Foster, Dean - Spellsinger 03 - The Day of the Dissonance

again, a pleasant thought to mull over as they hiked ever

deeper into the foggy terrain.

It was a sorry land, mostly gray stone occasionally

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stained red by iron. There were no trees, few bushes, a

little grass. The sky was a perpetual puffy, moist gray.

Fog and mist made them miserable, except for Mudge.

Nothing appeared to challenge their progress. A few mind-

less hoots and mournful howls were the only indications of

mobile inhabitants, and nothing ever came close to their

camps.

They marched onward into the heart of the Muddletup,

where none penetrated. As they moved ever deeper into

the Moors the landscape began to change, and not for the

better. The last stunted trees disappeared. Here, in a place

of eternal dampness and cloud cover, the fungi had taken

over.

Enormous mushrooms and toadstools dripped with mois-

ture as Jon-Tom and his companions walked beneath

spore-filled canopies. Some of the gnarled, ugly growths

had trunks as thick as junipers, while others thrust deli-

cate, semi-transparent stems toward the sodden sky. There

were no bright, cheerful colors to mitigate the depressing

scene, which was mostly brown and gray. Even the occa-

sional maroon or unwholesomely yellow specimen was a

relief from the monotonous parade of dullness.

Some of the flora was spotted, some striped. One

displayed a checkerboard pattern that reminded Jon-Tom of

a non-Euclidian chessboard. Liverworts grew waist-high,

while lichens and mosses formed a thick, cushiony carpet

into which their boots sank up to the ankles. Clean granite

was disfigured by crawling fungoid corruption growing on

its surface. And over this vast, wild eruption of thallophytic

life there hung a pervasive sense of desolation, of waste

and fossilized hope.

The first couple of days had seen no slowing of their

progress. Now their pace began to degenerate. They slept

longer and spent less time over meals. It didn't matter

what food they took from their packs or scavenged from

the land: everything seemed to have lost its flavor. What-

ever they consumed turned flat and tasteless in their

THE DAY OF THE DISSONANCE

69

mouths and sat heavy in their bellies. Even the water

which fell fresh from the clouds had acquired a metallic,

unsatisfying aftertaste.

They'd been in the Moors for almost a week when

Jon-Tom tripped over the skeleton. Like everything else

lately its discovery provoked little more than a tired mur-

mur of indifference from his companions.

"So wot?" muttered Mudge. "Don't mean a damn

thing."

"Ah'm sitting down," said Roseroar. "Ah'm tired."

So was Jon-Tom, but the sight of the stark white bone

peeping out from beneath the encrusting rusts and mildews

roused a dormant concern in his mind.

"This is all wrong," he told them. "There's something

very wrong going on here."

"No poison, if that's wot you're thinkin', mate." Mudge

indicated the growths surrounding them. "I've been care-

ful. Everythin' local we've swallowed 'as been edible,

even if it's tasted lousy."

"Lucky yo," said Roseroar. "No game at all fo me.

Ah find mahself reduced to eating not just weeds, but this

crap. Ah declah ah've nevah been so bored with eating in

all man life."

"Boring, tired, tasteless.. .don't you see what's hap-

pening?" Jon-Tom told them.

"You're gettin' worked up over nothin', mate." The

otter was lying on a mound of soft moss. "Settle yourself

down. 'Ave a sip o' somethinV

"Yes." Roseroar slipped off her swordbelt. "Let's just

sit heah and rest awhile. There's no need to rush. We

haven't seen a sign of pursuit since we left that town, and

ah don't think we're likely to encounter any now."

"She's right, mate. Pull up a soft spot and 'ave a sit."

"Both of you listen to me." Jon-Tom tried to put some

force into his voice, was frightened to hear it emerge from

his lips flat and curiously empty of emotion. He felt sad

and utterly useless. Something had begun to afflict him

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from the day they'd first set foot in the Moors. It was

something more than just boredom with their surround-

ings, something far more penetrating and dangerous. It

was a grayness of the heart, and it was digging its

insidious way deeper and deeper into their thoughts, kill-

ing off determination and assurance as it went. Eventually,

it would ruin their bodies as well. The skeleton was proof

enough of that. Whatever was into them was patient and

clever, much too calculating, it occurred to Jon-Tpm, to be

an accident of the environment.

He tried to find the enthusiasm to fight back as he

turned to scream at the landscape. "Who are you? Why

are you doing this to us? What is it you wan??"

He felt like a fool. Worse, he knew his companions

might think he was becoming unhinged. But they said

nothing. He would've welcomed some outcry of skepti-

cism. Instead, the sense of hopelessness settled ever deeper

around them.

Nothing moved within the Moors. Of one thing he was

fairly confident: this wasn't wizardry at work. It was too

slow. He had to do something, but he didn't know what.

All he could think of was how ironic it would be if, after

surviving Malderpot, they were to perish here from a

terminal case of the blahs.

So he was startled when a dull voice asked, "Don't you

understand it all by now?"

"Who said that?" He whirled, trying to spot the speak-

er. Nothing moved.

"I did."

The voice came from an eight-foot-tall mushroom off to

his left. The cap of this blotchy ochre growth dipped

slightly toward him.

"Not that I couldn't have," said another growth.

"Nor I," agreed a third'.

"Mushrooms," Jon-Tom said unsteadily, "don't talk."

"What?" said the first growth. "Sure, we're not loqua-

cious, but that's a natural function of our existence. There

THE DAY OF THE DISSONANCE

71

isn't much to talk about, is there? I mean, it's not just a

dull life, man, it's boring. B-o-r-i-n-g."

"That's about the extent of it," agreed the giant toad-

stool against which Roseroar rested. She moved away from

it hastily, showing more energy than she had in the

previous several days, and put a hand to the haft of each

sword.

"I mean, give it some thought." The first mushroom

again, which was taking on something of the air of a

fungoid spokesman. Jon-Tom saw no lips or mouth. The

words, the thoughts, came fully formed into his mind

through a kind of clammy telepathy. "What would we talk

about?"

"Nothing worth wasting the time discussing," agreed

another mushroom with a long, narrow cap in the manner

of a morrel. "I mean, you spend your whole existence

sitting in the same spot, never seeing anything new, never

moving around. So what's your biggest thrill? Getting to

make spores?"

"Yeah, big deal," commented the toadstool. "So we

don't talk. You never hear us talk, you think fungoids

don't talk. Ambulatories are such know-it-alls."

"It doesn't matter," said the second mushroom. "Noth-

ing matters. We're wasting our efforts."

"Wait." Jon-Tom approached the major mushroom,

feeling a little silly as he did so. "You're doing something

to us. You have been ever since we entered the deep

moors."

"What makes you think we're doing anything to you?"