They entered the forest, and the leafy branches closed over their heads, hiding the sky from view. They hadn't gone more than fifty yards before they lost sight of the grasslands they had just left, and if it hadn't been for the compasses in the handles of the wizards' knives, they might have lost their sense of direction very quickly and wandered around lost, possibly for the rest of their lives. Thomas looked fondly at his knife, remembering all the times it had saved his life and thinking of Shale Granore, the trog who had insisted that he, Lenny and Jerry buy them. Good old Shale, he thought fondly. I wonder what he's doing now. He remembered that they'd promised to return to Darmakarak one day and see how the work there was progressing. It'll be a long time before we're able to keep that promise, he thought.

     Unlike the ceenars that formed the bulk of the Overgreen Forest, the greybeam trees of Fengalla Forest were evergreen. They grew continually all year round and shed their leaves at a uniform rate. Although winter here was noticeably cooler than summer, it was never cold enough this close to the equator for it to interrupt plant growth, so there was no need for life here to follow a seasonal pattern. Consequently, the layer of dead leaves on the ground was always fresh and always being added to, forming a deep, spongy layer into which the horses' hooves sank to a depth of over a foot as they ploughed through it. The leaves smothered any ground plants that might have tried to grow there, and those small clumps of rinweed that did somehow manage to survive were further stunted by the almost total darkness, caused by the dense overhead canopy blocking out almost all the sunlight.

     These conditions of almost total darkness and a vast supply of decomposing vegetable matter were ideal for the growth of fungi, however, and their fruiting bodies were everywhere, rising from the vast network of fibrous hyphae that fed on the decomposing leaves, breaking them down and returning the nutrients they contained to the soil, where they would be taken up again by the trees.

     The fruiting bodies came in a bewildering variety of shapes, sizes and colours, some of them long, thin and veined with gills along their entire three foot lengths, others low and wide, looking like ordinary toadstools except for the fringe of long tendrils that hung from the edges of the cap. Others were great white globes two feet across that produced great clouds of spores when kicked or disturbed, while others consisted of long, crimson threads that covered hundreds of square feet of ground like a carpet of red grass. The most visually impressive, however, were the Fengalla fungi, after which the forest was named. A two foot wide bladder was split open by an eight to ten foot high stalk that grew out of it, curving over at the top so that the bright red and yellow spore sack that hung on the end looked like a lantern on a pole. In places, they grew so closely together that the horses and their riders couldn't help but brush against them, whereupon the spore sack burst, releasing a cloud of spores that the travellers had to be careful not to breathe in. Fengalla spores were highly irritating if they got inside the lungs, and had been known to put people to bed, coughing up blood, for weeks afterwards.

     Looking up, they saw the green, living part of the forest high above them, alive with the screeching, howling and roaring of arboreal herbivores and carnivores. Plant eaters, including sloths, monkeys, apes and lizards, crawled and swung from branch to branch, never touching the ground, and the flesh eating snakes, bark lizards and tree leopards followed them. The bright flowers of exotic parasitic creepers, which lived entirely on stolen tree sap and whose roots never came anywhere near the ground, gleamed brightly in the branches above them, and the air was filled with the songs of forest birds which they almost never saw except when they swooped down to catch flying insects or display themselves to prospective mates on the lowest branches. It was almost as if an ordinary forest had been lifted up on stilts, the stilts being the ten foot thick trunks of the greybeam trees which were smooth and branchless below a height of a hundred feet.

     The forest floor, in contrast, was a place of decay and decomposition, where none of the animals from the upper forest ever came. That didn't mean that it was safe down there, though. Quite the opposite. There were ground living creatures that fed on the fungi, forest oxen and craven boars being the most common, along with several species of rabbit, deer and forest pony, and there were ground living carnivores that fed on them, most numerous being the forest wolves. Other more dangerous but less frequently encountered ground life included army ants, forest reachers, giant spiders, strangle vines, devil flies, dream snakes and myconids. More dangerous still were the trolls, which were the main reason why people avoided the forest if they possibly could, and the most dangerous of all, but thankfully rare, were the forest dragons.

     "Isn't it fascinating!" cried Thomas as he gazed avidly all around them. "Two completely separate ecosystems, one above the other, with completely different inhabitants and food chains. Unique, so far as we know, in all the world!"

     "That's almost exactly what you said last time," reminded Lirenna.

     "When you were on the quest for the Sceptre," said Drake.

     "Yes. That time, though, we were with a large caravan, and so relatively safe. We were attacked by a family of trolls at one point, but there were enough fighting men among us to drive them away. If we run into any trolls this time, we'll be in real trouble."

     "Don't worry," said Matthew reassuringly. "It was probably the size and noise of the caravan that attracted them. If we're careful, we can move almost silently. They won't even know we're here.”

     “You were right about the horses,” said Lirenna, lifting a fallen branch that had been hidden in the deep carpet of leaves with the toe of her boot. “We're risking a broken ankle with each step. They'd have had real trouble trying to walk among this lot. It's hard enough with just two legs.”

     “How do the forest ponies manage it?” asked Jerry.

     “No idea. They’re just used to it, I suppose.”

     One day they were stopped by the side of a small stream to rest and have a bite to eat, and Thomas wandered a short distance away from the others to have a closer look at a strangler fig that had almost killed the greybeam tree up which it was climbing. He walked around it, studying it from every angle, and stroked its smooth bark, marvelling at the intricate patterns formed by its repeatedly branching and crossing stems, now so dense that they formed an almost continuous skin around the vast bulk of the tree that had first sheltered it and given it support and whose generosity it was now so brutally betraying. As he stroked the fig, though, his fingers found a smelly drop of bird dropping and he climbed down the bank of the stream, sitting on a grassy hummock to wash his hand in the water.

     A tree branch the size of his forearm had sunk half way into the muddy bank, and on a whim Thomas pulled it up. It left behind an almost perfect impression in the soft mud, which the wizard stared at in fascination. "The soul of the branch," he muttered under his breath.

     "What?" asked Lirenna, coming to sit beside him. "What did you say?"

     Thomas looked up in surprised delight and showed her the branch's impression in the mud. "Did you read the philosophy of Suang?" he asked.

     "I could never really get into philosophy. He was Fu Nangian, wasn't he?"

     "That's right. He had this theory that there was something, some kind of fluid, that permeates the whole world. He called it nooplasm. He said that it was very responsive to thought, and that every thinking being leaves an impression in it, like the impression that log's left in the mud, and that when we die, the impression is left behind. He said that that's what the soul is, the impression our minds leave in the nooplasm. You understand?"

     The demi shae nodded, and Thomas found his attention pleasantly distracted by the gentle touch of her shoulder against his. He concentrated on his explanation. "He said that these impressions are so perfect that they're actually conscious, that they can actually think, that even after we die our impressions carry on thinking just the same as we did in life. He said that that's what the afterlife is."

     "But what about Paradise, the Hell dimensions and the other immortal planes, the places the clerics say our souls go after death?"

     "He said that they're nothing more mysterious than other universes, parallel to our own, similar to the ones we took field trips to back in the University but further away. The Gods gather up the souls of the dead and carry them there, each one ending up in the afterlife the Gods think they most deserve."

     "While those left behind go on to become ghosts and things?"

     "That's right, but so long as they remain in our world they're as much in danger from us as we are from them. They're just impressions, after all, and impressions are so fragile, so vulnerable..." He prodded the impression the log had left in the mud, erasing half of it to make his point. "In the next world, though, they're protected. The natural laws are different there, making souls much more robust. Much harder to damage."

     "It's an interesting idea," said the demi shae, frowning doubtfully. "But I wouldn't discuss it with Di if I were you. Or Rob. They’d probably call it heresy. I imagine Rob would probably be rather angry."

     "We don't know that. I mean, there's nothing about it that's offensive to anyone. He's probably never given a moment's thought to what souls actually are, what kind of stuff they're actually made of. He'd probably think it's a completely irrelevant question."

     "Well, even so, let's keep it to ourselves, shall we?"

     Thomas agreed, and then they heard the others calling out to them, telling them it was time to go. Thomas stood, then reached down a hand to help Lirenna up. He didn't need to, she was quite capable of standing on her own, but it gave him an excuse to hold her hand, to feel the wonderful softness of her skin, and the smile of gratitude on her face as he lifted her to her feet suggested that she wasn't entirely displeased by the contact either. His head buzzed with pleasant thoughts as they walked back to the camp, and his hand and shoulder tingled pleasantly with the memory of the feel of her.

☆☆☆

     Thomas spent their whole time in the forest gazing about in wonder, marveling at every strange new sight they came across and excitedly pointing it out to the others until they were sick of it. He drew Shaun's attention to a cluster of small holes in the trunk of a tree they were passing, explaining that they were caused by a wood burrowing beetle which would eventually dig out so much of the tree's interior that it would come toppling down as though felled by a lumberjack. He pointed out to Drake that the mass of maggots devouring an eighteen inch high red capped toadstool were the larvae of razorflies and were considered to be delicacies by the korreds who inhabited some parts of the forest, and he explained to Matthew that the bloodcurdling screech they'd just heard came from a firebird, a small creature about the size of a blackbird with red and orange feathers that fed on squirrels and other small tree animals, killing them by breathing fire on them like a dragon.

     The others endured the natural history lessons with great patience and feigned interest, knowing that the wizard would be hurt and upset if they told him to shut up, as they dearly wanted to, but fortunately, to everyone's relief, his knowledge of Fengalla's flora and fauna was eventually exhausted, and he was reduced to giving exclamations of wonder and delight at every new discovery. After two or three weeks, he was convinced that he had seen everything the forest had to offer, but the biggest surprise was still to come.