This all had been a test. The forest sought to know his mind about the Mirari sword. It wanted to know if he was truly done with the blade, for the blade was not done with him.
"I am done," said Kamahl, as much to himself as to the wood. "I wish never to touch it again, but I will draw it and break it if it will save the wood."
Take the sword.
Kamahl reached into the hole. His hand settled in its accustomed way around the hilt. The soul of the Mirari trembled. He tightened his fingers. Instead of drawing the blade, though, he was drawn by it.
Kamahl left his body. It seemed a cicada husk crouched above the hole. The contact of skin to metal to root had conveyed his soul into the millennial root bulb. He entered the forest mind.
It was not a consciousness so much as a vast place, the ideal forest. Suffused with plant and creatures, it was vital. Air lived. Ground lived. Water lived. There was no blue sky, for the blazing sun lived immanently-in glowing stamens and fox fire and infinite eyes staring out of darkness. There was no sea except omnipresent dew and ghostly mist. All was forest. All was life.
This was the inner stillness, deeper than meditation, deeper than thought.
Kamahl breathed. Air tingled in his lungs and suffused him. Myriad leaf-shapes filled his eyes, receding upward to white and downward to black. Warm and humid, the forest air clung to him. He wished never to leave.
Yet into that place of utter quiet intruded a single disquieting thought.
"Jeska."
Kamahl suddenly returned to his body. In fact he had never left it. He had not been drawn down into the forest mind but had let the forest mind rise up into him. The quiet place, the ideal forest, was within him. In its stillness, he had gained strength enough to battle legions.
Kamahl stood. He left the sword where it lay. It was too dangerous to draw. He no longer needed it, for his power came from within.
The forest had granted him a great boon. It would keep the sword within a knot-work of roots. Never again would the Mirari decimate a land, and if it made the forest grow bountifully, it was a willing sacrifice.
Kamahl had begun this rampant growth and could not end it, but he would serve the forest as its champion. It had saved him and imbued him with power. Now he must go save another.
"Jeska."
Kamahl reached the forest's edge. He had walked unafraid among plunging boles and spiraling vines, but now, he felt fear.
Beyond a ridge of saw grass lay a nowhere place-a dune desert. It was the utter antithesis of the forest. Nothing lived in it. There was only sand and sky. Once, scrub trees and creosote bushes had clung to the clay soil, but sandstorms from the north had buried them. Only endless and undulating dunes remained beneath a swollen sun. Night would come soon.
It was a place of terrible emptiness, but it lay between Kamahl and his sister.
He had known it would be here. He had provisioned himself with water-root, which would provide both food and drink for his journey. He had fashioned palm leaves into shields against the merciless sun. At his belt hung the shell of a freshwater clam, a tool for digging daytime shelters. He needed but one thing more- a weapon, one that drew on the strength of the living forest.
Kamahl retreated to the tree line. Absently, he raised a hand to a nearby bole, clutched the vine clinging there, and pulled it free. Plucking away the sucker stalks, he rendered the vine into a long whip. He lashed it once experimentally. The tip whistled angrily by, wrapped a sole head of saw grass, and cut it off. Kamahl had learned to use a bullwhip during his weapons training but always had preferred straight steel. No longer. A whip could steal a man's feet without stealing his life. Still, it would not be enough.
Kamahl hunted among the trees, seeking precisely the right staff. He found a likely branch, though it was long dead and as fragile as clay. Another bough proved too short, a third too narrow, a fourth too crooked.
All the while, the blood-red sun sank toward the west. Forest shadows lengthened, and the sea of sand cooled. It was time to set off.
Kamahl drew a long breath and laughed gently. He had been too easily drawn back into the weary ways of time. The sun swallowing course made no difference to him. Nor did the acquisition of a simple staff. He would set out not because he must, but because he would.
Hands dropping to his sides, Kamahl walked with silent patience toward the desolation. The water-roots rapped gently against one leg and the makeshift whip against the other. His boots pressed deep prints among the saw grass, and then he was out onto the sand. Already, the air felt different around him-dry and unforgiving. With each step, his forest home drew farther back, and solitude sank more strongly over Kamahl.
The chuff of his feet in the grit became a bleak rhythm. Somehow, the desert seemed louder than the forest. Kamahl struggled to find his quiet center, the ideal forest within. His consciousness descended past the sound of night breezes, beneath the argument of thought, and down to that perfect place. A sigh escaped him as his soul settled in.
Something jabbed his foot-hard-and he fell facedown in the sand. Kamahl rolled to his feet, snatched the whip from his belt, and sent it lashing out in an arc where he had passed. The vine snapped angrily in thin air. No one stood nearby. Whistling through its arc, the whip circled back around and landed limply in the sand.
Something had tripped him. Kamahl retraced his steps. A small knob jutted up from the sand. It looked to be a white stone cracked in half, with a flower inside. Kamahl knelt, pulled the shell from his belt, and began to dig. Another small stone appeared, and another-they turned out to be the tough husks of a desert plant. More digging uncovered a whole cluster of the flower pods, and beneath them a thick, stout staff.
Kamahl smiled. It was a century plant-a desert agave that bloomed once every hundred years. It stored up its life essence for a whole century, produced a long, straight shaft, and topped it with a profusion of seed-bearing flowers. The plant had been buried by sandstorms, yet it reached out of them. There could be no more vital weapon for Kamahl.
Bowing his head in thanks, Kamahl reached down into the hole, grasped the pod, and yanked. With agonizing slowness, the shaft eased from the sand. Kamahl had cleared only a foot of it before he had to stop and pant. He grinned through the grit.
What did time matter to him?
The stars appeared and scratched across the sky to midnight. At last, the shaft came clear. Kamahl lifted the sandy thing high-straight, stout, and strong. It would be perfect. Only one final act remained.
Kamahl whirled the shaft, watching as the seeds of the doomed plant leaped away among the stars to plant their life anew.
CHAPTER THREE: UTTER DEFEAT
Ixidor worked feverishly, but not at his table. His quills and ink sat quiet beside sketches for the next battle-plenty of illusions to keep any foe jumping. Ixidor had put aside paper disks for metal disks-a different sort of image magic.
Crouching beside the fireplace, Ixidor fed three more wax-soaked logs into the blaze. With blackened fingers, he closed his jury-rigged furnace and pumped the bellows. Each breath of air stoked the heat. It radiated through the metal plates and made the river-stone chimney crackle. Ixidor watched in delight as the thin pewter wire resting atop the grate melted away.
He clapped his hands and rubbed them excitedly together. Donning a thick glove, he picked up an iron skillet filled with more pewter-shavings and shards from a cup he had owned-and gingerly slid the skillet into the upper compartment.
"What are you doing?" came a voice behind him.
He pivoted, nearly falling, and set his knee down. "Nivea. I didn't know you'd come in."