‘You were whining like a teething baby,’ said Cabal, watching Corde’s hand drift to the hilt of his sword. ‘Herr Corde. If you show steel, I shall kill you.’
Corde’s hand paused. ‘You’re very confident about that, Cabal.’
‘Why should I not be? I have had practical experience of fighting with swords, as distinct from fencing for sport. I am still here. You may draw your own conclusions.’
‘Gentlemen! Please.’ It was Bose, moving between them. ‘We are marooned and lost in a hostile land! Now, surely, is not the time for divisions within our party? United we must stand, gentlemen, for the alternative is oblivion.’
Corde’s hand twitched, then fell back to his side. Cabal, who had been on the point of verbally agreeing with Bose, instead kept his silence and allowed a carefully pitched mild smirk to cross his face. Thus, he was in the happy position of allowing Corde’s own pride to infer that Cabal considered him a coward, without actually having to go to all the trouble of implying it. It was the most effortless insult he had ever delivered, and its elegance charmed him.
Apparently unaware of the current of animosity that still ran between Corde and Cabal, and the potential differences it augured for the future, Bose seemed pleased by his peacekeeping efforts. ‘Mr Cabal, time seemed to jump. Is this something that you have ever read of in this or any similar context?’
‘It is not, which is suspicious in itself. One would expect such an effect to have been mentioned at least once in the great heap of portentous drivel that has been written about this place. Furthermore, it is not simply a skip forward in time, or – strictly speaking – the subjective perception of time that they use here instead of the real thing.’
Shadrach was nodding. ‘The fishermen. They seemed completely unmoved by what had happened. Indeed, they seemed party to it.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal, quickly regaining the expositional high ground. ‘It is hard to imagine a chain of events by which all four of us would meekly agree to be marooned in the woods, so one is drawn to the conclusion that this has been engineered in some way by an external agency.’
‘To what end?’ asked Shadrach.
‘With that sort of ability, why didn’t this hypothetical agency of yours just kill us?’ said Corde, dismissively. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Believe what you will. You are in error if you attempt to ascribe Earthly motives to every mind in the Dreamlands. This could all be in the nature of a prank. Our death was not sought, only our inconvenience.’
‘A
‘Or a distraction, or a pleasantry, or a comment, or something that cannot be interpreted by the human mind.’ Cabal shrugged. ‘Or it may just have been a fluke. A random fragment of awareness that momentarily settled upon us, Azathoth belching, the stars being not entirely wrong. Who knows? I doubt any mortal does. Whatever the intent, we must deal with the results. The very inconvenient results.’ He took the map from his bag and unrolled it once more. ‘Yes, there we are. The Dark Wood. We shall have to walk to Hlanith.’
The others gathered around, crowding into Cabal’s personal space and galling him immeasurably. ‘Whereabouts are we in the woods?’ asked Bose.
‘Somewhere.’
‘How far away is Hlanith?’ asked Corde.
Cabal measured out the distance from roughly the middle of the long length of riverbank where the Dark Wood met the Oukranos to the dot labelled ‘Hlanith’ between finger and thumb, then held up his hand. ‘About three and a half centimetres, I’d say.’ He rolled up the map, put it back in its tube and restored it to his bag. ‘You really must grasp the overriding principles at work in this place. Distances are measured in the difficulty of travel, time is measured by a sense of being either quick or slow. This is a world of subjectivism, loathsome though that may be.’
‘So the journey to Hlanith is what? Quick or slow?’
Cabal gestured carelessly at the trees standing densely behind them. ‘Is that not already painfully apparent?’
They tried to stay on the riverbank as they headed eastward, but quickly ran into an inlet that forced them inland. It was little more than a stream, but the cut it had created was steep and sharp and looked to be a great deal more trouble to climb out of than fall into, so nobody argued with taking the diversion. Soon, however, the wisdom of not risking the inlet became questionable.
The trees grew closer, the areas between them populated with bushes and tangles of high weed and briars. There seemed to be few paths, whether made by animals or people, and the ones they did find wound randomly about until they petered out into undergrowth and shadows. Cabal had anticipated the journey to Hlanith taking some time, but in the face of the extraordinarily hard going, he was forced to re-evaluate his estimate from ‘some time’ to ‘some considerable time’.
It was dark in the Dark Wood, indicating that in the Dreamlands, at least, things functioned as advertised. It was not simply the dappled verdant darkness of a normal wood, however, but a heavy, hungry darkness that seemed to sap the brilliance of every ray of sunlight that somehow penetrated the canopy of leaves until the light fell upon the ground attenuated and ghostly. No insects buzzed, no animals cried.
‘Anybody frightened yet?’ asked Cabal, suddenly, from a position of scientific curiosity.
‘We do not succumb to fright, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, not at all convincingly. ‘Only rational concern.’ The grunts of agreement from his fellows lacked conviction also. These grunts are worth mentioning if only because, if there had been a little less disconsolate grunting, they might have heard the crying a moment earlier, and subsequent events might have gone a little better for them.
It was Bose who heard it first, pausing and looking off to one side, while waving a hand for silence. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.
The others listened intently. The woods were unnaturally quiet, but even so the sound was distant. ‘Good heavens!’ said Shadrach, finally. ‘It’s a baby! Do you hear it?’
