This is the Road

Leaf, lolling cozily with Shadow on a thick heap of furs in the air wagon’s snug passenger castle, heard rain beginning to fall and made a sour face: very likely he would soon have to get up and take charge of driving the wagon, if the rain was the sort of rain he thought it was.

This was the ninth day since the Teeth had begun to lay waste to the eastern provinces. The airwagon, carrying four who were fleeing the invaders’ fierce appetites, was floating along Spider Highway somewhere between Theptis and Northman’s Rib, heading west, heading west as fast as could be managed. Jumpy little Sting was at the power reins, beaming dream commands to the team of six nightmares that pulled the wagon along; burly Crown was amidwagon, probably plotting vengeance against the Teeth, for that was what Crown did most of the time; that left Leaf and Shadow at their ease, but not for much longer. Listening to the furious drumming of the downpour against the wagon’s taut-stretched canopy of big-veined stickskin, Leaf knew that this was no ordinary rain, but rather the dread purple rain that runs the air foul and brings the no-leg spiders out to hunt. Sting would never be able to handle the wagon in a purple rain. What a nuisance, Leaf thought, cuddling close against Shadow’s sleek, furry blue form. Before long he heard the worried snorting of the nightmares and felt the wagon jolt and buck: yes, beyond any doubt, purple rain, no-leg spiders. His time of relaxing was just about over.

Not that he objected to doing his fair share of the work. But he had finished his last shift of driving only half an hour ago. He had earned his rest. If Sting was incapable of handling the wagon in this weather—and Shadow too, Shadow could never manage in a purple rain—then Crown ought to take the reins himself. But of course Crown would do no such thing. It was Crown’s wagon and he never drove it himself. “I have always had underbreeds to do the driving for me,” Crown had said ten days ago, as they stood in the grand plaza of Holy Town with the fires of the Teeth blazing in the outskirts.

“Your underbreeds have all fled without waiting for their master,” Leaf had reminded him.

“So? There are others to drive.”

“Am I to be your underbreed?” Leaf asked calmly. “Remember, Crown, I’m of the Pure Stream stock.”

“I can see that by your face, friend. But why get into philosophical disputes? This is my wagon. The invaders will be here before nightfall. If you would ride west with me, these are the terms. If they’re too bitter for you to swallow, well, stay here and test your luck against the mercies of the Teeth.”

“I accept your terms,” Leaf said.

So he had come aboard—and Sting, and Shadow—under the condition that the three of them would do all the driving. Leaf felt degraded by that—hiring on, in effect, as an indentured underbreed—but what choice was there for him? He was alone and far from his people; he had lost all his wealth and property; he faced sure death as the swarming hordes of Teeth devoured the eastland. He accepted Crown’s terms. An aristocrat knows the art of yielding better than most. Resist humiliation until you can resist no longer, certainly, but then accept, accept, accept. Refusal to bow to the inevitable is vulgar and melodramatic. Leaf was of the highest caste, Pure Stream, schooled from childhood to be pliable, a willow in the wind, bending freely to the will of the Soul. Pride is a dangerous sin; so is stubbornness; so too, more than the others, is foolishness. Therefore, he labored while Crown lolled. Still, there were limits even to Leaf’s capacity for acceptance, and he suspected those limits would be reached shortly.

On the first night, with only two small rivers between them and the Teeth and the terrible fires of Holy Town staining the sky, the fugitives halted briefly to forage for jellymelons in an abandoned field, and as they squatted there, gorging on ripe succulent fruit, Leaf said to Crown, “Where will you go, once you’re safe from the Teeth on the far side of the Middle River?”

“I have distant kinsmen who live in the Flatlands,” Crown replied. “I’ll go to them and tell them what has happened to the Dark Lake folk in the east, and I’ll persuade them to take up arms and drive the Teeth back into the icy wilderness where they belong. An army of liberation, Leaf, and I’ll lead it.” Crown’s dark face glistened with juice. He wiped at it. “What are your plans?”

“Not nearly so grand. I’ll seek kinsmen too, but not to organize an army. I wish simply to go to the Inland Sea, to my own people, and live quietly among them once again. I’ve been away from home too many years. What better time to return?” Leaf glanced at Shadow. “And you?” he asked her. “What do you want out of this journey?”

“I want only to go wherever you go,” she said.

Leaf smiled. “You, Sting?”

“To survive,” Sting said. “Just to survive.”

Mankind had changed the world, and the changed world had worked changes in mankind. Each day the wagon brought the travelers to some new and strange folk who claimed descent from the old ancestral stock, though they might be water-breathers or have skins like tanned leather or grow several pairs of arms. Human, all of them, human, human, human. Or so they insisted. If you call yourself human, Leaf thought, then I will call you human too. Still, there were gradations of humanity. Leaf, as a Pure Stream, thought of himself as more nearly human than any of the peoples along their route, more nearly human even than his three companions; indeed, he sometimes tended to look upon Crown, Sting, and Shadow as very much other than human, though he did not consider that a fault in them. Whatever dwelled in the world was without fault, so long as it did no harm to others. Leaf had been taught to respect every breed of mankind, even the underbreeds. His companions were certainly no underbreeds: they were solidly midcaste, all of them, and ranked not far below Leaf himself. Crown, the biggest and strongest and most violent of them, was of the Dark Lake line. Shadow’s race was Dancing Stars, and she was the most elegant, the most supple of the group. She was the only female aboard the wagon. Sting, who sprang from the White Crystal stock, was the quickest of body and spirit, mercurial, volatile. An odd assortment, Leaf thought. But in extreme times one takes one’s traveling companions as they come. He had no complaints. He found it possible to get along with all of them, even Crown. Even Crown.

The wagon came to a jouncing halt. There was the clamor of hooves stamping the sodden soil; then shrill high-pitched cries from Sting and angry booming bellowings from Crown; and finally a series of muffled hissing explosions. Leaf shook his head sadly. “To waste our ammunition on no-leg spiders—”

“Perhaps they’re harming the horses,” Shadow said. “Crown is rough, but he isn’t stupid.”

Tenderly Leaf stroked her smooth haunches. Shadow tried always to be kind. He had never loved a Dancing Star before, though the sight of them had long given him pleasure: they were slender beings, bird-boned and shallow-breasted, and covered from their ankles to their crested skulls by fine dense fur the color of the twilight sky in winter. Shadow’s voice was musical and her motions were graceful; she was the antithesis of Crown.

Crown now appeared, a hulking figure thrusting bluntly through the glistening beaded curtains that enclosed the passenger castle. He glared malevolently at Leaf. Even in his pleasant moments Crown seemed angry, an effect perhaps caused by his eyes, which were bright red where those of Leaf and most other kinds of humans were white. Crown’s body was a block of meat, twice as broad as Leaf and half again as tall, though Leaf did not come from a small-statured race. Crown’s skin was glossy, greenish-purple in colour, much like burnished bronze; he was entirely without hair and seemed more like a massive statue of an oiled gladiator than a living being. His arms hung well below his knees; equipped with extra joints and terminating in hands the size of great baskets, they were superb instruments of slaughter. Leaf offered him the most agreeable smile he could find. Crown said, without smiling in return, “You better get back on the reins, Leaf. The road’s turning into one big swamp. The horses are uneasy. It’s a purple rain.”

Leaf had grown accustomed, in these nine days, to obeying Crown’s brusque orders. He started to obey now, letting go of Shadow and starting to rise. But then, abruptly, he arrived at the limits of his acceptance.

“My shift just ended,” he said.

Crown stared. “I know that. But Sting can’t handle the wagon in this mess. And I just killed a bunch of mean-looking spiders. There’ll be more if we stay around here much longer.”

“So?”

“What are you trying to do, Leaf?”

“I guess I don’t feel like going up front again so soon.”

“You think Shadow here can hold the reins in this storm?” Crown asked coldly.

Leaf stiffened. He saw the wrath gathering in Crown’s face. The big man was holding his natural violence in check with an effort, there would be trouble soon if Leaf remained defiant. This rebelliousness went against all of Leaf’s principles, yet he found himself persisting in it and even taking a wicked pleasure in it. He chose to risk the confrontation and discover how firm Crown intended to be. Boldly he said, “You might try holding the reins yourself, friend.”

“Leaf!” Shadow whispered, appalled.

Crown’s face became murderous. His dark, shining cheeks puffed and went taut; his eyes blazed like molten nuggets; his hands closed and opened, closed and opened, furiously grasping air. “What kind of crazy stuff are you trying to give? We have a contract, Leaf. Unless you’ve suddenly decided that a Pure Stream doesn’t need to abide by—”

“Spare me the class prejudice, Crown. I’m not pleading Pure Stream as an excuse to get out of working. I’m tired and I’ve earned my rest.”

Shadow said softly, “Nobody’s denying you your rest, Leaf. But Crown’s right that I can’t drive in a purple rain. I would if I could. And Sting can’t do it either. That leaves only you.”

“And Crown,” Leaf said obstinately.

“There’s only you,” Shadow murmured. It was like her to take no sides, to serve ever as a mediator. “Go on, Leaf. Before there’s real trouble. Making trouble like this isn’t your usual way.”

Leaf felt bound to pursue his present course, however perilous. He shook his head. “You, Crown. You drive.”

In a throttled voice Crown said, “You’re pushing me too far. We have a contract.”

All Leaf’s Pure Stream temperance was gone now. “Contract? I agreed to do my fair share of the driving, not to let myself be yanked up from my rest at a time when—”

Crown kicked at a low wickerwork stool, splitting it. His rage was boiling close to the surface. Swollen veins throbbed in his throat. He said, still controlling himself, “Get out there right now, Leaf, or by the Soul I’ll send you into the All-Is-One!”

“Beautiful, Crown. Kill me, if you feel you have to. Who’ll drive your damned wagon for you then?”

“I’ll worry about that then.”

Crown started forward, swallowing air, clenching fists.

Shadow sharply nudged Leaf’s ribs. “This is going beyond the point of reason,” she told him. He agreed. He had tested Crown and he had his answer, which was that Crown was unlikely to back down; now enough was enough, for Crown was capable of killing. The huge Dark Laker loomed over him, lifting his tremendous arms as though to bring them crashing against Leaf’s head. Leaf held up his hands, more a gesture of submission than of self-defence.

“Wait,” he said. “Stop it, Crown. I’ll drive.”

Crown’s arms descended anyway. Crown managed to halt the killing blow midway, losing his balance and lurching heavily against the side of the wagon. Clumsily he straightened. Slowly he shook his head. In a low, menacing voice he said, “Don’t ever try something like this again, Leaf.”

“It’s the rain,” Shadow said. “The purple rain. Everybody does strange things in a purple rain.”

“Even so,” Crown said, dropping onto the pile of furs as Leaf got up. “The next time, Leaf, there’ll be bad trouble. Now go ahead. Get up front.”

Nodding to him, Leaf said, “Come up front with me, Shadow.”

She did not answer. A look of fear flickered across her face.

Crown said, “The driver drives alone. You know that, Leaf. Are you still testing me? If you’re testing me, say so and I’ll know how to deal with you.”

“I just want some company, as long as I have to do an extra shift.”

“Shadow stays here.”

There was a moment of silence. Shadow was trembling. “All right,” Leaf said finally. “Shadow stays here.”

“I’ll walk a little way toward the front with you,” Shadow said, glancing timidly at Crown. Crown scowled but said nothing. Leaf stepped out of the passenger castle; Shadow followed. Outside, in the narrow passageway leading to the midcabin, Leaf halted, shaken, shaking, and seized her. She pressed her slight body against him and they embraced, roughly, intensely. When he released her she said, “Why did you try to cross him like that? It was such a strange thing for you to do, Leaf.”

“I just didn’t feel like taking the reins again so soon.”

“I know that.”

“I want to be with you.”

“You’ll be with me a little later,” she said. “It didn’t make sense for you to talk back to Crown. There wasn’t any choice. You had to drive.”

“Why?”

“You know. Sting couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

“And Crown?”

She looked at him oddly. “Crown? How would Crown have taken the reins?”

From the passenger castle came Crown’s angry growl: “You going to stand there all day, Leaf? Go on! Get in here, Shadow!”

“I’m coming,” she called.

Leaf held her a moment. “Why not? Why couldn’t he have driven? He may be proud, but not so proud that—”

“Ask me another time,” Shadow said, pushing him away. “Go. Go. You have to drive. If we don’t move along we’ll have the spiders upon us.”

On the third day westward they had arrived at a village of Shapechangers. Much of the countryside through which they had been passing was deserted, although the Teeth had not yet visited it, but these Shapechangers went about their usual routines as if nothing had happened in the neighboring provinces. These were angular, long-legged people, sallow of skin, nearly green in hue, who were classed generally somewhere below the midcastes, but above the underbreeds. Their gift was metamorphosis, a slow softening of the bones under voluntary control that could, in the course of a week, drastically alter the form of their bodies, but Leaf saw them doing none of that, except for a few children who seemed midway through strange transformations, one with ropy, seemingly boneless arms, one with grotesquely distended shoulders, one with stiltlike legs. The adults came close to the wagon, admiring its beauty with soft cooing sounds, and Crown went out to talk with them. “I’m on my way to raise an army,” he said. “I’ll be back in a month or two, leading my kinsmen out of the Flatlands. Will you fight in our ranks? Together we’ll drive out the Teeth and make the eastern provinces safe again.”

The Shapechangers laughed heartily. “How can anyone drive out the Teeth?” asked an old one with a greasy mop of blue-white hair. “It was the will of the Soul that they burst forth as conquerors, and no one can quarrel with the Soul. The Teeth will stay in these lands for a thousand thousand years.”

“They can be defeated!” Crown cried.

“They will destroy all that lies in their path, and no one can stop them.”

“If you feel that way, why don’t you flee?” Leaf asked.

“Oh, we have time. But we’ll be gone long before your return with your army.” There were giggles. “We’ll keep ourselves clear of the Teeth. We have our ways. We make our changes and we slip away.”

Crown persisted. “We can use you in our war against them. You have valuable gifts. If you won’t serve as soldiers, at least serve us as spies. We’ll send you into the camps of the Teeth, disguised as—”

“We will not be here,” the old Shapechanger said, “and no one will be able to find us,” and that was the end of it.

As the airwagon departed from the Shapechanger village, Shadow at the reins, Leaf said to Crown, “Do you really think you can defeat the Teeth?”

“I have to.”

“You heard the old Shapechanger. The coming of the Teeth was the will of the Soul. Can you hope to thwart that will?”

“A rainstorm is the will of the Soul also,” Crown said quietly. “All the same, I do what I can to keep myself dry. I’ve never known the Soul to be displeased by that.”

“It’s not the same. A rainstorm is a transaction between the sky and the land. We aren’t involved in it; if we want to cover our heads, it doesn’t alter what’s really taking place. But the invasion of the Teeth is a transaction between tribe and tribe, a reordering of social patterns. In the great scheme of things, Crown, it may be a necessary process, preordained to achieve certain ends beyond our understanding. All events are part of some larger whole, and everything balances out, everything compensates for something else. Now we have peace, and now it’s the time for invaders, do you see? If that’s so, it’s futile to resist.”

“The Teeth broke into the eastlands,” said Crown, “and they massacred thousands of Dark Lake people. My concern with necessary processes begins and ends with that fact. My tribe has nearly been wiped out. Yours is still safe, up by its ferny shores. I will seek help and gain revenge.”

“The Shapechangers laughed at you. Others will also. No one will want to fight the Teeth.”

“I have cousins in the Flatlands. If no one else will, they’ll mobilize themselves. They’ll want to repay the Teeth for their crime against the Dark Lakers.”

“Your western cousins may tell you, Crown, that they prefer to remain where they are safe. Why should they go east to die in the name of vengeance? Will vengeance, no matter how bloody, bring any of your kinsmen back to life?”

“They will fight,” Crown said.

“Prepare yourself for the possibility that they won’t.”

“If they refuse,” said Crown, “then I’ll go back east myself, and wage my war alone until I’m overwhelmed. But don’t fear for me, Leaf. I’m sure I’ll find plenty of willing recruits.”

“How stubborn you are, Crown. You have good reason to hate the Teeth, as do we all. But why let that hatred cost you your only life? Why not accept the disaster that has befallen us, and make a new life for yourself beyond the Middle River, and forget this dream of reversing the irreversible?”

“I have my task,” said Crown.

Forward through the wagon Leaf moved, going slowly, head down, shoulders hunched, feet atickle with the urge to kick things. He felt sour of spirit, curdled with dull resentment. He had let himself become angry at Crown, which was bad enough; but worse, he had let that anger possess and poison him. Not even the beauty of the wagon could lift him: ordinarily its superb construction and elegant furnishings gave him joy, the swirl-patterned fur hangings, the banners of gossamer textiles, the intricate carved inlays, the graceful strings of dried seeds and tassels that dangled from the vaulted ceilings, but these wonders meant nothing to him now. That was no way to be, he knew.

The airwagon was longer than ten men of the Pure Stream lying head to toe, and so wide that it spanned nearly the whole roadway. The finest workmanship had gone into its making: Flower Giver artisans, no doubt of it, only Flower Givers could build so well. Leaf imagined dozens of the fragile little folk toiling earnestly for months, all smiles and silence, long, slender fingers and quick, gleaming eyes, shaping the great wagon as one might shape a poem. The main frame was of lengthy pale spears of light, resilient wingwood, elegantly laminated into broad curving strips with a colorless fragrant mucilage and bound with springy withes brought from the southern marshes. Over this elaborate armature tanned sheets of stickskin had been stretched and stitched into place with thick yellow fibers drawn from the stick-creatures’ own gristly bodies. The floor was of dark shining nightflower-wood planks, buffed to a high finish and pegged together with great skill. No metal had been employed in the construction of the wagon, nor any artificial substances: nature had supplied everything. Huge and majestic though the wagon was, it was airy and light, light enough to float on a vertical column of warm air generated by magnetic rotors whirling in its belly; so long as the earth turned, so would the rotors, and when the rotors were spinning the wagon drifted cat-high above the ground, and could be tugged easily along by the team of nightmares.

It was more a mobile palace than a wagon, and wherever it went it stirred excitement: Crown’s love, Crown’s joy, Crown’s estate, a wondrous toy. To pay for the making of it Crown must have sent many souls into the All-Is-One, for that was how Crown had earned his livelihood in the old days, as a hired warrior, a surrogate killer, fighting one-on-one duels for rich eastern princelings too weak or too lazy to defend their own honor. He had never been scratched, and his fees had been high; but all that was ended now that the Teeth were loose in the eastlands.

Leaf could not bear to endure being so irritable any longer. He paused to adjust himself, closing his eyes and listening for the clear tone that sounded always at the center of his being. After a few minutes he found it, tuned himself to it, let it purify him. Crown’s unfairness ceased to matter. Leaf became once more his usual self, alert and outgoing, aware and responsive.

Smiling, whistling, he made his way swiftly through the wide, comfortable, brightly lit midcabin, decorated with Crown’s weapons and other grim souvenirs of battle, and went on into the front corridor that led to the driver’s cabin.

Sting sat slumped at the reins. White Crystal folk such as Sting generally seemed to throb and tick with energy; but Sting looked exhausted, emptied, half dead of fatigue. He was a small, sinewy being, narrow of shoulder and hip, with colorless skin of a waxy, horny texture, pocked everywhere with little hairy nodes and whorls. His muscles were long and flat; his face was cavernous, beaked nose and tiny chin, dark mischievous eyes hidden in bony recesses. Leaf touched his shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “Crown sent me to relieve you.” Sting nodded feebly but did not move. The little man was quivering like a frog. Leaf had always thought of him as indestructible, but in the grip of this despondency Sting seemed more fragile even than Shadow.

“Come,” Leaf murmured. “You have a few hours for resting. Shadow will look after you.”

Sting shrugged. He was hunched forward, staring dully through the clear curving window, stained now with splashes of muddy tinted water.

“The dirty spiders,” he said. His voice was hoarse and frayed. “The filthy rain. The mud. Look at the horses, Leaf. They’re dying of fright, and so am I. We’ll all perish on this road, Leaf, if not of spiders then of poisoned rain, if not of rain then of the Teeth, if not of the Teeth then of something else. There’s no road for us but this one, do you realize that? This is the road, and we’re bound to it like helpless underbreeds, and we’ll die on it.”

“We’ll die when our turn comes, like everything else, Sting, and not a moment before.”

“Our turn is coming. Too soon. Too soon. I feel death-ghosts close at hand.”

“Sting!”

Sting made a weird ratcheting sound low in his throat, a sort of rusty sob. Leaf lifted him and swung him out of the driver’s seat, settling him gently down in the corridor. It was as though he weighed nothing at all. Perhaps just then that was true. Sting had many strange gifts. “Go on,” Leaf said. “Get some rest while you can.”

“How kind you are, Leaf.”

“And no more talk of ghosts.”

“Yes,” Sting said. Leaf saw him struggling against fear and despair and weariness. Sting appeared to brighten a moment, flickering on the edge of his old vitality; then the brief glow subsided, and, smiling a pale smile, offering a whisper of thanks, he went aft.

Leaf took his place in the driver’s seat.

Through the window of the wagon—thin, tough sheets of stickskin, the best quality, carefully matched, perfectly transparent—he confronted a dismal scene. Rain dark as blood was falling at a steep angle, scourging the spongy soil, kicking up tiny fountains of earth. A bluish miasma rose from the ground, billows of dark, steamy fog, the acrid odour of which had begun to seep into the wagon. Leaf sighed and reached for the reins. Death-ghosts, he thought. Haunted. Poor Sting, driven to the end of his wits.

And yet, and yet, as he considered the things Sting had said, Leaf realized that he had been feeling somewhat the same way, these past few days: tense, driven, haunted. Haunted. As though unseen presences, mocking, hostile, were hovering near. Ghosts? The strain, more likely, of all that he had gone through since the first onslaught of the Teeth. He had lived through the collapse of a rich and intricate civilization. He moved now through a strange world, all ashes and seaweed. He was haunted, perhaps, by the weight of the unburied past, by the memory of all that he had lost.

A rite of exorcism seemed in order.

Lightly he said, aloud, “If there are any ghosts in here, I want you to listen to me. Get out of this cabin. That’s an order. I have work to do.”

He laughed. He picked up the reins and made ready to take control of the team of nightmares.

The sense of an invisible presence was overwhelming.

Something at once palpable and intangible pressed clammily against him. He felt surrounded and engulfed. It’s the fog, he told himself. Dark blue fog, pushing at the window, sealing the wagon into a pocket of vapor. Or was it? Leaf sat quite still for a moment, listening. Silence. He relinquished the reins, swung about in his seat, carefully inspected the cabin. No one there. An absurdity to be fidgeting like this. Yet the discomfort remained. This was no joke now. Sting’s anxieties had infected him, and the malady was feeding on itself, growing more intense from moment to moment, making him vulnerable to any stray terror that whispered to him. Only with a tranquil mind could he attain the state of trance a nightmare-driver must enter; and trance seemed unattainable so long as he felt the prickle of some invisible watcher’s gaze on the back of his neck. This rain, he thought, this damnable rain. It drives everybody crazy. In a clear, firm voice Leaf said, “I’m altogether serious. Show yourself and get yourself out of this cabin.”

Silence.

He took up the reins again. No use. Concentration was impossible. He knew many techniques for centering himself, for leading his consciousness to a point of unassailable serenity. But could he achieve that now, jangled and distracted as he was? He would try. He had to succeed. The wagon had tarried in this place much too long already. Leaf summoned all his inner resources; he purged himself, one by one, of every discord; he compelled himself to slide into trance.

It seemed to be working. Darkness beckoned to him. He stood at the threshold. He started to step across.

“Such a fool, such a foolish fool,” said a sudden dry voice out of nowhere that nibbled at his ears like the needle-toothed mice of the White Desert.

The trance broke. Leaf shivered as if stabbed and sat up, eyes bright, face flushed with excitement.

“Who spoke?”

“Put down those reins, friend. Going forward on this road is a heavy waste of spirit.”

“Then I wasn’t crazy and neither was Sting. There is something in here!”

“A ghost, yes a ghost, a ghost, a ghost!” The ghost showered him with laughter.

Leaf’s tension eased. Better to be troubled by a real ghost than to be vexed by a fantasy of one’s own disturbed mind. He feared madness far more than he did the invisible. Besides, he thought he knew what this creature must be.

“Where are you, ghost?”

“Not far from you. Here I am. Here. Here.” From three different parts of the cabin, one after another. The invisible being began to sing. Its song was high-pitched, whining, a grinding tone that stretched Leaf’s patience intolerably. Leaf still saw no one, though he narrowed his eyes and stared as hard as he could. He imagined he could detect a faint veil of pink light floating along the wall of the cabin, a smoky haze moving from place to place, a shimmering film like thin oil on water, but whenever he focused his eyes on it the misty presence appeared to evaporate.

Leaf said, “How long have you been aboard this wagon?”

“Long enough.”

“Did you come aboard at Theptis?”

“Was that the name of the place?” asked the ghost disingenuously. “I forget. It’s so hard to remember things.”

“Theptis,” said Leaf. “Four days ago.”

“Perhaps it was Theptis,” the ghost said. “Fool! Dreamer!”

“Why do you call me names?”

“You travel a dead road, fool, and yet nothing will turn you from it.” The invisible one snickered. “Do you think I’m a ghost, Pure Stream?”

“I know what you are.”

“How wise you’ve become!”

“Such a pitiful phantom. Such a miserable drifting wraith. Show yourself to me, ghost.”

Laughter reverberated from the corners of the cabin. The voice said, speaking from a point close to Leaf’s left ear, “The road you choose to travel has been killed ahead. We told you that when you came to us, and yet you went onward, and still you go onward. Why are you so rash?”

“Why won’t you show yourself? A gentleman finds it discomforting to speak to the air.”

Obligingly the ghost yielded, after a brief pause, some fraction of its invisibility. A vaporous crimson stain appeared in the air before Leaf, and he saw within it dim, insubstantial features, like projections on a screen of thick fog. He believed he could make out a wispy white beard, harsh glittering eyes, lean curving lips; a whole forbidding face, a fleshless torso. The stain deepened momentarily to scarlet and for a moment Leaf saw the entire figure of the stranger revealed, a long narrow-bodied man, dried and withered, grinning ferociously at him. The edges of the figure softened and became mist. Then Leaf saw only vapor again, and then nothing.

“I remember you from Theptis,” Leaf said. “In the tent of Invisibles.”

“What will you do when you come to the dead place on the highway?” the invisible one demanded. “Will you fly over it? Will you tunnel under it?”

“You were asking the same things at Theptis,” Leaf replied. “I will make the same answer that the Dark Laker gave you then. We will go forward, dead place or no. This is the only road for us.”

They had come to Theptis on the fifth day of their flight—a grand city, a splendid mercantile emporium, the gateway to the west, sprawling athwart a place where two great rivers met and many highways converged. In happy times any and all peoples might be found in Theptis, Pure Streams and White Crystals and Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and a dozen others jostling one another in the busy streets, buying and selling, selling and buying, but mainly Theptis was a city of Fingers—the merchant caste, plump and industrious, thousands upon thousands of them concentrated in this one city.

The day Crown’s airwagon reached Theptis much of the city was ablaze, and they halted on a broad stream-split plain just outside the metropolitan area. An improvised camp for refugees had sprouted there, and tents of black and gold and green cloth littered the meadow like new nightshoots. Leaf and Crown went out to inquire after the news. Had the Teeth sacked Theptis as well? No, an old and sagging Sand Shaper told them. The Teeth, so far as anyone had heard, were still well to the east, rampaging through the coastal cities. Why the fires, then? The old man shook his head. His energy was exhausted, or his patience, or his courtesy. If you want to know anything else, he said, ask them. They know everything. And he pointed toward a tent opposite his.

Leaf looked into the tent and found it empty; then he looked again and saw upright shadows moving about in it, tenuous figures that existed at the very bounds of visibility and could be perceived only by tricks of the light as they changed place in the tent. They asked him within, and Crown came also. By the smoky light of their tentfire they were more readily seen: seven or eight men of the Invisible stock, nomads, ever mysterious, gifted with ways of causing beams of light to travel around or through their bodies so that they might escape the scrutiny of ordinary eyes. Leaf, like everyone else not of their kind, was uncomfortable among Invisibles. No one trusted them; no one was capable of predicting their actions, for they were creatures of whim and caprice, or else followed some code the logic of which was incomprehensible to outsiders. They made Leaf and Crown welcome, adjusting their bodies until they were in clear sight, and offering the visitors a flagon of wine, a bowl of fruit. Crown gestured toward Theptis. Who had set the city afire? A red-bearded Invisible with a raucous rumbling voice answered that on the second night of the invasion the richest of the Fingers had panicked and had begun to flee the city with their most precious belongings, and as their wagons rolled through the gates the lesser breeds had begun to loot the Finger mansions, and brawling had started once the wine cellars were pierced, and fires broke out, and there was no one to make the fire wardens do their work, for they were all underbreeds and the masters had fled. So the city burned and was still burning, and the survivors were huddled here on the plain, waiting for the rubble to cool so that they might salvage valuables from it, and hoping that the Teeth would not fall upon them before they could do their sifting. As for the Fingers, said the Invisible, they were all gone from Theptis now.

Which way had they gone? Mainly to the northwest, by way of Sunset Highway, at first; but then the approach to that road had become choked by stalled wagons butted one up against another, so that the only way to reach the Sunset now was by making a difficult detour through the sand country north of the city, and once that news became general the Fingers had turned their wagons southward. Crown wondered why no one seemed to be taking Spider Highway westward. At this a second Invisible, white-bearded, joined the conversation. Spider Highway, he said, is blocked just a few days’ journey west of here: a dead road, a useless road. Everyone knows that, said the white-bearded Invisible.

“That is our route,” said Crown.

“I wish you well,” said the Invisible. “You will not get far.”

“I have to get to the Flatlands.”

“Take your chances with the sand country,” the red-bearded one advised, “and go by way of the Sunset.”

“It would waste two weeks or more,” Crown replied. “Spider Highway is the only road we can consider.” Leaf and Crown exchanged wary glances. Leaf asked the nature of the trouble on the highway, but the Invisibles said only that the road had been “killed,” and would offer no amplification. “We will go forward,” Crown said, “dead place or no.”

“As you choose,” said the older Invisible, pouring more wine. Already both Invisibles were fading; the flagon seemed suspended in mist. So, too, did the discussion become unreal, dreamlike, as answers no longer followed closely upon the sense of questions, and the words of the Invisibles came to Leaf and Crown as though swaddled in thick wool. There was a long interval of silence, at last, and when Leaf extended his empty glass the flagon was not offered to him, and he realized finally that he and Crown were alone in the tent. They left it and asked at other tents about the blockage on Spider Highway, but no one knew anything of it, neither some young Dancing Stars nor three flat-faced Water Breather women nor a family of Flower Givers. How reliable was the word of Invisibles? What did they mean by a “dead” road? Suppose they merely thought the road was ritually impure, for some reason understood only by Invisibles. What value, then, would their warning have to those who did not subscribe to their superstitions? Who knew at any time what the words of an Invisible meant? That night in the wagon the four of them puzzled over the concept of a road that has been “killed,” but neither Shadow’s intuitive perceptions nor Sting’s broad knowledge of tribal dialects and customs could provide illumination. In the end Crown reaffirmed his decision to proceed on the road he had originally chosen, and it was Spider Highway that they took out of Theptis. As they proceeded westward they met no one traveling the opposite way, though one might expect the eastbound lanes to be thronged with a flux of travelers turning back from whatever obstruction might be closing the road ahead. Crown took cheer in that; but Leaf observed privately that their wagon appeared to be the only vehicle on the road in either direction, as if everyone else knew better than to make the attempt. In such stark solitude they journeyed four days west of Theptis before the purple rain hit them.

Now the Invisible said, “Go into your trance and drive your horses. I’ll dream beside you until the awakening comes.”

“I prefer privacy.”

“You won’t be disturbed.”

“I ask you to leave.”

“You treat your guests coldly.”

“Are you my guest?” Leaf asked. “I don’t remember extending an invitation.”

“You drank wine in our tent. That creates in you an obligation to offer reciprocal hospitality.” The Invisible sharpened his bodily intensity until he seemed as solid as Crown; but even as Leaf observed the effect he grew thin again, fading in patches. The far wall of the cabin showed through his chest, as if he were hollow. His arms had disappeared, but not his gnarled long-fingered hands. He was grinning, showing crooked close-set teeth. There was a strange scent in the cabin, sharp and musky, like vinegar mixed with honey. The Invisible said, “I’ll ride with you a little longer,” and vanished altogether.

Leaf searched the corners of the cabin, knowing that an Invisible could always be felt even if he eluded the eyes. His probing hands encountered nothing. Gone, gone, gone, whisking off to the place where snuffed flames go, eh? Even that odor of vinegar and honey was diminishing. “Where are you?” Leaf asked. “Still hiding somewhere else?” Silence. Leaf shrugged. The stink of the purple rain was the dominant scent again. Time to move on, stowaway or no. Rain was hitting the window in huge murky windblown blobs. Once more Leaf picked up the reins. He banished the Invisible from his mind.

These purple rains condensed out of drifting gaseous clots in the upper atmosphere—dank clouds of chemical residues that arose from the world’s most stained, most injured places and circled the planet like malign tempests. Upon colliding with a mass of cool air such a poisonous cloud often discharged its burden of reeking oils and acids in the form of a driving rainstorm; and the foulness that descended could be fatal to plants and shrubs, to small animals, sometimes even to man.

A purple rain was the cue for certain somber creatures to come forth from dark places: scuttering scavengers that picked eagerly through the dead and dying, and larger, more dangerous things that preyed on the dazed and choking living. The no-leg spiders were among the more unpleasant of these.

They were sinister spherical beasts the size of large dogs, voracious in the appetite and ruthless in the hunt. Their bodies were plump, covered with coarse, rank brown hair; they bore eight glittering eyes above sharp-fanged mouths. No-legged they were indeed, but not immobile, for a single huge fleshy foot, something like that of a snail, sprouted from the underbellies of these spiders and carried them along at a slow, inexorable pace. They were poor pursuers, easily avoided by healthy animals; but to the numbed victims of a purple rain they were deadly, moving in to strike with hinged, poison-barbed claws that leaped out of niches along their backs. Were they truly spiders? Leaf had no idea. Like almost everything else, they were a recent species, mutated out of the-Soul-only-knew-what during the period of stormy biological upheavals that had attended the end of the old industrial civilization, and no one yet had studied them closely, or cared to.

Crown had killed four of them. Their bodies lay upside down at the edge of the road, upturned feet wilting and drooping like plucked toadstools. About a dozen more spiders had emerged from the low hills flanking the highway and were gliding slowly toward the stalled wagon; already several had reached their dead comrades and were making ready to feed on them, and some of the others were eyeing the horses.

The six nightmares, prisoners of their harnesses, prowled about uneasily in their constricted ambits, anxiously scraping at the muddy ground with their hooves. They were big, sturdy beasts, black as death, with long feathery ears and high-domed skulls that housed minds as keen as many human’s, sharper than some. The rain annoyed the horses but could not seriously harm them, and the spiders could be kept at bay with kicks, but plainly the entire situation disturbed them.

Leaf meant to get them out of here as rapidly as he could.

A slimy coating covered everything the rain had touched, and the road was a miserable quagmire, slippery as ice. There was peril for all of them in that. If a horse stumbled and fell it might splinter a leg, causing such confusion that the whole team might be pulled down; and as the injured nightmares thrashed about in the mud the hungry spiders would surely move in on them, venomous claws rising, striking, delivering stings that stunned, and leaving the horses paralyzed, helpless, vulnerable to eager teeth and strong jaws. As the wagon traveled onward through this swampy rainsoaked district Leaf would constantly have to steady and reassure the nightmares, pouring his energy into them to comfort them, a strenuous task, a task that had wrecked poor Sting.

Leaf slipped the reins over his forehead. He became aware of the consciousness of the six fretful horses.

Because he was still awake, contact was misty and uncertain. A waking mind was unable to communicate with the animals in any useful way. To guide the team he had to enter a trance state, a dream state; they would not respond to anything so gross as conscious intelligence. He looked about for manifestations of the Invisible. No, no sign of him. Good. Leaf brought his mind to dead center.

He closed his eyes. The technique of trance was easy enough for him, when there were no distractions.

He visualized a tunnel, narrow-mouthed and dark, slanting into the ground. He drifted toward its entrance.

Hovered there a moment.

Went down into it.

Floating, floating, borne downward by warm, gentle currents: he sinks in a slow spiral descent, autumn leaf on a springtime breeze. The tunnel’s walls are circular, crystalline, lit from within, the light growing in brightness as he drops toward the heart of the world. Gleaming scarlet and blue flowers, brittle as glass, sprout from crevices at meticulously regular intervals.

He goes deep, touching nothing. Down.

Entering a place where the tunnel widens into a round smooth-walled chamber, sealed at the end. He stretches full-length on the floor. The floor is black stone, slick and slippery; he dreams it soft and yielding, womb-warm. Colors are muted here, sounds are blurred. He hears far-off music, percussive and muffled, rat-a-rat, rat-a-rat, blllooom, blllooom.

Now at least he is able to make full contact with the minds of the horses.

His spirit expands in their direction; he envelops them, he takes them into himself. He senses the separate identity of each, picks up the shifting play of their emotions, their prancing fantasies, their fears. Each mare has her own distinct response to the rain, to the spiders, to the sodden highway. One is restless, one is timid, one is furious, one is sullen, one is tense, one is torpid. He feeds energy to them. He pulls them together. Come, gather your strength, take us onward: this is the road, we must be on our way.

The nightmares stir.

They react well to his touch. He believes that they prefer him over Shadow and Sting as a driver: Sting is too manic, Shadow too permissive. Leaf keeps them together, directs them easily, gives them the guidance they need. They are intelligent, yes, they have personalities and goals and ideals, but also they are beasts of burden, and Leaf never forgets that, for the nightmares themselves do not.

Come, now. Onward.

The road is ghastly. They pick at it and their hooves make sucking sounds coming up from the mud. They complain to him. We are cold, we are wet, we are bored. He dreams wings for them to make their way easier. To soothe them he dreams sunlight for them, bountiful warmth, dry highway, an easy trot. He dreams green hillsides, cascades of yellow blossoms, the flutter of hummingbirds’ wings, the droning of bees. He gives the horses sweet summer, and they grow calm; they lift their heads; they fan their dream-wings and preen; they are ready now to resume the journey. They pull as one. The rotors hum happily. The wagon slides forward with a smooth coasting motion.

Leaf, deep in trance, is unable to see the road, but no matter; the horses see it for him and send him images, fluid, shifting dream-images, polarized and refracted and diffracted by the strangenesses of their vision and the distortions of dream communication, six simultaneous and individual views. Here is the road, bordered by white birches whipped by an angry wind. Here is the road, an earthen swath slicing through a forest of mighty pines bowed down by white new snow. Here is the road, a ribbon of fertility, from which dazzling red poppies spring wherever a hoof strikes. Fleshy-finned blue fishes do headstands beside the road. Paunchy burghers of the Finger tribe spread brilliantly laundered tablecloths along the grassy margin and make lunch out of big-eyed reproachful oysters. Masked figures dart between the horses’ legs. The road curves, curves again; doubles back on itself, crosses itself in a complacent loop. Leaf integrates this dizzying many-hued inrush of data, sorting the real from the unreal, blending and focusing the input and using it to guide himself in guiding the horses. Serenely he coordinates their movements with quick confident impulses of thought, so that each animal will pull with the same force. The wagon is precariously balanced on its column of air, and an unequal tug could well send it slewing into the treacherous thicket to the left of the road. He sends quicksilver messages down the thick conduit from his mind to theirs. Steady there, steady, watch that boggy patch coming up! Ah! Ah, that’s my girl! Spiders on the left, careful! Good! Yes, yes, ah, yes! He pats their heaving flanks with a strand of his mind. He rewards their agility with dreams of the stable, of newly mown hay, of stallions waiting at journey’s end.

From them —for they love him, he knows they love him —he gets warm dreams of the highway, all beauty and joy, all images converging into a single idealized view, majestic groves of wingwood trees and broad meadows through which clear brooks flow. They dream his own past life for him, too, feeding back to him nuggets of random autobiography mined in the seams of his being. What they transmit is filtered and transformed by their alien sensibilities, colored with hallucinatory glows and tugged and twisted into other-dimensional forms, but yet he is able to perceive the essential meaning of each tableau: his childhood among the parks and gardens of the Pure Stream enclave near the Inland Sea, his wanderyears among the innumerable, unfamiliar, not-quite-human breeds of the hinterlands, his brief, happy sojourn in the fog-swept western country, his eastward journey in early manhood, always following the will of the Soul, always bending to the breezes, accepting whatever destiny seizes him, eastward now, his band of friends closer than brothers in his adopted eastern province, his sprawling lakeshore home there, all polished wood and billowing tented pavilions, his collection of relics of mankind’s former times —pieces of machinery, elegant coils of metal, rusted coins, grotesque statuettes, wedges of imperishable plastic —housed in its own wing with its own curator. Lost in these reveries he ceases to remember that the home by the lake has been reduced to ashes by the Teeth, that his friends of kinder days are dead, his estates overrun, his pretty things scattered in the kitchen-middens.

Imperceptibly, the dream turns sour.

Spiders and rain and mud creep back into it. He is reminded, through some darkening of tone of the imagery pervading his dreaming mind, that he has been stripped of everything and has become, now that he has taken flight, merely a driver hired out to a bestial Dark Lake mercenary who is himself a fugitive.

Leaf is working harder to control the team now. The horses seem less sure of their footing, and the pace slows; they are bothered about something, and a sour, querulous anxiety tinges their messages to him. He catches their mood. He sees himself harnessed to the wagon alongside the nightmares, and it is Crown at the reins, Crown wielding a terrible whip, driving the wagon frenziedly forward, seeking allies who will help him fulfil his fantasy of liberating the lands the Teeth have taken. There is no escape from Crown. He rises above the landscape like a monster of congealed smoke, growing more huge until he obscures the sky. Leaf wonders how he will disengage himself from Crown. Shadow runs beside him, stroking his cheeks, whispering to him, and he asks her to undo the harness, but she says she cannot, that it is their duty to serve Crown, and Leaf turns to Sting, who is harnessed on his other side, and he asks Sting for help, but Sting coughs and slips in the mud as Crown’s whip flicks his backbone. There is no escape. The wagon heels and shakes. The right-hand horse skids, nearly falls, recovers. Leaf decides he must be getting tired. He has driven a great deal today, and the effort is telling. But the rain is still falling —he breaks through the veil of illusions, briefly, past the scenes of spring and summer and autumn, and sees the blue-black water dropping in wild handfuls from the sky —and there is no one else to drive, so he must continue.

He tries to submerge himself in deeper trance, where he will be less readily deflected from control.

But no, something is wrong, something plucks at his consciousness, drawing him toward the waking state. The horses summon him to wakefulness with frightful scenes. One beast shows him the wagon about to plunge through a wall of fire. Another pictures them at the brink of a vast impassable crater. Another gives him the image of giant boulders strewn across the road; another, a mountain of ice blocking the way; another, a pack of snarling wolves; another, a row of armored warriors standing shoulder to shoulder, lances at the ready. No doubt of it. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. Perhaps they have come to the dead place in the road. No wonder that Invisible was skulking around. Leaf forces himself to awaken.

There was no wall of fire. No warriors, no wolves, none of those things. Only a palisade of newly felled timbers facing him some hundred paces ahead on the highway, timbers twice as tall as Crown, sharpened to points at both ends and thrust deep into the earth one up against the next and bound securely with freshly cut vines. The barricade spanned the highway completely from edge to edge; on its right it was bordered by a tangle of impenetrable thorny scrub; on its left it extended to the brink of a steep ravine.

They were stopped.

Such a blockade across a public highway was inconceivable. Leaf blinked, coughed, rubbed his aching forehead. Those last few minutes of discordant dreams had left a murky, gritty coating on his brain. This wall of wood seemed like some sort of dream too, a very bad one. Leaf imagined he could hear the Invisible’s cool laughter somewhere close at hand. At least the rain appeared to be slackening, and there were no spiders about. Small consolations, but the best that were available.

Baffled, Leaf freed himself of the reins and awaited the next event. After a moment or two he sensed the joggling rhythms that told of Crown’s heavy forward progress through the cabin. The big man peered into the driver’s cabin.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving?”

“Dead road.”

“What are you talking about?”

“See for yourself,” Leaf said wearily, gesturing toward the window.

Crown leaned across Leaf to look. He studied the scene an endless moment, reacting slowly. “What’s that? A wall?”

“A wall, yes.”

“A wall across a highway? I never heard of anything like that.”

“The Invisibles at Theptis may have been trying to warn us about this.”

“A wall. A wall.” Crown shook with perplexed anger. “It violates all the maintenance customs! Soul take it, Leaf, a public highway is —”

“ —sacred and inviolable. Yes. What the Teeth have been doing in the east violates a good many maintenance customs too,” Leaf said. “And territorial customs as well. These are unusual times everywhere.” He wondered if he should tell Crown about the Invisible who was on board. One problem at a time, he decided. “Maybe this is how these people propose to keep the Teeth out of their country, Crown.”

“But to block a public road —”

“We were warned.”

“Who could trust the word of an Invisible?”

“There’s the wall,” Leaf said. “Now we know why we didn’t meet anyone else on the highway. They probably put this thing up as soon as they heard about the Teeth, and the whole province knows enough to avoid Spider Highway. Everyone but us.”

“What folk dwell here?”

“No idea. Sting’s the one who would know.”

“Yes, Sting would know,” said the high, clear, sharp-edged voice of Sting from the corridor. He poked his head into the cabin. Leaf saw Shadow just behind him. “This is the land of the Tree Companions,” Sting said. “Do you know of them?”

Crown shook his head. “Not I,” said Leaf.

“Forest-dwellers,” Sting said. “Tree-worshippers. Small heads, slow brains. Dangerous in battle —they use poisoned darts. There are nine tribes of them in this region, I think, under a single chief. Once they paid tribute to my people, but I suppose in these times all that has ended.”

“They worship trees?” Shadow said lightly. “And how many of their gods, then, did they cut down to make this barrier?”

Sting laughed. “If you must have gods, why not put them to some good use?”

Crown glared at the wall across the highway as he once might have glared at an opponent in the duelling ring. Seething, he paced a narrow path in the crowded cabin. “We can’t waste any more time. The Teeth will be coming through this region in a few days, for sure. We’ve got to reach the river before something happens to the bridges ahead.”

“The wall,” Leaf said.

“There’s plenty of brush lying around out there,” said Sting. “We could build a bonfire and burn it down.”

“Green wood,” Leaf said. “It’s impossible.”

“We have hatchets,” Shadow pointed out. “How long would it take for us to cut through timbers as thick as those?”

Sting said, “We’d need a week for the job. The Tree Companions would fill us full of darts before we’d been chopping an hour.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Shadow said to Leaf.

“Well, we could turn back toward Theptis and try to find our way to Sunset Highway by way of the sand country. There are only two roads from here to the river, this and the Sunset. We lose five days, though, if we decide to go back, and we might get snarled up in whatever chaos is going on in Theptis, or we could very well get stranded in the desert trying to reach the highway. The only other choice I see is to abandon the wagon and look for some path around the wall on foot, but I doubt very much that Crown would —”

“Crown wouldn’t,” said Crown, who had been chewing his lip in tense silence. “But I see some different possibilities.”

“Go on.”

“One is to find these Tree Companions and compel them to clear this trash from the highway. Darts or no darts, one Dark Lake and one Pure Stream side by side ought to be able to terrify twenty tribes of pinhead forest folk.”

“And if we can’t?” Leaf asked.

“That brings us to the other possibility, which is that this wall isn’t particularly intended to protect the neighborhood against the Teeth at all, but that these Tree Companions have taken advantage of the eneral confusion to set up some sort of toll-raising scheme. In that case, if we can’t force them to open the road, we can find out what hey want, what sort of toll they’re asking, and pay it if we can and be on our way.”

“Is that Crown who’s talking?” Sting asked. “Talking about paying a toll to underbreeds of the forest? Incredible!”

Crown said, “I don’t like the thought of paying toll to anybody. But it may be the simplest and quickest way to get out of here. Do you think I’m entirely a creature of pride, Sting?”

Leaf stood up. “If you’re right that this is a toll station, there’d be some kind of gate in the wall. I’ll go out there and have a look at it.”

“No,” said Crown, pushing him lightly back into his seat. “There’s danger here, Leaf. This part of the work falls to me.” He strode toward the midcabin and was busy there a few minutes. When he returned he was in his full armor: breastplates, helmet, face mask, greaves, everything burnished to a high gloss. In those few places where his bare skin showed through, it seemed but a part of the armor. Crown looked like a machine. His mace hung at his hip, and the short shaft of his extensor sword rested easily along the inside of his right wrist, ready to spring to full length at a squeeze. Crown glanced toward Sting and said, “I’ll need your nimble legs. Will you come?”

“As you say.”

“Open the midcabin hatch for us, Leaf.”

Leaf touched a control on the board below the front window. With a soft, whining sound a hinged door near the middle of the wagon swung upward and out, and a stepladder sprouted to provide access to the ground. Crown made a ponderous exit. Sting, scorning the ladder, stepped down: it was the special gift of the White Crystal people to be able to transport themselves short distances in extraordinary ways.

Sting and Crown began to walk warily toward the wall. Leaf, watching from the driver’s seat, slipped his arm lightly about the waist of Shadow, who stood beside him, and caressed her smooth fur. The rain had ended; a gray cloud still hung low, and the gleam of Crown’s armor was already softened by fine droplets of moisture. He and Sting were nearly to the palisade, now, Crown constantly scanning the underbrush as if expecting a horde of Tree Companions to spring forth. Sting, loping along next to him, looked like some agile little two-legged beast, the top of his head barely reaching to Crown’s hip.

They reached the palisade. Thin, late-afternoon sunlight streamed over its top. Kneeling, Sting inspected the base of the wall, probing at the soil with his fingers, and said something to Crown, who nodded and pointed upward. Sting backed off, made a short running start, and lofted himself, rising almost as though he were taking wing. His leap carried him soaring to the wall’s jagged crest in a swift blurred flight. He appeared to hover for a long moment while choosing a place to land. At last he alighted in a precarious, uncomfortable-looking position, sprawled along the top of the wall with his body arched to avoid the timber’s sharpened tips, his hands grasping two of the stakes and his feet wedged between two others. Sting remained in this desperate contortion for a remarkably long time, studying whatever lay beyond the barricade; then he let go his hold, sprang lightly outward, and floated to the ground, a distance some three times his own height. He landed upright, without stumbling. There was a brief conference between Crown and Sting. Then they came back to the wagon.

“It’s a toll-raising scheme, all right,” Crown muttered. “The middle timbers aren’t embedded in the earth. They end just at ground level and form a hinged gate, fastened by two heavy bolts on the far side.”

“I saw at least a hundred Tree Companions back of the wall,” Sting said. “Armed with blowdarts. They’ll be coming around to visit us in a moment.”

“We should arm ourselves,” Leaf said.

Crown shrugged. “We can’t fight that many of them. Not twenty-five to one, we can’t. The best hand-to-hand man in the world is helpless against little forest folk with poisoned blowdarts. If we aren’t able to awe them into letting us go through, we’ll have to buy them off somehow. But I don’t know. That gate isn’t nearly wide enough for the wagon.”

He was right about that. There was the dry scraping squeal of wood against wood —the bolts were being unfastened —and then the gate swung slowly open. When it had been fully pushed back it provided an opening through which any good-size cart of ordinary dimensions might pass, but not Crown’s magnificent vehicle. Five or six stakes on each side of the gate would have to be pulled down in order for the wagon to go by.

Tree Companions came swarming toward the wagon, scores of them —small, naked folk with lean limbs and smooth blue-green skin. They looked like animated clay statuettes, casually pinched into shape: their hairless heads were narrow and elongated, with flat sloping foreheads, and their long necks looked flimsy and fragile. They had shallow chests and bony, meatless frames. All of them, men and women both, wore reed dart-blowers strapped to their hips. As they danced and frolicked about the wagon they set up a ragged, irregular chanting, tuneless and atonal, like the improvised songs of children caught up in frantic play.

“We’ll go out to them,” Crown said. “Stay calm, make no sudden moves. Remember that these are underbreeds. So long as we think of ourselves as men and them as nothing more than monkeys, and make them realize we think that way, we’ll be able to keep them under control.”

“They’re men,” said Shadow quietly. “Same as we. Not monkeys.”

“Think of them as like monkeys,” Crown told her. “Otherwise we’re lost. Come, now.”

They left the wagon, Crown first, then Leaf, Sting, Shadow. The cavorting Tree Companions paused momentarily in their sport as the four travelers emerged; they looked up, grinned, chattered, pointed, did handsprings and headstands. They did not seem awed. Did Pure Stream mean nothing to them? Had they no fear of Dark Lake? Crown, glowering, said to Sting, “Can you speak their language?”

“A few words.”

“Speak to them. Ask them to send their chief here to me.”

Sting took up a position just in front of Crown, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted something high and piercing in a singsong language. He spoke with exaggerated, painful clarity, as one does in addressing a blind person or a foreigner. The Tree Companions snickered and exchanged little yipping cries. Then one of them came dancing forward, planted his face a handsbreadth from Sting’s, and mimicked Sting’s words, catching the intonation with comic accuracy. Sting looked frightened, and backed away half a pace, butting accidentally into Crown’s chest. The Tree Companion loosed a stream of words, and when he fell silent Sting repeated his original phrase in a more subdued tone.

“What’s happening?” Crown asked. “Can you understand anything?”

“A little. Very little.”

“Will they get the chief?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know if he and I are talking about the same things.”

“You said these people pay tribute to White Crystal.”

“Paid,” Sting said. “I don’t know if there’s any allegiance any longer. I think they may be having some fun at our expense. I think what he said was insulting, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

“Stinking monkeys!”

“Careful, Crown,” Shadow murmured. “We can’t speak their language, but they may understand ours.”

Crown said, “Try again. Speak more slowly. Get the monkey to speak more slowly. The chief, Sting, we want to see the chief! Isn’t there any way you can make contact?”

“I could go into trance,” Sting said. “And Shadow could help me with the meanings. But I’d need time to get myself together. I feel too quick now, too tense.” As if to illustrate his point he executed a tiny jumping movement, blur-snap-hop, that carried him laterally a few paces to the left. Blur-snap-hop and he was back in place again. The Tree Companion laughed shrilly, clapped his hands, and tried to imitate Sting’s little shuttling jump. Others of the tribe came over; there were ten or twelve of them now, clustered near the entrance to the wagon. Sting hopped again: it was like a twitch, a tic. He started to tremble. Shadow reached toward him and folded her slender arms about his chest, as though to anchor him. The Tree Companions grew more agitated; there was a hard, intense quality about their playfulness now. Trouble seemed imminent. Leaf, standing on the far side of Crown, felt a sudden knotting of the muscles at the base of his stomach. Something nagged at his attention, off to his right out in the crowd of Tree Companions; he glanced that way and saw an azure brightness, elongated and upright, a man-size strip of fog and haze, drifting and weaving among the forest folk. Was it the Invisible? Or only some trick of the dying daylight, slipping through the residual vapor of the rainstorm? He struggled for a sharp focus, but the figure eluded his gaze, slipping ticklingly beyond sight as Leaf followed it with his eyes. Abruptly he heard a howl from Crown and turned just in time to see a Tree Companion duck beneath the huge man’s elbow and go sprinting into the wagon. “Stop!” Crown roared. “Come back!” And, as if a signal had been given, seven or eight others of the lithe little tribesmen scrambled aboard.

There was death in Crown’s eyes. He beckoned savagely to Leaf and rushed through the entrance. Leaf followed. Sting, sobbing, huddled in the entranceway, making no attempt to halt the Tree Companions who were streaming into the wagon. Leaf saw them climbing over everything, examining, inspecting, commenting. Monkeys, yes. Down in the front corridor Crown was struggling with four of them, holding one in each vast hand, trying to shake free two others who were climbing his armored legs. Leaf confronted a miniature Tree Companion woman, a gnomish bright-eyed creature whose bare lean body glistened with sour sweat, and as he reached for her she drew not a dart-blower but a long narrow blade from the tube at her hip, and slashed Leaf fiercely along the inside of his left forearm. There was a quick, frightening gush of blood, and only some moments afterward did he feel the fiery lick of the pain. A poisoned knife? Well, then, into the All-Is-One with you, Leaf. But if there had been poison, he felt no effects of it; he wrenched the knife from her grasp, jammed it into the wall, scooped her up, and pitched her lightly through the open hatch of the wagon. No more Tree Companions were coming in, now. Leaf found two more, threw them out, dragged another out of the roofbeams, tossed him after the others, went looking for more. Shadow stood in the hatchway, blocking it with her frail arms outstretched. Where was Crown? Ah. There. In the trophy room. “Grab them and carry them to the hatch!” Leaf yelled. “We’re rid of most of them!”

“The stinking monkeys,” Crown cried. He gestured angrily. The Tree Companions had seized some treasure of Crown’s, some ancient suit of mail, and in their childish buoyancy had ripped the fragile links apart with their tug-of-war. Crown, enraged, bore down on them, clamped one hand on each tapering skull —“Don’t!” Leaf shouted, fearing darts in vengeance —and squeezed, cracking them like nuts. He tossed the corpses aside and, picking up his torn trophy, stood sadly pressing the sundered edges together in a clumsy attempt at repair.

“You’ve done it now,” Leaf said. “They were just being inquisitive. Now we’ll have war, and we’ll be dead before nightfall.”

“Never,” Crown grunted.

He dropped the chainmail, scooped up the dead Tree Companions, carried them dangling through the wagon, and threw them like offal into the clearing. Then he stood defiantly in the hatchway, inviting their darts. None came. Those Tree Companions still aboard the wagon, five or six of them, appeared empty-handed, silent, and slipped hastily around the hulking Dark Laker. Leaf went forward and joined Crown. Blood was still dripping from Leaf’s wound; he dared not induce clotting nor permit the wound to close until he had been purged of whatever poison might have been on the blade. A thin, straight cut, deep and painful, ran down his arm from elbow to wrist. Shadow gave a soft little cry and seized his hand. Her breath was warm against the edges of the gash. “Are you badly injured?” she whispered.

“I don’t think so. It’s just a question of whether the knife was poisoned.”

“They poison only their darts,” said Sting. “But there’ll be infection to cope with. Better let Shadow look after you.”

“Yes,” Leaf said. He glanced into the clearing. The Tree Companions, as though thrown into shock by the violence that had come from their brief invasion of the wagon, stood frozen along the road in silent groups of nine or ten, keeping their distance. The two dead ones lay crumpled where Crown had hurled them. The unmistakable figure of the Invisible, transparent but clearly outlined by a dark perimeter, could be seen to the right, near the border of the thicket: his eyes glittered fiercely, his lips were twisted in a strange smile. Crown was staring at him in slack-jawed astonishment. Everything seemed suspended, held floating motionless in the bowl of time. To Leaf the scene was an eerie tableau in which the only sense of ongoing process was supplied by the throbbing in his slashed arm. He hung moored at the center, waiting, waiting, incapable of action, trapped like others in timelessness. In that long pause he realized that another figure had appeared during the melee, and stood now calmly ten paces or so to the left of the grinning Invisible: a Tree Companion, taller than the others of his kind, clad in beads and gimcracks but undeniably a being of presence and majesty.

“The chief has arrived,” Sting said hoarsely.

The stasis broke. Leaf released his breath and let his rigid body slump. Shadow tugged at him, saying, “Let me clean that cut for you.” The chief of the Tree Companions stabbed the air with three outstretched fingers, pointing at the wagon, and called out five crisp, sharp, jubilant syllables; slowly and grandly he began to stalk toward the wagon. At the same moment the Invisible flickered brightly, like a sun about to die, and disappeared entirely from view. Crown, turning to Leaf, said in a thick voice, “It’s all going crazy here. I was just imagining I saw one of the Invisibles from Theptis skulking around by the underbrush.”

“You weren’t imagining anything,” Leaf told him. “He’s been riding secretly with us since Theptis. Waiting to see what would happen to us when we came to the Tree Companions’ wall.”

Crown looked jarred by that. “When did you find that out?” he demanded.

Shadow said, “Let him be, Crown. Go and parley with the chief. If I don’t clean Leaf’s wound soon —”

“Just a minute. I need to know the truth. Leaf, when did you find out about this Invisible?”

“When I went up front to relieve Sting. He was in the driver’s cabin. Laughing at me, jeering. The way they do.”

“And you didn’t tell me? Why?”

“There was no chance. He bothered me for a while, and then he vanished, and I was busy driving after that, and then we came to the wall, and then the Tree Companions —”

“What does he want from us?” Crown asked harshly, face pushed close to Leaf’s.

Leaf was starting to feel fever rising. He swayed and leaned on Shadow. Her taut, resilient little form bore him with surprising strength. He said tiredly, “I don’t know. Does anyone ever know what one of them wants!” The Tree Companion chief, meanwhile, had come up beside them and in a lusty, self-assured way slapped his open palm several times against the side of the wagon, as though taking possession of it. Crown whirled. The chief coolly spoke, voice level, inflections controlled. Crown shook his head. “What’s he saying?” he barked. “Sting? Sting?”

“Come,” Shadow said to Leaf. “Now. Please.”

She led him toward the passenger castle. He sprawled on the furs while she searched busily through her case of unguents and ointments; then she came to him with a long green vial in her hand and said, “There’ll be pain for you now.”

“Wait.”

He centered himself and disconnected, as well as he was able, the network of sensory apparatus that conveyed messages of discomfort from his arm to his brain. At once he felt his skin growing cooler, and he realized for the first time since the battle how much pain he had been in: so much that he had not had the wisdom to do anything about it. Dispassionately he watched as Shadow, all efficiency, probed his wound, parting the lips of the cut without squeamishness and swabbing its red interior. A faint tickling, unpleasant but not painful, was all he sensed. She looked up, finally, and said, “There’ll be no infection. You can allow the wound to close now.” In order to do that Leaf had to reestablish the neural connections to a certain degree, and as he unblocked the flow of impulses he felt sudden startling pain, both from the cut itself and from Shadow’s medicines; but quickly he induced clotting, and a moment afterward he was deep in the disciplines that would encourage the sundered flesh to heal. The wound began to close. Lightly Shadow blotted the fresh blood from his arm and prepared a poultice; by the time she had it in place, the gaping slash had reduced itself to a thin raw line. “You’ll live,” she said. “You were lucky they don’t poison their knives.” He kissed the tip of her nose and they returned to the hatch area.

Sting and the Tree Companion chief were conducting some sort of discussion in pantomime, Sting’s motions sweeping and broad, the chief’s the merest flicks of fingers, while Crown stood by, an impassive column of darkness, arms folded sombrely. As Leaf and Shadow reappeared Crown said, “Sting isn’t getting anywhere. It has to be a trance parley or we won’t make contact. Help him, Shadow.”

She nodded. To Leaf, Crown said, “How’s the arm?”

“It’ll be all right.”

“How soon?”

“A day. Two, maybe. Sore for a week.”

“We may be fighting again by sunrise.”

“You told me yourself that we can’t possibly survive a battle with these people.”

“Even so,” Crown said. “We may be fighting again by sunrise. If there’s no other choice, we’ll fight.”

“And die?”

“And die,” Crown said.

Leaf walked slowly away. Twilight had come. All vestiges of the rain had vanished, and the air was clear, crisp, growing chill, with a light wind out of the north that was gaining steadily in force. Beyond the thicket the tops of tall ropy-limbed trees were whipping about. The shards of the moon had moved into view, rough daggers of whiteness doing their slow dance about one another in the darkening sky. The poor old shattered moon, souvenir of an era long gone: it seemed a scratchy mirror for the tormented planet that owned it, for the fragmented race of races that was mankind. Leaf went to the nightmares, who stood patiently in harness, and passed among them, gently stroking their shaggy ears, caressing their blunt noses. Their eyes, liquid, intelligent, watchful, peered into his almost reproachfully. You promised us a stable, they seemed to be saying. Stallions, warmth, newly mown hay. Leaf shrugged. In this world, he told them wordlessly, it isn’t always possible to keep one’s promises. One does one’s best, and one hopes that that is enough.

Near the wagon Sting has assumed a cross-legged position on the damp ground. Shadow squats beside him; the chief, mantled in dignity, stands stiffly before them, but Shadow coaxes him with gentle gestures to come down to them. Sting’s eyes are closed and his head lolls forward. He is already in trance. His left hand grasps Shadow’s muscular furry thigh; he extends his right, palm upward, and after a moment the chief puts his own palm to it. Contact: the circuit is closed.

Leaf has no idea what messages are passing among the three of them, but yet, oddly, he does not feel excluded from the transaction. Such a sense of love and warmth radiates from Sting and Shadow and even from the Tree Companion that he is drawn in, he is enfolded by their communion. And Crown, too, is engulfed and absorbed by the group aura; his rigid martial posture eases, his grim face looks strangely peaceful. Of course it is Sting and Shadow who are most closely linked; Shadow is closer now to Sting than she has ever been to Leaf, but Leaf is untroubled by this. Jealousy and competitiveness are inconceivable now. He is Sting, Sting is Leaf, they all are Shadow and Crown, there are no boundaries separating one from another, just as there will be no boundaries in the All-Is-One that awaits every living creature, Sting and Crown and Shadow and Leaf, the Tree Companions, the Invisibles, the nightmares, the no-leg spiders.

They are getting down to cases now. Leaf is aware of strands of opposition and conflict manifesting themselves in the intricate negotiation that is taking, place. Although he is still without a clue to the content of the exchange, Leaf understands that the Tree Companion chief is stating a position of demand —calmly, bluntly, immovable —and Sting and Shadow are explaining to him that Crown is not at all likely to yield. More than that Leaf is unable to perceive, even when he is most deeply enmeshed in the larger consciousness of the trance-wrapped three. Nor does he know how much time is elapsing. The symphonic interchange —demand, response, development, climax —continues repetitively, indefinitely, reaching no resolution.

He feels, at last, a running-down, an attenuation of the experience. He begins to move outside the field of contact, or to have it move outside him. Spiderwebs of sensibility still connect him to the others even as Sting and Shadow and the chief rise and separate, but they are rapidly thinning and fraying, and in a moment they snap.

The contact ends.

The meeting was over. During the trance-time night had fallen, an extraordinarily black night against which the stars seemed unnaturally bright. The fragments of the moon had traveled far across the sky. So it had been a lengthy exchange; yet in the immediate vicinity of the wagon nothing seemed altered. Crown stood like a statue beside the wagon’s entrance; the Tree Companions still occupied the cleared ground between the wagon and the gate. Once more a tableau, then: how easy it is to slide into motionlessness, Leaf thought, in these impoverished times. Stand and wait, stand and wait; but now motion returned. The Tree Companion pivoted and strode off without a word, signaling to his people, who gathered up their dead and followed him through the gate. From within they tugged the gate shut; there was the screeching sound of the bolts being forced home. Sting, looking dazed, whispered something to Shadow, who nodded and lightly touched his arm. They walked haltingly back to the wagon.

“Well?” Crown asked finally.

“They will allow us to pass,” Sting said.

“How courteous of them.”

“But they claim the wagon and everything that is in it.”

Crown gasped. “By what right?”

“Right of prophecy,” said Shadow. “There is a seer among them, an old woman of mixed stock, part White Crystal, part Tree Companion, part Invisible. She has told them that everything that has happened lately in the world was caused by the Soul for the sake of enriching the Tree Companions.”

“Everything? They see the onslaught of the Teeth as a sign of divine favor?”

“Everything,” said Sting. “The entire upheaval. All for their benefit. All done so that migrations would begin and refugees would come to this place, carrying with them valuable possessions, which they would surrender to those whom the Soul meant should own them, meaning the Tree Companions.”

Crown laughed roughly. “If they want to be brigands, why not practice brigandage outright, with the right name on it, and not blame their greed on the Soul?”

“They don’t see themselves as brigands,” Shadow said. “There can be no denying the chief’s sincerity. He and his people genuinely believe that the Soul has decreed all this for their own special good, that the time has come —”

“Sincerity!”

“ —for the Tree Companions to become people of substance and property. Therefore they’ve built this wall across the highway, and as refugees come west, the Tree Companions relieve them of their possessions with the blessing of the Soul.”

“I’d like to meet their prophet,” Crown muttered.

Leaf said, “It was my understanding that Invisibles were unable to breed with other stocks.”

Sting told him, with a shrug, “We report only what we learned as we sat there dreaming with the chief. The witch-woman is part Invisible, he said. Perhaps he was wrong, but he was doing no lying. Of that I’m certain.”

“And I,” Shadow put in.

“What happens to those who refuse to pay tribute?” Crown asked.

“The Tree Companions regard them as thwarters of the Soul’s design,” said Sting, “and fall upon them and put them to death. And then seize their goods.”

Crown moved restlessly in a shallow circle in front of the wagon, kicking up gouts of soil out of the hard-packed roadbed. After a moment he said, “They dangle on vines. They chatter like foolish monkeys. What do they want with the merchandise of civilized folk? Our furs, our statuettes, our carvings, our flutes, our robes?”

“Having such things will make them equal in their own sight to the higher stocks,” Sting said. “Not the things themselves, but the possession of them, do you see, Crown?”

“They’ll have nothing of mine!”

“What will we do, then?” Leaf asked. “Sit here and wait for their darts?”

Crown caught Sting heavily by the shoulder. “Did they give us any sort of time limit? How long do we have before they attack?”

“There was nothing like an ultimatum. The chief seems unwilling to enter into warfare with us.”

“Because he’s afraid of his betters!”

“Because he thinks violence cheapens the decree of the Soul,” Sting replied evenly. “Therefore he intends to wait for us to surrender our belongings voluntarily.”

“He’ll wait a hundred years!”

“He’ll wait a few days,” Shadow said. “If we haven’t yielded, the attack will come. But what will you do, Crown? Suppose they were willing to wait your hundred years. Are you? We can’t camp here forever.”

“Are you suggesting we give them what they ask?”

“I merely want to know what strategy you have in mind,” she said. “You admit yourself we can’t defeat them in battle. We haven’t done a very good job of aweing them into submission. You recognize that any attempt to destroy their wall will bring them upon us with their darts. You refuse to turn back and look for some other westward route. You rule out the alternative of yielding to them. Very well, Crown. What do you have in mind?”

“We’ll wait a few days,” Crown said thickly.

“The Teeth are heading this way!” Sting cried. “Shall we sit here and let them catch us?”

Crown shook his head. “Long before the Teeth get here, Sting, this place will be full of other refugees, many of them, as unwilling to give up their goods to these folk as we are. I can feel them already on the road, coming this way, two days’ march from us, perhaps less. We’ll make alliance with them. Four of us may be helpless against a swarm of poisonous apes, but fifty or a hundred strong fighters would send them scrambling up their own trees.”

“No one will come this way,” said Leaf. “No one but fools. Everyone passing through Theptis knows what’s been done to the highway here. What good is the aid of fools?”

“We came this way,” Crown snapped. “Are we such fools?”

“Perhaps we are. We were warned not to take Spider Highway, and we took it anyway.”

“Because we refused to trust the word of Invisibles.”

“Well, the Invisibles happened to be telling the truth, this time,” Leaf said. “And the news must be all over Theptis. No one in his right mind will come this way now.”

“I feel marchers already on the way, hundreds of them,” Crown said. “I can sense these things, sometimes. What about you, Sting? You feel things ahead of time, don’t you? They’re coming, aren’t they? Have no fear, Leaf. We’ll have allies here in a day or so, and then let these thieving Tree Companions beware.” Crown gestured broadly. “Leaf, set the nightmares loose to graze. And then everybody inside the wagon. We’ll seal it and take turns standing watch through the night. This is a time for vigilance and courage.”

“This is a time for digging graves,” Sting murmured sourly, as they clambered into the wagon.

Crown and Shadow stood the first round of watches while Leaf and Sting napped in the back. Leaf fell asleep at once and dreamed he was living in some immense brutal eastern city —the buildings and street plan were unfamiliar to him, but the architecture was definitely eastern in style, gray and heavy, all parapets and cornices —that was coming under attack by the Teeth.

He observed everything from a many-windowed gallery atop an enormous square-sided brick tower that seemed like a survival from some remote prehistoric epoch. First, from the north, came the sound of the war song of the invaders, a nasty unendurable buzzing drone, piercing and intense, like the humming of highspeed polishing wheels at work on metal plates. That dread music brought the inhabitants of the city spilling into the streets —all stocks, Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and White Crystals and Dancing Stars and even Tree Companions, absurdly garbed in mercantile robes as though they were so many fat citified Fingers —but no one was able to escape, for there were so many people, colliding and jostling and stumbling and falling in helpless heaps, that they blocked every avenue and alleyway.

Into this chaos now entered the vanguard of the Teeth; shuffling forward in their peculiar bent-kneed crouch, trampling those who had fallen. They looked half-beast, half-demon: squat thick-thewed flat-headed long-muzzled creatures, naked, hairy, their skins the color of sand, their eyes glinting with insatiable hungers. Leaf’s dreaming mind subtly magnified and distorted them so that they came hopping into the city like a band of giant toothy frogs, thump-thump, bare fleshy feet slapping pavement in sinister reverberations, short powerful arms swinging almost comically at each leaping stride. The kinship of mankind meant nothing to these carnivorous beings. They had been penned up too long in the cold, mountainous, barren country of the far northeast, living on such scraps and strings as the animals of the forest yielded, and they saw their fellow humans as mere meat stockpiled by the Soul against this day of vengeance. Efficiently, now, they began their round-up in the newly conquered city, seizing everyone in sight, cloistering the dazed prisoners in hastily rigged pens: these we eat tonight at our victory feast; these we save for tomorrow’s dinner; these become dried meat to carry with us on the march; these we kill for sport; these we keep as slaves. Leaf watched the Teeth erecting their huge spits. Kindling their fierce roasting-fires. Diligent search teams fanned out through the suburbs. No one would escape. Leaf stirred and groaned, reached the threshold of wakefulness, fell back into dream. Would they find him in his tower? Smoke, gray and greasy, boiled up out of a hundred parts of town. Leaping flames. Rivulets of blood ran in the streets. He was choking. A terrible dream. But was it only a dream? This was how it had actually been in Holy Town hours after he and Crown and Sting and Shadow had managed to get away, this was no doubt as it had happened in city after city along the tormented coastal strip, very likely something of this sort was going on now in —where? —Bone Harbor? Ved-uru? Alsandar? He could smell the penetrating odor of roasting meat. He could hear the heavy lalloping sound of a Teeth patrol running up the stairs of his tower. They had him. Yes, here, now, now, a dozen Teeth bursting suddenly into his hiding place, grinning broadly —Pure Stream, they had captured a Pure Stream! What a coup! Beasts. Beasts. Prodding him, testing his flesh. Not plump enough for them, eh? This one’s pretty lean. We’ll cook him anyway. Pure Stream meat, it enlarges the soul, it makes you into something more than you were. Take him downstairs! To the spit, to the spit, to the —

“Leaf?”

“I warn you —you won’t like —the flavor —”

“Leaf, wake up!”

“The fires —oh, the stink!”

“Leaf!”

It was Shadow. She shook him gently, plucked at his shoulder. He blinked and slowly sat up. His wounded arm was throbbing again; he felt feverish. Effects of the dream. A dream, only a dream. He shivered and tried to center himself, working at it, banishing the fever, banishing the shreds of dark fantasy that were still shrouding his mind.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I was dreaming about the Teeth,” he told her. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Am I to stand watch now?”

She nodded. “Up front. Driver’s cabin.”

“Has anything been happening?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.” She reached up and drew her fingertips lightly along the sides of his jaws. Her eyes were warm and bright, her smile was loving. “The Teeth are far away, Leaf.”

“From us, maybe. Not from others.”

“They were sent by the will of the Soul.”

“I know, I know.” How often had he preached acceptance! This is the will, and we bow to it. This is the road, and we travel it uncomplainingly. But yet, but yet —he shuddered. The dream mode persisted. He was altogether disoriented. Dream-Teeth nibbled at his flesh. The inner chambers of his spirit resonated to the screams of those on the spits, the sounds of rending and tearing, the unbearable reek of burning cities. In ten days, half a world torn apart. So much pain, so much death, so much that had been beautiful destroyed by relentless savages who would not halt until, the Soul only knew when, they had had their full measure of revenge. The will of the Soul sends them upon us. Accept. Accept. He could not find his center. Shadow held him, straining to encompass his body with her arms. After a moment he began to feel less troubled, but he remained scattered, diffused, present only in part, some portion of his mind nailed as if by spikes into that monstrous ash-strewn wasteland that the Teeth had created out of the fair and fertile eastern provinces.

She released him. “Go,” she whispered. “It’s quiet up front. You’ll be able to find yourself again.”

He took her place in the driver’s cabin, going silently past Sting, who had replaced Crown on watch amidwagon. Half the night was gone. All was still in the roadside clearing; the great wooden gate was shut tight and nobody was about. By cold starlight Leaf saw the nightmares browsing patiently at the edge of the thicket. Gentle horses, almost human. If I must be visited by nightmares, he thought, let it be by their kind.

Shadow had been right. In the stillness he grew calm, and perspective returned. Lamentation would not restore the shattered eastland, expressions of horror and shock would not turn the Teeth into pious tillers of the soil. The Soul had decreed chaos: so be it. This is the road we must travel, and who dares ask why? Once the world had been whole and now it is fragmented, and that is the way things are because that is the way things were meant to be. He became less tense. Anguish dropped from him. He was Leaf again.

Toward dawn the visible world lost its sharp starlit edge; a soft fog settled over the wagon, and rain fell for a time, a light, pure rain, barely audible, altogether different in character from yesterday’s vicious storm. In the strange light just preceding sunrise the world took on a delicate pearly mistiness; and out of that mist an apparition materialized. Leaf saw a figure come drifting through the closed gate —through it —a ghostly, incorporeal figure. He thought it might be the Invisible who had been lurking close by the wagon since Theptis, but no, this was a woman, old and frail, an attenuated woman, smaller even than Shadow, more slender. Leaf knew who she must be: the mixed-blood woman. The prophetess, the seer, she who had stirred up these Tree Companions to block the highway. Her skin had the White Crystal waxiness of texture and the White Crystal nodes of dark, coarse hair; the form of her body was essentially that of a Tree Companion, thin and long-armed; and from her Invisible forebears, it seemed, she had inherited that perplexing intangibility, that look of existing always on the borderland between hallucination and reality, between mist and flesh. Mixed-bloods were uncommon; Leaf had rarely seen one, and never had encountered one who combined in herself so many different stocks. It was said that people of mixed blood had strange gifts. Surely this one did. How had she bypassed the wall? Not even Invisibles could travel through solid wood. Perhaps this was just a dream, then, or possibly she had some way of projecting an image of herself into his mind from a point within the Tree Companion village. He did not understand.

He watched her a long while. She appeared real enough. She halted twenty paces from the nose of the wagon and scanned the entire horizon slowly, her eyes coming to rest at last on the window of the driver’s cabin. She was aware, certainly, that he was looking at her, and she looked back, eye to eye, staring unflinchingly. They remained locked that way for some minutes. Her expression was glum and opaque, a withered scowl, but suddenly she brightened and smiled intensely at him and it was such a knowing smile that Leaf was thrown into terror by the old witch, and glanced away, shamed and defeated.

When he lifted his head she was out of view; he pressed himself against the window, craned his neck, and found her down near the middle of the wagon. She was inspecting its exterior workmanship at close range, picking and prying at the hull. Then she wandered away, out to the place where Sting and Shadow and the chief had had their conference, and sat down cross-legged where they had been sitting. She became extraordinarily still, as if she were asleep, or in trance. Just when Leaf began to think she would never move again, she took a pipe of carved bone from a pouch at her waist, filled it with a gray-blue powder, and lit it. He searched her face for tokens of revelation, but nothing showed on it; she grew ever more impassive and unreadable. When the pipe went out, she filled it again, and smoked a second time, and still Leaf watched her, his face pushed awkwardly against the window, his body growing stiff. The first rays of sunlight now arrived, pink shading rapidly into gold. As the brightness deepened the witch-woman imperceptibly became less solid; she was fading away, moment by moment, and shortly he saw nothing of her but her pipe and her kerchief, and then the clearing was empty. The long shadows of the six nightmares splashed against the wooden palisade. Leaf’s head lolled. I’ve been dozing, he thought. It’s morning, and all’s well. He went to awaken Crown.

They breakfasted lightly. Leaf and Shadow led the horses to water at a small clear brook five minutes’ walk toward Theptis. Sting foraged awhile in the thicket for nuts and berries, and having filled two pails, went aft to doze in the furs. Crown brooded in his trophy room and said nothing to anyone. A few Tree Companions could be seen watching the wagon from perches in the crowns of towering red-leaved trees on the hillside just behind the wall. Nothing happened until midmorning. Then, at a time when all four travelers were within the wagon, a dozen newcomers appeared, forerunners of the refugee tribe that Crown’s intuitions had correctly predicted. They came slowly up the road, on foot, dusty and tired-looking, staggering beneath huge untidy bundles of belongings and supplies. They were square-headed muscular people, as tall as Leaf or taller, with the look of warriors about them; they carried short swords at their waists, and both men and women were conspicuously scarred. Their skins were gray, tinged with pale green, and they had more fingers and toes than was usual among mankind.

Leaf had never seen their sort before. “Do you know them?” he asked Sting.

“Snow Hunters,” Sting said. “Close kin to the Sand Shapers, I think. Midcaste and said to be unfriendly to strangers. They live southwest of Theptis, in the hill country.”

“One would think they’d be safe there,” said Shadow.

Sting shrugged. “No one’s safe from the Teeth, eh? Not even on the highest hills. Not even in the thickest jungles.”

The Snow Hunters dropped their packs and looked around. The wagon drew them first; they seemed stunned by the opulence of it. They examined it in wonder, touching it as the witch-woman had, scrutinizing it from every side. When they saw faces looking out at them, they nudged one another and pointed and whispered, but they did not smile, nor did they wave greetings. After a time they went on to the wall and studied it with the same childlike curiosity. It appeared to baffle them. They measured it with their outstretched hands, pressed their bodies against it, pushed at it with their shoulders, tapped the timbers, plucked at the sturdy bindings of vine. By this time perhaps a dozen more of them had come up the road; they too clustered about the wagon, doing as the first had done, and then continued toward the wall. More and more Snow Hunters were arriving, in groups of three or four. One trio, standing apart from the others, gave the impression of being tribal leaders; they consulted, nodded, summoned and dismissed other members of the tribe with forceful gestures of their hands.

“Let’s go out and parley,” Crown said. He donned his best armor and selected an array of elegant dress weapons. To Sting he gave a slender dagger. Shadow would not bear arms, and Leaf preferred to arm himself in nothing but Pure Stream prestige. His status as a member of the ancestral stock, he found, served him as well as a sword in most encounters with strangers.

The Snow Hunters —about a hundred of them now had gathered, with still more down the way —looked apprehensive as Crown and his companions descended from the wagon. Crown’s bulk and gladiatorial swagger seemed far more threatening to these strong-bodied warlike folk than they had been to the chattering Tree Companions, and Leaf’s presence too appeared disturbing to them. Warily they moved to form a loose semicircle about their three leaders; they stood close by one another, murmuring tensely, and their hands hovered near the hilts of their swords.

Crown stepped forward. “Careful,” Leaf said softly. “They’re on edge. Don’t push them.”

But Crown, with a display of slick diplomacy unusual for him, quickly put the Snow Hunters at their ease with a warm gesture of greeting —hands pressed to shoulders, palms outward, fingers spread wide —and a few hearty words of welcome. Introductions were exchanged. The spokesman for the tribe, an iron-faced man with frosty eyes and hard cheekbones, was called Sky; the names of his co-captains were Blade and Shield. Sky spoke in a flat, quiet voice, everything on the same note. He seemed empty, burned out, a man who had entered some realm of exhaustion far beyond mere fatigue. They had been on the road for three days and three nights almost without a halt, said Sky. Last week a major force of Teeth had started westward through the midcoastal lowlands bound for Theptis, and one band of these, just a few hundred warriors, had lost its way, going south into the hill country. Their aimless wanderings brought these straying Teeth without warning into the secluded village of the Snow Hunters, and there had been a terrible battle in which more than half of Sky’s people had perished. The survivors, having slipped away into the trackless forest, had made their way by back roads to Spider Highway, and, numbed by shock and grief, had been marching like machines toward the Middle River, hoping to find some new hillside in the sparsely populated territories of the far northwest. They could never return to their old home, Shield declared, for it had been desecrated by the feasting of the Teeth.

“But what is this wall?” Sky asked.

Crown explained, telling the Snow Hunters about the Tree Companions and their prophetess, and of her promise that the booty of all refugees was to be surrendered to them. “They lie in wait for us with their darts,” Crown said. “Four of us were helpless against them. But they would never dare challenge a force the size of yours. We’ll have their wall smashed down by nightfall!”

“The Tree Companions are said to be fierce foes,” Sky remarked quietly.

“Nothing but monkeys,” said Crown. “They’ll scramble to their treetops if we just draw our swords.”

“And shower us with their poisoned arrows,” Shield muttered. “Friend, we have little stomach for further warfare. Too many of us have fallen this week.”

“What will you do?” Crown cried. “Give them your swords, and your tunics and your wives’ rings and the sandals off your feet?”

Sky closed his eyes and stood motionless, remaining silent for a long moment. At length, without opening his eyes, he said in a voice that came from the center of an immense void, “We will talk with the Tree Companions and learn what they actually demand of us, and then we will make our decisions and form our plans.”

“The wall —if you fight beside us, we can destroy this wall, and open the road to all who flee the Teeth!”

With cold patience Sky said, “We will speak with you again afterward,” and turned away. “Now we will rest, and wait for the Tree Companions to come forth.”

The Snow Hunters withdrew, sprawling out along the margin of the thicket just under the wall. There they huddled in rows, staring at the ground, waiting. Crown scowled, spat, shook his head. Turning to Leaf he said, “They have the true look of fighters. There’s something that marks a fighter apart from other men, Leaf, and I can tell when it’s there, and these Snow Hunters have it. They have the strength, they have the power; they have the spirit of battle in them. And yet, see them now! Squatting there like fat frightened Fingers!”

“They’ve been beaten badly,” Leaf said. “They’ve been driven from their homeland. They know what it is to look back across a hilltop and see the fires in which your kinsmen are being cooked. That takes the fighting spirit out of a person, Crown.”

“No. Losing makes the flame burn brighter. It makes you feverish with the desire for revenge.”

“Does it? What do you know about losing? You were never so much as touched by any of your opponents.”

Crown glared at him. “I’m not speaking of dueling. Do you think my life has gone untouched by the Teeth? What am I doing here on this dirt road with all that I still own packed into a single wagon? But I’m no walking dead man like these Snow Hunters. I’m not running away, I’m going to find an army. And then I’ll go back east and take my vengeance. While they—afraid of monkeys —”

“They’ve been marching day and night,” Shadow said. “They must have been on the road when the purple rain was falling. They’ve spent all their strength while we’ve been riding in your wagon, Crown. Once they’ve had a little rest, perhaps they —”

“Afraid of monkeys!”

Crown shook with wrath. He strode up and down before the wagon, pounding his fists into his thighs. Leaf feared that he would go across to the Snow Hunters and attempt by bluster to force them into an alliance. Leaf understood the mood of these people: shattered and drained though they were, they might lash out in sudden savage irritation if Crown goaded them too severely. Possibly some hours of rest, as Shadow had suggested, and they might feel more like helping Crown drive his way through the Tree Companions’ wall. But not now. Not now.

The gate in the wall opened. Some twenty of the forest folk emerged, among them the tribal chief and —Leaf caught his breath in awe —the ancient seeress, who looked across the way and bestowed on Leaf another of her penetrating comfortless smiles.

“What kind of creature is that?” Crown asked.

“The mixed-blood witch,” said Leaf. “I saw her at dawn, while I was standing watch.”

“Look!” Shadow cried. “She flickers and fades like an Invisible! But her pelt is like yours, Sting, and her shape is that of —”

“She frightens me,” Sting said hoarsely. He was shaking. “She foretells death for us. We have little time left to us, friends. She is the goddess of death, that one.” He plucked at Crown’s elbow, unprotected by the armour. “Come! Let’s start back along Spider Highway! Better to take our chances in the desert than to stay here and die!”

“Quiet,” Crown snapped. “There’s no going back. The Teeth are already in Theptis. They’ll be moving out along this road in a day or two. There’s only one direction for us.”

“But the wall,” Sting said.

“The wall will be in ruins by nightfall,” Crown told him.

The chief of the Tree Companions was conferring with Sky and Blade and Shield. Evidently the Snow Hunters knew something of the language of the Tree Companions, for Leaf could hear vocal interchanges, supplemented by pantomime and sign language. The chief pointed to himself often, to the wall, to the prophetess; he indicated the packs the Snow Hunters had been carrying; he jerked his thumb angrily toward Crown’s wagon. The conversation lasted nearly half an hour and seemed to reach an amicable outcome. The Tree Companions departed, this time leaving the gate open. Sky, Shield, and Blade moved among their people, issuing instructions. The Snow Hunters drew food from their packs —dried roots, seeds, smoked meat —and lunched in silence. Afterward, boys who carried huge waterbags made of sewn hides slung between them on poles went off to the creek to replenish their supply, and the rest of the Snow Hunters rose, stretched, wandered in narrow circles about the clearing, as if getting ready to resume the march. Crown was seized by furious impatience. “What are they going to do?” he demanded. “What deal have they made?”

“I imagine they’ve submitted to the terms,” Leaf said.

“No! No! I need their help!” Crown, in anguish, hammered at himself with his fists. “I have to talk to them,” he muttered.

“Wait. Don’t push them, Crown.”

“What’s the use? What’s the use?” Now the Snow Hunters were hoisting their packs to their shoulders. No doubt of it; they were going to leave. Crown hurried across the clearing. Sky, busily directing the order of march, grudgingly gave him attention. “Where are you going?” Crown asked.

“Westward,” said Sky.

“What about us?”

“March with us, if you wish.”

“My wagon!”

“You can’t get it through the gate, can you?”

Crown reared up as though he would strike the Snow Hunter in rage. “If you would aid us, the wall would fall! Look, how can I abandon my wagon? I need to reach my kinsmen in the Flatlands. I’ll assemble an army; I’ll return to the east and push the Teeth back into the mountains where they belong. I’ve lost too much time already. I must get through. Don’t you want to see the Teeth destroyed?”

“It’s nothing to us,” Sky said evenly. “Our lands are lost to us forever. Vengeance is meaningless. Your pardon. My people need my guidance.”

More than half the Snow Hunters had passed through the gate already. Leaf joined the procession. On the far side of the wall he discovered that the dense thicket along the highway’s northern rim had been cleared for a considerable distance, and a few small wooden buildings, hostelries or depots, stood at the edge of the road. Another twenty or thirty paces farther along, a secondary path led northward into the forest; this was evidently the route to the Tree Companions’ village. Traffic on that path was heavy just now. Hundreds of forest folk were streaming from the village to the highway, where a strange, repellent scene was being enacted. Each Snow Hunter in turn halted, unburdened himself of his pack, and laid it open. Three or four Tree Companions then picked through it, each seizing one item of value —a knife, a comb, a piece of jewelry, a fine cloak —and running triumphantly off with it. Once he had submitted to this harrying of his possessions, the Snow Hunter gathered up his pack, shouldered it, and marched on, head bowed, body slumping. Tribute. Leaf felt chilled. These proud warriors, homeless now, yielding up their remaining treasures to —he tried to choke off the word, and could not —to a tribe of monkeys. And moving onward, soiled, unmanned. Of all that he had seen since the Teeth had split the world apart, this was the most sad.

Leaf started back toward the wagon. He saw Sky, Shield, and Blade at the rear of the column of Snow Hunters. Their faces were ashen; they could not meet his eyes. Sky managed a half-hearted salute as he passed by.

“I wish you good fortune on your journey,” Leaf said.

“I wish you better fortune than we have had,” said Sky hollowly, and went on.

Leaf found Crown standing rigid in the middle of the highway, hands on hips. “Cowards!” he called in a bitter voice. “Weaklings!”

“And now it’s our turn,” Leaf said.

“What do you mean?”

“The time’s come for us to face hard truths. We have to give up the wagon, Crown.”

“Never.”

“We agree that we can’t turn back. And we can’t go forward so long as the wall’s there. If we stay here, the Tree Companions will eventually kill us, if the Teeth don’t overtake us first. Listen to me, Crown. We don’t have to give the Tree Companions everything we have. The wagon itself, some of our spare clothing, some trinkets, the furnishings of the wagon —they’ll be satisfied with that. We can load the rest of our goods on the horses and go safely through the gate as foot-pilgrims.”

“I ignore this, Leaf.”

“I know you do. I also know what the wagon means to you. I wish you could keep it. I wish I could stay with the wagon myself. Don’t you think I’d rather ride west in comfort than slog through the rain and the cold? But we can’t keep it. We can’t keep it, Crown, that’s the heart of the situation. We can go back east in the wagon and get lost in the desert, we can sit here and wait for the Tree Companions to lose patience and kill us, or we can give up the wagon and get out of this place with our skins still whole. What sort of choices are those? We have no choice. I’ve been telling you that for two days. Be reasonable, Crown!”

Crown glanced coldly at Sting and Shadow. “Find the chief and go into trance with him again. Tell him that I’ll give him swords, armor, his pick of the finest things in the wagon. So long as he’ll dismantle part of the wall and let the wagon itself pass through.”

“We made that offer yesterday,” Sting said glumly.

“And?”

“He insists on the wagon. The old witch has promised it to him for a palace.”

“No,” Crown said. “NO!” His wild roaring cry echoed from the hills. After a moment, more calmly, he said, “I have another idea. Leaf, Sting, come with me. The gate’s open. We’ll go to the village and seize the witch-woman. We’ll grab her quickly, before anyone realizes what we’re doing. They won’t dare molest us while she’s in our hands. Then, Sting, you tell the chief that unless they open the wall for us, we’ll kill her.” Crown chuckled. “Once she realizes we’re serious, she’ll tell them to hop it. Anybody that old wants to live forever. And they’ll obey her. You can bet on that. They’ll obey her! Come, now.” Crown started toward the gate at a vigorous pace. He took a dozen strides, halted, looked back. Neither Leaf nor Sting had moved.

“Well? Why aren’t you coming?”

“I won’t do it,” said Leaf tiredly. “It’s crazy, Crown. She’s a witch, she’s part Invisible—she already knows your scheme. She probably knew of it before you knew of it yourself. How can we hope to catch her?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Even if we did, Crown —no. No. I won’t have any part of it. It’s an impossible idea. Even if we did seize her. We’d be standing there holding a sword to her throat, and the chief would give a signal, and they’d put a hundred darts in us before we could move a muscle. It’s insane, Crown.”

“I ask you to come with me.”

“You’ve had your answer.”

“Then I’ll go without you.”

“As you choose,” Leaf said quietly. “But you won’t be seeing me again.”

“Eh?”

“I’m going to collect what I own and let the Tree Companions take their pick of it, and then I’ll hurry forward and catch up with the Snow Hunters. In a week or so I’ll be at the Middle River. Shadow, will you come with me, or are you determined to stay here and die with Crown?”

The Dancing Star looked toward the muddy ground. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me think a moment.”

“Sting?”

“I’m going with you.”

Leaf beckoned to Crown. “Please. Come to your senses, Crown. For the last time —give up the wagon and let’s get going, all four of us.”

“You disgust me.”

“Then this is where we part,” Leaf said. “I wish you good fortune. Sting, let’s assemble our belongings. Shadow? Will you be coming with us?”

“We have an obligation toward Crown,” she said.

“To help him drive his wagon, yes. But not to die a foolish death for him. Crown has lost his wagon, Shadow, though he won’t admit that yet. If the wagon’s no longer his, our contract is voided. I hope you’ll join us.”

He entered the wagon and went to the midcabin cupboard where he stored the few possessions he had managed to bring with him out of the east. A pair of glistening boots made of the leathery skins of stick-creatures, two ancient copper coins, three ornamental ivory medallions, a shirt of dark red silk, a thick, heavily worked belt —not much, not much at all, the salvage of a lifetime. He packed rapidly. He took with him a slab of dried meat and some bread; that would last him a day or two, and when it was gone he would learn from Sting or the Snow Hunters the arts of gathering food in the wilderness.

“Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Sting said. His pack was almost empty —a change of clothing, a hatchet, a knife, some smoked fish, nothing else.

“Let’s go, then.”

As Sting and Leaf moved toward the exit hatch, Shadow scrambled up into the wagon. She looked tight-strung and grave; her nostrils were flared, her eyes downcast. Without a word she went past Leaf and began loading her pack. Leaf waited for her. After a few minutes she reappeared and nodded to him.

“Poor Crown,” she whispered. “Is there no way —”

“You heard him,” Leaf said.

They emerged from the wagon. Crown had not moved. He stood as if rooted, midway between wagon and wall. Leaf gave him a quizzical look, as if to ask whether he had changed his mind, but Crown took no notice. Shrugging, Leaf walked around him, toward the edge of the thicket, where the nightmares were nibbling leaves. Affectionately he reached up to stroke the long neck of the nearest horse, and Crown suddenly came to life, shouting, “Those are my animals! Keep your hands off them!”

“I’m only saying goodbye to them.”

“You think I’m going to let you have some? You think I’m that crazy, Leaf?”

Leaf looked sadly at him. “We plan to do our traveling on foot, Crown. I’m only saying goodbye. The nightmares were my friends. You can’t understand that, can you?”

“Keep away from those animals! Keep away!”

Leaf sighed. “Whatever you say.” Shadow, as usual, was right: poor Crown. Leaf adjusted his pack and moved off toward the gate, Shadow beside him, Sting a few paces to the rear. As he and Shadow reached the gate, Leaf looked back and saw Crown still motionless, saw Sting pausing, putting down his pack, dropping to his knees. “Anything wrong?” Leaf called.

“Tore a bootlace,” Sting said. “You two go on ahead. It’ll take me a minute to fix it.”

“We can wait.”

Leaf and Shadow stood within the frame of the gate while Sting knotted his lace. After a few moments he rose and reached for his pack, saying, “That ought to hold me until tonight, and then I’ll see if I can’t—”

“Watch out!” Leaf yelled.

Crown erupted abruptly from his freeze, and, letting forth a lunatic cry, rushed with terrible swiftness toward Sting. There was no chance for Sting to make one of his little leaps: Crown seized him, held him high overhead like a child, and, grunting in frantic rage, hurled the little man toward the ravine. Arms and legs flailing, Sting traveled on a high arc over the edge; he seemed to dance in midair for an instant, and then he dropped from view. There was a long diminishing shriek, and silence. Silence.

Leaf stood stunned. “Hurry,” Shadow said. “Crown’s coming!”

Crown, swinging around, now rumbled like a machine of death toward Leaf and Shadow. His wild red eyes glittered ferociously. Leaf did not move; Shadow shook him urgently, and finally he pushed himself into action. Together they caught hold of the massive gate and, straining, swung it shut, slamming it just as Crown crashed into it. Leaf forced the reluctant bolts into place. Crown roared and pounded at the gate, but he was unable to force it.

Shadow shivered and wept. Leaf drew her to him and held her for a moment. At length he said, “We’d better be on our way. The Snow Hunters are far ahead of us already.”

“Sting —”

“I know. I know. Come, now.”

Half a dozen Tree Companions were waiting for them by the wooden houses. They grinned, chattered, pointed to the packs. “All right,” Leaf said. “Go ahead. Take whatever you want. Take everything, if you like.”

Busy fingers picked through his pack and Shadow’s. From Shadow the Tree Companions took a brocaded ribbon and a flat, smooth green stone. From Leaf they took one of the ivory medallions, both copper coins, and one of his stickskin boots. Tribute. Day by day, pieces of the past slipped from his grasp. He pulled the other boot from the pack and offered it to them, but they merely giggled and shook their heads. “One is of no use to me,” he said. They would not take it. He tossed the boot into the grass beside the road.

The road curved gently toward the north and began a slow rise, following the flank of the forested hills in which the Tree Companions made their homes. Leaf and Shadow marched, mechanically, saying little. The bootprints of the Snow Hunters were everywhere along the road, but the Snow Hunters themselves were far ahead, out of sight. It was early afternoon, and the day had become bright, unexpectedly warm. After an hour Shadow said, “I must rest.”

Her teeth were clacking. She crouched by the roadside and wrapped her arms about her chest. Dancing Stars, covered with thick fur, usually wore no clothing except in the bleakest winters; but her pelt did her no good now.

“Are you ill?” he asked.

“It’ll pass. I’m reacting. Sting —”

“Yes.”

“And Crown. I feel so unhappy about Crown.”

“A madman,” Leaf said. “A murderer.”

“Don’t judge him so casually, Leaf. He’s a man under sentence of death, and he knows it, and he’s suffering from it, and when the fear and pain became unbearable to him he reached out for Sting. He didn’t know what he was doing. He needed to smash something, that was all, to relieve his own torment.”

“We’re all going to die sooner or later,” Leaf said. “That doesn’t generally drive us to kill our friends.”

“I don’t mean sooner or later. I mean that Crown will die tonight or tomorrow.”

“Why should he?”

“What can he do now to save himself, Leaf?”

“He could yield to the Tree Companions and pass the gate on foot, as we’ve done.”

“You know he’d never abandon the wagon.”

“Well, then, he can harness the nightmares and turn around toward Theptis. At least he’d have a chance to make it through to the Sunset Highway that way.”

“He can’t do that either,” Shadow said.

“Why not?”

“He can’t drive the wagon.”

“There’s no one left to do it for him. His life’s at stake. For once he could eat his pride and —”

“I didn’t say won’t drive the wagon, Leaf. I said can’t. Crown’s incapable. He isn’t able to make dream contact with the nightmares. Why do you think he always used hired drivers? Why was he so insistent on making you drive in the purple rain? He doesn’t have the mind-power. Did you ever see a Dark Laker driving nightmares? Ever?”

Leaf stared at her. “You knew this all along?”

“From the beginning, yes.”

“Is that why you hesitated to leave him at the gate? When you were talking about our contract with him?”

She nodded. “If all three of us left him, we were condemning him to death. He has no way of escaping the Tree Companions now unless he forces himself to leave the wagon, and he won’t do that. They’ll fall on him and kill him, today, tomorrow, whenever.”

Leaf closed his eyes, shook his head. “I feel a kind of shame. Now that I know we were leaving him helpless. He could have spoken.”

“Too proud.”

“Yes. Yes. It’s just as well he didn’t say anything. We all have responsibilities to one another, but there are limits. You and I and Sting were under no obligation to die simply because Crown couldn’t bring himself to give up his pretty wagon. But still —still —” He locked his hands tightly together. “Why did you finally decide to leave, then?”

“For the reason you just gave. I didn’t want Crown to die, but I didn’t believe I owed him my life. Besides, you had said you were going to go, no matter what.”

“Poor, crazy Crown.”

“And when he killed Sting —a life for a life, Leaf. All vows are canceled now. I feel no guilt.”

“Nor I.”

“I think the fever is leaving me.”

“Let’s rest a few minutes more,” Leaf said.

It was more than an hour before Leaf judged Shadow strong enough to go on. The highway now described a steady upgrade, not steep but making constant demands on their stamina, and they moved slowly. As the day’s warmth began to dwindle, they reached the crest of the grade, and rested again at a place from which they could see the road ahead winding in switchbacks into a green, pleasant valley. Far below were the Snow Hunters, resting also by the side of a fair-size stream.

“Smoke,” Shadow said. “Do you smell it?”

“Campfires down there, I suppose.”

“I don’t think they have any fires going. I don’t see any.”

“The Tree Companions, then.”

“It must be a big fire.”

“No matter,” Leaf said. “Are you ready to continue?”

“I hear a sound —”

A voice from behind and uphill of them said, “And so it ends the usual way, in foolishness and death, and the All-Is-One grows greater.”

Leaf whirled, springing to his feet. He heard laughter on the hillside and saw movements in the underbrush; after a moment he made out a dim, faintly outlined figure, and realized that an Invisible was coming toward them, the same one, no doubt, who had traveled with them from Theptis.

“What do you want?” Leaf called.

“Want? Want? I want nothing. I’m merely passing through.” The Invisible pointed over his shoulder. “You can see the whole thing from the top of this hill. Your big friend put up a mighty struggle, he killed many of them, but the darts, the darts —” The Invisible laughed. “He was dying, but even so he wasn’t going to let them have his wagon. Such a stubborn man. Such a foolish man. Well, a happy journey to you both.”

“Don’t leave yet!” Leaf cried. But even the outlines of the Invisible were fading. Only the laughter remained, and then that too was gone. Leaf threw desperate questions into the air and, receiving no replies, turned and rushed up the hillside, clawing at the thick shrubbery. In ten minutes he was at the summit, and stood gasping and panting, looking back across a precipitous valley to the stretch of road they had just traversed. He could see everything clearly from here: the Tree Companion village nestling in the forest, the highway, the shacks by the side of the road, the wall, the clearing beyond the wall. And the wagon. The roof was gone and the sides had tumbled outward. Bright spears of flame shot high, and a black, billowing cloud of smoke stained the air. Leaf stood watching Crown’s pyre a long while before returning to Shadow.

They descended toward the place where the Snow Hunters had made their camp. Breaking a long silence, Shadow said, “There must once have been a time when the world was different, when all people were of the same kind, and everyone lived in peace. A golden age, long gone. How did things change, Leaf? How did we bring this upon ourselves?”

“Nothing has changed,” Leaf said, “except the look of our bodies. Inside we’re the same. There never was any golden age.”

“There were no Teeth, once.”

“There were always Teeth, under one name or another. True peace never lasted long. Greed and hatred always existed.”

“Do you believe that, truly?”

“I do. I believe that mankind is mankind, all of us the same whatever our shape, and such changes as come upon us are trifles, and the best we can ever do is find such happiness for ourselves as we can, however dark the times.”

“These are darker times than most, Leaf.”

“Perhaps.”

“These are evil times. The end of all things approaches.”

Leaf smiled. “Let it come. These are the times we were meant to live in, and no asking why, and no use longing for easier times. Pain ends when acceptance begins. This is what we have now. We make the best of it. This is the road we travel. Day by day we lose what was never ours, day by day we slip closer to the All-Is-One, and nothing matters, Shadow, nothing except learning to accept what comes. Yes?”

“Yes,” she said. “How far is it to the Middle River?”

“Another few days.”

“And from there to your kinsmen by the Inland Sea?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “However long it takes us is however long it will take. Are you very tired?”

“Not as tired as I thought I’d be.”

“It isn’t far to the Snow Hunters’ camp. We’ll sleep well tonight.”

“Crown,” she said. “Sting.”

“What about them?”

“They also sleep.”

“In the All-Is-One,” Leaf said. “Beyond all trouble. Beyond all pain.”

“And that beautiful wagon is a charred ruin!”

“If only Crown had had the grace to surrender it freely, once he knew he was dying. But then he wouldn’t have been Crown, would he? Poor Crown. Poor crazy Crown.” There was a stirring ahead, suddenly. “Look. The Snow Hunters see us. There’s Sky. Blade.” Leaf waved at them and shouted. Sky waved back, and Blade, and a few of the others. “May we camp with you tonight?” Leaf called. Sky answered something, but his words were blown away by the wind. He sounded friendly, Leaf thought. He sounded friendly. “Come,” Leaf said, and he and Shadow hurried down the slope.