They waited for three hours, until night was fully on the land. While the Hunters kept watch, the others took what rest they could, until the evening was mature, and the half-frozen rain that had fallen every other evening had begun to speckle the night. Then the group set out on foot through the sleet and darkness toward the glowing beacon of the croach.

“I’m going to catch a cold,” Max muttered. “These cloaks soak up water like towels.”

“That’s because they are towels, Max,” Tavi answered in a low voice. “The Vord sense the heat of our bodies at night. These cloaks are going to hold cold water, help hide us from them.”

Max gave Tavi a sour look. “I’m going to have rusty armor. Are you sure this works?”

“I’ve done it,” Tavi said with perfect confidence.

“But does it work?”

One of the Hunters turned to them and bared his teeth in pure threat.

Max muttered something under his breath, about someone smelling like wet dog, but subsided into silence.

They reached the edge of the croach, and Tavi shivered. The tall, dark forms of the Canim were just as threatening as the eerie landscape. The croach looked just as it had before, a coating like the drippings from an unimaginable number of candles, covering ground and stones and trees with a faintly luminous green sheathing. It spread out before them, nightmarishly beautiful, unsettling, and alien.

Nothing moved within-but that meant little. The Vord could hide dozens of their number virtually in plain sight upon the croach, and have them go as undetected as anything hidden by a windcrafter’s veil.

Tavi signaled Kitai with a motion of his hand, and the two of them moved up to the edge of the croach. Tavi crouched close to the ground to examine it, frowning. He beckoned Kitai, who ghosted over to his side, her green eyes shadowed inside her damp cloak, watching the spectral-lit forest steadily.

“Look,” Tavi whispered. “The croach. It’s thicker here than it was in the Wax Forest.”

She bent down and examined it quickly before returning to watching the forest before them. “You’re right. But why?”

Tavi pursed his lips, and frowned. “The Vord here have modeled themselves after the Canim. Each one is larger, and much heavier, but not quite as big as a Cane. The croach is growing thicker, maybe so that it won’t break under the weight of the Vord-just under that of a Cane.” He looked up at Kitai. “That’s one of the things the croach is designed for. It’s a kind of watchman. The Vord can alter their forms. They must alter the croach to be able to better serve their needs.”

Kitai regarded him steadily. Then she nodded, and said, “Then let us test it.”

Before Tavi could protest, she had prowled out onto the surface of the croach.

Tavi held his breath.

Kitai’s feet did not break the surface, though it sank slightly beneath her weight, and slowly restored itself to its original shape after she had passed. She took a dozen steps, body crouched, her bright eyes watching the forest, and returned to Tavi’s side.

“Your turn,” she whispered.

Tavi eyed her. But then he rose and tested the surface of the croach beneath his shoes, glad that he had opted for the lighter pair rather than his heavy, hob-nailed infantry boots. The surface of the croach had a bit of give to it, and almost seemed to push up against his feet as he stepped away from it, something like a furycrafted causeway did, if far more weakly. Tavi signaled Max and Durias to come forward, and the two men did. Max, like Tavi, had worn lighter riding boots, but Durias had nothing but his infantry footwear. He grimaced and began taking them off, and stepped out onto the croach in his bare feet a moment later.

“Well,” Durias murmured, looking around warily. “At least it’s warm.”

“So far so good,” Tavi murmured. “Time to test the Canim’s new shoes.”

Varg was the first to approach. As the largest of the Canim, he would be the most likely to break the surface of the croach and attract the presence of the wax spiders who maintained and repaired it. The big Cane approached with exaggerated steps, a peculiar tilt to his ears that Tavi had never quite seen before on one of the wolf-warriors. Broad discs, almost like dishes, really, of green-black Vord chitin were secured to each of his feet.

“These…” he switched to Aleran for the word, “shoes.” He shook his head. “I cannot move well in them.”

“They’ll distribute your weight,” Tavi told him. “I hope enough that you can walk the croach without breaking it.”

“Who taught you the use of these things, Tavar?”

“Some of my people use something like them to move more easily over deep snow,” Tavi replied. “Though the original design was made of wood and leather. I thought the chitin was more logical.”

“Perhaps if it does break the croach, it will not sense the presence of Vord hide as an outside attacker,” Varg growled.

“Worth a try,” Tavi said. He waited a beat, then added. “Anytime now.”

Varg eyed him without amusement. Then he swept his red-eyed gaze around the nearby forest and took a slow, cautious step onto the croach.

The shoes worked. They held him up.

Varg growled, a satisfied sound, and gestured once at the other Canim. Anag and the three Hunters prowled forward onto the glowing croach, almost comically cautious about where they placed their chitin-shod feet.

Tavi nodded at them once. Then he turned to Kitai, who flashed him a feral grin and started through the forest in deliberate silence, as scout and pathfinder.

The rest of them followed her, into the glowing green night, and toward the architect and epicenter of that eerie new world.

CHAPTER 31

“The less you say, the better,” Rook said. “The less I know about why you’re here, the less harm I can do you should the information be taken from me.”

Which is precisely why I did not inform you of Bernard’s presence, Amara thought.

They had stepped from the slavers’ tunnel into one of its adjoining chambers. There was a heady odor coming from a number of tightly fitted barrels against the far wall. Amara recognized the smell of preprocessed hollybells, the flowers from which the drug aphrodin was made. The slavers, it seemed, had used the tunnels as an entry point for smugglers as well as for moving their own merchandise in and out of the city. Doubtless, they had demanded their own extortionate piece of the lucrative enterprise.

“That’s a risk I need to take,” Amara told her calmly in reply. “You can tell almost as much about my intentions from the questions I ask as from anything I say. If I can’t ask you questions, whatever you tell me is going to be of limited use.”

Rook smiled grimly. “Believe me, Countess. I think I can make a fair guess at all of your questions.”

“Then you must already know what I’m doing here.”

“I suspect,” Rook said, raising a finger to the collar and shuddering. “I do not know. There is a difference.”

Amara studied the other woman for a long moment before she shook her head. “How do I know that you aren’t feeding me misinformation?”

Rook considered the question seriously for a moment before answering. “Countess, the First Lord himself came to me on the steadholt where my daughter and I were living. It was seventy-four miles south of here.”

Amara had to suppress a shiver. The past tense was certainly appropriate if the steadholt they had seen earlier that very day was any indication. The region that far south of Ceres had certainly been overrun by the Vord.

“He told me what was happening. He told me that if I served him on this mission, he would see to it that my daughter was taken to safety-to anywhere in Alera that I chose. And that if I returned from it, I could join her.”