By the end of the second day, the forest no longer resembled itself.
It was nothing dramatic, at first. The first signs were the kind of thing a careful officer would have caught and a careless one would have walked past. The trees on the left of the path were spaced wrong — not by feet, but by inches; not in any single place, but in a steady, accumulating pattern, as if the eastern column of trunks had been very gently rotated about an axis no one in the column was tall enough to see. The track underfoot followed a curve that Ryder's pocket map did not show. He matched the map to the compass three times and could not, on any reading, reconcile the deviation. The compass said one thing; the map said another; the ground beneath his boots said a third.
Sir. The path is wrong.
I know. Keep going.
Sir, the map is wrong.
I know that too. Keep going.
By the end of the third hour, the deviation was no longer subtle. They reached a clearing that should not, on any honest reading of the land, have existed.
Ryder knew the terrain. He had mapped it himself in the first ten days of the deployment, on careful afternoons with a pencil and a measuring cord and the patient assistance of two of his most reliable scouts. He had walked this region. He had drawn it. He had given the drawings to Raven and watched Raven file them. There was no clearing in this region. There was, by his own measurements, a continuous belt of mature forest from the river to the next ridge, broken only by two narrow game trails neither of which approached the spot he was now standing in. There should have been trees here. The trees should have been older than he was. They were not there. There was, in their place, a circular opening in the forest about twenty paces across, perfectly even at its edge, with not a single trunk inside it and not a single fallen log on the bare ground.
Raven stopped the column at the edge of it.
Hold. No one steps in. No one. That is an order, and it is also a request — your discipline today is doing me a favor I am not in a position to repay yet. Hold.
The column held. Ryder stood with Raven at the edge of the clearing and looked into it, and the clearing did to his eyes what the silence had been doing to the column's ears. The space pulled. It did not pull physically. It pulled attentionally. Standing at the edge of the bare ground was like standing at the edge of an open doorway in a house one had not entered before; the eye wanted to enter it, the mind wanted to know what was on the other side, the body's old animal logic wanted to step forward and stop wondering. The pull was not aggressive. It was not even, in the sense the word usually meant, a spell. It was a quiet, polite suggestion, lodged in the nervous system at the level of of course you would step forward; why wouldn't you; and it was very good.
Ryder felt the suggestion arrive. He did not move. He glanced sideways at Raven and saw that Raven, who had been watching the clearing for perhaps thirty seconds longer than he had, was visibly resisting the same suggestion, and the visible nature of the resistance was the most alarming thing Ryder had yet seen on Raven's face. Raven did not look strained. He looked concentrated — the way a man concentrates on holding still in a current that wants to move him.
A soldier stepped past them.
He did not ask permission. He did not announce himself. He did not show, in his face, any of the small visible signs of a man overruling a direct order. He simply walked forward, slowly, with no expression and no haste, and crossed into the clearing the way a man walks into his own kitchen after a long day.
Hold him. Don't go in after him.
Two soldiers caught the man at the elbows and pulled him back as fast as they could without crossing the line themselves, and they were not fast enough. He took three steps. His third step was inside. The forest around the clearing reacted instantly to the third step, in a way it had not reacted to anything in a month. The remaining ambient sound of the green country — the small leaf-noises, the small breath of the men holding the line — vanished. The light dimmed by a quality that was not darkness; the importance of the light dropped, as if some unseen hand had taken the volume of the sun's brightness down by a notch.
The soldier in the clearing stopped walking. He stood very still, facing roughly away from them, his back a clean line against the gray-on-gray of the suppressed light. Then, slowly, he turned around.
His face was not the empty face Ryder had seen on the others. That was the new thing, and the worse thing. The empty soldiers in the medical tent were absent — minds gone, bodies still breathing, no one home. The face on the soldier in the clearing was not absent. It was occupied. There was someone behind the eyes, looking out. Whoever was looking out was not the soldier.
The face smiled, by half. It was not a smile a soldier would have made. It was the small private smile of a guest discovering that the door has been left unlocked for him.
You're early.
The voice was the soldier's voice. The voice was also not. The cadence, the small lift at the end of early, the soft consonants that the soldier did not normally produce — none of those were his. Ryder felt the wrongness of it the way he had felt the wrongness of Ferrin's not yet, except that this time the wrongness was sustained for the full length of two words rather than for the snap of one syllable, and the longer the wrongness ran the more clearly it told him that something on the other side had been practicing.
Raven did not flinch. He stepped forward to the edge of the clearing, just to the edge, deliberately not crossing the line. His hand stayed clear of his weapon. His face stayed level.
Then we won't waste time.
Silence held in the clearing for a slow heartbeat. The soldier's borrowed face held its half-smile. Then — no flicker, no warning, no transition — the smile widened, very slightly, into something that was not a smile at all, and the body collapsed.
The clearing collapsed with it.
There is no other word. The bare ground that had not been there in the morning was, suddenly, not there again. Trees stood where the ground had been. The forest closed back into itself across the space the clearing had occupied with no transition that any eye in the column could track — one moment the clearing existed, the next it did not, and the trees that filled the space were not new trees but the original trees, the ones Ryder had drawn on his pocket map in the first ten days, full-grown and dense and completely undisturbed. The light returned. Sound returned. The ambient pressure of the green country snapped back to ordinary.
The soldier was on the ground in the place the clearing had been, alive, breathing, empty.
Ryder turned to Raven. His mouth had opened to say that was it, and he did not say it, because the word it did not feel large enough.
That was not it. That was a message.
Sir. From who?
Raven did not answer. He was looking at the place where the clearing had been, and his face had the specific concentration of a man rereading a sentence that had not, on first reading, said what he had thought it said.
The column carried the soldier back. They did not speak on the way to the camp.