Shadowglade Forest did not welcome Ryder's platoon, and it did not reject them. It performed neither of the two reactions a forest is supposed to perform when armed men step into it. It simply registered them, the way a still pond registers a stone — a brief disturbance, a measured spreading, and then, without comment, a return to whatever surface had been there before.
The first hour was ordinary. The trees thickened by degrees. The road narrowed into a track, and the track narrowed into a path, and the path narrowed into the kind of corridor between trunks that forces a column to walk in pairs. Light filtered down through the high canopy in thin, uneven shafts, and the shafts moved with the wind that ought to have moved them, and for a while Ryder allowed himself to believe that perhaps Darius had been wrong, and Raven simply liked his new lieutenant enough to give him a posting that was, after all, not difficult.
The first hour was ordinary. The second hour was where the wrongness began.
It came in by subtraction, which made it harder to notice and harder to name. There were birds, at the edge of the forest, and then there were fewer birds, and then there were no birds at all. There were small movements at the corners of vision — squirrels, foxes, the half-glimpsed bodies of deer in the deeper green — and then there were fewer movements, and then the movements stopped entirely. There were insects in the late-afternoon light, the brief constellations of midges that any soldier who had ever marched through a forest in summer would have batted absently away from his face. They thinned. They went. Nothing replaced them. The forest grew quieter without growing emptier, and emptier without growing quieter, and the thing was that no individual stage of the change was strange enough to mention aloud.
Pace check. Hold the column.
A scout returned from the front of the line and reported, in the careful tone of a man who suspects he is wasting his lieutenant's time, that the wildlife in the deeper sector was low. Not gone. Just less. He used the word twice as if testing it, the way a child tests a coin for weight, and Ryder told him to keep moving and to mark anything else that struck him as low. The scout saluted and moved on, and Ryder stood for a moment at the head of the column, listening to a forest that he could not stop hearing properly.
It was not silent. That was the trouble. It was almost silent, and "almost" is the wrong setting for a forest. A real forest is a layered noise — wind in the higher leaves, water somewhere, the small constant accidents of small lives. Shadowglade had retained some of those layers and dropped others, and the gaps did not match any pattern Ryder could remember from any forest he had ever walked. Wind without insects. Movement in the canopy without movement in the underbrush. A river he had not yet reached but could already faintly hear, and could not, on any compass reading he tried, point to with any accuracy.
The second report did not improve his mood.
Bring them to me.
The scouts laid the dead birds out on a folded oilcloth at the side of the path. Three of them. Different species. None of them recently fledged, none of them old, none of them visibly injured. Ryder crouched and turned each one over and inspected them himself, and the soldiers who had carried the cloth stood at a respectful distance and watched a new lieutenant make decisions on a thing his training had not prepared him for.
There were no wounds. There was no blood. There was no broken plumage, no twisted neck, no sign of a predator's claw or another bird's beak. There was no swelling that might suggest poison, and no foam at the small black slits of their mouths, and no rigor that might have suggested some seizure. They had simply, at three different points in the same general region, stopped being alive. The bodies were not even, properly speaking, cold. They were the temperature of the air around them, as if the heat of the small lives had been drawn out so gently that even the loss of the heat had not been violent.
Poison, sir?
No. Poison leaves signs. This doesn't.
He said it in the flat, unconcerned tone an officer uses when he wants the men around him to remain unalarmed, and he stood and gave the order to wrap the birds and continue, and as the column resumed its march he turned the small problem over in his head the way a jeweler turns a flawed stone toward better light. Things died. Animals died of stranger causes than men did, because men had names for their causes and animals did not. There was, somewhere in the natural order, a category that explained three small carcasses without external trauma. He simply did not know what it was. That's not the forest's failure, he reminded himself. That's mine. He marked the location on his small pocket map and ordered the column on, and he did not drink the next time the canteen came around, even though his throat had begun to ache.
By late afternoon the column reached the river that Ryder's map had told him to expect, and the river did to him what the dead birds had done — except more so.
Shadowglade River was beautiful. It ran shallow and clean through a bed of pale stones, and the stones were visible right down to the deeper channels, and small fish moved between them with the casual indifference of creatures that have not been hunted in any generation they can remember. The plants along the bank were thick and green and the right colors. The water was cold to the touch, and clear at the surface, and a soldier with a tin cup tasted it and pronounced it sweet. Two more men filled their containers. Ryder, who had wanted to drink for the last mile, knelt at the bank and watched the current move and did not drink.
It was not that the water frightened him. It was that the water was too correct. Every detail he could itemize was the detail he would have wanted in a survival report. Every item on the small private checklist a soldier carries about water — clarity, current, life in the depths, life on the bank — was checked. And in a forest where the air had been emptied of insects and the earth had been emptied of rodents, a river that had been left perfect felt less like a gift than like a place a careful hand had decided not to touch yet.
Fill what we need. Mark this spot. Move on.
The men obeyed, because soldiers obey lieutenants and because they had not yet noticed that he had not, himself, taken any of the water. He marked the river on the map, in a different ink than the dead birds, and gave the order to continue.
As the column climbed away from the bank, one of the older privates dropped back beside him and spoke in the low voice old privates learn to use with new officers when they want to give advice without giving offense.
Lieutenant. With respect. Feels like something's watching.
Ryder did not answer him. He did not need to. The man had said it because he wanted it heard, not because he wanted a reply, and the silence Ryder gave him was its own kind of agreement. They marched the rest of the afternoon under a canopy that had gone too deep into shadow for the time of day, and they made camp where the path widened, and they set the perimeter the way training said to set it, and Ryder ordered double watches and rotated them more often than the regulations required.
That night the forest did the worst thing a forest can do to a column of men in unfamiliar country. It went completely silent. Not the silence of a forest that has no living things in it — that silence has a quality, a thinness, a hollowness to the sound of one's own breathing. This was the silence of a forest that contained living things and had decided, all at once, that none of them would make any noise. The wind moved through the canopy without rustling the leaves. The water at the river, when the wind was right, no longer carried. Even the campfire, well-laid and well-fed, burned without the small pops and hisses a fire makes against the green wood at its edges.
Silence means something is listening.
The thought came up out of Ryder unbidden, in his old sergeant's voice, and he wrote it on the inside of his own head where no other man could read it. He did not sleep. The men did not sleep well. By the time the false dawn came up grey at the edges of the canopy, every face around the fire was drawn in a way that could not be blamed on the night air, and Ryder had, without quite admitting it to himself, already accepted that this posting was not what Raven had described, and that stability was a word that meant something the Major had not bothered to write down.