This part of the jungle seemed just like all the rest, a habitation for monsters. Heat. Humidity. Sandy, moist, marshy soil. Thickets of manganoza palms everywhere. Strange plants, strange birds overhead, strange little animals peering hungrily at them from the underbrush, clouds of sinister little buzzing things in the air, the great unrelenting eye of the sun above them, seemingly filling half the sky. The ocean close at hand on their left and a solid wall of green on their right. The populous northern shore of the peninsula was somewhere off beyond those trees, a pleasant land of thriving harbors, bountiful farms, sumptuous resorts, bayfront villas; but one had no sense here that any of that existed. The north shore might as well have been on some other world.
In this place plants and animals both were indefatigable foes. Nightmare things with teeth and claws lurked everywhere. And again and again it was necessary to leave the safety of the floaters, come forth with energy throwers, blast away at the stubborn tangles of inimical sharp-edged greenery that blocked their path. And for what? For what? The pursuit of an invisible enemy who vanished before their advance with will-o’-the-wisp stealth?
Today, though—today was going to be different. They had the Lady’s promise of that.
“Can you feel her with you?” Gialaurys asked. He and Septach Melayn were riding in the lead floater today. Navigorn was just behind them.
“I feel her, yes.”
The sendings had been coming to him, waking and sleeping, for the past day and a half. It was an experience such as Septach Melayn had never before had in his life, or even imagined was possible: the constant presence of the Lady in some corner of his mind, speaking softly to him, often without the use of words, simply touching him, steadying him, comforting him, lending him her strength.
She was with him now.
Rise before dawn. Go forward unhesitatingly. You are within striking distance of your enemy.
“What is she saying?” Gialaurys demanded. “Tell me, Septach Melayn! Tell me! I want to know!” He was like some big, eager, overfriendly tame beast, clambering all over him. “Are we really near him? Why can’t we see anything? The smoke of their campfires, for instance—”
“Peace, Gialaurys,” Septach Melayn replied. One had to be patient with the great burly fellow: he meant well, his heart was good. “The cloud of unknowingness still hangs over everything in front of us.”
“But if the Lady says it’s going to lift—”
“Peace, Gialaurys. Please.”
“I find you very strange today, Septach Melayn.”
“I find myself very strange. I am not my own self at all. But let me be: let me hear the messages of the Lady undistracted by your chatter, eh?”
“She speaks to you even now, while you’re awake?”
“Please,” said Septach Melayn in a tone compounded of irritation and weariness and anger, and this time Gialaurys withdrew sulkily to his side of the cabin and said no more.
It had been just after dawn when they set out, and now, an hour later, the sun was rapidly climbing in the sky. They seemed to be following a vaguely northwest course through the jungle, although always remaining within a few miles of the sea. It was the Lady, speaking through Septach Melayn from her place beside Prestimion at the western tip of the peninsula, who was directing their route.
Some mysterious enterprise, Septach Melayn knew, was unfolding back there in Stoien city under Prestimion’s command and with the aid of the Lady. He had no idea what it was, only that they had found some way of striking at Dantirya Sambail from afar, and that very shortly they would lift the shroud of darkness which for weeks had kept him and his forces from striking at the foe they had come into this ghastly jungle to find.
Was it so? Or was this all some sorry hallucination, born in his tired mind out of the long travail of their journey? How could he tell?
What could he do but obey the guiding impulses that arose in his mind, and hope they were real ones? And struggle on and on until this business had reached its conclusion, if such a thing was ever to be granted them.
This was not how he had expected things to be, this life of constant toil and frustration, when Prestimion first had been named as heir to the throne.
How strange it all had been since then, Septach Melayn thought, looking back over the short and troubled years of the reign of the Coronal Lord Prestimion. “Lord Confalume has told me that I am to be the next Coronal,” Prestimion had said one day when they all were much younger than they were now, thousands of years younger; and they had rejoiced, he and Gialaurys and little Duke Svor, they had caroused far into the night, and Akbalik had come in eventually to help them finish the last of the wine, and Navigorn, and Mandrykarn, who would die in the war, and Abrigant and perhaps one of Prestimion’s other brothers, and even Korsibar—yes, Korsibar had been there, joyously embracing Prestimion with all the rest, for the crazy idea of seizing the throne for himself had not yet entered his mind. And the future had looked bright indeed for them that night. But then—the usurpation, and the civil war, and the memory obliteration, and this new business with Dantirya Sambail—why, the whole reign thus far had been nothing but sorrow and toil. What had it gained any of them that Prestimion was Coronal Lord, except a life of hardship and pain and weariness and sorrow for the loss of good friends?
And now—now—this awful unending trek through the Stoienzar, pursuing a phantom that would not allow itself to be found—
Septach Melayn shrugged. Like everything else, this was part of the plan of the Divine. Who someday would summon them all to return to the Source, as was the destiny of everyone who had ever lived, great and small, and what difference would it make then that they had had to endure these little moments of discomfort in this jungle when they would much rather have been carousing at the Castle?
Therefore, he thought, utter no complaints. Go on and on, wherever you must. Do your task, whatever it may be.
He stared forward through the windscreen of the floater.
“Gialaurys?” he said suddenly.
“You told me that you wanted no conversation.”
“That was before. Look you, Gialaurys! Look there!” Hastily bringing the floater to a halt, Septach Melayn pointed toward the north with a frantic jabbing finger.
Gialaurys looked, rubbed his eyes, looked again. “A clearing? Tents?” he said, amazed.
“A clearing, yes. Tents.”
“Is Dantirya Sambail in there somewhere, do you think?”
Septach Melayn nodded. They had stumbled onto the verge of an actual road, two floater-widths wide, that cut straight across the rough track that they had been following westward. It began to their north, amidst the manganoza thickets, and appeared to run down toward the sea. Through the opening that it made in the saw-palm grove they could see the tawny tents of a good-sized encampment in the midst of the jungle, the sort of hastily improvised bivouac that their scouts had come upon more than once, but which no one had ever been able to find again the next day.
And there was the Lady’s sweet voice in his mind, letting him know that they had reached their goal and should make ready for attack.
Leaving the floater, he trotted back to the one just behind theirs, Navigorn’s, which had halted also. Navigorn was peering out, looking puzzled.
“Do you see it?” Septach Melayn asked.
“Do I see what? Where?”
“Why, the Procurator’s camp! Open your eyes, man! It’s right over there—”
But as he turned to point it out for Navigorn, Septach Melayn blinked uncomprehendingly, clapped his hand to his mouth, grunted in astonishment.