'I've been up this trail a little farther already this morning,' Ingold continued, returning to the fire. The trail itself ends about two miles from here; from there the ground gets worse. You and I might make it, but we'd have to leave Che. And aside from the fact that he would surely die in this wilderness, we shall have troubles enough before us without trying to live off the land as well.'
Rudy sighed. His whole body ached with the thought of a trailless scramble over terrain worse than yesterday's. For one thing, he hadn't thought terrain could get worse than yesterday's. Gritting his teeth, he asked, 'So what do we do?'
'Go back.'
Relief flooded Rudy's muscles like the hot bath that was rapidly replacing food, California, and Minalde as the object of his most wishful fantasies. 'I'm game,' he said. 'Maybe the woods will be easier to get through in daylight.'
They weren't.
From the stream back for some distance into the woods, the fire had seared off the underbrush, though the wet bark and damp leaves of the trees themselves had defied its heat. Beyond the burned woods, the trees yielded at first to Rudy's spells. But through his magic he felt their strength, and the implacable power of it frightened him. In time, the trees crowded in thicker, brambles tangling at the travellers' clothing and vines catching at their feet, until it was all Ingold could do to force a path.
Even so, it seemed that the underbrush closed in after the old man, and Rudy found himself struggling through the clutching hedges simply not to lose sight of his guide. The cloudy light of the overcast day sickened to murky gloom here, choked by mats of thrusting branches and tangled creepers, until the woods were almost as dark as evening.
Rudy cursed as Che's packs got hung up for the umpteenth time in the thick mazes of blackberry brambles. He pulled the little axe free and began chopping at the thick vines. There was ivy twined with the brambles, and the axe head became entangled as well. Rudy's hands and face were bleeding with scratches by the time he'd unravelled the mess. Turning to go on, he found the trail ahead of him entirely gone.
'Ingold!' he called out. 'Ingold, hang on a minute! Where are you?'
But only the silence of the black trees pressed upon him. Thorn and bramble surrounded him like a net, vicious and impenetrable. He could see no trail, either forward or back.
'Motherloving trees - INGOLD!' he yelled again. Somewhere in the woods there was a furtive, greedy rustling, but it was not in the direction Ingold had gone, nor anywhere near. Fighting panic, Rudy called on all his powers for a clearing-spell to break him out of what felt like a closing tangle of barbed wire, but the spells on the woods sapped his power like a leech on a vein, and the dark trees whispered in a sound very much like laughter.
For nearly an hour he called, his voice cracking with strain and terror, sweat running down his face and soaking his clothes. He began to wonder if something had happened to Ingold and the old man was never coming back for him. He remembered the rats. 'INGOLD!' he yelled, and this time he could hear the panic edging his voice.
Gritting his teeth, he repeated the spells of clearing, to open a path, some path, any path. So gripped was he by the suffocating sense of panic that he might have thrown himself at random against the thorns and tried to claw his way out. But a whisper
of the leaves behind him sent him swinging around in terror and a path was there. It was a fairly broad trail, and he thought he could glimpse faint glimmers of sunlight on the leaves far down its winding curves. He wrapped his hand tighter around Che's lead-rope...
... and stopped.
Sunlight? It's been raining for days.
Stay put, Ingold had said. It's the oldest trick in the book.
Rudy stayed put, like a lost child, calling Ingold's name.
Finally he heard a muffled reply, a hoarse, cracked voice calling, 'Rudy?'
'I'm over here!'
There was a trampling noise and a great shaking among the dark branches. Rudy had a momentary panic-stricken scenario of some incredible, slavering monster seeking him out by calling with Ingold's voice, but a few minutes later the wizard appeared from a thinning among the trees, his face and hands scratched all over and thorns and twigs lodged in his cloak and hair. He looked white and strained, exhausted by the game of wits with shadows. Without a word, he caught Rudy by the arm, took the axe from the pack, and began methodically hacking a path through the wall of briars. The woods yielded grudgingly, snaring the axe, tearing their clothes, reaching clawed, greedy hands to rip at their faces or snatch at their eyes. Both of them were stumbling with weariness when they finally broke through the last of the dark trees, to find themselves on the rim of jagged boulders that overhung a deep canyon - forty feet of sheer-sided cliffs falling below them to a jumble of water-torn rocks and splintery trees.
Ingold slumped quietly down against a boulder and shut his eyes. He looked dead and dug up, Rudy thought, sitting wordlessly beside him. Even the cold of the overcast day was welcome after the hushed, hot darkness of the haunted woods. Rudy also closed his eyes, glad to rest, to have a few minutes wherein he was not afraid of what was going to happen next. Wind snuffled down the canyon below them and set all the trees of the woods at their backs to whispering their angry curses. Spits of cold rain kissed his face, but he hadn't the heart to send the rain-clouds elsewhere. The veering of the wind brought another smell to him, bitter and metallic, one that he had scented before.
He opened his eyes and looked down the gorge before them. The rocks along the stream, he saw now, were stained black, and the brush and paloverde along the stream were charred and rotted in long spoors, as if filthy and corrosive streams had trickled down from farther up the canyon. That stinging smell breathed up at them again, poisonous and overpowering. He coughed and glanced over at his companion.
Ingold had also opened his eyes. The sweat was drying in his hair, the blood caking in little rivulets on his scratched hands. He was staring out into space, and his
eyes held a look of infinite weariness and a kind of tired despair.
'Ingold?'
Only his eyes moved, but they seemed to lighten and smile.
'What is it?' Rudy asked.
The old man shook his head. 'Only that we'll have to go up the gorge. We can't go back through the woods. There is worse evil in them than I thought, and I won't risk being trapped there until nightfall.'
'Ingold, I don't like this,' Rudy said. 'Who's doing this? What's happening? Did Lohiro really set up all this?'
Ingold made a tired little motion with his hand, 'No. Not Lohiro alone. I set up some of it myself when I was at Quo. In fact, many of the spells on the woods were mine, though they've been changed now and made - much worse. All the members of the Council have put their powers into the maze, and the maze changes, the traps and illusions shifting with each new mind that goes into it. It has never been this this difficult. It has never been this perilous. But Lohiro and the Council intended to wall themselves in. Only one of the makers of the maze can shift it now.'
Rudy sighed. He wondered what would have become of him if the Dark Ones had really made off with Ingold in the desert. Could he have found his way to the heart of the maze?
No wav, he decided. I'd have poked around the feet of the mountains till I died.
'You're the Great White Scout,' he said after a moment. 'But I'm here to tell you I do not like that gorge.'