With one last look down the empty path behind him, he turned about and hurried to catch up with Diane. As he hurried along the path, he caught the first faint sound of wailing he had heard since they'd entered the woods. It seemed farther off than ever, a mere whisper of a sound, muted and broken up by the denseness of the trees.

Suddenly, ahead of him, the heavy growth lessened, and he stepped out into a small clearing, an almost circular clearing, as if in some time long past a woodsman had chopped down the trees and hauled off the logs to make a cleared circle in the forest.

The rest of the band had stopped and were clustered in the center of the clearing. As Duncan stepped smartly forward to join them, he glanced around and it seemed that the circle was hemmed in by larger and thicker trees than they had passed through heretofore. The trunks of the trees were huge and they grew almost cheek by jowl; their massive interlocking branches, springing from the trunks only a few feet above the ground, formed an impenetrable hedge that held them locked inside the circle.

He hurried up to Conrad. "What are we stopping for?" he asked. "Why don't you continue on? We have to reach the fen."

"There is no path," said Conrad. "A path comes into the clearing, but there is none leading out."

"And now," said Andrew, thumping his staff upon the ground with an exasperation summoned up to mask his fear, "there's none coming in, as well."

Duncan spun around and looked back the way he'd come and saw that Andrew was right. The trees, somehow, had moved in and closed together to block out the path they had been following.

"With a great deal of work," said Conrad, "we could wriggle our way through. But it would be difficult for Daniel. He can't get down on his hands and knees and crawl as can the rest of us. We'll have to do some chopping to make a way for him. Even without the work of chopping, progress will be slow."

Meg came hobbling up. "It's witchery," she said, "and a most convincing witchery. Had it been otherwise than cunning, I would have smelled it out."

Snoopy jumped up and down in rage, flapping his arms. "It's them double-dipped-in-damnation gnomes," he howled. "I told them and told them no traps need be laid against the fen, for none of the Horde was there. Concentrate, I told them, on that stretch of ground north of the river meadow. But they did not listen. Gnomes are arrogant and they never listen. They laid this intricate trap to snare the Horde and now we're caught instead. Now the gnomes are gone, scattered like all the rest of them, and they cannot be gotten to spring and free the trap."

"You are sure of that?" asked Duncan.

"Sure of it I am."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I know the gnomes. Cross-grained folk they are. And skilled in very complex magic. No other of our people could do the kind of work required to lay out a belt of forest and to…"

The sound of flapping wings cut him short and everyone looked up to see what was going on. It was Nan, coming down in an awkward plunge, wings windmilling desperately to check her speed and to maintain her balance. She landed sprawling, falling forward on her face. Once on her feet, she lurched forward to meet them.

"The Horde is coming in!" she shrilled. "The Horde is on the way! They're pouring down the hill, moving toward the woods."

"Now what do we do?" yapped Andrew. "What do we do now?"

"We quit our blubbering," said Conrad gruffly, "and remember we are soldiers of the Lord."

"I'm no soldier of the Lord," yelled Scratch, "but if it comes to fighting, I'll fight by the side of those who are. Given the necessity, I can be a very dirty fighter."

"I just bet you can," said Meg.

"Let us hope," said Duncan, "that the magic of the gnomes can work as effectively against the Horde as it seems to work with us and…"

He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at the trees.

"My God," he whispered, "will you look at that!"

There had been, he remembered, many years ago, a roving artist who had stopped at Standish House for a bite of food and a night of shelter and wound up staying on for months, finally ending up at the abbey, where he undoubtedly still was, working at the scriptorium, drawing sketches and doing miniature paintings and other nonsensical conceits with which the monks fancied up their manuscripts and scrolls. As a boy, Duncan recalled, he had spent much time with the artist, whose name he had forgotten after all these years, hanging over the little desk on which he worked, watching in fascination the magic lines of his pencil sketching scenes and people unlike anyplace or anyone he had ever seen before. The sketch that had intrigued him the most, which the artist had given him, had depicted a group of trees that had somehow turned into rather frightening people—trees with faces that had only a rough, but frightening, equivalence to the faces of people, their limbs becoming arms, their branches many-fingered grasping hands. Trees turned into monsters.

And now here, in this magic forest of the gnomes, the trees were assuming the guise of monsters just as those trees the artist sketched had. The trunks bore flabby faces: loose-lipped, ravening mouths, most of them toothless, although a few of them had fangs; bulbous, obscene noses sprawling over half the face; ghoulish, spiteful eyes. Now there was a rustling of leaves as the limbs and branches of the trees became the arms and hands of monsters, some with fingers, some with claws, some with tentacles, and all of them waving in a frenzy of sudden energy, reaching out to grasp one, to claw one to his death.

They were hemmed in by monsters that were trees, or trees that were trying to be monsters.

"Them stinking gnomes," raged Snoopy, "they have no decency at all. This magic of theirs cannot distinguish between friend and foe."

From far away, apparently from the edge of the woods, back toward the slope they had descended, came muffled screaming.

"That's the hairless ones," said Conrad. "They have reached the woods and met the trees."

"Or the trees," said Andrew. "The hairless ones did not strike me as ones who would do much screaming."

"Meg, can you do anything?" Duncan shouted at the witch. "Do you have the spells to overcome this magic?"

Andrew strode forward toward the trees opposite their entry point into the circle, brandishing his staff at them and intoning Latin phrases, the most atrocious Latin, Duncan told himself, that he had ever heard.

"Shut up!" Duncan yelled at him, and to Meg, he said, "Is there any way that you can help?"

"I can but try," Meg told him. "As I've explained before, my powers are very feeble. My witchery trappings all were taken from me."

"Yes, I know," said Duncan. "You have told us that. All the bat's blood, all the polecat dung, all the rest of it. But there must lie within you a power that does not need these trappings."

He yelled at Andrew, "Desist from that silly blather. This is not a place where churchly mouthings will do us any good."

Meg said in a small voice, "Perhaps the two of us together?" A faint tendril of fog came drifting through the trees at that point where they had entered the clearing.

Conrad came up to stand beside Duncan and Diane. "That fog," he said, "is the fog of the Horde. You remember, when we fought before the castle mound. It has the same smell as it had then. They came at us in a rolling bank of fog and…"

"I don't remember any smell," said Duncan.

"Well, I do," said Conrad. "I have a sharper nose than you have."

"The Horde is trying to get through the woods," said Diane. "They may be held up for a while, but perhaps not for long. Snoopy told us none of the magic traps could really stop the Horde."

Snoopy said, "This one will hold a little longer than the others. Those crazy gnomes really put their heart into this one. All their efforts put the one place it wasn't needed. If it hadn't been for them, we would have reached the fen by now."