'My mind, you mean.'
'Trust you to say it the most brutal way.'
'Life is brutal, and so are facts.'
At the rear of the column, Cutwood could hear every thing, and he said, 'I think they're mad at each other.'
'Shows how much you know,' Sighter replied. 'Human males and females always act strangely toward each other.
They never want their true feelings to show.'
'Why is that?'
'Because they don't want to seem vulnerable. Humans have a lot of this attitude called 'pride,' which is sort of like the satisfaction you get when your machine performs cor rectly. Pride makes them act contrary to the way they really feel.'
'That's silly!'
Sighter shrugged under his towering pack and almost fell down. 'Unh! By Reorx! Of course it's silly, and these two humans have especially bad cases of pride, which means the fiercer they act and the louder they yell, the more they care about each other.'
Cutwood was dazzled by his colleague's understanding of human behavior. 'Where did you learn so much about humans?' he said.
'I listen and learn,' said Sighter, very ungnomishly.
Though he didn't yet realize it, that was the change wrought in Sighter by the magic of Lunitari. From an intuitive, impetuous gnome, he had become a logical, thoughtful, deductive gnome, a creature that had never before existed.
The field of stones was largely barren of plants, even by day, so the first sign the marchers had that they were near the village was when stands of scarlet-capped mushrooms seven feet tall appeared, growing in neat rows between two low stone walls. Roperig picked a section of wall apart to study; it was simply made of loose rocks stacked conven iently together. 'Very primitive,' was his disdainful verdict.
The mushroom orchard served to screen them from the village itself. Sturm, Kitiara, Wingover, and Cutwood crept through the rows of fungus to the very edge of the settle ment.
By Krynnish standards, it wasn't much of a village. There weren't any houses at all, just a series of concentric stone walls about waist high, plus a few cribs filled with harvested food. The only full-scale structure was the keep, a squat, single-story, windowless block in the center of the village walls. A lone pole stuck up from the keep, and a dirty gray banner hung limply from it.
'Not exactly the golden halls of Silvanost, is it?' said Kiti ara. To the gnomes, she said, 'Can you hear or see anything stirring down there?' Wingover could see nothing moving.
Cutwood squinted one eye shut and listened hard.
'I hear footsteps,' he said uncertainly, 'pretty faint.
Someone's walking around inside the keep.'
'Fine. Let's bypass this place,' said Sturm.
The other gnomes waited patiently on the other side, chattering in whispers. When Wingover, Cutwood, and the humans returned, they shouldered their lofty packs and formed a single file again.
'The village looks deserted,' Sturm said. 'So we're going past it. Be quiet anyway.'
The trail of the Cloudmaster bent away from the village just beyond the walls of the mushroom orchard. As they rounded the tall red stalks, Kitiara, who was leading, saw that the path was lined on either side by tall, leafless trees.
'Odd,' she said. 'Those weren't there before.'
'Did they grow up suddenly, like the other plants?' asked
Roperig. Kitiara shook her head and drew her sword. v' The trees stood about seven feet high. Their trunks were graduated in bands of color, ranging from deep burgundy red at the base to the lightest of pinks at their rounded-off tops. All had branches that grew out and bent down.
'Ugliest trees I ever saw,' said Cutwood. He left the line long enough to chip a piece of the flaky bark off with his
Twenty Tool Pocket Kit. He was examining the fleshy gray wood when the tree's left branch flexed and swatted the specimen from his hand.
'Hey!' he said. 'The tree hit me!'
The double row of trees launched into motion. They pulled their roots out of the ground and freed their limbs.
Black dishlike eyes opened in the trunks, and ragged mouths split apart.
Sturm grabbed for his hilt. The gnomes bunched together between him and Kitiara.
'Suffering bloodstained gods! What are these things?'
Kitiara exclaimed.
'Unless I'm gravely mistaken, these are our villagers.
They were expecting us,' Sturm replied, keeping the tip of his sword moving back and forth to discourage the tree things.
The tree-folk emitted a series of deep hooting sounds, like a chorus of rams' horns. From recesses in their own bodies they produced an array of swords and spears — all made of clear red glass. The tree-folk closed the circle around the besieged band.
'Be ready,' Kitiara said, her voice taut with anticipation.
'When we break through them, everybody run.'
'Run where?' asked Fitter tremulously.
One tree-man, the tallest of the lot, broke ranks with its fellows and advanced. It did not actually walk. Rather, the tangle of roots that made up its feet flexed and carried the creature forward. The tree-man raised its crude, hiltless glass sword in one bark-covered hand and hooted loudly.
'Yah!' Kitiara sprang forward and cut at the glass blade.
She knocked it aside and swung again, this time striking the tree-man below its left arm. Her sword bit deeply into the soft wood-flesh — so deeply that it would not easily come out. Kitiara ducked the return cut by the tree-man's sword and let go of her own. She retreated a few steps, leaving her blade embedded in the foe. The tree-man did not appear too much discomforted by the yard of steel stuck in him.
'Sturm, lend me your sword,' said Kitiara quickly.
'I will not,' he replied. 'Calm down, will you? That crea ture wasn't attacking, it was trying to speak.'
The impaled tree-man regarded them with wide, unblink ing eyes. In a raspy bass voice it said, 'Men. Iron. Men?
'Yes,' said Sturm. 'We are men.'
'And we're gnomes,' said Bellcrank. 'Pleased to meet — '
'Iron?' The tree-man plucked Kitiara's sword from its flank, grasping it by the blade. He offered the hilt to Kitiara.
'Iron, men — ' She gingerly took the handle and let the point fall to the ground.
'Men, come,' said the tree-man. His eyes and mouth van ished, only to reappear on the opposite side. 'Men, come, iron king.'
The tree-man reversed direction without turning around.
The other tree-folk did likewise; their eyes closed up on one side of their heads and reopened on the other.
'Fascinating,' said Cutwood. 'Completely saves them the trouble of turning around.'
'Do we go with them?' asked Rainspot.
Sturm looked away to the trail of the stolen flying ship.
'For now,' he said. 'We should pay our respects to this iron king. Maybe he knows what could've taken our ship.'
The tree-folk made straight for the village keep. Sturm,
Kitiara, and the gnomes fell in behind them. Closer to the village, they saw signs of damage to the walls and
