Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (54 page)

When in need, the gods provided.  Or so said most
priests.  They provided amply for him by giving him the worst terrain to
traverse that he had ever been forced to deal with.  All thoughts other than
careful maneuvering to avoid a broken ankle left his mind.

*        *        *        *        *

With the journey including as much vertical as
horizontal, Marik found it hard to judge distances traveled.  By the time they
stopped for the night he guessed they might have made a total of six miles
south following the old crow’s measurement.

His sense of position was badly distorted by the
Stoneseams’ rough interior.  He believed they were still at the same altitude
as the crevice they had left behind that morning.  Except Caresse, while
collapsing in that exuberantly cheerful way of hers, had observed that the air
was growing thicker since they had descended so far back toward the ground.

He sensed no difference, either through his mage
senses or the laboring of his lungs, yet he did not possess the geomancy
talent.  Marik disliked magic on general principal, and having to rely on
someone else’s talent caused him disquiet.  The only magics he could put his
trust in were those he spun personally.

But what choices did he have?  The task of bringing
down the Citadel had demanded magical power beyond what he could wield.  There
had been no other alternative.  Despite Tybalt’s admonitions while they stood
around the Thrull Valley model, deploying mage groups to kill men in battle
still repulsed him.  That was no honest way to claim a victory.

Yet he had been swallowed whole by the situation,
forced not only to take part, but to work hand-in-glove with the royal
enclave.  How could man possibly labor under the illusion that he, and not the
gods, controlled his own destiny?

Flames licked at night’s fabric from the rock pile
Wyman had constructed.  Caresse’s ability to weave elemental essence continued
to squeeze blood from a stone…or heat, at least.  It radiated warmth to the
small gathering clustered under a jutting shelf that extended over the chasm.

He had prayed hard.  Prayed in vain.  Caresse,
apologetic, kept steering them back to the chasm’s edge, saying there were no
other paths out except ones that hugged the drop’s lip along natural fracture
lines.  The ways she claimed would be passable were, at times, nearly anything
but.

Worst had been the last leg immediately before they
halted.  Again they followed a narrow ledge along the cliff face, made all the
worse for the fact that this one slanted toward the void menacingly
and
the stone surface crumbled ominously underfoot.  Flecks vanished silently into
the lurking fog.

The path had grown crowded because a matching shelf
above their heads descended with every step.  Their dangerous path had become a
natural corridor in the mountainside, except that the eastern wall missing. 
Soon enough, what Marik feared came to pass.  The corridor had dead-ended. 
Before he could take out his panicked anger on Caresse, a city mage had knelt
at yet another gap in the trail.

“I can see down there!  Do you see?  There is a second
path under us.”

Wyman had edged closer to the hole.  “Yes.  Four feet
across, eight feet down.  Too wide to safely chimney-crawl our way down.”

Marik threw himself back against the wall after he had
leaned forward to ask what Wyman meant by that remark.  A windy gust had nearly
pulled him off after the tumbling stone flecks.

His legs had trembled badly.  He played no part in the
solution as he kept firmly to his position.  Their words only came to him on
the vagaries of the inconsistent wind.

When he learned what they were cobbling together, he
had nearly screamed in worse panic than before.  Wyman ordered all the packs to
be passed forward to him.  There he tied the straps together until they
resembled an absurd rope ladder, the parts that normally rested against a man’s
back acting as the rungs.

Nothing offered itself as an anchor except a jagged
crack running along the wall where the gap ended.  Wyman made a loop from a
strap, tied a thick knot and pushed it into the crack, then slid the strap down
the increasingly narrow split until he reached the narrowest part.  A hard tug
on the strap proved that the knot was stuck fast within the crack.

One by one, the three city mages slowly worked their
way down to the lower path.  Wyman held fast to the straps to decrease the
tension put on the knot.  The stone was already cracked.  Too much pull against
it might cause it to fragment further.

Lynn went down next.  Wyman looked Marik in the eye. 
Silent words were exchanged.  Marik hated to seem weak in front of others, so,
with his shakes hardly subsiding as he moved this time, he gripped Wyman’s left
hand tightly.  He knelt on his bad leg in order to lower his good foot down to
the pack ladder.

The instant his full weight stood on the construct,
he’d felt his center of gravity sway toward the chasm.  Wyman’s grip was firm
enough that Marik somehow held onto his sanity.  Teeth gritted, his free hand
sweating while it throttled the pack straps, he shifted his weight.  He swung
hard into the cliff wall.  It jarred him badly and sent fiery lances racing
through his ribs.

He found this the most horrible experience he could
clearly remember.  Reaching for the next lower pack with his foot made his head
swim.  It seemed he had to keep stretching into eternity until he held on with
his fingernails before he finally found the next step.  When he found it, and
shifted his weight so he stood firmly on that foot, the pack curled around his
boot, the ladder swaying out over the chasm once again.  The whole time his
back scraped painfully against the natural chimney’s sharp stone.

Marik kept his eyes closed throughout the ordeal. 
Feeling it was bad enough.  The trial lasted for half a lifetime until, at
last, his boot struck stone and hands held his back to steady him.  It was a
feat of willpower to unclench his hands.

Wyman waited until Marik stepped away before racing
down the pack ladder.  Caresse held the straps as best she could, but Wyman
wanted to reach the bottom as quickly as possible to minimize the stress
against the unreliable stone.  In an eye blink, he cleared the last pack.

Caresse pulled the knot free and dropped the ladder
into Wyman’s waiting hands.  He passed it along their line until the city mages
started separating them.

Marik clenched his eyes shut all over to avoid
witnessing what he felt certain would be the wizardess’ death plunge.  She
nimbly dropped to her knees at the chimney’s ledge, spun to face the opposite
direction, then lowered her body into the gap.  Wyman coached until she hung by
her hands, her legs in his encircling arms.

An easy drop of three feet followed.  She fell through
his arms until she landed.  Wyman controlled her momentum as best he could,
which ended with them both pressed hard against the cliff.  They untangled
their bodies, unseemly comments unspoken, though an excited flush colored her
cheeks when Marik dared view the world.  He doubted it was from Wyman’s close
contact as much as her thrill with the adventurous moment.

Onward they had plodded until the new path branched
into a cliff-side clearing as large as the overlook had been.  The shelf above
would ward off the rain if it finally chose to abandon the heavens and race
toward the ground.  All in all, it had been the sort of day Marik truly
despised.

What they needed was to find an actual path leading
back to Galemar.  When they had originally journeyed to the overlook, they had
only traveled a short distance into the Stoneseams.  There could only be a
single line of mountains separating them.  The thought of traversing the entire
range to reach Tullainia made him shudder…but if they were continually forced
to follow the single way out of one hellhole to reach the next, they could very
well be forced into the neighboring kingdom.

He had never before appreciated how hostile a mountain
range could be.  His only experiences were with the pass through which the
Taurs had stampeded the previous winter.  And the time on the lower slopes of
the Cliffsdains where he’d become a roasted carcass thanks to a certain
hedge-wizard.

Come to think of it, all his experiences with
mountains could be categorized as distinctly negative.  Small wonder the third
time proved as bad.  The legendary trouble-triplets.  Clichés never became
clichés because they were baseless.  Truth persists.

An animal trail had brought them to the first
overlook.  One so ancient it had become as lasting as the mountains through
which it wound, a well-known path knowledge of which had passed from the locals
to army maps.  If a curly-horned goat had ever trod through these inner
reaches, it had left no evidence to prove it.

The Stoneseams had always struck Marik as forbidding
when he’d had opportunity to gaze upon the sheer walls rising from the
forests.  He’d never known the half of it.  What would they do if the next time
they ran into a dead end there was no handy hole to drop down through?  They
could be trapped with no way out…

Considering the problem, he realized the only other
ingress into the mountains he knew of was that same pass the Taurs had poured
through.  If they could reach that, then they could…get killed.  It was still
held by the Arronaths.  Could they possibly slip into the pass and down without
running into enemy forces?

He doubted it.  What then?  If they found no way back
to Galemar before they reached the pass, should they try to slip across it,
slink into the mountains on the other side while praying that sooner or later
they would?

The mountains near the Rovasii were so sheer they were
impossible to scale.  Were there any paths down before they reached that far
south?  He remembered none.

From the temporary army outpost on the Southern Road
following the initial invasion, he and half the Ninth Squad had run nonstop to
the Rovasii in a single day.  He could have run past a dozen mountain paths
without noticing them since they were hardly skirting the Stoneseams’ base at
the time.  Most of the way they could only see the peaks rising in the
distance.

But how far would they have to travel south through
the Stoneseams on limited rations?  Could they count on finding a trail down to
Galemar?  If not before the forest, could there possibly be any still further
south that emptied into the Rovasii?

He shuddered.  The wind had picked up, yet it had
nothing to do with the chill he felt.  Thoughts of reentering those bewitched
trees after being fortunate enough to escape with a whole skin the last time
made his flesh crawl.

Perhaps that dark forest was responsible for
Colbey’s…illness.  The scout, he remembered, had suddenly grown worse after
they entered the forbidden trees.  His sadistic attack on the Arronath they had
captured, his odd behavior later…and he’d mentioned to Sloan that he had grown
up in Surrill.  Since Colbey had lived his childhood in a town on the Rovasii’s
very borders, could that not have allowed whatever malice ruled the trees to
seep into his mind?

The poison that had destroyed such a capable man... 
Colbey had been suffering a personality deterioration all through the previous
year.  He had never spoken of it, yet the changes could be marked to the time
of his return from scouting alone in Tullainia.  Did he pass through the forest
during that journey?  If the Rovasii were at the root of Colbey’s ailment, then
reentering it with the Ninth must have triggered whatever confusion had
ensnared his senses.

To Marik, this notion seemed to have merit.  After
all, roots were what forests were all about.

Fat drops of nighttime tar began pelting the path
outside their overhang when rain finally assaulted the Stoneseams.  Entwined
around his worries concerning how slippery the stone would be next morning, one
thought repeated endlessly in his head.  They had better find a trail down to
Galemar before it came to a choice of heading into the Rovasii or attempting to
cross the entire range to reach Tullainia.

*        *        *        *        *

For the first time in…well,
years
, Dietrik
stared in awe.  The scene that arrested his attention was neither a natural
wonder, a monumental achievement by mankind nor evidence of a divine hand at
work.  What left him utterly flabbergasted was—

“Your advice is noted, mercenary leader!  For the last
time, I care little for the slipshod ways you free-swords go about the business
of warfare.  The Galemaran Forces Rules and Regulations Charter was crafted by
men well-learned in the arts of battle!  Their knowledge is based on the
boundless expertise garnered by both them and their predecessors.  We will
commit no action which the charter strictly forbids.”

Torrance’s jaw clenched tighter.  Dietrik nursed a
spark of sympathy for the commander, whose temper finally looked to be cracking
a tad after the long days enduring these fools.

“Your rigid adherence to your standards is admirable,
major.  Yet by holding back all scouting patrols, you reduce our sphere of
awareness from ‘partial’ to exactly zero.  It is easily possible that the
Arro—”