She assumed Cotillion would understand all of this. That he would trust her instincts, even if she was, ultimately, unable to explain them.
She must… hurry.
A moment's concentration. And the scene before her was transformed.
The cliff now a slope, crowded with collapsed trees, firs, cedars, their roots torn loose from dark earth, the boles flattened as if the entire hillside had been struck by some unimaginable wind. Beneath a leaden sky, a vast forested valley clothed in mist stretched out across what had moments before been the waters of the strait.
The two skeletons pattered up to crowd her feet, heads darting.
'I told you there'd be a forest,' Telorast said.
Apsalar gestured at the wreckage on the slope immediately before them.
'What happened here?'
'Sorcery,' Curdle said. 'Dragons.'
'Not dragons.'
'No, not dragons. Telorast is right. Not dragons.'
'Demons.'
'Yes, terrible demons whose very breath is a warren's gate, oh, don't jump down those throats!'
'No breath, Curdle,' Telorast said. 'Just demons. Small ones. But lots of them. Pushing trees down, one by one, because they're mean and inclined to senseless acts of destruction.'
'Like children.'
'Right, as Curdle says, like children. Children demons. But strong.
Very strong. Huge, muscled arms.'
'So,' Apsalar said, 'dragons fought here.'
'Yes,' Telorast said.
'In the Shadow Realm.'
'Yes.'
'Presumably, the same dragons that are now imprisoned within the stone circle.'
'Yes.'
Apsalar nodded, then began making her way down. 'This will be hard going. I wonder if I will save much time traversing the forest.'
'Tiste Edur forest,' Curdle said, scampering ahead. 'They like their forests.'
'All those natural shadows,' Telorast added. 'Power in permanence.
Blackwood, bloodwood, all sorts of terrible things. The Eres were right to fear.'
In the distance a strange darkness was sliding across the treetops.
Apsalar studied it. The carrack, casting an ethereal presence into this realm. She was seeing both worlds, a common enough occurrence.
Yet, even so… someone is on that carrack. And that someone is important…
****
T'rolbarahl, ancient creature of the First Empire of Dessimbelackis, Dejim Nebrahl crouched at the base of a dead tree, or, rather, flowed like a serpent round the bleached, exposed roots, seven-headed, sevenbodied and mottled with the colours of the ground, the wood and the rocks. Fresh blood, slowly losing its heat, filled the D'ivers' stomachs. There had been no shortage of victims, even in this wasteland. Herders, salt-miners, bandits, desert wolves, Dejim Nebrahl had fed continuously on this journey to the place of ambush.
The tree, thick-boled, squat, with only a few twisted branches surviving the centuries since it had died, rose from a crack in the rock between a flat stretch that marked the trail and an upthrust tower of pitted, wind-worn stone. The trail twisted at this point, skirting the edge of a cliff, the drop below ten or more man-heights to boulders and jagged rubble.
On the other side of the trail, more rocks rose, heaped, the stone cracked and shelved.
The D'ivers would strike here, from both sides, lifting free of the shadows.
Dejim Nebrahl was content. Patience easily purchased by fresh meat, the echoing screams of death, and now it need but await the coming of the victims, the ones the Nameless Ones had chosen.
Soon, then.
****
Plenty of room between the trees, a cathedral of shadows and heavy gloom, the flow of damp air like water against her face as Apsalar jogged onward, flanked by the darting forms of Telorast and Curdle. To her surprise, she was indeed making good time. The ground was surprisingly level and tree-falls seemed nonexistent, as if no tree in this expanse of forest ever died. She had seen no wildlife, had come upon no obvious game trail, yet there had been glades, circular sweeps of moss tightly ringed by evenly spaced cedars, or, if not cedar, then something much like it, the bark rough, shaggy, black as tar. The circles were too perfect to be natural, although no other evidence of intent or design was visible. In these places, the power of shadow was, as Telorast had said, fierce.
Tiste Edur, Kurald Emurlahn, their presence lingered, but only in the same manner as memories clung to graveyards, tombs and barrows. Old dreams snarled and fading in the grasses, in the twist of wood and the crystal latticework of stone. Lost whispers in the winds that ever wandered across such death-laden places. The Edur were gone, but their forest had not forgotten them.
