Ben looked again. He saw nothing different, but he nodded as if he did anyway. “Sure — just a trick with magic to scare us off.” He took a deep breath. He was calm again. “Want to know something, Willow? It works pretty well.”
He gave her a quick smile. “How is it that you aren’t fooled?” She smiled a pixie grin back. “The fairy in me senses such tricks.”
They continued their descent toward the hollows floor. Fillip and Sot seemed unbothered by the illusion. That was probably because their eyesight was so poor that they were unaware of the illusion, Ben decided. Sometimes ignorance was bliss.
They reached the hollows floor and paused. The tangle of the wilderness spread away before them, seemingly endless. Gnarled trunks and limbs twisted like spiders’ webs against the ceiling of mist, vines clung like snakes, and brush choked on itself in thick tangles. The earth was damp and yielding.
Fillip and Sot sniffed the air a moment, then started forward. Ben and Willow followed. They pushed ahead through the wilderness, finding paths where it seemed there could be none. The hollows wall disappeared behind them and the jungle closed about. It was eerily still. They neither saw nor heard another living thing. No animals called, no birds flew, no insects hummed. The light was weak, sunlight screened into a dim gray haze by the clouds of mist. Shadows lay over everything. There was a sense of having been swallowed whole. There was a feeling of having been snared.
They had not gone far when they encountered the lizards.
They were at the edge of a deep ravine and about to start down when Ben saw movement at the bottom. He brought the others to a hurried halt and peered cautiously into the shadows. Dozens of lizards clustered together in the pit of the ravine, their scaled, greenish black bodies slithering across one another, their wicked-looking tongues flicking at the misted air. They were all sizes, some as large as alligators, some as small as frogs. They blocked all passage forward.
Willow took Ben’s hand and smiled. “Another illusion, Ben,” she assured him.
“This way, High Lord,” advised Fillip.
“Come, High Lord,” invited Sot.
They descended into the pit and the lizards disappeared. Ben was sweating again and wishing he didn’t feel like such a fool.
Other illusions awaited them, and Ben was fooled each time. There was a monstrous old ash tree clustered thick with giant bats. There was a stream filled with piranhalike fish. Worst of all, there was the clearing in which vaguely human limbs stretched from the broken earth, clawed fingers grasping at anything that sought to pass through. Each time Willow and the gnomes led him resolutely toward, and the imagined dangers evaporated into the mist.
More than an hour slipped by before they reached the swamp. It was past midday. A vast marsh of reeds and quick-sand stretched across their path for as far as the eye could see. Steam lifted from the marsh, and the quicksand bubbled as if fed by gasses from the earth below.
Ben glanced quickly at Willow. “Illusion?” he asked, already prepared for the answer she would give.
But this time she shook her head. “No, the swamp is real.”
The gnomes were sniffing the air again. Ben glanced out across the swamp. A crow sat on a branch of deadwood halfway across, a large, ugly bird with a streak of white cresting its head. It stared at him with its tiny, dark eyes, and its head cocked reflectively.
Ben glanced away. “What now?” he asked the others.
“There is a trail further on, High Lord,” Fillip answered.
“A pathway across the marsh,” Sot agreed.
They waddled ahead, following the line of the swamp, ferret faces lifted, testing the air with their noses. Ben and Willow trailed slowly after. A hundred feet further on, the gnomes turned into the swamp and proceeded to cross. The swamp looked no different here than anywhere else, but the ground was firm enough to hold them, and they were safely past in a few minutes time. Ben glanced back at the crow.
It was still watching him.