betrayed you a moment before. He was calling out to Arunis, trying to get his attention, to tell him we stood by this pool. He started the moment you declared you could not heal him, Thashiziq. The voices told me: ‘Come away, come away, you’re doomed, you’re in the sorcerer’s trap.’ ”
“You did well to kill him,” said Neda. “Don’t weep; there is no shame in your act.”
Ibjen shook his head. “It’s not because of my oath,” he said. “It’s because I waited, hoping one of you would do it for me. That is worse. That is meaner.”
Hercol looked up: the darkness was descending like a black fog. “No more delay,” he said. “We must get away from here, away from those bats, before we try again with the torch.”
The elder Turach gazed at him heavily. “And then?” he said.
“Then we backtrack to the trail we were marking,” said Hercol, “and resume the search.”
“Resume!” laughed Alyash. “Begin it, you mean! Only this time we’ve got piss-all to go by. Stanapeth, it’s over. You can fool yourself that you might find a needle in a haystack-no, in a blary barn-if you’ve got a lodestone to drag around through the hay. But our lodestone was a cheat.”
“We must find the place where the River of Shadows breaks the surface,” said Hercol. “What else would you counsel?”
“To follow our own trail back to the vine, that’s what,” cried Alyash. “And the vine to blessed daylight.”
Several of the soldiers, human and dlomic alike, nodded approvingly. Hercol looked at them in alarm. “You know that to concede the Nilstone to Arunis means death to us all,” he said. “Surely Fulbreech made that clear once again?”
“Let’s just start walking,” pleaded Big Skip.
A furtive movement caught Thasha’s eye: Jalantri was squeezing Neda’s hand in his. She pulled away. Jalantri whispered something in Mzithrini that unsettled her even more. But before he finished there came a loud pop, like a child’s toy cannon, and Jalantri howled in pain.
Something black and amorphous had struck the back of his head. He stumbled, groping at it. The thing slipped through his fingers again and again, and yet one end of it seemed embedded in his skin. At last he ripped it away, leaving a coin-sized wound.
Pop. Pop. Thasha felt a blow to her arm, and a sharp stab. An identical creature was there, wriggling, burrowing into her flesh. “Leeches!” cried Dastu, as another struck his leg. “But they’re coming like cannon- shot!”
Pop. Pop. Pop. “The globe mushrooms!” said Ensyl, pointing. “They’re bursting out of them! Great Mother, there could be thousands.”
All at once the air was thick with the foul, biting creatures. Thasha felt them strike her again, in the shoulder, in the neck. “Out of here!” bellowed Hercol. “Get beyond the globes, beyond that ridge we descended! But then stop and regroup, for the love of Rin!”
Humans and dlomu were bolting in all directions. Neeps tripped over Fulbreech; Jalantri, his chest thick with leeches, shouted for Neda as he ran. Alyash was waving his pistol, of all things. Then Pazel slipped in the slime from the pool, and cried out as his wounded leg was wrenched. Thasha dived for him, grabbed his arm and dragged him, leeches and all, out through the fern-fungi, and under the fallen tree, and then “Cover your eyes!”
— right up the slope, the wall of exploding fungi, and on among the towering trees until she was sure nothing else was striking them.
Twenty feet from the pool, and it was nearly pitch black. “Tear them off, Pazel!” she shouted.
“I am! I am!”
Gods, but they hurt. Eight, nine of them-and another in the small of her back. She was still trying to get a grip on it when she felt Pazel’s fingers. He groped, squeezed, ripped: the leech was gone, along with a barbed mouthful of her skin. Then a match flared in the blackness, somewhere off to their left. It died, and Alyash bellowed in rage. Another match glowed, and this time Alyash managed to light the torch. “Here, here, to me!” he bellowed. “You heard Stanapeth! Regroup!”
Thasha and Pazel stumbled toward him. Others, by the sound of it, were doing the same. Then Alyash screamed as a flickering, flapping darkness took his arm. The torchlight disappeared. Thasha caught the stink of burning flesh.
“The bats!” cried Alyash. “They attacked the torch! Devils in the flesh, they’re suicidal!”
“Light it again! Light it again!”
“Ain’t but half a dozen matches left-”
Another flared: Thasha saw Alyash’s crazed eyes by its light-and then sudden motion, and darkness. “Damn the mucking things!” cried the bosun. “It’s impossible! They dive on the flame!”
“Strike no more matches,” came Hercol’s voice, suddenly. “We must get farther from their roosting-place; there are simply too many here. Do not run, do not separate! But tell me you’re here! Turachs! Where are you?”
“Here!” shouted the younger of the soldiers. “Undrabust is with me. We’re all right, we’re just-”
“Vispek!” shouted Hercol. “Jalantri! Neda Ygrael!”
Only Neda answered him-and from a surprising distance. Thasha heard Pazel’s frightened gasp. “Neda!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Over here! Hurry, hurry!”
This time there was no answer at all. The bats flowed about them like water. Nothing was visible save the fading glow from the pool.
Footsteps crashed nearer, and then Neeps and the younger Turach found them, their blind hands groping. From farther off, the dlomic warriors shouted, drawing nearer.
“But the sfvantskors!” cried Pazel. “I can’t hear their voices anymore!”
“Forget them,” said Alyash. “They ran the wrong way.”
Furious, Pazel turned in the direction of Alyash’s voice. “She’s my Gods-damned sister!” he shouted.
“She’s a fanatic, a monster with a womb!”
A sword whined from its sheath. “Pathkendle! No!” cried Hercol.
“You drawing a blade on me, Muketch?” snarled Alyash. “Come on, then, I’ll have your blary head!”
There was a horrible scream. But it came from neither Pazel nor Alyash. It was the Turach who was screaming, and his voice came from above them, rising by the second.
“It’s the worms!” Pazel shouted. “I’m fighting the mucking worms!”
Then there was no order of any kind. Every voice rose to howling; no one could see anyone; bodies smashed in all directions; Hercol’s shouts for order fell on deaf ears. Thasha felt a tentacle graze her hand, then whip around her leg. She was rising; then her sword flashed and cut the tendril and she fell headfirst, and barely missed dying on her own sword. Up she leaped, stumbling, whirling, blind as death. The voices were already fewer, and all farther away. She cried out for Pazel, for Neeps and Hercol, but no one answered. From somewhere a fitful light appeared; she whirled toward it, a strange, pulsing, indistinct sort of light, but there were figures in it, struggling “Oh Gods. Oh sweet Rin.”
Not struggling. Making love. It was herself and Pazel she saw, naked under their cedar tree, her hands on the branch above them, her legs on either side of his thrusting hips.
It was Syrarys and Sandor Ott. The concubine looked at her suddenly, over the assassin’s shoulder. “Daughter,” she gasped.
Thasha fell to her knees. Not real. Not true. But she was weeping; it was a physical attack she was suffering, it was the spores, the darkness, the world that stabbed and stabbed again. She forced herself to her feet and pushed on, toward nothing, and then she heard Alyash and Hercol behind her, and they were fighting, and she turned and floundered toward them with the last of her strength.
“Idiot! Put it down, put it down!”
That was Hercol. Thasha tried to quicken her pace-and fell down the slope, back among the leeches, not stopping to fight them, not stopping for anything. There was the dying glow from the pool. And there was Hercol, collapsed against its rim, dragging himself after Alyash, who kept leaping out of his reach, and fumbling with matches, and something else “Fool! You can’t shoot whatever’s up there!”
“I can mucking well scare the bastards!”
“Don’t do it, Alyash!”
A match flared. The bats descended on it immediately, but Alyash was quicker. He forced the tiny flame into the ignition chamber of his pistol, thrust it straight up through the mass of creatures and fired.
