Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (69 page)

They were not solid spheres.  Rather, they were
hollow, their sides carved away in strips from top to bottom much like a
festival gourd.  The strips remaining were as wide as the empty spaces between
them.  Each strip’s edge was jagged, recalling again to Marik’s mind the image
of the round saw blade in Tattersfield’s mill.  While he watched, Xenos set the
orbs to spinning in place, the speed quickly reaching such intensity that the
whirling energy left afterimages in his retinas.

So fast did they spin that they looked like solid
orbs.  Yet, as the tree behind him testified to, they would chew their way
through anything they hit.

Xenos engaged in a dramatic gesture.  At his sweeping
arm, the fifteen orbs sped fast as diving eagles.  Two angled for each man
present except the Red Man, who found three attacking his legs, torso and head.

Marik dove to his right.  He felt the rushing wind of
the first passing, the breeze tugging at his tunic.  With no time to for
elegance he forced his waist to bend, bringing his stomach up enough that the
second missed by a whisker-length.  His face drove into the grit and pebbles
littering the ground.

The second saw-blade orb instantly covered him in
churned earth.  It dug a mole’s furrow into the ground, ejaculating the
tunnel’s contents behind.

Marik swung his feet into a crouch, ready for the next
volley, realization illuminating his consciousness as he did so.  Xenos could
not control the orb after he loosed it.  Or else he had set so many into play
that he could only shoot them like arrows.  None of the saw blade orbs bent the
slightest in their trajectories.  So long as they could dodge them, they had
nothing to worry about.

Except Xenos’ strength.  In the short span of time
since launching his second flight, he had crafted twenty new orbs.  This time
they hovered before him in a ten-foot tall circle.  He fired an orb at Rail and
the empty space within the curving line was instantly replaced by a fresh one.

Rail tracked the orb intently.  When it closed to
within feet in a mere second, he whipped his sword upward in a southeastern
slash.  The glowing edge met the saw-blade orb.  In a flash, the high buzzing
dissolved to tortured crackles, and the etheric power in the orb was shattered.

The circle shifted as Xenos faced the Red Man.  Six
orbs lanced forward one after the previous from different points in the
circle.  With equanimity, the Red Man met them all despite the various angles. 
Power suffused his hands while he struck each orb a single blow in rapid
succession.  One by one he burst the orbs…until the last.

Each orb had moved slightly faster than he.  With the
fifth, he was forced to twist awkwardly to reach it before it chewed through
his left knee.  The sixth stormed ahead to tear out his throat.

He’s meat!  It’s going to kill him!

With the saw-blade orb only feet away, Marik saw the
Red Man’s eyes suddenly flash.  The brilliant crystalline hue seemed to leave
his irises momentarily, to cover the clearing in the illumination of a scarlet
lightning bolt.

Exactly what happened, Marik could not say.  The orb
was destroyed.  Its faint energy wisps fluttered against the Red Man’s coat
harmlessly.

Xenos laughed.  Marik felt dread filling his spine
with ice.  Not from the merciless amusement shown by a harvester with power
beyond what any mortal should command, but from the exhaustion that abruptly
gripped the Red Man.  For the first time his breaths deepened.  Sweat broke
across his forehead.

A bludgeoning thud slammed into his left shoulder. 
Marik exclaimed in surprise before recognizing Colbey.  The scout pushed him
away ruthlessly.

“What—”

“Go!  Now!”  He paused only to shove Marik harder than
before.

Marik stumbled until he saw in front of him the
western root wall.  Too, Dietrik was already halfway up, moving like a
squirrel.

The buzzing warned them an instant before the new orbs
attacked.  Marik twisted hard and avoided one that would have reduced his head
to a mess from the butcher’s grinder.  Colbey simultaneously bent backward,
bracing his hands on the ground, and lifted one leg so it pointed at the trees
above.  Both his orbs ate nothing but wood.

Marik leapt onto the round root, feeling his
fingernails cracking when he dug hard for purchase.  He ignored the pain and
yanked his body higher by willpower alone.  His boots slammed into the root as
if determined to make a foothold if no natural ones were available.

He rolled over the edge onto the top faster than he
would have believed possible.  A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him around
to the opposite side.  How had Colbey managed to gain the top before him?

“This is a dead end alley,” the scout hissed.  “A
killing ground to trap your quarry.  We must leave.”

“What about my father?”  Marik turned back to stare into
the clearing.

Colbey’s hard tug on his collar swept him from his
feet again.  As he fell, the twenty orbs in Xenos’ circle exploded away in
twenty different directions.  One slammed into the root below where they stood
at the same moment Marik crashed against the bark surface.  An instant later it
burst through the wood only two inches from his nose and continued upward into
the tree branches.

“Go!”  Colbey’s strength lifted Marik from his prone
position and spun him over the root’s far side.  Terror at the fall filled him
until the hard landing ripped the wind from his lungs.

Colbey landed lightly beside him and Dietrik.  Marik
missed what he said.  Pain overwhelmed his senses.  Dietrik ran in the
direction the scout pointed.  When Colbey lifted him to his feet and pushed him
in the back, Marik struggled to make his body function on its own.

It was only when water soaked through his breeches
above his boots that he realized where they were.  “The creek!  Gods above,
we’ll be bitten by a snake and killed!”

“That way, mage!”  Colbey beat him as relentlessly as
a willful horse.  “Across the water!  Hurry!”

“What about—”

“Go!”

Marik moaned, uncertain which was worse.  A painful
death by snakebite or a quick death by Xenos.  His only thought was to exit the
creek swiftly as possible.  He loped after Dietrik, splashing wildly since he
tried to lift his feet fully above the water with each step.

Once they neared the far bank, Colbey darted ahead. 
He jogged thirty feet downstream until he reached a natural archway of twisting
roots against a hillside.  A wide, flat boulder formed the bank above the
flowing water.  He stood on it, within the archway, palms pressed to the arcing
wood.

In moments, the earthen wall framed by the arch
rippled as the previous seals had.  Dietrik wasted no time.  He ran into what
should have been the solid dirt hill that descended to the stream.

Marik stood firm.  His father was back there!  Could
they not follow the river south a hundred yards, climb back over the root and
enter the clearing behind Xenos?  They could take his back while he dueled with
the Red Man!

But Mendell’s soldiers were waiting to kill anyone who
tried to charge Xenos.  They could never take the whole detachment down without
alerting Xenos to their presence.

Or could they?  What if—

“Mage!”

“We have to save them!  We can’t leave my father to
face Xenos on his own!  What can—damn it!  Let go!”

For the second time, Marik was thrown against his will
through a Euvea’s seal.

“You’re going to fall, mage.  Stop scraping away the
bark.”

“Help me then, gods damn it!”

Sweat flowed across Marik’s face in streamlets.  His
hands wrapped in iron bands around the rope he dangled from.  He felt the rope
sliding inexorably through his grip, the sweat slicking his skin too much for
adequate purchase against the hemp.

“Hurry up!  I’m slipping!”

Colbey swung down easily from above, rope whirring
through his fingers until he had drawn level with Marik.  His hand seized his
own line, instantly stopping him and making him swing feet first back to the
cliff wall.

“Around your wrist, as I showed you,” Colbey
instructed.  He pried one of Marik’s hands from their grip.

“I’m falling!”

“No, you are not.  Stop flailing the bark away with
your boots.  Press
against
the wall, rather than along it.”

The scout held him steady until Marik adjusted his
feet.  His body threatened to freeze.  It took every ounce of his willpower to
jerk his leg up, to put the boot sole flat to the bark.  When at last he
managed it, he stood horizontally over the void, his weight supported solely by
the rope.

“Let the rope wrap around your wrist,” Colbey
instructed.  “You are too much a novice to trust the strength of your grip
alone.  That will slow it enough that you may control the speed with which you
descend.  You see?  Dietrik has the matter well in hand.  You can as well.”

Marik looked over his shoulder to where Dietrik was
already fifty feet lower.  Dietrik had duplicated Colbey’s method of pushing
backward off the cliff face, dropping several feet, then arcing back to land
safely against the bark.

“I’m not damned fool enough to jump to my death, no
matter how sturdy this line is!”

“Time passes,” Colbey reminded Marik.  “And with it
all chance of getting ahead of the Arronaths and laying our trap.”

The scout pushed off from the wall, falling three
times the distance Dietrik had before swinging back to repel again.  Marik
gritted his teeth.  In his mind, the only question was if they would survive to
escape this nightmarish sealed area or become carrion on the…whatever lay
below.  More roots, like as not.

Against his better judgment, he peered down, wondering
if he could see anything distinct yet.  True he had only come down forty feet
from the top, but still…

Far below, jutting from this abnormal cliff, was the
massive branch Colbey had insisted was the only way to proceed.  Several such
branches extended from the cliff for miles to his left and right.  Most unusual
of all, the cliff was composed completely of bark over hardwood without a
single stone in sight.  It stretched in both directions without visible end,
into the far horizon.  The distant ground was an unknowable fog.  Those thick
mists lurking at the cliff’s base could either be a light covering or fifty
fathoms deep.

In this madhouse, Marik would certainly not rule that
out.

He loosened his grip fractionally.  Around his lower
back he felt the rope slide.  His left hand clamped its length in terror, as
did his right with the line encircling his wrist.  The sudden stop forced his
left hand, underneath him, to mash hard into his side.

“Mage!  We do not have all the day!”

Marik swore within the confines of his mind.  While he
tried to sort out his left hand and get it back down to the lower rope, his
boots slipped off the bark.  His shoulder slammed into the wall.  Bark flecked
away, all of it seemingly landing in his eyes.  He kicked his legs furiously
through the air which accomplished nothing save to entangle his limbs in the
other two of the five ropes to which Colbey had led them.

“Not if Vernilock has any say in the matter!” Marik
waspishly shot back when Colbey demanded to know if he would be joining them
any time soon.

Colbey refrained from duplicating Marik’s fit of
vitriolic exclamations.  He instead shimmied up the rope no less quickly than
if he had jogged up a spiraling staircase.  Before Marik could make his plight
much worse, the scout’s hands were efficiently unwinding the loose ropes from
around his limbs.

“You lower yourself,” Colbey directed.  “This time I
will remain above to watch over you.”

“What about when I fall and turn into raspberry
jelly?”

Colbey remained calm in the face of Marik’s heated
fear.  “Keep your eyes meeting mine.  You will be fine.”

“How in the hells should I do that?  With you dangling
above me?”

For answer, Colbey released the rope he held looped
around his back via his left hand.  He gripped the line firmly and swung his
legs straight up.  Somehow he wrapped his ankles around the rope, then
terrified Marik into a near plunge by removing both his hands from the hemp.

“Should you begin to slip, I will catch you,” Colbey
explained, remaining stationary despite his hands waving free in the air.  “But
you must hurry, mage.  We have no chance against this monster Xenos unless we
strike him unawares.”

Marik felt the perspiration slicking his hair.  From
its dampness he might have been swimming.  Summoning his determination, he
allowed the rope to slip through his hands, around his back.  He dropped a
foot, stopped, then slowly dropped the next.

Colbey consistently remained within arms reach.  His
hands hovered inches from Marik’s, his decent controlled by an unnatural
manipulation of pressure through his ankles.  Rather than think about that, and
worse, if the scout could actually hold his dead weight without falling as well,
Marik kept his mind on the next inch, the next twist of hemp sliding through
his fingers.  The whole way he locked gazes with Colbey.

He released the rope in shock when his back eventually
struck the rough branch.  It was wide as the paved center of Capitol Highway. 
His limbs lay spread-eagle, his clothing soaked.  Sprawled there, perched above
a bottomless chasm, his mail felt three times heavier than usual.

“You should have gotten used to this climbing down
from the Stoneseams,” Dietrik observed dispassionately.

“We always had our feet under us,” Marik spat back. 
“What lunatic would climb down a rope just to see if anything interesting was
at the bottom?”

“People who came from the other way,” Colbey replied. 
He gestured at the branch’s opposite end.  “The first Guardians to explore this
area found their way to the cliff from the Tangle.”

Marik sat up enough to follow Colbey’s motion. 
Dietrik stood with arms folded, staring into the mess.  As wide and tall as the
bark cliff, massive tree branches were twined around each other in a fantastic
disregard for gravity.  Peering further than a dozen feet in was impossible due
to the weaver’s catastrophe before them.

To east and west, Marik could see down the eighty yard
wide canyon to where blue sky met the impenetrable fog.  Had he not known
better, he could almost believe this wooden cliff and the worms’ tangle of
branches opposite were perched atop a cloud.

“We have made poor progress,” Colbey declared.  “This
marks only the halfway point between entrances.”

“Shake your tail, mate.  Our guide will leave us
behind if we drag on him too much.”

Marik reached his feet only after pushing himself up
on all fours.  His legs trembled alarmingly.  “I thought that was your heart’s
secret desire.”

“Not a mile between nowhere and nothing.  I doubt I
could climb these ropes back to the top for one.  And for the other, that looks
worse than any blueblood’s hedge maze I’ve heard tell of.”

“Yeah.  As much up and down as lefts and rights.”  His
legs stubbornly refused to shift an inch.

“I will leave you both if you do not make the effort,”
Colbey called over one shoulder.  Traces of the old irritation at all things
non-Colbey had reappeared in his tone.

Marik ensured that he stood exactly in the branch’s
center before sliding a foot forward.  Despite the width, the lack of handrails
made movement feel especially treacherous.  Bark scraped off from his grinding
boot sole.

Dietrik shrugged his mail into a comfortable position
and followed without a further word.  His mood had been dark since the two
friends had re-encountered each other at the mountains’ base.  Troublesome as
that was, it still comforted Marik to have him at his side.  He shuffled fast,
the trembles never completely subsiding.

The Tangle rose above them, vast, unnatural and
intimidating.  At least while running to the cliff’s edge, they had progressed
through forest that was, visually at any rate, normal.  Now here, in this
purgatory, there was no ground.  Only crisscrossing branches growing and
curving in every direction conceivable.  If he fell, he would surely strike
another branch quickly.  Except with nothing save bark to grab hold of he would
undoubtedly slide off, his body slamming into countless eeling tree limbs,
broken long before he eventually thudded into the ground.

Wherever that might be.

Colbey set a fast pace.  He was determined to arrive
at Xenos’ target first.  Their brief encounter had demonstrated the
effectiveness of attacking the monster head-on.  They would be dead before they
were aware of it.

Their only chance was to take him unawares.  Marik
agreed with the assessment.  Dietrik had volubly stated the foolishness of
trying to fight Xenos at all, no matter the method.

But Marik could no more abandon the effort than he
could drink the Southern Sea.  Seeing Rail appearing in the clearing…perhaps it
was that which roiled his insides so badly rather than the precarious path he
trod.

There was no longer any question of why his father and
the mysterious man clad in red were so intent on bringing about Xenos’
downfall.  Could there be any question but that he was the worst mage to lust
after power in centuries?  His astonishing strength, fearsome to behold...all
at the cost of innocent people’s pain and suffering.

And it was not enough to satisfy the man’s thirst. 
Whatever he hoped to capture within the Rovasii must be such that it would
grant him power that would dwarf his current abilities.  The entire Galemaran
army would be hard-pressed to destroy him then.  If the army weren’t already
bleeding from losses in multiple wars.

The scene replayed in his memory.  Roots of guilt were
burrowing through him.  In the face of terrifying magical power, he had left
his father to fend off the attacks alone.  After the prolonged search, the
daily doubts whether he would ever find Rail, it had ended with him leaving
behind the only man Marik could call family.

But who is to say what happened then?  This is hardly
the first time they’ve fought.  Father will survive, and the red one, too,
probably.  Except they’re out of time.  They can’t sit and ponder the next best
attempt because Xenos will have plundered Colbey’s village by then.  And there
won’t be any stopping him after that…

Marik forced his feet to raise off the bark enough to
take a full step.  Shuffling along would be far too slow a pace to set. 
Especially with Colbey pushing harder by the moment.

The scout constantly slowed his pace from a near run
to a hard walk.  Marik could feel the irritation wafting off the man.  Yet he
never said a word.  His guilt would ensure he never abandoned them.  Not within
the confines of a sealed area, anyway.  Once they breached the seal he might
leave them to their own devices in order to race ahead.

Learning what he had from Marik around the campfire
had rekindled a fire in his soul.  The other reason Marik refused to turn back
was that, if left alone, Colbey might decided to recklessly charge Xenos, teeth
bared and sword flying, either in hopes of vanquishing a hated foe or dying in
the glorious attempt.

The daylight darkened once they worked their way
deeper into the Tangle.  Their branch continued without end.  It rose in steep
hills and plunged in steeper descents until Marik felt his feet sliding despite
his care.  Once it climbed two-hundred feet in a perfect spiral seventy feet
wide.

Many times they were forced to duck or crawl under
branches that overlapped theirs.  The last was so narrow Marik had to exhale
deeply to squeeze under.  It marked the strangest journey of his life,
following the airborne pathway through the Tangle, listening to birdsong as if
it were only an ordinary forest.

They caught up to Colbey after he stopped sharply
several candlemarks later.  He bent his concentration on a separate branch that
passed vertically next to their path.  Close enough to touch.  Looking for all
the world like an innocent tree trunk.  Neither he nor Dietrik commented.  Both
were offering silent thanks to their patron deities for deliverance.

Dietrik marched through the shimmering air the moment
it appeared.  Marik followed with a quicker step than he had managed since
releasing his rope.  He was ebullient at the prospect of feeling solid earth
beneath his boots.  Never again did he
ever
wish to depart the ground
for any reason.

The icy sensations washed over him.  When they were
replaced by the mild cool of deep forest springtime, he opened his eyes.  A cry
nearly escaped his lips.