The forest deepened and took on a new aspect as they rolled on toward Ikos. Perhaps, Gerin thought, taking on an old aspect was a better way of describing it. Elabonian traders and explorers, back in the days before Ros the Fierce brought the northlands under imperial control, described them as almost unbroken forest from the High Kirs to the Niffet and all the way west to the Orynian Ocean.
Around the Sibyl's shrine at Ikos, that ancient forest survived undisturbed. Some of the gnarled oaks and deep green pines might have been saplings when the men round what would become the City of Elabon were still unlettered barbarians. Some of them might have been saplings before the Kizzuwatnans in their river valleys scratched the world's first letters onto clay tablets and set them in an oven to bake.
Maybe the shaggy beards of moss hanging from many of those trees helped muffle sound, or maybe some lingering power clung to the forest: some of the trees that grew there, at any rate, Gerin had never seen outside these confines. Whatever the reason, the woods were eerily still. Even the squeak and rattle of the wagon's ungreased axles seemed diminished. Far above the roadway, branches from either side interlaced, cutting off a good part of the daylight and turning the rest cool and green and shifting.
"If we could drive the wagon under the sea, it might look like this," Gerin said.
"Maybe so." Van kept craning his neck, looking up, down, all around. "I don't like this place-and I don't think it likes people, either. It wishes we weren't here, and so do I."
"I'd argue with you, if only I thought you were wrong." Gerin kept not quite hearing things pacing alongside the road as if tracking the wagon, not quite seeing them no matter how quickly he turned his head toward what he hadn't quite heard.
Van mused, "I wonder what would happen if, come a dry summer, some lord sent his peasants in here with axes and torches."
Gerin wondered if the forest and the things that dwelt in it understood Elabonian. He feared they did, for all at once the cover of branches over the road grew thicker and lower, while most of those branches suddenly seemed full of thorns. The very roadway narrowed, with trees-many of them full of thorns, too-crowding close, as if ready to reach out and seize the intruders. Once or twice he was sure he saw eyes staring balefully at him from behind the leaves, but he never got a glimpse of the creatures to which they were attached.
Nervously, he said, "You were just joking there, weren't you, my friend?"
"What? Oh, aye." Van was more than bold enough against any human foe, but how could even the boldest man fight a forest? Eyeing the growing number of encroaching branches, he went on, "All this lovely greenery? In truth, it would be a dreadful shame to peel even one leaf off its stem."
For a long moment, nothing happened. But just when Gerin was about to grab for his sword and start slashing away at the aroused trees and bushes, everything returned to the way it had been. The sun played through breaks in the overhead canopy, the road widened out again, and the trees went back to being just trees. Whatever had been moving along with the wagon went away, or at least became altogether silent.
"Whew!" Van muttered under his breath. "Place must have decided I was just joking after all-which I was, of course." He added that last in a much louder voice.
"Of course you were," Gerin agreed heartily. Then his voice felclass="underline" "All the same, we'll spend tonight in one of the lodgings round Ikos, not in this wood. That will further prove we mean no harm to the powers here."
Van's eyes met his. The two men shared one thought: It will also keep anything in the forest that's still angry from coming down on us. The words hung unspoken in the air. Gerin didn't want to give any of those possibly angry things ideas they didn't have already.
The sun was low in the west behind Gerin and Van when they topped a rise and looked down into the valley wherein nested Biton's gleaming white marble shrine and, leading down from within it, the rift in the earth that led to the Sibyl's chamber.
"Last time we came this way, we camped in the woods," Van said. " As you say, though, better to pay the scot at one of the inns down there tonight." A little town had grown up in front of the Sibyl's shrine, catering to those who came to it seeking oracular guidance.
"Aye, you're right." Gerin sighed. He didn't like silver going without good cause. Come to that, he wasn't overfond of paying silver even with good cause. But he did not want to spend a night in these uncanny woods; they were liable to shelter worse things than ghosts. He twitched the reins and urged the horses forward.
When he'd visited Ikos before, the town in front of the shrine had been packed with Elabonians from both the northlands and south of the High Kirs, Sithonians, Kizzuwatnans, Trokmoi, Shanda nomads, and other folk as well. A big reason Gerin had preferred to camp in the woods then was that all the inns had bulged at the seams.
Now, as the wagon rolled into town, he found the dirt streets all but empty. Several of the inns had closed; a couple of them, by their dilapidated look, had been empty for years. The innkeepers who survived all rushed from their establishments and fell on him and Van with glad cries. Gerin hardly needed to haggle with them; they bid against one another until he got his lodging, supper, and a promise of breakfast for half what he'd expected to pay.
The taproom in the inn was all but deserted. Apart from Gerin and Van, only a couple of locals sat at the tables, drinking ale and telling stories they'd probably all heard a thousand times. The innkeeper brought ale and drinking jacks to his new guests. "And what would your pleasure for supper be?" he asked, bowing as low as if the Fox had been Hildor III, Emperor of Elabon.
"Not chicken," he and Van said, much as they had at Ricolf's.
"You've traveled some way, then, and spent nights in the open." The innkeeper pursed his lips to show he sympathized. "I killed a young pig this afternoon. I was going to smoke and salt down the flesh, but I do some lovely chops flavored with basil and thyme and wild mushrooms. It's a splendid dish, if I say so myself, and one I don't have the chance to prepare as often as I'd like these days. True, the cooking of it takes a while, but where have you gentlemen to go in the meantime?"
Gerin and Van looked at each other. They nodded. The Fox said, " Your trade has fallen off since the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet and the Empire shut the last passage up from the south."
"Good my sir, you have no idea." The innkeeper rolled his eyes. " Sometimes I think all of us left here make our living by taking in one another's washing. The shrine has fallen on hard times, that it has, and every one of us with it."
"Does the old Sibyl still live?" Gerin asked. "I'd not expected to find her breathing when I was last here five years ago. Now nothing would surprise me."
"No, Biton took her for his own last year," the innkeeper answered. "The god speaks through a younger woman now. 'Tis not that the quality of oracle has suffered that's cost us trade"-he made haste to reassure the Fox-"only that fewer folk now find their way hither."
"I understand." Gerin drained his jack dry. The innkeeper hastened to refill it. Gerin drank again, sighed with something close to contentment. "Good to relax here, away from the ghosts, away from robbers in the night, with only the worries that brought me here to carry on my shoulders."
"That my humble establishment is able to ease your burdens does my heart good," the innkeeper declared.
"To say nothing of your coin hoard," Gerin said dryly.
The innkeeper turned his head to one side and coughed, as if mention of money embarrassed him. Then he paused, plainly listening over again to what Gerin had said a moment before. "Robbers in the night, good my sir? So men begin to hold the ghosts at bay and the gods in contempt?"