Chapter Fourteen

Leaving the highway for a more rural route they slowed down dramatically until they were barely crawling along, much slower than a human could walk. They stopped at a sign nearly obscured by wrist-thick tree trunks:

Now Entering REXROTH STATE FOREST

Ayaan was uncertain how one could be expected to differentiate this new forest from the jungle behind them.

A few miles farther in they came to a place where the trees grew so close to the road that the green phantom had to come down into the cab with them. He smelled like something stale and wet. They listened to the tree branches drumming on the roof of the truck for a while and drove in silence. Eventually they came to a place so narrow the truck couldn’t fit through. The green phantom and Erasmus jumped down from the cab and started to press on. The handless ghouls from the cargo bed streamed down after them, their eyes narrow slits, their tongues licking at their dry lips as if they’d only awoken from sleep, though she knew they had been dead, truly dead moments before. Ayaan called out to them to wait a moment.

“What’s this, the famous Ayaan? Scared of a few trees?” the green phantom chortled at her.

“No,” she told him. She waved at where their vehicle stood nearly wedged in by vegetation. “I just wanted to turn the truck around. If we need to get out of here in a hurry it will save us time later.”

Even the skull-faced lich had to admit she had a point.

“I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she told him. “I only stayed alive as long as I did by knowing all the little tricks.”

It took a long fifteen minutes to move the truck, backing and filling over and over again on the narrow road surface. When it was done they moved into the dark space between the trees and Ayaan realized she was, in fact, a little afraid. The shadowy forest pressed in on them instantly, the waxy leaves of the trees brushing against their clothes, their hair, the branches underneath scraping at them like limp and bony fingers. Cobwebs draped across the path every few feet and had to be swept away. Insects plagued Erasmus, live insects that he would pick from his fur and absently stuff into his mouth to suck out their golden energy.

Though it was only mid-afternoon the darkness swam in around them like a fog. They tried to follow the road but the forest had its own paths to offer. One of these lead to a wide clearing and the green phantom hurried inward, digging his femur staff into the ground for traction on the moss-slick trail.

Ayaan followed him in and emerged into a brightly-lit place where the underbrush grew wild but the trees had all been pruned back. Piles of gray deadfall ringed the open space, a few dead leaves still fluttering on the fallen branches. Ayaan had grown up in a desert land but even she could tell that trees didn’t form such a clearing naturally.

Then there was the goat. He lay in the middle of the clearing, staked to a low hillock. He was dying, his fur littered with bits of decaying leaves, his eyes milky and lost, the long sideways pupils very much dilated even in the bright sun. He had kicked over his water dish and Ayaan could count the ribs sticking out of his side. Only his horns, which rose from his head in a thick, curling V looked healthy.

“Someone has left me a snack,” the green phantom announced, cheerfully. Ayaan could feel the goat’s energy herself, flickering away slowly but still golden and almost irresistible. She put out a hand to stop the green-robed lich, though.

“Why hasn’t some wandering ghoul finished this animal off long ago?” she asked.

“Maybe there aren’t any nearby.” He looked down at her arm as if he would happily chew it off to get to the goat.

“Not any more, there aren’t.” With her free hand Ayaan pointed to piles of bleached bones—human bones—mixed in with the woody deadfall at the edges of the clearing. Then she pointed out a shallow depression in the grass on the far side of the goat’s mound. Once one knew to look for it it could be seen that broken vegetation pointed away from the defile in a radial pattern. A similar crater dipped down not more than a dozen feet from where they stood. “Have you ever seen a minefield before?” she asked.

“Ridiculous,” the green phantom rasped. Behind him Erasmus came up with a large rock in one furry hand. Before Ayaan could stop him he tossed the rock deep into the clearing. Metal sprouted from the ground like an evil weed and then a flash of light pressed up hard against Ayaan’s side and nearly knocked her over. Hot dirt and bits of shredded goat meat splattered her leathers.

“I didn’t expect that big an explosion,” Erasmus said, spitting dirt and pebbles out of his mouth. All three of them had been caught by metal shrapnel, ruining their clothes. Had they been any closer their brains would be strewn around the trees behind them.

“That,” Ayaan said, fingering a hole in her skull-print leather jacket, “was a Bouncing Betty. It was spring-loaded to jump in the air when detonated. This spreads the shrapnel over a much wider area and dramatically increases the kill radius.”

“You’ve seen these before?” the green phantom asked.

“Friends of mine have. From closer up.” Ayaan peered through the smoke that filled the clearing. “Mines. There are better ways to keep out strangers, but few that make as much noise. They will know we’re coming now if they didn’t before. We have to move faster. That’s probably the quickest way in,” she said, pointing at a continuation of the trail on the far side. “It’s probably booby-trapped, every step of the way.”

“So we go around.” The green phantom turned away from the minefield and headed back into the darkness of the forest. He had a small compass and while they lacked a map he could at least tell if they were headed in the right direction. Erasmus went first, his vicious claws effective at clearing the overhang like ten little machetes. Ayaan followed and was followed in turn by the green phantom. The handless ghouls brought up the rear, so silent Ayaan kept forgetting they were even there.

They’d been moving for the better part of half an hour, pushing westward and southward when they could, when Erasmus stopped short and Ayaan’s face collided with his furry back. “Hold on,” he said. “There’s something... there’s some energy up here.”

Ayaan called his name but he rushed forward, perhaps intent on reaching their goal, perhaps after something else. She followed as fast as she could while keeping her wits about her. Her feet—nowhere near as steady as they used to be—kept getting snagged in tree roots and undergrowth and she had a terrible presentiment that she would arrive too late, that he would fall in some pit lined with sharpened stakes or trigger a precariously-balanced log to fall on him from high branches. She shouted to him again but he made no answer.

She nearly ran into him when she finally found him. He had stopped before an enormous old-growth tree, big enough that the trail wrapped around it, a massive wooden column climbing with ants, wrapped with the tendrils of epiphytes, studded everywhere with stunted, sunlight-deprived limbs still as thick as saplings of their own. Erasmus looked as if he were leaning forward into the tree’s bulk, perhaps just resting for a moment. Resting on his face. She cautiously moved around him. He had his eyes and nose pressed up tight against a knot in the trunk the width of a dinner plate. He wasn’t moving. Coupled with a dead man’s lack of breath or pulse he looked more like some furry excrescence of the tree than a separate organism.

The green phantom came stumbling through the underbrush behind her, making enough noise to alert every enemy in the forest. “What’s wrong with him?” he demanded. “What’s been done to him? Get him out of there.”

Ayaan wasn’t sure if he should be moved but she tugged at one of his paws anyway. She might as well have pulled on a strand of ivy—Erasmus’ body, while still flexible, was stuck to the spot. She tugged again and again. Finally the green phantom stepped up to help her. He leaned his staff against the tree and pulled.

Erasmus came loose with a howl, a noise only an animal could make. His claws came up and he raked the green phantom across the belly, tearing open skin and flesh. With another scream he jumped away and headed deeper into the forest, moving as fast as his dead legs could carry him, following no trail that Ayaan could see but merely stumbling through the brush and smacking into tree limbs like a man possessed.

She had a feeling that was exactly what he had become. She saw a round space had been hollowed out of the tree, behind its wide knot. Inside someone had placed an hexagonal mirror, its frame made of human finger bones. Dark energy streamed from the thing—magic—and Ayaan was careful not to look into the glass. Instead she took the green phantom’s staff and used it to smash it into bits of silver and jagged glass.

Then she turned around, and realized what fate had offered her.

The green phantom lay disemboweled on the path. His ancient, dried-up guts slithered onto the ground next to him, his hands trying in vain to keep them in. He wasn’t even looking at her. Ayaan could kill him easily, smash in his head with his own staff or fire a bolt of her own particular kind of darkness directly into his brain. It would take a mere second of her time. The handless ghouls coming up the path would destroy her or perhaps the Tsarevich would kill her from a distance but that was immaterial.

She stepped closer to the green phantom, intending to finish him off—and then she stopped.

I see his heart. His black and dead heart!

The words moved through her head like a pebble rolling around on her tongue. Half her face lost all feeling and a thin trickle of drool fell from her numb lip.

You be caution in all things.

The words stopped her in her tracks.

“It’s your big chance, now,” the green phantom said. He looked up at her with bitter fear in his eyes. “If you want to prove yourself. If you want to live.” He had the remote control in one hand, the control that could activate the wards on her neck.

“Yes,” Ayaan said, “I want to live.” The words fell out of her mouth. She had thought nothing of the kind.

“Then you’ll go after him. You’ll go after that furry cocksucker who just gutted me and you’ll find out what happened. Yes or no?”

Ayaan sucked breath into her lungs, trying to clear her head, but the unnecessary air just wheezed out of her again. “Alright,” she said, all thought of killing the green phantom gone. It just wasn’t in her head anymore. She could feel where the thought had been but she couldn’t remember what it might have been.

Your friend has friend in me, she thought. A curious thing to think, but it didn’t bother her too much.