Warlock

we must get moving. I want to see this marvel by this day's light and not by tomorrow's sun!”
        

----

    16
        
        
        
        They progressed in an odd and ungainly manner, though none of the trouble they put themselves to was wasted. Rather than use their two machetes immediately and hack their way into the dark heart of the rain forest, they split into five groups and paralleled each other with six feet between the lines. They climbed over the snaking boles that wound across the fertile earth, wriggled through patches of dense ferns and snatching, semi-sentient vines whose green tendrils more than once ensnared a man beyond the point where he could struggle free on his own. They helped one another, moved some thousand feet from the jungle's edge only with a great deal of effort. There, Richter called them together into one group, where they formed a single line and began using the machetes, clearing a path before them. But when they had gone only another thousand feet, the old officer ordered the original five lines formed again, and again they moved out without leaving much if any trail behind them. Even if trackers picked up their path a thousand feet into the forest, they would not be able to follow it and swiftly overtake the Darklands unit.
        
        Once, when Richter was considering abandoning this tack and moving the rest of the way as one group, behind a single cleared trail, his decision to be careful was reinforced by the flickering sound of something huge and powerful as it made its way over the heavily thatched roof of palms above them.
        
        Everyone stopped, listening. Faces paled, and hands went to daggers.
        
        “It must be one of the aircraft,” Richter said, calling back the lines of frightened men. “The ones our spies have told us circle round the castle keep of Jerry Matabain.”
        
        “Tis not something that should be in the skies!” one of the men said, shuddering.
        
        “Wrong,” Shaker Sandow called. “It was made for the skies. The skies are exactly where it belongs. In the days before the Blank, there were thousands of such vehicles in the heavens, and any one of us-or all of us-might have owned one for traveling.”
        
        Fear was replaced, to a small degree, by awe. Then the noise was gone, and there was nothing to do but advance toward the region of the crystal trees.
        
        Slowly, the landscape around them seemed to change. The trees and the plants seemed filmed with something misty which refracted the light and made them glitter. A hand drawn over the leaves, though, felt nothing amiss. Step-by-step, the mist became heavier until, in scattered spots, small, sprouting clusters of jewels seemed to grow directly from the trees, like thumb-sized mushrooms.
        
        The men broke them off, examined them as they marched, stuffed their pockets full of them.
        
        “Could they be real jewels?” Daborot asked the Shaker, turning around from his place before the magician to show a fungus of rubies.
        
        “Perhaps,” the Shaker said. “I am no expert of such things. But even if they are priceless, why stuff your clothes with them here? So the birds say, there are more and better wonders ahead.”
        
        “Just the same,” Daborot said, his broad face flushed and beaded with sweat, “I'll keep 'em. Being so recently near death, the nice things in life seem all the nicer. You know?”
        
        “Indeed,” the Shaker said.
        
        Soon, the sound of their feet on the trail rose differently to their ears, with a grinding noise that echoed for a short way through the jungle before the heavy growth impeded all sound and returned silence to them. It was as if they were walking on ground glass, on a thousand shattered store windows. Commander Richter called a halt, and they fell to examining what lay beneath the cut ferns over which they had been moving. When the tight undergrowth was pulled back far enough, they could see that, rather than soil, the land was composed of a powder of diamonds, glittering with all the colors of the spectrum.
        
        “What do you make of it, Shaker?” Richter called, holding up a handful of the powdery soil and letting it flow brilliantly through his hand.
        
        “I think, at one time, the crystal disease-if disease it was-reached this part of the forest, though it