The Conqueror's Shadow (15 page)

The ogre shrugged. “Your call. If you're not here in two days, I'm calling you dead and going home. Any later, and I won't get back to my animals before the last of the food runs out or goes bad.”

“I told you, Seilloah will take care of that.”

“Only if you're alive to ask her to.”

“Fair point. All right, Davro, wish me luck.”

“Why?”

Taking a deep breath to steady himself—after all, there was nothing to be worried about (and that gaping, slavering hole did
not
look like a mouth, damn it!)—Corvis stepped inside.

If someone had simply tossed a heavy cloth over his head, it could not have grown more instantly dark. Even though the passage loomed open behind him, the light itself seemed to lose its nerve, refusing to enter the depths of Theaghl-gohlatch. Corvis wondered if it was possible for light to be afraid of the dark, and then quickly gave up the notion.

All right, Corvis, focus already. Evil warlord. Terror of the East. Not about to let a forest stop us, are we?

Shaking off his doubts, Corvis muttered the words to a minor incantation. His surroundings began, barely perceptible at first but with growing rapidity, to brighten. He kept the illumination down to a muted glow, little more than a moderately sized lantern. He wanted to see, but he also wanted to disturb as few of the denizens of this place as possible. Somehow, the thought of flooding the surrounding hundred yards with daylight didn't seem even vaguely inconspicuous.

Now that sight was more than a memory of happier moments, Corvis studied the environment, one hand hovering within a hairbreadth of Sunder.

The earth beneath his feet was a thick, tightly packed soil that clung tenaciously to the soles of his boots as he braved the darkness. Here and there, a small sapling, a hint of brush, or a far-ranging root would intrude into his path, but by and large he seemed to tread upon a road deliberately cut through the heart of the wood. On either side, reaching into a canopy of leaves too dark to make out, the trees lined up, soldiers
of a relentless, disciplined army. Only a handful were visible at any given time, briefly touched by the light he cast as he walked, and just as rapidly fading back into the permanent gloom that was their entire world.

And if the branches quivered where the light touched them, if the leaves and twigs drew back from the gleaming, well, that was just a trick of the breeze and the rustling of small animals. Right?

The roof above, interwoven branches and heavy leaves, was lost in shadow beyond the range of his meager light. Corvis felt that even had he cast his spell with all the power at his command, the weight hanging over his head would still appear as nothing more than a dark, threatening veil.

The rustling of the trees grew more violent. Corvis could hear the gentle whisper of leaf upon leaf, the scraping of twigs and branches. The shadows cast by the looming trees danced across his face and arms, phantoms that threatened to claw at his eyes, his mind, his soul.

Shadows? On his face? Corvis suddenly swallowed, his throat dry as if he'd gulped down a mouthful of desert sand.
He
cast the spell;
he
was the only source of light! The shadows should be falling
away
from him.

Yet the flickering and dancing continued before him. And even as he glanced in growing apprehension to either side, determined to spot the shadows he knew must be stretching away from him into the forest, his eyes could pick out nothing but a wall of gloom, a curtain of darkness hanging, impenetrable, behind the first of what must have been countless rows of the ancient forest giants. He felt each of the hairs on his neck slowly stand up, and the Terror of the East barely repressed a shiver.

Slowly, Corvis looked back the way he came. He'd walked only a dozen steps or so into the heavy, unnatural night of Theaghl-gohlatch. Still, he was not even remotely surprised to discover the passageway sealed behind him; it was simply too apropos. Where before there was a portal—menacing but perfectly functional—into the forgotten world of light and life, there stood now only more of the implacable forest: layers upon layers of trees standing between him and whatever was out there.

With little other option, then, Corvis went forward.

I'll admit this much: If—
when
—I do get out of here, I'm going to pay a damn sight more attention to Davro's legends and superstition!

Only when he'd maintained his steady pace for several moments, and had grown as accustomed to the alien surroundings as he was ever likely to, did further details penetrate his numbed mind. Sounds-quiet, distant, muted, but present all the same—slowly worked their way into his ears. The call of an owl, the chitter of a squirrel of some sort—they were all there, and more. For all the fear that lurked in this place like another hungry predator, the wood apparently contained all the requisite woodland life of any other forest. He found that oddly comforting. Hell, if a squirrel could live here, the place couldn't be
all
bad, could it?

But this ephemeral respite proved just another taunting phantom, as he realized that the sounds never changed. No matter where he walked or what noise he made, the calls of the animals remained unaltered, neither drawing nearer nor rushing away in sudden fear. What briefly seemed a comfort was now mocking him, mocking his foolishness in daring to hope. It seemed as though all he heard—all he would ever hear—were the echoes of life that had not existed in this place for untold ages.

There! A sudden flash of movement on the path before him, barely within the last flickering inches of his light spell's range. Nothing tangible, nothing identifiable, just motion where before there was none, and then back to the same, featureless trail.

Corvis, one hand upon each weapon, had all but convinced himself it was merely his imagination when he spotted it again, this time vanishing into the woods on his right. With lightning speed Corvis drew his sword, sending it whistling through the air. There was no sound of impact, no blood upon the blade. Somewhere, in the depths of Theaghl-gohlatch, the chittering of one of the squirrels slowly twisted and warped itself into a hair-raising cackle of malevolent glee.

It—they—were all around him now, darting in and out on the fringes of his light: ghosts and shadows, movement without form, never remaining long enough for him to make out any detail but the simple presence of—presence. Laughter echoed from the trees around him, cloaked in the call of the hunting owl or the rustling of the leaves. Another
blur of movement, nearer than before. Corvis gasped at the sudden touch of fire across his left arm. He stared in shock at the wound-three perfectly parallel gashes, deep, bloody, and already swelling with some unnatural infection—that marred the surface of his skin.

Fighting the urge to lash out blindly around him, Corvis carefully returned the sword to its scabbard, and drew Sunder from his right hip with a quick, fluid motion. The Kholben Shiar flared at the feel of flesh and blood against its grip, exulted at the sense of fear and pain and, most delectable of all, burning fury in its wielder.

The laughter ceased in a sudden hiss of indrawn breath from among the nearest trees.
“Enemy!”
It was a whisper, but it carried clearly across the unobstructed path. It cradled within itself the voice of legions, though it was spat forth as a single word, from a single source.

A heartless grin settled across Corvis's face. If they feared, they could be killed.

“Enemy, is it now?” he called back, his voice steady, his tone challenging. “So what was I before?”

Again, an infinity of hisses breathed as one.
“Prey …”

“Ah. Given the options, I prefer my current status.”

Silence from the trees. Even the distant sounds of animals had faded.

“What's the matter?” he called, taunting. “Not the way prey's supposed to act? Not an enemy you'd care to face? Maybe you should have thought of that before you tried taking a piece of—”

The path, indeed the entire forest, slowly tilted upward before his eyes. He pitched forward, half catching himself with an ungraceful stagger that brought him to one knee. He glanced around wildly, fully expecting a sudden rush of … whatever he was facing.

No attack came, but the simple movement of his head set the entire world to spinning. The butt-end of Sunder smacked the ground, its steadying influence the only thing keeping Corvis even remotely upright.

What's happening to me? The wound isn't
that
bad! It doesn't even hurt any—oh …

Though difficult to see through his blurring vision, the gashes along his arm had swelled horribly, spewing blood and a noxious-looking pus
into the soil around him. There must have been some anesthetic in the poison, or infection, or whatever coursed through his flesh.

Fueled by spite as much as anything else, Corvis dragged himself to his feet, leaning on Sunder as if the ancient weapon were a simple cane. Then, though every muscle in his body protested, he lifted the axe and dropped unevenly into a ready stance.

“You think I'm impressed?” he shouted, his voice grown hoarse as his body battled the raging contagion. “I'm not! Poison or no, I'll take you with me!” He didn't know what he was shouting anymore, only that the words needed to keep coming, that defiance alone kept him on his feet. “Come on! One at a time or all at once! I'll drag you into hell with me!”

And he thought, for an instant, that his unseen tormentors might oblige. Several trees at the illumination's edge began to writhe and shift, as though something large moved through the branches. Unable to see straight, scarce able to stand, Corvis faced the coming threat.

Nothing emerged from the madly thrashing trees. Instead—or so it seemed to Corvis's failing eyes—the branches of the wooden behemoths stretched and split, lacing their ends together at obscene angles, until the abstract suggestion of a face appeared, woven from bark-covered tendrils. Though no eyes hung in those empty sockets, Corvis was convinced that the thing was glaring down at him.

“I …,” he began unsteadily, but the face in the trees gave him no time to speak.

The leaves shuffled in wildly uneven patterns behind the artificial visage, the branches scraped together. And, impossibly, the random cacophony of sound resolved itself into a raspy, but fully intelligible, voice.

“Follow,” it scraped down at him. Then the branches fell limp, the face dispersing back into its component branches.

Corvis wondered if the entire thing was some twisted hallucination. But no, the trees leaned aside, branches sweeping back, clearing a second, smaller trail that diverged from the main path. Corvis thought he heard a scream of rage from deep within the trees behind him, but no one and nothing appeared to stop him from taking the newly offered route.

Head spinning, chest and legs burning, Corvis stumbled onto the smaller trail. He leaned heavily on Sunder, which quivered in disappointment as the battle and blood were left behind. More than once he stumbled and would have fallen, and more than once a heavy branch protruded into the path where it was most needed, presenting itself to steady him. The trail stretched on forever, though Corvis's poison-racked senses had lost all track of time and he hadn't the first notion how long he'd wandered this endless darkness. The passageway twisted and turned randomly. He wondered, with what coherent thought remained to him, if the damn place was just leading him in circles, waiting for him to lie down and die.

Once, in a lucid moment, he removed a length of bandage from his pack. Shearing off the end, he tied the sliver tightly around the tip of a branch. That, at least, would tell him if he was retracing his own path.

When he came across the strip of bandage some minutes later, tied tightly around the branch of what was blatantly a different tree, Corvis abandoned himself to whatever force guided his steps.

For an eternity he stumbled on. His spell of illumination slowly faded, until the feeble glow could barely show him where the trail left off and the endless trees began. He felt himself drenched in sweat, and he cycled regularly from the heat of fever to the chill of the grave as his body tried to burn out the infection. All feeling drained from his arm and it no longer responded to his commands, moving only occasionally as it spasmed without apparent cause.

He was forced, ever more frequently, to stop and rest, leaning against the trunk of a tree or huddled by the side of the road, vomiting up the few contents of his battered and abused stomach. He thought once of the smoked meat in his pack, realizing much time must have passed since his last meal, but the very notion sent him to his knees, dry-heaving.

Finally, he stumbled one time too many, and he lacked the strength to catch himself. The taste of soil coated his tongue, dirt caught in the back of his throat, and he found himself blind. He became aware of a faint tickling on his upper lip, decided it was probably an ant, and wondered deliriously if he could rotate his eyes far enough around to see it if it crawled up into his skull. Maybe if he could make himself sneeze
hard enough in the right direction, he could catch an updraft and land the little bug in Davro's dinner. Assuming it was anywhere near dinnertime. Corvis laughed hysterically, choking on the soil, and flipped over like a landed fish. No sense in choking to death while he waited for the infection to kill him. He laughed again.

And then, as his vision cleared for just a moment, he saw it. Not fifteen feet from him, visible only as a vague shape in the last sputtering remnants of his light spell, was a building. Nothing more than a simple hut, but it meant
someone
was here.

Or had been here, at any rate. If nothing else, it offered a more comfortable place to die. With the absolute last of his reserves, Corvis drove himself to his feet and staggered through the front door.

“I see you got my message,” Seilloah told him.