‘I don’t think sunshine would help this place very much,’ Ulath disagreed.

‘What could have laid waste so vast a region?’ Bevier asked with a shudder.

‘The earth itself is diseased,’ Sephrenia told him. ‘Let’s not linger too long in this accursed wood, dear ones. A man is not a tree, but the noxious miasma of this forest cannot be healthy.’

‘We’re losing daylight, Sephrenia,’ Kurik said.

‘That won’t be a problem. There’ll be light enough for us to press on after it grows dark.’

‘What was it that diseased the earth, Lady Sephrenia?’ Berit asked, looking around at the white trees thrusting upward from the contaminated soil like imploring skeletal hands.

‘There’s no way to know, Berit, but the reek of this place is the reek of death. Horrors beyond imagining may lie under the ground. Let’s put this place behind us.’

The sky darkened with the approach of evening, but as night fell, the dead trees around them began to give off a sickly, greenish glow.

‘Are you doing this, Sephrenia?’ Kalten asked, ‘making the light, I mean?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘The light isn’t the result of magic’

Kurik laughed a bit ruefully. ‘I should have remembered that,’ he said.

‘Remembered what?’ Talen asked him.

‘Rotten logs and the like glow in the dark sometimes.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘You’ve spent too much time in cities, Talen.’

‘You have to go where your customers are,’ the boy shrugged. ‘You don’t make much profit swindling frogs.’

They rode on through the first hours of night in that faint greenish glow, covering their noses and mouths with their cloaks. Not long before midnight they reached a steep, forested ridge. They rode on for some distance and then set up camp for the remainder of the night in a shallow, wooded basin where the night air seemed unusually sweet and pure after the endless hours in the fetid stink of the dead forest. The prospect they viewed the following morning as they crested the ridge was not a great deal more encouraging. What they had faced the previous day had been dead white. What lay in store for them today was just as dead, but it was black.

‘What on earth is that?’ Talen gasped, staring out over the bubbling expanse of sticky-looking black muck.

‘The tar-bogs Kring mentioned,’ Sparhawk replied.

‘Can we go around them?’

‘No. The tar seeps out of the face of a cliff, and the bogs run on for leagues out into the foothills.’

The tar-bogs appeared to be vast puddles of shiny black, glistening wet, bubbling and stretching to a rocky spur perhaps five miles to the south. Near the far side there rose a plume of bluish flame quite nearly as tall as the spire rising above the cathedral of Cimmura.

‘How can we hope to cross that?’ Bevier exclaimed.