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Slowly—but still smiling, and that was somehow terrible—Helmsman shook his head. He gave the boy a last fond and lingering look, then poled the ramshackle boat away from solid ground and into the unsteady part of the world that was their home. Tim stood watching it make its slow and stately turn south. When the crew raised their dripping paddles in salute, he waved. He watched them go until the boat was nothing but a phantom waver on the belt of fire laid down by the setting sun. He dashed warm tears from his eyes and restrained (barely) an urge to call them back.
When the boat was gone, he slung his gu
Dark came. At first there was a moon, but its glow was only an untrustworthy glimmer by the time it reached the ground . . . and then that too was gone. There was a path, he was sure of it, but it was easy to wander to one side or the other. The first two times this happened he managed to avoid ru
Now I’ll have to grope around on my hands and knees, and unless I stay here until morning, I’ll still probably miss some of the—
“Would you like a light, traveler?” a woman’s voice asked.
Tim would later tell himself he shouted in surprise—for don’t we all have a tendency to massage our memories so they reflect our better selves?—but the truth was a little balder: he screamed in terror, dropped the disc, bolted to his feet, and was on the verge of taking to his heels (and never mind the trees he might crash into) when the part of him dedicated to survival intervened. If he ran, he would likely never be able to find the food scattered at the edge of the path. Or the disc, which he had promised to protect and bring back undamaged.
It was the disc that spoke.
A ridiculous idea, even a fairy the size of Armaneeta couldn’t fit inside that thin plate of metal . . . but was it any more ridiculous than a boy on his own in the Endless Forest, searching for a mage who had to be long centuries dead? Who, even if alive, was likely thousands of wheels north of here, in that part of the world where the snow never melted?
He looked for the greenglow and didn’t see it. With his heart still hammering in his chest, Tim got down on his knees and felt around, touching a litter of leaf-wrapped pork popkins, discovering a small basket of berries (most spilled on the ground), discovering the hamper itself . . . but no silver disc.
In despair, he cried: “Where in Nis are you?”
“Here, traveler,” the woman’s voice said. Perfectly composed. Coming from his left. Still on his hands and knees, he turned in that direction.
“Where?”
“Here, traveler.”
“Keep talking, will ya do.”
The voice was obliging. “Here, traveler. Here, traveler, here, traveler.”
He reached toward the voice; his hand closed on the precious artifact. When he turned it over in his hand, he saw the green light. He cradled it to his chest, sweating. He thought he had never been so terrified, not even when he realized he was standing on the head of a dragon, nor so relieved.
“Here, traveler. Here, traveler. Here—”
“I’ve got you,” Tim said, feeling simultaneously foolish and not foolish at all. “You can, um, be quiet now.”
Silence from the silver disc. Tim sat still for perhaps five minutes, listening to the night-noises of the forest—not so threatening as those in the swamp, at least so far—and getting himself under control. Then he said, “Yes, sai, I’d like a light.”
The disc commenced the same low whining noise it made when it brought forth the stick, and suddenly a white light, so brilliant it made Tim temporarily blind, shone out. The trees leaped into being all around him, and some creature that had crept close without making a sound leaped back with a startled yark sound. Tim’s eyes were still too dazzled for him to get a good look, but he had an impression of a smooth-furred body and—perhaps—a squiggle of tail.
A second stick had emerged from the plate. At the top, a small hooded bulge was producing that furious glare. It was like burning phosphorous, but unlike phosphorous, it did not burn out. Tim had no idea how sticks and lights could hide in a metal plate so thin, and didn’t care. One thing he did care about.
“How long will it last, my lady?”
“Your question is nonspecific, traveler. Rephrase.”
“How long will the light last?”
“Battery power is eighty-eight percent. Projected life is seventy years, plus or minus two.”
Seventy years, Tim thought. That should be enough.
He began picking up and repacking his gu
With the bright glare to guide him, the path he was following was even clearer than it had been on the edge of the swamp, but it sloped steadily upward, and by midnight (if it was midnight; he had no way of telling), Tim was tired out in spite of his long sleep in the boat. The oppressive and u
“Would you turn the light off, lady?”
He wasn’t sure she would respond—he had tried several conversational gambits in the last four or five hours, with no result—but the light went off, plunging him into utter darkness. At once Tim seemed to sense living things all around him—boars, woods-wolves, vurts, mayhap a pooky or two—and he had to restrain an urge to ask for the light again.
These ironwoods seemed to know it was Wide Earth in spite of the u
I’ve gone jippa, he thought—the unpleasant Tree term for people who lost their minds. But he didn’t feel jippa. What he felt was full and content, although he missed the Fagonarders and worried about them.
“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “Will you wake me if something comes, sai?”
She responded, but not in a way Tim understood: “Directive Nineteen.”
That’s the one after eighteen and before twenty, Tim thought, and closed his eyes. He began to drift at once. He thought to ask the disembodied female voice another question: Did thee speak to the swamp people? But by then he was gone.
In the deepest crease of the night, Tim Ross’s part of the Endless Forest came alive with small, creeping forms. Within the sophisticated device marked North Central Positronics Portable Guidance Module DARIA, NCP-1436345-AN, the ghost in the machine marked the approach of these creatures but remained silent, sensing no danger. Tim slept on.
The throcken—six in all—gathered around the slumbering boy in a loose semicircle. For a while they watched him with their strange gold-ringed eyes, but then they turned north and raised their snouts in the air.
Above the northernmost reaches of Mid-World, where the snows never end and New Earth never comes, a great fu