Ambel seemed at a loss to find a reply and he stood there dumbly as Sild moved off with the others. After a moment he shrugged, then turned to face Janer and Erlin.

‘Best you two go with them,’ he said.

‘Not one chance in hell,’ said Janer, and Erlin just shook her head. Ambel nodded, expecting this response, then, hoisting his blunderbuss up on to one shoulder, turned towards the dingle.

Ron took up a huge machete, advanced on the wall of vegetation, and set to. Ambel followed, and the rest of them, after taking up their packs of supplies, followed after him.

Beyond the first thick layer of dingle, things began to get a little easier, though there were numerous peartrunk trees, with their concomitant crops of leeches, to get past. Janer clutched Keech’s carbine to himself and kept a wary eye on the dingle. There were things moving around in the bluery - big, slimy things with buzz-saw mouths.

‘Mask,’ Erlin warned him at one point and, not having encountered putrephallus weeds before, he was a bit slow to cap the filter mask over his face. He nearly filled it with vomit.

‘What’s that?’ he asked when he had recovered enough to point at the horrible baggy bird-thing clinging to one of the phallic flowers.

‘Lung bird,’ Erlin told him. ‘They’re about the only creatures here that other creatures won’t eat. They stink worse than their food, and are full of toxins. No one’s figured out how they manage to stay alive. But no one’s really wanted to get close enough to find out.’

‘And those.’ Janer pointed again.

‘Frogmoles. Don’t step on one. They’ve got barbed spines that’ll go through just about anything, and you’d need surgery to have them removed,’ said Erlin.

‘Charming.’

Beyond the peartrunk trees and stands of putrephallus, yanwood trees reared into the sky. Below them the ground was clear of new growth, though thickly layered with oily oval leaves that smelt of kerosene. With the vegetation now thinning sufficiently for Ron to put away his machete, they picked up their pace and soon came to a place where ahead of them reared something like a grassy slope. What was growing on it - though the same green as ordinary grass - consisted of small translucent spheroids that popped when trod upon and let off a smell like coffee and curry powder combined. They were also slippery underfoot when burst, so climbing the slope became hard going.