Warlock. Part 8

Shaker Sandow sat down on the cool carpet of ferns before Richter, looked around at the verdant landscape. 'A geographic impossibility, wouldn't you say?' he asked.

Richter noticed how the old Shaker's fatigue seemed to have disappeared. Out of the mountains and the cold, finally in the east where knowledge waited, Sandow was almost young again. 'I hadn't noticed,' he said.

'Here we are but a short distance from the frost line of the Cloud Range, from a climate of snow and wind and ice. Less than half a day's travel, even by foot. And yet we find ourselves in a tropical world of palm trees and what appear to be orchids. I have only seen pictures in old books and stories about the flowers of the Salamanthe Islands, but I would say this is much like the land about the equator: humid, heavily grown, with its own breed of animals and insects. Geographically, such a closeness of opposite climes is impossible.'

'Yet it's here,' Richter pointed out.

'Aye, and I've been attempting to discover why.'

'And what have you found?'

In the jungle, strange birds called in ululating lullabies to each other while others squealed atonally and rustled in the high branches.

Sandow placed the palm of his hand against the earth after brus.h.i.+ng away the ferns that obscured it. Richter followed suit, looked perplexed a moment. 'It feels warm. But should that be unusual in a warm place such as this?'

'It is unusual,' Sandow said, 'when you compare it to the earth only ten feet farther on-there where nothing grows but a few mutant ferns that haven't adapted.'

'What is the difference?' Richter asked.

'There,' Sandow said, 'the earth is cool, almost chilly. I traced the temperature change and found a precise line where the warmth ceases altogether and where the cold begins. There is no melding s.p.a.ce at all.'

'And what do you make of that?' the commander asked, genuinely interested.

Almost too interested, Sandow thought, in such a minor mystery as this. To the Shaker, the old officer's motives were plainly obvious. In his desperation to forget the dead they had left behind them-the slit-throat boys buried in the snow and all the others back to Stanton's Inn where it had begun-Richter grasped at any diversion in order to remove the memories from the fore of his mind. It was a standard method of overcoming grief, of forgetting tragedy. If it should continue more than a day or two, however, it could swiftly become a psychosis that would endanger all the men in the expedition; Richter needed to be awake and alert with no regrets and no sorrows to dull the edge of his normally sharp mind.

'It seems to me,' Sandow said, turning his thoughts again to the earth and the jungle, 'that there is a heat source of some kind beneath the ground here which supports the tropical plants and animals, even through the winter months-though the top-most branches of the trees probably get frostbitten, wilt and die.'

'Artificial?' Richter asked.

'Perhaps. Or maybe natural conditions. One mystery would be as great as the other.'

'Do you think it would be of interest to us to attempt to unearth this heat source?' Richter asked, brus.h.i.+ng at the rich, black soil beneath the ferns.

'Even if it were possible,' Sandow said, 'I doubt that it would be worth our time. It was just an incongruity which I thought would-'

At that moment, the Squealer keeper, Fremlin, approached them and interrupted the quiet conversation. He looked keyed-up, his eyes bright, and his slim but powerful hands busy in each other, his fingers locking and unlocking, pulling at one another with his overabundance of nervous energy.

'Yes, Fremlin?' the commander asked.

'The Squealers, sir. I've already eaten, and I've had time to speak with them, to give them their orders. Do you think I could turn them loose now and set them about their work?'

'I suppose they're anxious, eh?'

'Aye, that they are, Commander. They're cursing at me with some of the words they've learned off the men, because they want to be gone.'

'Very well,' Richter said.

'Thank you, sir!' Fremlin said, turning and walking off toward the cages where the four black mites waited, making strange, low chortling sounds among themselves.

'Wait there!' Shaker Sandow called to the fair, well-muscled bird master. 'Could I come along to watch?'

Fremlin was glad for an audience and nodded approval as he continued on toward the birds.

At the cages, the Squealer master knelt and cooed to his charges in soft, pleasant tones that reminded the Shaker of wind blowing against the open ends of bottles or of long, hollow pipes.

'How many will you send?' he asked Fremlin.

'Just two,' Fremlin replied. 'I never risk them all at once. Besides, two will do sufficiently.'

He opened the wicker cage to his left, and the two black creatures hopped out, scratched at the earth with their three-toed feet, fluffed their feathers and shook themselves, as if getting accustomed to the world outside the cage. At some unseen and unheard direction from their master, they leaped onto his arms, one perched on each wrist, and clung there as he turned to the jungle and issued some last word of advice. Then they were gone in a flapping, brilliant display of smooth aerodynamics, up, up and over the roof of the rain forest, away from the eyes of the men below.

Fremlin watched even after there was nothing to see, then returned to the two birds in the other cage and spoke with them, consoling them for the necessity of sending only two and not all four.

When he came to the Shaker, he said, 'They hate the cages. It worries my heart to keep them there. Yet they were safer there in the mountains than they would have been on their own in those turbulent high alt.i.tude air streams. And down here! Well, who knows what sort of predator might lurk in those trees? Again, the cage is better. At home, beyond the Banibals in the Darklands, I let them fly loose by the cliffs, along the sea, and that makes them ever so much happier.'

'What will those two do now that you've released them?' Sandow asked.

'The commander wants to know how far the jungle extends to the north, how long it will offer cover to our march. They'll fly over the top of the trees, unless it seems to be too long a stretch. If they do not see some sort of end to it in short order, they'll fly high enough to look down and make an estimate of its size. Higher than we were when we came out of the mists on the Cloud Range.'

'May I stay to hear them speak of it when they return?' The Shaker had spent some time with Fremlin and the birds on the first leg of the trek, hoping the creatures would get to know him and trust him.

'I think so,' Fremlin said. 'But we'll see for certain when they come back. I cannot always tell when they are ready to give their confidence to a stranger.'

The two dark mites returned in short order, not fifteen minutes after their release. 'Which means,' Fremlin said as they soared in toward him, 'that they could have been back in five minutes. After being cooped as they were, they surely took an extra ten minutes of flight just for the joy of it.' They settled on his arms with the grace and gentleness of two tufts of cotton, pecked at their s.h.i.+ny feathers with their red and orange beaks, their crimson face swaths seeming to ripple as some hidden muscles did some unknown work beneath.

'Will you speak before the Shaker?' he asked them.

Both birds c.o.c.ked their heads toward Sandow, examined him with small, coal-dust eyes.

'I am a friend,' Sandow said.

'Weeewill, weeewill,' the Squealers affirmed in a whining imitation of English. 'Heees good freeend of feethered peepoleee!'

'Tell me then,' Fremlin said, nuzzling them with his face, like another man might nuzzle his lover's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The creatures began a warbling, high-pitched conversation, sometimes speaking at once, sometimes one at a time. Their language was composed of trills and ripples, ascensions of the musical scale that stung the ear with their abruptness, descents of the same scale that sounded like the dying cries of animals.

Sandow could see why they had come to be known as Squealers. If one did not listen closely to the fantastic intricacy of the sounds they made, one might only hear a high-pitched squeal that sometimes rose and fell but was no more than the dumb sonorous cry of an animal. But it was not dumb. The intricacy, the complex arrangements of sounds, gave indication of a language every bit as complicated as the one the Shaker spoke or the one the Salamanthe Island people spoke. Perhaps even more complicated, since the combinations of the sounds were not the only things which gave meaning to what was said. As Fremlin had told him, the musical key in which a word was spoken by the Squealers was indication of an altogether different meaning for that word, so that they had a grammar not only of syllables, but of tones.

In time, the birds ceased their discourse and returned to pecking at themselves and to cooing quietly to each other and to the other pair of flyers which had been restrained all this while in their cage.

'Quite a strange report,' Fremlin said, his brow furrowed.

'How so?'

'They say the jungle is a perfect circle,' Fremlin said.

'Perfect? Have they any conception of that word's meaning in our language?'

'Yes, Shaker. Of course, they speak in generalizations when they use it now. But what they mean is that this jungle before us is, to the eye, as perfect a circle as you or I could imagine. Their sight is far more critical than ours.'

Sandow's heart beat a little faster, and his spine was swept its length with a s.h.i.+vering sense of expectancy. Ahead lay the unknown and the keys to unlock all these secret places. 'It fits with what I said to the commander just before you came to us a while ago. This jungle, I am convinced, is artificially contained. For what purpose and by whom, I cannot guess. But this report from your feathered charges goes a long way toward proving my suppositions.'

'There's more yet,' Fremlin said.

The birds chortled.

'They speak of a part of the jungle which is crystalized. They speak of trees with leaves like lacy sugar works, with boles like compacted diamonds. They speak of plants the color and the texture of crushed rubies and emeralds. They say the jungle has a diameter of five miles and that the northern mile and a half is all constructed of the most marvelous gems we might wish to see.'

'They do not lie?' Sandow asked.

Fremlin looked hurt.

'Forgive, please,' Sandow said. 'I am foolish. Of course they do not lie. What would they have to gain from it? But we must get this information to the commander. And we must get moving. I want to see this marvel by this day's light and not by tomorrow's sun!'

16.

They progressed in an odd and ungainly manner, though none of the trouble they put themselves to was wasted. Rather than use their two machetes immediately and hack their way into the dark heart of the rain forest, they split into five groups and paralleled each other with six feet between the lines. They climbed over the snaking boles that wound across the fertile earth, wriggled through patches of dense ferns and s.n.a.t.c.hing, semi-sentient vines whose green tendrils more than once ensnared a man beyond the point where he could struggle free on his own. They helped one another, moved some thousand feet from the jungle's edge only with a great deal of effort. There, Richter called them together into one group, where they formed a single line and began using the machetes, clearing a path before them. But when they had gone only another thousand feet, the old officer ordered the original five lines formed again, and again they moved out without leaving much if any trail behind them. Even if trackers picked up their path a thousand feet into the forest, they would not be able to follow it and swiftly overtake the Darklands unit.

Once, when Richter was considering abandoning this tack and moving the rest of the way as one group, behind a single cleared trail, his decision to be careful was reinforced by the flickering sound of something huge and powerful as it made its way over the heavily thatched roof of palms above them.

Everyone stopped, listening. Faces paled, and hands went to daggers.

'It must be one of the aircraft,' Richter said, calling back the lines of frightened men. 'The ones our spies have told us circle round the castle keep of Jerry Matabain.'

'Tis not something that should be in the skies!' one of the men said, shuddering.

'Wrong,' Shaker Sandow called. 'It was made for the skies. The skies are exactly where it belongs. In the days before the Blank, there were thousands of such vehicles in the heavens, and any one of us-or all of us-might have owned one for traveling.'

Fear was replaced, to a small degree, by awe. Then the noise was gone, and there was nothing to do but advance toward the region of the crystal trees.

Slowly, the landscape around them seemed to change. The trees and the plants seemed filmed with something misty which refracted the light and made them glitter. A hand drawn over the leaves, though, felt nothing amiss. Step-by-step, the mist became heavier until, in scattered spots, small, sprouting cl.u.s.ters of jewels seemed to grow directly from the trees, like thumb-sized mushrooms.

The men broke them off, examined them as they marched, stuffed their pockets full of them.

'Could they be real jewels?' Daborot asked the Shaker, turning around from his place before the magician to show a fungus of rubies.

'Perhaps,' the Shaker said. 'I am no expert of such things. But even if they are priceless, why stuff your clothes with them here? So the birds say, there are more and better wonders ahead.'

'Just the same,' Daborot said, his broad face flushed and beaded with sweat, 'I'll keep 'em. Being so recently near death, the nice things in life seem all the nicer. You know?'

'Indeed,' the Shaker said.

Soon, the sound of their feet on the trail rose differently to their ears, with a grinding noise that echoed for a short way through the jungle before the heavy growth impeded all sound and returned silence to them. It was as if they were walking on ground gla.s.s, on a thousand shattered store windows. Commander Richter called a halt, and they fell to examining what lay beneath the cut ferns over which they had been moving. When the tight undergrowth was pulled back far enough, they could see that, rather than soil, the land was composed of a powder of diamonds, glittering with all the colors of the spectrum.

'What do you make of it, Shaker?' Richter called, holding up a handful of the powdery soil and letting it flow brilliantly through his hand.

'I think, at one time, the crystal disease-if disease it was-reached this part of the forest, though it did not attack the larger growths. Whether for reasons of its innate nature or because it was losing potency, I could not say. For a while, however, it crystallized the ferns, the smaller and simpler forms of plant life. And then it lost its hold and real ferns returned, crumbling the diamond plants beneath them.'

'Why don't we just load up on this stuff and return to Darklands?' Crowler asked. 'We wouldn't have to fight Oragonia then; we could buy the whole d.a.m.ned country!'

'Aye, return and find we've carried nothing but ground gla.s.s across the Cloud Range and the Banibals!' someone said, and the laughter at Crowler's remark ceased.

'What about it, Shaker?' Richter asked. 'Real gems or gla.s.s we walk upon?'

'Real,' Fremlin said before the Shaker could make testament to his ignorance on the subject 'And how would you know?' Richter asked.

'I have some small interest in stones myself, Comander,' the Squealer master said. 'My brother is a jeweler in Dunsamora, back home. I've spent time with him, learning the trade. When I get too old for scaling mountains, perhaps I'll take my birds and open some jewelry shop somewhere.'

'Aye,' Crowler said, 'and have them flit around and steal your wares for you. A smart way to build an inventory!'

Shaker Sandow desperately wanted to cease this conversation-or at least to finish it as they walked. But he could see the salutory effect this jocularity had upon them, and he was not going to be the one to break the first mood of optimism to pa.s.s through the ranks since they had left Perdune. All of them needed to laugh. Even he and Mace and Gregor. But the sun was going to be behind the mountains soon, and the forests of diamond trees lay so close ahead!

'But real, then?' Richter asked Fremlin.

'Yes, real. Or as near as couldn't tell the difference. But real I think.'

'Hear this, then,' Richter said, sweeping the men with steady, clear eyes. 'I will permit every man to pack upon his person the equivalent of two pounds of the gem stones, though no more than that. This has been a h.e.l.lish journey, and the very least that all of you deserve is a moderate wealth upon our return to the Darklands!'

There was a rousing cheer delivered there, hands raised in the fisted salute of appreciation for their master. The troops were positively beaming with good humor.

'But mind you: no more than two pounds. For one thing, a great abundance of gems in the Darklands will only bring the prices down. For another, climbing back across the Cloud Range and then the Banibals will be task enough-without a huge burden of diamonds and emeralds on each man's shoulders.'

'Aye, but maybe we are destined to return home by air!' Crowler said, his tone not argumentive, only friendly. He was acting as a bit of comic relief, and he knew it.

The men cheered that thought.

'And maybe not,' Richter said, acting as the balancing force of sobriety.

Whether or not they have planned this act and used it before, they are excellent at it, the Shaker thought. One works to raise the men's spirits while the other works to dampen them just enough to add caution to their good nature.

'In any event,' Commander Richter said, 'two pounds and not a stone more. But I would also advise you that you wait until we find this place which the birds have reported, for there may be higher quality gems to be found.'

In agreement, men began emptying their pockets of the treasures they had stored there, and they picked up the pace of the march again-faster and more jubilant than ever.

The trees around them were shot through with strips of bright jewels, like veins of coal or gold striking through earth, beveled and fractured, casting back amber here like the rustling silk of heavy curtains! here crimson as bright as blood! here blue like deep waters! here blue like a high morning sky! now and then catching their images, casting them back in multi-faceted fantasies! cold to the touch of a hand, cloyding with the evaporation of perspiration from the offending fles.h.!.+ here orange and s.h.i.+mmering with the stinging beams of filtered sunlight stabbing through the canopy of palm fronds! singing with a clear bell note when snapped with the nail of a finger! here green, casting back the colors of the forest that were not affected with the jewel disease!

'Soon now,' Daborot said, turning to the Shaker, his broad face alight.