Tallamorn, the Deathguard necromancer who had interrogated Muhallah’s corpse, led them around the pool to the very edge of the jungle. He took from his robes a slender rod forged from pure silver, its length cut with symbols. The company stood back while Tallamorn murmured a spell under his breath.
Vaddi tensed beside Nyam, and even Ardal looked deeply uneasy.
Tallamorn bent down and dipped the tip of his silver rod into the pool, which was deep, shadow-filled in the coming twilight. Light rippled out from the rod and spread. In its glow at the heart of the pool, something swam below the surface, circling. Tallamorn stood, raising the rod above him as a fisherman plays his catch and at once the waters of the pool burst up in a bright fountain, but it was no fish that erupted with the waters. It was man-like, though not a man. Vaddi and Nyam jumped back in shock, but the Deathguard had been prepared for this.
Tallamorn called out sharp commands to the figure, which writhed this way and that, flinging water from itself like a dog shaking itself dry. Scaled like a fish, with long talons and a sharp spine running down its back, the being glared at its tormenter. The face may once have been human, but now its eyes were huge, its nose a gash and its mouth a thin line that opened to reveal twin rows of sharply pointed teeth. The thing clawed at the air, hissing at Tallamorn, wriggling across the surface slowly but unable to get close to him.
“Who dares summon Ezrekuul?” snarled the twisted mouth.
“You see how this accursed jungle treats those it traps,” whispered Ardal to Vaddi. “How perverse is its magic.”
Tallamorn pointed his silver rod at the creature, which writhed even more, cowed by its power. “We are the Deathguard,” the necromancer told it, his voice low but filled with chilling power. “Your time has come.”
“I serve Madwood, I am Madwood. Everything is Madwood.”
“No, Ezrekuul. You are no more than a part of it. We have come to free you.”
A long silence followed, then the creature writhed anew, as though fires licked at it, or some other power gripped it and twisted it, tormenting it. “You cannot. Only Wood commands!”
“No. It crushes you, grinds you under its roots, wraps you in its coils. It sucks the blood from you, as you suck the blood of the unwary. It chains your soul, your essence. It saps your will.”
“Deceiver!”
“No,” said Tallamorn, his words like a litany, a part of his working. Vaddi felt the aura about the necromancer, the weaving of magic, centered on the silver rod. “Your desires are twisted away from you. You are not permitted choice. You are damned. The Madwood has cursed you. You long for true freedom.”
“It is you who are cursed,” sneered the creature, but it had shrunk down, its voice dropping. “I am … not to be fooled.”
“Your time has come. I offer you release from this nightmare. I will rip your false guise from you and show you. The spirit of the Holy Ancestors will purge you, if you so desire.”
Tallamorn pointed again with the rod. As he did so, the creature began to blur, to shapechange.
Vaddi gasped at what it was becoming. At first it seemed to become no more than a pillar of shapeless clay, but then, encouraged by Tallamorn’s working, it sculpted itself into a human form, an androgynous being, young and slender. Its beauty was marred by the intense sorrow in its face, which intensified as it looked down at itself and its new form.
“This is as you were, as you should be,” said Tallamorn, “before you were corrupted by the evil of the Madwood. You were a dryad, Ezrekuul, and you shared the life of the great trees before they, too, succumbed to the horrors of this place.”
“Yes, I remember. It was … before the darkness.”
“Your time has come. I can release you from that darkness.”
There were tears now in the eyes of the dryad. “But my trees … they are dead. Worse, they are undead, twisted. I cannot go back to them. I can only dwell in the stream.”
“Would you be free of this life, this living death?”
The creature gazed at the last rays of the sinking sun beyond the hill, fingers reaching out in sudden longing, as if to catch the disappearing light. It shuddered, breathing a soft affirmative.
“Very well, but first you must serve us. A small price for your freedom.”
“What must I do?”
“Guide us into the Madwood.”
“Where do you go?”
“Where does this stream lead?”
“Into the heart of the jungle, then it divides. To the southwest it flows into the Naalbarak. The other way it flows east, entering the sea beyond the jungle’s edge.”
“South of Valen Bay,” said Fallarond softly beside Vaddi.
“It is this second way that we would go,” Tallamorn told the dryad. “To the ruins, which are near it, are they not?”
“Khamaz Durrafal?” said the dryad with genuine fear in its voice. “But I cannot enter them! The river runs near to them. The city is overgrown, choked with the death-weeds of the jungle. It is tempting oblivion to set foot near it.”
“Take us along the river as far as you can. When it is no longer safe for you, I will free you.”
“You promise this?” said the dryad, eyes full of pleading.
“In the name of the true Undying and my revered ancestors, I so swear.”
“Very well.”
“You must be again what you have become until I free you. In the Madwood, you must don the guise of its slave, though you are mine now.”
Tallamorn worked yet another series of spells and the others watched more in pity than in horror as the dryad was transformed back into its original, twisted shape, flinching away from the same rays that it had groped for.
Vaddi spoke quietly to Ardal. “What is this place that Tallamorn named?”
“Khamaz Durrafal. There were cities in the Madwood once. We suspect it is there that the Murughel have taken Zemella. Its ruins are the nearest to Valen Bay. They are as far as the Murughel would dare venture into the Madwood.”
“Are they safe?” said Nyam.
Ardal grunted. “Safe? Nowhere in there is safe, but in the past, there have been attempts to make pacts with the jungle. Such unhealthy alliances have usually centered on former Aereni cities. Khamaz Durrafal may offer a brief respite from the worst excesses of the Madwood—that or it will be a focus for them.”
Nyam groaned. “You would risk that?”
“We have no choice, but this dryad will guide us.”
“Yes, well that fills me with confidence,” muttered the peddler, taking an even firmer grip on his sword.
Shortly thereafter, the dryad Ezrekuul led the way under the arch of boughs and into the gloom of the Madwood. Tallamorn and Fallarond were close behind the creature, the healer keeping his silver rod to hand. Vaddi, Nyam, and Ardal followed behind them, with the remainder of the Deathguard bringing up the rear. It was tike entering a cave, hundreds of feet below the earth, so intense was the silence. For long minutes they were unable to see anything, but gradually light began to diffuse their surroundings, a corpse-light glow, eerie and unwavering, as if the very trees and weeds that choked everywhere were imbued with it.
Vaddi imagined he could hear the deep breathing of a huge animal far below the surface of the earth. The first real sounds that any of the company heard were the shufflings and slitherings from the matted undergrowth, as unseen denizens of this place, large and small, drew back from the hated intruders. It was as though a monstrous, amorphous entity tensed its coils. As the company grew accustomed to the bizarre light, they could see above them the trunks of the trees, most of which were immense, like the columns of temples, bending and twisting upward, solid as stone, to a vaulted ceiling that allowed in not a single chink of natural light. In the convoluted branches that ran like beams far overhead, there were more scuttlings, more half-glimpsed movements of creatures best left unseen.