“Your beliefs are your own, Ian, but I’ll wager a show of hands around the table will fall to the elves’ favor. Very well. Let’s see who agrees.”
“The bet also was for our bill, and so we’ll add another round to Ian’s burden before Miss Sarah sends us home!”
“Ha! Hear, hear!”
Chapter 21
OCTOBER 24. AFTERNOON
After more hours of brooding concentration and scribbling, Osley began to open up. “Ara definitely is on an epic journey, headed south. Here’s a typical passage that I can pretty much read on its face. Bear with me.”
He held up the page and read it to Cadence.
Ara struck due south and before she realized it, she was lost in Myrcwudu, the great remnant wellspring of mighty Mirkwood itself! A darker forest, perhaps, than what may lie even in the full depths of that haunted realm. All life that could flee, even the great spiders, had long ago abandoned this drear world. She stumbled forward in the pervading gloom that would not give back its pathways.
To either side were immense, desiccated tree trunks, like beings frozen in writhing torment. Their numbers faded into the mist. At her feet, the leaves rustled like a living membrane as they parted to create a track before her and forever close the one behind. She had no choice but to go on. Hafoc flitted from branch to branch, afraid to fly more than a few feet and nervous at resting on the old limbs that seemed to reach out with grasping fingers.
She trod warily, resigned to the single, winding track the forest offered. She sensed that time was forgotten here. In the far world outside this gloom, events would run their due course and leave her far behind. The waxing moon would grow and gloat over the trap set for the Bearer. He was already moving fast to his fate while she was caught in the black heart of the Forest of Doubt.
Here the unlucky traveler contended with the most terrible of foes. Not the dim murk that seemed to flow before her. Not the legendary troops of man-sized spiders that guarded the outer reaches. No, here she faced something darker and more subtle.
Hemmed in by fallen trunks that, to her, were as walls many times her height, shadowed by a murky gloom that only grew thicker, and watched by a presence implacable and unyielding, she quit the false trail. She crawled away and curled into a frightened ball. A veil fell across her eyes. A false veil, for it portrayed that her Amon was lost forever. She imagined his face, his eyes grey-hued like a morning mist with the sun shining through. Eyes she would never see again.
As the darker dark of evening came to Myrcwudu, a glistening fog seeped from the forest floor. It pooled in the dells and flowed among roots that spread like the gnarled fingers of dirtied and downfallen giants. Ara got up and stumbled, directionless, lost in a desolation of spirit that seemed to whisper, Y
The terror of her insignificance built itself in her mind, like a cairn of rocks heaped up one by one. The very idea made her both fearful and infuriated. If it meant anything to be a Halfling from Frighten, it was to carry a wounded pride. She was wretched and thus she was dangerous. She tried to resist the fog, but it was unrelenting. She stopped, for no apparent reason, as a cockroach might, and waved the antennas of her soul in a desperate search for direction.
Myrcwudu’s answer was no answer.
She scurried forward. Deft footfalls paced on either side. Things unseen scuttled and rustled. Once, Ara heard, far ahead, a long, plaintive sound that was something between a whistle and a cry. But for the stillness, it might have been the saw of the wind through a knothole. She froze and waited, but its maker, if there was one, did not reveal itself.
The opalescent gloom thickened until she unconsciously put her hands in front of her, as if parting cobwebs. She had to find shelter. She peered and groped until she discovered a massive, upended tree. The base of the tree was covered with roots, like a snarl of dirty hair. She could just see within these a mouth-like entrance that beckoned her. She parted the roots and, heedless, put her head in the gaping mouth. She tumbled in. To her surprise, the interior was clean and dry. It felt safe. She summoned Hafoc to perch on a limb near the entrance and she squirmed inside. There she curled into the thin comfort of her cloak.
Huddled there, like some subterranean grub, Ara listened to the night sounds of Myrcwudu. It was an ominous, horrible orchestra. Whisperings of gibberish mixed with anguished cries, as of some passing column of sad and penitent beings. An owl screeched as it passed high overhead. A raucous warbling of some unknown bird cut through the ongoing creak and groan of the giant, ruined trees. In time, the haunted melody swirled into the eddies of her dreams.
As she slept, the sounds collected in a black sack in her mind. The sack bulged and swelled and refused to spill out its contents. Ara writhed in her sleep until she felt silent hands, perhaps her own, but leprous and scabbed, feel their desperate way across her cheeks and plunge hungrily into her mouth to grope for that foul bag.
She awoke with a gasp. Her heart thudded. Her ears sensed something. A dim, gray light, precursor of a far away dawn, seeped though the entrance. Her small and delicate hands, this time unquestionably hers, pulled out her knife as she coiled in readiness.
Then she realized what had awoken her.
The silence.
No birds, no wind, no moans or whispers or creaks or groans. She sensed Hafoc was gone. Everything was waiting, and something had arrived. She held her breath and stretched her eyes wide, straining to hear or see. Or smell. She flared her nostrils. Floating in the air was the waft of some creature rustic and unwashed, fouled with the stench of raw meat. It was close.
Ara’s world closed down to that graylit entrance. She knew this was no dream. She watched in horror as, beyond all her imaginings, a ghastly arm — large and knobby and bristled with hair — finger-walked through the opening.
As she held her breath, a dark bulk followed the arm, filling the gray mouth with a deadly intruder. Her own movement surprised her. She uncoiled her body and, quick as an adder, drove the knife into the shadowy form. It screamed and fell back. The sound cut into the forest like the thudding bite of a sharp axe.
She crawled out, parting the roots and blinking in the luminous mist. Before her lay an orc-captain, his throat bleeding in spurts. He coughed but could not speak. His eyes locked on hers. Dismay, regret, sadness were all there. Whatever had brought him here — perhaps the same inexorable spell that had controlled her path— their fates had at this spot thrown the dice together. Her heart broke as she watched him fade, his orc-life ruined. Her sorrow sliced through the sack in her mind, and the loathsome spell of Myrcwudu gushed out.
Now she could focus her fury. She looked up and around, and thought,
She struck out, heedless of direction, and wandered, whether for sleepless hours or days she knew not.
At last she came upon a clearing, shot through with lances of sunlight. These bright shafts highlighted the immensity of the trees. She stood in awe, her gaze climbing the trunks until her neck ached. At her feet, amidst a riot of auroch-sized roots, a puddle of water caught the light between floating leaves and twigs and created a vicious sparkle that assaulted her unadjusted eyes. She held her hands to her face and looked down between her fingers. She realized she had a bit of magic that might get her out of this place. She knelt and cleared the debris from the puddle. She felt in her cloak and found the small leather kit hidden in a pocket of its folds. This she opened and brought out a tiny, flat bit of wood, no bigger than her fingernail. She lifted from the leather fold a splinter of rock. It was dull gray and each end tapered to a point. One end had been marked with white chalk. She put the bit of wood in the pool and let it float freely. Then she placed the rock splinter on it. It turned and twirled, and came to rest with the white end fixed in one direction. The opposite end was south.
