'What's happening?' someone called to her, fraying with hysteria.
'Lucia will see us through,' she replied, with more conviction than she felt. 'Wait.'
She glanced back at where Lucia knelt. There was another shriek somewhere among the trees, cut short. She squeezed her eyes shut – which did nothing to block her Weave-vision – and prayed. The spirits were looming now, nightmare caricatures of childhood terrors, prowling between the trunks of the trees, stalking the humans. Kaiku desperately wanted to lash out; maybe she could ward them off, make them think twice about their prey. But to do so would mean the death of them all, for whatever Lucia was saying to them, her negotiations would collapse at the first sign of hostility from Kaiku.
'Stand still and wait!' she said again, because she could not bear the silence. The Tkiurathi had not moved. Asara was nowhere to be seen. And seeping towards them like mist came the spirits, their forms now shifting and warping as they moved, bending perspective to become elongated, then suddenly two-dimensional, now folding around a tree at an angle that had not seemed possible a moment before.
Closer, closer. Close enough to kill any one of them.
Something slackened, some constriction in the air that went loose. The oppressive hatred of the spirits seemed to retreat. Kaiku looked to Lucia, but there was no outward reaction from her. The spirits hung where they were. Some of them had risen up by their intended victims like malevolent shadows about to snatch the bodies that formed them. She dared not breathe. Here, at this instant, was the balance. If it tipped one way, they would all live; if the other, she would have no option but to fight, and there would be no hope for them then.
Then the forest sighed, and the spirits began to float backwards and away, bright eyes still fixed on the humans as they slipped between the trunks of the trees. Kaiku let out the breath she had been holding. The horrifying shapes were losing coherence now, dissipating into the Weave. And with their passing, the sense of malice and danger faded and the light returned. Slowly and by degrees, vision returned to them. It was like waking from a dream.
They stared at one another gratefully, their eyes thirsty for sight. Guilt and confusion flickered across their faces as they were revealed: some were caught still cringing, others brandished swords inches from their companions. All were ashamed of their fear. Those who had moved about or fallen over reoriented themselves, blinking. The Tkiurathi rose slowly to their feet. Asara reappeared, stepping into view from where she had hidden herself.
The forest had lightened back to normal now; Nuki's eye glowed through the canopy, and the world was green and brown and sane again. The silence was as great as before, but the spirits were gone.
Lucia stood up slowly, her hands still dirty. She looked around, but her gaze passed over them as if they were not there.
'They will give us passage,' she said simply.
Phaeca began to cry. They went on, for there was little else to do; but their fragile confidence was shattered, and they crept like skulking children beneath the louring boughs of the forest.
Two of the soldiers had been lost in the darkness, vanished without trace. Had Lucia not been there, none of them would have been alive now. Far from reassuring them of their faith in their appointed saviour, the incident had reminded them of just how slender their chances really were. Even the Weavers were better than this: at least they were a physical enemy. In the Forest of Xu, they were allowed to survive only because the spirits chose not to kill them. If anything happened to Lucia, they would never leave this place.
Kaiku's thoughts were darker still. For she knew something the others did not, and it made matters worse than they already were.
'We're still not safe here,' Lucia had said in response to her prompting, once they were back on their way. 'These spirits suffer us to pass, but there are others that won't.'
Kaiku checked that there was nobody else within earshot. 'What are you saying?'
'As we go further towards the heart, we will find older spirits,' Lucia replied. 'They will not be so easily pacified.'
Kaiku was observing the shaken expressions on the faces of the party.
'Perhaps you had better keep that to yourself for now,' she muttered, hating herself for advocating dishonesty. 'For a while, at least.'
Lucia made a distracted noise, and seemed to forget that Kaiku was there at all.
Kaiku had walked with Phaeca for a time: she was affected worst of all of them. It hurt to see her in such a state, but some callous part of Kaiku wished that she had not been so indiscreet about her distress. Heart's blood, she was supposed to be a Sister. These people needed to believe that she was indomitable. Her own weakness was infecting the others, undermining everyone. She was concerned that Phaeca might pick up some of the impatience in her manner, but if she did, she said nothing.
As the day aged through evening to dusk, the forest became strange.
The change was slow and gradual. At first it was only an occasional incident: an unfamiliar flower, or a tree that looked odd. Then they found a remarkable rock that poked from the turf, a brilliant silvery lump of some kind of metallic mineral. Later they came across a cluster of dark magenta blossoms which nobody could identify, and a tree whose branches wrapped through the branches of other trees, twisting like vines. The green of their surroundings deepened and became mixed with purple and platinum.
Heading deeper into the forest, they began to see animals, silent and watchful, some unlike anything they had ever observed before. One of the soldiers swore that he had seen a white creature like a deer, out in the trees. Asara spotted a long-legged spider, carapaced like a crab and as high as a man's knee, sidling from its burrow. The terrain became rougher, hills and cliffs rising, ghylls and ditches deepening into chasms.
The sky was a sullen crimson when the leader of the party, a middle-aged Libera Dramach man known as Doja, called for a camp. The spot he chose was on the grassy lip of a stony gorge, where the trees drew back and left a fringe of clear ground, a gentle slope between the forest and the dizzying drop, where there was mercifully no canopy to hem them in. Iridima was visible through the translucent veils of colour still hanging across the ceiling of the night. On the other side of the gorge there was a narrow and immensely high waterfall. The water was carved into three uneven streams by red-veined rocks, and plunged in thin, misty strings, joining together again halfway down in their rush to the river below.
When the camp was made, Kaiku stood on the edge of the precipice and looked down into the gorge. What river was this? A tributary of the Ko? Where was the source, and where did it end? Had anyone in living memory ever looked upon it until now? This river had flowed here, perhaps for thousands of years, and nobody had known it. If not for Lucia, it might have flowed for thousands more, untroubled by humanity.
She gazed into the middle distance, saddened by the indifference of the world. How small they were in the eyes of creation, how petty their struggles. The spirits guarded their territories, the moons glided through the skies, the seas remained bottomless. Nature did not care for the plight of humankind. She began to wonder if Lucia's task was not an impossible one after all. Could she really rouse the spirits, even to protect themselves? Did even the gods take notice of how they fought and died?
She turned away from the gorge. Such thoughts would only make her despair. And yet the idea of returning to the camp held no attraction for her, either. The party was subdued, still reeling from how easily they had been overcome. Asara was there; Kaiku was avoiding her as best she could. Phaeca was a wreck that she did not want to deal with. She did not feel like talking to Tsata or the Tkiurathi, either: somehow, what she felt was too private to try to explain to them.