From ahead came the sudden sound of a horse rearing up. Someone screamed, though he could not tell whether the voice was male or female. And then the horses were running again, their hooves drumming on harder-packed earth.

Kosar hurried on, ducking beneath branches, skirting around a huge writhing ant mound that had been smashed in two by the fleeing horses. And then he emerged suddenly from the pine forest into a deciduous woodland—the trees more widely spaced, the ground harder, shrubs and tangles of fern growing here and there—and he saw what had startled the horses.

All color had gone. The trees, leaves and trunks, the ground, ferns and shrubs and thorny bushes on the forest floor, the vines hanging from high branches . . . all color leeched away, leaving the whole landscape a uniform, dull gray. Texture and dimension were picked out only by the fall of sunlight, the distinction of shadows. A bird flew from one high branch to another, calling in a weak, croaky voice, and its color was the same.

Kosar gasped, paused, fell to his knees on the forest floor. The leaves there, left over from the previous winter, had taken on this sickly hue. The ants that crawled over and under the leaves were like speckles of ash migrating across the ground. A beetle here, something larger there—a scorpion, perhaps, or some huge insect—all tinted with shades of gray. He closed his eyes, held out his hand and opened them again. His skin was browned, leathery from the sun, his nails black with filth, and the blood that continued to drip from his fingertips was a stark red against this nothingness.

Kosar sighed with relief, stood and ran on. He felt like an invader here, unnatural and alien, whereas it was the place itself that was so wrong. There had been no fire. The leaves still seemed alive, and they even retained a healthy sheen viewed from certain angles, but something had stolen their color. He kicked the leaves at his feet, wondering whether color had been washed away into the ground, but only the compacted dark gray of the dried mud beneath revealed itself.

The trail was harder to follow in here—the trees grew farther apart and there were no broken branches to show the way, no churned ground—but he could hear the horse now, so he followed his ears instead of his eyes.

There were no longer any noises behind him. He was either too far away or the fighting had finished. He could not bear to imagine what that could mean.