To start with, it's pretty impressive to see a grown man lift himself into a perch using one hand. But, more importantly, it meant he was probably safe now. The Bargainers didn't carry swords or axes or arrows; if they tried to climb up he could probably knock them off as they came. And the forest was so dense, he could go from tree to tree if he wanted to escape his pursuers on the ground.
Of course, it was also tough luck for me. Even if I had been able to hold off the Bargainers surrounding me, I wouldn't be able to fight the whole crowd. But I had known I was taking a risk coming into the wood. The stray was safe-that was the reason I had taken my risk-but he might not know it.
"You're all right!" I shouted at the stray. "Stay up there until dawn and they'll go away!"
The stray looked at me, right at me with those gray eyes that pierced like spear points. Then he scanned the clearing, looking at the Bargainers drifting away from the tree and toward me.
"Stay up there!" I shouted desperately. I was afraid he'd throw his safety away in a futile attempt to assist me. "I'm done! You're not! You can't help me!"
He sheathed his sword and braced his back against the tree trunk.
I had to duck from a club launched at me by a Bargainer, so I didn't see what happened next.
But I heard it. I heard part of it, anyway. It was a sound impossible to hear, but audible just the same. A word, spoken in a human voice, but a word that resonated with power, a bright black hammer of a word. I passed out before the word was finished.
When I came to myself I was lying in the clearing. Someone was moving about nearby. I struggled groggily to my feet and reached for a weapon.
But there was no need: the only person moving about was the stray. He was binding the hands of the Bargainers, who were strewn unconscious about the clearing.
"Good evening," he said, nodding toward me as his hands worked ceaselessly. "You might stand by to clop a few of these fellows on the head, if they start waking up before I can bind them. They should be coming out of it soon."
"It?" I said, picking up my truncheon.
"I spoke one of the Silent Words. Your helmet shielded you from some of it, so you woke up sooner, but these others aren't dead. They're just stunned, as you were. I am Morlock Ambrosius, by the way." He glanced directly at me, as if to see whether I recognized the name.
I didn't, so I just told him mine in return. Then I added hesitantly, "Um. Strictly speaking, I should kill these Bargainers."
"Oh?" Morlock didn't seem surprised-it was hard to read his expression, for a fact-but he didn't seem inclined to cooperate, either.
"Or I could herd them to Caroc Castle when they awake. It would be tricky work, but just possible."
"What would happen to them there?"
"They'd be killed."
Morlock shook his head. "I don't know what lies between your people and theirs, but I can't stand here while you kill"-he glanced around the clearing-"forty-seven people."
"It doesn't appeal to me, either," I grumbled. "Then I'd have to haul them out, or burn the bodies…. Let's just bind them and leave them. It's not the first Rule I've ever broken."
Somehow Morlock's face indicated approval without changing expression in the slightest. We bound the rest of the Bargainers (clubbing them into unconsciousness as necessary), Morlock recovered his pack and bedroll from the campsite, and we buried the fire in moist earth.
I led the way back to the Road. At first I thought that I had reached the wrong part-it's easy to lose your way in the woods after dark, and Liskin and my horse weren't anywhere to be found.
But there was some fresh horse dung on the Road, as if more than one horse had been there for a while recently. And I did recognize the place.
"Liskin, you worm," I muttered to myself.
"Liskin?"
"My partner. I left him holding my horse when I saw your campfire from the Road." I gestured at the horse crap on the Road. "Some of that's probably his."
"So we walk."
"Right." I thought about going back for the three bodies of the Bargainers I had killed and decided against it. There was no way we could bring those corpses out without a horse, and if we tried to burn them needletoothed Bargainers would come like moths out of the wood. Much as I hated to, I'd just have to leave the Enemy a little snack tonight.
"You should dump some of that iron," Morlock suggested, gesturing at my armor. "You'll move faster."
"I'm used to it. Besides, I can't leave a Rider's armor on the Road-some Bargainer might find it and use it to trick someone."
Morlock nodded, and we started down the Road. Morlock kept his eyes on the right side of the Road, I watched the left, and every now and then one of us looked over his shoulder to check the Road behind us.
"These Bargainers," Morlock said presently, "they live in the wood?"
"Yes."
"Why are you at war with them?"
"They serve the Enemy who lives in the wood, the Boneless One. They take us, when they can, to feed it. We kill them, when we can, to prevent that." I gnawed my lip. "I should have done something about those damn Bargainers. I don't know why it made a difference that there were so many. They'd've taken forty-seven of us and bragged about it afterward."
"Probably," Morlock agreed flatly. I glanced at him, but his eyes were scanning the roadside. He seemed neither skeptical nor surprised to find people preying on each other the way the Bargainers did on us.
He seemed to be a pretty reasonable person. I wanted to ask him why he'd been talking so crazily when I first spoke to him, but I didn't want to insult him. "What's talic stranj?" I asked, eventually.
His grim face twisted in a one-sided grin. "You're wondering whether I'm crazy."
There didn't seem to be any point in denying it. "Yes."
"Some people who are crazy can't stay in their own heads. They keep drifting into other people's, or abroad in the world. Have you ever known anyone like that?"
"No. I haven't known that many crazy people."
"There can't be too many people like that in these woods. Your Whisperer-"
"He's not mine."
"-he would eat them, I think. But I was trained by such a person to ascend to the rapture of vision and see all three phases of the world."
"Uh-huh. Three phases?" I was getting nervous again. Walking through woods thick with Bargainers, with the Enemy lurking unseen, was bad enough; I didn't like adding a crazy Coranian to the mix.
He shrugged his wry shoulders and said, "Hear me out and decide if I'm crazy. There are matter and spirit, yes? The things we see and feel and touch, and the minds that lie behind them."
"All right. Say there are."
"But how does dead matter impinge on a living mind? How does a living mind make dead matter respond?"
"You tell me."
"Through the middle phase: tal. Tal is the medium through which the spirit realm takes action in the world of matter and the medium through which matter affects the spirit."
"So ghosts-"
"Not just ghosts. People. Squirrels. Dogs. Bugs. Any entity that can take volitional action in the material world is a fusion of three bodies: material, talic, and spiritual. Physical death occurs when tal is no longer able to unite matter and spirit. In rapture I can ascend from material perception to talic perception, with at least a glimpse of the spiritual realm beyond."
"Hm. Not my line of work."
He laughed, surprising me. "Yes it is." He waved his hand at the road. "You collect dead bodies-"
"When someone doesn't run off with my horse."
11 -and people in the woods. Why?"
"So that the Enemy won't eat them. What's good for him is bad for us."
"What do you suppose the Enemy eats?"
"You're telling me you know?"
"I do know. I sensed its specific hunger when I was in rapture. It feeds on tal. The tal of living beings, men and women, when it can. A living consciousness is haloed in tal. But the dead still possess tal, which will fade over time, like the heat of a dead body."