She knows I’m listening, thought Pazel, smiling. It was Diadrelu who brought us together, Ensyl. Your teacher, Hercol’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 Hercol, “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 Hercol. “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! Spirake! 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.
“A worm,” gagged Myett. “One of those dangling tendrils. It snatched him up by the throat. I was pinned against his neck, but my sword-arm was free, and I managed to saw through the thing. It was lifting us higher and higher.” Her eyes found the dlomu. “Your clan-brother is dead. Many worms seized his limbs; they were fighting over him. I am sorry. They tore him to pieces before my eyes.”
The dlomic soldiers cursed, their faces numb with shock. Big Skip drew an agonized breath. He did not look badly hurt, but he was frightened almost out of his wits. “Lost my knife, my knife-”
“You’re safe now, Sunderling,” said Hercol. At these words Jalantri actually giggled, earning him a furious stare from his master. Jalantri dropped his eyes, chastened, but a smile kept twitching on his face. What’s wrong with him? thought Pazel. Is that all the discipline they’re taught?
But Jalantri wasn’t alone in looking strange. The younger Turach kept glancing to the right, as though catching something with the corner of his eye. And Ibjen was staring at an insect on a frond, as though he had never seen anything more fascinating.
“Never mind your knife, Sunderling,” said Hercol. “We’ll find you a club. You showed us what you can do with one when we fought the rats.”
Big Skip stared up into the darkness. “The rats were easy, Hercol.”
They marched on. The gigantic trees were more numerous now. Pazel had barely cleared the slime from his face when the next torch died.
“Stanapeth!” hissed Alyash. “How much farther have we got to march into this hellish hole?”
Hercol did not answer, but Pazel heard him searching carefully for the matches. Pazel realized that his heart was still racing exceptionally fast. It was not just the heat, he realized-the darkness, the darkness was worse. It had begun to affect him like something tangible, like a smothering substance in which they could drown. Suddenly he thought of the Master Teller’s strange words to him in Vasparhaven: You need practice with the dark. Surely this was what the old dlomu had meant. But the Floor of Echoes had done him no harm, and the last encounter had even been wonderful.
Perhaps that was the point: that the darkness could hide joyful things as well as danger, love as well as hate and death. Yet when he had reached for that woman with love she had vanished, and the world they’d supported between them had been destroyed.
The third torch lit. Hercol looked at Alyash. “We should arrive within the hour, to answer your question. That will leave us three torches to return by, if our work goes swiftly.”
“Our work is the killing of a deadly foe,” said Cayer Vispek. “It may not be swift at all.”
“Then we will find which of these mushrooms best holds a flame,” said Hercol.
Off they started again. The ground descended, slowly; the water gurgling underfoot sounded nearer the surface. The heat, if possible, grew more intense; Pazel felt as if he were entangled in steaming rags. His leg throbbed worse than ever, and now he let Thasha support him, though walking together was hard on such treacherous ground.
“We have to stop and clean that wound,” she said.
“Not when we’re this close,” he replied.
“Stubborn fool,” she whispered. “All right, then, tell me something: your Master-Word. The one that blinds to give new sight. Could it help us, when the torches run out? Could that be the sort of thing it was meant for?”
Pazel had expected the question. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Thasha, but I’m sure it’s not. Ramachni said I’d have a feeling, when the time was right. And it feels completely wrong, here-like it would be a disaster, in fact. I don’t think it’s about literal blindness.”
“Ah,” she said. “I see.”
He could hear the effort she was making, trying not to sound crushed by his answer. She was desperate. The thought jabbed him like a splinter, much harder to ignore than the pain in his leg. And that was love, surely: when you could stand your own suffering but not another’s.
Neeps fell into step beside them. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something wrong with me.”
Pazel turned to him, alarmed. “What’s the matter, Neeps? How do you feel?”
“Easy, mate,” murmured Neeps. “It’s probably nothing, just… well, damn it! I keep hearing her.”
“Her?” said Thasha. “Do you mean… Marila?”
“Blary right,” said Neeps, shaken. “And someone else, too, with her. Some man. He’s laughing at her, or at me.”
Thasha touched his forehead. “You’re not feverish. You’re just worked up, probably.”
“I think it’s Raffa,” whispered Neeps, almost inaudibly.
Raffa was the person Neeps hated most in Alifros: his older brother, who had let him be taken away into servitude by the Arquali navy rather than pay the cost they demanded for his release. “I know it isn’t real,” he said, “but it sounds so real. Pazel, Thasha-what’s happening to me? Am I losing my mind?”
“No!” said Thasha. “You’re exhausted, and hungry, and sick of the dark.” She slapped his cheek lightly. “You stay awake, and calm, do you hear me? Pretend we’re in fighting-class back in the stateroom. And what’s the rule in class, Neeps? Tell me.”