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 You re lucky it s clear, Maran observes.  We often have an early morning fog
in the winter, especially around the wall. It can make it difficult if the
forest tries to use a fallen trunk as a bridge to escape because no one sees
anything until the giant cats are loose and killing cattle or peasants or
until a stun lizard has killed an entire wagon team.
Lorn nods, listening to the words and remembering them, neither accepting nor
rejecting what the majer says.
Even from a kay away, the Accursed Forest towers into the sky, a mass of
greenery that appears more like a dark, low-lying cloud than vegetation. The
crown of the forest canopy rises at least two hundred cubits skyward, and the
ward-wall itself appears as little more than a thin shimmering white line at
the base of the trees it confines.
The grass through which the narrow road leads dies away, and the white paving
stones continue toward the wall through a grayish white dirt that oozes the
red chaos of salt-killed soil. The light breeze intermittently swirls
powder-like soil and salt across the road. Lorn can also sense residual
chaos-from firelances, or magus-bolts, or perhaps from the specal firecannon
Maran had mentioned the afternoon before.
 It s amazing the first time you see it, Maran observes.  It s hard to
believe that anyone could have built something this massive and so long.
Remember, the part that s underground is ten times as deep as what you see.
As they approach the wall more closely, Lorn glances upward at the
dark-trunked trees that appear evenly spaced just inside the wall. Each trunk
appears to be set no less than thirty cubits from the next and no more than
forty. At the height from which Lorn can see their bases across the top of the
wall, he judges each trunk to be between ten and fifteen cubits in diameter.
Maran reins up the white stallion a good fifty cubits back from the wall, and
Lorn follows the majer s lead.
Then Lorn studies the wall-a barrier not terribly high, perhaps five cubits
high, low enough that he can look beyond it while mounted. Each white granite
wall stone is an oblong two cubits long, one cubit high, and approximately one
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thick, from what Lorn can tell. The wall s thickness is three courses. He
looks to the southeast, but there the wall seems to end less than a kay away,
a spot marked by the fifty-cubit-high granite structure that stands a quarter
kay back from the wall-the southernmost chaos tower. The tower is windowless
and squat.
He glances back to his left, where the wall seems to stretch endlessly to the
northwest, a line of white dwindling and then vanishing into the gray-green of
the horizon.  It looks as though any one of those trees could fall and crush
the wall.
 If it were a normal wall, they might. The bark and the outer layer splinter
and shatter, but their heartwood absorbs all the chaos for a long time, and
that allows all sorts of animals to use the trunk as a bridge. Maran snorts.
 Then, to remove it from the wall proper takes special engineer equipment, and
the engineers have their hands full. Sometimes, there are seeds that sprout as
well.
 Even in the salted soil?
 Even there, and at times the seeds and fragments get thrown or carried beyond
the barrier strip.
Lorn glances from the wall back along the road. At most, one of the tallest
trees would cover less than a quarter of the distance to where the grass
begins.  How often does that happen?
 An actual full trunk falling-perhaps ten a season in a bad season, five in a
good season. Two years ago, there were close to three score in the autumn.
That was the most ever.
Lorn frowns. Between twenty and forty tree trunks falling across the wall
every year? In a bad year, that might approach one an eightday.
 A giant cat or a stun lizard-they re about as dangerous as a company of
barbarians.
 How many lancers do we lose every year? asks the captain.
 Some years, perhaps a handful. Two years ago, we lost almost tenscore. Maran
shrugs.  That was high. The majer turns his mount right, along the white
paving stones of the twenty-cubit-wide road that parallels the wall, back
along the wall toward the chaos tower.
Lorn follows, his eyes and senses still studying the wall.
Every two hundred and fifty cubits is a glittering cube of crystal, from which
chaos radiates above the whitened granite. A stronger, but less obvious, line
of chaos runs from ward to ward through the cupridium cables within the white
ceramic casings set under the capstones of the wall, cables that link each
cube with the next.
The entire wall glitters with chaos and power, yet it seems almost
insignificant against the unseen wall of dark order that the Accursed Forest [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]