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warning sounds, appeared a short while later on the cubble running parallel to the persons’ path. He was panting slightly and puffing with anger.
    “Brown many-legs,” the furcot reported. “A mated hunting pair. Saw me and the she spat, but her mate turned her. Gone now.” The furcot turned, leaped to a lower branch, and disappeared in the undergrowth. Reader nodded with satisfaction and waved the column forward. Thorns were returned to quivers, tank seeds to pouches.
    A single brown many-leg wouldn’t hesitate to charge two or three men, Born reflected. A mated hunting pair would take on almost anything in the hylaea. But a group of man and furcot in such numbers would cause even the greater forest carnivores to think twice before attacking. Whether a demon would think likewise remained to be seen.
    They must be nearing the place. Born recognized a distinctive Blood tree, its pitcherlike leaves filled with crimson water caused by the plant’s secretion of tannin. Soon after passing the Blood tree they found themselves walking into a steady breeze. A responsive murmur sprang up among the marchers. Within the forest world the wind rarely blew steadily in any single direction. Instead, gusts of air came and went like wraiths, darting and curling around branches and boles and stems like living things. But this breeze was steady and purposeful and warm. Warm enough, Born reflected, to come from Hell itself.
    Reader brandished his axe, defying any evil spirits in the area who would dare to come near. Each man pulled his green cloak more tightly and protectively around him.
    Born motioned the party to slow and spread out. Ahead of him the world seemed suddenly to change perspective. He took another couple of steps along the cubble, pushed aside a drooping whalear leaf, and cried out at what he saw, one hand tightening convulsively around a supporting liana. Similar cries sounded nearby, but he was momentarily paralyzed, unable to look for his companions.
    Not a hand’s breadth away the thick wood of the cubble he stood on had been shattered like a rotten stem, as had that of other lesser and greater growths nearby. A vast well had been opened up in the world. Born looked up, up, to a circle of strange color two hundred meters overhead. A patch of deep blue flecked with white cumulus— the blue of the Upper Hell.
    Below—he gripped the liana ever tighter—below and down an equally great distance, somewhere at the Fifth Level, lay a brilliant blue object that caught the sun like the axe. In its center was something even more shiny, something that made rainbows from sunlight, an uneven half-globe of material like a flitter’s transparent wings. Its top was ragged and open to the air.
    Already vines, creepers, cubbies, tuntangcles, and other growth were destroying the smooth sides of the well, pushing outward in furious competition for the wealth of unaccustomed sunlight.
    Born studied the spreading epiphytes and rampaging growers and estimated that in another twice seven-days the new vegetation would cover the well completely. They would have to avoid this area for some time, however, until some denser growth filled it in.
    “Here, Born!” a voice called.
    He turned to see Reader standing on the broken-off limb of a Pillar, leaning out as far as he dared and gesturing with the axe. It flashed like lightning in the greenish light. In a few minutes every member of the party had assembled on the meters-wide broken branch. The furcots had gathered to themselves and sat silently on one side to see what the persons would do.
    “It is a demon for sure, and it sleeps,” began one of the twins—Talltree, Born noted.
    “I still do not think it is a demon,” Born countered firmly. “I believe it is a thing, an object that has been fashioned,” and he nodded toward Reader, “like the axe,”
    Various exclamations greeted Born’s blasphemous opinion. Reader held up a hand for quiet. “People, this is no place for loud