And then it was daylight. One moment, the soldier was within the gloom, and the next, with but a single pace, he was standing in tall, amber grass, heavy with seed pods, the not quite right sun beating down upon his head. Behind him and on three sides, the wood still loomed, seeming almost black in the sunlight and radiating an almost palpable aura of... something he couldn’t quite put a name to. Two paces clear of the wood and he could hear insects and the far off cries of some sort of birds. He was standing in a eighty or ninety acre bay of grass scooped out of the treeline. And beyond, the ocean. More of the amber grain, stretching as far as the eye could see, its surface rippling gently in a soughing wind, unbroken by so much as a bush.
Between the soldier and the vastness of the prairie, giving a wide berth to the trees, a straight line clove the vegetation at the mouth of the clearing. It was too far off to see for certain, but he had little doubt it was a road.
As if to cement that notion, a troop of armored horse cavalry cantered noisily into view from downspin, the echos of hooves on cobblestones clearing the treeline half a second after they did.
“Okay, mommy,” the soldier mumbled softly to himself as they clattered to a halt midway between the edges of his clearing and turned to bear on him. “I’m ready to wake up now. I don’t like this dream anymore.”
* * *
“Aha!” the sergeant crowed, spying the figure emerging from the wood. “Should’ve known from the start that it would be here. What do you make of that then, Corporal?” triumph colored his voice.
“Coming from out of that wood, Sergeant?” the corporal shaded his eyes with an upheld arm to peer into the gloom at the edge of the forest. “It couldn’t be aught but an— ah, I see it! Gods, I couldn’t guess. A revenant perchance?”
“A revenant?” the sergeant’s tone was scornful. “in these parts? In broad daylight? A golem, more like. Something cooked up by the mountain folk to torment the King’s good citizenry.”
The corporal nodded, foreswearing to comment on the lack of citizenry, good or otherwise, so near the accursed faerie wood. Or the fact that the nearest mountain folk were near two turns’ journey in the opposite direction. It wasn’t his job to attempt sage comments in any case, merely to keep the roads clear and his men more or less of a piece.
The object of discussion, meanwhile, had managed, after a few moments of immobility, to close the distance between itself and the party of soldiers, arms swinging loosely.
It was man-shaped, or nearly so, its lower quarters clothed in something like blue light, covered in muck and blood and forest litter. Nearly naked it was, and barefoot. The shoulders were broad and well set up, the arms and legs muscular seeming. It appeared on the whole, however, not too altogether healthy.
But of all the whole strange spectacle, the strangest part was the head, ruining an otherwise masterful semblance of manhood. Normal enough in most respects, covered at the top and one side with brownish hair of the sort an Iskan might boast, and half the face stubbled with a heavy mat of beard, ginger where the mud and blood didn’t hide the color. The other side of the face, however, was metal where some of the outer covering had slewed off, and you could see the magic leaking out the eye hole. And since only the mountain folk worked metal so cleverly....
It was nearly to the road now, and the rank and file of the patrol was casting nervous, sidelong glances at their officers.
“Do you suppose it would be worthwhile to order it to halt?” the corporal wondered aloud.
“Be interesting if nothing else. See how much life they’ve put into it, the squatty vermin.”
“Halt!” the corporal called, holding his hand up, palm outward.
The creature stopped, much to the surprise of the assembled horsemen. It stood swaying slowly in an invisible wind, head cocked slightly, a dirty lock of brownish hair draping down over the human-looking eye, the glowing sapphire hole opposite flickering at them. It looked to be at the end of its strength.
Almost long enough, it stood there, for the King’s men to begin believing it might be intelligent. But then it began to jabber —an unintelligible string of nonsense sounds— and the spell was broken.
“Knew they couldn’t be that good,” the sergeant chuckled somewhat self-consciously. “Got the proportions right, if a bit on the large side, but they couldn’t force enough magic into the shell to get it acting like a true man.”
“I don’t know, Sergeant,” the corporal rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It’s acting true enough by my thinking. I’d expect a man to act a bit odd were he lost in such a place for any length of time and then come upon soldiers.”
“Don’t be daft, man,” the sergeant gestured sharply at the figure confronting them. “What sort of man is it supposed to be then? Look at it with its head up and staring. Would a peasant approach a mounted patrol and stand in such a manner? Never! He’d know it to be as much as his life was worth to be so bold. Nor is it supposed to be a soldier or adventurer, for it’s not wearing a speck of armor nor weapons, and when was the last time you saw an adventurer wandering about didn’t speak at least some Turaleean?”
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“It’s got that knife.”
“A farmer’s knife,” the sergeant snorted. “Fit to slice beets, no more. No, obviously some half-crazed mountain mage has given us this botched creation to amuse ourselves with. I’m almost insulted.
“Still,” he said confidently. “It seems abundantly clear that this is what we’ve spent these long days trying to find. How the Lord Chamberlain knew it to be here is a mystery, but....”
He gestured to the first rank of his men, waving the troopers forward. “Destroy it.”
The indicated troopers started forward, then hesitated. “Beggin’ yer pardon, Sor,” one of them asked, “but ‘ow are we t’be after doin’ that if ‘tis no’ a man? Oy main, Sor, ‘ow does one go aboot killin’ such a thing?”
“How in the hells should I know,” bellowed the sergeant. “Do I look like a mage to you? Run it through, break it to pieces, scatter the crumbs!”
Not totally convinced, the trooper nonetheless nodded to the sergeant and to his comrade, lowered his lance, and charged.
He bore down upon the hapless golem, leaning out over his saddle in the appropriate manner, lance braced and set to skewer the target as though it were a wild pig. At the start, the thing simply stood there stupidly, apparently too dim to understand its peril. Then, at the last moment, the creature shifted. Not much. Just enough for the thick cavalry lance to miss its chest and slide between torso and arm.
Twisting as the heavy blade passed, the creature slammed its off hand into the shaft midway up while at the same time using its own weight to force the lance head down and into the duff behind it. As the lance head touched the dirt, the golem, following, rolled over onto the weapon, using its body to force the thing completely over.
His weapon jerked abruptly from his grasp, the lancer left his saddle with a startled yelp, somersaulting onto his back virtually under his own horse’s hooves. Before he could recover, the creature was upon him, knife flashing. The lancer’s back arched as the knife unerringly found his kidney and skewered it neatly, entering, twisting, and withdrawing in an instant.
The second lancer was still fighting to bring his own mount around, wondering how he’d managed to miss a target so large and stationary, and how he was to explain such a blunder to the sergeant. He stood the horse on its rump and muscled it around just in time to see his companion die. With a howl of rage, excuses forgotten, he spurred the horse and leaned out to bury his own lance in the monster’s guts.
CLACK! Out of nowhere, his dead comrade’s lance appeared, spinning in to deflect his thrust, the force of the blow knocking him farther away from his seat. He felt himself begin to topple, snatching desperately with his rein hand for a handhold on the saddle.
The fallen lancer’s weapon came around again, describing a one hundred-eighty degree arc to contact the mounted trooper’s helm just above the left eye. Both eyes crossed and he began the final fall from the saddle. But the stolen lance was spinning back again, and he was still nominally ahorseback when the blade sank into the back of his neck just between helm and gorget, severing his spine and lodging in the gristle of his larynx.
The soldier released the shaft of the lance as the lancer’s body jerked it away, rolling clear of the thundering hooves and then back the instant the horse had passed. The dead lancer hit the ground in a cloud of arterial blood and bounced, raising a dust that didn’t begin to hide the approach of the rest of the patrol hellbent on avenging their dead fellows.
Two more rolls brought the soldier to the lance abandoned by his second victim, and he was up on his knees and facing the onrushing party, drenched in the vital fluids of his kills. An arm raised, pulled back, and flew forward. A tortured grunt tore itself from his chest as he flopped forward into the dust with the effort of the throw.
The corporal heard the clang from beside him and turned in time to see his sergeant launched off the back of his horse, the last two, frost rimed span of a lance shaft protruding from his breastplate and a truly puzzled expression on his doughy face.
That’s that, then! the corporal thought to himself. Then aloud, his breath pluming behind him in the suddenly frigid air. “Break off men! Break off and retreat!”
The party of troopers split wide around the prone monster and galloped off at their best speed, back in the direction of the garrison and safety.
“But Corporal, it was down!” an angry trooper cried, although he didn’t slow his pace at all.
“Aye, it was down,” the corporal hollered over the clash of hooves on stone. “And was it you put it down? No, and nor was it any of the rest of us! It was down because it wanted to be down, and don’t ask me why it would want to be stretched out upon the grass, for I’m no more a mage than old Beltran back there dead as your chances for promotion. And should I need to remind you it was standing sleepy-still and unarmed when it slaughtered Oberon and Burge with their own weapons?
No, lad,” he assured. “We’re naught but soldiers, and that thing’s not what we’re paid to deal with. We need a mage for such as that, and a mage we’ll have. Old Belius is at the barracks, remember? Him as sent us on this fool’s quest to begin? We’ll have him and be back to destroy that abomination as killed our friends, don’t you doubt it!”
* * *
Thrush Dancing stumbled, nearly going to her knees.
“What is it now?” Swallow demanded. Thrush was acting much more than strange lately. Ever since the inward looking, and it was becoming worrisome.
“Cold!” Thrush breathed uncertainly. “Suddenly it was so cold! Did you not feel it?”
“A bit. What of it? We’re still in the old wood, Thrush, for all that we’ve left the dark timber. There are cold places where the oldest spirits dwell.” She tossed her head offhandedly, dismissing the strangeness. “So long as we leave them be, they’ll leave us be.”
“It wasn’t—” but Thrush didn’t bother to finish. Swallow didn’t want to know and Thrush didn’t have the will to force her. The cold hadn’t been a spirit chill, it had been loss. The icy bitterness of emptiness. It had flashed through her soul for perhaps fifteen or twenty heartbeats and then gone, leaving behind only the hint of loved ones vanished in the night. And Swallow had felt it too, and known it for no spirit chill — it shone in the haunted cast of her eyes.
“We must resolve this, Swallow,” she insisted evenly. “Such things cannot be allowed to continue inside Bayel’s Wood.”
“Such things may well not,” Swallow answered. “If it veers not from the way it’s been heading, it will be back in the world of men before the day wanes. If it hasn’t left the wood already. If so, do we continue to pursue.”
The notion was a troubling one. Did they pursue? Strictly speaking, a woodrover’s duty was protection of the wood. The question which begged asking was ‘having left the wood, did the creature remain a danger to it?’ It was a question Thrush couldn’t answer, although that was answer in and of itself. And then there was the other question... could she let him leave? Could she allow the faint song that was his far off touch fade into silence?
“Leave us see whether the tree falls, sister,” she told Swallow, “ before we begin to build with the wood.”