Diamond Warriors

rotting log.'

Behind me, I heard Liljana murmur soft reassurances to the children, and behind them, Abrasax announced that the trees here exuded a more powerful aura than those of any he had ever encountered. And then, fifty yards farther on, I heard Maram call for a halt.

'There's something strange here,' he said.

I, too, felt what he felt, and perhaps even more strongly. The air suddenly grew denser and moister, and seemed to waver with a charge as if lightning might strike out at any moment.

'Val — I feel sick to my stomach. It's as if a fist is driving into me and keeping me back.'

As it turned it out, when we gathered in close to discuss things, we all felt a deep and silent force working at our bodies and souls like an ocean's tide pushing us back the way we had come.

'It was this way,' Master Juwain said, 'with the Vilds.'

I remembered vividly the three magic woods that we had found in Ea's wild places: in the great tract of the Alonian forest and on the grasslands of the Wendrush and in the burning waste of the Red Desert. It did not seem possible that another Vild could exist in the middle of Mesh, surrounded by farms and men who had hunted all through these woods many thousands of times over thousands of years.

'Kane,' I called out, 'you once said that at least five Vilds still remained somewhere on Ea. Can one of them be here?'

'Not that I know,' he said with a strange tightness in his voice. 'At least, not that I remember.'

I could almost hear Master Juwain rubbing the back of his bald head in intense cogitation. He suddenly said to me, 'In the three Vilds, we have found great power and great healing. Perhaps, in your forays here, you sensed the presence of a Vild within this wood, even if you wire never aware of it. And have now sought it in your blindness.'

His thoughts, it seemed, almost exactly mirrored my own. 'Let us go on then,' I said. 'Into that very place where it seems the hardest to go.'

The silver streak of my sword pointed us deeper into the woods. More than once, the force pushing at us almost caused me to turn my sword to one side or the other, or lower it altogether. But I kept a hold of it, and we continued moving through the great; silent trees.

'Do you see anything?' I heard Maram say to Kane. 'Does anyone see anything? There are only trees here, just as there always weTe, and one tree is like another!'

I smiled at this, for not even two oaks that grew from a pair of acorns would be like each other — to say nothing of the immense oaks of Ea's Vilds that were like no other trees on earth. I felt sure that we must be close to these living giants that grew out of the forest floor. I wondered why no one seemed able to make them out.

'Wait!' Maram shouted. 'There is something ahead of us — I can almost see it!'

I, however, could could not. Trapped within a cloud of blackness as I was, I wondered at the nature of sight, itself. How did anyone, or anything, really see? Vision could not merely be a matter of light filling up the eyes with colors and shapes, or else my eyes would behold a sea of green all around me. When my grandfather had taken me hunting as a young boy, he had taught me how to look for fire moth caterpillars, whose form and hue exactly matched that of the twigs they hid among. Detecting them, he had told me, required patience, concentration and a training of the mind behind the eye. Had it been this way for Atara, too, searching among millions of possible futures for the one that might hold life for the earth?

True seeing, I thought, could not be possible without a will to see. One must learn to look behind surfaces and the usual expectation and habits of the eye and mind. There must be a sensitivity to nuance, a drive toward something higher and deeper, the sudden perceiving of things in a new light — and a sort of astonished touching of the real. To see the unseen required a freshness of the mind and a cleanness of the spirit. And seeing, as my grandfather had told me, was much of what the One had created us to do. What did the One will us behold? Above all the infinite depths and delights of the One's creation and the immense glory of life that filled even the tiniest of seeds as they sent up through the earth green shoots that fought their way higher and ever higher toward that brilliant and beautiful star in the sky that men had named the. .

'Maram!' I heard Kane shout out from ahead of me. 'Can you see me? Can you hear me?'

With the breaking of Kane's voice into the peace of the woods, the darkness suddenly lifted from me. It was as if the door to a dungeon had been flung open: I blinked against the burning stabs of light that drove into my eyes. It took me many moments before everything began to clear. Then I gasped in awe to see that we had somehow left the wood to find ourselves in a grove like unto no other that I had ever seen. The trees around us, with their silver bark and golden leaves, all were astors but much taller and more magnificent than their cousins in Ea's other Vilds. They grew not like the trees of most woods, crowded together crown to crown, but rather spaced apart allowing a clear sight of the blue, sun-filled sky. Few bushes spread out above the forest floor, carpeted with old leaves and patches of grass, but flowers grew everywhere.

'Maram!' Kane called out once more. And then: 'Liljana! Daj! Master Juwain!'

I whipped about in my saddle, looking around me. I could see none of our friends whom Kane had named, nor Joshu Kadar, Master Matai, Master Nolashar, Master Yasul or Master Storr. Of the Seven, only Master Virang and Abrasax himself seemed to have found their way into this new place. As had Bemossed and Estrella, but no one else.

Or so I thought until I saw Alphanderry suddenly take form to stand in a spray of crimson flowers almost as bright as his mysterious being, which seemed somehow much more luminous and real than it had ever been before.

Kane saw me looking about, and called to to me: 'You can see again!'

'Yes,' I told him, 'the Ahrim left me suddenly. I think it is gone.'

I cast about trying to sense it, perhaps hiding in the lee of one of the great trees. But the brightness of this wood made even shadow seem light. 'But what happened?' I said to Kane. 'Where are the others?'

Beneath the silvery bough of one the astors high above us, we gathered to hold council: Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed, Alphanderry and myself. And Estrella. Although our passage into these wondrous trees had not cured her of her muteness, she could say more with a smile and a brightening of her eyes than most people could with a whole stream of words.

'So, this happened,' Kane said. 'I was looking for the Vild, and suddenly found myself within it.'

'So it was with me,' Abrasax said. The intense sunlight seemed to set his white hair and beard on fire. 'I was looking, as a Master Reader is trained to look. There should be an aura to any Vild, different from other woods. And then, of a moment, instead of the wood where the Ahrim attacked Val, I saw this.'

Off through the silver and golden shimmer of astor trees, I noticed gardens of emeralds and diamonds that the Vild's people cultivated, along with dozens of other gems and even gelstei themselves. Birds as bright as parrots flew from tree to tree. Timpum — in all their swirling, scintillating, many-colored millions — hung about nearly every branch, twig and leaf. Never had I seen these luminous beings blaze so brilliantly.

It turned out that all of us had experienced a sort of ripping away of our bodies and souls to find ourselves suddenly riding our horses through this glorious wood. Even Kane, who must have experienced almost everything that could be experienced, seemed distressed. Estrella, however, simply gazed up in wonder above the trees at the fiery red sun. She evinced no fear at how she had come to be in this place; in truth, she seemed utterly at home here, as in some strange way she did everywhere.

It was Bemossed who asked the questions that pressed most keenly on all our minds: 'But where are the others, then? Did they remain behind? And if so, why?'

At this, Kane shrugged his shoulders then scowled at the sky. Not even Grandmaster Abrasax, wise in all lore, had an answer for him.

'And if they did make their way here,' Bemossed continued, 'is it possible that they came out into a different part of this wood?'

No one knew. The Vild seemed to spread out for miles around us in all directions. So open were the spaces between the giant trees that one could say that no path led through them — or that a thousand did.