A shiver ran along his spine at that thought, for it was all too easy to picture something slamming the cup of wicker down on top of them, trapping them inside, where they would be helpless to defend themselves…
With a shudder, he turned away, and followed after Blade as she picked her way through the tangled growth of the forest floor.
There was still fog in the treetops, just high enough that there was no real way for them to tell precisely where the sun was. In a little while, the last of the fog would burn off completely, and then they might be able to cross-check their bearings with the angle of the sun—although so far, they hadn’t been able to manage that yet.
We’ll know where we are exactly, but only if we can find a hole big enough to see the sun through. And then it will only be possible if the sun is high enough to shine down through the hole at the time we find it.
Living in this forest was like living inside an enormous, thick-aired cave. How could anything that lived here know where it was? It was very disorienting for Tad not to be able to see the sky, and somewhat claustrophobic; he wondered if Blade felt the same as he.
She seemed determined to concentrate on the forest ahead, slipping carefully through the underbrush in such a way that she disturbed as little as possible? The kind of leaf litter that served as the forest floor didn’t hold tracks very well, and if their enemies could just hold off following until the afternoon rains started, it wouldn’t hold a scent very well either. If she found their surroundings claustrophobic, she wasn’t letting the feeling interfere with what she was doing.
But he kept swiveling his head in all directions every time they paused to pick a good route. Those frequent pauses as she pondered her route to the next bit of cover gave him ample opportunity to feel the forest closing in on him. His nerves were afire with tension; he couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t feel the same.
But maybe she doesn’t; maybe this doesn’t bother her. Maybe she doesn’t even need to feel sky and wind. He had always known that humans weren’t like gryphons, and that thought made her seem positively alien for a moment.
But, then again, she lived in a veritable burrow back in White Gryphon, so maybe this landscape felt cozy to her, rather than constricting. But oh, how he longed for enough room to spread his wings wide, even if that longing reminded him pointedly that he couldn’t spread them at the moment!
As Blade eeled her way between two bushes that were barely far enough apart to let him through, he realized something else that was very strange. There weren’t any game trails here.
That realization was just as disconcerting to him as not being able to see the sky. He knew there were some large animals that lived down here on the forest floor, so why didn’t they leave regular trails? There should be deer trails, going to and from water. Deer couldn’t collect rainwater in vessels to drink, obviously; they had to have a water source. He had never in all of his life encountered a deer herd that didn’t make paths through their territory just by virtue of the fact that there were a lot of them going in the same direction.
Was there something living down here that was so dangerous that it was suicidal to have a regular trail, foolhardy to move in groups large enough to make one?
Could that something be what had brought them down, and what had been examining their ruined belongings?
That’s altogether too logical, and is not a comforting thought. I know there are large cats like lions here, and bears, because the Haighlei told us there were—yet I have never seen deer and wild pigs afraid to make game trails in lion or bear country. If there is something else living here that makes creatures who regularly face lions afraid to leave a game trail…
The answer could be that whatever this putative creature was happened to be so fierce, so bloodthirsty, that it wasn’t safe for herbivores to travel in herds. That it was the kind of creature that slaughtered everything within its reach, whether or not it was hungry. He swallowed, his throat feeling tight and dry.
But he might be overreacting again. He didn’t like this place; perhaps his imagination was getting the better of him. Maybe we just are in a bad place in the forest. Maybe there’s nothing here worth foraging for to bring deer and other browsers into this area. There certainly doesn’t seem to be anything tasty for a plant eater to feed on; all these bushes are extraordinarily tough and we’ve seen precious little grass. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any trails through here; it simply isn’t worth a deer’s time to come here.
And perhaps that was the reason for the unnatural silence all about them.
There might be an even better explanation for the silence—they were dreadfully obvious to anything watching and listening. Despite the fact that they were trying very hard to be quiet, the inevitable sounds they were making were an unholy racket in contrast with the silence surrounding them. Try as they might, as they passed from one spot of cover to the next, they rattled vines and rustled bushes, and none of those noises sounded natural.
And anything living up in the trees is going to have a fine view of us down below. I doubt that Blade looks harmless to what’s up there, and I know I don’t. I look like a very large, if oddly shaped, eagle.
Tree dwellers might not recognize Blade as a predator, but they would certainly recognize Tad. There were eagles here, they knew that for a fact, for he had seen them flying below him, hunting in and above the forest canopy. Anything that looked like an eagle was going make a canopy dweller nervous.
And yet… there hadn’t been a silence this wary and profound since they had felt as if they were being watched. For that matter, the tree dwellers hadn’t been particularly quiet in any of the other places that they had camped before they had crashed.
This is exactly like the silence that falls when an eagle-owl is hunting, and everything stays absolutely quiet and motionless until the moment it makes a kill, hoping that whatever it is hunting, it will not find one of them.
There weren’t even the sounds made when other animals hunted… but when a greater predator prowls, the lesser remains silent and hidden. Are we the greater predators, or is something else?
Perhaps he should put his mind to thinking of ways to delay pursuit.
If whatever-it-is does come after us, it wouldn’t matter now if I laid booby-traps behind us. Would it? How much worse could I make things, if I hurt something that was following us?
Well, the answer to that could well be—much worse. Why anger something that was following only out of curiosity?
Perhaps not booby-traps then, at least not yet. Perhaps just things to confuse the trail. The first thing to confuse would be scent, because that was of primary importance to a ground-dwelling predator in an environment like this one. There wasn’t much of a line-of-sight, but scent would hold and cling until the next rain washed it away. And by then, a trail would more than likely be too cold to follow anyway.
He began watching for a vine with leaves veined with purple and red; it had a pungent, peppery smell. He’d noticed that they were fairly common, and when he finally spotted one, he hissed at Blade to stop for a moment.
When they next moved on, it was with the thick juice from those leaves rubbed all over their feet and hands—and they were going to have to remember not to rub their eyes until they washed it off, for it burned just like real pepper! There were other plants, less common, that had equally distinctive odors, and as he came across them he intended to gather generous samples. Every time the current scent was about to wear off, he’d change it. If anything came hunting them depending on its nose, he’d have handed it a surprise. And maybe one of these plants would have the effect of numbing a sensitive nose.
He had to hope this ploy would work, for they were certainly proceeding at a crawl to begin with, and their progress only slowed as the day progressed. His pack was awkward, heavy, and made his bad wing and all his bruises ache; he wasn’t suited to walking in the first place, and his injuries combined with the pack only made it worse. Fortunately for his own feeli
ngs, Blade wasn’t doing any better, so he wasn’t in the position of knowing that he was the one impeding their progress.
The longer they walked, the worse it got. Eventually the fog burned off, and the temperature rose, so that he was overheated as well as in pain. Blade’s shirt stuck to her, dark with sweat. He couldn’t sweat, so he panted. Neither sweating nor panting brought any relief in the humid air; it must have been nearly as sultry as a Kaled’a’in steambath. There wasn’t a breath of breeze down here to stir the heavy air. If he had been left to his own devices, he’d have called a halt and flung himself to the ground for a rest.
As he had predicted, their progress was measured in furlongs, not leagues, with no discernible differences in the territory that they crossed. He could only be certain that they were not walking in circles by virtue of the fact that Blade kept checking the north-needle every time they stopped moving. They stopped for a brief break and something to eat. The sun actually penetrated the canopy in a few places eventually, but it was not much help in showing them where they were. There wasn’t enough of it visible to help them get a bearing from it, either by using a measuring stick or by taking the angle of it.
In fact, the sunlight proved to be something of a new hazard. The beams of sunlight lancing down through the dark green leaves were very pretty, very picturesque, but they were also to be avoided at all costs. Pinned even for a moment in such a bright light, they would be extremely obvious as something that didn’t belong there.
There were still no signs of any watercourses, either, which probably meant that this forest depended on rain rather than ground water for the trees to thrive. That was not precisely a surprise, given the daily thunderstorms.
But a creek or a small stream would have given them a path to a river, and a way to break their trail completely. If they were ever able to wade for some distance along the path of a creek bed, they would completely lose anything that hunted by scent. He had been hoping for a stream, in fact, for that very reason.
That, and stream water would certainly be cooler than the water in my water skin. The tepid liquid he was carrying had not been particularly refreshing, although he had drunk his ration dutifully. And it would taste better. Much better.
But there was no sign of any sort of a stream, and eventually the beams of sunlight faded, the light all about them dimmed, and a distant rumble heralded the afternoon storm approaching. At that point, despite their lack of progress, he was almost grateful to hear it. Now they would have to stop and rig a shelter for the night, because it wouldn’t be long before the rain started to fall and made it impossible to get anything constructed.
Blade stopped, held up her hand, then motioned him up beside her.
“We’ve got to stop and get our canvas up,” she said, weariness in every syllable. He felt instantly sorry for her; she sounded even more tired than he was.
She pointed ahead, to one of the few distinctive places he’d seen in this forest. There was a break in the cover, through which the fat, gray bellies of the clouds were clearly visible; at some point in the past few years one of the forest giants had toppled here. They edged forward to a place where the hollowed-out carcass of an ancient snag stood, half-covered with vines, the remains of the rest of the tree lying on the ground beside it, smothered in vines and plants. “That snag is big enough to hold both of us. We’ll use that for the base of our shelter; it’s the closest thing I’ve seen today to something that we can count on to protect us overnight.”
And she doesn’t mean from the rain. He nodded. Abandoning any pretext at moving quietly, they thrashed their way through the undergrowth to the giant snag. It stood a little taller than Blade’s head, and as she had stated, was just large enough to hold both of them in its hollow interior. There was no room for a fire, but in confines that close, they would keep each other warm with the heat of their bodies.
And I’m not certain that I want a fire to advertise our presence tonight.
They were going to need one initially, though—otherwise they were going to be sharing this shelter with a wide variety of multi-legged guests. Rotten wood meant insects, and some of them could be noxious or even poisonous.
They didn’t have much time before the storm broke, though; perhaps not enough time for Blade to use the fire-striker to start a fire in the hollow. But he was a mage, and the easiest spell in the lexicon was to call fire.
Dare I? It could have been the mere presence of magic that got us attacked… Well, if I don’t, she might not get a torch going before the rain comes. And the fire-spell is so very small, so limited in scope and duration—I’d better chance it. “Move back,” he ordered her; as soon as she had obeyed, he closed his eyes, concentrated—and called fire into the midst of the hollowed-out trunk.
There was enough in the way of dry leaves and dry, half-rotted woodchips on the floor of the snag to start an enthusiastic and very smoky fire. The smoke had the immediate effect of driving out everything that could leap or fly; Blade bundled other burnables together into two torches and they lit both at the fire and proceeded to char the interior. Smoke rose all about them in a thick fog; he coughed and backed out to get a breath of cleaner air more than once. Half-rotten wood did not give off the kind of pleasant smoke that made sitting beside a campfire a pleasure. It was a pity they hadn’t come upon this place earlier; some of the grubs might have been very tasty, especially cooked. Now their only concern was to rid the tree of all other inhabitants before the rains came.
He coughed again, as a new and more acrid set of odors joined the heavy smoke. We must have hit a nest of something nasty. Ugh. Or maybe we’ve just incinerated a crop of unpleasant fungi. He hoped that whatever they burned off didn’t give off poisonous fumes. A little late to worry about that now.
They didn’t quite beat the downpour completely. They were in the process of roofing the snag with their canvas and tying it down when the first cloudburst descended, wetting them both to the skin.
At that point, Blade gave in to the inevitable and stood in the downpour until she and her clothing had been flushed clean, and he let the rain wash all of the soot and dirt from his own feathers before shaking himself partially dry under the shelter of a nearby tree. It was too bad that Blade’s clothing didn’t sluice clean so easily, nor could she shake herself dry. He made a dash to the snag and squeezed himself into the downed tree with the supplies. She had already gotten out blankets and bread and dried meat. He tucked the packs up in a way that she could sleep on them, and put her blanket on top of the pile. He had to put the dried meat out into the stream of water pouring off the canvas and soak it until he could eat it. Meanwhile, Blade emptied and refilled their water skins, then joined him in their shelter.
Their combined body heat did do something to warm the interior; with blankets over each of them, they weren’t completely miserable, and Blade’s clothing actually began to dry out. And the strong smell of smoke wasn’t too bad after a while—though they must not have gotten all of the bugs out of their shelter, since periodically he would feel a small one taking a trip under his feathers, or Blade would slap at something. Once again, the rain persisted until after nightfall, though once it stopped, it was—again uncannily silent beneath the trees.
“Damn,” Blade whispered. “I was hoping…”
“That we’d left them behind?” Tad was altogether glad of the thick wood at his back, and of the deep shadow of the interior of their shelter. Not even an owl would be able to see them in here. “It might not be them that’s making everything so quiet. It might just be the smell of smoke; you know how most wild things fear fire.”
“And I might be the Haighlei Emperor. No, they’re out there. They followed us, I’m sure of it.” She stared out into the darkness fiercely, as if willing her eyes to be better than they actually were.
“Well, they can’t get us in here,” he said, and meant it. “It’s safe enough for you to sleep if you want to take second watch this time.”
“You can’t
sleep?” she asked. He shook his head.
It was true, he wasn’t going to be able to sleep for a while; he was horribly tired, but not sleepy. His muscles kept twitching and jumping with accumulated fatigue. His nerves all felt strung as tightly as a Kaled’a’in horse-bow, and every tiny sound out there had him peering into the darkness as fiercely as she. It was going to be some time before he relaxed enough to fall asleep.
“Well, I think I’ve reached the limit on my nerves,” she replied, punctuating the sentence with a yawn. “Believe it or not, I’m going numb. Right now, I hurt so much that all I want to do is drink my medicine and drop off as soon as the pain stops. In fact, right now, they could come kill me as long as they did it while I was asleep; I just can’t get up the energy to care.”
“I know how you feel.” Awkwardly, he managed to pat her leg in sympathy. “You go ahead. I’ll take the first watch as long as I can.”
She sounded fatalistic; he wasn’t quite ready to share that emotion, but there was something else to consider. I’m not sure it would matter if we both fell asleep tonight. So far, we haven’t any evidence beyond the fact that something probably dangerous is probably following us. They haven’t actually done anything. Even assuming that they intend to attack us, as cautious as they have been, I don’t think they’re ready to try and pry us out of some place like this. “I think we’re as safe as we can be under the circumstances. Get some sleep while you can.”
She didn’t need a second invitation. In an instant, she had downed her vial of medicine and curled up against his side in her blanket, propped up by the packs to save her shoulder. Provided she didn’t get a kink in her neck from sleeping this way, or stiff muscles from a chill, she ought to be more comfortable tonight than she had been since the accident.
The Mage Wars Page 86