it? A delirium that clouded your mind. A mist that protected you from the truth you couldn’t bear to look at. Until something solid parted the mist: a cannonball, a reef, the words of a traitor with just minutes to live.
— when a darkness comes beyond today’s imagining.
It was at that very moment that her hand caught something solid, and held. It was one of the worm-like tendrils, and though it strained terribly to pull free, to lift her up into the canopy and another sort of death, the rushing water was far stronger, and it became Thasha’s lifeline, minute after blind, precious minute. And then her blindness came to an end.
Logic told her that she was hallucinating yet again, but her heart knew otherwise. At a great distance away through the flooded forest, a haze of light began to shine. It was wide and dispersed, like the stars on a cloudless night, except that these stars were blue, and moving, and as they neared her they lit up the forest as no starlight could. They were fireflies, and they broke over her in a blue wave, a second flood above the water, and before them flew a great dark owl. It circled Thasha once, then swept away into the darkness, and the storm of fireflies went with it. But some of the insects stayed, whirling above Thasha, showing her the great complexity of vines and upper branches of the trees, and the underside of the bottommost leaf-layer, three hundred feet over her head.
When the water fell, it did so quickly, draining out through the root-mat beneath her feet. Fungi opened pores like puffy lips, spat out water and mud. When the water dropped below her waist Thasha released the tendril, watched it curl into a slender orifice high in the joint of an overhead branch. Trees with mouths. In some of those mouths were dlomic soldiers. In another, a young Turach marine, sent by his Emperor to the far side of the world on a secret mission, to fight (he was surely told) the enemies of the Crown.
Dark or bright, I hate this place, she thought.
Then the fireflies drew closer together and dropped nearer to the ground. As she watched, dumbfounded, they illuminated a path: one that began just over her head, and stretched away into the forest. Thasha couldn’t help but smile. As in a dream, she set out walking, and the path vanished behind her as the little insects followed on her heels.
Some ten minutes had passed when she saw the owl again. It was perched atop a high qu
artz rock that glittered in the light of the fireflies.
“You’ve lost your ship, I see,” said the owl. “And it is yours, you know, regardless of the paperwork back in Etherhorde.”
Thasha stared at it a moment. “I’m not imagining you,” she said, and raised her arms.
The owl dived straight at her, and Thasha did not flinch. Right before her face it suddenly fanned its wings dramatically, came to a near halt, and fell into her arms: a black mink.
A cry from deep in her chest escaped her, and she lifted the creature and hid her face in its fur. “Ramachni. Ramachni. Aya Rin, it’s been so long.”
“Oh dearest, that is such a charmingly human way to reckon time. I was just thinking that this has been the shortest night’s sleep I could remember. But an eventful night, to be sure. Come, dry your eyes. There will be time for tears, and much else, when the fight is done.”
“Don’t leave us again!”
The mage sat back in her hands. His fixed his immense black eyes on her, and there was a thousand times the depth and mystery in them as in the forest, and yet they were, as they ever had been, kind.
“You and I cannot be parted,” he said. “Even if we leave the world of the living behind-minutes from now, or years-we shall do so together. Now walk, Thasha. Or better still, run, if your wounds will bear it. Many are suffering for your sake.”
His words were like a jolt out of a dream. She ran, with the mage in her arms, beneath the firefly-lit path, and in another five minutes she came to a small rise, above which the fireflies danced in a net of brilliance. Atop the rise, seated among seashell-like fungi, were some half a dozen of their party. She dashed among them, heart in her mouth. Ibjen. Neda. Bolutu. Big Skip. Lunja. And Neeps.
“Thasha!” he cried, jumping up to embrace her.
“But where-where are-”
Neeps pointed down the far side of the hill. There were two other firefly-paths snaking off into the forest. One of them was shrinking toward them, and upon it they could see the older Turach, Dastu and Cayer Vispek, running with one hand folded to his chest. When he saw Neda on the hillside Vispek did something Thasha never would have believed of him: he sobbed. Hiding the reaction almost at once, he held out his arm, and Myett leaped to the ground. The humans and the ixchel gazed with wonder at Ramachni.
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