And then they were in the open again. Tarrant cut a tunnel through the last thick tangle—a veritable wall of white vines and fungus, with mold clinging to every available surface—and then the vines were behind them, and the trees also, and the party looked out upon an expanse of water so clean and fresh that just looking at it made Damien feel renewed.
Tarrant nodded toward the water. “I thought that under the circumstances the river might offer you the best campsite.” His choice of words made Damien glance up at the sky. No good; there was still enough mist to keep him from seeing how exactly dark the sky was. But Tarrant’s manner made it clear that dawn was coming, and in this place it would take him some time to find a suitable shelter. “You sure you wouldn’t rather stay with us?” He hesitated. “There’s no shelter for me here. I regret.” He chose for some reason of his own not to transform on the spot, but made his way back toward the midnight confines of the forest. Damien watched as the vine-tunnel swallowed him, then reluctantly turned his attention to making camp. He was worried. Very worried. He had made the offer more as a gesture than as a serious suggestion; he knew the Hunter well enough to know how much he valued his daytime privacy. If Tarrant would actually prefer to stay with them, if he would prefer Damien’s presence to whatever was out there . . . that was a sobering concept, indeed.
Daylight. Sort of. The mist turned a deep gray, then a dingy half-gray, but got no lighter. Between the steep walls of the valley and the fog that attended its floor, the sunlight was hard pressed to penetrate. At noon the swirling fog turned white at last, but it was only a brief respite; within an hour the world was gray once more. It reminded Damien of the false dawn of the arctic region, where the late autumn sun teased the eye once a day but never fully rose. It was depressing there, too, he remembered.
There were things that came out of the fog, faint wisps of faeborn life that drifted through the airborne miasma like some ethereal fish. They had no solidity, these creatures, and their forms were as changeable as the mist, but lack of material substance made them no less dangerous. Evidently Tarrant’s presence had kept them at bay during the night, but now—with the light so dim that it could barely hurt them—they drifted toward Damien with the blind instinct of demonic hunger, sensing in his flesh and his human vitality a feast beyond all measure. God alone knew what part of him they wanted; he didn’t stop to figure it out. When two strokes of his sword convinced him that solid weapons were of no use in this case—they passed through the fog-wraiths with little more effect than a wire passing through smoke—he resorted to a Working. He drove them back as far as he could with the threat of a Dispelling, then crafted crude wards to keep them from coming back. His hands shook as he Worked, for he knew how risky it was to spend so much time immersed in the currents; an earthquake now would fry his brain before he knew what hit him. But at last he was done, and he took the eight stones he had chosen and placed them about the circumference of the camp in a rough circle. The coarse rocks were far from ideal for ward-making—the best ward hosts were carefully inscribed, precisely made, symbolically powerful items—but they’d have to do for now. Each of them had been bound to a pattern that would tap into the earth-fae if one of the demonlings tried to approach, and would use that power to drive them away. Since rocks had no brains, the earth-fae could surge all it liked and not do them an ounce of harm.
Hesseth watched him in some amusement, but spared him any derisive comment. Which was good. Because the damned things hadn’t gone after her, had they?
Only when he was done and had rejoined her by the fire did she venture, “He must have been right, you know.”
“Who?”
“Tarrant. About there being humans here.”
He looked back toward the forest, where the last of the fae-creatures had fled. “There’d have to be, wouldn’t there? And a lot of them, too. It takes more than a single mind to manifest numbers like that.” Now that the creatures were gone it was hard to visualize them, but he tried. How odd they were . . . and how utterly logical that they should exist. “It’s fear of the mist,” he reflected aloud. “That’s what spawned them. Fear of the mist and what it hides. The humans here must have come from outside this valley, and they found the mist threatening. So that when their negative emotions began to sculpt the earth-fae, it took that form. Foglike. Amorphous.” He looked back at the fire, and tried to think. Tried to make it all come together. “There are no more traditional demons here, are there? At least none that we’ve seen yet. Yet most human communities produce a folkloric repertoire—vampires and succubi, human distortions—long before they come up with anything as abstract as this. Strange,” he mused. Something foggy with bright red eyes began to drift in from across the river; when it reached his nearest ward, it shivered and stopped. “I wonder what caused it?”
“Tarrant will probably know,” she murmured. Watching as the demonling turned away, drifting into the mist beyond the wards.
Tarrant didn’t know.
When he returned that night he paused briefly at the outer boundary of the campsite, and gazed upon the ward-stones one after another. Only when he was done, did he join them by the fireside. “These aren’t strong enough to matter,” he said to Damien, “but you should bear in mind that the power I draw on is demonic in nature. Your wards define me as an enemy.”
Damien winced; he should have anticipated that. “Sorry.”
As they doused the fire and saddled the horses, Damien and Hesseth told him about the strange demonlings. He shared with them his own growing frustration at being unable to get a fix on the humans who must be somewhere in these woods. “It’s not an Obscuring,” he insisted. His tone was almost angry, it seemed to Damien. “But what, then? What could make a dozen or more humans vanish from the currents, so that the earth-fae didn’t acknowledge their presence?”
There was no answer for that, and no other option but to go on. They rode back into the strangling forest, and for once Damien was glad for its closeness. It was comforting to see something besides a wall of gray fog, even if it was this twisted flora.
They spent the night in silence, riding through mile after mile of the alien forest, trying to make out its features by lamplight. Tarrant could see by the fae-light, of course, and Hesseth’s nocturnal eyes worked well in the dark, but for Damien it was a constant strain. Add to that the fact that the forest was changing, and that each mile was stranger than the last, and it was no surprise that by the time Tarrant declared it a night he was exhausted.
Vines strangling trees. Then vines in shreds, white sap dripping from their ravaged ends. Then black things that scuttled up and down the tree trunks, carrying bits of vine and spongy leaves in their mouth. Then larger things, spiderlike, that ate those. Rodents that fed on the spiders. They weren’t intermingled, as natural species would have been, but existed in waves so populous that each new life-form devastated the forest anew, leaving a wasteland of dead trees and shriveled vines and bones. So very many bones. They littered the ground like dead leaves in autumn. Piles so thick that they cracked beneath the horses’ hooves with every step. The smell of decay, of rotting flesh, was so overwhelming in places that Damien wrapped a strip of cloth over his nose and mouth and Worked it to act as a barrier. Hesseth looked so nauseous that he offered to do the same for her, and to his surprise she accepted. Whatever Tarrant did to deal with the smell was private and undiscernible, but Damien was sure he did something. The Hunter was too fastidious a man to put up with that kind of stink for long.