To one side of the table, embedded in the wall, a rock basin received a steady trickle of clear water from a mossy knothole above it and lost the same amount in overflow through a second knothole beneath. Animal-thirsty, I strode over, bent and drank. The water tasted sweet and cool.
Next to the water basin, hidden behind a fall of silver and black honeywhisper, I discovered an exit. It was a vertical slit in the tree trunk barely tall enough and wide enough for a man of my size to pass through—if he ducked and turned sideways. On a rattan chair by the door lay my rapier and clothes, or at least my jeans. Sword and pants had both been cleaned of blood, and the jagged tears in the left leg of the pants had been sewn up.
Sight of the jeans brought back my dream and its triggering reality in a hissing flash: fighting the red-eyed beasts, climbing to the rope bridge, the moths. My wounds! My right arm had been savaged; my left leg had been a bloody mess. I should barely be able to move, but I felt little pain.
Almost fearfully, I glanced down. My wounds were bound with cloth and whoever or whatever had brought me here had applied poultices. With my awareness shifting, I felt for the first time a pleasant tingle beneath the bandages, and smelled a dozen bright, clean odors of growth and life.
I held up my right hand, clenched and relaxed a fist. It hurt, but the fingers flexed normally. And my left foot and leg supported my weight with barely a twinge. I couldn’t understand it. My injuries had been serious. How could they have healed this much in less than a day?
A chill struck me then. What if it hadn’t been a day? It was late afternoon now, but how many such afternoons might have passed while I slept here? What might have happened in that time—to Diken Graye, to Bryce, to the world I knew?
Quickly, I grabbed up the jeans and yanked them on, then buckled the sword about my waist. I had to get out of here, had to find my way to Diken Graye, find out if he was still alive, then pick up the trail to Bryce and Vohanna. I was bending to look under the chair in hopes of finding my boots when a voice from behind stopped me.
“How soon they flee my hospitality,” the voice said. “And without even a thank you.”
I spun, still in a crouch, hand dropping to my sword’s hilt as I expected to see some red-eyed thing with a demonic smile. A woman stood there, clad in a simple kirtle of oat-brown. Her eyes were jade. Beautiful. Her hair was a copper-fire mane that hung tousled to the small of her back. She was barely five feet tall, slender waisted with hips flaring sweetly below. Her mouth was generous in a face of sharp cheekbones and large, almost hollowed eyes. Her chin was strong, her nose delicate. She wore her sadness so well that it almost seemed she wore none at all.
I straightened slowly from my crouch, blushing as her words registered.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was raised better. I do owe you my gratitude. Thank you.”
The woman’s lips curled in what could have been either a smile or a smirk. She let go of the rope ladder that she’d unfurled from above to use in climbing down the hollow inside of the tree, and walked to the table carrying a bird nest in which several somethings chirruped. She placed the nest into an old, battered war-helmet and dropped in a handful of bread crumbs.
“A harsupex got their mother last eve,” she murmured, not looking at me, not even seeming as if her words were meant for me.
I knew what a harsupex was—a kind of ferret-cat with the smarts and habits of a racoon—but I wasn’t sure how to respond to her comment.
“And left them alone,” is all I said.
She looked at me, studied me for a moment, then looked away. “I will accept your apology,” she said.
She leaned down and tugged a small chest from under the table. Opening it, she drew out a long sleeved shirt of ivory linen and tossed it to me. Next, she came up with a pair of calf-high boots that did not appear to be made of leather but of some flexible steel-gray shell, like sea-turtle shell that had not yet hardened. She tossed these to me as well.
“Yours were beyond repair,” she said. “Those should fit.”
The shirt was button-less. I slipped it on, tucked it in my jeans, then sat in the cane chair and began to tug on the boots. The right went on easily but the left was a tight fit over my bandages. After a few moments of listening to me curse, the woman came over and knelt to help.
“Thank you again,” I said when the boot was on.
She shrugged, rising. “There is no use for them here anymore. And you will need them where you are going.”
I looked up at her. There was some meaning behind her words of “here anymore,” but that meaning sounded personal and I did not wish to intrude.
Instead, I said: “I am Ruenn Maclang.”
“Ahrethane,” she said. I took that as her name, wasn’t sure if it was one name or two.
“And where is it that you think I’m going, Ahrethane?” I asked, responding to her earlier comment.
“The heart of the jungle,” she replied. “And below.”
I blinked. “How do you know that?”
Her cheeks hollowed a bit. Some shadow of past pain flitted across her lips and was gone. “I know the forest,” she said. “I know what happens in it. Who comes and who goes. And why.”
She added: “Your friend is no longer under the tree where he collapsed.”
I started in my chair. “Diken Graye,” I said. I looked at her...hard. “Then where? What happened to him?” For a moment, I paused. “How long have I been here?”
“I do not know where...Diken Graye is. He is not in the forest, though. I imagine he was taken below. As for you, it is the afternoon of the third day since you were brought to me.”
Nearly three days lost,” I thought. But I said: “Who carried me to you? And,” I held up my bandaged arm, “how is it that my wounds have healed so quickly?”
“There are those in the forest who aid me,” she said. “They brought you here.”
“And they healed me?”
“No,” Ahrethane said.
She turned her attention back to her table. Taking up the old helmet with its cargo of bird nest and chirping occupants, she placed it on a shelf to one side. Then she began to stack swords and daggers and books to make a space that she immediately filled again with two large wooden bowls. She placed thorn-forks beside the bowls and began to shred into them greenery and bits of dried fruit.
“Who then?” I insisted. “Who healed me?”
“No one,” she said. “It was the moths. I merely poulticed your wounds with herbs to continue what they began.”
Lifting handfuls of shelled nuts from a small wooden keg, she dropped them into the bowls with the greenery and fruit.
“The moths?” I asked, incredulous.
She filled two wooden cups from the water basin and set them on the table.
“Eat.” She motioned to one of the bowls.
She pulled a chair up to the other bowl and began to fork food to her mouth. I hesitated. Getting information from this woman was a little easier than plucking a scorpion-hawk’s tail barb, but not much. I felt an intense urge to shake her, but was quite sure it wouldn’t do me a bit of good. In fact, judging by the way she handled edged weapons it might well do me some harm.
I drew my chair up to the table. Sat. Ate. The greens were tastier than they looked; the fruit was filling; the nuts were delicious. I hadn’t realized how ravenous I was.
After a bit, I chuckled.
Ahrethane stopped eating and frowned. I met her gaze, smiled innocently as I plucked out a nut and crunched it between my teeth.
She put down her fork. “The moths weave,” she said. “It is what they do. To the forest.” She flicked a finger toward my cloth-wrapped arm. “To those who are injured in the forest. You thought they were hurting you but they are incapable of harm.”
I put down my own fork. “Some healing balm in their saliva, perhaps,�
� I said.
“Yes, perhaps” she agreed. “And more.”
“I appreciate you telling me.”
She watched me. After a moment she nodded, and I felt that nod as a victory.
“What will you do when you go below?” she asked.
“Find my friend,” I said.
“And?”
I did not speak at first. My hand found my water cup and I drained it. I ate another nut.
She chuckled, quite deliberately.
I looked at her in surprise, then grinned. She grinned back. Her face lost years.
I took a deep breath. There was no clear reason why I should trust his fire-tressed woman. But I did.
“My brother is below,” I told her. “A witch has him.”
“Vohanna,” she said.
“You know her?”
The years came back to her face. “I know her. You named her witch but she is far worse. If she has your brother then...I am sorry. It is unlikely you will be able to save him.”
She glanced down into her bowl, then pushed it away as if her appetite had fled. “I was never able to,” she whispered.
Again her words were personal but this time I did ask. “Never able to what?”
She glanced up. Her lips had thinned, lost their lushness. Her eyes grew even more haunted. She said, very clearly: “I was never able to save my brother after Vohanna took him. Or any member of my family.”
I made no murmur of sympathy. Though she deserved it, I did not think she would take it well at that moment. Instead, I asked her: “How is it that you remain?”
The tiny flicker of a humorless smile played over her lips.
“Vohanna leaves me alone,” she said. “The jungle hides her from the prying eyes of the world, and without me the jungle would die.”
She said this so matter-of-factly that I knew it was true.
“Are you efrinore?” I asked.
She seemed surprised that I knew that word—which in English might translate as something like druid-shaman—but after a moment she nodded.
“That won’t matter when Vohanna reaches her full strength, though,” she added. “Then she’ll not need the jungle and there will be no place for me or any other who does not serve her.”
I was no longer hungry. I pushed away my own bowl and rose. Time was precious. I had to go.
“But you Vohanna fears,” Ahrethane said, watching as her words caught and held me.
I felt my eyebrows arch. “That seems unlikely.”
“She has tried to discredit you. Frighten you. She tried to kill you more than once. Her failures gall her.”
I didn’t ask her how she knew these things that she should not know. The efrinore have their ways.
Thinking of the parchment note that had sent me fleeing from Timmuzz, and of all the things that had happened since, I said: “She discredited me with those I care most about. Killed some of them. She’s hacked years off my life in worry. Failure seems a poor choice of words for what Vohanna has done to me.”
Ahrethane shook her head. “That’s not enough for her. She’s underestimated you at each step. She won’t again. She’ll have an army waiting to stop you. Monsters that make the red-eyed howlers look like children’s pets. Men that are worse.”
“Then I’ll have to hope that I continue to be lucky.”
She nodded at my need for luck, rather vigorously, I thought. “You’ll need all the fortune you can muster. But also, I must help you. I cannot...go below. There is nothing but death there for an efrinore. Where no natural life can thrive.”
“Then how will you help?” I asked, showing a faint irritation that I knew was unreasonable.
She did not notice it. Or chose to ignore it.
“I can give you cover,” she said. “The worst of Vohanna’s creatures will be in the forest. She will not want you to reach the underworld. But if you can. Undetected. You might have a chance.”
Moving quickly then, she rose and pushed aside the honeywhisper that curtained the exit I had found earlier.
“Come,” she called, as she slipped through the split in the trunk and I lost sight of her.
I followed, more angry now, and angry with myself for feeling that way. I wanted to tell her that, lucky or not, I had done pretty well before without her help. But that would have been both cruel and foolish. Cruel because, if anything, she had suffered worse from Vohanna than I had. And foolish because, I did need her help. I might very well be dead now without it. Certainly I could have been crippled.
Trying to swallow my pride and finding it hard, I joined Ahrethane outside her tree house on a broad branch to which several rope bridges were anchored. The efrinore’s home tree bulked huge in the center of a clearing, with lesser giants in a circle around. Still other hempen walkways—many of them in poor repair—were moored to limbs above and below me, leading off in every direction through the forest. It was as if Ahrethane’s tree had once been a traffic hub for a jungle-spanning network of trade and travel that no longer existed.
As I glanced from the rope bridges to Ahrethane, I had the sudden impression that the walkways behind me had filled with slender men and women, strolling, chatting, smiling, stopping here and there to hug—or to kiss. And for that instant I swore that I heard the sweetly languid sounds of the kalina, the seven-stringed Taleran guitar, drifting over the clearing. Then the feeling was gone and I understood finally what had been lost here in this place.
I looked away from the woman who stood beside me. I looked up into the brilliant green sky and the last of my pride went down my throat in a lump. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for my anger. She gave me no time; she pointed to a hempen bridge at my right hand.
“That is the route,” she said. “At the jungle’s center it is anchored to the top of a black pyramid. But do not follow it all the way. At a tree with a lighting-blasted limb you will leave the bridge. Under that limb is a door into the tree’s heart. A ladder will take you down. Flat in the ground at the bottom you will find a strange, smooth stone as big around as a man’s body. This lifts. If you have the strength. There, is an entrance to the underground. One that I think Vohanna may not know.”
I was about to thank her one last time when she turned and silenced me with a finger to my lips. She rose on tiptoes to dab a kiss at the corner of my mouth, then pulled back, her brilliant eyes studying mine.
“I am sorry if I sounded...unkind before,” she said. “Do not be angry with me. It is only that I want an end to Vohanna as badly as you do.”
She stepped back, into the narrow doorway of her strange abode. “Go with the storm,” she said, and disappeared inside.
For a moment, I hesitated. There was no storm except the one in my thoughts. I glanced into the sky, glanced back to the tree of Ahrethane.
Then the faces of Bryce and Diken Graye, and of Rannon, swam up before my eyes. I turned and started along the bridge that Ahrethane had indicated to me. And from the trees all around arose a vast cloud of Emperor moths, like a blizzard of scarlet snow. They gathered, so many that I could hear the thrum of their wings and feel the stir of wind currents in the air.
A crackle of static electricity discharged in the clearing around me. Lightning answered from above. I saw a drop of rain, then more, and ran for the trees at the other side of the open space. The moths peeled away in flight, diving for shelter as a tempest exploded in fury out of what had been clear air moments before.
I ran. And though the storm stomped in the forest it barely brushed my path with wet fingers. Something protected me.
I ran.
And whispered: “Coming for you, Vohanna.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GOING BELOW
Moving within the storm’s shroud, I reached the lightning-savaged tree that Ahrethane had told me to watch for. No one, no thing, contested my passage; I saw
no sign of enemies, though I sensed something malevolent nursing at the very air through which I passed.
But if there were foes here, they must have had their heads bent against the flood of rain and wind. I wondered if they prayed to Vohanna as a goddess to save them. I doubted she’d be much help. This forest, at least, was still under Ahrethane’s dominion.
In the distance ahead of me, shrouded in robes of rain over the tops of the trees, there lifted the matte black pyramid Ahrethane had warned me to avoid. That pyramid lay at the center of ruined Vohan, the city over which the jungle had grown, and I recalled that when Diken Graye had released our saddle birds they had flown to that building and settled. We had both suspected then that Vohanna’s own bird riders held their mounts at that place, and glad I was not to have to pass through what was surely an army.
Instead, I vaulted off the bridge onto the lightning-twisted tree limb and clung for a moment to rain-slick bark before searching out the opening in the trunk that would let me bypass the enemy’s front door. I found that opening, slipped inside. It was dry there. Protected. There was light—animal-made light—from insects that crawled here and there on the rough inner walls. I recognized them as tris, candle-bugs, which are common to dark, enclosed places all over Nyshphal. I’d seen them in sewers before, and in wine cellars.
Tris are not like the fireflies of Earth. For one, they are smaller and flightless. For another, their glow is nearly constant. And they typical live in mats of millions. Here there were only a few handfuls, and I was sure that those had come up from the underground, from below.
The soft turquoise light of the tris revealed a ledge—almost a rind of wood—around a hollow core in the tree. I perched on that rind; a rope ladder dangled down the core. I swung out on it and went swiftly down.
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