Chương 37: Chapter 36 — The Middle Band

The upper slopes were quiet and green and full of what the list had promised. Ted and Ren Deyi worked the middle band while Huang Zhisong and Su Jieran took the upper treeline. Qin Miaoxiu moved between the pairs, checking specimens against the list with the focus of someone who had memorized the descriptions the night before. She named the right species on her first pass, and twice reached past Ren Deyi's hand to stop him picking the wrong plant. The morning went well.

The middle-band species grew in clusters around the exposed rock, easy to find once you knew the leaf, and the treeline plant hid in the damp underbrush where the canopy kept the light off the ground. By mid-morning Ted's pouch was a third full and Ren's was close to the same, though Ren had spent as much of the morning talking about the plants as picking them.

"This one smells like the garden back at the compound," Ren said, a leaf held to his nose.

"You think they grow these at Verdant Hollow? Somebody must have carried seeds home from a run like this one. I bet the whole garden started out wild." Ted tied off his oilcloth and set the bundle in his pouch.

"Probably." Ren kept talking and Ted let him. The talk was a small tax, and it bought something worth the price: as long as he could hear Ren Deyi, he knew where Ren Deyi was. A quiet Ren would be the thing to worry about. By the time the sun stood overhead, the upper two species were near their minimums. Huang came down from the treeline with his pouch full and his sleeves dark with dirt, Su Jieran a few steps behind with a cloth of treeline specimens.

They had worked well together, the lead giving orders and the transfer taking them without a wrinkle. A good little team inside the team. Ted checked the sun. Midday. He looked south. The fog had still not moved. * Huang stood at the southern edge of the ridge and looked at the valley for a long while. The fog sat where it had sat at dawn, pale and flat, its edge clean. The sun was warm, the air was dry, and the fog cared about neither.

"We need the stream bed species," he said. No one argued the point. The list wanted minimums from all three, and the third grew only in the low ground by the water, and the count on it stood at zero. Without it the merit would be prorated. Half the promised pay, or less, for three days of walking and risk.

"The fog covers the straight approach," Qin Miaoxiu said. She had come to stand at Huang's shoulder, arms folded, her weight still tipped forward in that listening stance.

"But the stream beds run east to west. If we follow the ridge east and drop down the far side, we might reach the water below the fog's line."

"I was about to say the same." Su Jieran pointed east along the ridge, to where the ground fell away into a wooded draw that angled down toward the valley floor.

"There's a drainage channel down that way. I've used it before. It joins the stream bed from the east, below where the fog starts. We come in from the side instead of walking into the front of it." Of course he had used it before. Ted looked at the eastern draw. Steep, narrow, thick with trees. Ground where you could see only a few yards ahead and met whatever waited in it once you were already inside. But it did angle away from the fog, which held the center and the southern end of the valley.

"How far below the fog line?" Ted asked.

"Fifty, sixty yards. Maybe more." Su Jieran's voice stayed easy, conversational. He was not pushing. He was handing over facts, helpful and unhurried.

"The stream bends south past the zone, but the plants are in the first hundred yards before the bend. In and out." Huang weighed the draw against the fog against the list. The same sum as the night before, except that half a day's collecting was already in the pouches now, and the road home left tomorrow.

"We go together. We stay together. Anything looks wrong, we turn around and come back up." Ted did not argue, because there was nothing in the plan to argue with, and that was the problem of it. The approach was sound. It dodged the fog. It used the ground to reach the water from a side an array might not cover, if it was an array, and Huang had set the right conditions on top of it, together and retreat. Every piece was reasonable.

A man who fought a reasonable plan with nothing but a bad feeling got told to wait in camp. What he could not say out loud, because it would have come out as fear, was the one thing that mattered. The fog showed its edge. The array did not. You could walk around a thing you could see. You could only guess at the borders of a thing you could not, and a guess at a border was a poor thing to put a team on top of. He shouldered his pack and followed the others east along the ridge.

* The drainage channel was worse than it had looked from above. It dropped steeply enough that they braced against the tree trunks on the way down, the ground soft with old leaves that slid under a boot. Huang took the lead, planting each step and testing it before he trusted his weight to it. Su Jieran went second. Ren Deyi should have walked in the middle, where the least sure-footed man on a slope belonged.

Instead he came at the back, unwatched, and Ted tracked him by sound: the hard breathing, the scrape of boots on root, the snap of a pack catching low branches and tearing through them. The draw pinched in as they dropped. The canopy closed over them and took most of the midday light, and the air turned cool and wet. The metallic smell came back, faint between the pine and the wet earth, and Ted breathed through his nose and tried to measure it.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. It did not take long to measure that it was getting stronger. At the bottom the ground leveled into a thin strip of flat beside a stream, shallow and clear over smooth stones, the habitat the list had described to the letter. Low plants with the right leaf clustered along both banks between the rocks. The stream bed species. Right where Su Jieran had promised. Huang crouched at the water and held a leaf against the list. He nodded.

"This is it. Spread out along the bank and cut fast. We don't stay a minute past what we need." He looked at Ted last.

"You take the draw end. Cut what's in reach and keep your eyes on the way we came in. If anything moves up there, you call it." Rear observation. The job you gave the man whose absence from a fight cost you the least. Ted said, "Yes, Team Leader," and thought that it was also the job with the shortest walk to the exit, and that Huang had probably not intended him a favor. The team fanned out. Su Jieran went upstream to the left. Qin Miaoxiu went right, downstream, staying inside the edge of sight.

Ted knelt at the nearest patch and worked, cutting and wrapping and stowing, his hands busy and his attention somewhere else entirely: on the smell, on the light, on the soft endless sound of the water that would cover any smaller sound a person might want to hear. Ren Deyi had drifted thirty yards downstream, past Qin, picking and narrating root structures to himself. He had gone further than anyone, because Ren Deyi always went further.

Talk pulled him one way and curiosity another, and he followed whichever pulled harder. Ted looked south. Through the trunks, forty yards off, the fog stood. From down here it had changed character: taller, thicker, a wall instead of a blanket, its edge bright between the dark trees and as sharp as it had been from the ridge. The stream ran toward it and curved south and disappeared into the white. It was about forty yards. Su Jieran had said fifty or sixty.

The margin had shrunk somewhere between the ridge and the water. Ted opened his mouth to call it out. Two things happened first. Ren Deyi stopped talking. Ted felt the change before he placed it. Ren's voice had run under the whole trip like the sound of the stream, a thing his mind had stopped hearing days ago, and now it was simply gone, and the gap where it had been felt like a sudden drop in pressure. He turned.

Ren stood at the stream's edge thirty yards down, facing south, no longer picking, his pouch hanging open at his hip and his hands forgotten beside it. His head was tilted, listening to something in the fog.

"Does anyone else hear that?" Ren took a step toward the white.

"Ren Deyi, Stop." Ted pitched it to carry, not to startle. A shout might throw the man forward instead of back. He took the step anyway. His boot came off the bank and onto dry ground, five yards nearer the fog, and the metallic smell spiked so hard that Ted tasted it at the back of his tongue, the flat copper of a coin held in the mouth. The ground under Ren's foot lit up.

A line of light drew itself across the forest floor, left and right from his boot, and found other lines that had not been there a breath before. They ran out in both directions under the leaf litter, a web of cold light, and the web had corners. Straight edges. Right angles. Geometry, where a forest had no business making any. Ren looked down at his feet. His mouth opened.

"I didn't—" The fog moved toward him. It rolled forward off its line like water out of a broken dam, fast, with nothing of wind or weather in it. The edge had been forty yards off. A second later, twenty. A second after that the first of it reached Ren Deyi and climbed him from the boots up. Ren screamed, once, and short. The sound cut off, not into silence but into the fog, which swallowed noise the way it swallowed shape. Ted saw the dark smear of him inside the white, stumbling.

Then the smear thinned, and there was only white. Qin Miaoxiu was nearest, fifteen yards or so from where Ren had stood, and she had already started moving. She had started turning when the lines lit and moving when the fog surged, three fast steps up and back from the stream and the cold light beneath it. She moved as if she had been ready for this since dawn. Ted did not decide to flee.

He was already running, downstream, toward the last place Ren had been, his feet hunting the wet stones of the bank and keeping off the leaf-covered dirt, because the light had been under the leaves and the streambed might lie outside the array's edge. It was the only calculation he had time for, and he made it with his legs. A man who had spent his life finding the exits ran, this once, straight at the thing the others were running from. His hand closed on cloth at the fog's edge.

Ted grabbed a sleeve, an arm in it, half in the white and half out, dragging away from him. Ted hauled back, upstream, against the dead weight of a man gone blind and stumbling in a fog that should not exist. His lung meridian tore at him. The old bruise on his collarbone went burned like a coal had been fed air. He pulled again, found stream rock under his feet, and the weight lurched and came, and then they were both clear of the edge and reeling upstream over wet stone, and the world was visible again.

The array's qi still ran in the streambed, a current Ted felt in his forearms and his dantian at the same instant. It was nothing like the compound's hum, that faint condensation a man could ignore. This was a river. Spiritual energy poured through channels somebody had cut into the earth on a scale that made his tiny amount of qi a joke. His dantian was a cup. The thing that had just fired was an ocean, and it had not so much as noticed him. Whoever had cut these channels into the rock had not been guarding herbs.

You did not build an ocean to fence a streambank of weeds. Ren Deyi was on his knees in the shallows, coughing, his hands shaking, his face drained white. His left forearm was burned, though not by any fire. The skin stood up in thin raised lines that matched the web in the dirt, as if the array had printed its own pattern through his sleeve and into the arm beneath it.

"Up," Ted said.

"Move. Now." He dragged Ren to his feet and shoved him upstream, toward Qin, and the draw. Behind them the fog still came on, slower now, feeling its way up the banks as the buried lines kept spreading. The web showed faint through the running water, under the streambed, reaching past where the white had stopped. The array was bigger than the fog. The fog was only the part of it built to be seen. Huang Zhisong was shouting from the foot of the draw.

"Move! Up the slope!" He stood ten yards up the channel, waving them on. Su Jieran was already climbing beside him, quick and sure on the bad ground. He had been upstream when the lines lit, the furthest of any of them from the boot that tripped it. It looked like Su had been the first one clear of danger. Ted pushed Ren up ahead of him. Qin was already going, hand over hand on roots and branches, fast and unpanicked.

Below them the fog reached the base of the draw and stopped, as though the steep ground were a wall it could not climb. The lines glowed a moment longer in the leaf litter, faded, and the fog settled back, and the valley went quiet and innocent again. They kept climbing. Ted's lungs burned, his collarbone throbbed, and the pack hung off him as though it had doubled since morning. He did not stop until the ridge, and there he put his hands on his knees and breathed until the copper taste left his mouth.

Under the part of him that was only trying to breathe, his brain had already started its work. That was a formation that ate people. A valley a team walked into, and a count that came back one short. He had read those numbers in the archive for weeks with no mechanism to hang them on. Now he had the mechanism, and it had printed itself onto Ren Deyi's arm. The accounting would keep until his hands stopped shaking. Ren Deyi sat down hard, the burned arm hugged to his chest, pulling air in short and shallow.

His face was still white. He had stopped talking. It was the most frightening thing Ted had experienced all day.