For forest it was, if one judged that term applied to growths that arose vertically into the air from grounded roots, spread branches, grouped closely together. But this was a forest of branching, glittering crystals. No leaves rustled here, no color save the rainbow flickers that twinkled and sparkled in the moonlight. It was as if ice had chosen to reproduce trees and had succeeded in part.
The beam pulled them on, downslope, into that place of cold and deadly beauty. Because deadly it was. Ayyar memory in Naill brought fear, the terror known when a man faces something far greater than himself as an enemy—not personally, but to all his species. As early men of the Terran breed had feared the dark and what might walk in that blackness their eyes could not pierce, so did the Iftin-born hold an age-old aversion to stark light and what could dwell comfortably in its glare. But Naill and Ashla had no choice—there was no breaking that invisible pull between them and the space suit stalking forward, towing them as a man might tow a recalcitrant hound.
As they were drawn over the lip, down into that place of white light, the wytes no longer dogged them. Perhaps they, too, found this a place of terror.
Naill’s boots crunched on a surface that gave in brittle fashion beneath his weight. He glanced down, saw that there was a trail of broken crystals powdered into sparkling dust. The ponderous footfalls of the suited guard were clearly marked, lying over other tracks—perhaps many of them.
Now there was another sound or sounds—a tinkling, coming from the growths or pillars making up the forest. As they drew closer, Naill could see that those horizontally branching shafts stood tall, not with the overwhelming height of the tree towers of Iftcan, but tall indeed compared to his own inches.
“The White Forest,” Ashla repeated. “Tall it grows, straight it stands.” Her voice held the queer singing note which Naill had come to associate with Illylle speaking through changeling lips. “But it is not real—it does not live. . . . Therefore—it is not!”
What she meant he did not understand, but oddly enough her denial of what they could both see was a lift to his spirits.
“Built—grown by a will,” she continued. “It lives by a will, it will die by a will. But this will cannot make another Iftcan, no matter how it tries.”
They had passed under the wide, stiffly held branches of the first “tree,” and her words returned as faint, whispering echoes. The chiming tinkle grew stronger, a hiss of answering anger.
Ashla laughed. Her hand lifted to point a slim green finger at the next tree.
“Grow leaves—but you cannot! Nourish life—but you cannot! Shade the traveler—but you cannot! Feed with your fruits—but you cannot! Bend to the storm—but you cannot! Forest which is no true forest—beware the life, the storm, that which you have not . . .” Her voice sank again, and once more her hand reached for and clasped Naill’s.
“Why did I say that?” she asked. “If I could only hold the old knowledge in my head as you hold the sword in your hand—then perhaps together we might follow the path of Kymon and—and . . . ” She shook her head. “Even the manner of the triumph of Kymon is lost to me now. Only, I tell you, Naill-Ayyar, that had we the old knowledge we could fight. There is a secret that slips through my memory when I would have it forth. . . . Always it is just gone from me. This is a place of Power, but not the Power of Iftcan—and therefore one Power might be ranged against the other, had we only the proper key.”
The hissing tinkle of the forest waxed stronger, making an odd rustling which lapped them about. But there was no change in the pace of the suit, drawing them after it in the grip of the ray-hold.
The faint path, which had wound down the slope, now led in a curling curve among the boles of the crystal trees, while the moonlight reflected and re-reflected on glittering nobs and surfaces confused and bewildered. If the lesser light of the moon proved so formidable, what would sunlight make of this mirror-trunked forest?
There was no evidence of any native life. As Ashla had accused, this was a dead place, dead without ever having held life as they knew it.
“Does Illylle remember this?” Naill appealed to the girl by his side.
“A little—far too little.”
“Any idea where we may be going?” he persisted.
“No—save that it will be a place where there is peril, for this is the opposite of that which dwells in the Mirror—it balances this against that as a harvest is weighed on the Speaker’s scales.”
The ground still sloped down. Naill had not been able to judge during their short halt on the rim of the valley how large a territory the crystal structures covered. Perhaps whatever controlled the space-suited sentry, the wytes—the flying thing—lay in the very heart of this land.
Naill’s mouth was dry; his ankle ached dully as did his arm. And he knew that Ashla must be as hungry, tired, and thirsty as he was. Food, water, a chance to rest—they needed those badly, might need them more before this journey came to an end.
Above their heads the crystal branches wove a crisscross net shutting out the night sky. They were capped over by an icy cover. Could they some way mark a trail against a possible retreat?
Naill was shocked out of that speculation by Ashla’s fingers biting deep into his flesh in a convulsive grip. Startled, he looked around, but her eyes were not for him. Her gaze was fixed on a tree ahead and to the left.
“Look!” The merest whisper directed him.
Naill obeyed. By some trick of the reflecting surfaces there was a mirror of sorts. And pictured on it . . .
At first he thought that greenish figure was himself—or Ashla. Then he knew that at such an angle their own reflection would be impossible. No—that was an Ift, but a stranger! Who? And where?
They were pulled ahead two steps and that shadow image was gone, vanished as if it had never been at all. But they were left with the knowledge that they were not alone in this glittering prison.
If what or whoever walked in the space suit had seen that momentary reflection, there was no hint of it, no pause in the steady pace it set. Almost Naill could persuade himself that he had seen nothing either, but Ashla held to its reality.
“An Ift—one of us,” she told him softly. “Another prisoner.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because—an Ift in the White Forest could only be a prisoner. To us this place is death!”
Their captor crunched on, and the invisible tow cord on which he held both of them continued its unrelenting pull. The ground now leveled out. They must be at the foot of the valley wall, close to its heart and whatever secret it did hold. Here the crystal trees stood very tall, approaching the lower “towers” of Iftcan in size. And for much of their length their trunks were unbroken by branches. Those bare limbs existed close to their crowns, forming a roof overhead, but leaving much space underneath.
Abruptly the prisoners were at the head of a stairway, much like the stairs that had led up to the mountain-cupped Mirror, but which here reached downward into a second valley or crevice bitten sharply into the earth, as if some giant warrior had struck with a sword blade to divide a furrow in soft and yielding soil. Yet here was no soil . . . the ground itself had a glassy glaze that struck back at their eyes with punishing light.
Naill surveyed that stair with foreboding. The acute angle of descent would tax a strong man. He doubted if the two of them could make it now. For the first time since it had taken them captive and turned to march into this wilderness, the space-suited leader made a move other than just walking. Its metal-mittened hands rose to chest level. It lazily cast from it another beam disk.
Ashla screamed and Naill shouted. They were whipped after that spinning disk, their feet skidding and slipping on the slick surface of that glassy verge, pulled on out into the air above the crevice—with no hope of escape.
But a swift plunge to ghastly oblivion did not follow as Naill expected. Though their feet had left the surface of the ground and they lay extended forward on what he would swear was air alone, they were not falling—they were floating, as a man might in the free fall of a spaceship, descending into the gulf, that was true, but not at a speed to crush them when they met the surface below.