Vaasurri cast a cursory glance across the flat plain, shaking his head.
“We cannot defend this,” he muttered just above the wind.
“All the more reason to take what advantage we can,” Uthalion said. His voice had taken on a commanding, edgy tone, more like the cold soldier he’d been when Vaasurri had found him wandering the Spur. “Any estimate on numbers?”
“Perhaps two, at least,” Vaasurri said as he squinted, trying to make out the trees that didn’t quite fit the natural order of the others. “Though I don’t suspect the numbers mean much until we know what we’re up against.”
Uthalion increased his speed again, forcing Vaasurri and Ghaelya to catch up. Brindani had fallen behind several strides, seemingly oblivious to their conversation. The wind picked up, its howl becoming a rising and falling moan as the Lash’s constant storm whirled faster.
“You don’t remember any of this your first time through here?” Ghaelya fairly yelled as she leaned into the wind, her cloak whipping around her shoulders.
“It was dark,” Uthalion answered, barely loud enough to be heard. “I lost a few men, and didn’t have time to stop and investigate.”
Vaasurri noticed a few trees seemed to have changed their positions, though he couldn’t be as sure as he wanted to be. The wind obscured his line of sight, and the smallest blink was confusing as he readjusted and tried to focus.
“How close are we to the ruins?” he asked.
Uthalion’s reply was cut off as a strange clicking sound joined the moaning wind. Random at first, it quickly grew rhythmic and strong, something more than mere chance. Vaasurri had an image of bugs on the march, tiny voices chanting a cadence in a singsong melody.
“Too close,” Uthalion answered at length and tapped the blade of his sword, a reflexive, if unnecessary, signal to be ready as they searched for the direction of the new sound. “Is Brin with us?”
Vaasurri glanced back swiftly, his hood fluttering across his face as he eyed the trudging stride of the half-elf and shook his head. Something about Brindani made him nervous, and he wondered if the half-elf’s stride was actually moving in time to the clicking tempo on the wind.
“He’ll catch up,” he said, uncertain if his words should be construed as hopeful or a looming threat.
The insectlike clicks became a buzz, whirring with the gale and forming new sounds. They organized themselves yet again into more intelligent, sentient patterns that drew Vaasurri’s attention away from Brindani and back to the path ahead. As he strained to listen, to make sense of the murmuring wind, he heard the slow coalescing of syllables gathering to form a word.
Ghaelya …
“What?” she blurted out, stopping and drawing her sword.
Her heart hammered in her chest as she turned in a circle, listening carefully and hoping it had been merely a trick of the wind. The buzzing devolved into rapid clicking and back again, each little sound floating around her like puzzle pieces falling inexorably into place. They sounded like the myriad ravings of a mad mind, making sense only occasionally, and then only to minds just as mad.
Uthalion and Vaasurri had stopped as well, listening and watching, before turning to her questioningly.
“You heard that?” she asked, flooded with a relief almost as powerful as the anxiety that had kept her sword raised, waiting for an inevitable attack.
Uthalion raised an eyebrow, tilted his head, and appeared about to speak, but Vaasurri answered first with words that turned her blood to ice.
“There,” he said simply, nodding as he gestured to the path behind them.
Ghaelya turned swiftly, staring in shock as she froze into a guarded position. She caught the hiss of drawn blades as Vaasurri and Uthalion turned alongside her.
Brindani stood perfectly still, his hood thrown back and his head lowered, but his eyes fixed on her, glinting with a strange and alien light. Ghaelya had seen men affected by sorcery in Airspur, their wills taken away either willingly for amusing street-shows or forcefully by wizards hired to collect unpaid debts from clients of the Lower District’s more unscrupulous business owners. Brindani had the look of a man who had taken leave of himself, one who had been mastered by something beyond his control.
In a rough half circle close behind him stood three bone-trees that effectively blocked the path, rooted loosely in ground they had walked upon just moments before. Over twice as tall as the seemingly enthralled half-elf, the trees and their bare branches shivered unnaturally in the wind, like puppets on taut invisible strings, playacting for the benefit of an audience. Their bark was smooth and shiny, showing no grain or knots, no natural trait of any kind.
Ghaelya barely repressed a shudder, sensing in the trees an ominous, hungry presence that was far more aware of her than she was comfortable with.
“Brin,” Uthalion said, taking a cautious step forward. He raised a steadying hand as he stared down the half-elf. “Very slowly Brin, just come toward-”
“Hush,” Brindani said in a whisper that rushed over Ghaelya like rolling thunder, a sibilant hiss drawn out until it merged with the wind and the buzzing clicks. “Can’t you hear them?”
Ghaelya took a step back, glancing nervously at Uthalion as the human took yet another step forward. Uthalion remained cool and stern, his stony gaze unwavering.
“Hear what Brin?” Uthalion asked, drawing closer. “What do you hear?”
Several crooked branches twitched in opposite directions to the driving wind, their sharp tips dipping like the flexing claws of a predator about to pounce on its prey.
“They sing, Uthalion,” Brindani answered and swayed slightly, his eyelids fluttering wistfully as the buzzing undulated in languid waves of sound. He shook his head, wincing as if in pain, and added in a strained voice, “They ask me why I am still here, why I have not yet delivered the twin …”
Ghaelya …
Brindani cried out in sudden pain, clutching the side of his head as he reached for his sword. Ghaelya’s breath caught in her throat at the sound of her name again, the word rising out of the dark rhythm with a longing that seemed to reach for her with grasping hands. White branches creaked, snapping as they bent to the ground in awkward segments.
“Step away from the trees, Brin,” Uthalion said, a little louder now, more commanding. He repeated the half-elf’s name each time he spoke as if to draw Brindani out of his strange trance, to remind him of who he was. “Don’t listen to them!”
Bright blue flashes caught Ghaelya’s eye, popping in the distance and dotting the ground in small clumps. The blue flowers, barely buds when they’d begun crossing the Lash, were blossoming with ghostly blue light, tiny arcs of energy darting through their thick petals as thunder rumbled overhead.
“They are calling for her,” Brindani said suddenly through clenched teeth, drawing his sword and eyeing Ghaelya threateningly. “Singing for her …”
“He’s gone,” Vaasurri yelled over the wind and edged closer to Uthalion. “Leave him!”
“No!” Uthalion replied angrily and stepped closer still, refusing to give up on the half-elf.
“Not one of you!” Brindani growled as the trees shifted, shaking from their roots to the tips of their branches. Their white, unnatural bark wavered, rippling like a mirage as deep cracks appeared in their trunks, growing and splitting as thunder roared through the sky. Brindani’s voice joined the cacophony, “I am not one of you!”
The deep cracks spread through the trees in long curving lines. The rippling bark smoothed out, revealing large, bulbous knots that squirmed against one another. Long branches fell into well-ordered groups, gathering beneath the bulges and falling away from one another in a scampering tangle of limbs and skittering bodies. Shining blue eyes sprouted like gems above screeching sets of long mandibles and circular mouths set with rows of triangular teeth. Tiny, handlike claws pawed at the ground beneath the large, white spiders as they separated into groups, abandoning their treelike illusions.