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leaves, branches. There was no need for anything more; the trail was only too obvious. Behind them the razorhounds snarled and spat, answering each other across the lake, always closer.
    Galen burst through a hanging curtain of leaves, Raffi breathless behind. The keeper stopped dead; peering past him, Raffi saw why.
    Solon was kneeling, deep in the leaves. He wasn’t touching the tree, but they could feel his contact with it, his struggle to reach its deep intelligence.
    Galen stepped forward. To his left, a crossbow swiveled up.
    “My God, you’re persistent!” Marco muttered.
    “He needs me to help him. Or none of us will get out of this.” Without moving from where he stood, Galen sent sudden sense-lines of energy flickering between the trees, their power raw and sharp. Instantly Solon glanced back. He looked amazed, then afraid.
    “Who are you?” he breathed.
    But Galen spoke to the forest. “Let us through,” he said quietly. “Make a way and close it after us. The men behind us are despoilers, burners of trees. We need to escape from them. Will you do this for us?”
    Like the stirring of many leaves the forest answered him, its voice rustling and multifold. It has been many years.
    “I know that. But you see who we are.”
    We see. You are Soren’s Sons.
    Raffi was surprised. It was a name for the Order rarely heard now, written only once or twice in very old books, like the Prophecies of Askelon.
    Something dragged and slithered next to him, so that he turned in fear. Branches and leaves were drawing back. Beyond them was a dim green darkness.
    We make a way for you, the wood whispered. Go through.
    The hole led deep into the forest. It was a network of spaces, the knotted boughs easing apart, leaving gaps to scramble through and over; far in front of them Raffi could see it unfurling, a dim tunnel of branches. He went in front, pushing and climbing. Galen came next with Marco, Solon was last, and behind him with scarcely a sound the trees closed their mesh again, the giant branches sprouting and interlocking.
    Down here the gloom was so deep nothing else grew, only pale toadstools and ghostly threads of fungus fingering up from the accumulated springy mattresses of a century’s dead leaves. Stumbling, Raffi remembered Galen once telling him that the quenta forest was supposed to be all one tree, a vast, sprawling entity. If that was the case, they were deep inside its body now, miles inside, the smooth green-lichened trunks rising above him into rustling canopies.
    After what seemed an age Galen gasped, “All right, Raffi. This is enough.”
    It was a small clearing, musty-smelling. When Raffi sat down he sank into leaves to his waist, dry and crumbling.
    Galen, limping now, eased Marco down. The bald man still held the crossbow. Leaning over, one hand on a tree bole, Galen dragged in deep breaths. He looked haggard, as if his old leg wound ached, but his eyes were sharp with that reckless triumph Raffi knew only too well. When Solon caught up, they were all silent a while, recovering. Raffi lay on his back and listened to the forest, the cold wind making an endless whistling in the high leaves above him, though down here everything was still, as if it had never moved. Lichen grew thick on trunks and bark; hanging green beards of it, as if snow or wind never penetrated, never disturbed it. Only the slow drip of the rain would reach this place.
    Slowly the terror died in him. They were safe here. No one else might ever have come this far in, not since the Makers walked the world.
    Solon must have thought so too. He sat down wearily and looked up at Galen, rubbing one hand through his smooth silver hair. “It seems we have much to thank you for.” Then he stood up abruptly and held out his hand.
    Galen took it, their fingers tight in the sign of Meeting.
    “Another keeper,” Solon breathed. “I hardly believed there were any left!”
    “A few.”
    “Flainsteeth,” Marco muttered. “More