“It seemed best to let you sleep,” she said. “You looked at the end of your strength.”
“How long?” he asked. He was hungry again and his head felt fuzzy.
“A day and a night.”
“I have been lying in this Shadow-tainted place for so long.”
“You have your amulets and have been protected by such wards as I have woven into this place.” Without being asked, she proffered him a package of food and a different flask. “Spring water,” she said, “from outside this land. It is best for your kind not to use elfdraft save in times of need. You can swiftly grow dependent on it.”
Kormak nodded, looked at her closely. She had the ageless quality that all elves shared. Her skin was smooth as a child’s. She looked in the prime of health, beautiful and exotic. She might have been old enough to be his great-grandmother but she gave no sign of it.
“You have come unscathed from under the shadow of Mayasha,” she said. “I would not have believed that was possible for a mortal man. Or an elf for that matter.”
“I was lucky and I believe I had help.”
“How so?”
Kormak considered her for a moment. He was not sure how much to tell her but she was here in a land tainted by Shadow and must have her own agenda. “Why are you here?” he asked.
She tilted her head to one side and looked at him with eyes larger than human, with much deeper and darker pupils. “I am looking for my spear-sisters.”
“Elves of your lodge?”
“Yes. They came here when news of the spread of the Blight reached us. They were shocked by what they found and then all contact was lost.”
“They sent no more messages.”
“The Green is corrupt here. It is difficult to send.” He was not sure he understood her and his confusion must have shown on his face.
“Your people cannot use the Green to communicate.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“No matter. You do not need to know any more than we lost touch with them. The last messages they sent showed they were frightened.”
“If they have seen the things I have seen I am not surprised.”
“The Shadow is very strong here.”
“So why are you still here. Are you not afraid of being tainted yourself.”
“I have mostly only been entering the Blight for short spells, I have eaten nothing and drank nothing from this place. I am warded to the limits of my power. I cleanse myself when I leave and there are still untainted places even here if you seek them out.”
“In the long run that means nothing.”
“In the long run you are right but I was not planning on being here for the long run.”
“What were you planning on doing?”
“When Ghostwing told me of your party entering the woods I came to warn you. Then I followed in case there was any help I could give.”
“That is very altruistic of you.”
“And you do not believe in altruism?”
“Sad, isn’t it?”
“I thought that by helping you I might help myself?”
“How?”
“You at least can summon others of your kind to make war on the Blight.”
“I hope so.”
“The Kayoga don’t have the strength to cleanse this place on their own. The Weaver’s force is far stronger than ever I suspected. She is recruiting not just among the Lost but among your people. Soon she will have an army the like of which has not been seen in the Forest for ten thousand seasons.”
“You seek allies?”
“It would seem wise, would it not, in the face of what is coming? If Weaver recruits among humans and spiders we must find some way of matching her strength.”
Kormak could see the sense of that. He could even see the utility of being allied with the elves in this vast forest. He was not sure the human lords of Taurea would go along with this though. There was a great deal of old enmity between human and elf, and what Weaver was doing was only reinforcing that. Now did not seem to be the time to point that out though particularly since he was going to need Gilean’s help to get out of here.
“Who is Weaver?”
“A sorcerer who has found a new god. Or rather a new way to contact an old god. We had heard sing long ago that she was gaining power in the councils of Mayasha. No one could have foreseen that she would rise to where she is now, or that one of the Lost could wield such power.”
“The Lost?”
Her cheeks hollowed and her lips thinned in a faint grimace of disgust at his ignorance. It was clear that she was talking about things that would have been clear to any elvish child. “Those who no longer touch the Green.”
“What is that?”
“Think of it as the Spirit of the Forest. If an elf is away too long or too far from the Forest the connection is broken. You cannot feel the presence of the Green. You cannot talk to the other Children of the Green with your spirit. You lose the essential thing that makes you an elf. Being unable to touch the Green is like being deaf and mute and blind.” There was a note of despair in her voice as she spoke.
“Are you Lost?” he asked. She looked at him as if he had just insulted her gravely.
“I have not willingly turned my back on the Green,” she said eventually, as it sank in that he had not been trying to be insulting. “In this place the Shadow comes between my spirit and the Green. If I open myself to communicate, I become vulnerable but the longer I remain here out of contact with the Green the more vulnerable I become anyway. The loneliness becomes all but unbearable. I think it is through this that the Shadow tempts the Lost.”
She sounded as if she had direct experience of the temptation and perhaps she did. “Ghostwing is part of the Green as well.”
She nodded. “Even with him I dare not speak save when we are close; to reach out over any distance would be unwise.”
“You do not worry about him becoming corrupted?”
She laughed. “He spends less time here in the Shadows than I do. He has wings, he can come and go as he pleases in far less time than it takes me. He can rest in untainted lands and fly here.”
“What do we do now?”
“We leave. The Shadow Children still seek you but judging by their drum-calls, there has been a great in-gathering. Hunting parties have been sent to track you but I think Weaver has other plans that she must implement.”
“You think she plans to attack the Settlements?”
“If you mean the human lands between the Twin Rivers then yes.”
“They must be warned.”
“That takes us in the direction of maximum danger, where the forces of Shadow will be strongest.”
“Then they will least expect us to go that way.”
“That is the logic of madness, man.”
“I must warn my people, if that is possible.”
She considered him for a moment. Her watchful gaze reminded him of a cat. “Yes, I can see that you must.”
“I must reach the human lands anyway if I am to raise the war-banner and summon my Order to battle against the Blight. You said you needed allies. This is the way to get them.”
She sighed. “Very well then, let us try but I fear that path will prove closed to us.”
He felt a momentary suspicion. Why was she trying to discourage him? “We will never know if we never try.”
“Very well, when Ghostwing returns, we will try.” She did not sound very hopeful.
The great owl fluttered over them, eying them. It had returned an hour after sunset bearing news of the movements of the Lost and the Spiders. Gilean had immediately dispatched it south to find a route through. When it returned it seemed agitated, at least to Kormak’s untutored eye.
“Ghostwing says an army is on the march south of us, with scouts and spiders moving ahead of it. It looks like Weaver intends to cross the river and go into the lands you call the Settlements.”
“Can we get there first?”
/>
“If we move swiftly, I believe so. We will need to be quick though. It would not do to be caught trying to cross the river by the Lost.”
“Then we had best be going.”
They descended from the tree and reached ground level. The forest was as dismal as Kormak remembered. Every bush seemed frosted with furry mould. Most of the trees seemed dying and rotten. There was an oily taste on his tongue and he constantly had to fight down the urge to look over his shoulder. There was a sense of being in a place hostile to his kind, to all normal life. It was very easy to believe that he was in the presence of the Shadow.
They set out along the benighted trail, the owl came and went, scouting ahead and bearing news of the paths they followed. It perched close to Gilean and though she and the bird never spoke, Kormak had an uneasy sense of the communication between them. After these short sessions were complete the owl would fly off again.
“It is very bad,” Gilean said, once Ghostwing had departed. “All of Weaver’s people seem to be on the move. She has, at long last, decided to strike against the lands of men. There are thousands of the Lost and hundreds of humans and who knows how many spiders. Some of those are Shadow-warped and monstrous.”
“Perhaps we can slip through their midst. They may mistake us for members of their army.”
“Perhaps we can, but I suspect the Lost can tell those unlike them in the same way as I can tell the Lost.”
“You can tell who is Lost just by looking at them?”
“I sense the absence of the Green or the presence of the foulness of Shadow.”
“You think they could tell this about humans.”
“I do not know. Your people are different from mine. You lack the senses we have. No elf would try to touch one of your people through the Green. You are blind and deaf to it.” There was just the faintest hint of contempt in her voice.
“My people say yours have no souls,” said Kormak, needled.
“What is a soul?”
“Our animating spirit, what makes us what we are, or immortal essence.”
“You refer to the spark of the Green. Your people do not have it.” Kormak found himself laughing softly. “It seems that elves consider men soulless too.”
And perhaps with more reason, Kormak thought. She shrugged. “Our lives come from the Green. When we die our sparks go back to join it. Perhaps yours go elsewhere.”
Drums sounded like thunder in the distance. Ahead of them, this time. “It looks as if Weaver does not care who knows she is coming.”
“She is confident.” Kormak thought of the small disunited villages, and the vast camp of armed elves he had seen around the great dead tree.
“Perhaps with good reason,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
THEY MOVED CAUTIOUSLY, Gilean with her bow ready. Kormak’s hand never strayed far from the hilt of his sword. He could see the signs of the passage of an army all around him. The paths were churned by hundreds of feet, not all of those moving as lightly as elves or spiders. There were humans among the elves, which was not a reassuring thought. There were also signs that something much larger and heavier than humans had been moving through. Branches had been broken at higher than the head height of a man; brush had been swept back from the pathway.
Kormak thought of giants and then he thought of the Mother and her children.
“Spider Queen?” he asked Gilean, pointing to the damage on the trail.
“Or her brood.” Kormak fought down the concept of there being more than one of those giant arachnids.
“She needed webs to support her when I fought her.”
Gilean stopped, and stood stock still for a moment then turned her head to look at him. “You fought a Brood Mother?”
Kormak nodded.
“And you are still alive?”
“Apparently.”
“Truly you are a Champion of the Sun.”
Kormak shrugged.
“And how did you encounter the creature?”
Kormak decided that there was nothing to be gained from keeping her in the dark. “I was sent there by the ghost of Mayasha.”
“What?”
He told her what had happened. By the end he was surprised to see that tears were dribbling down her cheeks. “You destroyed an Elder Tree,” she said. Wonder and horror warred in her voice.
“I did what I was sent to do.”
“You performed the greatest act of sacrilege against the Green I have ever heard of.”
He wondered whether she was going to attack him. He seemed to have outraged one of her religious sensibilities. She stared long and hard at him.
“I don’t think you understand what you have done,” she said.
“Perhaps you could explain it to me.”
“You have destroyed an immortal, a being who would have lived forever.”
“I’ve done that before,” Kormak said. “Many times.”
“I do not care about the Old Ones. I care about the Elders.”
“It was the Elder that instructed me to do it. Otherwise he would have become a slave to the Shadow. He would have corrupted all of your forest or so he believed.”
“Perhaps the Tree could have been purified.”
“I doubt the Elder thought so or it would not have told me what to do?”
“Are you certain it was the Elder and not the Shadow that sent you to that place?”
“I know what I saw and the place where the Tree’s heart lay was tainted by its power.”
She took a deep breath and seemed to get a grip on herself. “This is too great a matter for me. I am but a Speardancer. You should be taken before the Council of Elders.”
He wondered if she was going to try and take him there right now. Somehow she seemed to think that what he had done outweighed even the invasion of her land by the Shadow. Perhaps it did. He had no idea of how elves weighed the value of these things. He resolved he had better keep a close eye on her. She was looking at him coldly now.
“Do you intend to take me before them now?” he asked. He kept his voice calm, and put no challenge into it. Her muscles tensed. Her knuckles went white on the wood of her bow. He wondered if she was going to point it at him.
“No. Not now. I cannot judge you. We go on.” He could not help but feel that in that moment her whole attitude had changed towards him, perhaps her whole attitude towards humanity in general.
Ahead of him now he could hear horns sound, and men shouting and the sound of something crashing through the woods. Gilean held up her hand as an indicator that he should stay where he was and then moved forward, swift and silent and beckoned for him to follow cautiously. He did so with as much stealth as he could muster and did not make any more sound than she.
He could see why she indicated caution now. They were overtaking a huge force of elves. Most of them were on the ground, bows and spears in their hands. Some of them rode on the back of spiders the size of mastodons. Their carapaces were armoured and their legs were reinforced with chitin and seemed much larger and thicker than those of the Brood Mother. They stalked forward like great living war-machines.
He tried to make as assessment of the military impact of such monsters. On a battlefield they would terrify men and horses. Against a castle they would have less effect unless they could scale walls like their smaller kindred which he very much doubted. Against the spiked log palisades that surrounded the woodland villages, they would be terrifying. By rearing up they could pull themselves over the walls. He wondered how you could stop them— pikes, hacking away their legs with a battle-axe. Normal arrows would most likely have no effect unless they struck a vulnerable point.
“We need to try and circle round them, off the path,” Gilean said. “We can never make it through such a force.”
They moved off the path and, crouching low, scrambled through the underbrush. As they moved, Kormak became aware of shadows around them and he knew that there were elves there. Whether they were pickets, scouts or simply folk w
anting to move away from the crowded paths he did not know. It did not matter much either, if one of them spotted him and gave the alarm; things would get very dangerous, very quickly. There were too many enemies around for him to be comfortable with the thought, and too much rested on them getting through in time to warn the inhabitants of the Settlements.
At last they seemed to reach an area clear of potential enemies and speeded up even though there were webs all around them, and the sounds of large animals moving through the undergrowth. Kormak wondered whether they had merely swapped one type of danger for another and whether some huge predator would spring on him any second.
He felt sweat running down his back. He felt his mouth go dry and his heart beat strongly against his ribs. He pushed aside a thick, black leaf, large as a dinner plate on which sat a glistening insect with strange blister marks on its side and he stepped forward. Mulch sucked at his feet. They emerged on the river bank. Gilean stopped short and glanced back along the watercourse. A large body of troops and gigantic spiders were fording the river downstream.
“This is it,” she said. “Across there are your Settlements.”
“Thanks for your help,” Kormak said. “I would never have made it this far without you.”
“This is not farewell, Champion of the Sun. I am coming with you. I wish to see the outcome of this.”
Kormak nodded and considered. The river was broad and swift flowing at this point and the current was likely to carry them away if they were not careful. He moved down the bank to see what the elves were doing. The great spiders spat rope-like webs across the river and smaller spiders wove an aerial bridge between the cables thus created. Soon there was a walkway across the river for Weaver’s troops. The gigantic spiders then plunged into the river and waded across.
“We could wait and take the bridge ourselves,” Gilean said.
“That would put us behind and they will most likely leave guards anyway. We need to cross now if we are going to bring warning to the villagers.”
“Then we swim.” Kormak stripped off his armour, wrapped it in his jerkin, and bound it with his belt.