Bellcrank opened his mouth to vent his opinion, but just then Kitiara and Wingover came running at them. The war rior woman carried the gnome under her arm like a loaf of bread. Wingover's head bounced and jiggled each time her heels struck the ground. In another situation, the image might have been comic.

Kitiara braced to a halt in front of Sturm. "There's a vil lage up ahead," she said. She wasn't even out of breath.

"Village? What sort of village?" asked Roperig.

"A village village," said Wingover from under Kitiara's arm. "There's some kind of keep in the center of the place."

"Does the trail lead to this village?" asked Sturm.

Kitiara shook her head. "It veers off to the north, avoid ing it completely."

"We ought to inspect this village," Cutwood called from thirty yards away. Sturm and the others looked at each oth er, then at Cutwood.

"Can you hear what we're saying?" said Wingover in a bare whisper.

"Well certainly! Do you think I'm deaf?" Cutwood yelled back. Sighter tapped him on the shoulder.

"I can't hear them," he said. He grabbed Cutwood by the ears and turned his head from side to side, peering into the carpenter's ears. "Everything looks normal," he said. "Does my voice sound loud to you?"

"It does when you yell from an inch away!"

Sighter took Cutwood by the hand to where the others stood. "It's happened again," he reported. "Cutwood can hear normal conversation from thirty yards away, maybe more."

"Really? This calls for some tests," said Rainspot. He low ered his pack to the ground and tried to disentangle himself from the cords and straps.

"Never mind!" Kitiara said. "What do we do about the village'?"

"How close will we have to pass if we follow the trail?"

Sturm queried.

"Spitting distance."

He squinted into the sky. "Half the day's gone. If we start now, we can be past the village before nightfall and not lose the trail." Sighter grumbled about the human's lack of scien tific curiosity, but no gnome seriously considered going against Sturm's plan.

Sturm formed the party single file and sternly admon ished the gnomes to keep quiet. "I feel trouble coming," he said. "A keep means a lord of some kind, and probably armed retainers. If," he added, "if this world is anything like

Krynn."

Looking straight ahead, Kit said, "Are you afraid?"

"Afraid, no. Concerned, yes. Our stay here has never been more precarious. A pitched battle could destroy us even if we win."

"That's the difference between us, Sturm. You fight to pre serve order and honor; I fight for myself. If trouble is brew ing, the only thing to do is come out on top."

– No matter what happens to the rest of us?"

He scored a touch. Kitiara's eyes flashed. "I have never changed sides in a battle, nor betrayed a friend! The little men need our protection, and I'll shed my last drops of blood defending them. You've no right to imply otherwise!"

Sturm walked on silently for a moment, then said, "I'm sorry, Kit. It's becoming harder for me to know your mind. I think this magical strength you've gained has affected your outlook."

"My mind, you mean."

"Trust you to say it the most brutal way."

"Life is brutal, and so are facts."

At the rear of the column, Cutwood could hear every thing, and he said, "I think they're mad at each other."

"Shows how much you know," Sighter replied. "Human males and females always act strangely toward each other.

They never want their true feelings to show."

"Why is that?"

"Because they don't want to seem vulnerable. Humans have a lot of this attitude called 'pride,' which is sort of like the satisfaction you get when your machine performs cor rectly. Pride makes them act contrary to the way they really feel."

"That's silly!"

Sighter shrugged under his towering pack and almost fell down. "Unh! By Reorx! Of course it's silly, and these two humans have especially bad cases of pride, which means the fiercer they act and the louder they yell, the more they care about each other."

Cutwood was dazzled by his colleague's understanding of human behavior. "Where did you learn so much about humans?" he said.

"I listen and learn," said Sighter, very ungnomishly.

Though he didn't yet realize it, that was the change wrought in Sighter by the magic of Lunitari. From an intuitive, impetuous gnome, he had become a logical, thoughtful, deductive gnome, a creature that had never before existed.

The field of stones was largely barren of plants, even by day, so the first sign the marchers had that they were near the village was when stands of scarlet-capped mushrooms seven feet tall appeared, growing in neat rows between two low stone walls. Roperig picked a section of wall apart to study; it was simply made of loose rocks stacked conven iently together. "Very primitive," was his disdainful verdict.

The mushroom orchard served to screen them from the village itself. Sturm, Kitiara, Wingover, and Cutwood crept through the rows of fungus to the very edge of the settle ment.

By Krynnish standards, it wasn't much of a village. There weren't any houses at all, just a series of concentric stone walls about waist high, plus a few cribs filled with harvested food. The only full-scale structure was the keep, a squat, single-story, windowless block in the center of the village walls. A lone pole stuck up from the keep, and a dirty gray banner hung limply from it.

"Not exactly the golden halls of Silvanost, is it?" said Kiti ara. To the gnomes, she said, "Can you hear or see anything stirring down there?" Wingover could see nothing moving.

Cutwood squinted one eye shut and listened hard.

"I hear footsteps," he said uncertainly, "pretty faint.

Someone's walking around inside the keep."

"Fine. Let's bypass this place," said Sturm.

The other gnomes waited patiently on the other side, chattering in whispers. When Wingover, Cutwood, and the humans returned, they shouldered their lofty packs and formed a single file again.

"The village looks deserted," Sturm said. "So we're going past it. Be quiet anyway."

The trail of the Cloudmaster bent away from the village just beyond the walls of the mushroom orchard. As they rounded the tall red stalks, Kitiara, who was leading, saw that the path was lined on either side by tall, leafless trees.

"Odd," she said. "Those weren't there before."

"Did they grow up suddenly, like the other plants?" asked

Roperig. Kitiara shook her head and drew her sword. v' The trees stood about seven feet high. Their trunks were graduated in bands of color, ranging from deep burgundy red at the base to the lightest of pinks at their rounded-off tops. All had branches that grew out and bent down.

"Ugliest trees I ever saw," said Cutwood. He left the line long enough to chip a piece of the flaky bark off with his

Twenty Tool Pocket Kit. He was examining the fleshy gray wood when the tree's left branch flexed and swatted the specimen from his hand.

"Hey!" he said. "The tree hit me!"

The double row of trees launched into motion. They pulled their roots out of the ground and freed their limbs.

Black dishlike eyes opened in the trunks, and ragged mouths split apart.

Sturm grabbed for his hilt. The gnomes bunched together between him and Kitiara.

"Suffering bloodstained gods! What are these things?"

Kitiara exclaimed.

"Unless I'm gravely mistaken, these are our villagers.

They were expecting us," Sturm replied, keeping the tip of his sword moving back and forth to discourage the tree things.

The tree-folk emitted a series of deep hooting sounds, like a chorus of rams' horns. From recesses in their own bodies they produced an array of swords and spears – all made of clear red glass. The tree-folk closed the circle around the besieged band.