by Fred Chappell

Our introduction to the shadow traders Astolfo and Falco came in our March 2007 issue with “Dance of Shadows.” (Those of you who missed the story can find it reprinted on our Website this month.) Their new adventure places Falco in some rough company as he pursues his trade.
Fred Chappell has been pursuing the writing trade for more than five decades, during which time he has published eight novels, seventeen collections of poetry, two books of essays, and two volumes of short fiction. A third story collection, entitled Ancestors and Others, is due out later this year. A two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, he was honored with the Thomas Wolfe Prize in 2005. He lives in North Carolina.

We read in Pausanias’s account of ancient Arkady (lib. VIII, cap. 34) of the Dark Vale stretching southward from the eastern foot of Mount Lykaion. That was a place shunned by men because whoever entered there lost his shadow and perished within a twelvemonth. Fearing no local superstition, the satrap Dousonious marched his small army through this valley to surprise his foe’s rearward in the Lykaionian Meadows. His final order to his ministers was to make certain the chroniclers set down the loss of his troops to plague. Even on his bivouac deathbed, Dousonious clung to his peculiar pattern of rationality.

A deadly place, then, and that is one reason that plants taken from similar locations are so avidly sought after. The nobility of Tardocco and the outlying counties are a race proud of their gardens. They roll out smooth greenswards and carve parterres tier upon tier; they shear topiary into curious shapes, heraldic, and allegorical and obscene; they plant gaudy exotic flowers rank after rank. They vaunt themselves according to the magnificence of their grounds and comb the world to search out rarities.

To speak accurately, they send out mercenaries like myself and my colleague Mutano to make their searches for them, after having first deliberated with Master Astolfo, our mentor and employer. Trusting to his knowledge of all that has to do with shadows, they gape their purses generously to acquire plants that will throw fantastically contoured shadows upon the ground, shadows to complement their fountains and statuary, shadows to cool an enclosure or adorn an open space. They are confident that Astolfo shall deliver happy result. Trust is justified, for in matters where he lacks informancy and skill, he declines commission. The enterprise of shadow-dealing is sufficiently dangerous, he declares, without adding to it the perils of attendant ignorance.

* * * *

All this substance I communicated to my host, the hill-country bandit Torronio, as we sat around the hungry small fire in this cave where he and his band had brought me as captive. They had taken me as I traveled the steep path through the pass below and offered violence if I did not follow them to their smoky lair and there deliver to them my gold.

This was an odd proceeding, I thought. Why did they not attempt to chop me down where I stood and lighten my quivering corpus of valuables? I discovered they were avid for news of the world beyond their hill. They would have had difficulty in putting my silver to use, exiled to the wilderness and with tall bounties prominent upon their heads.

Torronio passed to me a companionable jug of sourish ale and informed me that they would be taking my purse, as a matter of course.

“Let us negotiate,” I said. “I will hand over six eagles, one to each of your men, and two to you. For this amount, I shall expect you to feed and water my horse, share your eatables with me, and lodge me here by your fire for this night.”

“Do you take me for your groom?”

“Signor Torronio, I do not. But my mount is thirsty. I should be pleased to spare a coin or two that we might be looked after.”

“You but invite us to take all your coin and your makeshift nag also.”

“The mount is not mine to bestow. I was reluctant to bring my own horse upon this journey and so hired this gelding whose name, I was told, is Belus. I have heard that there are bandits in this wood that prey upon travelers. Some, I understand, are so penurious they would make a meal of horseflesh.”

“Do you not think the five of us can work our will upon you?”

“Mayhap,” I said. “Yet the struggle would cost you sweat and hard breathing and at least two lives. Why should you suffer such exertion when I would share a few eagles willingly?”

He stared at me long, as if to judge of the soundness of my wits. Then he laughed softly. “Well, thou’rt no coward. It is also to your credit that you are so mindful of the horse. Yet five upon one make the chance strong in our favor.”

I looked where the others sat together on an uneven ledge of stone and studied their shadows the fire threw upon the cave wall. “I should begin by skewering that beanpole fellow in the patched hose,” I said. “He has no fight in him and his quick dispatch will undermine the courage of the others. Then I should look to the fate of that shifty little man there, he with the twitching squint. He only enters a fray when he sees the opponent already hotly engaged and he tries then to sneak about to the blind side. The red-haired lout with the vile laugh fancies himself an accomplished duelist and he does possess arm strength; but his feet are large and clumsy and are not always upon conformable terms with his intentions. That other gent, the dark, silent footpad, will pretend to engage with the sword while looking for opportunity to fling the dagger from his belt into my thigh. I should take pains to press him hard, so that he gaineth not space to ply his jape.”

Torronio smiled less happily. “And I?”

“Thou art the ablest. If you were of a mind to spare lives, you and I might try our steels in a private set-to.”

“The night is long and you are travel-weary. You must sleep sooner or later and then we, having traded watch, will undo your head at the neck and count your gold. But this Belus seemeth too aged to make a palatable stew.”

“You would not play me such a scurvy turn.”

“Why say you so?”

“You shadow belieth you.” I pointed to its shape on the moisturous wall. “The outlines of your colleagues are vague and hazy. They lack true character and so might take my life underhandedly. But your lines are firm and in the center of your shade there is a straight line so black it tendeth to a purple. Uprightness of character produces such a figure. You, Signor Torronio, are no bandit by nature but an upright man fallen upon stingy times.”

“These things you know by looking at mere shadows?”

“Let me unfold myself to you a little,” I said and, after telling him something of my situation in the port city of Tardocco with Maestro Astolfo (though without saying the shadow master’s name) and describing briefly some aspects of the shadow trade, I told him the story of the Dark Vale and how men were reputed to lose their shadows there and how the herbs and flowers and shrubs and trees of that place would be in sharp demand among the dissolute wealthy and how I now traveled with the purpose of transporting some of these fabled flora out of their obscurity.

“And will you be well paid for this rooty plunder?” he asked.

“We shall all be well remitted—you and I the more handsomely, of course.”

“All?”

“You five and I would make up a competent troop. By all signs, you do not flourish grandly. As I came up the hill path, I observed that none hath traveled here since the rains of last sennight. Scant must be your takings. You must be highly desirable to guard troops and shire-reeves to squirm you into such a hole and feed upon vermin like that stoat turning there upon the spit.”

“My history—our history—is no affair of yours.”

“Indeed not,” I replied, “nor of any interest whatsoe’er, unless you might wish to better your plight.”

“You speak,” he said, “as if you had expected to be waylaid by us. You give out your sentences as might an actor upon a stage. You came a-purpose to recruit.”

“If I know of you and your whereabouts, so must others. They only wait till hunger brings you out of hiding. Already the noose prefigures your neck in its blank oval.”

“What is’t you offer to better us? Only the opportunity to meet a death more spectral in your Dark Vale of Arkady.”

“Not in Arkady,” I replied. “That country is lost to the historied ages. I go up through the hills to the Moluvorio Mountains. In their midst lies another Dark Vale said to snatch shadows and to put forth plants of great value. We can make up a company and seek a fortune, or you may stay hunched in this smoking hole to wither away. In any case, six eagles are all you shall gather from me this night.”

“Let me think on’t till morn.”

“Think then. But meantime you should advise that dusky little hop-o’-my-thumb to stay his hand free of his dagger. From where I sit I can place mine in his ear before he turns toward me.”

He gave the fellow a look and quietly spoke his name. “Rinaldo.”

The man shrugged, assenting, and turned his attention elsewise.

“Six eagles be it, then,” Torronio said. “We’ll give thee meat and sup, poor though they are. We will water and provender your nag. Tomorrow we shall take consult upon the matter of your shadow bushes.” He put forth his hand for the coins. “Count out six.”

I did so, pleased not to have to cross blades. Torronio was of medium height, lithe and tawny, and his black-pupiled eyes brooded with intelligence. I would have had difficulty blooding him without killing and I wanted sleep, that healing balm poets prate of.

He gave over the jug again and I drank and it tasted not so sour as before.

I woke to the sound of their jawing as they debated my offer. My sword was in my right hand and when I sat up, I took care they should see I had held it ready through the night. They looked me over incuriously, then took up their jangle again. I found a dented tin ewer and took a swallow of water to spit out and splashed my face and wrists and inspected what weather I could see through the cave mouth.

Then Torronio beckoned me to join the group. “We would put to you some questions.”

“I will answer four,” I said, “be they brief.”

The little dirk-flinger spoke. His voice rasped like a saw-blade over flint. “Do you know how to find the Vale or must we wander on the slopes like shepherdless goats?”

“I have a map.”

“I should like to see this map.”

“It is invisible,” I said and touched my forehead. “Count two.” I did not tell that I carried upon my person two maps, a true one and a false.

“How can we know you do not draw us into a trap to reap the bounties?”

“What need for that? If I were intent upon bounty gold, my colleagues would surround us now. Count three.”

The red-haired louty one: “How should we provision us? Your supplies are as invisible as your map.”

“Are we not a merry band of cutthroats? We shall denude the sheepish we find in our way.”

He began: “But there are few who—”

“And so conclude,” I said. “Four are four.”

“I do not like the look of this,” said the tall, mopish one. He fingered the hilt of his hanger until I rested my gaze upon the weapon. Then he withdrew his hand.

“Thou’lt like it less till the success of the venture persuadeth thee otherwise. Thou’rt of a sour mien and henceforth shall be addressed as Crossgrain. You—” I gestured toward the dark, small one “—are to be known as Sneakdirk. Tall yellow-hair shall be named Goldenrod and Rinaldo shall be Squint. Accustom these names to your persons. Use them habitually. In the heat of affray, do not allow your former names to escape your lips. From this time, we are secret men.”

“And I?” inquired Torronio. “What insultive cognomen will you try upon me?”

“Thou art Torronio, since that was never your true name.”

“Thyself?”

I thought for a trice. “Call me Stalwart,” I said, “though by rights I should be called Quartermaster.”

“How so?”

“I have arranged to break our morning fast in a handsomer style than you are used to. If Sneakdirk and Goldenrod will take my horse down the path for about a mile the way I came, they shall find a little gray mule tethered by a stream in the grove. That mule is laden with provisions and weapons and maybe a pannier or two of stout wine.”

Torronio laughed aloud. “Well, we have been foreknown,” he said. “You have made it foolish to do else than follow your directives.”

“It is good to meet a man of sense.”

He replied jocularly: “And what shall be the name of the mule?”

“Woman, I call her because she hath a mind all her own and will never learn by being beaten.”

* * * *

Goldenrod and Sneakdirk returned a little before midmorning. Their brightened faces told that they had searched through the bundles Woman had carried and had been pleased with what they found. Some of the implements and instruments would mean naught to them, but the dozen quick-edged swords and the array of smaller blades had struck their desires. They had discovered the brandy too and had a pull or two at a bottle and I did not begrudge them. A guard troop customarily plies new recruits with strong waters as a means to fellowship They had broken out the loaves of brown bread and Goldenrod brandished one of them above his head as he trudged along behind Sneakdirk on Belus, with Woman in tow.

We ate and drank awhile and then I began the oration I had written out in my mind, telling them that the crimes for which they were hunted were no worse than what any ordinary man might commit; that is, upon finding a shipwreck perched on a reef on the coast north of Tardocco, they had undertaken to plunder it, according to the custom of salvagers. They could not have known that the murderous pirate Morbruzzo and his men had lured the Silvereen to ruin with false lights on the beach and then hid away till nightfall. Our four petty plunderers had been sighted bearing away some silks and casques by townsfolk who described them to the local guard troops. They fled, abandoning their gains. These events had placed them in their present pinched circumstances.

“Better for my purposes were you of a more criminal breed,” I said, “for what I have in mind will require steady nerve in the face of dangers you have never bethought. Yet you may bring yourselves to the point if desire of gold can spur you.”

“Gold is ever a reliable spur,” Torronio said. “Tales of gold are ever unreliable.”

“We shall be mining gold from shadows, as I explained. We shall be gathering plants to carry from the Dark Vale to be sold in Tardocco. I will demonstrate how to transport this herbage with as little damage as possible. You will be astonied to see how much a single Herba umbrae supplex can bring.”

“In the supplies you loaded on Woman were no sorts of agricultural tools,” said Goldenrod. “No spades or shovels or mattocks to dig with.”

“We shall trust to the Fates to throw such things in our way.”

At these words they declined their polls doubtfully.

“How much?” asked Squint.

“Two hundred eagles at the least, fifty for Stalwart, thirty for Torronio, the rest divided as you see fit.”

“If so much gold accrues to mere husbandry—digging plants and carting them away—why do not venturers flock to the place and make themselves wealthy with ease?” This was Torronio’s pointed question.

“Reasons three,” I said. “Few know the location of the ancient and fabled vale; fewer still have heard of these strange flora. Foremost, though, is the danger. We may lose our lives and the manner of our deaths, while mysterious, is reputed most unpleasant.”

“Whom must we fear?” asked Goldenrod. He thrust his chest forward to signify bravery.

“I know only that they are shadows.”

They gazed at me, then at one another.

“I fear no shadow,” Squint said.

“Then naught stands in our way.”

Torronio shook his head. “I stay doubtful. You have not told us all. Something in this matter conturbeth me.”

“I say again, Dangers abound.”

“Well,” he said, “we shall go to this vale. We have long since left a life of safety behind.”

Torronio was wise to doubt, for I had told them only so much as might persuade them to fall in with me. I had not told them that more gold was at stake and that some part of it, should we end happily, must go to Maestro Astolfo, by whose commission the enterprise was undertaken. It was he who must inspect these plants, pass on their authenticity, and market them to the vanity of that circle of nobility who named themselves the Green Knights and Verdant Ladies, they who harbored such passion for their sumptuous and curious gardens. It was Astolfo who had outfitted me for the venture—and not me alone.

This horticultural task was not only a commission, it was a test of skills. I had been now four years in service to Astolfo alongside his manservant Mutano. Ours had become a companionable rivalry after I had thoroughly partaken of the education in shadow-craft that Mutano relayed to me, generally by means of kicks and blows in my early days at Astolfo’s town villa, later by means of mischievous jocoseries designed to make me lose countenance.

Nowadays our rivalry had risen to such a pitch that Astolfo proposed this present quest for us as a matching of our abilities. He told us of this particular Dark Vale, described its treasures, spoke of the attendant perils, and then set this trial of judgment: “Whoso of you first delivereth to me handsome specimens, truly desirable plants, shall possess as much as seven parts of our profit. From the remaining portion I will pay all accrued expenses and keep for myself only what is left from the rest. If all goes well, one of you shall amass heaping chests full.”

His proposal suited. I had been gaining skills and knowledge, laboring in the craft, and had scored successes by my own efforts and Mutano had begun to hold jealousy toward me; he found me mounting the ladder of Astolfo’s esteem while he remained in his accustomed station. Too, he had suffered a mishap. In attempting to reacquire the beautiful voice that had been robbed from him by violence, he had acquired instead a voice not his own at all, together with an uncommunicative language. These days he could speak only in the voice of a cat, a voice that had fastened to him like a disease of the throat. He burned with fury—not against the Maestro or myself—but against the unjust circumstances that sometimes betrayed him to ridicule and scarlet embarrassment.

For these reasons, I thought I might have an advantage. Mutano was eager to shine; he would be impatient to make a start; he might neglect some point of proper preparation. If he misstepped, I must seize opportunity to repay some of the knockabout, kick-arse treatment he had visited upon me. Here lay a chance to make myself his equal.

Accordingly, I gave myself to long study of certain of the villa’s library of books, manuscripts, codices, and maps. One edition of Mandeville’s Travels was inlaid with many a map, richly colored and decorated with mermaids and monsters, but I soon thrust it away as untrustworthy and inspected more recent cartography in the Collecteana of Gaius Junius Solinus and in the anonymous Imago Mundi. In short, I examined every source with any least promise down to its last majuscule.

Meanwhile, I studied also Mutano, marking in my mind the pages and maps he most often turned to and gauging what sheets most keenly roused his interest. When the day came that he decided to desert the company of ancient authors and strike toward the northern mountains, I was confident I knew what route he had inscribed in his mind.

Over and again he had studied De Casa’s Mappae Mundi Magnae and had copied out one page on a sturdy vellum that could withstand the rigors of hard journeying. He must have been pleased with his thoughts because he began insensibly to emit a feline purr so resonant that it filled the silence of the room like a bowed viol string. He had even been so neglectful of his best interest as to trace out lines on the page with his thumbnail, so that I was able to follow the projected course of his route with ease.

Keeping that track in mind, I consulted the newer maps and journals of the region by Duclessis, Filomorio, Amerigus, Getzner, and the brothers Muzzino, among others.

I had hoped I might discover a swifter and more efficient path to the Vale than Mutano’s, a path that might cross his own at a farther point so that I should be ahead of him on the track.

This hope was fulfilled. I hit upon a more efficacious trail to the valley, one less littered with obstacles, and made a serviceable map. I also made another map, a feigning one, of no use to a traveler. If one of my maps were to fall into the hands of others, this false one must be it. Ship captains wary of pirates keep such false maps and logs at their disposal.

Then it was necessary that I should try to confirm some of the rumors I had heard in the street-stalls and taverns about the flight from justice of a luckless quartet of fishermen who plundered the vessel that Morbruzzo the pirate had lured to reef-wrack. They had afterward leagued, it was said, with the dispossessed scion Eleazar del Binnoto, also a fugitive, though not from public justice. He had become embroiled in a tiresome family squabble over estate property, had boxed a cousin’s ears, and offered to duel. His father disowned him—or pretended to, for the sake of propriety—and Torronio, as he now called himself, had exiled his existence to the savage wilds, there to bemoan his fate to the trees and rocks like a lovesick shepherd.

Holding all this matter in mind, I depleted my small personal treasury, gathered weapons and other usefuls, provided my pouch with eagles, and set out to be captured by the Wreckers, as townspeople named the ill-starred five. In the rumor galleries of Tardocco they were reputed a fearsome group. I did not credit such report.

* * * *

These were the reasons, therefore, that on our second day of the journey toward the Dark Vale, I gave my band of illicit dependents certain orders.

“In a short while, we shall come to a place where the path widens to receive the jointure of another trail to the west. We shall go past this fork two furlongs or so, then we shall return to efface every trace of our coming there. No pebble, no hoof-print, not a displaced leaf shall show disturbance. Then we shall go back to the farther point, set up a cold camp, dig holes to cache supplies in, and await our guest.”

“Who is this guest to be?” Torronio asked.

“He is our provider,” I said. “He bringeth the spades and other implements we must labor with. And if I mistake not, he will be supplied with wine, cheese, salt meat, and bread. These stuffs will provide for our meals into the Vale and back again and on to Tardocco, where I will merchant our prizes.”

“He must be a generous soul, so graciously to charitize.”

“He is as yet insensible of his munificence. You must employ persuasion.”

“You—and not we?”

“You will have an easier time if he see me not. The sight of my visage would redouble his fury and he would fight like twelve devils.”

“How furiously will he fight with you viewless?”

“Be well prepared,” I said, “for you must not take his life or wound him in any serious fashion. If he come to real harm, we are all done for.”

“How so?”

“He hath powerful friends. In particular, he owneth one friend whose reach is long and whose grasp would be merciless.”

“Who is this all-powerful eminence?”

“You need not know. Sufficeth that I have provided easy takings necessary for our enterprise.”

“The more I learn of you, the more I find to mistrust,” Torronio said.

“Your misgivings are natural. But do be mindful of this man’s person. He will be of use to us in other ways at a later time.”

“If so you say.” He shrugged and turned away.

* * * *

The business went almost as planned. Attentive to my request that Mutano not be harmed in any serious way, they decided to overpower him rather than to brandish steel. Sneakdirk shinnied up into an oak which overhung the trail and knotted a rope to climb before dropping it to Squint. There in the leafage they made seats as comfortable as they might and then Sneakdirk climbed to the tip where he might overlook the trail behind.

I stationed myself in a thicket to eastward where I could observe unseen and hoped that I had calculated with some accuracy the pace of Mutano’s passage. He had taken the shorter route as it was laid out on his favored map but neglected to search into the condition of the track. Washed away in places, with two bridgeless streams to cross, hindered with fallen timber, it was the slower way. I computed Mutano at about seven hours in arrears of me and, if I proved correct, he must be nearing us now.

And here he was, pat on cue like the cat i’ th’ adage. Sneakdirk clambered to his lower perch and told groundlings Crossgrain and Goldenrod that our man approached from the west, mounted on a roan horse and leading in train two mules laden with boxes and chests lashed with diamond hitches. Squint uncoiled his rope, saw to the loop knot, and snugged into the leafage so closely I could hardly make out his form.

Along came Mutano, careless under a cloudless sky, thinking no doubt of the profit he would soon turn with easy spadework. But when Squint dropped the loop around his shoulders and began to spin the rope around him like a spider enwrapping a hornet, Mutano let out a ferocious roar, loud as any lion in the Hyrcanian desert waylaid by pygmies.

I had heard Mutano’s feline voice only in domestic setting when he would purr to himself or meow to me in hopes I might begin to decipher his cattish dialect. This great, hoarse roaring startled me. One would not think that a man’s breast held breath sufficient to give it utterance. The hairs stood erect on my neck.

The sound startled his mount also and it bounded from beneath him and galloped up the trail ahead. The mules, being loosed, ran off into the bordering woods for they took fright equally with the horse. If Squint had not already twirled two loops around Mutano, the large man would have landed on his feet, ready to defend himself. As it was, he swung there in the air for a short space, time enough for Crossgrain and Goldenrod to emerge from the bushes and tether more rope upon him.

Mutano’s voice had been accidentally bartered for that of a big housecat. Yet he growled and spat and hissed as loud as a lynx caught in a forester’s net. If I closed my eyes, I might declare it was not my colleague there but a big and dangerous animal bristling with fight.

In fact, this description fit Mutano at this moment, as he gave battle with legs and feet and tried to wrest his arm free to get at his sword. He was beginning to make some headway out of his toils when Goldenrod wrapped his arms around the legs and pulled Mutano down as if plucking an apple from a limb. Then they bound him tightly, Sneakdirk and Squint dropping down to aid, and all taking care to keep clear of his boots and his teeth—for he snapped at them as he spat and hissed and his eyes were tiger-wild.

Crossgrain tied Mutano to a sturdy ash tree and stood by to keep guard. The others set out in search of the mules and I struggled to the other side of my thicket and stalked up the trail in pursuit of the horse.

In the span of about half an hourglass, I found Gaetano, Mutano’s mount, cropping grass beside the trail. This horse knew me of old and did not gallop away as I came to take the reins and lead him a little farther still, to where we had set up camp. There I awaited to hear the approach of the Wreckers with Mutano in tow and when I heard their voices and the shuffle of the mules on the trail, I slipped away into the surrounding wood where I could observe the doings in camp.

So far, all had succeeded as I planned, except for the leonine roar that had cost us some bit of trouble with the mules. And my makeshift band of hapless highwaymen followed my orders in regard to Mutano. They made him a place by the fire that they now set spark to, not knowing that he had exchanged his own tongue for that of a cat.

In a while Torronio strayed casually from the site and sought me out. “Well,” he began, “it has been as you said. I may now be willing to believe these miraculous tales you tell of man-eating shadows and gardener nobility and easy wealth.”

“‘Twill be none so easy. We have but made a start. We will push on tomorrow sun-up and make the longer part of our journey.”

“What of our captive?”

“Before we set out, you shall give him his freedom, leave him sufficient eatables, and tell him that you shall return to rescue him from the wilderness. Also you must hide away, in the hidden cache-holes we dug, food and drink to enable us to march back to Tardocco from here. Tell him also that if he have patience, he shall possess his mount again.”

“Should not you deliver these tidings?”

“He must not spy me.”

“As you say, then. Shall I fetch bread and water for you here?”

“Thank you,” I said. “Do so discreetly. In the morning, join with me about half a league farther on. I will ride Mutano’s horse. Sneakdirk may ride my hireling mount and bring along Woman. He showed a capable hand in taking our captive.”

“He has a fisherman’s wrist for casting rope,” Torronio said, departing.

* * * *

They made a late start from camp; the sun was over the treetops when they joined me on the trail. We went on, the six of us with three horses and three mules, making slow progress, with Crossgrain quarreling over his turn to ride and Goldenrod complaining that he, being a jolly sailor, was not suited to stony trails in thickety hills. When we came to an open space at ridge-top, I halted our train and gestured toward the forward vista. “Behind yonder mountain lie our fortunes.”

Though it was a league from us, it looked to stand as close as the wall of a castle and seemed as sheer in its slope. Green and pleasant shone its foot, but the incline darkened to a misty blue and then to purple and along its topmost ridge a fringe of frost silvered the peaks against a bright blue heaven. Our trail meandered from our vantage through a grassy, unpeopled plain, then disappeared into the mountain’s lower forest.

“This day’s march shall bring us to the foot,” I said, “and there we shall make camp for tonight and all next day. We shall be climbing that eminence for two nights, lying doggo during daylight. We must accustom ourselves to moving in darkness and we shall not enter the Dark Vale until the dark o’ the moon.”

“Why so?” asked Crossgrain. “The Vale does not retreat. Let us make haste and reap its lettuces and sell them off and spread our beds on massy heaps of coin.”

“Daylight is too perilous in that place,” I replied and did not explain, though I saw by his expression that impatience sat restless on his mind like an unhooded falcon on a hunter’s wrist. “Alive you may sleep on coin; dead you can sleep as comfortably on stones and thorns.”

* * * *

So on we went at leisure. The sky was pleasant, the verdure appealing, and by the foot of the mountain ran a river where we filled our two casks and watered the beasts and refreshed ourselves, bathing in the cold water.

We found an easy glade a little above the plain and set up camp and lazed and ate. When night fell, I went to my supply chest and brought out four lanthorns fashioned to my particular design.

“You see how this lanthorn is made,” I said, “with top and all sides but one so tightly enclosed that no ray of light can escape its innards.”

They looked on gravely.

With a scrap of tinder and a quick steel spark I lit the oiled wick inside. “You see?” I closed the black tin door so that no light showed, opened it again to let light shine out, then clapped it shut quickly. “You see?”

They stood silent. Squint shrugged and I called him forth.

“Stand here,” I said, placing him between the lanthorn and the thick, whitish trunk of a plane tree. I opened the lanthorn blind then snapped it closed. To the others: “You see?”

“What is there to see?” Crossgrain said. “Anyone can open and shut the blind of a lanthorn.”

“His shadow on the tree trunk—what did you observe?”

“That without the lamplight it does not appear and when you loose the light upon him his shadow darkens the wood. ‘Tis but a child’s game.”

“How long does his shadow stay on the wood?”

“Briefly, of course.”

“What else did you see of the surroundings?”

“Little. The light went away too quickly.”

“This then is our exercise,” I explained. “In that brief space of time while the lamplight is loosed we must each learn to see and locate the objects about us accurately and remember where they are. And we must not allow our shadows to lie on any surface for more than the swiftest of moments.”

“Why so?” asked Torronio.

“If our shadows be not visible, they cannot be taken from us. Yet in the dark we cannot find the objects of our desire. So we must learn to place them in our minds as ‘twere by the flash of a lightning bolt and then go to them in the ensuing blackness. If we are deft at this sleight o’ hand, we shall take our prizes.”

They gazed at one another for some moments and then laughed softly.

“We are fishers,” said Sneakdirk. “We work our boats and nets at sea when no light from landward shows. We float silent in the darkest night.”

“That is one reason I have enlisted you,” I replied. “But fishermen labor in moonlight and starlight. We enter the Vale in the dark of the moon. Have you seen your shadow cast by starlight?”

“Faintish to discern.”

“Too faint, too flimsy, we shall hope, to be snatched away from us. We shall toil when the moon is absent in a place where little starlight enters. If we work quickly, our shadows shall be secure.”

“Shadows are often stolen from men and women,” Torronio said. “I have heard that in Tardocco town there dwelleth a master thief named Astolfo whose trade in shadow-filching is profitable as well as venerable. Yet I never heard that they who lose their shadows to him perish afterward.”

“Those shadows still exist in our world,” I said. “They only go to serve the purposes of others. But shadows forfeited in the Dark Vale are destroyed utterly—so all the sages agree. It has been said that they are devoured. Such a destruction must bring the end of life.”

“This seemeth a tale for an idle chimney nook,” he said.

“We shall take precautions,” I stated firmly and with that we set at it again, opening the lanthorn blinds quickly and clapping them shut. We advanced so well in this practice that in the time required for the least gray glimmer of a shadow to appear on the tree trunk, we had thrust into memory much detail of the surroundings.

When this employment began to wear the aspect of sport, I called a halt and we made ready for sleep.

“By tomorrow midday we shall reach the limits of the Vale,” I told them. “There we will stop and observe. In the dark we shall enter.”

“Well,” said Torronio. The others said nothing. Solemnity had crept upon them.

* * * *

“Stalwart, where are you?”

It was Crossgrain inquiring, but his voice lacked its customary querulous tone. There was no reason to whisper as Sneakdirk did, since we were going not among men or animals but only plants. The Dark Vale, it was said, was void of animal life. Only plants throve there, as in that happy age of the world before humanity arrived to sully creation.

That fancy proved delusory.

“Here I am,” I said.

“I cannot see you. I can see nothing.”

I grasped his shoulder from behind and, startled, he made a tremulous half leap.

“Gods!”

I had wrapped myself all in a thin black cloak, muffling the green-forest colors of hose and doublet and eclipsing the glitter of buttons and silver buckles. My colleagues were outfitted less prudently and I could just make out their forms, dark against the dark.

We had made our way in the gloaming down the disused trail through the hill cleft and had paused till full dark before descending into the Vale itself. I had spent the daylight on the hilltop, scanning the area with my glass, trying to distinguish the more valuable plants and locating them in memory. This was a vague undertaking. The terrain would be much different at the lower levels than it appeared from a height and the darkness made this landskip a different world.

Commercing with shadows, as I had done now for so many seasons, I had experienced darknesses of every shade, texture, and smell, but this night in the Dark Vale brought forth a voluminous atmosphere aggressive in blackness. Here might be one of the world’s origins of darkness, I thought, and there was writing to the effect that great earth-mouths in the Vale opened to a world below and visible darkness poured forth from these orifices like streams gathering themselves to rivers from woodland springs. It had been conjectured by Albertus and Lullius that the precious flora of the Vale had first developed in these local subterranean caverns and over their long generations had progressed gradually to the surface, braving the light and changing their pallid mushroom hues to dark greens nigh black in their flat dullness. It was proposed by some half dozen wise herbalists that these plants—ferns, flowers, creeping shrubs, and low bushes—fed upon shadows to replenish the obscure powers they had derived from their underworld beginnings.

We had fared middling well so far. Squint had proved the aptest among us for facility in opening and closing the lanthorn blinds and Goldenrod was most capable at locating specimens in the black intervals. But the farther we penetrated into the depths of the Vale, the deeper the obscurity thickened and this had caused Crossgrain to lose all sense of where I was and where the others might be.

“All goes well,” I told him. “I am here at your side.”

“I can see nothing. I feel this dreadful darkness pressing upon my eyes like dusty cloth.”

“‘Tis thick,” I admitted.

“No! My eyes—”

“Light us,” I told Squint. “Be quick.”

He unblinded the lanthorn and shut it again and in that instant we saw that Crossgrain’s eyes had been taken from him. That was our swift impression. Then when the dark returned and the glimmer-echo of the light had faded from my eyeballs, I understood. A great black moth had lit upon Crossgrain’s forehead—the size of a trencher, this insect—and its velvet wings spread over his eyes.

“It is but a bug,” I said. “Cast it from you. The gleam of your eye-water drew it to you.”

“‘Tis monstrous,” he said.

“There will be more. We must take all care.”

“There was to be no animal in here. So you said. What else might there be?”

“Our business is with plants. Did you not glimpse a night-bloomer just now in reach of your right-hand side?”

We heard him step away and heard the rustle of his hand amid foliage. “Yes,” he said. “I feel a huge blossom here. Moist and pulpy, like the tongue of a young heifer, though not wet.”

“Feel below where its stem joins to the main stalk. Snip there and place the blossom in your pouch. Then follow the stalk to the ground and find whether you can lift it out or we must dig.”

We heard him fumbling with the plant and breathing hoarsely as he stooped, though not from exertion. The black moth had quickened the breath of each of us.

Then he swore. “The ground is covered with—”

We waited. “What is it?”

“Light!”

Squint complied and we saw that the ground about Crossgrain’s feet writhed as if with throbbing vines. A network of ebon vines undulated, shiny and repulsive. When he closed the lanthorn, we waited a space to try to comprehend what we had seen.

Goldenrod spoke first. “Black serpents. They are all around us. I can feel them over my boots and crawling upward.”

“We are undone,” said Crossgrain.

“Courage,” I said. “If they were noxious, we should already be shrieking with pain. But there is nothing here for a poison serpent to strike. The plants consume the shadows of anything that moves.”

“These serpents move most unpleasantly,” said Goldenrod.

“But they cast no shadow, being so close to the ground.”

“What if they be attracted to eye-gleams like the moth?”

“Did you not note that they have no eyes? They are harmless to us. Let us set about our tasks.”

“What is that smell?” asked Torronio. “It much clingeth.”

We made sounds of disgust nigh unto sickness. A passerby in this deep night, if any could be in this place, would surmise that we had all fallen foul of spoilt oysters.

“It smells as of an ancient offal pit, filled with excrement and diseased corpses.”

“It is odorous as a hundred turnip-fed bum-blasts.”

“A devil has shat here and been proud of his work.”

Squint ascertained the source. “It is those cursed blind serpents. They exude an oil that smears upon the skins of things. They need not fangs to repulse their enemies. Their perfumery is more daunting than the sharpest bite.”

“Take heart, lads. Let us cleave to our purpose. Keep in your mind’s eye the picture of gold coins stacked into a tower. Let it glow before you in this foul darkness like a beacon on a promontory.”

They answered not, but Squint was busily opening and closing the shutter of the lanthorn and the Wreckers were gathering leaves, buds, roots, and blossoms as quickly as they could. They were not discriminate in their collecting, but I had no heart to admonish. I longed to depart this noisome hole as avidly as did they.

* * * *

We were at this tedious work for the rest of the watch. The Wreckers tried to lighten their burden with common shipmate raillery, as when Goldenrod said to Crossgrain, “Had’st not thou once a wife who smelled as of this place?” and he retorted, “If you say so, then thou know’st more than is well for thee.” But there was more determination than true humor in their chat and when the east began to lighten they were glad to hear me give order to depart.

“Take care to tie up the bags and keep the vial lids tight,” I said. “We must not cast our shadows on our prizes.”

They mumbled assent and we turned to go back up the slope, but I had miscalculated the hours and more light was spread through the sky than was healthy for our welfare. A saving grace was that clouds thinly veiled the east; we did not cast dark shadows with sharpish edges but only ghostly emanations, the tinges of shadow, as ‘twere, and these the pulpy leaves rubbed against and the questing tendrils of vines touched searchingly.

Wrapped in my black cloak, I was less affected than the others, but when a great black leaf that looked something like a burdock swept against my tinge-shadow my forearms went gooseflesh and my neck hair prickled. I urged them along more quickly and they did not hang back. “Come along.” They struggled upward as fast as they could.

When we arrived at camp on the crest of the ridge the sun was almost ready to peer over the horizon and I ordered them to cache all our goods in the holes we had dug to store them and to cover these over with canvas and brush.

This done, we looked to one another. Squint must have caught the worst of it. His pupils were enlarged and unfocused, gray sweat bathed his neck and forehead, and his face and arms and hands had taken on a sickly, blue-gray pallor, as of a consumptive shut long away indoors.

“Brandy,” I said. Goldenrod reached for the bottle in our chest of potables and Squint dosed himself with three liberal swallows. His eyes became calmer, but his complexion remained gray.

“How goest thou?” I asked.

He considered. “It felt like something was being pulled out of me,” he said. “Out of my chest, from between the ribs.”

“Like a knife withdrawn?”

“No.... Like a length of wool-stuff slipped through the fingers.”

“Painful?”

He shook his head and tottered and his mates settled him to the ground where he put his head between his knees and coughed dryly.

“Is anyone else affected?”

“Here, cap’n,” Sneakdirk nodded. “Naught but only a twinge, like the passing of a dead woman’s hand over my front.” He wiped his forehead. “‘Tis away from me now ... I will take brandy for it.”

“Better conserve,” I said. “We know not but we may have need.”

“Let us all take a sup now,” Goldenrod suggested. “I am certain it hath power to ward off evil aforehand.”

I let them jolly along with such talk, then put it to them: “What think you? Shall we try the Dark Vale again tomorrow night? We have learned that it is indeed the danger it is fabled to be, though we know not what causes it to be so.”

“But we have learned,” said Torronio, “that our precautions are good defenses, if we take pains to follow them aright. We were only tardy in taking leave, so that our palest shades betrayed us. If we approach in full dark and depart so, we shall be secure enough.”

“But we would not return to the same place,” objected Crossgrain. “If we go back, we must thrust farther to gain a different variety of herbage.”

When they looked at me, I nodded. “He says true. There will be more profit in a wide selection. But are we willing to face those slime-snakes and their dire stenches again? Maybe we can ablute ourselves with a substance to keep the ooze from us.”

“But look!” said Sneakdirk. “The slime is drying.”

So it was. Goldenrod had been most thoroughly covered with the ooze and I asked him to stand forward against the sunrise now full on the horizon. As we watched, the black oils whitened like campfire coals embering, gathered to a gray dust, and fell from him like flour through a sifter. He shook himself like a bear that has forded a cold river and all that substance dropped away.

“I am game to return,” he said.

* * * *

When I put it to them that we must capture some of those black serpents to bring out of the Vale, they were displeased. The hour was drawing toward twilight and it would soon be time to reenter.

“Wherefore?” scolded Crossgrain. “I do not relish going again amongst these smelly slime-worms, but I will do so to obtain plants. Yet I see no profit in the serpents. No sound mind would purchase such ugliness.”

“I have not become enamored of them,” I replied, “but I have had a thought. The slime that covered Goldenrod changed to white powder when the sunrays struck it. Upon examining, I found it to resemble that generative fine dust the ancients called pollis or pollen, necessary to the propagation of all flora excepting the ferns. I think that if we carry our Dark Vale plants away, they will not propagate without the aid of those black snakes.”

“So you think,” retorted Crossgrain, “but you do not know.”

“True.... Can you conjecture another purpose for such animals?”

“They exist,” said Sneakdirk, “in order to sour the innards of anyone who attempts to uproot those plants. Their guardian purpose is to sicken by putridity, in the fashion of vultures that protect themselves by vomiting.”

“I will perform this task myself,” I said, “since none else hath heart for it. If the rest of you will gather the flora, I will collect the serpents. I may take as my reward a slightly larger portion of profit.”

“And welcome to it,” said Goldenrod.

* * * *

So we returned to the Vale, following the track as before but pushing a little farther into the valley where the darkness seemed to grow thicker and more malodorous with every pace. Squint had acquired a swift skill in unblinding and reblinding his lanthorn and the others grew defter in plucking, snipping, and uprooting. I judged that we would have a broad variety of plant life to take away.

My duty with the serpents went none so pleasingly. I grasped them up, dropped them in disgust, found others and thrust them into a leathern bag. Though eyeless, they struck at my hands and legs as would any of their breed, but they had no fangs. It was something like catching eels, except that people make dishes of eels. The man who would eat these serpents must be a starving omnivore, capable of ingesting iron, stone, and the burdens of privies.

Yet again I had miscalculated the amount of time our expedition must consume and my error cost us grievous. There being no birds in the Vale, there were no foredawn songs to warn of daybreak and, too, we had penetrated farther and would require more time to leave.

The light came on sooner than we were prepared for and on this return our shadows were more substantial than before. Torronio advised his Wreckers to keep close to one another, reasoning that in a group they would cast but one large shadow instead of five smaller ones and the plants would not be able to tear such a large one away.

‘Twas a sound stratagem until Goldenrod gave in to his terror, broke from the pack, and struggled up the slope past me as I led them. There he stood plain against the light that slanted over the ridge-top. He had climbed some six paces before me, panting stumbling, sobbing. I saw that his shadow, though not solid, had sufficient body for a black, spiny bush to catch its edge with a thorny twig.

There was an instant when his shadow seemed to stretch like a woolen stocking pulled from the leg. And then came a sudden chuck of sound as of an arrow striking into an oat-straw archery target. The tall fellow uttered no more than a squeak; a mouse in the claws of a tabby would make a louder sound.

His shadow I could not see as the bush enveloped it, but the effect on the plant was evident. The ebon thing shuddered from ground to top leaf. It wriggled within itself, enlarging its shape, and the pulpy leaves rubbed against one another, with a motion like a butcher washing his hands after a slaughter.

Goldenrod—or rather, his corpus, for he was no longer a living man nor even the same man now dead—pitched southwise off our track like a statue toppling. As life left him, I could feel the serpents in my bag suddenly roil and tumble together. The other plants around set up an inward commotion. All about us there was a change in everything, even in the soil. Everything shifted.

Now the Vale gave birth to an eerie music, a moanful dirge mingled of the voices of scores of men, a chorus of those who had died here, their shadows absorbed into the bodies of plants as red wine is absorbed into a swatch of linen. What mouths produced this music we never discovered. I have conjectured that the sad chords emitted from animals we had not seen, but Torronio proposed that the blind serpents sang out when a shadow was taken by the Vale.

There was no time to debate. We redoubled our efforts, straining every muscle to haste us out of that place. Each of us felt a mucid clutching at his shadow, a sensation we would feel in our sleep for long to come.

* * * *

We climbed at last out of the reach of the Vale and no more of us were stricken fatally, yet none was soundly whole. Each had lost some part, though small, of his shadow and of his vis naturae.

We stored last night’s gathering quickly and then flung ourselves to the ground in silence and lay like shipwrecked men cast ashore. I felt strengthless, as after a long bout with grippe, and force did not return to my limbs for some part of an hour.

My case was not the worst. Crossgrain lay perspiring in rivulets, staring sightlessly at the high blue sky. He heaved for breath and his teeth chattered. We rose to our feet to gaze down upon him but offered no aid, for none knew how to minister to one whose shadow had been half devoured. Squint thought to pour brandy into him, but his chattering teeth and the convulsions of his breast prevented that succor. Sneakdirk thought to allay his anguish somewhat by holding a blanket between him and the light, so that his sadly torn shadow did not lie in the sun, and this did seem to alleviate his suffering. In a while he quietened and closed his eyes in unpeaceful sleep.

We moved ourselves to eat and drink, though none had stomach, and afterward we sat silent, looking sorrowfully at one another. In time I said what all waited to hear: “We must bring Goldenrod out of the Vale.”

“Why must we?” demanded Crossgrain. “He lives not. He has no wife nor child to mourn. His elder brother died off the coast of Clamorga in a great tempest. There is scant reason to risk ourselves.”

“He is our friend and comrade fallen in the enterprise,” Torronio said. “This duty bears upon us.”

Crossgrain objected. “I would not call him friend. We ill sorted.”

“It matters not,” said Squint. “It is our duty regardless.”

“Our time there would be better spent in collecting more herbage,” Crossgrain said. “We have much expense to make up for now.”

“As to that,” I said, “we shall gather no more. I spoke beforehand of the perils we might meet, but this mortality is too sorrowful. We must return to bring Goldenrod away and bury him with proper honor.”

“We have no honor—” he began, but Crossgrain was shouted down. I believe that each felt that any of us might have failed of his nerve and broken rank and suffered shadow-loss and died dreadfully in an alien place. We did not wish to live with that thought unreconciled.

We decided to put our gatherings in order, go back after dark to the Vale, and bear Goldenrod away and depart on the morrow for the bivouac where Mutano stood abandoned.

* * * *

Events did not fall in so orderly a succession.

As soon as it was securely dark we made our way back down the ridge slope, our estimation being that Goldenrod’s body would lie about halfway to the valley floor on the overgrown path. We had to steel ourselves to begin the lightless decline and our spirits were sorely battered. I tried to assure Torronio and the remaining Wreckers that our shadows would regenerate from their damaged states and, over a healing period, make themselves whole again.

I did not know if this conjecture would prove true. Shadows damaged by clumsy thieves or by accident or combat or otherwise will indeed return to their earlier conditions or near, but a shadow devoured must be lost, I thought. Yet I said naught for it was best not to dishearten my fellows.

Nor had I been wholly truthful in the matter of Goldenrod. In a different instance, I would have let him lie to decompose into the evil soil of the Vale or to be eaten by whatever tenebrous scavengers ranged therein. My hidden desire was to examine the corpse, to determine if the manner of his dying left marks by which I might discover some method of defense against the deadly flora of the place. If I could find such a thing, a fortune lay before me.

Down the pathway we struggled, keeping close company and hearing about us the succulous leaves rubbing one against another and feeling, more than hearing, the blind black snakes crawling all about. We made ourselves silent as the night and place demanded.

Then we could not ascertain the spot where Goldenrod must lie. The track had overgrown notably during the brief time we had come away from it. There was an abrupt steepness of the slope where our comrade had fallen, but he was not near it.

“I misremember it being so close-knit here,” Sneakdirk whispered and we assented silently as we scattered out to search.

We were sufficiently diligent, I am sure, to have turned him up, but that tall, lanky body was nowhere to be found. He seemed to have melted into the surrounding Nature as a pinch of salt will melt in a pail of water. Squint unblinkered our light more times than was safe, but naught was to be seen.

“Come away, lads,” I said. “There are mysteries in this place we have not resource to comprehend. Our friend is gone from us, taken by peril, as I foretold you.”

They agreed readily, except for Sneakdirk who averred that Goldenrod had owed him some small amount he wished to reclaim from the corpus. His objection was swept away.

The starry midnight had passed by the time we returned to camp. We composed ourselves for sleep and lay in our places, keeping well away from the pallet where Goldenrod had lain. My sleep was uneasy with nervy dreams and, to judge by the muttering and restlessness, so was that of all.

* * * *

In the morning we were brisker, boiling up tea and munching the biscuit and salt beef we had found in Mutano’s store of victual. We spent a goodish deal of time putting our samples in order to travel and it was then that my bagful of a dozen or so of the black serpents disclosed itself as a clutch of inert vines or roots.

They had been snakes when I thrust them into the leathern bag—slime-sheathed, offal-smelling, writhing, and blindly striking. But when I brought them out into the light to place them in a wicker basket, they had changed into solid, woody lengths, so stiff as to be almost rigid. Except for the general shape, there was little to recall their former serpentine nature. An indentation here might suggest a mouth or some lichenous mottling elsewhere might recall scales, but these details seemed but accidental as the early sunlight fell upon them.

The others gathered round to gaze and wonder, but only Torronio supplied a useful thought. “Your adders,” he said, “must share something of the nature of the Vale’s flora. We have guarded the health of our plants by hiding them away from the light. Try if darkness will restore them to serpents.”

I placed the lengths of root and vine in the bag, but no change transpired.

“Perhaps,” he said, “a momentary darkness is insufficient. It may be that the deep nighttime only will reveal what they are.”

“Perhaps,” I said, shaking my head over this conundrum that but added to our store of ignorance.

We finished our preparations and departed the place of this mount that walled off the Dark Vale from the rest of the world.

* * * *

I had anticipated encountering Mutano at the place where Torronio and the Wreckers had abandoned him. He did not know of my connection with his situation and of my small but sweet retribution for his overly strenuous methods of training me in the shadow trade. I had pictured myself riding into his bivouac with Torronio at the head of our band of makeshift plants-men, exhibiting with dramatic flourish the specimens we had obtained, and flaunting my triumph with pretended nonchalance.

We made good time on the journey back and our spirits lightened as we came farther away from the Vale. No rain had fallen in recent days and we could follow backward our track with ease for a long while. Then at one point in our trace that seemed most familiar, all evidence of our passing disappeared. Our surroundings seemed less well known here and I wondered if we had strayed. I spoke my misgiving to Torronio.

“There was one spacious width in this road I am sure I would recognize,” he said. “It cannot be far ahead.”

I reflected then that Mutano had been keeping a solitary watch for three days and nights and might have devised a way to recover his losses from the Wreckers, if he expected them to pass this way again.

We trudged around a slow bend and Torronio pointed and said, “There we made our camp. I recall how wide the space was and what refreshment that hospitable canopy of leaves offered. Yet there is no sign of our encampment. That man—Mutano, you call him?—must have moved along to where he came from, trusting to fortune for shelter and direction.”

“He is not one to joy in a long journey afoot,” I replied. “Something is amiss. Let us keep keen watch for trickery.”

As soon as I spoke, that coolsome canopy of leaves came falling down upon us, covering us over, men and beasts, with a coarse, tatterdemalion netting of rope and rags and thongs all interlaced with foliage. It offered an obstruction that the five of us could not make short work of, but I think our wits as well as our bodies had been weakened by our recent struggles. Boxes and baggage went tumbling; our comrades swore and wrestled against the tatty netting, even as it grew tighter around us.

And then there was Mutano, of course, with a short staff in his left hand and a rope that served as drawstring for the netting in his right. With the rope he pulled the reticulate mass close about our ankles; with the staff he poked and belabored us in every undefendable place our carcasses presented. All the while, he was howling in the way that cats do, with a wailing that sounds like angry grief to men but signifies ardency of erotic joy to the claw-foot race. As soon as I saw the happy smirk on his face, I knew that Mutano had understood I was involved in the waylaying of him and that I must have planned the whole business. My knowledge was confirmed by the severe drubbing his staff laid upon my ribs.

We were too pressed upon one another to unlimber our blades, but Sneakdirk managed to squirm a small dagger from inside his doublet. He began sawing at a joint knot, but Mutano spied him and with a sharp stroke broke the blade and, to judge by the outcry, one of Sneakdirk’s fingers into the bargain. Then, with expressive motions of his hands and contortions of his features, he made known that we were to divest ourselves of iron and push all weapons onto the ground outside our leafy cage. He encouraged us heartily with licks and pokes and as a matter of course I received the most and heartiest.

Further expressive pantomime indicated that we were to thrust our hands through the netting and when we did so, he bound our wrists and set us free one by one. He stood us in a line and stalked back and forth before us, purring like any fat housepuss sated with cream. Now and again he paused and with a knock or two brought our stances to more erect, military postures.

Here was another sad moment for poor Falco. Pleased with myself as we had come back along the track, I had been spinning fancies of the commendations I would receive from Maestro Astolfo, of the coin I would collect from my herbalizing, and of the trinkets and cates and amorous companionship I would purchase. But now again I was under Mutano’s thumb, or beneath his heel, and must bow to his will.

Forward and back again he strode, looking us over severely, taking close views of Torronio and Squint. Myself he hardly deigned to notice until with a smart rap to a shinbone he directed me to follow him apart and seated me on the scabby butt of a fallen plane tree. Pointing with his staff, he indicated which boxes, bags, and canvas-wrapped vials he desired Squint to bring forth and place on the ground before me.

Then commenced the most awkward and intense lesson in grammar a backward schoolboy could ever have endured. I had gathered some smattering of Mutano’s feline dialect over the past two seasons, but now I was to learn in earnest what the different growls and half growls, the purrings hoarse or mellifluous, the quiet or importuning meowings intended to convey.

He thumped a box of stoppered vials with his staff, a stout green length of ash with a few leafy twigs dangling, and uttered what was unmistakably a question: “Mrowwwr-mirr?”

When I shook my head uncomprehendingly, he boxed my ears. His notion seemed to be that I understood him well enough but pretended not to. I was accustomed to such blows from Mutano. What vexed me more was the laughter it drew from the Wreckers where they stood all in line by the fallen nettage. It was good to note that Torronio did not join in.

In fact, I did perceive what my shadow-trade colleague wished to find out, but the situation confused me. Did he expect me to answer him in the cat language? A slap to my forehead brought me around.

Yet I could not return answers I did not have. “These plants we gathered in dark of deepest night in the darkest of valleys,” I said. “We worked quickly and crudely, more by sense of touch than by sight. We only gathered in the mass and have had no opportunity to examine our findings.”

“Mrr mrr-mrr mrrieu?”

“Yes, I believe them to be of sound value,” I said, after puzzling for long moments. “I could not set a price. In a sense, they are beyond price, for our man Goldenrod gave up his life to find them.”

Mutano’s eyebrows rose and his expression grew pensive. This was something he could not have known.

“He was forewarned,” I said.

He touched one of the oblong boxes with his greenstaff. “Murr rr.”

“Best not to unseal the baggage here. Sunlight has a deleterious effect upon this flora of the darkness. We have already lost several fine specimens.”

“Mir?” He gave me a skeptical look but let the matter go. He brought from an inner pocket of his doublet a square of soiled vellum and thrust it at me. It was the map he had made from study of the old books, the map that had brought him here by a toilsome, hindrous journey.

I shrugged and he pushed it into my face. Then he flung it down and held out his hand, demanding my more helpful map to take him back to Tardocco.

Here was a point requiring careful judgment. If I handed over the false map immediately, he might suspect something amiss, knock me over, and ransack my clothing. If I held back for long, I would be inviting bruises purple and yellow. I decided to chance three blows before pretending to give in and present the deceptive document. But Mutano was no tyro in the skill of tendering punishment and one solid thwack upon my shoulders sealed my decision.

Groaning and swearing, I brought out the counterfeit with all its elaborate notations and whimsical instructions. Mutano examined it front and back, then turned about for the advantage of better light, and pored it over. I retained all confidence in this map wherein I had mingled the true and the misleading with judicious balance. Many of the features he would know from his travel or by hearsay; others were in plausible relations with those; still others were but mere brain-wisps and shared likeness with no place on the round Earth.

After long study, he tucked it inside his doublet. Then he turned his attention to the Wreckers. His grin broadened as he surveyed them and I surmised that he was proud to have caught the five of us in the same trap we had laid for him, dropping from the trees. At length he tapped Crossgrain on each of his shoulders, like a prince knighting a worthy squire, and motioned him forth, always keeping his staffless hand near his sword hilt. Under his direction, Crossgrain began gathering up the containers and loading them on the mounts and mules. Goaded by the greenstaff, Squint aided in the task.

He looked at the sky to ascertain that a half-day’s light remained, then Mutano mounted Gaetano and departed, taking with him not only our herbal treasures but all our weapons and almost all the food we had robbed him of.

We watched him out of sight, then all eyes turned upon Falco.

“Now, Stalwart,” said Torronio, “Thou’st brought us to a pretty pass. Are we to starve in this wilderness or have you another fume-witted scheme to bring us to destruction?”

“Be of better cheer,” I said. “Let us find our former camping ground. It cannot be far down this pathway. You will recall that we made a cache of provisions there to replenish us homeward.”

This sentence struck a more pleasant note, but Sneakdirk reminded me that now we had no horse.

“After we find our provisions, we shall have but a five-day march to Tardocco.”

“Why go we there?” he asked. “The noose awaits us and this Mutano will anticipate our coming.”

“If my cartographic skills stand good, we shall arrive before Mutano by some hours if not days. Then I shall make arrangements.”

“Arrangements?”

“Let us stir along,” I said. “I shall enlighten you as we go.”

* * * *

When I introduced Torronio to Maestro Astolfo, the shadow master looked him over side to side, bottom to top. Then he spoke in his calm voice: “I know the set of these features. Are you not of the family Binotti? There is a certain length of jaw line—”

“My name is Torronio. That is all the world need know.”

Astolfo’s gaze rested on him still, those mild gray eyes never roving from his face. “There was a story of one of them who fell into disfavor with the clan and fared into the forest to live as a celibate hermit and ponder the ills of life.”

Torronio sighed. “Celibate I am, and for a long while. But the ills of life thrive stoutly without my thinking on ‘em.”

Astolfo nodded. “And you are confederate with Falco in this scheme to gull his friend and cohort, my man Mutano?”

“If Stalwart be Falco, then I am bound with him. As for gulling, are we not the parties injured? We have not the herbal treasures we labored after and this Mutano, where’er he be, enjoys their possession. I am no cony to cheat and delude; if I rob, I rob forthrightly, in order to keep spirit and corpus united.”

Astolfo turned to me. “I must inform you, Falco, that lately such exotica of greenery has dropped from fashion. You will recall Ser Marchiotti who prided himself on his great collection of noxious plants. He hath fallen prey to a peculiarly miasmic lily and his health is much shaken. The exotic mania may be running its course.”

“Have we then no buyers?” asked Torronio.

“Have you any wares?” Astolfo inquired.

“We shall have within three days or fewer such oddments of nature that even the most jaded of the Green Knights and Verdant Ladies will vie for,” I said. “These specimens follow behind us by messenger.”

I did not say that the messenger was Mutano and that I had stationed Sneakdirk, Crossgrain, and Squint a half league above Tardocco on the Via Auster to waylay him and once more lighten him of his precious burdens. I counted upon my delusive map to bring him down from the mountains by the Via Auster and not the Via Boreas to eastward.

“Perhaps you overvalue this cargo,” Astolfo suggested.

“I think not,” I said and went on to describe the character of some of the plants we were bringing forth. The march from the mountains had made us dusty, weary, and footsore, but its tediousness had lent me time to think on our travails in the Dark Vale and upon the things we found there. I recalled the silence that was thicker than silence, with the whispery sibilance at its heart; I recalled the mucid, velvety leaves and blooms of the shrubs and how they rubbed upon our clothing and how the vine tendrils sought for our patches of bare flesh. I pondered the fetid gum that clung to us and sublimed to white powder in sunlight and thought long upon the black adders that changed their forms to become hard roots and vines.

“I believe the flora and fauna of that valley to league in convolvement together,” I told Astolfo. “Their properest food is the shadows of animals, though they doubtless derive some nourishment also from rain and soil. It is not that they eat shadows as donkeys munch down hay. They take into themselves the shadows they capture and within them are preserved the living shades of passersby—of the troops and caravans and robber bands and solitaries who come that way. Undoubtedly, they also hold captive from early times the shadows of bears and boars and deer and suchlike. All these shadows are interwoven into a single entity through the roots and vines underground and above. It is a thing like—like a fisherman’s net.” I almost said, Like the leaf-net that Mutano dropped upon us from treetop, but bit my tongue in time. “They propagate by means of an evil-smelling slime that blind snakes exude, crowding amongst ‘em. And all this dark herbage, together with the serpents and some invisible flying creatures like black moths, make up, all of them at once, a single intelligence, darkly knowing, ravenous in its need for animate shadows.”

As I was speaking, Astolfo closed his eyes, the better to comprehend my meaning. He was silent a long time. Then: “All this matter, if’t be true, will be a discovery to the world. Such plants would have a value beyond any price that might be set.”

I agreed.

“But,” he continued, “there are dangers attending, known and unknown.”

Again I agreed.

“If one of these plants, be it set in soil and nurtured, grow to maturity, may it not snatch away the shadow of its possessor or of some other?”

“It may.”

“Will this raped shadow join to the great knot of them?”

“I know not. The Vale is far.”

“Yet the night lappeth all the world.”

“I take you not.”

“The sea hath its currents, as do the river and the lake. Fish and other water creatures know and traverse such flowings. Midnight owns its currents also which these ombraphagous plants must know and utilize.”

“How so?”

He fell silent. Then: “I do not know. ‘Twill be a matter of constrained study.”

“You imply that our plants are too dangerous for human possession.”

Sighing ruefully, he shook his head. “The peril only makes ‘em the more precious to those of a certain cast of mind. We shall not lack buyers, but we must be at pains to inform them how to ensure their safety.”

“We!” said Torronio. “How are you concerned with the selling?”

“Our expedition was undertaken at the Maestro’s commission,” I said. “He hath vested coin and the labor of his servants, mine and Mutano’s.”

“If so you say.” He took the news with ill grace, feeling deceived.

“Fear not,” Astolfo said. “My interest here is more philosophical than monetary. There is an unthought world to be known of these plants, if indeed they come into our hands. And it may be that Mutano will return with an entirely different store of specimens and a different history.”

“That may be,” I said, keeping my laughter silent. “Meanwhile, Torronio and I must go to look after our own.”

“Well, then.”

* * * *

This time it fell out more easy.

Torronio, Sneakdirk, Squint, and Crossgrain accosted Mutano and his pack animals on the Via Auster a league above the western gate of Tardocco. He offered but puny resistance, Torronio reported. His long and fruitless wandering had sapped strength of body and vitality of spirit. He drew his cutlass but threw it down when the four raised their points toward him. He handed over the reins with the air of an aged prince abdicating a weary throne.

I did not make my presence known to him until I had overlooked the cargo and ascertained it was in fair good order and had performed certain experiments with lamps, mirrors, and sheets of fine-wove linen.

Our trio of confederates must not enter the precincts of the city, so Torronio and I presented ourselves with the containers of roots, blossoms, and so forth before Astolfo and then requested that Mutano be sent for.

When he entered and saw me there, he showed no surprise. He must have understood that in following the circuitous, perplexing routes my false map laid out he had fallen into a ruse. He eyed me with silent resignation, but I heard from his throat, or perhaps his brain, a small feline growling that promised retribution.

I must keep watch on him, I thought.

Yet he did not go unrewarded, for Astolfo promised to apportion him a small share of whatever profits might accrue. It would be my duty to study these materials and to turn them to trade. Meanwhile, Astolfo advanced a fat pouch of eagles to share out with Torronio and his comrade exiles. There would be sufficient for all to buy off the bounties that had been set upon them.

“Mrrir mrrir?”

“Mutano inquires,” I told Astolfo, “about what might happen if I fail to find profit in these specimens.”

“Then the materials will be placed in his charge,” he answered, “to see if he may do better.”

At these words, Mutano grinned cheerfully and that grin, more than the prospect of coin, gave spine to my resolve. I would research these black plants and their husband serpents and make experiment. I would bring their secrets to light.

As if in answer to my thoughts, the adders fell into a commotion in their leathern bag, tumbling and thumping, and a small, quiet, sourceless music sounded in the room.

Astolfo looked a question toward me.

“Some errant pilgrim has wandered into the Vale,” I said. “His shadow is his no more.”