“You use this word, ‘demon,’” he said at last. “What do you even mean by it?”
Lyn frowned at him. It hardly seemed her place to lesson a sorcerer in such things. “Surely you . . .”
“You remember the broken worker we met in the mountains?”
“That yet follows you.”
“I’ve told it to sleep, to go away, but the part of it that should obey such words is flawed.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t call it a ‘demon’？”
“No.” Obviously, but apparently not to him.
“And the servants that Ulmoth suborned, when Astresse and I went against him, not demons?”
“Monsters.”
“A distinct word, unrelated in origin,” he noted, as though to himself. “So what is a demon, then? What has everyone recognised, in this thing we face?”
“Something from outside.” She felt he must be testing her. “Something that is not part of the world, and that wishes us harm.”
“Outside,” again more to himself than her, and then waved his fingers at the night sky. “Up there?”
“No, outside,” and she had the curious feeling that now it was he, the Elder, failing to understand her.
*
The next morning she was awakened by Allwer’s yell. He had taken the last watch, and the dawn had brought more than just daylight down through the branches.
Lyn had her sword out before she made any decision about it, leaping up and swinging the point at the gaps between the trees. Her dreams had been full of demon-taint anyway, familiar faces and places disfigured by that scaly, eye-pocked growth. Now she expected a staggering host of the merged and the eaten-away, the malformed and the unrecognisable to be emerging all around the clearing.
There was just one visitor, though, and if it was not exactly welcome, nor was it demon touched. Nyrgoth had called down the monstrous flying servant.
The first rays of the dawn touched its metal hide as it swung ponderously towards them through the air. The rings that were its wings, each wide enough that Lyn could have fallen lengthways through them, rattled the branches, sending a fine dust springing away from them. It had lost a leg since last they saw it, and its carapace bore shiny scars from who knew what encounters. It was still a fearsome sight so close, though. Nyrgoth stood before it, one hand up and his fingers seeming to signal and govern its descent. The three of them watched him silently, there in the monster’s shadow and yet undaunted. Lyn thought about what he’d said, how the creature was left over from the distant past. It had been a magician’s servant, and now it had no master and so it shadowed Nyrgoth, hoping he would instruct it.
He spoke to it in words none of them knew, sometimes commanding, sometimes questioning. It had no voice of its own, but his manner suggested that satisfactory answers came to him somehow, and at last it rose unsteadily into the air, veered abruptly sideways to rip and scrabble against a tree, tearing up the outer layers so that the sap jetted out in a mist, and then returned to the air, ascending until it was only a shape again.
“It will wait on,” Nyrgoth said. “There is not much life left in it. Its strength dwindled over the centuries it slept. And I fear what might happen if this infection is capable of touching it. Best it keeps its distance for now.”
“But you have a plan,” Lyn finished for him, and his face twitched and a very small smile came to it.
“Some thoughts.”
“Will it fight the demon for us?”
“Let us first see the demon.”
*
Allwer reckoned they would see Farbourand before the end of the day, even with their slower rate of progress. The forest around them was becoming more infested with the demon-mark, meaning they had to go out of their way to avoid the worst thickets of it. Lyn had expected them to simply meet more and more corruption as they progressed, but the mark was in patches, spread out through the forest. Whole stands of trees were furred over with thick coats of leaf-like scales, glittering with malign scrutiny and bristling with lazily waving feelers. Often there were animals caught within the mesh, no hard division between them and the branches and trunks. Their bodies pulsed and twitched, but then so did the trees themselves. Some gluts of infection were in constant motion, the actual boles of the trees twining about themselves like slow, anxious fingers, the roots rippling to slowly drag whole vast assemblages through the forest, leaving a churned trail of devastation behind them.
One such interconnected knot of trees had a human being within it. They came to it by the screaming. She—Lyn’s best guess—was partly within two trunks, as though she had hidden there before the corruption had overtaken her. Now there was only the shape to show that there had been an extra body tucked into the clump of trees. The plants themselves were stretching farther apart, then back together, with a rhythm uncomfortably like breathing, and the human form stretched to bone-popping dimensions with each convulsion. The scream came with the expansion, ripping out of the scale-fringed hole in the otherwise featureless face.