Wizards At War

But it was afraid. It was in absolute terror. It was holding itself still in utter dread, frightened to speak to Nita, frightened to do anything at all. It was afraid of something far worse than the merely physical destruction Nita had seen. Finally she took her hand away and moved off, rubbing the hand nervously, as if the tree’s anguish was something that could cling to her like sweat.

What? Kit said, catching some leakage of what she felt.

It reminds me of the way the trees were in the Central Park in that other Manhattan, she said, when we were out on Ordeal. That same kind of dumb fear. They wouldn’t respond to the Speech.

Come on.

Softly they made their way closer to the long lines of dark creatures weaving their way among the tree-trunks. Nita could just barely hear the soft footsteps of the others around her, and the slight rustling noise that Sker’ret and Filif made when they moved. She came up behind one particularly large tree and, without touching it, peered around it at the twisting pathway running between it and other large trees a few yards away.

Her nose wrinkled at the strange smell that hung in the air. It’s almost like coffee, Nita thought, as one of the shadowy shapes came around the huge tree that blocked the pathway, but more bitter, a little burnt, as if it—

One of the shapes came around the tree and drifted toward her, almost without a sound—and Nita lost the thread of her thought completely, utterly shocked. A great, shining, dark-glossed almond-shaped body, held up at a diagonal on legs that were longer at the front than in the back; eight black legs, jointed three times each, the back edges of them razor-sharp; up high, a blunt wedge of a head with great dark mirror-shade eyes. Huge claws, hinged at the front top of the body shell, even sharper than the legs, held the squirming, dripping branches torn from some tree.

Nita stood frozen as the creature walked delicately past her. A few seconds later another one passed, and another, in what seemed an endless line. They came in all sizes, but even the smallest of them was the size of a big car. The larger ones, the creatures with the longest claws and heaviest armor, were more the size of vans or small trucks. They went on along the path, some of them making a low soft hum as they went, three or four notes repeated one after another. They weren’t words; if they were, Nita would have been able to understand them as Speech. Unnerved, Nita began to back away very slowly and softly as the long parade continued. The image from her dream was on her mind now: Della’s expression suddenly buried behind a glossy unrevealing eye, a claw coming up to brush blond hair away. Whatever it means, I have to find out.

At last the final dark-shelled creature went past Nita and out of sight beyond the trees down the path. Nita let out a long breath of relief, but couldn’t get rid of the profound unease that had been troubling her since she first touched the tree. There’s something really bad going on here, she thought. And we don’t have much time to find out what.

Without warning, from behind her she heard a different kind of humming sound, getting louder by the second. Nita turned quickly to see what was making it—

She had just time enough to jump back as a claw huger than any of the ones on the parading creatures came snapping straight at her face. She jumped back again in shock, grabbing for her charm bracelet, and the creature followed, snapping at her again. It sees me! But how?