One of the shapes came around the tree and drifted toward her, almost without a sound—and Nita lost the thread of her thought completely, utterly shocked. A great, shining, dark-glossed almond-shaped body, held up at a diagonal on legs that were longer at the front than in the back; eight black legs, jointed three times each, the back edges of them razor-sharp; up high, a blunt wedge of a head with great dark mirror-shade eyes. Huge claws, hinged at the front top of the body shell, even sharper than the legs, held the squirming, dripping branches torn from some tree.
Nita stood frozen as the creature walked delicately past her. A few seconds later another one passed, and another, in what seemed an endless line. They came in all sizes, but even the smallest of them was the size of a big car. The larger ones, the creatures with the longest claws and heaviest armor, were more the size of vans or small trucks. They went on along the path, some of them making a low soft hum as they went, three or four notes repeated one after another. They weren’t words; if they were, Nita would have been able to understand them as Speech. Unnerved, Nita began to back away very slowly and softly as the long parade continued. The image from her dream was on her mind now: Della’s expression suddenly buried behind a glossy unrevealing eye, a claw coming up to brush blond hair away. Whatever it means, I have to find out.
At last the final dark-shelled creature went past Nita and out of sight beyond the trees down the path. Nita let out a long breath of relief, but couldn’t get rid of the profound unease that had been troubling her since she first touched the tree. There’s something really bad going on here, she thought. And we don’t have much time to find out what.
Without warning, from behind her she heard a different kind of humming sound, getting louder by the second. Nita turned quickly to see what was making it—
She had just time enough to jump back as a claw huger than any of the ones on the parading creatures came snapping straight at her face. She jumped back again in shock, grabbing for her charm bracelet, and the creature followed, snapping at her again. It sees me! But how?
The huge shelled creature lunged at Nita, its claws snapping as she dodged around the tree, doing her best to stay out of its way while she dumped the invisibility spell, which could interfere with what she was about to do. Then she said the short phrase of a basic defense spell, the single spell she probably knew better than any other in the world, because it had been the first one she’d ever done. As the creature followed her and its great down-reaching claws stabbed at Nita again, she saw the claws skid away from the spell. Nita hurriedly held up her hands and spoke the words of the blast spell that she’d been ready to use on whatever had been attacking her in her dream. In a blaze of glowing green-white fire, the force-blast wizardry jumped away from her outstretched hands. The creature vanished in it, leaving her staggering backward. Wow. Who’d have thought it’d have a kick like that. It must be the power boost. The fire faded down as Nita straightened up, relieved. So much for that. I hate having to use so final a spell on anything, but—
—and then she gasped and backed up fast, as the creature came right at her through the fading light of the wizardry. Its armor was shattered and cracked, but it was still making that awful, bone-rattling hum that now escalated into a roar. Those huge claws reached out for her. One of them struck at her shield-spell, and this time the claw didn’t skid aside. It burst right through.
Nita backed up and blasted the creature again. From behind her, Kit, also visible again, came up and did the same. His blasting spell was built differently from Nita’s, and this one knocked the thing back against the nearest tree … but only for a second. The creature recovered its footing and came at them again, the huge claws reaching out.
Down! someone said from behind them, and the word was as much wizardry as order: Nita’s and Kit’s muscles took control of them and flung them down hard on the soft, oozing ground. Nita just managed to turn her head as she went down, and so was able to see the furious fire of the Spear of Light streak over her and Kit and into the huge chitin-mailed form. The ferocity of the light left her briefly blind; she could only hear, and what she heard was a roar like the wind shouting in rage, followed by a silent wave of white-hot force that made Nita throw her arms up around her head to shield it. Then, nothing but silence.
Nita looked up, blinking and still half blinded, and pushed herself up to her knees. She and Kit were both covered with a dusty, scorched-smelling powder that was still sifting down through the air from where the attacking creature had been. Behind her, Ronan put out his hand, and the Spear flew back to his grip.
Filif and Sker’ret and Ponch came up behind him as Kit and Nita helped each other up. “I think we need to get out of here right away now,” Ronan said, “and go somewhere quiet for a think.”
“Boy, are you ever on,” Kit said.
Nita brushed herself off, looking at the vanishing tail end of the column of creatures, and listening to the faint sound of the sobbing trees behind them. “Bugs,” Nita said softly, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. “Giant bugs…”
Hurriedly, the six of them vanished.
9: Operational Pause
“The world’s called Rashah,” Kit said.
They sat on a transparent sheet of hardened space a couple of thousand miles above the planet’s surface, gazing down. The world turned sluggishly under them, its seemingly endless expanses of green and blue-green and brown stretching far to either side of a narrow, profoundly deep sea. Hovering a few feet above the wizardly surface where they sat, and surrounded by five intent wizards and a dog, Sker’ret’s implementation of the manual—a spherical holographic display like a particularly high-tech crystal ball—was showing them a slowly turning, annotated version of the planet.
Filif leaned past Kit, all his eye-berries on one side trained on the image as it rotated. Kit glanced over at him, concerned, for though Filif now looked fairly steady, he had been trembling all over when they first made it up into space. “You feeling better?” Kit said.
Filif rustled impatiently. “The initial shock’s passed,” he said. “Those plants aren’t sentient the way my people are. But they’re still in great pain.” His thought turned dark with anger. “The Kindler of Wildfires has plainly made this place Its own.”
There seemed no way to argue with that, for over the image of Rashah in Kit’s manual, and across it in Sker’ret’s view of his own, a string of boldface characters burned in the Speech. They said, “ARESH-HAV,” an acronym for a much longer phrase, and one rarely seen because few worlds were so completely dominated by the Lone Power to qualify for its use. “Aresh-hav” implied “lost”—a place almost as much lost to hope as to the powers of darkness, and presumed to be beyond redemption until the Powers That Be should intervene directly. The term also implied that the intervention might possibly be fatal for the world’s inhabitants, if the Lone One could not be otherwise dislodged.
Kit turned in his manual to the page that held the breakdown of the planet’s physical characteristics. Rashah was the fourth world out from its sun, at about the same distance Jupiter would have been in Earth’s solar system. The other three planets were much too close to Rashah’s ferocious blue-white O-type star for even Life’s endless inventiveness to do much with. Those worlds weren’t much more than little scorched Moon-sized rocks, their sunsides repeatedly slagged down by flare activity. Rashah at least had been distant enough from its star Sek to keep its atmosphere through the flares. Afterward, the plant life that had come to cover the world had slowly exhaled enough gases to breed a greenhouse effect, which allowed other life to evolve there—though not much of it. Millions of years had produced a planet where the vast march of the ruthlessly struggling rain forest was broken only by tar pits thousands of miles wide, slicked over with lakes of oozing oil—the last remnant of far more ancient forests killed by solar flares and transformed by heat and dead weight over thousands of millennia. Rashah’s turbulent weather was as unforgiving as its sun: summers hot enough to melt Earth’s polar caps alternated with winters that were simply one long, supremely violent hurricane.