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more warped. The insects were bigger and strangely distorted. Glowing fungus reached the height of his knees.
    “The taint of the Shadow is stronger here,” said Kormak. “The Blight is getting worse.”
    Grogan grinned. “I would say so much is obvious.”
    “There is magic here,” Kormak said. “This is a place that can warp body and soul now. Tell everyone to remember what I said and to be extra careful.”
    He sniffed the air. The under-currents of rot were stronger. There was the smell of something worse there as well. The saliva in his mouth was starting to feel oily. “We can’t stay here more than a day or two at most. The less time on this unholy ground the better.”
    A moth with a wingspan as long as the distance from his finger-tips to his elbow fluttered past. It glowed in the shadows. Men shrank away from it unwilling to feel the soft caress of its strange wings on their flesh. The carpet of mulch beneath their feet felt sticky. A tick the size of a man’s fist inched across a diseased branch. The leaves of the trees swayed although there was no breeze. There was a sense that the forest was alive and inimical all around them.
    Grogan had his bow knocked now and was staring around, wary as a wolf. Kormak held the crossbow ready. A sour wind sprang up, like the exhalation of a great dragon. It carried with it a strong sickly sweet odour of corruption. Kormak froze as if he had come under the eye of some huge monster and all of those around him did the same. He was not sure how the nameless dread communicated itself through their entire party but it had, so much was obvious.
    Kormak put his hand on the ground. The rotting leaves were sticky and unclean but he thought he felt a faint vibration there. The image of a hive of gigantic, burrowing insects sprang into his mind. He thought of a giant nest of spiders large enough to make the earth shiver as they moved. He breathed out and performed the cleansing exercises he had been taught on Mount Aethelas when he was a novice. Calmness returned.
    Then he heard the swish of something moving through the air. One of the hunters near him fell, a poisoned dart in his neck. Something moved overhead in the branches of the trees. Looking up Kormak saw the glowing green eyes of a huge spider. He fired the crossbow but missed the scuttling creature.
    A net of webbing dropped towards him. Kormak dropped the useless missile weapon. His sword cleared its scabbard. The razor edge of the dwarf-forged blade sliced through the sticky webbing, parting it around him. Others were not so lucky. He saw men entangled by rope thick web-strands.
    Overhead now he could see the elves moving, swinging from branch to branch with uncanny agility. Their pet spiders scuttled along branches. Grogan had somehow avoided being entangled. He raised his bow and fired. An elf dropped from the tree, chest pierced. Grogan fired again. Another elf fell.
    Short of clambering into the swaying boughs there was nothing Kormak could do. He raced across to the nearest entangled woodsman and cut him free, moved on to free another. Arrows and darts traced his tracks. Springing and rolling, he narrowly avoided them. He realised that they had one advantage here. It seemed the elves did not want to kill them unless they had to. They wanted captives if they could get them. Kormak thought about the dead prisoners he had seen. Falling into their hands would not be a pleasant experience.
    A few more of the woodsmen had worked themselves free of the webbing and were returning fire with their bows. Screams indicated that at least some of their arrows had found a mark.
    “Damn,” he heard Grogan curse and turned to see a new horror had been unleashed. Large spiders were dropping on threads of webbing. They were smaller than the ones Kormak had fought during the attack on the village. Their markings were different, a complex swirl like a strange flowing script. Their eyes glittered with malign intelligence though and a