The tarboy glowered, abashed. The others descended without incident. Even the dogs managed well enough, scrambling down almost on their bellies. Pazel bent and touched the leaf surface: it was spongy, like the inside of a gourd.
When they were all on the lower level, Hercol picked the dark fruits: six in all, very juicy and soft. He placed them carefully in the pack Alyash wore. “They certainly smell delicious,” he said, “as they would, if they were meant to lure us down here.”
“Call me lured, then,” said Big Skip. “Your mul lasts a fair spell in the stomach, I’ll admit. But not this long.”
“You can see the branches, farther in,” said Ensyl. “And there in the distance: that may be a trunk.”
Pazel could make out a few of the pale, slender branches, piercing the leaf on which they stood and dividing overhead, to prop up the uppermost level like the beams of a roof. But he could not see any trunk. It was too dark already: about as dark as the berth deck at twilight. And this, he thought, is just the first level down. He glanced back up along the vine and saw a sliver of blue sky, and wondered what on earth they were getting themselves into.
“The vine keeps going down,” said Neda, crouching, “and there’s another hole like this one, but smaller. And more fruit, too, I think.”
Down they went. The third gap was indeed smaller, and there were but three fruits. And now it was truly dark. Since the holes were so far apart, no direct sunlight could reach them, only a dull, reflected glow, and small pinpricks of light along the cliff wall.
Pazel bent over the third gap. A mix of pungent smells, earth and mold and rotting flowers, issued from it. He looked up at Hercol. “Time we lit one of those torches, don’t you think?”
Hercol considered. “We have but six,” he said, “and each will burn but an hour-or less, if our swim in the Ansyndra has damaged them. But yes, we should light one now. We cannot go on blind.”
“We dlomu are not blind, yet,” said Bolutu.
“And we ixchel,” said Ensyl, “will not be blind until the darkness is nearly perfect. But if you light that torch it will dazzle us, and we will see no better than you.”
“Let us go first, and report what we see,” said Myett.
The others protested. “You can’t be serious,” said Thasha. “You don’t have any idea what’s down there.”
“But we know a great deal about not getting caught,” said Ensyl. “More than any of you, in fact.”
“Go then,” said Hercol, “but do not go far. Take a swift glance and return to us.”
The two women started down, with the matchless agility of ixchel. They were lost to Pazel’s sight almost at once, but at his shoulder Ibjen whispered: “They are halfway to the next level. They are pausing, gazing at the space between. Now they are descending farther. They are upon the fourth level, and walking about. But what are they doing? They are going on! Hercol, they are leaving my sight!”
“Fools!” whispered Hercol. Stepping onto the vine, he began to rush down after them. But then Ibjen hissed, “Wait! They’re returning.” And minutes later the ixchel were back beside them, unharmed.
“We saw nothing threatening at all,” said Ensyl. “But we had two surprises. First, it is very hot, and hotter as you descend. Hot and wet.”
“And the other surprise?” asked Neeps.
The ixchel glanced at each other. “We reached the fourth level,” said Myett at last. “There is no fifth. The vine merely continues into the darkness. We crawled down it a short distance, but never caught sight of the floor.”
“It can’t be much farther,” said Big Skip. “We’re down some seventy feet already from the rim. Drop a torch, I say. That’s how we’d explore the old silver mines at Octray, when I was a lad.”
“You would only soak the torch,” said Ensyl, “and announce us to anyone or anything waiting below. Better to let us lead the way, and light it when we reach the bottom.”
Now even the dlomu grumbled about “climbing blind.” Myett looked at them and laughed. “They don’t trust us, Ensyl,” she said in their own speech. “Not even the black giants want to put their lives in crawly hands.”
She was forgetting Pazel’s Gift, or not caring that he heard. Impulsively, he said, “This is rubbish. They can see, we can’t. Let’s get on with it.”
No one liked the plan, but no one had a better. They descended. After the fourth level Pazel could not even see the vine he clung to. He trod on Neda’s fingers, and Dastu trod on his. The silence was oppressive, and the heat more so. There was no breeze whatsoever, and the moist air felt like syrup in his lungs. “It goes deeper!” the ixchel kept saying, amazed.
The sickly sweet odors grew alongside the heat. Pazel’s hands became slippery. He could not judge how far they had descended (even looking up he saw nothing, now), but a point came when he knew that it was much farther than the four leaf-levels combined, and still they went down and down.
Finally Ensyl said what they had all been waiting for: “The bottom, at last! Watch your step, now! Great Mother, what are we standing in?”
Pazel heard those below him exclaiming softly, and a squelching sound as they left the vine. He reached the ground himself: it felt like a heap of fishing nets: moist, fibrous, very strong.
“Hot as midsummer in the marshes,” whispered the younger Turach.
“Now is the time for that torch,” whispered Myett. “We are almost blind ourselves. This is not the darkness of a forest; it is the darkness of a tomb.”
A scraping sound: Hercol was struggling with a match. Finally it caught, and Pazel watched the tiny flame lick the end of the oil torch. The match sputtered, nearly dying; then all at once the torch burst into light.
Pazel gasped. They were in a forest of jewels, or feathers, or cloaks of colored stars. His eyes for several moments simply could not sort out all the hues and shapes and textures.
“Plants, are they?” whispered Jalantri, wild-eyed, tensed like a cat.
“Obviously,” hissed Dastu.
The things grew all around them, some just inches tall, others towering overhead. The colors! They were hypnotic, dazzling. But the shapes were even stranger: branching sponges, serpentine trunks ending in mouths like sucker fish, bloated knobs, delicate orange fans. Bouquets of fingers. Clusters of long, flexing spoons.
“They feel fleshy,” said Ibjen.
“Don’t touch them, you daft babe!” said Alyash, smacking his hand.
It was hard not to touch them, the things grew so thick and close. Pazel tried to look through the mass of petals, bulges, braided tentacles, feathery limbs, flaring blue, purple, green in the torchlight. They were even shedding color: rainbow droplets were falling and splattering everywhere, as though the things were exuding brilliant nectar or pollen from their pores.
“Fireflies!” said Bolutu suddenly, and Pazel turned just in time to see them: a trail of blue sparks, whirling around Bolutu’s upraised hand, then speeding off to a cluster of growths beyond the torchlight, where they all winked out together. There were other insects, too: flying, crawling, wriggling, with bright reflective spots on wings or feelers. Only the fireflies, however, glowed with their own light, and they were already gone.
Pazel wiped his forehead. The hot air wrapped him in a smothering embrace. Then he felt Ensyl scramble nimbly to his shoulder. “The ground is alive,” she said. “Have a look at your boots.”
Muffled cries and curses: their feet were being embraced by pale, probing tendrils, wriggling up from the ground on all sides. They were easily broken, but relentless in their work. The scene might have been comic, if anyone had the heart to laugh: twenty figures shuffling in place, lifting one foot and then the other. “Pitfire, we can’t stay here,” said the older Turach.
“Keep close to me,” said Hercol. Raising the torch, he set off in a straight line, forcing a path through the rubbery growths. The others fairly stampeded after him. They had not gone twenty steps when Pazel realized that they were no longer pushing through so many of the weird living things. Hercol stopped and turned to look back, and Pazel did the same.
They had been standing in a thicket formed by the great vine. The growths surrounded it, grew atop it, buried it in their flesh. The vine snaked away across the forest floor, every inch of it covered with growths.
“Like a reef back home,” said Neeps, “except that it’s so blary hot.”
“It feels like the bottom of the sea,” said Pazel. “And this is just a clearing. Those growing things are still all around us.”
