He clenched the hilt of his own weapon in readiness. Then more men entered the clearing. The pent-up expression on the troop-leader’s face broke; he sagged, and the point of his blade dropped.
Looking around the glade, concluding that here at least they were safe for the moment, the troopers sank to the ground without even acknowledging their commander. Their spirit, it seemed, had finally been knocked out of them.
Scabbarding his sword, Vorduthe strode to the group. “On your feet,” he ordered. “There’s work to do.”
The men glanced up but at first did not move, until the troop leader, in somewhat sullen voice, joined in.
“You heard what the lord commander said. No lounging!”
He turned to Vorduthe, obviously trying to fight off both weariness and fright. “What is to be done, my lord?”
“We have to regroup and recover our equipment,” Vorduthe said. He looked chidingly at the seaborne warriors who were forcing themselves erect. “You won’t survive by giving up. Keep your wits about you, and don’t let your strength flag.”
He ventured to the edge of the glade, peering between the trees which hereabouts were fairly close together. He saw men stumbling about aimlessly, and called to them.
He heard the voice of Lord Korbar, also calling through the jungle. Slowly the survivors began to collect together. At first Vorduthe couldn’t believe how few of them there were, and he sent troop leaders forth to seek out more.
After a time a white-faced Askon Octrago appeared. “That was a bad patch,” he muttered to Vorduthe. “Sorry I didn’t spot it in time.”
By now they had approached to within sight of the place where the small army had been so nearly destroyed. The wagons stood abandoned, some turned on their sides or bristling with tree-lances which could not dislodge themselves. Far above, if one dared lift one’s eyes to a spectacle so horrid, the trees bore human fruit, transfixed by living spears or hanging limply.
“How can we move our equipment out?” Vorduthe asked Octrago.
“With great care,” the other replied with irony. “But it will be less dangerous now. The forest is mindless—it works by reflex. Once a plant has been triggered it usually does not react again for a while. So do not delay further.”
It was far from easy. So bad had morale became that the men were afraid to return to the scene of the carnage. But when they saw Vorduthe and Korbar put their backs to the nearest overturned vehicle, the tougher troop leaders stepped forward to help. Serpent harriers followed cautiously, in twos and threes, until finally the whole army—what was left of it—was at work.
Shortly they were once again making slow but steady progress, pushing forward while the forest continued its mindless and savage war of attrition.
The disaster at the fallpit patch proved to be a watershed for the expedition, a screen that blotted out the world beyond Peldain, and the day took on the quality of a nightmare. While Vorduthe resumed the march wondering how much more punishment his followers could take, the thought began to be replaced by an eerie feeling that none of this was happening; that he had died, perhaps, or was asleep and dreaming. From the glazed faces and nervous actions of those around him, he realized that the same flight from reality was affecting everybody—except, perhaps, Octrago.
He struggled to take a grip on himself; it would be a disgrace for the warriors of King Krassos to succumb to psychological breakdown.
But it was hard to avoid feeling helpless as the hours wore on and his force was steadily, mercilessly depleted by all the horrid means the forest had at its disposal. Then, sometime after midday, Octrago gave brief warning of a second major attack.
They had been hacking through thick bush, when he was alerted by a curious motion ahead.
“Call a halt,” he advised urgently. “Ready the fire engines.”
Vorduthe immediately did so, and studied the object of Octrago’s alarm. In their path lay numerous trees of a type he had not seen before, dwarfs in comparison with the tall trunks that gave the forest its ever-present canopy. Their olive-colored branches were long and whip-like, and thrashed constantly about as if tossed by a strong wind.
Many of the branches bore on their tips fluffy white spheres, resembling large puffballs. Octrago was shouting to Vorduthe to have the fire engines wheeled forward when, as if by command, the whip-branches drew themselves back and flung several dozen spheres at the advancing army.
They flew swiftly at first, until slowed by the resistance of the air, then sailed, then drifted, over the ragged column.
Petrified with dread, most men cowered or dived under wagons. Only one fire engine operator had the presence of mind to swivel his nozzle, swing his match-cord, and send a swath of fire through the setting spheres.
In that moment, the puffballs burst. It was as if a cloud of gnats came into existence and dispersed, all in the space of seconds.
Again the trees threshed, flinging more puffballs.
“Fire engines forward!” Vorduthe bellowed, galvanized into action. “Burn those trees! Burn them!”
But even as the crews moved to obey, the puff-balls showed their deadly purpose. Each seed-like particle expelled by them floated on the air by a parachute of silken threads; now it in turn burst to release a puff of violet spores.
If the colorful little clouds encountered nothing, they sifted harmlessly to the ground. Yet where they settled on human skin, a horrible transformation took place. In less than a minute a patch of discoloration could be seen spreading fast over the helpless victim. This quickly thickened to become a slimy carpet. His flesh had become food for a quick-growing fungus. If touched, fungus and tissue fell away together in rotting gobs, revealing bone that, too, was rapidly disintegrating.
“The mould! The mould!”
The disbelieving moans came from those stricken, who staggered about in horror and despair while their comrades fled from them, refusing to deliver the mercy of their swords lest they should receive contagion from the blades. Vorduthe forced himself to ignore the gruesome sight. Like everyone else, he could do no more than hope to escape infection and to keep his mind on the task in hand. For now, at least, was a peril that could be dealt with after the manner of a military engagement. It was indeed fortunate that the fire engines could frizzle the puffballs in midair, or else the fungus-rot might well have consumed the entire army. As it was, only a dozen or so of the second volley won through the criss-crossing firestreams to airburst their spores, and in seconds the trees themselves were writhing, massed with flame, even while letting loose the last of their delicate artillery.
It was then that the forest sent in its second wave: a hail of lances and a rain of danglecups from the taller trees all around. To these, too, Vorduthe responded with his only effective weapon: fire. He realized he would have to forsake all restraint, all thought of conserving the precious fuel. He created a conflagration. Tree trunks roared with leaping flame. From above, there came a snowstorm of burning leaves.
A fuel wagon was pierced by a tree-lance that had been converted to a spear of flame, and exploded. Yet somehow Vorduthe kept his ravaged force together, leading it between burning stumps that had been a grove of whiplash trees. Behind them the fires flourished but briefly before the forest, in its usual manner, magically damped them down. Behind them, too, lay numerous corpses, including those that had fallen with the fungus-rot. These were almost visibly decomposing. They would add their substance to the soil and furnish fast food for the root system—in its own way, the forest was fiercely logical. Perhaps, Vorduthe thought, they would even be the means of regenerating the whiplash trees he had just burned.