An end came to the bickering. This was new territory to all of them, and with every passing mile the landscape was turning stranger and more menacing. The roadway had diminished until it was hardly more than an unpaved track, barely wide enough to let the floaters go through. In places it was completely overgrown, and they had to halt and cut a path for themselves with their energy-throwers. And then, after a time, there seemed to be no road at all, and it was necessary to have the floaters bull their way onward by main force, with frequent interruptions while they hacked at vines or even trees that blocked all forward access.
There was no rain here, but this country was more humid, even, than Kajith Kabulon had been. A perpetual steamy fog prevailed everywhere. The ground itself exuded moist vapor, belching steam upward at the merest touch of the sun’s rays. Shrouds of furry parasitic plants dangled from every branch of every tree. And the trees themselves were nightmarish things. One, that seemed to create forests all by itself, sent up thousands of slim vertical shoots from a single thick horizontal stem that ran like a black cable along the ground for close to a mile. Another grew with its roots facing upward, rising ten or fifteen feet out of the ground and waving about as though trolling for passing birds. There was a third kind that seemed to have melted and run at the base, for its trunk emerged from a swollen woody mass, a kind of botanical tumor, at least fifty feet across and taller than the tallest man.
These were mere oddities, though, curious and strange, that posed no dangers for the travelers. And there were others that were actually charming in their peculiarities, like the tree whose multitudes of brilliant yellow flowers dangled at the ends of long ropes, like so many lanterns, or the one of somewhat similar structure whose suspended blue-gray seed-pods clanged in the breeze to make a pleasant tinkling sound. A little way onward they came to a huge grove of trees that entered into bloom all at the same moment, at sunrise. It was Septach Melayn, rising early, who saw it happen. “Look at this!” he cried, awakening the others, as giant crimson blossoms began opening everywhere at once around them, creating a symphony of color, a single great chord. All day long they passed through this wondrous forest of flowering trees; but at twilight the petals began to drop with the same singleness of timing as had marked their unfolding, and by dawn they all were fallen and the ground had become a carpet of pink.
But as the expedition proceeded westward such moments of beauty came further and further apart, and what they encountered now seemed increasingly threatening.
First came a few manculains, creeping about sullenly in the underbrush: solitary long-nosed many-legged creatures, sluggish and timid, with narrow red ears. They were covered all over by long yellow spines sharp as stilettos whose black tips, breaking off easily at the lightest touch, or, seemingly, only at a glance, could burrow deep into your flesh as though they had minds and volition of their own.
Then some round hairy insects with double rows of malevolent eyes were seen feeding on a small mikkinong that had injured one of its fragile legs: they reduced it to picked bones in mere moments. And then, in an open place in the forest, the travelers met a hovering swarm of energy-creatures, each one a brilliant white flash no bigger than one’s thumb. When they realized that they had been seen, they quickly elongated into horizontal forms two yards long that danced about in the air in unattainable groups a hundred yards away. One unwary officer drew too close to them and they fell on him with a wild buzzing sound of glee, surrounding him in such numbers that he could not be seen at all within that cloud of zigging streaks of light, and when they withdrew from him nothing remained but blackened cinders.
The energy-creatures did not reappear. But the heat and humidity, which had been overwhelming from the moment of the expedition’s entry into the peninsula, increased with every mile. They were not far from the coast, now. The breeze here blew straight from Suvrael, so that the southern continent’s searing blowtorch heat mingled with the vapors rising from the warm sea that separated the continents and turned the air of the Stoienzar’s maritime lowlands into a salty soup.
Bugs of all sorts grew huge and mighty here: meaty things with bristly legs and clacking jaws, crawling about everywhere over the moist sandy muck that passed for soil in this place. The first swamp-crabs came into view, also, baleful purple-domed crustaceans of tremendous size resting half-submerged in the marshy ground. Here, too, were groves of the celebrated animal-plants of Stoienzar, things that were rooted permanently in place and manufactured their food by photosynthesis, but which had fleshy arms that slowly moved about, and rows of shining eyes about the upper section of their tubular bodies, and slit-like mouths below. They came in all sizes, and swung about in an unsettling way to stare at the travelers as their floaters passed by. They would, said Galielber Dorn, seize and devour any small animal that came within reach of their grasping hands.
“We should torch them all,” Gialaurys muttered, shuddering.
But they knew they would need their energy-throwers for more immediate purposes. This was the land, now, of the manganoza palms, ungainly slouching trees that grew one up against the next with so little space between that they formed a well-nigh impenetrable wall. These trees had clusters of long, arching feather-like leaves, lined along every edge with astonishingly sharp-edged crystalline cells. The slightest breeze was enough to make these leaves stir and flutter about. It took no more than a glancing touch to draw blood; a harder gust of wind and the trees were capable of lopping off hands, arms, even heads.
Now the journey became truly appalling. There no longer was any road at all, and the only way to penetrate the saw-palm forest was to get out of the floaters and blow a pathway through it with energy-weapons. But every such blast expended here was one less that could be used against the forces of Dantirya Sambail.
Eventually, thought Septach Melayn, it would come down to the necessity of having to advance through this stuff on foot, prepared for ambush and hand-to-hand combat with the Procurator’s men at any moment. And, he reflected, they must know this country well by now, whereas we are strangers in it. In every way the advantage lay with them.
But he kept his misgivings to himself. All that he said aloud was, “This is the perfect place for Dantirya Sambail to have chosen as his camp. His kind of place exactly: everything here is as stubborn and vile and dangerous as he is himself.”
11
In Stoien City it was still at least an hour before dawn. Prestimion had scarcely slept at all. He stood now at the great curving window of his bedroom atop the Crystal Pavilion, staring intently eastward as though by the force of his gaze alone he could somehow hurry the rising of the sun.
Out there in the east, hidden from him now by the darkness that lay like a shroud across western Alhanroel, the future of Majipoor was being shaped. The history of the reign of the Coronal Lord Prestimion was being written. The entire course of the period that would bear his name was going to be determined in the next few weeks. And somehow he was here in Stoien, thousands of miles from the scene of action, passively allowing others to act in his name. He was a marginal player in his own destiny. How had he contrived to allow that to happen?
There was Dantirya Sambail, huddling like a malign spider at the center of the web he had spun for himself in the ferocious jungles of the Stoienzar Peninsula, preparing to launch whatever campaign of subversion and disruption he had been hatching since his escape from the Sangamor tunnels. And there were Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and Navigorn hacking their way toward him through those jungles from the west at the head of one armed force, while a second band of soldiers was moving eastward across the same peninsula to the same destination—an army that the Coronal himself should be leading, or, at the worst, Akbalik or Abrigant, but which was instead commanded by some Pontifical captain whose name Prestimion could not seem to remember more than two days running.