Black Jade

even more, for Berkuar had told us that the undergrowth should thin out along the western reaches of the Cold Marshes. I felt my sense of direction sharp and strong inside me; it was as if the iron in my blood pointed our way unerringly like a weather vane in the wind. I had no doubt that soon we would put both the Marshes and the Skadarak far behind us.

'This isn't so bad, Daj,' I heard Maram call out. It seemed that he was trying to reassure the boy — or himself. 'You should have been with us in the Black Bog. Ah, perhaps you shouldn't. There, Val disappeared like a wraith, and I thought I'd lost him forever. There, too, time ate up the moon — a whole month of moons in a single night. There was a dragon, too, I think. Kane later told us that for a few moments out of time we were walking on the Dark Worlds, perhaps even Charoth. I have to believe him. That night was ten times longer than this day, and I thought it would never end.'

'I wish this mist would end,' I heard Daj say to him. 'It's nearly as dark in day here as it was in the mines of the Dark City.'

'Do not speak of that place,' Maram said to him as he slapped his neck. 'At least there were no mosquitoes there. As for that, though, I haven't been bedevilled by them nearly so badly this last hour, and so we must be drawing near the end of these damn Marshes — mustn't we?'

Maram's question alarmed Berkuar, who called for a halt. He stood beside me sniffing the air. Then he said, 'I can't smell the Marshes.'

'Neither can I,' Maram said. 'Hurray, hurray!'

Berkuar looked at me through the mist and said, 'We can't have come that far. The marshlands should still be to the south.'

'Perhaps a shift in the wind has carried off the stench,' Master Juwain offered.

But there was no wind — only the stillness of the silent wet woods. 'Are you sure of our course?' Berkuar asked me. 'Perhaps we've veered to the north.'

'Does one of your arrows veer,' I asked him, 'or does it fly straight?'

Gorman, who had walked off a dozen yards to look for mosses growing on trees or other sign of north, suddenly straightened up and called out to us, 'Look at this sapling Oak, it is, and white oak at that. Its bark has gone black, and it's as twisted as an old man!'

We noticed then that something was wrong with the trees around us, for their trunks, too, were blackened and twisted as with some disease.

'This is a bad place,' Gorman said. 'Let us flee it as quickly as we can.'

'And flee into a worse place?' Berkuar asked him. 'Let us remain here until the mist clears so that we can see what is about us.'

He cast no more aspersions on my leadership, but argued strongly for waiting, whatever my sense of direction might say. We finally reached a compromise: if the mist did not clear by noon or soon thereafter, we would push on to the west.

'But how will we know when it's noon?' Daj asked, looking up into the blinding mist.

Although my sense of direction, I thought, was nearly inviolate, my sense of time was not. And so I said to Daj, 'We'll have to guess.'

And. so we waited. Maram and Berkuar built up two little fires, around which we all gathered to keep warm. An hour passed, and then another, and I was sure that noon had passed as well. Daj was the first of us to notice a soft wind blowing through the woods and thinning of the mist. Maram cried out that we were saved, but his celebration proved to be premature, for as the wind sucked away the mist and the air began to clear, we had a better view of the woods all around us: in every direction, the trees grew all stunted and twisted, with blackened bark and a brownish rust that blighted their leaves. Old oaks, which should have been as tall and stately as kings, grew only twenty or thirty feet high. Many were, as Gorman had said, bent like crippled old men. Few bushes and no flowers grew out of the forest floor; I put my hand to this dark gray ground, and it seemed too warm, as if the earth itself were burning up with fever.

'The accursed forest,' Berkuar said, looking at me. 'We've surely wandered into it.'

I said nothing because I could no longer deny that I had led us into the one place that Abrasax had warned us we must not go.

Chapter 16

For a while, as we waited near the fires and the mist grew thinner, Berkuar stared at me. Maram, I knew, did not like the accusation in his eyes because he came to my defense, saying, 'It's not Val's fault.'

'Did I say it was?' Berkuar asked him. 'The Skadarak might well have grown so that it would be impossible not to wander into it. All that matters now is how we will find our way out.'

This proud woodsman did not say what was obvious: that he had become lost in the mist, and could not tell north from south. Neither did his sharp eye for mosses and the like give hint of direction, for none such grew on these diseased trees.

Above us the clouds still gathered so thick and gray that no glow of white marked the position of the sun. Gorman told us that it was often this way in Acadu, in late Ashte, for weeks on end.

'That way is west,' I said, pointing straight ahead of us. I drew my sword, which glowed faintly when I pointed it toward my right. 'Do you see? Argattha should be to the north of us here, and Alkaladur confirms this.'

Once, my shining sword had led us to Argattha where the Lightstone resided.

'Let us go on,' I said.

'If you're wrong,' Pittock said, 'we could walk straight into the heart of the Skadarak.'

'Yes, that's true,' I told him. 'But so long as we walk straight, eventually we'll come out on the other side. Now let's be off.'

We smothered the two fires with some stinking muck and resumed our hike toward what I was sure was west. The walking was easy here, with no bracken or bushes to trip us up; with the lifting of the mist, the drizzle dried up, too, and it grew cool rather than cold. The afternoon's journey might even have been pleasant but for the horror of the blighted woods and our dread of what had made it so. It was a dark wood, to be sure — darker even than the Vardaloon. The trees about showed but little green. They grew black like burnt firewood, and their worm- eaten leaves showed shades of brown and blood-red. But the worst of it, I thought, came not from the omnipresent clouds blocking the sun or the blackening of tree bark; rather, it felt like something from within was stealing their life and dimming their essential light.

As it was with the trees, so it was with us. We walked on into the woods, and we all felt a gradual dampening and draining of our life fires. The earth itself seemed to call us down into herself, and her voice was long, dreadful and deep. By the end of the day, we had to struggle to keep our limbs moving. It was like trying to fight our way out of a lake frozen with slush.

'I'm cold,' Maram grumbled as we trudged along. 'I'm tired and I'm hungry, too. And thirsty. Surely this is a night for a little brandy?'

'Remember your vow,' I said to him. My voice, even to myself, sounded as raucous and repetitive as a parrot's. 'The brandy is to be used only for medicine, and there's nothing wrong with you.'

'Is there not? My whole body feels like one big bruise.' He paused as his glazed eyes took in the darkening woods around us. 'Ah, besides, it's not my body that really needs medicine, but my soul.'

We found no clear brook or stream upon whose banks to break our journey, and so we made camp that night in the middle of the featureless forest. Maram was keen enough to build up a great fire, but Kane had to drive him — and Gorman and Pittock — to gather deadwood for our fortifications. In truth, there seemed no need. Mostly to frighten Maram into activity, Kane spoke of maddened panthers or bears made into ghuls, or even demons that might come for us in the night. But for all that afternoon we had | seen not a single animal larger than a worm. We had seen no sign of men, either, nor did we expect to, for who would be foolish enough to enter such a doomed wood? Kane warned that after our encounter with the droghul, Morjin might send a company of soldiers after us or even the second droghul that Atara had told of. But as a despondent Maram pointed out in a heavy voice, 'Why should he bother, when this damned dark place will do his work for him?'