When True Night Falls (43 page)

He watched while they moved into the clearing, gathering up the supplies and taking hold of the horses’ reins. They didn’t move like children, Damien thought. Too awkward. Too stiff. It was hard to watch them closely, he discovered. Hard to focus on one for any length of time. Was that the remnants of an Obscuring? It was an odd sensation.

At last the camp had been gathered up, except for those few items the children didn’t value. Damien’s weapon had been taken up, along with Hesseth’s. A slender girl with a predatory mask carried his sword in its harness; it was taller than she was.

“Who are they?” Hesseth whispered. “
What
are they?”

The tall boy heard her. As the children drew close about them, preparing to herd Hesseth and Damien back into the forest and to God knows where, he took a stance opposite them with his feet spread wide and his spear planted firmly in the ground by his side. A challenging stance. A triumphal stance.

“Terata,” he told them. And though a mask obscured his features, Damien had the distinct impression that he was grinning. “We’re the Terata.”

They tied his hands behind his back. It went against his grain to allow it, but he saw no other option. He had already surrendered, after all. As they bound the coarse rope tightly about his wrists he did what he could to tense his arms, to thicken his wrists, and they seemed not to notice. That should net him some slack later. When they left him to work on Hesseth, he pulled at his bonds in several directions, testing the sophistication of the arrangement. He was pleased to feel it give slightly, which meant that although he had been tied tightly, he had not been tied well; between that and the small slack he had earned, he should be able to work himself free later.

When they were satisfied that their prisoners were bound, the Terata led them into the forest. Spears prodding their backs to keep them moving, they forced Damien and Hesseth through the thick brush that flanked the river, then into the shadowy realm beyond. Once Damien fell, and the sharp point of a weapon stabbed between his shoulder blades; he had to bite his lip to keep from cursing them aloud.

They’re children
, he reminded himself. Struggling to his feet without benefit of his hands. He could feel blood trickling down between his shoulder blades, adhering his woolen shirt to his back.
Self-indulgent by nature, not yet sophisticated enough to value self-control ... you anger them now, and there’s no telling what they’ll do. Be careful, Vryce
.

Where had they come from, these painted infants? What chain of circumstances had brought them to this place? He could only wonder as he stumbled through the shadowy forest, trying to keep his footing for fear that some fledgling warrior might run him through if he didn’t. Hesseth seemed to be doing well enough, though the set of her ears and the soft hiss of her breathing made it clear she was far from happy about the turn their travels had taken.

Yeah
, he thought darkly.
That makes two of us
.

The Terata led them south. Through a forest that had been stripped of its lower leaves by some gnawing creature—another sorcerous creation? —and past trees that had been girdled by toothmarks, robbed of their sap so that the upper limbs dried out and died. Long bark fingers scraped down from the heights above them, brushing their hair as they passed. Now that Tarrant had pointed out the pattern of life here, Damien could see it clearly. And if the Neocount had wondered what type of mind would create such creatures, now Damien understood. Limited minds. Untested, untrained. Minds that could not yet encompass the awesome complexity of Nature, nor make allowances for her excesses.

Children.

That meant at least one of them was a sorcerer, he reminded himself. If not more than one. And the power required to Work an entire species was no small thing; these Terata might lack adult sophistication, but in raw power they could probably hold their own with any mature sorceror. A sobering thought to consider as he fought his way across beds of dead twigs, pulling loose from the thorns that snagged his clothing as he passed.

Then something loomed ahead of him that brought him to a stop. For once no spear-point prodded him onward. He gazed at the wall of tangled brush before him and wondered how they meant to hack their way through it with nothing more than spears and arrows and a few short knives. Had the children traveled this route before? It seemed unlikely—

Light flared brightly to one side of him. He turned and saw one boy holding a torch, whose smoky flame illuminated the woods and the mist surrounding them. Then he reached down and tore up some grasses, which he thrust into the flame; black smoke coiled upward, thick and choking. He then passed the torch to the lean boy at the front of the pack, the one who had spoken to Damien. With a quick glance at the prisoners the boy moved to where the barrier-brush began, and for a moment stood still, studying it. The light of the torch glinted on the tips of vast thorns, as long as a man’s hand and as thick about the base as a finger. Liquid glistened on the needle-sharp tips, and something about the way it gleamed made Damien very uneasy about coming in contact with it. It seemed to him that the brush seemed to rustle slightly as the boy drew near—or was that his imagination working overtime?—and then the lean Terata thrust the torch forward so that smoke billowed into the brush, obscuring the nearer branches—

The brush shuddered. Thorns twitched. Damien watched in horrified amazement as branches which had seemed dry and brittle drew back like arms, their glistening thorns trembling as if in rage. The boy thrust the torch even farther forward, and tangled limbs whipped back as if trying to escape him. There was a hole in the tangled wall now, and the boy worked at it—moving the torch from one side to the other, threatening back whatever branches seemed to be returning to their place—until the opening was nearly as wide as a man. Then another child, a small girl, came forward with a second torch and lit it from his; with her help he managed to enlarge the opening until it formed a crude tunnel perhaps six feet in height, and wide enough for a horse to pass through.

“Go!” he ordered. The Terata moved quickly. The nearer limbs of the thornbush shook as they passed, and Damien had no doubt that if the smoke thinned for a moment the branches would close in upon the travelers. But the girl and the lean boy held the thorns at bay with practiced skill, and even enlarged the opening enough that when the horses passed through their manes hardly brushed the nearest branches. Damien dared to work a Knowing as he entered the thorny tunnel, and what he learned nearly caused him to stumble. But then a number of small hands pushed him and he was through, falling to his knees on the rocky earth a safe distance from the grasping branches.

When they all were through, the girl and boy followed. With them gone, the smoke cleared in an instant. The branches which had drawn back snapped toward them with sound like a whip cracking, but the children had gauged their distance well; the longest thorns fell inches short of their target, and all the convulsions of branches which followed were incapable of getting them any closer.

As he watched the vast plant writhe in frustrated hunger, Damien wished that Tarrant were with them. And not just because his power would have been so welcome.

You were wrong, Hunter. They didn’t put their killer in the river at first. They didn’t have that much foresight. They rooted their creation in the ground and let it grow, until the animals it fed on had learned to avoid it and the only prey left to it were the Terata
.

He could hear the branches twitching as he got to his feet. Struggling for food. Starving, in the midst of plenty.

But these children do learn from their mistakes
, he thought grimly. Watching as the Terata extinguished their smoking torches.
Something to remember
.

The miles fell behind them with painful slowness. It was hard for Damien to match his stride to that of the children; for all of their youthful energy, their legs were so much shorter than his own that every step was a struggle to match their pace. When he moved too quickly a spear-point in his back or a knife-point in his side reminded him to slow down; he didn’t look down to check but would have bet that his body was spotted with blood from the treatment. Hesseth seemed to hold her own, moving with feline grace among the children, like a sleek predator among awkward browsers.

And their movement was all wrong, he thought. Watching the three leaders of the group ahead of him, the others out of the corners of his eyes. For all that they were children, for all that their bodies were still growing and therefore awkward, there was a wrongness to their motion that went beyond that. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was—when he tried to focus on them his vision grew hazy, until he had to focus his attention straight ahead to bring his eyes under control once more—but some deep-set instinct warned him that it was wrong, that something about these children was even more strange than it appeared, and that he’d damned well figure out what it was before his life depended on that understanding.

Half a day later. Well past noon. Exhaustion numbed his limbs, his mind, his hopes. The dismal forest thinned at last, leaving only the serpentine mist curling above muddy earth. He could smell the river, though he couldn’t see it. Hesseth looked bedraggled. He felt no better. The awkward pace had drained them both.

At last they came to a place where the river spread out before them, glistening coldly in the filtered sunlight. It was no longer a free-moving stream of water that gushed over rocks and through tree-lined channels, but a vast lake whose still surface rippled softly as far as the eye could see. Trees had fallen into the water at various points and lake plants had taken root in their bark, sprouting branches that covered the water’s surface like a web. Green fronds waved softly in the current as small animals scampered across the tangled branches, as comfortable inches above the water’s surface as they had once been in the treetops. Here and there Damien could see a sandbar peeking through a bed of reeds, mountain mud carried down from the heights by the swift-running river. And in the center....

An island arose some half-mile in the distance, that was clearly their destination. The base was a vast mound of boulders, sparsely covered with greenery. Flood waters had left their mark a good ten feet above the current water line, and only above there did trees and larger bushes flourish—but those were twisted creations, whose gnarled trunks and contorted branches seemed grimly well suited to serve as the Terata’s home. Damien wondered if the children had sculpted these life-forms as well, or if they had learned enough of a lesson from their other attempts to leave this island in its natural state.

They started toward the water, prodding Damien forward. He regarded the lake’s surface with some trepidation, remembering the waterborn predators that lived upriver. But though it seemed that there was no solid land ahead of them, the children led them through a matted path in the rushes to a mud bar that stretched some ten yards into the water. He stepped out upon it gingerly, glad that the horses weren’t intelligent enough to understand the risk. But the ground beneath his feet was quite solid, not like mud at all—so much not like mud that he paused for an instant to Work his sight, wondering what it was that he truly walked upon. And his Working failed. No, not
failed
exactly; it was more like
slid off.
As if the space he was trying to focus on was made of the slickest glass, and his Sight had gone skittering off its surface.

Strange. He had never experienced anything like it before, could come up with no explanation for the odd effect. Tarrant had once turned his Workings aside, back when they had first met, but the sensation was nothing like this. Was this how the Hunter had felt when his best attempts at a Knowing had netted impossible results? Ominous.

The lead boy had reached the end of the mud bar, but though water seemed to lap at his ankles the ground was as solid as ever. He turned slightly to the left as he stepped off into the water, and the others were careful to follow. Damien braced himself as he came to the end of the bar, knowing that if these children were willing to wade in the cold mountain water, then it was probably quite safe—

And then he stepped down, and didn’t get wet. Nor did the ground beneath him feel like it now looked: a treacherous surface of pitted gravel and water-polished stones, slicked by slime and algae and sported about by thousands of tiny fish. No, it felt more like ... wood. Was that possible? Old wood, weatherworn and mist-dampened. He tried to Work his sight again—nearly stumbled doing so—but if the water beneath his feet was some kind of illusion, he damned well couldn’t See through it. Nor could he See any sign of the region having been Worked, although there should have been something.
Every Working leaves its mark,
Damien thought, as he followed carefully in the children’s footsteps.
Without exception.
But if there was a Worker’s mark on this, he damned well couldn’t see it.

Tarrant could make it out. Tarrant could make sense of this.
He glanced up at the sky—or rather, up at the mist overhead—and judged it to be very near nightfall. A sense of relief flooded his nerves at the thought, and he felt his muscles relax a tiny bit.

At the end of the unseen bridge was a visible line of stairs, crudely cut into the base of the island. Damien climbed them carefully, knowing that his bound hands would be unable to afford him balance should anything go wrong. Behind him he could hear the children struggling with the horses, who were clearly unhappy about the route. But in the end the animals were coerced into climbing—with sorcery, perhaps?—and soon they had all gained the top of the island, to gaze out upon the Terata camp.

It was, as the Terata themselves were, fragmented and ill-executed. Skin tents betrayed by their shapes that the staffs upholding them were less than perfectly arranged, and indeed several had collapsed; there were children working on them even as Damien watched. A foul smell came and went with the breeze, from skins that were less than perfectly tanned, and the odor of long-dead meat seemed to hang about the camp like a haze. And the children! There were at least two dozen here, in addition to Damien’s band of captors, including several that were mere babes, hardly able to walk. Without their masks and fierce weapons they looked strangely vulnerable, and though their flesh seemed healthy enough, Damien thought he caught a hint of past abuse in their eyes, the haunted look of bruised souls.