"Naeli's been dead for six years or more," I told him. "She was lost in the woods."

Liskin was silent for a long time. Finally he said, "I'm sorry." (That's what you're supposed to say, isn't it? It's one of the Rules.) "Her own d.a.m.n fault," I replied, to get him to shut up. It worked. But it didn't work with Naeli. Nothing ever worked with her.

Naeli's last child, a girl, had been born two months after the death of the father. (He'd been a miner and was killed in a cave-in.) At that time she was living with her husband's stepparents, but about a month after the birth they began wondering aloud how she was going to help pay the expenses of the household. She took the hint, as only Naeli could, and stormed out of there. She stormed all the way from Rendel's to Caroc-not so easy, seeing that she had three boys and an infant girl to tend to-and moved in with me.

At the time I was a journeyman jeweller, working for a crafty old half- Coranian named Besk. I was doing well enough to support my sister's family. And, although there was only one kind of work for women that paid a decent wage, Naeli helped out where she could. She worked a plot of ground behind the house, selling some of her produce, feeding the rest to us. (She referred to us collectively as the Enemy and pretended to mourn each individual vegetable. She would cry out absurd names she had invented for each tomatoroot, then shout, "But no! Their suffering is on their heads! They were born like vegetables, let them die like vegetables! Let their piths be accursed and their names be forgotten!" And the children would laugh, scandalized, and even I would grin. Except for the people she cared about, Naeli took nothing in the world seriously, including the Enemy.) Naeli was half crazy, anything but a rule-keeper. She was a good mother, though. She taught her children how to read, both Coranian and Castellan, and the two oldest sons were apprenticed out-one to a blacksmith, the other to a carpenter. It wasn't easy to achieve this: sons were supposed to follow the trade of their fathers; that was the first law of the Guilds. But Naeli was tireless in her pet.i.tioning, bribing when she could afford to; she insisted that none of her sons would go to the mines to die like their father (in a cave-in) or his father (withered away by some illness breathed in deep under the earth). And she had her way: her youngest son, Thend, we agreed would be Besk's apprentice, or mine, when the time came.

So she took care of her sons and loved them. But it was her daughter, Fasra, who truly held her heart. She doted on the girl, spoiled her, labored long hours at the petty labor permitted to women so that Fasra could have a dowry. And her affection was not misplaced: Fasra was a lovely child, with silver-pale hair, clear brown skin, and two black lightning bolts dwelling permanently in her storm-dark eyes. She was clever and engaging, too; everybody was fond of her.

But it was clear, from the moment she took to her own feet, that Fasra had a will of iron, which she was not inclined to have anyone temper. And Naeli could rarely bring herself to discipline the girl (at once the last remnant of her husband and the radiant mirror of her own youth) as she should have, so matters grew worse. Fasra, at first merely strong-willed, grew contrary; "no" meant yes to her, and "yes" meant I won't.

One day, when Fasra was around seven years old, she was invited on a picnic with some of her friends; they were going to pick wildberries in the woods. The mothers of the children were to accompany them, but Naeli could not go. It was market day and she had a load of vegetables ready to sell. So she told Fasra she couldn't go. Fasra disagreed, and finally Fasra had her way. Naeli committed her to the care of one of the other mothers in attendance, a friend of hers, one of the thousand and one people she knew in Four Castles.

The children went on their picnic. The forest is a strange and beautiful place during the day, but still forbidding in comparison to the ordered life of town and castle. During the morning the children stayed close to their protectors, terrified by the approach of the smallest chipmunk. But, as the day approached noon, the terror receded; the children wandered farther through the green woods and golden clearings, seeking out skeneberries and cl.u.s.terfruit and the three types of mushroom they had been taught were good to eat.

As noon gave way to afternoon Fasra found herself with less in her basket than most. It wasn't because she wasn't clever or hadn't been taught. But she was moody and contrary. She looked for berries in the shade and mushrooms in the sunlight. It took her much of the day to learn that things grew where they grew, and not where she thought they should.

She explained her theory to her custodian, Naeli's friend, as they sat down for lunch. The berries, she said, were like bright little suns; they could warm up the woods when it was too cool. The mushrooms were chilly and gray, like clouds; they would be pleasant in the hot sun-drenched clearings.

Naeli's friend applauded the ingenuity of this idea, then asked how many berries and mushrooms Fasra had actually collected. Fasra reluctantly showed her basket. Then Naeli's friend showed Fasra her own daughter's basket: it was more than twice as full as Fasra's. Many children had brought in full baskets from the morning's berrying, Naeli's friend explained, perhaps a bit tactlessly, so a change of method seemed in order.

Fasra's face fell and she turned away. But she wasn't stupid; she could learn a hard lesson when she had to. And she had brought three baskets along, which she was determined to bring home full to Naeli, whom she loved as fiercely as Naeli loved her.

So she went to work in the afternoon in grim earnest. The nearby clearing had been plucked clean in the morning, so she searched the ones that were farther away. And she filled two baskets with cl.u.s.terfruit and skeneberries, bringing them proudly back to her custodian.

It was the third basket that brought disaster. She had resolved to bring back a basket full of cleft-caps, the rarest edible mushroom in our woods. But she started on this too late in the day. That third basket-and her iron willsealed her fate.

In midafternoon, the other children began to wander back, with berrysmeared faces and full baskets. They were happy, but tired, and a little frightened by the lengthening shadows. Darkness was rising from the earth; they wanted to go home; their custodians wanted to take them ... but Fasra was missing.

Naeli's friend left her own daughter in someone else's care and ran to the place where Fasra had been last seen. She kept calling out Fasra's name until the girl finally appeared at the edge of a clearing, like a wood-sprite reluctant to leave the forest shadows.

"Come back," Naeli's friend said to the proud child. "We're going home."

"Not till I'm done. My basket's only half full."

Now, if I'd been there, I might have indulged the little girl with a few more moments to pick mushrooms. I might have helped her. I might have bribed her with the contents of my own baskets. And if the child had balked again at coming home I might have said, You are more important to your mother than a basket of mushrooms.

Or, weary from the long day, tired of the child's imperious manner, frightened by the onset of darkness, I might have done exactly what Naeli's friend did. Which was to shout, "No! Come now!"

"Just a moment," Fasra said icily. "I'm not finished."

"You're finished when I say you're finished!" Naeli's friend cried. "Darkness is rising! Come home."

"Not till I'm done."

"We're leaving," Naeli's friend said, walking toward the girl, who ran back a few steps into the wood.

"No!" shouted Fasra. "No! No! No!"

Naeli's friend turned and began to walk away. "Good-bye," she said, over her shoulder. "I hope you can make your way out of the forest by yourself."

There was no answer. After a few steps more she turned and looked back. Fasra had vanished.

They searched for her, of course. But the day was growing old, and they had other children to take care of, their own children. Finally they returned to Caroc without Fasra, and Naeli's friend brought the terrible news to my house around sunset.

Naeli came to Besk's shop immediately. She was weeping, but she managed to tell the story as she knew it.

"Naeli, I'm sorry," was all I could find to say, as she sobbed. "I loved her, too."

"Her name will be mentioned at the next Mysteries," Besk promised her, his pale brown face etched with grief. He was very fond of Naeli, and Fasra too.

"What do you mean?" cried Naeli, in fresh alarm. "Aren't you going to help me find her?'

Besk and I stared at each other in astonishment. Then Besk said firmly, "No. You must mourn her, Naeli. No one can help her now."

"White-faced Bargainer," she cursed him. "Stay here and lick your pennies! My brother will still help me!"

"Help you do what?" I shouted. "I won't help you commit suicide. It's already getting dark!"

"She's alone!" Naeli said. "She's never been alone this long. She'll be getting cold. She'll be afraid. And soon it will be dark and they will come for her. The Bargainers. The Enemy. The Whisperer in the Dark. They'll come for her!"

She stared at us in silence for a few moments as Besk and I refused to meet her eye. The thought of the beloved child dying alone in the dark woods was terrible. But there was nothing we could do. We knew that. We resented Naeli for not knowing it, too.

"Help me!" she screamed in my face. "Help me! Why won't you help me?" Then she ran from the shop, leaving the door swinging open behind her.

I turned resolutely back to the work we'd been doing, a commission from the Baron of Caroc which was to be ready the next day. But Besk reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.

"Go after her," he said. "Go now. Hurry, Roble."

"No," I said stubbornly. "She'll come to her senses in a little while."

"She's in her senses now," Besk replied. "But that doesn't mean for her what it does for dull fellows like you and me. She is a great one, an empress or a merchant lady by rights. If she lived in the wide world, she would be one or the other by now, or something better than both. She knows everything you know, how the law is about to be broken in the woods. To you, that means she must not enter there. To her, it means she must. Go, Roble. Run. It may be too late as I stand here talking...."

Besk was a good man, but he'd never sent me home early in the ten years I'd been working for him. This, more than anything else, struck me with urgency. I dropped my tools and ran out the open door.

The sun had set, and the narrow lanes of Caroc Town were heavy with shadow. The dark blue radiance left in the evening sky was already dim and fading. As I left the side-lanes for the Road I heard the hillconches ring out like thunder, breaking the law.

"Naeli!" I shouted as I ran. "Wait! Naeli!"

She didn't wait. At the edge of town there were only the black-armored Riders on their black steeds. I could hear the one's voice as I ran up to them, but made no sense of the words. (I realize now what he was saying, of course, having said it so many times myself.) The one finished speaking and I asked them, "Have you seen a woman pa.s.s this way? I-"

The Rider who had not spoken drew his truncheon and pointed it at my throat. Neither of them said a word, and I found myself unable to speak either.

Now I know that the Rider was only threatening to kill me if I tried to enter the woods. But then his gesture seemed full of mystic import. I had never confronted one of these Riders in their dark regalia before, never thought about what they implied. The forest where Fasra had vanished had now taken Naeli, too. But it was their forest, I realized: only they could cross and recross it in the lawless hours. I didn't understand how they dared to do it. But I realized that I couldn't imitate them, that I must not. They had forbidden it. And in that strange moment they seemed to have more power than the Four Barons themselves. After all, the Barons could only say what the law was. The Riders said what it was not, and rode beyond its limits.

"Will you at least look for her?" I pleaded, when I found my voice again. "Her daughter is there, too, a girl of seven years ... lost in the woods."

They still did not speak. I suppose they were simply hesitating, wondering whether to explain to me that they could not afford to wander from the Road, that they were powerless and couldn't really help. I suppose they resented me as I had resented Naeli, demanding more than I could give. But I felt none of this. I felt as if I had bowed down in prayer to two statues of the Strange G.o.ds, or asked a favor of a stone wall.

Defeated, I turned and walked away in silence. They watched me go and then, no doubt, rode off down the lawless road. It was long after dark when I finally reached my house. My sister's sons were sitting huddled around the cold fireplace in the front room.

"Where is Naeli?" I asked stupidly, as if I didn't know. I guess part of me expected her to be there, to always be there.

"She went to find you," Stador, the eldest boy said. "She said you would help her...."

I don't remember the rest of that night, or much of the following days. There were the funerals, strangely bitter with no bodies to bury. And I apprenticed my sister's youngest boy to Besk. A month and a half later I enlisted in the Riders.

I thought it would be difficult to join. But it wasn't. There were always places falling vacant.

The trouble with Liskin, I discovered, was that you could shut him up, but he wouldn't stay shut. He kept wanting to talk: about whether we were riding fast enough, about whether we were riding too fast, about whether we should have hunted down the Bargainers tending the trap. The subject didn't matter; he just wanted to run his mouth. But, when you're riding through the woods during the lawless hours, you have to pay attention to what's happening around you. You can't do that with someone nattering in your ear all the time.

Finally, I had to rein in and tell him. I added, as an afterthought, that it was crazy to try to carry on a conversation in full armor on trotting horses.

Up till then he had been nodding (like, chastened). But this he wanted to argue about. "Oh, I don't know, Roble-"

"Bargain it, Liskin," I swore, then stopped. Over his shoulder I could see a flicker of red light filtering through the night-black branches of the forest.

"Stray!" I said, and pointed.

He turned to look and said, "Or another trap."

"Either way, there are bodies to bring out." I dismounted.

Liskin didn't. "Roble," he said, "it's against the Rules to go that far from the Road."

"Then don't," I replied. "But if there were any rules in these woods we wouldn't be here." I drew my sword and left the Road, plunging into the forest that had swallowed my sister and her child.

The light was a longish way from the Road. It took me endless moments to wend through the close-set tree trunks until I approached close enough to see that the light was from a campfire. Someone was sitting beside it.

You get an eye for spotting illusions after you've been in the Riders for awhile. The illusion-bait is always something you want to see, the thing that's too good to be true. It's the image in your mind most likely to kick you forward before you have a chance to think.

There are a lot of variations the Enemy could play on this method: traps baited with simulacra of your enemies; traps baited with images of people you don't recognize; traps baited with sleeping or otherwise defenseless Bargainers, and so on. But the Enemy never does this; maybe it can't. Maybe the Enemy, for all its immortality and power, is a little stupid.

So I knew that what I saw before me was real. Because I was not in the least impressed.

The stray was about average height. He had white skin, like a Coranian, but it had been burned on his face and hands. He looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors: all his clothing (as dark as a Rider's) was travel-worn and weather-stained, and his shoes had been mended more than once. He had crooked shoulders and dark unruly hair. All in all: the sort of person you might expect to find at your back door, begging for a meal or a mug of beer. He was too unpleasant not to be real.

I looked the situation over carefully. Just because he wasn't an illusion, it didn't mean this wasn't a trap. Alev and I had found that out yesterday. And even if it wasn't a trap, Bargainers might have spotted the stray and staked him out, just as I had. Then, the stray himself might be dangerous (though he didn't look it).

I slowly made my way all around the campsite, a.s.suring myself at every step that there were no Bargainers to compete with me for this stray. The stray himself didn't seem to notice me; he was intent on some carving he was doing with a long pointed knife.

Finally I stepped into the firelight. The stray looked up at me without surprise. I was wondering what language I should speak to him when he solved the problem by addressing me in a kind of Coranian.

"Do you speak for the singing wood?" he asked sleepily.

"No," I said, as clearly as I could. Obviously the vagrant was halfenchanted: his disturbingly pale gray eyes seemed to be glowing slightly. "I've come to take you out of the woods."

He shook his head. "I will stay here tonight and listen," he said sleepily. "And perhaps, tomorrow night, I will answer. If-"

"If you stay here tonight, you will die here tonight. I'm paid to prevent that. Come along with me and I'll take you to the nearest castle."

He shook his head again casually and said, "There is a great hunger in these woods, though. Felt it immediately. Something like it only once before. I fell asleep in the middle of a forest fire. I heard a deep golden voice calling to me. I pa.s.sed from sleep to the rapture of vision, and tried to speak with it. But it knew nothing except hunger, an inhuman and utterly destructive hunger. Then I awoke and realized: I had been in talic stranj with the heart of the flames." He laughed fondly at the memory.

"Talic stranj, eh?" I said. "I know exactly what you mean. Happens to me all the d.a.m.n time." This stray was probably crazy or a sorcerer or both. (They go together like sh.e.l.l brisket and earth-apples.) That meant that I would probably have to kill him to get him out. And I'd have to do it fast, before the Bargainers arrived. I covertly loosened my sword in its sheath.

He noticed, d.a.m.n him. He was no longer as sleepy or as stupid as he had first seemed. We stayed that way for a moment, looking at each other, saying nothing.

When the Bargainers. .h.i.t me from behind, the first thing that I thought was, Bargain it! It is a trap! That flashed through my mind as I fell like a stone, as if I were unconscious (though I wasn't). Three of them stayed to guard me, and the rest moved into the circle of firelight I rolled to my feet (try it in full armor sometime; but I spent my off months exercising, not soaking up beer in the taverns) and drew my sword. I cut two of their throats before they were ready for me; the third turned to meet me, though, his club held high.

As we fought, I realized this wasn't a trap. The stray had a long sword with an odd flashing blade and was fighting the Bargainers as fiercely as I was. That was something. But there were so many of them!

I killed my third Bargainer easily enough. They're not usually armored and they don't carry weapons to kill, only a long club, like our truncheons, to knock people unconscious. (The Boneless One is said to prefer live victims.) They're best at stealth, and the Enemy helps them there. But right now stealth wasn't on the table; Bargainers were pouring out of the woods on several sides.

I ran into the clearing and was going to charge the Bargainers around the stray when someone called my name. I turned my head and saw what I most wanted to see: Alev limping toward me through the wood. "Roble!" he shouted. "Bargain it! It is a trap! Come this way!"

I took three steps without thinking. It was impossible not to. Then I did think. I turned back to the Bargainers and found several of them bearing down on me. I met the club of one with my truncheon and slashed wildly at another with my sword. Then they leapt back and encircled me, beginning a long, slow, carefully coordinated attack certain of victory. They had most of the night, and my attention was divided several ways. They had only to stay out of reach of my sword and wait for my inevitable mistake. I didn't need to glance back into the wood to know that Alev was not there, had never been there. His image had been a sending of the Enemy.

Over the shoulder of a Bargainer, I saw the stray do something pretty smart: he leaped up and caught hold of a branch with his left hand. Then he lifted himself into the tree as the Bargainers surrounding him swarmed in to grab him.

To start with, it's pretty impressive to see a grown man lift himself into a perch using one hand. But, more importantly, it meant he was probably safe now. The Bargainers didn't carry swords or axes or arrows; if they tried to climb up he could probably knock them off as they came. And the forest was so dense, he could go from tree to tree if he wanted to escape his pursuers on the ground.

Of course, it was also tough luck for me. Even if I had been able to hold off the Bargainers surrounding me, I wouldn't be able to fight the whole crowd. But I had known I was taking a risk coming into the wood. The stray was safe-that was the reason I had taken my risk-but he might not know it.

"You're all right!" I shouted at the stray. "Stay up there until dawn and they'll go away!"

The stray looked at me, right at me with those gray eyes that pierced like spear points. Then he scanned the clearing, looking at the Bargainers drifting away from the tree and toward me.

"Stay up there!" I shouted desperately. I was afraid he'd throw his safety away in a futile attempt to a.s.sist me. "I'm done! You're not! You can't help me!"

He sheathed his sword and braced his back against the tree trunk.

I had to duck from a club launched at me by a Bargainer, so I didn't see what happened next.

But I heard it. I heard part of it, anyway. It was a sound impossible to hear, but audible just the same. A word, spoken in a human voice, but a word that resonated with power, a bright black hammer of a word. I pa.s.sed out before the word was finished.

When I came to myself I was lying in the clearing. Someone was moving about nearby. I struggled groggily to my feet and reached for a weapon.

But there was no need: the only person moving about was the stray. He was binding the hands of the Bargainers, who were strewn unconscious about the clearing.

"Good evening," he said, nodding toward me as his hands worked ceaselessly. "You might stand by to clop a few of these fellows on the head, if they start waking up before I can bind them. They should be coming out of it soon."

"It?" I said, picking up my truncheon.

"I spoke one of the Silent Words. Your helmet shielded you from some of it, so you woke up sooner, but these others aren't dead. They're just stunned, as you were. I am Morlock Ambrosius, by the way." He glanced directly at me, as if to see whether I recognized the name.

I didn't, so I just told him mine in return. Then I added hesitantly, "Um. Strictly speaking, I should kill these Bargainers."

"Oh?" Morlock didn't seem surprised-it was hard to read his expression, for a fact-but he didn't seem inclined to cooperate, either.