Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (25 page)

Everyone else looked up, too, rather confused. Nita craned her neck back to follow Ponch’s glance, and was surprised when, all by itself, down the largest of the trees a single squirrel came running. It was white.

The squirrel ran down the bole of the tree onto the ground, and there sat up in the middle of the perfect green grass and looked at all of them. Ronan suddenly started to laugh.

Now I understand,
said the Defender through him.
It’s an embodiment, a way to perceive the trail as an active entity rather than as something passive. Very sophisticated.

And fun. Hurry up and put the leash on!
Ponch said, while the white squirrel sat there completely still, its little dark eyes moving across them, one by one. Nita met its eyes and was briefly transfixed, perceiving the white squirrel somewhat as Ponch might have. It was shorthand for a twisting trail made up of a complex of many virtual scents, all braiding and corkscrewing through a peculiar skewed landscape that might have meant time and space as a dog saw them… or as Ponch did, as he wasn’t just any dog anymore.

Kit got Ponch to sit down beside him, and fastened the “collar” end of the wizardly leash around his neck again. Nita and Sker’ret and Filif and Ronan all arranged themselves behind Kit, holding hands or claws or fronds as they’d done before.

The white squirrel’s eyes met Ponch’s. Ponch leaped forward. Just a few lengths ahead of him, the squirrel ran across the grass, then jumped into a sudden darkness that leaped forward to surround them all.

They ran. Ahead of them in the dark, like a white streak through the blackness, the squirrel ran. Ponch tore after it. Kit ran after him, or was dragged. All the rest of them were dragged along as well, and a breath later the darkness vanished—

—to leave them running over something that cracked and glowed. Nita looked down and gasped as the heat struck up at her, burning through her sneakers. They were running over lava, under a dull red sky in which hung a single huge planet, banded in eye-vibrating greens and blues. The lava churned and flowed, hot and sluggish, and as two smaller bodies like moons came cruising across the fierce hot sky, Nita glanced to one side and saw how the lava humped toward the new moons’ pull in strange swollen tides—

A second later, the darkness fell again, and the heat and the burning light were gone, and they were racing through the dark, faster now. The white squirrel bounded away in front of Ponch, and Ponch tore after him, and the darkness fell away behind them like the sides of a tunnel until they were all out in a new light, cooler. A blue-green sky stretched over a dusty violet wasteland without a single feature—not a tree or a plant or a rock to be seen anywhere, only the wind blowing a pinkish stinging dust past them, with clouds of more pink, blowing sand airbrushed against the sky’s distant lavender-tinged horizon. The cold began to bite, the air smelled strange, but Nita had no time to get more than a whiff of it before the darkness closed around them all again—

—to break and leave them running across a wasteland of snow, huge mountains uprearing in the background, but closer to hand, the hard-packed snow sculpted into ridge after knife-sharp ridge, imitating the mountain range behind. They plunged and slid down the broad side of one of the ridges, the squirrel almost lost against the whiteness, but Ponch running right behind it, fast and sure, not losing the trail. Then up the far side of the little valley, sliding, trying to get purchase on the snow. The white squirrel leaped, and Ponch leaped, and the darkness folded down around them all again—

Ponch ran, his speed increasing so that it became more and more difficult to grasp the details of one universe before they were into the darkness again, and out into the next world.

The “squirrel” hardly had that shape anymore. It was a blurred line of light, streaking ahead of them, zigzagging, jumping upward, bouncing down, world to darkness to world again; energy getting ready to discharge as soon as it reached its goal. And that had to be soon.
We’ve come so far,
Nita thought.
Not even Ponch can keep this up for much longer.
They were flickering from world to world now at least once a second, so quickly that Nita was tempted to close her eyes to keep the flicker from disorienting her. She concentrated on just breathing, because otherwise she would start thinking about the growing pain in her legs, and if she did that, she’d have to stop.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Nita’s lungs burned. The pain was beginning to force itself through her concentration.
Just run. Just run. Just keep running—

—and then suddenly she tripped over Sker’ret, who’d stopped, and fell on top of him; and from behind Nita, Ronan fell on top of her.

The air went out of her lungs, leaving Nita unable even to say “Ow!” Within a second or so Ronan got up off her, and Nita could just lie there for a moment, feeling her legs—or wishing she couldn’t feel them.

Underneath her, something hard and edgy moved, or tried to. “Nita,” a muffled voice said in the Speech, “could you please get off me before we accidentally become more than just good friends?”

Nita opened her eyes at that, partly in alarm. She wasn’t entirely sure what Sker’ret meant, but she didn’t intend to find out. “Sorry,” she said, and disentangled herself from him as best she could. It was kind of like having fallen into a closetful of coat hangers, but finally she managed to get herself and her clothes undone from all those jointy pointy legs of his, and carefully stood up to have a look around.

The ground of the dimly lit clearing where they’d wound up was strangely soft underfoot. All around them was a great silence, broken only by a faint rushing sound a long way off. Nita glanced toward Kit, who was removing the wizardly leash from Ponch, and then looked around.

Trees,
was her first impression.
Trees as far as the eye can see. But they’re so weird!
The trees were many-trunked, their branches reaching down half the time to root themselves in the ground again. Other branches and trunks reached higher, but almost immediately got involved and snarled up with the wrestling, shoving trunks and branches of other nearby trees, so that the upper canopy was as much wood as leafage. It made Nita think of a many-arched roof trying to grow into a cathedral, but strangling itself in grappling loops and buttresses, and having to break away each time in some new direction—then getting tangled and strangled all over again. Little light pierced such a canopy, but what did was blinding. Here and there the strife between the upthrusting, furiously contending branches had let a crack of the high sky show. This burned whiter-hot than the daytime sky above the Crossings, an unbearable glare that seared the skins of the trees through which it tore. Like multiple fiery spearshafts, that light struck down through the branch-ceilings, scarring the nearby growth to a scabrous black and plunging like white knives into the squelching surface below. Slowly, softly, the spongy peat-black stuff underfoot bubbled where the light bored into it, as if something there boiled.

Kit sniffed the air. “Motor oil,” he said. Nita caught the scent he meant, and looked over at one of the closer patches on the bumpy, root-tangled surface, where brown-black tar came oozing up through the ground, slicked over with what was probably crude oil. It gave off the scent Ponch had been tracking.

The rushing sound was slowly getting louder. The effect was like walking toward a waterfall, except that none of them was walking. The sound made it seem as if the waterfall was coming toward them.

And then, in the distance, Nita saw the shadowy shapes moving slowly among the giant, broken-backed trees, in several lines, one after the other, somber, dark, steadily approaching. Slowly she started hearing more than just that rushing noise as the shapes got closer. She heard a low humming or singing sound, and other noises that made her hair stand on end: anguished cries and sobbings that got louder as the marching shapes drew nearer. The crunch and creak of breaking wood told Nita that they were breaking the trees as they came, tearing down branches, ripping away every scrap of brush and undergrowth.

The shrieks echoing along the path of the approaching creatures became louder every moment, and Nita had to force herself to stand still and keep silent, concentrating on not panicking as she heard the trees wailing in anguish as their branches were bitten away. Onward came the softly singing column, leaving everything that had stood in its immediate path now bare except for the spongy ground underfoot. Off the creatures went and out of sight, bearing with them branches like banners, oozing strange sap; and behind them the trees moaned low, and more sap fell and trickled onto the soft ground, pooling like tears.

Filif stirred in silent horror. “And you’re sure this is the place we were looking for?” he said.

Ponch stood up again, gazing at the indistinct, moving shapes with interest.
This is the place.

“What are they?” Nita whispered. “I can’t see.”

“I think we should keep that mutual,” Kit said.

Nita nodded and reached down to her charm bracelet for the ready-to-implement invisibility spell, taking hold of the fabric of the spell and whispering its last word in the Speech. She felt the faint itch on her skin that told her it had taken hold, and around her the others all winked out of sight as well.

Best we keep any comments mind-to-mind for the time being,
Ronan said.

Silently the others agreed. They all moved carefully forward: not just to avoid making any sound that would be noticed by the creatures they were stalking, but because everybody was using different kinds of invisibility, and this made it all too easy for people to bang into one another.

Something light tickled Nita in the kidneys. She whirled, but there was nothing there, which meant what she’d felt was one of Filif’s fronds.
Sorry, Fil.

My fault, I was too close—What?

Sorry, it was me,
Sker’ret’s ratchety mind-voice said.

Nita let out a little breath of laughter as she softly skirted around the vast intertwined trunk of one great tree. She put out a hand, touched it—

The tree shuddered. Nita snatched back her hand, shocked, and then laid it against the tree again, much more gently.
What’s the matter?
she said to it silently in the Speech.
Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.

But it
was
afraid. It was in absolute terror. It was holding itself still in utter dread, frightened to speak to Nita, frightened to do anything at all. It was afraid of something far worse than the merely physical destruction Nita had seen. Finally she took her hand away and moved off, rubbing the hand nervously, as if the tree’s anguish was something that could cling to her like sweat.

What?
Kit said, catching some leakage of what she felt.

It reminds me of the way the trees were in the Central Park in that other Manhattan,
she said,
when we were out on Ordeal. That same kind of dumb fear. They wouldn’t respond to the Speech.

Come on.

Softly they made their way closer to the long lines of dark creatures weaving their way among the tree-trunks. Nita could just barely hear the soft footsteps of the others around her, and the slight rustling noise that Sker’ret and Filif made when they moved. She came up behind one particularly large tree and, without touching it, peered around it at the twisting pathway running between it and other large trees a few yards away.

Her nose wrinkled at the strange smell that hung in the air.
It’s almost like coffee,
Nita thought, as one of the shadowy shapes came around the huge tree that blocked the pathway,
but more bitter, a little burnt, as if it—

One of the shapes came around the tree and drifted toward her, almost without a sound—and Nita lost the thread of her thought completely, utterly shocked. A great, shining, dark-glossed almond-shaped body, held up at a diagonal on legs that were longer at the front than in the back; eight black legs, jointed three times each, the back edges of them razor-sharp; up high, a blunt wedge of a head with great dark mirror-shade eyes. Huge claws, hinged at the front top of the body shell, even sharper than the legs, held the squirming, dripping branches torn from some tree.

Nita stood frozen as the creature walked delicately past her. A few seconds later another one passed, and another, in what seemed an endless line. They came in all sizes, but even the smallest of them was the size of a big car. The larger ones, the creatures with the longest claws and heaviest armor, were more the size of vans or small trucks. They went on along the path, some of them making a low soft hum as they went, three or four notes repeated one after another. They weren’t words; if they were, Nita would have been able to understand them as Speech. Unnerved, Nita began to back away very slowly and softly as the long parade continued. The image from her dream was on her mind now: Della’s expression suddenly buried behind a glossy unrevealing eye, a claw coming up to brush blond hair away.
Whatever it means, I have to find out.

At last the final dark-shelled creature went past Nita and out of sight beyond the trees down the path. Nita let out a long breath of relief, but couldn’t get rid of the profound unease that had been troubling her since she first touched the tree.
There’s something really bad going on here,
she thought.
And we don’t have much time to find out what.

Without warning, from behind her she heard a different kind of humming sound, getting louder by the second. Nita turned quickly to see what was making it—

She had just time enough to jump back as a claw huger than any of the ones on the parading creatures came snapping straight at her face. She jumped back again in shock, grabbing for her charm bracelet, and the creature followed, snapping at her again.
It sees me! But how?

The huge shelled creature lunged at Nita, its claws snapping as she dodged around the tree, doing her best to stay out of its way while she dumped the invisibility spell, which could interfere with what she was about to do. Then she said the short phrase of a basic defense spell, the single spell she probably knew better than any other in the world, because it had been the first one she’d ever done. As the creature followed her and its great down-reaching claws stabbed at Nita again, she saw the claws skid away from the spell. Nita hurriedly held up her hands and spoke the words of the blast spell that she’d been ready to use on whatever had been attacking her in her dream. In a blaze of glowing green-white fire, the force-blast wizardry jumped away from her outstretched hands. The creature vanished in it, leaving her staggering backward.
Wow. Who’d have thought it’d have a kick like that. It must be the power boost.
The fire faded down as Nita straightened up, relieved.
So much for that. I hate having to use so final a spell on anything, but—