Bats erupted from the clearing in a boundless swarm. Alyash stood unharmed among them, laughing, triumphant-and then came a sound like a great sail ripped in two.
The flood lifted Thasha like a matchstick. The light was gone, the clearing gone; she flailed, helpless, borne away by the onslaught of water. Disarmed, nearly drowning, rolled head over heels through the fungi and leeches and drowning bats, grabbing at the larger growths only to find them ripped away, smashing through trees, tearing at roots with her fingernails. And still the water thundered down, as if a suspended lake were emptying into the forest.
A bladder-fungus, dangling over them, a monster of a growth. The trap had been sprung.
Her strong limbs were useless; her body struck tree after rock-hard tree. A part of her had always wondered what it could possibly feel like, to go down with a ship in storm. This was the answer. Pain and blindness and sharp blows in the dark. She thought of Pazel and wished they’d made love long before.
Just let me see something (she was begging Rin like a schoolgirl). I can die, we can fail, but let me see something, anything. So many ways they might have died before, but not this way, in this pit of a forest, this unspeakable, dark hole A thought burst inside her. She stopped fighting, stilled by wonder. An insane, a delirious idea.
Look for me But hope was like that, wasn’t it? A delirium that clouded your mind. A mist that protected you from the truth you couldn’t bear to look at. Until something solid parted the mist: a cannonball, a reef, the words of a traitor with just minutes to live.
— when a darkness comes beyond today’s imagining.
It was at that very moment that her hand caught something solid, and held. It was one of the worm-like tendrils, and though it strained terribly to pull free, to lift her up into the canopy and another sort of death, the rushing water was far stronger, and it became Thasha’s lifeline, minute after blind, precious minute. And then her blindness came to an end.
Logic told her that she was hallucinating yet again, but her heart knew otherwise. At a great distance away through the flooded forest, a haze of light began to shine. It was wide and dispersed, like the stars on a cloudless night, except that these stars were blue, and moving, and as they neared her they lit up the forest as no starlight could. They were fireflies, and they broke over her in a blue wave, a second flood above the water, and before them flew a great dark owl. It circled Thasha once, then swept away into the darkness, and the storm of fireflies went with it. But some of the insects stayed, whirling above Thasha, showing her the great complexity of vines and upper branches of the trees, and the underside of the bottommost leaf-layer, three hundred feet over her head.
When the water fell, it did so quickly, draining out through the root-mat beneath her feet. Fungi opened pores like puffy lips, spat out water and mud. When the water dropped below her waist Thasha released the tendril, watched it curl into a slender orifice high in the joint of an overhead branch. Trees with mouths. In some of those mouths were dlomic soldiers. In another, a young Turach marine, sent by his Emperor to the far side of the world on a secret mission, to fight (he was surely told) the enemies of the Crown.
Dark or bright, I hate this place, she thought.
Then the fireflies drew closer together and dropped nearer to the ground. As she watched, dumbfounded, they illuminated a path: one that began just over her head, and stretched away into the forest. Thasha couldn’t help but smile. As in a dream, she set out walking, and the path vanished behind her as the little insects followed on her heels.
Some ten minutes had passed when she saw the owl again. It was perched atop a high quartz rock that glittered in the light of the fireflies.
“You’ve lost your ship, I see,” said the owl. “And it is yours, you know, regardless of the paperwork back in Etherhorde.”
Thasha stared at it a moment. “I’m not imagining you,” she said, and raised her arms.
The owl dived straight at her, and Thasha did not flinch. Right before her face it suddenly fanned its wings dramatically, came to a near halt, and fell into her arms: a black mink.
A cry from deep in her chest escaped her, and she lifted the creature and hid her face in its fur. “Ramachni. Ramachni. Aya Rin, it’s been so long.”
“Oh dearest, that is such a charmingly human way to reckon time. I was just thinking that this has been the shortest night’s sleep I could remember. But an eventful night, to be sure. Come, dry your eyes. There will be time for tears, and much else, when the fight is done.”
“Don’t leave us again!”
The mage sat back in her hands. His fixed his immense black eyes on her, and there was a thousand times the depth and mystery in them as in the forest, and yet they were, as they ever had been, kind.
“You and I cannot be parted,” he said. “Even if we leave the world of the living behind-minutes from now, or years-we shall do so together. Now walk, Thasha. Or better still, run, if your wounds will bear it. Many are suffering for your sake.”
His words were like a jolt out of a dream. She ran, with the mage in her arms, beneath the firefly-lit path, and in another five minutes she came to a small rise, above which the fireflies danced in a net of brilliance. Atop the rise, seated among seashell-like fungi, were some half a dozen of their party. She dashed among them, heart in her mouth. Ibjen. Neda. Bolutu. Big Skip. Lunja. And Neeps.
“Thasha!” he cried, jumping up to embrace her.
“But where-where are-”
Neeps pointed down the far side of the hill. There were two other firefly-paths snaking off into the forest. One of them was shrinking toward them, and upon it they could see the older Turach, Dastu and Cayer Vispek, running with one hand folded to his chest. When he saw Neda on the hillside Vispek did something Thasha never would have believed of him: he sobbed. Hiding the reaction almost at once, he held out his arm, and Myett leaped to the ground. The humans and the ixchel gazed with wonder at Ramachni.
“The weasel-mage,” gasped the Turach. “By the Blessed Tree, I thought Arunis had finished you off.”
“Not yet,” said Ramachni, baring his teeth.
“Hercol spoke of you,” said Cayer Vispek, “a woken mink with the powers of a wizard. I did not believe him, but now-”
“I am a mink only in this world, Cayer,” said Ramachni, “and even here I can take other forms, now and then. I know you believe that that can be done-you who crossed the Nelluroq as whales.”
“And died as humans, some of us,” said Vispek. “Jalantri fell to the leeches, Neda Ygrael. He was gone before the water came.”
Now it was Neda’s turn to fight back tears. Thasha reached to console her, but Neeps caught her arm, gently shaking his head. The two of them descended the hill, toward the last remaining path of fireflies. At first glance it appeared quite empty. Wordlessly, they started to run along its course, back into the forest. They could see where the light ended, just beyond that next tree, and then Hercol and Pazel, limping arm in arm, rounded the tree, and clinging to Hercol’s shoulder was Ensyl. Seeing Neeps and Thasha, the ixchel woman pointed and cried out with joy. They rushed together, and Thasha for one made no attempt to hide her tears.
When she told them that Ramachni had come at last, Thasha thought her friends were close to tears themselves. “He’ll be stronger than ever,” said Pazel. “He said he would be, when he came back.”
“The rest of us aren’t so lucky, though,” said Neeps. “Lunja is still alive, but the other dlomic soldiers are gone, and so’s the younger Turach. And Alyash too, I suppose.”
“I’m not sorry for that,” said Pazel.
“Be sorry for the day he was truly lost,” said Hercol, “though it was decades before your birth, and perhaps not so long after his own.”
“Lost to evil, you mean,” said Pazel. “I understand. I saw into his master’s mind, Ott’s mind, you know.” He stopped a moment, his voice suddenly tight. “I understand, but I can’t forgive. Is that wrong of me, Hercol?”
“You are wrong only in being certain of what you can and cannot do,” said the swordsman. “For now clear your minds, of rage and fear alike. Our work is not done. And here is one tool that remains to help us do it.” He touched the leather band across his shoulder. Ildraquin was still strapped to his back.
“Cayer Vispek kept his sword as well,” said Neeps, “and Neda still has her dagger. That’s all the weaponry left to us.”
“Then be glad I made you train with staves,” said Hercol, “and find some, quickly. Put Big Skip on the task; he is a fine judge of anything resembling a club.”
