The first day of the journey passed without event. Our meager supply of silver had managed to wring us a pair of horses for the trip and some oh-so-inspiring bowls of something resembling gruel. (I hoped we were received favorably in the White City, because we didn’t have another penny to our names.) The horses, old and listless beasts with heavy feet and long, thick manes the color of new wool, had probably been used for pulling plows, and they seemed as likely to canter as they were to fly. The villagers wanted them back and the fee we had paid was a deposit we could ill afford to lose.
A series of rills and streams-including, I expect, the overflow from the Falcon’s Nest cistern-came down from the mountain and congregated randomly over the two miles north of the Refuge Inn. Thereafter our route followed the eastern bank of a slow river. This was the Snowborne, a southbound frigid curl of clear, shallow water only twenty or thirty feet across for much of its length but swelling, we were told, to several times that as it passed the White City. It was reedy and its surface was broken by rocks and stones, but there was never any chance of us losing it altogether, and it was as good a guide as we could have wished for.
That was presuming, of course, that we wanted to go at all. I was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around in the village of the damned while Renthrette rode off looking for her knight in shining armor and his heroic pals. I wanted to get some distance between me and that nightmare fort, at least until I could do something constructive to get my friends out of it. I did still feel responsible for them, to be honest, but I couldn’t wish myself into being something I wasn’t. If I could I would have been Will the Heroic and Invincible long ago. Well, probably.
Incidentally, I had not given up on finding some other road, one that got us away from these lands of legend and myth and back to more predictable problems and petty miseries, but when I had asked the residents in the Refuge about Stavis and Cresdon, the mountains of Thrusia and the Diamond Empire, I just got blank stares. One of the barmaids pointed out that someone had once had a cow called Cresdel. That was very helpful.
So what was I supposed to do? Take off by myself and go wandering through this land of goblins and talking bears? Good scheme. So I sat astride my ponderous mount and kept my eyes on the riverbank just in case something grotesque came striding over to tear my head off. It was, after all, only a matter of time.
Renthrette, by contrast, was quite jaunty. For her. She seemed to have gotten over our catastrophe in the mountains and the imminence of the denizens of Hell now that we were “taking the right course.” She rode on, talking idly about reforging her sword blade and how much she missed riding Tarsha. To these observations I made wary agreement, which seemed all that was required of me. We didn’t speak of the others-any of them, the ones we lost in Stavis or those we had left under goblin guard-as if even breathing their names would be bad luck.
Then we saw the forest. It appeared along the western bank of the Snowborne and it was all the villagers had said it was and more, a dank and sinister-looking wall of trees. Sarak-Nul, they had called it. An ugly name for an ugly place, though “ugly” doesn’t begin to describe it. The trees along the riverbank-those that were still standing, that is-were pale and gray, stripped of their leaves by more than winter. Their branches clawed the sky, and, at their feet, piles of dead lumber blackened and sprouted flesh-like fungus in great tubes and swellings clearly visible even from this side of the black water. The wood was swampy, silent, and vast, its dead, waterlogged foulness stretching farther than the eye could see. The horses snorted and tossed their heads uncomfortably, and a chill ran down my back, making me look sharply away. Renthrette stared at it fixedly, as if getting to know the enemy or staging her defiance. I just thanked God that we were forty feet of water away from it and did my best to ignore it.
I was less than completely successful at this because the woodland had a way of making you feel like you were being watched. I realize that sounds clichéd, but that’s how it felt. There is, after all, usually a degree of truth at the bottom of every cliché, only the familiarity of the words making the thought sound insincere. So, trust me, I’m being sincere. The trees had, I was convinced, eyes. If they didn’t, there were things among them that did, and the eyes were trained on us like a thousand crossbows. Could a place be evil? I had never thought so, but this soul-sapping forest was doing a pretty good impression.
An hour after the forest first appeared, we came upon a collection of buildings too small to call a village. None of them advertised itself as an inn or tavern, so we didn’t even dismount. We slowed, however, to discuss whether it was worth checking our route with one of the locals. As we did so, we became aware of doors and window shutters stirring fractionally. More eyes. Then the doors were closed carefully and bolts were thrown into place. Shadows passed across upper windows and vanished. The hamlet became quite still and we, it was apparent, were not welcome.
“Such warm people,” I remarked to Renthrette loudly. “Hard to believe the place isn’t awash with tourists! I mean, considering their openness and their exotic cuisine, amiable wildlife, and picturesque scenery”-this last bellowed with a broad gesture toward the fetid forest over the river-“it just takes my breath away that we aren’t fighting for road space. Well,” I concluded, in a bitter roar at the shuttered windows, “I’ll spread the word, have no fear! I’ll say, ‘If ever you’re passing a cramped and run-down shanty on the edge of a dead forest, a lousy collection of ruinous hovels populated by a bunch of inbred, misanthropic gits,’ I’ll say, ‘do yourself a favor and keep passing.’ ”
“Quiet, Will,” sighed Renthrette predictably. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, I’m not sure I can tear myself away from this. . ”
“Shut up, Will.”
That was the last haven of civilization (if you could call it that) that we saw for ten days. Thereafter it was just us, the river, and the forest, and a right hoot that was.
We slept alternately during the deepest hours of the night, taking a couple of hours each to watch by the fire. It was cold, but there was no wind, and we had brought extra blankets from the inn. Strange birds called from the river at night, great booming rolls that didn’t sound like birds at all; Renthrette said they were bitterns and that I should go back to sleep and stop being so pathetically infantile. There were other noises that she said were birds, too, lunatic cries that came out of the darkness when you least expected it, chuckling and whooping insanely to themselves, then stopping abruptly. The sooner we got to this White City place, the better I’d feel.
Then the forest crossed the river. I don’t mean that the trees of Sarak-Nul uprooted themselves and splashed their way across, though I was beginning to think anything was possible in this land of goblins and their conversational pets. I mean that the forest spread onto our side as we had been told it would. This was Eventor, the wood which was supposedly still largely untainted by the black hand from the western bank. Still, it was a forest and, given recent associations, I was more than happy to give it a wide berth, and said so.
“No,” said Renthrette in that apprentice-party-leader way she sometimes had. “We have to stick to the riverbank, and the forest is big. To go round it would take us twenty, thirty miles out of our way.”
“To go through it could cost us a good deal more than time,” I pointed out.