Elder Race(30)

“It will wait on,” Nyrgoth said. “There is not much life left in it. Its strength dwindled over the centuries it slept. And I fear what might happen if this infection is capable of touching it. Best it keeps its distance for now.”

“But you have a plan,” Lyn finished for him, and his face twitched and a very small smile came to it.

“Some thoughts.”

“Will it fight the demon for us?”

“Let us first see the demon.”

*

Allwer reckoned they would see Farbourand before the end of the day, even with their slower rate of progress. The forest around them was becoming more infested with the demon-mark, meaning they had to go out of their way to avoid the worst thickets of it. Lyn had expected them to simply meet more and more corruption as they progressed, but the mark was in patches, spread out through the forest. Whole stands of trees were furred over with thick coats of leaf-like scales, glittering with malign scrutiny and bristling with lazily waving feelers. Often there were animals caught within the mesh, no hard division between them and the branches and trunks. Their bodies pulsed and twitched, but then so did the trees themselves. Some gluts of infection were in constant motion, the actual boles of the trees twining about themselves like slow, anxious fingers, the roots rippling to slowly drag whole vast assemblages through the forest, leaving a churned trail of devastation behind them.

One such interconnected knot of trees had a human being within it. They came to it by the screaming. She—Lyn’s best guess—was partly within two trunks, as though she had hidden there before the corruption had overtaken her. Now there was only the shape to show that there had been an extra body tucked into the clump of trees. The plants themselves were stretching farther apart, then back together, with a rhythm uncomfortably like breathing, and the human form stretched to bone-popping dimensions with each convulsion. The scream came with the expansion, ripping out of the scale-fringed hole in the otherwise featureless face.

“Just noise,” Nyrgoth Elder assured them. “Just the air being forced out of the lungs.” She wasn’t sure if he was saying so because the alternative was too horrible to consider.

“You can’t use your power to save her?” she tried. “Like you did Esha.”

“You saw what you had to do, to carve the thing from your friend.” Nyrgoth was staring at the screaming thing with that frightening dispassion, that she bitterly coveted in moments like this. “You saw the things that attacked us at Birchari. Can you imagine what would be left, once you cut away all that infected flesh?” He frowned, and leant forward so close to the trees that Lyn feared for him. “I hear the demon’s voice,” he said. “I hear it in the moment of its arrival like an echo in a cave, but not the original voice of it. It comes from no direction I know. . . .”

“Even as you spoke with your familiar,” she pointed out.

Nyrgoth shook his head. “No. That . . . has a very plain explanation, if you but knew the secret to it. But for this I have no explanation. It should be as you say, some similar manipulation of the way the world is, but . . . I can’t account for it.” And he was more discomforted by that, she could see, than she was. How much worse to think yourself wise, and still be as ignorant as one who knew themselves a fool?

The one blessing was that they saw very few free-moving parts of the demon’s army. Those people and beasts still able to move were kept at the edge of the demon’s influence, she guessed, where they might march and spread it farther. Here, whatever was left was all warped into one. They were behind enemy lines.

They did not go down to Farbourand. The outpost, the farthest extent of the forest kingdoms’ influence, was sheathed entirely in the demon’s mark, and within the bowed palisade some huge, single thing rocked and bleated, its bloated, rounded mass visible over the wall, filling almost all the space. They passed on quickly and for once the sorcerer sought no closer study.

Soon after, Allwer stated they were close to the demon’s house, and with evening coming they made camp.

“If we make a fire, will it know?” Lyn asked, but Nyrgoth had no answer. He had been quiet all day, sunk into himself. Now he could only say, “I don’t know. I can’t say anything about this. I don’t know why I don’t know.” And then, just as she was drawing back with the resolution to pass a cold night as best she could, he gripped her wrist.

She froze. Is it now? Does he demand some price from me, or else he’ll leave us here? He wasn’t looking at her, though; the fingers seemed to have acted of their own volition.

“I will need time, tonight,” he said awkwardly. “But I cannot just go and find my own camp, away from here. I need to face the enemies that lie within me, like before. And I am afraid, Lyn. Lynesse. Because of what we have seen, and because of my own ignorance. I should be the master of any strangeness in this world, because my people know the secrets of the universe. We travel the night sky and craft objects of power and change our very bodies so that we are no longer heir to the frailties of humanity. And yet I am in this forest with you, and the darkness between the trees is just as fearsome to me.” His voice was flat, the affectless tone fighting against the actual words he used.

“What do you need, Elder?” she asked him. “What can I do?” Here it comes, and I will have no chance but to pay his price.

But he just said, “I don’t know. It wasn’t like this with Astresse. I am going to feel, Lyn. And it will hurt. And I won’t want to go on. I won’t want to do anything. And if it gets very bad, I may just want to die. And I can only tell you these things because my protections hold. I can be so very dispassionate about these things, right now. But the reckoning has come. I can’t hide from it, and I will need to think clearly tomorrow.”