‘Yes, little mother,’ the broad-faced Deiran agreed. Sparhawk had noticed that they had all, unconsciously perhaps, taken to addressing her in that form.
They camped in the forest that night and continued the following morning under still-cloudy skies. They were climbing steadily through the forest, and as they progressed, the air grew colder. It was about midday when they reached the eastern edge of the wood and turned south, staying perhaps a hundred yards back under the trees to take advantage of the concealment they offered.
As Kring had advised Sparhawk they would, they reached an extensive grove of blighted trees late in the day. The stark white band of dead trees spilled down from the mountainside like a leprous waterfall, foul-smelling, fungus-ridden and about a league wide. ‘This place looks – and smells – like the outskirts of Hell,’ Tynian said in a sombre tone.
‘Maybe it’s because of the cloudy weather,’ Kalten told him.
‘I don’t think sunshine would help this place very much,’ Ulath disagreed.
‘What could have laid waste so vast a region?’ Bevier asked with a shudder.
‘The earth itself is diseased,’ Sephrenia told him. ‘Let’s not linger too long in this accursed wood, dear ones. A man is not a tree, but the noxious miasma of this forest cannot be healthy.’
‘We’re losing daylight, Sephrenia,’ Kurik said.
‘That won’t be a problem. There’ll be light enough for us to press on after it grows dark.’
‘What was it that diseased the earth, Lady Sephrenia?’ Berit asked, looking around at the white trees thrusting upward from the contaminated soil like imploring skeletal hands.
‘There’s no way to know, Berit, but the reek of this place is the reek of death. Horrors beyond imagining may lie under the ground. Let’s put this place behind us.’
The sky darkened with the approach of evening, but as night fell, the dead trees around them began to give off a sickly, greenish glow.
‘Are you doing this, Sephrenia?’ Kalten asked, ‘making the light, I mean?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘The light isn’t the result of magic’
Kurik laughed a bit ruefully. ‘I should have remembered that,’ he said.
‘Remembered what?’ Talen asked him.
‘Rotten logs and the like glow in the dark sometimes.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘You’ve spent too much time in cities, Talen.’
‘You have to go where your customers are,’ the boy shrugged. ‘You don’t make much profit swindling frogs.’
They rode on through the first hours of night in that faint greenish glow, covering their noses and mouths with their cloaks. Not long before midnight they reached a steep, forested ridge. They rode on for some distance and then set up camp for the remainder of the night in a shallow, wooded basin where the night air seemed unusually sweet and pure after the endless hours in the fetid stink of the dead forest. The prospect they viewed the following morning as they crested the ridge was not a great deal more encouraging. What they had faced the previous day had been dead white. What lay in store for them today was just as dead, but it was black.
‘What on earth is that?’ Talen gasped, staring out over the bubbling expanse of sticky-looking black muck.
‘The tar-bogs Kring mentioned,’ Sparhawk replied.
‘Can we go around them?’
‘No. The tar seeps out of the face of a cliff, and the bogs run on for leagues out into the foothills.’
The tar-bogs appeared to be vast puddles of shiny black, glistening wet, bubbling and stretching to a rocky spur perhaps five miles to the south. Near the far side there rose a plume of bluish flame quite nearly as tall as the spire rising above the cathedral of Cimmura.
‘How can we hope to cross that?’ Bevier exclaimed.
‘Carefully, I’d imagine,’ Ulath replied. ‘I’ve crossed a few quicksand bogs up in Thalesia. You spend a lot of time probing in front of you with a stick – a long one, preferably.’
‘The Peloi have the trail marked,’ Sparhawk assured them. ‘They’ve poked sticks into solid ground.’
‘Which side of the sticks are we supposed to stay on?’ Kalten asked.
‘Kring didn’t say,’ Sparhawk shrugged. ‘I imagine we’ll find out before we go very far, though.’
They rode down the ridge and moved at a careful walk out into the sticky black quagmire. The air hanging above the bogs was thick with the penetrating odour of naphtha, and Sparhawk began to feel somewhat light-headed after a short distance.
They plodded on, their pace slowed by the need for caution. Great viscous bubbles rose up from the depths of the naphtha sinks around them to pop with odd belching sounds. When they neared the southern end of the bog, they passed the burning pillar, a column of blue flame that roared endlessly as it shot up from the earth. Once they had passed that blazing shaft, the ground began to rise and they were soon out of the bogs. Perhaps it had been the heat from the burning gasses spurting from the earth that made the contrast so noticeable, but when they left the bogs behind, the air seemed much, much colder.
‘We’ve got weather coming,’ Kurik warned. ‘Rain at first most likely, but I think there might be snow behind it.’
‘No trip through the mountains is complete without snow,’ Ulath observed.
‘What are we supposed to look for now?’ Tynian asked Sparhawk.
‘That,’ Sparhawk replied, pointing at a high cliff with broad yellow bands running diagonally across its face. ‘Kring gives very good directions.’ He peered on ahead and saw a tree with a patch of bark slashed away. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘The trail to the pass is marked. Let’s ride on before the rain starts.’
The pass was in fact an ancient stream-bed. The climate of Eosia had changed over the eons, and as Zemoch had grown more and more arid, the stream which had patiently carved the narrow ravine had dried up at its source, leaving a steep gully running back up into the towering cliff.
As Kurik had predicted, the rain began in the late afternoon. It was a steady drizzle that dampened everything.
‘Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit called from the rear. ‘I think you should take a look at this.’
Sparhawk reined in and rode back. ‘What is it, Berit?’
Berit pointed towards the west where the sunset was no more than a lighter shade of grey in the rainy sky. In the centre of that lighter spot hovered an amorphous cloud of inky black. ‘It’s moving the wrong way, Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit said. ‘All the other clouds are moving west. That one’s coming east, right towards us. It looks sort of like the cloud those dawn-men were hiding in, doesn’t it? The one that’s been following us?’