Barrington Bayley - The Forest of Peldain

The progress of the procession had ceased; the expedition was in total disorder. And now a new menace appeared—but, unlike the shafts, one which had previously been described by Askon Octrago.

They dropped in almost leisurely fashion from the overhead murk: greenish lines, looking like elongated stems from some innocuous flower, whose ends sported cap-like buds or petals. Like the shafts, they appeared to have some way of sensing animal presence and they also had the power of movement, for they twisted and turned as they descended, until they fell daintily on the heads of warriors busily fleeing from the lunging tubes.

One might have thought the helmets the men wore would have afforded some protection. Not so: the cap-like cups were so pliable they pushed themselves between the strips of metal and withe to clamp directly to the skull, fitting as neatly as the cap of an acorn.

In utter horror, Vorduthe watched men lifted aloft by the dozen, the stems withdrawing as if they were fishing lines being reeled in. How the caps managed to grip a man’s skull so tightly was a mystery. But up in the cover of the branches Vorduthe could vaguely see his warriors dancing and writhing, and he could hear them crying in agony.

He knew that they would hang there like grotesque fruit, all the nutrients of their bodies gradually being drawn out.

A troop leader staggered up and almost collided with Vorduthe. His face was pallid with fear.

“ Danglecups !” he gasped. “ Danglecups , my lord!”

“Yes. Octrago told us of these.”

At least it was possible to fend them off. Vorduthe’s sword scythed the air, severing a green cord that seemed to have been making for the troop leader. The danglecup cap flexed itself as it lay on the moss.

And not far away there was a blur of motion followed by a sickening thud mixed with the crunch of metal. A warrior had fallen to his death from far overhead. A stalk projected from his helmet, and a danglecup clung to his scalp. The sword with which he had managed to hack himself free was still clenched in his fist.

The troop leader’s tone was pleading. “What shall we do, my lord?”

“Fire is our only weapon.” Vorduthe pointed with his sword. “You take that wagon. I’ll take the other one.”

The crew of the fire engine had either been plucked from it or else had joined the other warriors who were huddled beneath it for protection. Sliding his sword up his scabbard, Vorduthe vaulted at a run onto the operator’s perch.

No new tube-shafts were descending now. Those that had already appeared seemed sated by their activity, or perhaps they were only capable of applying their suction once. Indolently they were withdrawing. But danglecups there were in plenty, and one was dropping straight at Vorduthe with frightening speed. He swung the nozzle to his highest elevation, pointing it up into the trees. Frantically his feet worked the pedal boards up and down, pumping oil. He snatched up the matchcord and reached out with it as the stream began to issue in a fountain.

The satisfying gout of fire that answered his efforts reached far when aimed upward, assisted by its natural inclination to rise. Its fringe caught the danglecup no more than a dozen arm’s lengths from Vorduthe’s head and burned it to a crisp.

By now the troop leader had managed to get his fire spout into action. From both engines billowing clouds of fire boiled up to the tree cover. Vorduthe turned his muzzle in a wide circle, spreading conflagration among the lower branches.

But suddenly his firestream died, the spout dribbling the last few drops of oil. The wagon had been in the van of the expedition, and it had drained its tank.

Vorduthe jumped to the ground. He reached beneath the wagon and roughly dragged one of the men hiding there into the open. Then he started kicking at the others.

“Cowards! Come out and fight! I’ll kill any man who doesn’t fight!”

“Fight who, my lord?” groaned a voice. But about a dozen men crawled into the open, climbing to their feet with shamed but grim faces.

Fragments of blazing twig and leaf rained down. The hanging shafts had become columns of fire.

Beyond the vicinity, however, danglecups wrought havoc as before.

“Those sucking tubes aren’t doing anything anymore,” Vorduthe told the men. “The danglecups you can use your swords on. So go to it—get those fire engines working!”

Though they were reluctant to leave the glade of safety he had created, he led them through the chaos, eyes constantly on the alert for the deadly caps that still were falling from the semi-darkness.

Now that the terror of the tubes was over, others were recovering their wits enough to take Vorduthe’s lead. From points all around came the roar of billowing flame. The gloom of the forest turned to lurid incandescence. And slowly, as the danglecups burned and the foliage overhead became a canopy of fretted fire, the expedition began to move again.

How much fire do we need to get us through this hell? Vorduthe asked himself. How much fuel is left? And what happens when it is gone? In their panic the warriors were using it wildly, and he gave orders for the spouts to be used only when necessary. Gloom returned, and the attacks of tubes and danglecups became only occasional.

At last Askon Octrago appeared. Vorduthe noticed that the front of his armor was stained green, as though he had been lying on his belly in the moss. He seemed distressed, and at once approached Vorduthe, laying a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m glad you came through, my lord. That was a rough passage.”

“You never told us about those shafts that drag men up inside them,” Vorduthe accused him. “Why not?”

“Those are shoot-tubes,” Octrago told him. “I had hoped we wouldn’t meet any of those, that’s all.”

Vorduthe didn’t believe him. He thought the Peldainian had probably kept quiet about them for fear of deterring the expedition from setting forth.

How much else had he withheld?

“What happens to a man who is taken that way?” Vorduthe asked. “He is slowly devoured, I suppose.”

Octrago shook his head. “No, it is not like that. Shoot tubes are open at both ends: they work like blowpipes. They hurl a man high in the air, over the treetops to fall down into the vales. If the fall doesn’t kill him he faces horrors greater than anything we can meet here.”

The appearance of the forest was changing once more. The overhead foliage had thinned, though rarely could one glimpse the sky, and the wagons rolled past new types of tree. Suddenly Octrago stopped, gripping Vorduthe’s arm.

“Look. We are in a grove of cage tigers.”

Throughout the journey so, Vorduthe had been seeing the striped black-and-white trees Octrago called cage tigers. They had all proved harmless. He was surprised, therefore, at Octrago’s sudden alarm.

True, the tigers were numerous here. Of all the plants so far encountered they were the most predatory-looking: bizarrely shaped, as though about to pounce like animals, even though they clearly consisted of timber of some kind. Their foliage was sparse, and they stood barely ten feet in height.

“Too late to think of going round,” Octrago rumbled. “Best to get through as quickly as we can. Order a speed-up.”

“We should form up in some order,” Vorduthe rumbled. “We are all over the place.”

“Later,” Octrago advised tersely. “Let’s get through the grove first.”

Vorduthe concurred. Those who could do so hurried ahead. The wagons too increased their pace as much as was possible, the men at the shafts sweating with the effort.

Octrago was stepping carefully, as though afraid his footfall would set off some trap, and was eyeing the striped boles which, now that Vorduthe thought of it, could almost have been carved by the hand of man, so smooth and strange were their misshapen forms.