Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Nita’s lungs burned. The pain was beginning to force itself through her concentration. Just run. Just run. Just keep running—
—and then suddenly she tripped over Sker’ret, who’d stopped, and fell on top of him; and from behind Nita, Ronan fell on top of her.
The air went out of her lungs, leaving Nita unable even to say “Ow!” Within a second or so Ronan got up off her, and Nita could just lie there for a moment, feeling her legs—or wishing she couldn’t feel them.
Underneath her, something hard and edgy moved, or tried to. “Nita,” a muffled voice said in the Speech, “could you please get off me before we accidentally become more than just good friends?”
Nita opened her eyes at that, partly in alarm. She wasn’t entirely sure what Sker’ret meant, but she didn’t intend to find out. “Sorry,” she said, and disentangled herself from him as best she could. It was kind of like having fallen into a closetful of coat hangers, but finally she managed to get herself and her clothes undone from all those jointy pointy legs of his, and carefully stood up to have a look around.
The ground of the dimly lit clearing where they’d wound up was strangely soft underfoot. All around them was a great silence, broken only by a faint rushing sound a long way off. Nita glanced toward Kit, who was removing the wizardly leash from Ponch, and then looked around.
Trees, was her first impression. Trees as far as the eye can see. But they’re so weird! The trees were many-trunked, their branches reaching down half the time to root themselves in the ground again. Other branches and trunks reached higher, but almost immediately got involved and snarled up with the wrestling, shoving trunks and branches of other nearby trees, so that the upper canopy was as much wood as leafage. It made Nita think of a many-arched roof trying to grow into a cathedral, but strangling itself in grappling loops and buttresses, and having to break away each time in some new direction—then getting tangled and strangled all over again. Little light pierced such a canopy, but what did was blinding. Here and there the strife between the upthrusting, furiously contending branches had let a crack of the high sky show. This burned whiter-hot than the daytime sky above the Crossings, an unbearable glare that seared the skins of the trees through which it tore. Like multiple fiery spearshafts, that light struck down through the branch-ceilings, scarring the nearby growth to a scabrous black and plunging like white knives into the squelching surface below. Slowly, softly, the spongy peat-black stuff underfoot bubbled where the light bored into it, as if something there boiled.
Kit sniffed the air. “Motor oil,” he said. Nita caught the scent he meant, and looked over at one of the closer patches on the bumpy, root-tangled surface, where brown-black tar came oozing up through the ground, slicked over with what was probably crude oil. It gave off the scent Ponch had been tracking.
The rushing sound was slowly getting louder. The effect was like walking toward a waterfall, except that none of them was walking. The sound made it seem as if the waterfall was coming toward them.
And then, in the distance, Nita saw the shadowy shapes moving slowly among the giant, broken-backed trees, in several lines, one after the other, somber, dark, steadily approaching. Slowly she started hearing more than just that rushing noise as the shapes got closer. She heard a low humming or singing sound, and other noises that made her hair stand on end: anguished cries and sobbings that got louder as the marching shapes drew nearer. The crunch and creak of breaking wood told Nita that they were breaking the trees as they came, tearing down branches, ripping away every scrap of brush and undergrowth.
The shrieks echoing along the path of the approaching creatures became louder every moment, and Nita had to force herself to stand still and keep silent, concentrating on not panicking as she heard the trees wailing in anguish as their branches were bitten away. Onward came the softly singing column, leaving everything that had stood in its immediate path now bare except for the spongy ground underfoot. Off the creatures went and out of sight, bearing with them branches like banners, oozing strange sap; and behind them the trees moaned low, and more sap fell and trickled onto the soft ground, pooling like tears.
Filif stirred in silent horror. “And you’re sure this is the place we were looking for?” he said.
Ponch stood up again, gazing at the indistinct, moving shapes with interest. This is the place.
“What are they?” Nita whispered. “I can’t see.”
“I think we should keep that mutual,” Kit said.
Nita nodded and reached down to her charm bracelet for the ready-to-implement invisibility spell, taking hold of the fabric of the spell and whispering its last word in the Speech. She felt the faint itch on her skin that told her it had taken hold, and around her the others all winked out of sight as well.
Best we keep any comments mind-to-mind for the time being, Ronan said.
Silently the others agreed. They all moved carefully forward: not just to avoid making any sound that would be noticed by the creatures they were stalking, but because everybody was using different kinds of invisibility, and this made it all too easy for people to bang into one another.
Something light tickled Nita in the kidneys. She whirled, but there was nothing there, which meant what she’d felt was one of Filif’s fronds. Sorry, Fil.
My fault, I was too close—What?
Sorry, it was me, Sker’ret’s ratchety mind-voice said.
Nita let out a little breath of laughter as she softly skirted around the vast intertwined trunk of one great tree. She put out a hand, touched it—
The tree shuddered. Nita snatched back her hand, shocked, and then laid it against the tree again, much more gently. What’s the matter? she said to it silently in the Speech. Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.
But it was afraid. It was in absolute terror. It was holding itself still in utter dread, frightened to speak to Nita, frightened to do anything at all. It was afraid of something far worse than the merely physical destruction Nita had seen. Finally she took her hand away and moved off, rubbing the hand nervously, as if the tree’s anguish was something that could cling to her like sweat.
What? Kit said, catching some leakage of what she felt.
It reminds me of the way the trees were in the Central Park in that other Manhattan, she said, when we were out on Ordeal. That same kind of dumb fear. They wouldn’t respond to the Speech.
Come on.
Softly they made their way closer to the long lines of dark creatures weaving their way among the tree-trunks. Nita could just barely hear the soft footsteps of the others around her, and the slight rustling noise that Sker’ret and Filif made when they moved. She came up behind one particularly large tree and, without touching it, peered around it at the twisting pathway running between it and other large trees a few yards away.
Her nose wrinkled at the strange smell that hung in the air. It’s almost like coffee, Nita thought, as one of the shadowy shapes came around the huge tree that blocked the pathway, but more bitter, a little burnt, as if it—