It led him up a rise. He was cresting the top when, on the far side of it, green fire suddenly sparked, and above him the thick forest lit with thrown-off reflections and shadows, everything visible, sharply defined.
He ran over the top just as Waldroup, in a gully ahead and below, traced a diagonal line to the ground, and the line split into two and each half flexed outward until a ring formed. Waldroup laughed, like a child entertained by a simple trick.
The flickering, spitting light made the trees and undergrowth ahead seem to shift and dance. Within the ring, despite the color of the fire, lay a space the color of blood, the same as he’d beheld at Old Melrose. Waldroup tucked away the stone and drew his two knives. He stepped through the opening.
Once inside it he paused, seeming to peer at something distant.
Thomas half expected the circle to close up and seal him off. It would not have surprised him to discover that the stone was speaking to Alpin, inveigling, ensorcelling him all the while it was driving him mad with dreams and visions, duping him into returning it and himself to its homeworld. He waited for the circle to snap shut. But nothing happened, and the opening remained where it hovered in the middle of the forest, as stable and solid as a stone arch.
Looking around himself inside it, Waldroup shook his head as if to say “There’s nothing here,” and then walked on out of sight.
Thomas looped the bow across his torso, right shoulder to left hip, then ran down the slope and sprang through the circle after him.
XIII. Þagalwood
The space is like a tunnel, with creased and puckered sides as reflective as polished bronze but of a much darker red that seems in motion, flowing—or at least appearing to—all around them. It begins where Waldroup has cut the air, as if that cut formed the tunnel, not as if he has cut into something that was already there. Thomas, staring into its depths, remarks to himself, “This goes on for eternity.” Running hard to catch up, he feels as if he’s wading hip-deep through an invisible gelatinous current opposed to him. Finally, he reaches his friend, who turns, startled.
“Tom, what are you doing here?” Waldroup breathes hard. It’s as much a challenge for him to push forward as it is for Thomas. The air seems thick as porridge.
“Did you think I would let you do this on your own?” He glances back at the opening. “Should we leave it like that, do you think?”
“Have to. If we seal it, how will we ever find our way back?”
“The tunnel is right here. It leads to this spot.”
“But you go in deeper and look back, it’ll look like every other tunnel.”
“Every other?”
“There are hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
This is not the first time Waldroup has cut open the night. The blue desert and sky full of moons weren’t just random examples plucked out of the air. For now, though, he says nothing. That’s a discussion for when they are back in their own world. Instead, he comments, “To me this all looks the same as where you carved an opening to send that Yvag home.”
This far in, the tunnel is strange, queasy, as though at every moment as he pushes against the invisible current, he’s about to stumble forward and fall. His grotesque reflection in the surfaces all around distracts, tricks his senses, even seems to move just before he does, anticipating him, as though time is stuttering, letting him get ahead of himself. It causes him almost to tumble forward, and so he tries not to look. Wonders if the tunnel is itself somehow alive.
Focusing instead upon the way ahead, he sees where the pathway vanishes and the blood-drenched tunnel seems to evaporate. He turns around again, looks at the exit, which ought to have dwindled but doesn’t seem to have done—at least it’s not receding as quickly as it should. He lays a hand on Waldroup’s shoulder to slow him down. “It’s as if,” he huffs, “wherever we are, wherever we cut, we always enter . . . the same place.”
Waldroup stops, while his asynchronous reflection still proceeds for an instant. “Believe me, we’re not in the same place.” But he sounds less than certain, and glances at the glittering stone he holds as if afraid to let go of it. “I mean, where’s the dead Yvag I shoved in here, then?”
“That was a long time ago. They surely came and took the body away.”
Waldroup shifts from foot to foot, obviously unable to wait. “We need to go farther. We can’t waste this opportunity.”
“But the ring—” He points back.
“No one can see it. I picked a good place, I know how to choose places where nobody will see.”
Thomas bites back a comment that Alpin has certainly kept all of this from him.
“Come on, we’ll be quick,” he insists and sets off again.
Thomas wants to ask how they can be quick when it takes such effort just to walk forward. He contemplates using his own stone to go back and seal the opening, but Waldroup’s point that they might never find their way out again prevents him. There’s also the niggling prospect that they might open it up and find themselves back at Old Melrose or who knows where. Maybe in a world with four moons and blue sand. Maybe in hell—who can say this isn’t the way into it, bordered by pellucid walls full of swirling blood? Anyway, why should one side of the divide be consistent when the other is not? Nothing is clear except that this is hard going.
He presses on to catch up with his friend again.
The unnatural thickness of the air proves more noticeable the faster he moves. The reflective walls lie just out of reach; when he angles over and stretches toward one, the surface eludes his fingertips, untouchable, as if it has slid away from him so that the tips of his fingers reflect in its surface but never make contact. Struggling that way again, straining, he still cannot lay a hand on the wall. He slips his bow off, ducking his head, and then holds it straight out from his side, even thrusts the bow at the wall that appears to be right beside him. It also contacts nothing, while the tip appears to glide upon the surface. Can the sides be mirrors made of air? Uneasy, he drifts back to the seeming center—or at least to where he is lined up directly behind Waldroup. Securing the bow across his body again, he glances around.
The green circle remains clearly in view, though still not as distant as it should be by now. Something small and dark seems to be moving about in the center of it. What if the Yvag are containing them, hemming them in? Well, he thinks, if so, he and Waldroup are surely done for. There is nowhere they might hide in this strange tunnel, following this hard and narrow path, itself like stone but seamless. Whatever this Ailfion is, they are at its mercy now, and will probably have to fight their way out.
Slowly, the red walls become less substantial, and reflection dulls as if they’re veering away, until it’s nothing but a mist, a sheet of fog hovering in the torpid air. Then slowly that, too, fades, revealing a greater depth, a suggestion of distance and of shapes in the darkness. Then, as if a cloud has drifted from the face of an unseen moon, he and Waldroup find themselves hemmed in by pale and leafless trees like none he has ever seen. They border the path on both sides. Neat rows of them extend away into the blank landscape, as if they were planted in rows, like a crop in a field. Receding into a black distance, the trees might be carved from bone. Patterns of knars and whorls cover their thick, deformed trunks; their branches fan out like enormous, elongated fingers.
As he walks, his position relative to the trees never seems to change—the branches remain in the same place, as if the trees are on spindles, turning while he trudges so as to keep the same side toward him. Again he has the sensation of slogging in place, and a kind of vertigo grips him as he follows the ossuarial branches overhead, where they link right above him as at some knuckle joint with those on the opposite side, forming a tracery vaulting over the path, a parody of every window, ceiling, and door in every church and abbey he’s worked on. So intent is he upon this intricate archway, that he runs straight into Waldroup, who has stopped ahead of him.
“Tom”—the one syllable filled with terror—“where have we come?” However much the ördstone may have enchanted him previously, this skeletal woodland has Waldroup ready to bolt.
“You haven’t come this way before?”
“Never saw nowt like this.”
The nodose deformities on the trunks move then, warping in such a way as to imitate features: contorted eye sockets and distorted mouths, the toothless skulls of antlered giants stretched into tree shapes. All seem to have awakened at the sound of Waldroup’s voice.
A whisper floats to them like a chill rising out of the ground. “Þagalwood.” The word shivers. “Þagalwood. Lonely ones, come.” He makes himself look away from the trees. Way off through the gaps between thousands of branches, something glitters distantly, tiny jewels sparkling. But at this distance, whatever it is must be huge. Is it someone’s bonfire out across some darkling plain? There’s no apparent sun, nothing to throw such a reflection. What can the source of the light be?
Waldroup’s seen it, too. “What—” he starts to say, when from behind them comes a cry.
“Attendere! Attendere, streghe!”
