The soldier opened his eyes as the gloom beneath the canopy lessened, awakening to the full measure of his injuries. The rib was the worst, a burning brand against his chest. But the rib was only the peak of a very tall mountain.
He struggled to think clearly as awakening muscles sent their messages of damage to his central nervous system. He catalogued each of them, comparing the tally to yesterday, trying to ascertain if the previous day’s numbed journey had garnered him any surprises.
His legs were on fire and his lungs hurt. Something more than fatigue was at work here. He was a conditioned combat trooper — the distance he’d traveled from the clearing had been nothing, and even his injuries couldn’t account for the legion of aches assaulting his body. The thought was beginning to creep into his head that whatever sort of journey it was that had brought him to this place, it had taken awhile, and had probably not been comfortable. Perhaps it was a good thing he didn’t remember it.
The pain was beginning to cloud his mind, so he left off wondering at great mysteries and concentrated on calming his breathing, beginning the exercises that would manually renew the pain blocks and allow him another day before his body realized how mortally he was betraying it.
As he staggered to his feet some time later to resume his slow trek, he tried to ignore the niggling whisper at the back of his mind that these things weren’t intended as a replacement for medical attention, but merely as an aid in getting a soldier to medical attention.
* * *
Thrush Dancing was panting heavily as she neared the Ghost Road a few paces ahead of her sister. They’d run the night through, daring not to rest while a power strong enough to send ripples so far still roamed free within the wood. Even for woodrovers, it had been a long run.
This still wasn’t the main road, and for all their haste, they weren’t yet altogether near the source of the disturbance. But caution learned painfully through the years told her that they were near enough to begin taking some precautions. No sense to go blundering around like some half deaf, club-toed man child when danger was afoot, was there? After all, mightn’t the evil as easily be wandering the wood as calmly awaiting their intervention?
So it was that she slowed and gave care to her cover, and that she took heed of the signs and was hidden when the thing appeared. And saw it before it could see her. Seeing her signal, Swallow Courting squirmed in beside her and drew in a surprised breath at the sight of it.
Moving along silently, a strange creature materialized out of the gloom. It looked almost like a man child in a general sort of way —short-haired and dirty with beard stubble— but something about it wasn’t altogether right. Too, it went bare chested and barefoot like an ogre, clad only in tight pantaloons of mottled but startlingly bright blue, torn and dirty. And the way it moved... not as an ogre or man child at all. It traveled the wood almost like a person.
Thrush Dancing went still, willing herself indistinct and nonexistent, blending herself into the foliage around her. The air seemed to shimmer for an instant, and then again, as Swallow Courting followed suit. A dryad or brownie might still be able to detect their presence, but a mundane animal would have missed seeing them until it had actually blundered into physical contact.
The thing drew nearer, seeming at once graceful and lumbering; as though it had once been fluid but had forgotten itself and was trying to relearn its balance. As it passed them by, still a long stone’s throw distant, it paused, freezing as still as any wild creature, conforming its body to its surroundings so that, had they not been watching it, they’d not have seen it. Thrush Dancing nearly let go of the concealment spell, so shocked was she. Then the head swivelled, seeming to bear down upon their hiding place, as though sensing their presence. It had been horribly mauled some time in the very recent past, and even at this distance, the sisters could smell the reek of burnt hair and fresh blood on it, though the scent was like no blood they’d ever smelled before.
Thrush Dancing closed her eyes for a moment to reinforce the spell, and when she opened them, it was gone. Gone? A quick twist of her eyes up and down the forest road revealed nothing. Risking the spell, she turned to Swallow, seeing her sister’s eyes straining.
Taking her bearings on Swallow’s gaze, she concentrated hard. There. Was that movement beyond the road? It took a long time, and her eyes were beginning to water before the movement repeated itself. There it was, creeping along the ground amid the duff like some great cat on a stalk. Here was no man child, certainly. To leave a trail within the dark timber? Never in a score of lifetimes! The thing faded back until she could see it no more, but still she held the spell, unmoving. Something about it....
Swallow Courting touched her arm, and she jumped near out of her skin. The spell was gone, and she followed Swallow’s pointing arm. There it was again, once more upon the road, but far along down the slope and moving away. Was it her imagination, or was it less lumbering than it had been — closer to the fluidity she’d seen hinted at?
Here, obviously, was something that had, if not caused the disturbance, then at least been a part of it, for surely nothing so strange had ever graced the wood before. What should they now do? Swallow looked over quizzically. Thrush knew the question in her green eyes. Did they follow the thing or track it back to whatever cataclysm had spawned it and so shaken the wood? Thrush looked down the trail to where the thing was just now disappearing, then back the way it had come, stretching her senses to the utmost. In either direction, the wood was silent. Nor had any further ripple reached them since the initial rush. The anger remained undiminished, but, she now realized, unfocused. Of course, they could always split up, one following each direction....
“We follow the creature,” she told Swallow softly, moving to suit action to words
“Thrush,” Swallow’s voice turned her. “Did you notice?”
“Notice?”
“The trees,” Swallow waved an arm to indicate the place from which the thing had vanished initially.
“The trees,” she repeated. And then she realized what her sister was saying. This area was old, even in the eyes of the world. Old enough to have seen the last of the migrations. The trees here were hoary with age and wisdom, their very lines bespeaking the passing of ages.
There was a reason that man children refused to veer from the pathways of the deep forest... the trees wouldn’t let them. Not the old ones of Bayel’s wood, in any case. Things happened to man children who ventured into the trackless darkness beneath their canopies. Sometimes bones would be found, or sometimes only madmen, gibbering tales of years spent wandering lost within the gloom.
“The trees allowed it passage.” she breathed softly.
“No,” Swallow shook her head. “What’s the matter with your head, sister? Count the time!”
“I don’t know what you—” her eyes widened. The creature had faded back into the trees a long way, becoming lost to her sight, but had then reappeared down the trail altogether too soon for the distance it would have had to have traveled.
Swallow Courting nodded at the dawning understanding in her face. “Aye, addled sister. The trees helped it.”
Thrush Dancing stared openmouthed down the road.
* * *
Belius awakened slowly and with a pounding head. A fly was buzzing maddeningly close to his ear, just out of sight. Or perhaps it was that blasted faerie wood, humming its song of magic unconstrained. Then the fly landed on his nose.
Of the prior evening, his memory was vague. He remembered entering the inn well enough, but after that things got a bit blurry. He’d only gone in for supper, hadn’t he? A single ale with the meal, wasn’t it? And yet his head throbbed as though he’d been at a barrel of barleywine.
And the dreaming. He’d dreamt of his old master. What had that been about? He hadn’t thought of that old bastard in years, and now out of the blue...?
The old wizard eased himself to a sitting position, turning and plopping bare feet against the rough stone of the floor, scrubbing a hand at his face. The dream had been amazingly lucid, and his memory of it was remarkably clear. Remarkably.
He brought his eyes up and to bear on the rack where his robe hung, just as it normally did. His staff rested against the wall beside his bed in the same manner he’d rested it every night of his stay in this wretched place. Beside the bed, his boots were where they ought. Not a single thing in the whole room, in point of fact, was the least bit out of place. On the morning after a night during which he’d apparently drunk himself uncharacteristically stupid.
Grunting softly to himself, he leaned over and poured a mug of water from the small jug he kept on the bedside table. Swirling the tepid water before he swallowed, he ruminated on the perfection of the scene and the unlikeliness that it should be so, given the state of his recollection.
After a moment, he rose and fetched ink, foolscap, and a quill. Sitting naked at the table in the main room of his quarters, he began to quickly, carefully, transcribe the entirety of the dream, if dream it had been, before the details of it fled from his memory.
* * *
Thrush Dancing peered down upon the creature from a perch high within the spreading branches of a swaying tilia, its singing leaves masking the noise of her passage. Swallow Courting held position two trees farther along, her roost being an aged blue oak. For most of the day, they’d been following like this, leapfrogging to keep the strange being in sight while they attempted to decide what it might be. Thus far, the clues had been contradictory, and their only conclusions had been that it was strange beyond measure, that it was injured, and that it had come to some sort of accommodation with the trees.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
As it passed slowly beneath, she catalogued what they’d learned so far. Although it bore a superficial resemblance to a man child, neither it nor its blood bore more than the slightest hint of man child scent. Too, it had yet to speak within the wood, where man children were known to babble like angry squirrels merely to keep the silence from forming. It moved through the wood almost as though it were sylvan —moving around or twisting through deadfalls that a man child would blunder through with a crashing to wake the dead, gliding along the narrow path like a deer. It stepped upon stones or along the bridges formed by the trunks of fallen trees rather than slog through the mud simply because it was the ground, leaving scant trail behind. And it seemed aware of its surroundings like no man child ever was. Almost a score of times the sisters, one or the other, had had to scramble to avoid its sharp eyes or oddly flexible round ears.
At the back of Thrush’s mind was the nagging sense that they should not be spending so much time at this. They owed to their duty to look to the actual place of the disturbance. This thing, though a wonderful mystery, could wait. With its frequent stops to rest, it wasn’t moving so swiftly that they couldn’t catch up again after fulfilling the letter of their obligations. Still.... Still..... The truth of it was there for her. Their curiosity had been aroused, and until they could figure out what this thing was, the sisters could no more stop following than they could stop breathing. The puzzle was too intense. What was it? What would it do next?
* * *
The stream appeared out of nowhere, so abruptly that the soldier had nearly stepped in it before he could catch himself. Not much as streams go — little more than a trickle between sunken banks running with flowers. Still it was the first he’d seen all day. He knelt and touched a finger to the water. Icy cold, but only an inch or so deep. He dipped his palms into the stream, bringing the life-giving liquid to parched lips, feeling the icy caress spread through him like a freezing fog. Three times he dipped his hands full, never allowing his eyes to cease their roving of the surrounding forest. For all the seeming solitude, he knew, deep down, that he wasn’t alone here. Had known for hours.
What had it been that had alerted him? Not the ears, and not the eyes. It may have been a whisper of a smell — a strange, oddly airy musk. Not at all unpleasant, but somehow out of place. Possibly a flicker of deeper shadow that shouldn’t be. There was also the prickling in the back of his neck — that extra sense most old soldiers develop if they survive very many battles.
Well, he’d survived his share of battles and more, and he was definitely being followed. What did he do about it? He gave it conscious thought as he dipped his hands in the water. Thus far, there’d been no hostile move. Of course, he admitted to himself, the first evidence of such was usually the death blow from the darkness. Still, despite the quivering itch between his shoulder blades, the feeling wasn’t hostile. Merely... neutral. Curious. Not that neutral or curious couldn’t be as dangerous as rabid hatred, but only that they were less likely to be instantly fatal.
Thirst momentarily quenched, he remained crouched upon the trail, pondering. About the watchers, he could do nothing, at least for now. On the other hand, there was something about the stream... Abruptly, he rose and turned left, against the current.
If he’d thought the trail he’d been following vague, the verge of the stream cured him of that notion. It buckled right down and got to work showing him what vague was all about. The stream chuckled in gentle arcs with only the occasional small fall, carving its way through the rock of the mountain beneath a tunnel of dense, all but impenetrable foliage. His pace less than a crawl, he followed as closely as he was able, scrabbling along on hands and knees as often as not. Sometimes high above the flow, sometimes nearly in it, frequently out of sight, but always able to hear the soft sounds of running water. The way made the near-invisible track he’d started on seem like a starport runway.
Despite the arcs, the stream held to a more or less straight course, regardless of surrounding topography, and he grew more certain with every passing step that this was deliberate.
Perhaps six kilometers distant and two or three hundred meters higher than the trail he’d started on, he paused for a moment, hands on his knees, breathing labored, muscles throbbing. There, just above him, a wall of interwoven brush about three meters from roots to rail neatly crowned a gentle swell set between grander slopes. Almost like what he’d seen surrounding the clearing he’d started in, with its weave of living plants, but older.
Older? No, far more than that. Old! Old like Stonehenge was old. Old like dinosaur bones were old. The trickle issued from beneath it.
Circling around, he found the arched entrance readily enough, about a hundred meters downspin. Cautiously and a little awed at the age of it, he ducked through and into a shrouded glade carpeted in soft green grass no more than ankle high, lush as thousand solar carpet and overhung with ancient willows, the wind whispering through their thin leaves.
The stream he’d been following, along with several others, flowed from a pool of nearly black water that lay in the center of the glade, and was itself, fed from a low waterfall. Not a rushing cataract, but only a merry splashing among water-worn stones. It seemed to originate from within the bones of the mountain, falling perhaps two feet in as many steps. High above, taller trees surrounding the glade creaked with the wind, adding dolorous counterpoint to the water’s sparkle and the crinkling of the willow leaves.
He knelt himself beside the pool and drank deep, the water sending icy streamers through his body. He splashed water over his face, arms, and chest, teeth chattering in response to the frigid caress, but mad to clean the crud from his wounds.
Then, since his bones were about to melt with the fatigue, he settled gingerly back into the soft grass, sighing as the cool blades came into contact with his burns. Head in his cupped hands, he closed his eyes, drinking in the echos of childhood memories from the time before the relocation, feeling the tension leach out of him into the soft grass. There’d been glades then, he remembered, and chuckling streams, and willows that sang to you if you listened right. If you knew how to listen. Just listen....
* * *
Perched within the foliage of a tall redwood, Thrush Dancing could clearly see the creature within the glade, and what it was up to. “It’s listening!”
“It’s been listening all day,” Swallow replied, once more at her side. “That’s why it was so hard to follow.”
“No, no. I mean it’s listening to the gladesong!”
“Don’t be silly,” Swallow Courting chided. “Man children can’t even hear the music, much less appreciate it. It’s only sleeping.”
“No,” Thrush insisted. “See the face? See the eyes? It’s not sleeping. And the smile... you smile like that when we visit the glade.”
“Do not!” Swallow Courting shot back. “That’s a silly smile! It’s probably remembering the flavor of some maiden it ate before we started following it.”
“Mock how you will, sister,” Thrush Dancing assured her, “that thing is in a sylvan glade, which it shouldn’t even know how to find, listening to sylvan music, which it shouldn’t be able to hear, and enjoying it.”
“But it’s not sylvan.”
“And yet....”
* * *
Half asleep, at peace for the first time in years, the soldier could almost will himself to remain here disappearing into the caress of the soft grass. No war, no EarthGov, no duty.... But that wasn’t strictly true, was it? The pain of his wounds gnawing at the edge of consciousness told him the truth of it. There was always duty. There was always loyalty. There was always honor. He had responsibilities that he could not abandon. Somewhere.
He sat up, resting elbows on knees, eyes grim. The spell was broken. He was back from the childhood place and he was a soldier again. Time to be moving on.
Back beside the pool, reluctant to leave in spite of the firm pull of duty, he took another long drink as he pondered his path. Did he head back the way he’d come or try and strike a new way? Sinking within his thoughts, he paced idly along the edge of the pool. He’d thought to find a river and follow it to somewhere, but that idea was dead. Upstream was all of a hundred meters and a small hole in the mountainside, and downstream the pool emptied only into half a score of those tiny rivulets that had led him here, none of them remotely capable of sustaining any sort of civilized habitat. They were only signs in any case, directing travelers to this place.
Distracted, his mind on other problems, it never occurred to him to wonder how he could know this. Regressing further into the place of blocked memories, he simply took for granted that it was.
Idly, he stooped to clear a bit of drift clogging one such rivulet, replacing the rock that had been dislodged when the wood had come over the small falls, taking the time to set the stone just so. Something about the place wouldn’t let him do otherwise. As though the symmetry of the glade had taken hold of him on a fundamental level. Had made him a part of itself, and itself a part of him.
* * *
It was Swallow’s turn to gasp.
“You see?” Thrush Dancing demanded.
* * *
The original path, he decided as he flipped the bit of flotsam over the brush wall surrounding the glade.
He reentered the primeval gloom of the forest, moving with an eye always upon the surrounding trees. The watchers were still there, and if they were that persistent it would pay to have a bit more care. Not full combat mode, or he’d have been the rest of the day and part of tomorrow regaining the trail, but only heightened alertness. Errant cracks and thumps were no longer simply attributed to squirrel antics, or rustling grass automatically assigned as windblown.
He struck the trail as the forest was dimming from simply gloomy to downright stygian, nearly missing it in the darkness. Not that it wasn’t easy to miss. He’d been calling it a trail in his mind simply because it seemed to be a lesser density within the thick tangle of timber — what Sylvan had called dark timber back when they’d been kids. He doubted anything bigger than a marmot had ever traveled the thing, overgrown as it was, but it beat thrashing aimlessly through the deadfalls.
Kneeling at the verge, he paused, cycling his mechanical eye slowly through its more passive modes as he ran his hand carefully over the thread of packed earth, feeling for his earlier footprints. More importantly, he was feeling for any other prints that might overlay them. But if something had passed behind him, it had been careful to leave no trace. More than careful. Caution still his overriding concern, he eased himself back onto the trail.
He’d waited too long, he realized as the darkness closed its grip upon the wood. He should have been looking for a place to camp hours ago. Better yet, he should have remained in the glade. No, said a quiet voice, dimly remembered from that part of his life that had long been locked away. That isn’t what the glade is for. The voice, however, failed to mention the glade’s true purpose or to introduce itself to his conscious mind.
The trail wasn’t opening up appreciably, and the darkness was near absolute. Even with his eye set to light gathering, the going was torturously slow. There was nothing like his previous night’s haven about, so he allowed his gaze to rise. He knew that the trees weren’t always as safe as most people believed, but he also knew that they were safer than the ground. Usually. In most cases. Providing arboreal predators weren’t the area’s dominant species.
* * *
“Where do you suppose it’s going in such a hurry that it doesn’t stop to rest at night?” Swallow wondered. “Except for that time in the glade, it’s been pushing forward like it’s chasing something. And it reeks of urgency.”
“I haven’t any idea,” Thrush replied absently, the most of her attention given over to trying to keep the creature in sight. “Perhaps we’ll know more after it strikes the main road. The direction it picks should give us a clue at least.”
“Can you even still see it?”
“Not so well as I’d like.” Thrush replied, squinting into the darkness below.
“Shouldn’t it be stopping soon?”
“What I’d like to know is why it hasn’t stopped already. Why isn’t it thrashing around through the brush with a sound to wake the dead by now —it’s even darker down there than up here— DOWN!”
It was a silly thing to say, seventy five span up in a tree, but Swallow Courting understood, and made herself blend with the trunk she’d been leaning against as her sister flattened her own body along the branch she was perched upon.
“Where?” Swallow demanded.
“The... thing. It’s stopped, and it’s looking right at us.”
“It can’t possibly—”
“Yes, brilliant sister,” Thrush shot back. “Tell me something else it can’t possibly. It can’t possibly so many things we’ve seen it do already, who is to say that it cannot see in the darkness as well?”
“But look down there,” Swallow tossed her head. “A mountain child would be blind within that.”
“Mountain children are never blind, Swallow,” Thrush scolded absently. “Don’t you remember the elders? The mountain children see heat like we see colors.”
“Thank you for the lesson, oh wise one, but I still say—”
“It’s moving away,” Thrush interrupted, moving along the branch to follow.