Cahan woke to the dim light of day in Wyrdwood. A light dew had settled upon everything and soaked into his clothes, making him both cold and damp. It was not the cold and damp that had awoken him. Cold and damp was simply part of life. It was Udinny’s snoring that had pulled him from the depths of sleep. He prepared food, dried meat, nuts and berries, while he waited for the monk to wake. Udinny continued to snore so loudly he thought every creature in Wyrdwood must know they were there. With a wave he sent Segur over and the garaur woke her with its rough tongue. The monk’s spluttering and gasping had him turn his head away to hide his amusement.
“Away, cursed creature!” spat the monk, sitting upright. “I was in the midst of an excellent dream where I was the rapt attention of a first-, second- and thirdwife, and the required amount of husbands waited in case they tired.” The garaur whined and cowered down before Udinny, hiding its sharp face beneath small paws. “And two trion,” added the monk. Then Udinny scratched between Segur’s ears. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I cannot blame you for finding my face attractive as well. It is a very fine face.”
“Food, monk,” he told her. She came over and picked up the leaf he had placed her food on.
“Ah,” said Udinny, “feet meat and nuts, I have been looking forward to this.” She began to eat. “Do you think we will find the child today?”
“Today? I hope so,” she looked at him as she shovelled nuts into her mouth with one hand, “we have been catching up with him quickly since we entered Wyrdwood. I think the forest wants us to find him now.”
“It makes me uncomfortable when you talk like that,” said Udinny. The cowl shivered beneath his skin. Did he see a grey figure out of the corner of his eye?
“Best not to think, then,” he told her, threw his empty leaf away and combed fingers through his beard to remove any food that may have been lodged there.
They set off once more. The first part of the journey much the same as the last, trekking onward, avoiding the ever-present orits as they scavenged the forest floor to build their strange towers. Segur took delight in baiting the creatures; the garaur would run up to them, growling and hissing. If they did not react it would bite at their legs until the orit raised itself up on two legs, exposing the pulsing mouthparts and feeding tentacles on the underside of its body, then slammed down the sharp points of its feet. The garaur was never in any danger from them; it was far too quick, and they never followed it when it ran away.
It was also never foolish enough to bother the larger, protector orits. Nevertheless, Cahan forbade the game and Segur chose to go and sit around the neck of Udinny, occasionally giving him baleful looks from its big brown eyes.
“Light!” said Udinny, pointing ahead at a faint glow. As they approached it became almost blinding. Their eyes had become used to Wyrdwood gloom.
A clearing, far ahead of them, where at some distant point in time one of the forest gods had fallen. Cahan could not imagine the violence of such a thing. When a tree is so tall it took you most of the morning to walk around the base came down, the destruction and noise of its fall must be apocalyptic. The fallen cloudtree was long gone. It had probably come down many generations ago and was no longer even a memory. Certainly, Harn no longer showed any profit from it. As far as he knew, once a cloudtree fell it was gone forever; nothing ever grew in its place and he had never heard of anyone seeing a cloudtree sapling. There was something melancholy in that, to know even these gods of the forest may die.
He squinted as he approached the bright clearing. A meadow had sprung up where the tree had once been. Long grass swayed in the breeze and the temperature dropped now they were no longer insulated by the cloudtree canopy.
“Ranya bless me, but I have missed the light above,” said Udinny, raising her face to bask in the brightness and reaching out to grasp a handful of grass. “It is good to be between land and sky once more.”
“Come, monk,” said Cahan, “and keep watch, the grasslands of Wyrdwood are dangerous places.”
“Is any place here not dangerous, Cahan?”
“No, monk, it is all dangerous.”
“And what horrors await us here?”
“Swarden, among other things.” Her eyes widened and she hurried after him.
“I have heard tell of swarden,” said Udinny, staring across the grassland, “and hope you will say they are ‘not really dangerous’, like the orits.”
“No,” he said. “If we see swarden we hide in the grass until they are gone. They are not like the orits, not at all.”
“What are they like, then?” said Udinny, hurrying to keep up.
“Something other, something unnatural.” He grasped his staff more firmly and they carried on walking until Udinny pointed out a shape rising from the grasslands ahead. The monk had sharp eyes. What rose from the grass was not unlike the towers of the orits, but it was built from branches and bits of wood and bush rather than chewed-up matter. It resembled a spire of the spire cities in its shape. A central tower that was tall, maybe as tall as five people, and he thought there must be a good view from the top, though no one in their right mind would climb it. There was nothing of it that spoke of permanence or skill in the building. Around it a ring of smaller towers, half built and seemingly forgotten midway through construction.
He pulled Udinny to a stop. It looked like something moved on the structure.
“Down,” he said quietly. “That is a swarden tower, they do not put up with intruders. We will use the grass to mask our passage and go as far around as we can.” The monk nodded, her face drawn and worried-looking. He no doubt wore a similar expression.
He had seen swarden in action once; he did not want to see it again.
It was backbreaking, to crawl around the tower with their heavy packs. At the halfway point he could see the figures on the tower more clearly, not enough for detail. They were only shapes moving over the scaffold of branches. Unlike people they did not stay upright, but climbed like animals, head facing whichever way they were going, up, down, left or right, and he found it disconcerting, uncomfortable to see. Cahan counted eight swarden. They frightened him but he kept it to himself as they crawled on.
Udinny remained blessedly quiet.
They stopped at a track in the grass, one that had been flattened by the passage of feet, though not the feet of people. Udinny crawled over to him and was about to move through the wall of grass and across the passage when he stopped her. She looked at him and he shook his head.
“Listen,” he said. She frowned. A moment later she heard what he had, a sound like leather clothing squeaking as it rubbed against itself. Rhythmic, coming closer. “Swarden,” he said softly. “We wait here and hope they pass.”
The gradual approach of the swarden was like a growing weight on him. If he closed his eyes he heard the screaming of a warrior he had once seen them capture. Saw them hacking at them, no thought to killing swiftly, their actions mechanical and unthinking. It had taken the warrior a long time to die.
When the swarden came it was in another group of eight, walking in single file. He thought of the swarden as the soldiers of the forest, brought into being for some unknown purposes. Perhaps they, like the reborn, were the work of some long-ago Cowl-Rai. Certainly, the presence of swarden was something he felt as much in his cowl as he saw with his eyes. Some still held swords in their skeletal hands.
“The dead walk,” said Udinny. Terror in her voice. He shook his head for it was not true: the swarden were no reborn who retained what it was that made a person real. They were only remnants, skeletons animated by Wyrdwood. Where people were moved by muscle and flesh, the swarden were moved by forest grasses wrapped around their bone frames. It was the vegetation that made the leathery sound, the squeak of grass against grass as the group of swarden marched past. Moss-clad bone glimpsed through layers of dying greenery. Few of the swarden still had their jawbones, they had been lost long ago. Most were clearly old corpses, the bones browned and splintered with age. One was white-boned. New. That fascinated him; whatever it was that created them was clearly still working.
The line of swarden marched past, the last of them limping and had fallen behind, the grass around its hips frayed and broken. It stopped in front of them, sightless skull moving from side to side. Took a step closer. Cahan covered Udinny’s mouth lest she squeak in fear and give them away. The mouldering skeleton stood, sightless eye sockets looking into the grass, and he found himself holding his breath. The swarden stood there for a long time. Then a bony hand reached out and grasped a handful of long grass, ripped it from the ground and pressed it against its leg. Cahan watched as the grass, like a living creature, wrapped itself around the swarden’s hip and thigh, joining with what was already there. Then it turned and continued on its way, the limp gone. They waited, hidden, his hand clamped around Udinny’s mouth until he was absolutely sure the swarden would not come back.
“Well,” he said quietly, taking his hand from her mouth, “I seem to remember you wished to see swarden, Udinny, are you glad you did?” She nodded, a sheen of sweat across her brow.
“Ranya tells us no experience is ever wasted,” she whispered back. “But at the same time I am not sure it was the best-considered wish I have ever made.”
“I will not disagree,” he said, then glanced down the path of grass. “I think it is safe to continue now.”
When they were far enough from the swarden tower to stand again, the line of dark forest between the huge cloudtrees looking no more than a pace away, such was their size, they stopped. His back ached from constantly being bowed over and his head ached from keeping alert to the possibility of more swarden. Udinny’s face was covered in small bites from the creatures that lived in the grass. No doubt his was the same.
They continued through the meadow, enjoying the light until they re-entered the gloom of Wyrdwood. They walked without incident until late in the second eight when Udinny grabbed him, pulling him to a stop and raising a trembling hand, pointing back the way they had come.
“A giant,” she whispered, “hiding in the bushes at the base of the cloudtree.” He turned, slowly and carefully. Her words may have sounded foolish but in Wyrdwood all was possible. He stared at the cloudtree trunk, a soaring wall of living wood, and at its base he saw Udinny’s giant and smiled.
“Some call rootlings forestmen, Udinny,” he said, “but that is a real Forest Man.” The figure would be, if standing, maybe as tall as three people standing on each other’s shoulders. But it did not stand, it remained slumped where it was as if it had fallen asleep against the vast tree. “It is only a statue,” he said. “Would you like to look at it more closely? It is quite safe.” The monk nodded and they walked over to the Forest Man. Up close it did not appear as much like the people it did from a distance; its carved armour was of an old design, long lost to them. Its face strangely stretched and the beard stylised, in a way that reminded him of the mask that Saradis, Skua-Rai of Zorir, had worn when she was about her official duties. The Forest Man’s hands were odd also, having only two fingers, and those fingers shorter and thicker than looked right.
“Who carved this, all the way out here?” said Udinny, staring up at the Forest Man. “And why?”
“I do not know, nobody does. They are ancient, but there are plenty of them and all different.” He touched the wood of the Forest Man; it was cold. “They are of an older time, from when the spire cities were raised and Iftal ruled in Great Anjiin. Or that is what I was told. Some are so old that the cloudtrees have grown over part of them, and they appear to drown in the wood.” Udinny stared at the statue.
“We should go, Cahan,” she said, “it makes me uncomfortable. People should not be so large.” She shook herself, like Segur after a rain shower, and turned to walk away. “It is unnatural,” she shouted back and he hurried after her before she got too far away, so he could point her in the right direction.
It was not long after they came across the Forest Man that they found the child.