Under the warm shade of the blossom trees, the grass was shorter, and the woodland bustled with life. Tiny brightly colored birds darted about in the branches above our heads, and a multitude of small creatures flittered busily in the grass. Dragonflies feasted on the clouds of smaller flies that hung in the shade below the blossom-rich branches.
“This is as different from Saxe as I could imagine,” I said to Cara as we moved slowly through the woods.
“It is, in many ways,” she replied, her eyes on the ground. “But for all that, a lot of the plants here are familiar. Some are almost exactly the same, and some are like bigger versions of familiar plants.”
She stopped and crouched, taking a few leaves from a low creeping plant with bright yellow flowers and adding them to the already generous bundle under her arm.
“I want to stop and craft a potion or two,” she said.
“Fine by me. I want a rest and a bite to eat anyway.”
I glanced around for a likely spot and saw a shaft of bright sunlight cutting through the trees away in the direction we were headed. It looked as if there might be another clearing in that direction.
“Let’s go that way and see if we can find a good spot to stop for a while.”
We walked for half an hour through the woods, Cara stopping every now and again to gather some new herb for her potions. I didn’t know much about potion plants, but I knew about gathering food in the wild.
I was pleased to see a flash of bright, sulfur-yellow peeping out from a fallen tree stump. It was a Yellow Treefall mushroom, which could be very good to eat when fresh.
I took my belt knife and cut a generous portion of the mushroom, gathering some wild onion tops from the ground around the fallen tree and adding them all to my supply pouches. Cara looked on in approval.
The brightly sunlit spot we had been heading for turned out to be more than a clearing. It was the edge of a fern-clad cliff which dropped away steeply down to a flat, grassy tableland stretching away toward the town. We were higher up than I had realized; the grassy flats were forty feet below us.
Looking in the direction of the town, I could see that it still lay some way off. The land below us was dotted with copses of trees and bushes, but these seemed tended. Paths ran through the land, and here and there smoke rose from the chimneys of little homesteads, the outlying farms surrounding the town of Otara.
Cara smiled down at the land. “This world is beautiful, peaceful, and well-cared for. That says a lot about the people.”
“Whereas Saxe is grim, austere, and cold; does that describe the people, too?” I asked with a wry smile.
She looked at me with a smile and touched my arm lightly. “Some of them, Leo. Not all.”
Directly below us, hard by the cliff, the roofs of a few simple buildings gleamed red in the sun. One looked like a simple home, with a kitchen garden out back and a little bench at the front. It was very humble, roofed with grass and made from what looked like bricks of clay or mud. Nearby, a larger building looked more formal; a tiered, red-tiled roof lay over an entranceway framed by two green-painted columns. Lamps hung from hooks on each column, and three broad stone steps led to the entrance, but there was no door.
“What could that be?” asked Cara.
“It looks like a shrine or temple of some sort,” I hazarded.
In Saxe, we had places where a fighter could give an offering to the God of War, and places where a farmer could pray to the spirits of the land for a plentiful harvest. The building we were looking at followed a similar pattern; an open entrance, which I figured symbolized the ever-present nature of the spirit or deity, and three steps up to the entrance, symbolizing the three levels of superiority of the spirit world over the earth.
As we watched, a man approached from the direction of the road. His brightly colored yellow robes fluttered in the wind as he carried a bowl of some white grain. He laid the bowl on the bottom step before bowing low to the entrance, raising his offering to the second step, and bowing again.
“Definitely a temple of some kind,” Cara said. “I wonder what deities they worship in this land?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. I was about to turn away when something caught my eye. I grabbed Cara’s arm. “Look down there! Look at the worshipper!”
The man had finished genuflecting to the temple and now raised his bowl from the final step, but a change had come over him. Instead of walking into the temple, he stood still as stone, as if frozen in place by some spell.
The sky darkened for a moment. From the open entrance of the shrine, a sudden mass of ethereal black tendrils reached out and wrapped around the frozen figure of the man. With a jerk, they drew him quickly through the door.
As he disappeared from view, a sudden wave of dark energy pulsed from the temple. It expanded swiftly in every direction, then vanished, leaving the scene as empty and peaceful as it had been before.
Chapter Four
I heard Cara gasping as she crumpled to her knees beside me.
“It’s the Festering!” I hissed through clenched teeth. “But somehow it’s concealed from my senses. I didn’t know that was even possible. There was a wave of it when that poor worshipper was dragged in, but now it’s hidden again.”
“My potion has worn off,” Cara
