The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “The vine keeps going down,” said Neda, crouching, “and there’s another hole like this one, but smaller. And more fruit, too, I think.”

  Down they went. The third gap was indeed smaller, and there were but three fruits. And now it was truly dark. Since the holes were so far apart, no direct sunlight could reach them, only a dull, reflected glow, and small pinpricks of light along the cliff wall.

  Pazel bent over the third gap. A mix of pungent smells, earth and mold and rotting flowers, issued from it. He looked up at Hercól. “Time we lit one of those torches, don’t you think?”

  Hercól considered. “We have but six,” he said, “and each will burn but an hour—or less, if our swim in the Ansyndra has damaged them. But yes, we should light one now. We cannot go on blind.”

  “We dlömu are not blind, yet,” said Bolutu.

  “And we ixchel,” said Ensyl, “will not be blind until the darkness is nearly perfect. But if you light that torch it will dazzle us, and we will see no better than you.”

  “Let us go first, and report what we see,” said Myett.

  The others protested. “You can’t be serious,” said Thasha. “You don’t have any idea what’s down there.”

  “But we know a great deal about not getting caught,” said Ensyl. “More than any of you, in fact.”

  “Go then,” said Hercól, “but do not go far. Take a swift glance and return to us.”

  The two women started down, with the matchless agility of ixchel. They were lost to Pazel’s sight almost at once, but at his shoulder Ibjen whispered: “They are halfway to the next level. They are pausing, gazing at the space between. Now they are descending farther. They are upon the fourth level, and walking about. But what are they doing? They are going on! Hercól, they are leaving my sight!”

  “Fools!” whispered Hercól. Stepping onto the vine, he began to rush down after them. But then Ibjen hissed, “Wait! They’re returning.” And minutes later the ixchel were back beside them, unharmed.

  “We saw nothing threatening at all,” said Ensyl. “But we had two surprises. First, it is very hot, and hotter as you descend. Hot and wet.”

  “And the other surprise?” asked Neeps.

  The ixchel glanced at each other. “We reached the fourth level,” said Myett at last. “There is no fifth. The vine merely continues into the darkness. We crawled down it a short distance, but never caught sight of the floor.”

  “It can’t be much farther,” said Big Skip. “We’re down some seventy feet already from the rim. Drop a torch, I say. That’s how we’d explore the old silver mines at Octray, when I was a lad.”

  “You would only soak the torch,” said Ensyl, “and announce us to anyone or anything waiting below. Better to let us lead the way, and light it when we reach the bottom.”

  Now even the dlömu grumbled about “climbing blind.” Myett looked at them and laughed. “They don’t trust us, Ensyl,” she said in their own speech. “Not even the black giants want to put their lives in crawly hands.”

  She was forgetting Pazel’s Gift, or not caring that he heard. Impulsively, he said, “This is rubbish. They can see, we can’t. Let’s get on with it.”

  No one liked the plan, but no one had a better. They descended. After the fourth level Pazel could not even see the vine he clung to. He trod on Neda’s fingers, and Dastu trod on his. The silence was oppressive, and the heat more so. There was no breeze whatsoever, and the moist air felt like syrup in his lungs. “It goes deeper!” the ixchel kept saying, amazed.

  The sickly sweet odors grew alongside the heat. Pazel’s hands became slippery. He could not judge how far they had descended (even looking up he saw nothing, now), but a point came when he knew that it was much farther than the four leaf-levels combined, and still they went down and down.

  Finally Ensyl said what they had all been waiting for: “The bottom, at last! Watch your step, now! Great Mother, what are we standing in?”

  Pazel heard those below him exclaiming softly, and a squelching sound as they left the vine. He reached the ground himself: it felt like a heap of fishing nets: moist, fibrous, very strong.

  “Hot as midsummer in the marshes,” whispered the younger Turach.

  “Now is the time for that torch,” whispered Myett. “We are almost blind ourselves. This is not the darkness of a forest; it is the darkness of a tomb.”

  A scraping sound: Hercól was struggling with a match. Finally it caught, and Pazel watched the tiny flame lick the end of the oil torch. The match sputtered, nearly dying; then all at once the torch burst into light.

  Pazel gasped. They were in a forest of jewels, or feathers, or cloaks of colored stars. His eyes for several moments simply could not sort out all the hues and shapes and textures.

  “Plants, are they?” whispered Jalantri, wild-eyed, tensed like a cat.

  “Obviously,” hissed Dastu.

  The things grew all around them, some just inches tall, others towering overhead. The colors! They were hypnotic, dazzling. But the shapes were even stranger: branching sponges, serpentine trunks ending in mouths like sucker fish, bloated knobs, delicate orange fans. Bouquets of fingers. Clusters of long, flexing spoons.

  “They feel fleshy,” said Ibjen.

  “Don’t touch them, you daft babe!” said Alyash, smacking his hand.

  It was hard not to touch them, the things grew so thick and close. Pazel tried to look through the mass of petals, bulges, braided tentacles, feathery limbs, flaring blue, purple, green in the torchlight. They were even shedding color: rainbow droplets were falling and splattering everywhere, as though the things were exuding brilliant nectar or pollen from their pores.

  “Fireflies!” said Bolutu suddenly, and Pazel turned just in time to see them: a trail of blue sparks, whirling around Bolutu’s upraised hand, then speeding off to a cluster of growths beyond the torchlight, where they all winked out together. There were other insects, too: flying, crawling, wriggling, with bright reflective spots on wings or feelers. Only the fireflies, however, glowed with their own light, and they were already gone.

  Pazel wiped his forehead. The hot air wrapped him in a smothering embrace. Then he felt Ensyl scramble nimbly to his shoulder. “The ground is alive,” she said. “Have a look at your boots.”

  Muffled cries and curses: their feet were being embraced by pale, probing tendrils, wriggling up from the ground on all sides. They were easily broken, but relentless in their work. The scene might have been comic, if anyone had the heart to laugh: twenty figures shuffling in place, lifting one foot and then the other. “Pitfire, we can’t stay here,” said the older Turach.

  “Keep close to me,” said Hercól. Raising the torch, he set off in a straight line, forcing a path through the rubbery growths. The others fairly stampeded after him. They had not gone twenty steps when Pazel realized that they were no longer pushing through so many of the weird living things. Hercól stopped and turned to look back, and Pazel did the same.

  They had been standing in a thicket formed by the great vine. The growths surrounded it, grew atop it, buried it in their flesh. The vine snaked away across the forest floor, every inch of it covered with growths.

  “Like a reef back home,” said Neeps, “except that it’s so blary hot.”

  “It feels like the bottom of the sea,” said Pazel. “And this is just a clearing. Those growing things are still all around us.”

  “Other things, too,” said Big Skip. He pointed away from the cliff: white, rope-like strands were dangling there, from somewhere far above. They were thick as broom handles and segmented like worms, and they ended in coils a few feet above the ground.

  “There must be hundreds,” said Ensyl. “They go on and on into the forest.”

  “The plants seem hardly of this world,” said Neda, gaping.

  “Maybe they’re not plants at all,” said Pazel.

  “Well, naturally they’re plants, Muketch,” said the younger Turach. “What else, by Rin?”

  “M
ushrooms,” said Thasha.

  “Mushrooms?” Bolutu looked startled. “That could well be so. Fungus, molds, slimes—they all thrive in darkness. And moisture too, for that matter.”

  “And heat,” said Cayer Vispek. “But great devils, a whole forest of fungi?”

  “Not the trees,” said Thasha. “They’re plants, all right. That vine is a plant too, and there must be others. But most of these things—yes, I’m sure they’re mushrooms.”

  “Come here often, do you?” asked Alyash. “Summer picnics and such?”

  Thasha turned away, indifferent to his taunts. But Pazel touched her arm, trying in vain to get her attention. The familiar, faraway look was creeping back into her eyes.

  Neeps pointed off to the left. There the growths, though tall as apple trees, were the same parasol-shapes as any mushrooms of the North. “I guess that settles it,” he said.

  Hercól put his hand on Ildraquin. “Our quarry is motionless, but still far away. Let us form ranks and be off. Ibjen, bear the torch as you would bear no weapon. Stand in the center and hold it high. And to all of you: need I say that Alyash is right? You must touch nothing, if you can avoid it, and be ever on your guard.” He glanced back to where they had started. “The vine heads toward the center, and that is where we are bound. Let us follow it—safely to one side, of course—for as long as we may.”

  They left the cliff wall and started out over the spongy ground. The vine grew thicker still, and its load of outlandish growths even heavier. Soon it was less a vine they followed than a twisting, scaly wall, each section flaring brilliantly in the torchlight as they neared. It was very quiet. Nothing moved save a few tiny insects, and the root-tentacles snatching weakly at their boots. Pazel was soon gasping with heat. His leg too began to hurt, but when Thasha came to his aid he shook his head and whispered, “Not yet.”

  “Don’t ignore it,” she said, and gave his hand a squeeze. She marched ahead, fierce in her readiness for whatever was to come. As she had been just hours ago, in that so-much-gentler darkness, walking with him to the cedar tree. For an instant the wonder of their lovemaking came back to him, and he felt a wild need for her, a contempt for everything but the desire to be with her, far from these troubles, far even from their friends. The feeling appalled him with its selfishness.

  An hour passed. With every step they saw new beauties, new horrors. The crown of one mushroom was a miniature flower garden, each blossom smaller than a grape seed. Another mushroom was as large as a haystack, and twisted as they passed, aiming a hideous, hairy mouth in their direction. The great dangling worm-tendrils moved also, reaching slowly for an outstretched hand. When Ibjen brought the torch near, the tendril coiled like a snake into the darkness above. In some places the tendrils had reached the ground and taken root, so that one looked through them as through prison bars.

  Other vine-reefs descended from the unseen trees. Some they passed under; others lay upon the ground like the one they followed. Climbing them was an awkward business, for it was hard to find the solid vine beneath the fungal mass. And some of the mushrooms burned like nettles to the touch.

  Atop one of these reefs they suddenly came face to face with a pair of enormous, four-legged creatures, grazing placidly on the far side. Elephant-tall and milky white, they resembled giant sloths, but their backs were hidden under jointed shells. They had great lower mandibles with which they scooped up mushrooms, and gigantic eyes, which they pinched shut against the torchlight. Flapping their soft ears in vexation, they shuffled away from the vine.

  As the journey continued they met other creatures: graceful deer-like animals with serpentine necks; a waddling turtle that hissed at the dogs; and far more alarming, a swarm of bats the size of pumas that blasted like a storm through their midst, at eye level, and never brushed them with a wing tip. The bats settled on a gargantuan loop of vine and feasted on its melon-like fungi, before racing off into the perpetual night.

  “Fungivores, all of them!” said Bolutu. “They must rarely go hungry. I wonder if anything in this forest lives off meat?”

  “I do,” said Big Skip, “but I’ll settle for one of those fruits. How about it, Hercól? They smelled like blary ambrosia.”

  “Hold out a little longer,” said the swordsman, “we may find something better, after all. I was a fool not to kill that turtle.”

  A bit later they heard running water, but saw none. The sound grew louder, closer, and at last Neda bent to the ground and said, “It is under us. It is flowing beneath the roots.”

  After that they realized that they were often mere feet over a rushing stream. Once or twice the gap in the roots was wide enough for them to reach a hand inside. There they found the running water deliciously cool, and bathed their faces. But Hercól warned them not to dip their arms too deep, or to taste even a drop of the water. As soon as they left these gaps the heat swallowed them anew.

  They were on their second torch when they reached the base of one of the gigantic trees. It was a straight pillar, twelve or fourteen feet thick. Though painted with lichens its bark was paper-smooth, with no knobs or branchings as high as they could see.

  “We will not easily climb such a trunk,” said Cayer Vispek.

  “Myett and I could manage,” said Ensyl. “Those lichens will bear our weight.”

  Then they saw it: the vine they had followed from the start took root here, right at the base of the tree. Beyond it there was no clear path to follow.

  Hercól was unperturbed. “We will blaze a new trail,” he said. “Step up here, Neda, and count paces, and speak each time you reach twenty.”

  Sweating and stumbling, they moved on. Each time Neda spoke Ildraquin cut a deep slash at breast height in the nearest fungus. “What if we miss one, Stanapeth?” Alyash called out. “What if something eats them? This is lunacy, I say.”

  “The bosun’s right,” Pazel heard Myett say to Ensyl. “We should not have descended to the forest floor! We should be walking above, in the sunlight!”

  “And then?” asked Ensyl. “The sorcerer is not up in the sunlight. What if we had marched all day across the surface, only to find no way down?”

  “I do not want to die in this place, sister, on this giants’ quest. A reunion awaits me in Masalym.”

  “I do not want to die at all,” said Ensyl. “But Myett, be truthful with yourself: Taliktrum surely returned to the Chathrand, ere the ship departed?”

  “You do not know him as I do,” said Myett, “and you did not hear his words to Fiffengurt. Nothing will persuade him to return to the clan.”

  “Love might,” said Ensyl, “and I think you will have your reunion, however unlikely that appears. We are not defeated yet.”

  “Ensyl, you amaze me. Do you truly have such faith in them?”

  “In the humans?” said Ensyl, surprised. “Not all of them, of course. But in Hercól, and the tarboys and Thasha—yes, in them I have faith a-plenty. They have earned it. And besides that, I would honor … whatever made us unite. Even as we honor the founders of Ixphir House, what they lived and died for.”

  She knows I’m listening, thought Pazel, smiling. It was Diadrelu who brought us together, Ensyl. Your teacher, Hercól’s lover, my friend. Diadrelu who showed us the meaning of trust.

  Someone screamed.

  It was Alyash, Pazel realized a moment later. He was holding his head, reeling, smashing into the others. Then Pazel saw that there was something in the air, like a fine sawdust, trailing from his hands and head. Some of it drifted into the torch’s flame and crackled; some of it touched those nearest Alyash, and they too cried out.

  Alyash crashed away into the darkness, blind with pain, sweeping through the white ropes like curtains. The others charged in pursuit. Cayer Vispek and Neda managed to grab him after thirty feet or so, but it took the whole party to calm him down. “He was cutting extra notches,” said the older Turach. “He was afraid you weren’t marking the trail well enough. I was about to say something when he slashed one of
them fat yellow globs, and it exploded! Credek, I breathed that powder in myself, it burns like thundersnuff!”

  “I breathed it too,” said Ibjen. “What is thundersnuff?”

  “Something not to be toyed with,” said Hercól, “like the things that grow in this place. You are a fool, Alyash. Were you hacking any fungus in your path, or did you choose that one because it resembled a sack fit to burst?”

  Alyash’s eyes were streaming. “It stings, damn it—”

  “You’ll be lucky if the spores do only that,” said Bolutu.

  Alyash screamed at him: “What’s that supposed to mean, you damned bookish fish-eyed doctor to pigs?”

  With rare fury, Bolutu retorted: “These fish eyes see more than the little oysters in your face! I know! I had to use them for twenty years!”

  They were still bickering when Lunja gave a cry. “Indryth! Indryth is gone!” She was speaking of one of her comrades, a Masalym soldier.

  “He was right beside me!” shouted another. “He can’t have gone far!”

  “Fan out,” said Hercól. “Watch one another, not the forest alone. And do not take a single step beyond the torchlight!” Then he whirled. “Gods, no! Where is Sunderling? Where is Big Skip?”

  “Myett!” cried Ensyl. “She was with him, on his shoulder! Spiraké! Myett, Myett!”

  Three of their number had suddenly, silently vanished. The others turned in circles, casting about for foes. But there was nothing to be seen but the brilliant spots and stripes and whorls on the fungus.

  Then came a sickening sound of impact, not five feet from Pazel. A fungus like a glowing brain had suddenly been crushed, splattering all of them with slime. Out of the remains of the mushroom rolled Big Skip, both hands at his neck, barely able to breathe. Clinging desperately to his hair was Myett.

  Big Skip’s hand came away from his neck holding six feet of slippery white tendril, writhing like a snake. With a tortured gasp he hurled it away.