My face must have done something I didn't know about, for Rafe backed slowly away. I forced myself to speak slowly: "Kyla is a guide, and indispensable. If anything happens to me, she is the only one who can lead you back. Therefore her safety is my personal affair. Understand?"
As we went along the trail, the vague green light disappeared. "We're right below the Trailcity," I whispered, and pointed upward. All around us the Hundred Trees rose, branchless pillars so immense that four men, hands joined, could not have encircled one with their arms. They stretched upward for some three hundred feet, before stretching out their interweaving branches; above that, nothing was visible but blackness.
Yet the grove was not dark, but lighted with the startlingly brilliant phosphorescence of the fungi growing on the trunks, and trimmed into bizarre ornamental shapes. In cages of transparent fibre, glowing insects as large as a hand hummed softly and continuously.
As I watched, a trailman—quite naked except for an ornate hat and a narrow binding around the loins—descended the trunk. He went from cage to cage, feeding the glow-worms with bits of shining fungus from a basket on his arm.
I called to him in his own language, and he dropped the basket, with an exclamation, his spidery thin body braced to flee or to raise an alarm.
"But I belong to the Nest," I called to him, and gave him the names of my foster-parents. He came toward me, gripping my forearm with warm long fingers in a gesture of greeting.
"Jason? Yes, I hear them speak of you," he said in his gentle twittering voice, "you are at home. But those others—?" He gestured nervously at the strange faces.
"My friends," I assured him, "and we come to beg the Old One for an audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will receive us."
He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the trunk and took the basket. The trailman said, "I am Carrho. Perhaps it would be better if I guided you to your foster-parents, so you will not be challenged."