Sir Tombin pulled the carriage to a stop when they were a couple of hundred yards short of the edge of the forest.
“This is the western fringe of the Everwoods,” he said loudly, so that those inside could hear him. “It’ll take us two days, perhaps three, to reach the far side, if we’re lucky. I’m hoping we’ll be able to take the carriage the full distance, but we may find we have to go at least part of the way on foot. If anyone has second thoughts about accompanying us, please speak now.”
No one dissented.
The Frogly Knight clicked his tongue and Snowmane carried on toward the forest. The road continued into the trees as an overgrown trail barely wider than the carriage, and soon they were rolling along it. The thick foliage on either side muffled the noise of Snowmane’s hooves and the carriage’s wheels, so it sounded to Sagandran as if he’d put a thin pillow over his ears. There was no color but green in every direction; even the trunks of the trees and the occasional protruding boulder were covered in moss and lichen, and the old wheel-ruts in the trail were so overgrown that they were almost invisible. The air smelled moist, heavy and rich with fertility. Insects buzzed around his and Sir Tombin’s faces; spider webs hung from the branches like the thin breath of ghosts.
“Not many people seem to come this way,” Sagandran observed, pushing a dangling cobweb out of his face.
“Suits us fine,” said Sir Tombin absently. His tongue flashed out to snap a fly from the air.
After they’d been traveling among the trees for a few hours, the trail suddenly opened onto a much broader way. By contrast with the path they had been following, this one showed signs of frequent use. Its surface was churned-up and muddy, and some of the footprints in the sludge were large, clawed and menacing.
Sagandran shivered.
“I don’t like the look of this,” murmured Sir Tombin, as if in confirmation. “Those spoors look like worg tracks to me.”
“Me too,” said Sagandran.
Sir Tombin tugged on the reins and Snowmane veered off the trail under a heavy canopy of foliage and came to a halt. The Frogly Knight climbed down to the ground with a nimbleness that was astonishing for one who’d been sitting on a hard coach seat for the past two and a half days.
Perima and Samzing poked their heads out the carriage window.
“I’m going to leave you here a while,” said Sir Tombin, “while I search ahead of us on foot. There may be another way that saves us following the trail of these accursed worgs. You should be well enough concealed from anyone, anything, following the path, but stay as quiet as you can – and touch nothing. Worgs may not be especially bright, but they have a great amount of cunning. I’d not put it past them to have rigged traps for unwary wayfarers.”
The others nodded and mumbled their assent, and with a swish of branches, Sir Tombin was gone. The last they saw of him was the tip of Xaraxeer’s sheath, then it too vanished. For a time, nobody said anything. Flip let out a cough, then looked around him guiltily at the accusatory stares.
“Sorry,” he squeaked. “I didn’t meant to—”
“Quiet,” hissed Perima, clamping a hand around his head.
But as time passed and all they heard from the forest around them was carefree birdsong, they began to relax. It was Flip who first spotted the sign.
“Over there. Look.” He pointed.
Sagandran squinted in that direction and, sure enough, he saw something strangely out of place: a small rectangle of white in the middle of a broad, mossy tree trunk. Getting to his feet, he crept toward it.
“There’s writing on it,” he whispered to the others.
Perima looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to be bored or terrified. “What does it say?”
Sagandran took another cautious step. The sign read:
Underneath, a lever was sticking out from the dark green sponge of the moss.
“They must think we’re mugs,” he whispered, a little louder as his confidence grew. “No one but an idiot would lay a finger on that lever.”
“But that’s what it’s there for,” protested Flip. “See? The sign says so.”
“It’s a trap,” said Perima.
Ignoring her, the little creature raced forward and stood at the base of the trunk.
“Let me be the one to pull it! Let—”
“Leave him be,” Perima said to Sagandran, chuckling. “It’s far too high for him to reach.”
“Good thing he’s not a squirrel,” remarked Sagandran, sitting down in the grass beside her.
“A squirrel?”
“It’s an animal we have on the Earthworld,” he began. He knew there were squirrels in Sagaria, because Flip had mentioned them a couple of times, but it turned out that Perima had never heard of them, let alone seen one. In her own way, she was as much of a townie as Mom was. By the time he’d finished telling her about squirrels and their long bushy tails, she seemed to be feeling friendlier toward him than she had since they’d left Spectram. So he seized the opportunity to tell her about other Earthworld creatures (she flatly refused to believe him when he described the sea cucumber) and finally the conversation wound its way around to worgs.
“I don’t think I could stand to meet another of those horrible beasts,” she said, shuddering theatrically. “The one that captured us before reminded me of one of my teachers, Professor Gonfalcoran. He’s not really a professor, but that’s what we all had to call him.”
“You go to school?” said Sagandran. “I assumed you were taught by tutors at your father’s court.”
“Most of the time, yes, but there are some things they don’t know about, and so I have – had – to attend school with the servants’ children and the children of the town. Much more fun than the ones who’re part of Daddy’s court; they’re not frightened the whole time of getting their clothes muddy, and they tell me the most intriguing things about stuff that no one at court’s even allowed to mention.”
“Such as?” Sagandran said leadingly, and then realized that he didn’t want to know. “Professor Gonfalcoran,” he prompted.
“Oh, him. He makes me read ancient writings that nobody needs or cares about.” She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. “I don’t really want to talk about fusty old Professor Gonfalcoran. He’s a long way away from me at the moment, and I hope he stays that way.”
“Tell me about your classmates, then.” As long as she keeps talking, thought Sagandran, the coldness she’s been keeping between us might thaw.
“I don’t see much of them out of school hours, alas. My father doesn’t like me mixing with ‘the common children’ as he calls them.”
“Why not? Is he afraid they’ll tell you too many of those ‘intriguing things’?”
She gave him a blank look, then laughed quietly. “No, he’d have a fit if that possibility ever crossed his mind. He’s just worried that they might give me silly ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, well, like running away from home, for example.”
Again there was that quiet, heart-warming chuckle. He found that he was grinning from ear to ear.
Just then, Sir Tombin emerged into the little clearing, startling them both. His approach had been completely silent.
“There’s another trail leading to the northwest,” he said briskly. “It’s even better, in a way, than the one we’ve been on, more direct, but we’ll never be able to get the carriage through to it. The undergrowth’s too thick. The wheels would jam up in an instant. It’s going to be a matter of traveling on foot, I’m afraid. Stash whatever you can into your backpacks and strap the saddle bags onto Snowmane, and let’s be moving. I want to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the carriage before night falls. Any worg that stumbles across it will soon tell its friends, and they’ll start scouring the forest for us. They won’t want to pass up the opportunity of nice fresh meat like us.”
“Oh, yuck,” said Perima. “Just the thought I didn’t want to have.”
“Where’s Samzing?” said Sir Tombin, looking around.
“Snoozing in the carriage, I guess,” Sagandran replied.
They found the old wizard stretched out on one of the seats, fast asleep. Sir Tombin hastily shook him awake and explained the plan.
Samzing pottered down out of the carriage in his usual crabby way, and peered around.
“What’s young Flip up to?”
“Keeping out of trouble, I hope,” said Sagandran darkly, busily sorting through a pile of the spare clothing Queen Mirabella had given them. He hadn’t even the first idea how to put on some of the garments, and most of them he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing.
Perima giggled at the expression on his face.
It was the giggle that caused their downfall, he afterward concluded, though he would never breathe a word of that to Perima; it certainly wasn’t her fault, after all. He was luxuriating in the sound of that giggle, bathing in her friendly teasing, and as a result was paying no attention to Flip and the wizard. At the periphery of his mind he was aware of Flip saying, “If only I could jump a little higher,” and of Samzing amiably responding, “Let me give you a hand then, little fellow,” but the words didn’t mean anything until a second or so later.
“Stop that!” yelled Sir Tombin.
“Stop what, old bean?” said the wizard mildly, one hand on the lever.
“Leave that alone. It’s the trigger of a trap!”
“This? Surely not, my dear friend. It’s just, well, a lever sticking out of a tree trunk. See?”
And with that Samzing pulled firmly downward.
There was instantly pell-mell confusion. Sagandran couldn’t work out what was going on for a moment, just that something had caught him under the legs so he was sent sprawling over Perima, who was likewise falling. Except they weren’t really falling at all, they were shooting upward. Their ascent stopped as tooth-jarringly suddenly as it had begun.
Sagandran, who’d closed his eyes in panic, opened them again and found that he was looking downward over Perima’s shoulder at the forest floor, which seemed dizzyingly far away. The splosh of silver-white was Snowmane’s face, peering anxiously up at them. The small brown spot was Flip.
“Get off me, oaf,” said Perima angrily. “You’re at least five times as heavy as you look.”
Sagandran did his best, but it was hard to find purchase for his hands and feet, which kept getting tangled in what he soon realized was the broad mesh of an old rope net. Samzing was moaning loudly somewhere above him. Sir Tombin was muttering imprecations even further above. The four of them were jumbled in a heap, with Perima at the bottom of it.
“A net!” said Sagandran. “We’ve been trapped by a net. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.”
“It’s a pity Snowmane and the carriage weren’t a little closer,” observed Sir Tombin, obviously trying to inject some calm he didn’t feel into his voice. “Their weight would almost certainly have broken the mechanism.”
“It’s a pity Flip was small enough to slip through the mesh,” said Sagandran through gritted teeth. “If he were up here I could wring his neck.”
“No need to be so extreme, young man.” Sir Tombin was still clinging to that calm. “Besides, I rather think I might beat you to it. However, I have my sturdy blade Xaraxeer with me, so I should soon be able to saw our way out of here. Assuming,” he grunted, “I can manage to get it out of its scabbard. Samzing, dear fellow, do you think you could possibly move your stomach, just for a trice?”
“Too late,” said Sagandran. “Can’t you hear?”
“Stop trying to just ignore me, Sagandran,” Perima began.
“Sh.”
Coming closer to them was the sound of gurgling laughter that Sagandran recalled only too well.
A worg.
Just a little earlier that afternoon, somewhere not so far away in the forest …
The mountain worg, Bolster, wasn’t in a foul mood. If he’d merely been in a foul mood his mood would have been just as normal, and he’d have been perfectly contented with that. The mood he was in right now, though, was so much fouler than foul, there weren’t any words he could think of to describe it. Certainly not any words he knew anyway and, even though he was aware of the strict limitations of his vocabulary, he was pretty sure not any words that anyone else knew either. If you could imagine a bolt of lightning hitting a cesspit you might have had some pale glimmering of an idea of the nature of Bolster’s current mood.
No, even that didn’t come close.
The reason for his ill humor was that he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink last night. He’d had a very disturbing visitor late in the evening. The only way visitors could normally disturb Bolster was by giving him food poisoning, but this one was different.
The visitor had the outward form of an exceptionally handsome young man (not that Bolster was much of a judge of handsomeness), but the worg had sensed that this was something else entirely; something that wasn’t human at all; something that, in all probability, wasn’t even edible. Since just about everything was regarded as edible by a worg, this meant that the visitor was extremely unusual indeed.
Bolster didn’t like unusual things. They made his warts crawl.
He’d been sitting in the forest cave he called his house, happily picking the remains of a wild boar from between his teeth, when the stranger was abruptly there beside him. Bolster could have sworn that the visitor hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t as if he could have crawled in through the cave entrance without Bolster noticing, because Bolster had been sitting with his ample rear end blocking the entrance.
He’d been so startled by the sudden appearance that he’d very nearly swallowed his nose.
“Who you?” he’d growled threateningly, reaching around beside him for his trusty club, Skullcrusher.
Skullcrusher wasn’t there.
Skullcrusher was lying on the far side of the cave, where Bolster hadn’t left it.
“A friend,” said the visitor with an amicable shrug. His smile was so ingenuous and fresh that it seemed to light up the cavern’s interior. “A friend who’s come to ask you a favour, in the name of the Shadow Master. I’m his emissary.”
“Wot is an enemiwhat?”
“Emissary,” the visitor corrected.
Bolster still looked puzzled. There were, after all, only so many words that could squeeze into a worg brain, even though he was considered one of the smarter ones.
“Oh, I do beg your pardon, Mr. Bolster. Let me be more succinct.”
“Shuggint?”
“The Shadow Master’s messenger,” the visitor said with some testiness.
“Who he, then?” asked Bolster suspiciously.
“The person who will soon be the lord of this forest domain, and all others,” said the stranger. “You really don’t want to get on his wrong side before you’ve even met him, you know.”
“I da lord a dis forest,” snarled Bolster. “I da one dey call da boss.”
The visitor gave a shrug, so that his gleaming silver armor jangled. “Not for much longer, I’m afraid. However, my master can be very generous and kind. As long as you accord him the respect he is due, I’m sure he won’t interfere too much with your charming little ways. You’ll still be the boss of the forest. It’s just that the Shadow Master will be your boss.”
The idea of a hierarchy of authority was a little complex for Bolster. The way he saw it, the natural order of things was that there was himself and everybody else. It was his good fortune in life to have the right to splatter anybody else’s brains out with Skullcrusher, and then eat the good meat. The only creatures he habitually spared were other worgs, just so long as they obeyed his orders. If they didn’t, they, too, got their brains splattered out with a few lusty blows from his club, though he only stooped to eating worgs when he was very, very hungry. He was dimly aware that as he grew older, another worg might come along who was bigger and stronger than him who would splatter his brains out
and take over as the new boss of the forest, but that unhappy day lay in the future. As the future was another concept too complex for Bolster, he didn’t let it worry him. But he was worried by this unnatural stranger all right. Only that he mustn’t show it.
“Sez who?” he quipped.
“Says Arkanamon, proud tyrant of the Shadow World, soon to be the conqueror of all Sagaria,” answered the visitor with another of those unsettlingly bright smiles.
“Oh, does he? And he got a big club?”
“He has an army hundreds of thousands strong made up of troops who are virtually unkillable.”
Bolster considered this for a moment. “Dat a big number?” he asked.
“Very big,” the armored being assured him. “Think of the number of termites in a nest, then double it.”
Bolster tried, but all it did was make his head hurt. Multiplication had never been one of his strong points.
“Lots,” he said at last.
“Lots,” the stranger agreed.
“Um.”
There was silence between them except for the sound of Bolster sucking gobbets of gristle out of his caries. The silence stretched out until several minutes had passed.
“Dis favour?” said Bolster finally. “Wot is it?”
“My master is searching for a boy.”
“Lotsa boys around,” said Bolster with a wave of his greasy fingers. “Dey best cooked slowly wid a sprig or two of marjoram.”
“Not just any boy. A particular one. He has something that my master wants. That he needs.”
“Wot’s dat den?”
“A crystal. A jewel.”
“Bolster like jewels. Dey pretty.”
“Not just any jewel—”
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