Forest For The Trees (Book 3)

by Damien Lake

  A livid expression twisted Xenos’ already angry features. He dropped to a crouch and caught the lancing furrows in his bare palms. His sleeves flapped as if caught in a whirlwind. An instant later the power disappeared. It vanished so completely he might have swallowed it.

  The life harvester stood slowly, glaring at the Red Man. “You dare…dare use the forces of earth against me?”

  Stoically, the Red Man stared back. “It is no less the foolhardy than your efforts toward my destruction through fire.”

  Xenos paused. He noticed the eclectic group arrayed before him for the first time. “It seems our misguided enemies are better organized than suspected,” he announced. A frown creased his features.

  Mendell stepped to Xenos’ side from the rear, sword drawn. Several other black-armored soldiers crowded around them. The colonel spoke an Arronathian phrase that deepened Xenos’ displeasure.

  In a cold, calm voice, the older Arronath Marik had battled delivered several lines in response. Marik kept darting his gaze between them. Nothing about the way these two viewed each other seemed right considering they were allies. To his left, he noticed Colbey inching sideways, trying to get behind the one-eyed fighter who still supported Rail.

  “I will end it finally, tonight,” Xenos declared in response to a second statement from Mendell. “I consider this a blessing. In one action, those who struggle to deny the penultimate god will cease to be.”

  The Red Man raised both hands until they were inches apart. His gloves glowed with power as crimson as his attire. Rail and the two Arronaths crouched, swords ready, prepared for combat.

  Marik whirled. “Dietrik, where—”

  A furious, high-pitched buzz split the morning gloom. His spine erupted in a hundred grass itches. Without thinking, he dove to the dirt.

  An etheric orb like his own blurred past where he had been. It struck the Euvea tree. Unexpectedly, it did not burst, as it should have. Instead the buzzing switched to the sound of a watermill’s enormous saw blade chewing at intense speed through a stripped tree trunk.

  Clouds of sawdust billowed over Marik and Dietrik, who were both flat on the forest floor. Tears flooded his eyes anew from the fog of wood particles. He caught glimpse of a perfect, round hole bored through the Euvea. A black hole, flawless in its circularity, gaping in the root.

  Marik scrambled across the dirt. Before he leapt to his feet, he searched wildly for Xenos. He found the man exactly where he had been before. Rail and the two Arronaths were rolling on the ground to avoid the orbs. The Red Man had caught the one aimed at him with the scarlet energy encasing his gloves. With a motion, he tore the energy composing the orb to fragments.

  But Xenos already had a dozen new orbs prepared, and created three more in the space of a single heartbeat. Where they hovered ominously in a line before him, Marik could see they were different than his own simple orb after all.

  They were not solid spheres. Rather, they were hollow, their sides carved away in strips from top to bottom much like a festival gourd. The strips remaining were as wide as the empty spaces between them. Each strip’s edge was jagged, recalling again to Marik’s mind the image of the round saw blade in Tattersfield’s mill. While he watched, Xenos set the orbs to spinning in place, the speed quickly reaching such intensity that the whirling energy left afterimages in his retinas.

  So fast did they spin that they looked like solid orbs. Yet, as the tree behind him testified to, they would chew their way through anything they hit.

  Xenos engaged in a dramatic gesture. At his sweeping arm, the fifteen orbs sped fast as diving eagles. Two angled for each man present except the Red Man, who found three attacking his legs, torso and head.

  Marik dove to his right. He felt the rushing wind of the first passing, the breeze tugging at his tunic. With no time to for elegance he forced his waist to bend, bringing his stomach up enough that the second missed by a whisker-length. His face drove into the grit and pebbles littering the ground.

  The second saw-blade orb instantly covered him in churned earth. It dug a mole’s furrow into the ground, ejaculating the tunnel’s contents behind.

  Marik swung his feet into a crouch, ready for the next volley, realization illuminating his consciousness as he did so. Xenos could not control the orb after he loosed it. Or else he had set so many into play that he could only shoot them like arrows. None of the saw blade orbs bent the slightest in their trajectories. So long as they could dodge them, they had nothing to worry about.

  Except Xenos’ strength. In the short span of time since launching his second flight, he had crafted twenty new orbs. This time they hovered before him in a ten-foot tall circle. He fired an orb at Rail and the empty space within the curving line was instantly replaced by a fresh one.

  Rail tracked the orb intently. When it closed to within feet in a mere second, he whipped his sword upward in a southeastern slash. The glowing edge met the saw-blade orb. In a flash, the high buzzing dissolved to tortured crackles, and the etheric power in the orb was shattered.

  The circle shifted as Xenos faced the Red Man. Six orbs lanced forward one after the previous from different points in the circle. With equanimity, the Red Man met them all despite the various angles. Power suffused his hands while he struck each orb a single blow in rapid succession. One by one he burst the orbs…until the last.

  Each orb had moved slightly faster than he. With the fifth, he was forced to twist awkwardly to reach it before it chewed through his left knee. The sixth stormed ahead to tear out his throat.

  He’s meat! It’s going to kill him!

  With the saw-blade orb only feet away, Marik saw the Red Man’s eyes suddenly flash. The brilliant crystalline hue seemed to leave his irises momentarily, to cover the clearing in the illumination of a scarlet lightning bolt.

  Exactly what happened, Marik could not say. The orb was destroyed. Its faint energy wisps fluttered against the Red Man’s coat harmlessly.

  Xenos laughed. Marik felt dread filling his spine with ice. Not from the merciless amusement shown by a harvester with power beyond what any mortal should command, but from the exhaustion that abruptly gripped the Red Man. For the first time his breaths deepened. Sweat broke across his forehead.

  A bludgeoning thud slammed into his left shoulder. Marik exclaimed in surprise before recognizing Colbey. The scout pushed him away ruthlessly.

  “What—”

  “Go! Now!” He paused only to shove Marik harder than before.

  Marik stumbled until he saw in front of him the western root wall. Too, Dietrik was already halfway up, moving like a squirrel.

  The buzzing warned them an instant before the new orbs attacked. Marik twisted hard and avoided one that would have reduced his head to a mess from the butcher’s grinder. Colbey simultaneously bent backward, bracing his hands on the ground, and lifted one leg so it pointed at the trees above. Both his orbs ate nothing but wood.

  Marik leapt onto the round root, feeling his fingernails cracking when he dug hard for purchase. He ignored the pain and yanked his body higher by willpower alone. His boots slammed into the root as if determined to make a foothold if no natural ones were available.

  He rolled over the edge onto the top faster than he would have believed possible. A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him around to the opposite side. How had Colbey managed to gain the top before him?

  “This is a dead end alley,” the scout hissed. “A killing ground to trap your quarry. We must leave.”

  “What about my father?” Marik turned back to stare into the clearing.

  Colbey’s hard tug on his collar swept him from his feet again. As he fell, the twenty orbs in Xenos’ circle exploded away in twenty different directions. One slammed into the root below where they stood at the same moment Marik crashed against the bark surface. An instant later it burst through the wood only two inches from his nose and continued upward into the tree branches.

  “Go!” Colbey’s strength lifted Marik from his prone p
osition and spun him over the root’s far side. Terror at the fall filled him until the hard landing ripped the wind from his lungs.

  Colbey landed lightly beside him and Dietrik. Marik missed what he said. Pain overwhelmed his senses. Dietrik ran in the direction the scout pointed. When Colbey lifted him to his feet and pushed him in the back, Marik struggled to make his body function on its own.

  It was only when water soaked through his breeches above his boots that he realized where they were. “The creek! Gods above, we’ll be bitten by a snake and killed!”

  “That way, mage!” Colbey beat him as relentlessly as a willful horse. “Across the water! Hurry!”

  “What about—”

  “Go!”

  Marik moaned, uncertain which was worse. A painful death by snakebite or a quick death by Xenos. His only thought was to exit the creek swiftly as possible. He loped after Dietrik, splashing wildly since he tried to lift his feet fully above the water with each step.

  Once they neared the far bank, Colbey darted ahead. He jogged thirty feet downstream until he reached a natural archway of twisting roots against a hillside. A wide, flat boulder formed the bank above the flowing water. He stood on it, within the archway, palms pressed to the arcing wood.

  In moments, the earthen wall framed by the arch rippled as the previous seals had. Dietrik wasted no time. He ran into what should have been the solid dirt hill that descended to the stream.

  Marik stood firm. His father was back there! Could they not follow the river south a hundred yards, climb back over the root and enter the clearing behind Xenos? They could take his back while he dueled with the Red Man!

  But Mendell’s soldiers were waiting to kill anyone who tried to charge Xenos. They could never take the whole detachment down without alerting Xenos to their presence.

  Or could they? What if—

  “Mage!”

  “We have to save them! We can’t leave my father to face Xenos on his own! What can—damn it! Let go!”

  For the second time, Marik was thrown against his will through a Euvea’s seal.

  Chapter 24

  “You’re going to fall, mage. Stop scraping away the bark.”

  “Help me then, gods damn it!”

  Sweat flowed across Marik’s face in streamlets. His hands wrapped in iron bands around the rope he dangled from. He felt the rope sliding inexorably through his grip, the sweat slicking his skin too much for adequate purchase against the hemp.

  “Hurry up! I’m slipping!”

  Colbey swung down easily from above, rope whirring through his fingers until he had drawn level with Marik. His hand seized his own line, instantly stopping him and making him swing feet first back to the cliff wall.

  “Around your wrist, as I showed you,” Colbey instructed. He pried one of Marik’s hands from their grip.

  “I’m falling!”

  “No, you are not. Stop flailing the bark away with your boots. Press against the wall, rather than along it.”

  The scout held him steady until Marik adjusted his feet. His body threatened to freeze. It took every ounce of his willpower to jerk his leg up, to put the boot sole flat to the bark. When at last he managed it, he stood horizontally over the void, his weight supported solely by the rope.

  “Let the rope wrap around your wrist,” Colbey instructed. “You are too much a novice to trust the strength of your grip alone. That will slow it enough that you may control the speed with which you descend. You see? Dietrik has the matter well in hand. You can as well.”

  Marik looked over his shoulder to where Dietrik was already fifty feet lower. Dietrik had duplicated Colbey’s method of pushing backward off the cliff face, dropping several feet, then arcing back to land safely against the bark.

  “I’m not damned fool enough to jump to my death, no matter how sturdy this line is!”

  “Time passes,” Colbey reminded Marik. “And with it all chance of getting ahead of the Arronaths and laying our trap.”

  The scout pushed off from the wall, falling three times the distance Dietrik had before swinging back to repel again. Marik gritted his teeth. In his mind, the only question was if they would survive to escape this nightmarish sealed area or become carrion on the…whatever lay below. More roots, like as not.

  Against his better judgment, he peered down, wondering if he could see anything distinct yet. True he had only come down forty feet from the top, but still…

  Far below, jutting from this abnormal cliff, was the massive branch Colbey had insisted was the only way to proceed. Several such branches extended from the cliff for miles to his left and right. Most unusual of all, the cliff was composed completely of bark over hardwood without a single stone in sight. It stretched in both directions without visible end, into the far horizon. The distant ground was an unknowable fog. Those thick mists lurking at the cliff’s base could either be a light covering or fifty fathoms deep.

  In this madhouse, Marik would certainly not rule that out.

  He loosened his grip fractionally. Around his lower back he felt the rope slide. His left hand clamped its length in terror, as did his right with the line encircling his wrist. The sudden stop forced his left hand, underneath him, to mash hard into his side.

  “Mage! We do not have all the day!”

  Marik swore within the confines of his mind. While he tried to sort out his left hand and get it back down to the lower rope, his boots slipped off the bark. His shoulder slammed into the wall. Bark flecked away, all of it seemingly landing in his eyes. He kicked his legs furiously through the air which accomplished nothing save to entangle his limbs in the other two of the five ropes to which Colbey had led them.

  “Not if Vernilock has any say in the matter!” Marik waspishly shot back when Colbey demanded to know if he would be joining them any time soon.

  Colbey refrained from duplicating Marik’s fit of vitriolic exclamations. He instead shimmied up the rope no less quickly than if he had jogged up a spiraling staircase. Before Marik could make his plight much worse, the scout’s hands were efficiently unwinding the loose ropes from around his limbs.

  “You lower yourself,” Colbey directed. “This time I will remain above to watch over you.”

  “What about when I fall and turn into raspberry jelly?”

  Colbey remained calm in the face of Marik’s heated fear. “Keep your eyes meeting mine. You will be fine.”

  “How in the hells should I do that? With you dangling above me?”

  For answer, Colbey released the rope he held looped around his back via his left hand. He gripped the line firmly and swung his legs straight up. Somehow he wrapped his ankles around the rope, then terrified Marik into a near plunge by removing both his hands from the hemp.

  “Should you begin to slip, I will catch you,” Colbey explained, remaining stationary despite his hands waving free in the air. “But you must hurry, mage. We have no chance against this monster Xenos unless we strike him unawares.”

  Marik felt the perspiration slicking his hair. From its dampness he might have been swimming. Summoning his determination, he allowed the rope to slip through his hands, around his back. He dropped a foot, stopped, then slowly dropped the next.

  Colbey consistently remained within arms reach. His hands hovered inches from Marik’s, his decent controlled by an unnatural manipulation of pressure through his ankles. Rather than think about that, and worse, if the scout could actually hold his dead weight without falling as well, Marik kept his mind on the next inch, the next twist of hemp sliding through his fingers. The whole way he locked gazes with Colbey.

  He released the rope in shock when his back eventually struck the rough branch. It was wide as the paved center of Capitol Highway. His limbs lay spread-eagle, his clothing soaked. Sprawled there, perched above a bottomless chasm, his mail felt three times heavier than usual.

  “You should have gotten used to this climbing down from the Stoneseams,” Dietrik observed dispassionately.

  “We always
had our feet under us,” Marik spat back. “What lunatic would climb down a rope just to see if anything interesting was at the bottom?”

  “People who came from the other way,” Colbey replied. He gestured at the branch’s opposite end. “The first Guardians to explore this area found their way to the cliff from the Tangle.”

  Marik sat up enough to follow Colbey’s motion. Dietrik stood with arms folded, staring into the mess. As wide and tall as the bark cliff, massive tree branches were twined around each other in a fantastic disregard for gravity. Peering further than a dozen feet in was impossible due to the weaver’s catastrophe before them.

  To east and west, Marik could see down the eighty yard wide canyon to where blue sky met the impenetrable fog. Had he not known better, he could almost believe this wooden cliff and the worms’ tangle of branches opposite were perched atop a cloud.

  “We have made poor progress,” Colbey declared. “This marks only the halfway point between entrances.”

  “Shake your tail, mate. Our guide will leave us behind if we drag on him too much.”

  Marik reached his feet only after pushing himself up on all fours. His legs trembled alarmingly. “I thought that was your heart’s secret desire.”

  “Not a mile between nowhere and nothing. I doubt I could climb these ropes back to the top for one. And for the other, that looks worse than any blueblood’s hedge maze I’ve heard tell of.”

  “Yeah. As much up and down as lefts and rights.” His legs stubbornly refused to shift an inch.

  “I will leave you both if you do not make the effort,” Colbey called over one shoulder. Traces of the old irritation at all things non-Colbey had reappeared in his tone.

  Marik ensured that he stood exactly in the branch’s center before sliding a foot forward. Despite the width, the lack of handrails made movement feel especially treacherous. Bark scraped off from his grinding boot sole.