by Darius Hinks
‘Bubbleblack, sicklesack,’ whispered voices from the shadows. ‘Crunch the bones and drink the sap.’
Clara stiffened in horror, knowing without a doubt where the words had come from. She was sightless for a moment and imagined that the faces were drifting up towards her, mouths wide and eyes rolling.
After a few minutes, she grew accustomed to the dark again and she was able to make out the twelve, pale blobs in the gloom. To her dismay, she realised that they were a little closer.
‘Bubbleblack,’ they whispered.
She climbed higher, still amazed by how nimble she was. For all the forest’s madness, she could not deny that it had filled her with the most wonderful vigour. Even while in human form, she was charged with magic. She could feel all eight winds of it whistling through her veins. She had never felt this young.
‘Think, you old goat,’ she whispered, peering into the shadows. ‘What did the ghost say to you?’ She closed her eyes, wracking her brains and trying to recall her exchange with the child in the autumn leaves. ‘He said there was a way.’
The spirit had been as deranged as everything else, but Clara had nothing else to pin her hopes on. Every step she took left her deeper in the forest and, even if she could return to the white stones that guarded its borders, she knew she could not leave – not in her current state. She needed to be made human again.
‘Where have you gone?’ she hissed, wanting to shout but terrified of what she might summon if she did.
‘Gone?’ asked a voice from behind her.
Clara jumped so violently that she almost fell from her perch. Once she had steadied herself, she turned around to look for the golden spirit.
At first she could not see it, then the breeze picked up again, letting in another shaft of light and throwing some dead leaves up towards her. A column of bronze and gold shimmered nearby and, as it flickered back and forth, she saw a familiar impish face.
‘Zephyr is with you, old human, do not fear.’
The spirit spoke with gentle concern, but Clara was wise to its tricks. Or perhaps tricks was the wrong word – the spirit seemed to be genuinely confused for most of the time. In one breath it would speak of helping her home and ridding her of mutation; in the next breath it would rant at all the injustices it imagined had been done to it.
Clara replied carefully, conscious that the wrong word would send the spirit fleeing into the trees. ‘Are we near the place you mentioned?’
The spirit child did not seem to hear. Since arriving in the clearing it had been looking around with a worried expression on its little face – taking in all the grotesque, bloated shapes that surrounded them. The twelve grinning mushrooms were not the only signs of the forest’s decay; there was barely a tree that had not been torn open by tumour-like growths of fungus and the ground was alive with movement – thousands of tiny grubs were washing through the glade. They were pale and maggot-like, but some of them moved on spindly, spider-like legs and others whirred by on humming wings. It was obvious, even in the fragile bursts of light, that they were not normal grubs. Some, like the mushrooms, had humanoid features – tiny, wide-eyed faces that stared out of their ridged flesh. Almost as strange as the creatures, were the colours. The trees were leafless but dressed in a revoltingly gaudy blossom of fungal blooms – quivering, petal-like brackets of fungus and clouds of mustard-yellow spores.
The spirit child shook its head and drifted higher. As it saw the surrounding hills, it looked even more troubled.
Clara looked in the same direction and saw the same thing she had seen whenever she regained her senses – the trees were either twisted into colourful, nightmarish shapes, or absent altogether, replaced by a stew of yellow liquid and quivering, goitre-like fungus. She guessed from the spirit’s expression that even the Everwood was not usually this strange. An idea occurred to her. She had let the forest and its pernicious little agent take charge for too long. If she were to stand any chance of escape, she needed to show some initiative.
‘It’s worse in the south of the forest,’ she said quietly.
‘What is?’ snapped the spirit, appearing next to her in a flurry of leaves.
The spirit was trying to adopt a haughty, nonchalant expression, but it was too infantile to play such games and Clara felt a rush of excitement as she realised how naive her companion was.
‘The forest is being overrun by…’ she hesitated, struggling to think of a suitable name. Her gaze skipped over a knotted root and she said. ‘It is being killed off by Yellow Root.’
The child spirit stared at her from its spiral of leaves. Then it sneered disdainfully and whirled away from her, vanishing into the shadows.
Clara’s heart raced, but she held her tongue. She was starting to understand the spirit’s erratic, fidgeting behaviour.
After a few minutes, as she expected, the column of leaves rustled back into view, picked out again by the shaft of light. The childish face looked suspiciously at her.
‘I know all about Yellow Root,’ it snapped. Then it narrowed its eyes. ‘What do you know of Yellow Root?’
Clara tried to keep her voice as deadpan as possible. ‘I come from a place that is regularly plagued by it. It was one of my jobs to remove the infestations.’
The spirit looked anxiously at the twelve faces looking up at them. Then it licked its gilded lips and drifted closer. ‘How?’
‘My memory is so confused,’ she answered. ‘Strangely enough, changing from a hawk, to a newt, to a trout has left me unable to think straight.’ She ran her fingers gently over the open wound on the side of her head. Since her run-in with the peasants, it had got progressively worse. She could feel a whole patch of exposed skull beneath her bloody, matted hair. More worryingly, the bone seemed to be changing shape – forming itself into a raised lump. She had been trying not to think about it too much, but it felt almost like a little tusk. Her thoughts leapt to the one-eyed, pot-bellied monsters she had seen all over the forest. Each of them had a single horn rising from their heads.
She quashed her fears and focussed on the spirit. ‘If I could just be healed,’ she said, speaking slowly, ‘perhaps I could remember the trick to removing this blight. I’m sure it was something quite simple.’
The spirit narrowed its eyes, then adopted a sullen, sulky pout. ‘I already told you I could help. I can show you a way to be human again.’
Clara gave what she hoped was a disarming smile. ‘Then perhaps we could help each other. Where do we need to go?’
The spirit sneered at her. ‘The Darna-Càoch, of course. The Blind Pool. The Forgotten Lake. The Endless Dream. Call it whatever you like. The puddle. It doesn’t matter. Only the Council of Beasts can help you. Sativus can undo any…’ The spirit’s words trailed off and it looked troubled again. ‘But Sativus is no more.’
The spirit fell silent and Clara wondered if it was about to leave her again. She looked down and saw that her mind had not been playing tricks on her. The mushrooms were growing larger, and taller. Their broad, smiling faces were definitely closer. Her pulse raced as she realised they had risen halfway up the tree trunk in just the last few minutes.
‘Sativus is gone, but the rest of us remain,’ continued the spirit, not looking entirely convinced by its own words. ‘And besides, the Darna-Càoch sees only the immutable truth of things. The water is too old to be confused by confusion. It would see you for what you are. Or what you think you are. Or what you need to be.’
The spirit began to talk in irritating riddles and Clara lost the thread of its conversation. A creaking sound: the mushrooms had risen even higher. They were now just a few feet away and she could see the rows of needle teeth with horrible clarity. Their grinning mouths were lined with them.
‘You will need to take me there quickly,’ she said, interrupting the spirit’s confused ramblings. ‘We don’t have much time.’
Zephyr looked furious at being interrupted. Then it noticed that the fungal growths had almost reached them.
>
‘I know that,’ it replied, petulantly, enveloping Clara in a funnel of whirling leaves.
Clara yelped as she felt her body being lifted and hurled through the air.
Chapter Five
Finavar staggered to a halt in the darkness, unsure which direction to take. After a while he sensed movement ahead and followed it, recognising the scratching, scampering sounds of Mormo and Mauro. The absence of light was complete, but he trusted his guides. After a while he realised that they were leading him towards a noise. At first it was a distant rushing sound, like wind moving through leaves, but it tripled in volume with every step he took until it became a deafening roar. It sounded as though a mountain were crashing down around him. Other noises followed: battle cries and the clattering of weapons, but they were all dwarfed by this thunderous din.
Finavar emerged into moonlight and his breath caught in his throat. He was standing at the entrance to a deep, broad valley and towering overhead was an incredible sight – a vast, three-limbed waterfall, tumbling around two colossal towers. The falls must have been miles tall and Finavar knew immediately what he was looking at. He had never glimpsed it before, but he knew that he was witnessing one of the forest’s most guarded treasures. The waterfall was called the Limneonas and it featured in countless asrai tales and histories. The two pillars that divided the water into three were actually ash trees, naked and skeletal, but so tall that they seemed to support the very heavens, their crowns lost in a haze of clouds and spray.
Finavar was cowed by the magnificence of the sight. The Limneonas blazed in the moonlight – three blinding columns of silver, crashing down into an oval lake. He was so shocked that it took him a few seconds to notice that he was not alone. There was an army gathered at the foot of the falls and, as the light flashed brighter, it gave Finavar a vivid, frozen, snapshot of grim-faced warriors. His pulse raced as he saw that the forces mustered below the waterfall were even greater than those that fought at the Battle of Drúne Fell.
Every realm of the forest must have volunteered its children to create such a proud gesture of defiance. Finavar saw pennants from every realm he could name and dozens more he could not. Riders were thundering by in their hundreds, spears aloft and horns trilling, led by nobles in flamboyant robes.
Moving down the south bank of the river was a host of glaive-wielding foot soldiers. They were clad in thick, leather armour and Finavar recognised the sword of Wydrioth on their banners. ‘Lord Findol,’ he muttered in surprise. The Findol Host was famed for its brutality and heroism, but Finavar had never heard of them travelling so far west. They rarely left their briar-rock fortress in the heart of the Pine Crags. He wondered who, or what could have dragged them so far from their haven.
Fast-limbed, semi-clad figures were slipping past them and Finavar grinned, recognising his brothers in mirth: the wardancers of Loec. Where Findol’s host marched, the wardancers seemed to glide, hurling themselves through the air, cartwheeling through the spray and twirling their leaf-shaped blades.
The light grew even brighter and Finavar looked for its source. It was emanating from another asrai kindred – a group of spellweavers that were drifting in the air, way above his head. They were hanging before the waterfall like a chain of water sprites with their robes spiralling in the foam and their staffs wrenching lightning from the spume. The light blazed in their flesh as they created spheres of root and magic and hurled them through the air.
Finavar watched, hypnotised, as the glittering spheres tumbled into the distance. As they went, they illuminated the whole length of the valley and revealed a sight that shocked him even more than the waterfall. As the mage-fire lit up the far end of the river Finavar glimpsed a terrifying vision – a flood of hunched figures; thousands of half-seen, malformed horrors, lurching and slithering towards the waterfall from the surrounding hills. Before the lights failed, they washed up against a vast outcrop of land, blocking the river at the far end of the valley.
A cloud of arrows poured from the slopes on either side of the waterfall. They fell in their tens of hundreds on the approaching monsters, but Finavar saw that the daemons were not the only threat.
The water was rising fast. Blocked by the distant outcrop, it had burst from the banks of the river and was lapping quickly up the slopes of the valley. As the asrai advanced they were forced to wade, knee deep through eddying torrents of water.
Then the sorcerous light failed, leaving Finavar with nothing but the dreadful din of the falls and a toiling mass of shadows.
He looked back the way he had come, but saw only a mossy, jagged valley wall. There was no sign of the portal he arrived through, but he was not particularly surprised. Many of the forest’s shadow paths only ran in one direction. He grimaced and stepped further from the shadows.
His arrival was met by a series of guttural cries and Finavar whirled around to see that the slopes above him were alive with the enemy. One-eyed mutants, clutching rusted, broken blades were scrambling through the shrubs and thicket and several of them had already singled him out with their swords.
Finavar bounded down the slope, making for the valley floor and the army at the foot of the falls.
The roar of the water was bewildering – a low, grinding, drum roll that reverberated through the valley and caused Finavar’s legs to tremble as he fled.
Arrows whistled through the air, missing Finavar’s face by inches and felling some of the daemons.
He dropped into a crouch. ‘Some guides,’ he muttered, seeing the polecats looking up at him from lower down the slope. ‘Is this your idea of a rescue?’
The daemons behind him lurched back to their feet and summoned more of their kind from the shadowy slopes.
Finavar skipped and rolled lightly down the valley wall and quickly left the daemons behind.
After a few moments he splashed into the river and began wading through it towards the asrai lines.
There was another dazzling flare from the spellweavers hanging over the waterfall. Finavar was too far away to see their faces but he could see the tendrils of light lashing from their fingers. He counted at least a dozen and shook his head in wonder. He had never witnessed such a gathering of mages. They were summoning cages of root and water from the falls and then hurling them at the daemons.
The light lasted a little longer this time and Finavar saw one of his kinsmen a few feet away. He saw by the markings on his leather armour that it was one of Findol’s guardsmen. He was hunched, ashen faced, over a body that was drifting in the water.
Finavar dashed towards the warrior, calling out a ‘Hello’.
The warrior flinched at the sight of Finavar, his eyes straining with fear and disgust. ‘Get back!’ he cried, rising from the water with a glaive in his hands. He looked around for support, as though he had been attacked, but everyone was busy rushing to join the attack.
Finavar stumbled to a halt and shook his head. Before the light dimmed, he looked down at his body and realised what the warrior was so afraid of. The tree spirits’ medicine had transformed him. They had replaced his missing patches of skin, but not with new flesh. They had repaired his body with brittle plates of bark-like shell. To the warrior, he must look as grotesque and strange as the monsters that surrounded the valley.
The light flashed even brighter, blinding him.
The last thing Finavar saw was the desperate face of the asrai warrior as he charged towards him, glaive raised.
Finavar thanked Loec for letting him regain his old agility. Even half-blinded, he had enough balance to flip away from his attacker.
His agility did not enable him to see behind him, however, and he slammed into a tree trunk.
He fell and stifled a yell as sharp pain exploded in one of his hands.
Still half blind, he felt, rather than saw, the asrai warrior, rush towards him.
Then there was a moist tearing sound as the daemons lurched past him and hacked the warrior to the ground, pulling him limb-from-limb in a matter o
f seconds.
Finavar prepared to defend himself but the daemons rushed on, making for the crush of bodies near the lake.
I could be killed by either side, he realised. People will think the daemons have corrupted me. He felt a rush of panic as he thought that he may never be able to approach his own kind again. Then he remembered that the scales of bark only covered his torso and upper arms. The spirits had mended the wounds he gained being torn from the white boundary stone. All he needed to do was dress himself in something more than his loincloth and he would be able to pass as normal.
He remembered that his attacker had been examining a body in the water and waded towards it.
There were now warriors rushing all around him. He could hear hooves and feet pounding past but he fixed his attention on the shape ahead. As he had guessed, it was the body of a fallen asrai warrior and he knew he only had seconds to reach it before someone else noticed his deformed flesh.
His hand brushed against the still-warm body of the fallen asrai and he began to quickly remove its clothes. He hesitated. What if the corpse was infected with the plague?
Then he remembered that the warrior had been hunched over the body, muttering some kind of prayer. He would not have dared get so close to mutation or disease.
Finavar wrestled with the body, struggling to undress it with one hand.
The mage-fire flashed again, just as Finavar finished dressing himself.
A line of horse riders was charging past him to join the army, adding to the general din and filling the air with spray. They were returning from the front lines and making for the foot of the waterfall. Finavar saw from their trailing banners that this was another kindred who were far from their halls. They were the horse-masters of Cavaroc, a realm of sunsplashed meadows in the southernmost reaches of the forest. They wore their hair tied back in long ponytails, plaited with intricate designs woven from pieces of straw and horsehair. Their proud faces were bronzed from a life spent in the plains. Like everyone else in the valley, their features were drawn and lined with exhaustion, but their chins were raised defiantly and they had their eyes locked on their destination.