And then he realized what the tone was. Fear. The Hunter was afraid.
“You want to go on?” he asked. Suddenly not so sure himself.
Tarrant nodded. “It’s still far off. Perhaps if we get closer I can read its source. Let’s hope.”
He swung himself back up onto his horse’s back. Damien expected him to move his mount forward, and prepared to urge his own horse to follow. But Tarrant turned back to them instead, twisting about in the black leather saddle.
“There’s something else,” he told them. “Something I don’t understand at all. I sensed very clearly that there was human life in this valley, somewhere to the south of us.”
“That trace should be growing stronger as we travel toward it. A simple Knowing should reveal it.” He shook his head in frustration; his fine hair, mist-dampened, glistened in the lamplight. “It’s not there now,” he muttered.
“What? The trace?”
“Anything. Any sign of humanity. It’s as if no other humans were in these woods—as if no other humans have ever been in these woods. But I know that’s not the case. It simply can’t be.”
“An Obscuring?” Damien asked. “If a band of hostile humans wanted to hide themselves—”
“No.” He shook his head sharply, almost angrily. “Even that would leave a trace. A kind of echo, which should still be discernible. No, it’s as if . . . as if they ceased to exist, somehow. As if they ceased to ever have existed.”
“Are you sure of that?” Hesseth demanded.
He glared at her. “Do you doubt my skills?”
“You were misled in the rakhlands,” she reminded him.
The Hunter’s expression darkened. “I’m not a fool, you know. I do learn from my mistakes.” Anger flared coldly in his eyes. “I’m not saying there isn’t more to this than meets the eye. If human sorcery were a simple affair, then any idiot could guard himself against it. Obviously, anything I see in the currents might have been put there for our benefit. But all Workings leave some mark, even a mis-Knowing; now that I know to look for such things, I’m hardly likely to miss it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. By the tension in her body Damien could tell just how much those words were costing her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Obscure us if you can,” he said shortly. And he kneed his horse into sudden motion, so that it practically leapt ahead into the mist.
They traveled for over an hour through the fog-shrouded woodland, until their hair and their clothing and the horse’s flesh beneath them were all damp from the omnipresent moisture. With the day’s miserly warmth long gone from the earth the air grew more and more chill, the mist more and more icy. They moved at a slow but steady pace, and Damien and Hesseth took turns walking so as not to push their communal horse past endurance. If the day had been pleasant, the exercise would have been welcome; as it was, he was glad when at last Tarrant signaled for a break.
He brushed the horse down a bit, more to reassure it than for any other reason; there was no real hope of getting the animal dry. It was more a ritual of normalcy than anything else, a chore so automatic that his mind could wander while his muscles worked. Trying to untangle Tarrant’s words in his own mind, to come up with an explanation of who or what might be ahead of them . . . but if the Neocount of Merentha couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation, how could he hope to?
We need more information, he thought. And he prayed that the information would come to them before the danger with which it was surely allied.
They rested and ate in silence, and in silence they remounted and resumed their course. Tarrant led the way. Damien sensed a growing unease in him—dare he call it fear?—but he had no way to address the issue, no safe way to draw him out on it. They would just have to function in ignorance until the Neocount decided that it was time to share his fears.
The forest changed as they traveled farther south. Subtly at first, one species of tree giving way to another, one type of clinging vine giving way to its cousin. It was hard to say exactly where or when the flora began to seem threatening, or to pinpoint what was wrong with it. All the elements of a normal forest were in place, along with the smell of rot and a hundred varieties of mold that the omnipresent mist fostered. If anything, it should be a surprise that plant life growing under these conditions should seem so normal.
Now vines proliferated, and they were not the healthy green vines of home. Thick ropy stems twined about the trunks of trees, sprouting spongy leaves that looked like some kind of fungus. They were not even green, these vines, but a kind of ghostly white that shimmered wetly in the party’s lamplight. Damien went out of his way to see that the mare didn’t touch them. In some places they had grown so thick that a mat of tangled vines hung between the trees like sheets, and small mantled insects scurried in between the knots and the funguslike leaves. Toward the treetops the vines took on a green cast, but that was because they had sucked the color from their hosts; dead branches swayed in the chill night breeze, moldy bark fingers with white leaves at their tips. The whole of it reeked of rot and decay, and Damien had no doubt that thousands of tiny scavengers were eating their way through the dying trees’ flesh, so that all that was left in the end was a ghostly shell, a husk of dead bark, a grotesque trellis for the clinging vines.
It’s just nature, he told himself. Species have adapted to meet the special demands of this place. But that didn’t seem right, somehow. Tarrant’s Forest had been horrible, but all the elements were interlocked in perfect biological harmony; you could sense that balance, even though you were repelled by its tenor. But here . . . there was too much death, he decided. Too much decay. It was as if Nature’s precious balance had somehow been overburdened, as if something had been introduced or removed—or changed—that threw the whole system out of kilter. What would the vines feed on when all their hosts were dead? They rode past dense mats of tangled vines, that covered their trees like a blanket. What happened when that growth became so thick that sunshine could no longer reach the host tree’s leaves? If one listened closely enough, could one hear the sounds of a forest dying? The moans of an ecosystem in collapse? The thought of it made him shiver, so that Hesseth twisted around to see what was wrong with him. Her expression was grim, and the thin ridge of scar tissue which was all that remained of her inner eyelid was drawn in as far is it would go. So. She felt it, too. There was some comfort in that, at least.
They rode for hours, with brief stops so that he and Hesseth and the horses could eat, and so that Tarrant could study the currents. The rotting forest seemed to close in about them as soon as they stopped, for which reason Damien and Hesseth ate as quickly as they could, and took no more rest than was absolutely necessary. Even Tarrant seemed uncomfortable in this place. And when you really thought about it, Damien reflected, didn’t that make sense? The Hunter was a creature of order and precision, whose creative genius had embraced not only man’s faith, but nature in all her vast complexity. Was there any greater ugliness than this, an ecosystem corrupted past saving?
After a time—no telling how long, he had lost all sense of measuring the hour—the Hunter turned east. They followed him without question, trusting in his sense of purpose. Overhead the vine-blanket thickened, and spongy tendrils hung down low enough to brush their hair as they passed. The sour smell of decay was nigh on overwhelming, even to Damien’s merely human senses; he could only guess at how much Hesseth was suffering. Lower and lower the tangled masses hung, until at last Tarrant had to draw his sword and cut a path through them in order to continue. The coldfire light of the Worked steel was reflected by the mists about them, turning the whole world a cold silver-blue. Tendrils of vine shattered like glass as he cut through them, tangled mats becoming shards of ice in an instant, glittering like stars as they fell.