Eternity's Mind by Kevin J. Anderson Page B

communed with them, demanded answers, and upon emerging, he seemed inspired by what he had learned. “I know what you are now!” he shouted to the voidpriests as he pulled Arita close. He glared up at the Onthos. “The trees told me.”
    Kennebar and his dark companions were undeterred. They reached toward their trapped victims, and Arita and Collin pressed back against the trunk of the huge tree behind them. “The worldtrees are not dead,” Collin said. “They are aware of you!”
    â€œThe trees are weak,” said Kennebar.
    Then Arita felt the whispers stir in her mind again with a wordless urgency. Something else was awakening in the cosmos, something that sensed the danger of the growing shadows. Arita didn’t understand it, but she reached out for it nevertheless.
    She had despaired of ever knowing what it was like to be a green priest, to share thoughts with a mind so vast. But the trees had altered her, left her open for something more. It seemed impossible, but she realized that the inner voice also belonged to some grand sentience, different from the verdani. It was beyond the faeros, wentals, and hydrogues. Arita was connected to it, could commune with it the same way Collin connected with the trees.
    As the voidpriests reached out to kill them, coronas of blackness shimmered from their hands. Arita felt Collin grab her like a safety net. “The trees know me,” he rasped. “They remember me … and they have to remember themselves!”
    Collin dug deep and touched the slumbering worldforest, while Arita called on that other presence. And the power of her plea joined with his, magnifying it, building, reverberating until it woke the trees at last, forcing the verdani to defend themselves.
    Arita felt dizzy as the inner sounds became a roar in her ears. Her vision expanded, and she could see through the clustered trees, their thick fronds interlocked in a canopy that now began to stir. Leaves thrashed about, and vines twisted up from the forest floor.
    Startled by the unexpected response, the alien Onthos skittered away, some scrambling higher into the fronds while others dashed across the branches.
    Kennebar and his voidpriests froze as if in disbelief.
    Collin shouted out to the verdani. “Save us! Save the forest.”
    The other voice inside Arita also thrummed out wordlessly, offering defenses against the spreading stain of the destructive shadow.
    Alive, the thrashing fronds hurled dozens of fleeing Gardeners into the air, dashing them against the branches. Newly wakened vines and branches reached out to catch the Onthos and squeeze them like huge fists.
    Fronds whipped about with the sound of a great windstorm. Branches wrapped around Kennebar, engulfing him. The voidpriest leader struggled with his ebony arms, soulless eyes wide on his blank, shadowed face. The other tainted priests made no sound as they struggled.
    Arita felt as if her mind would burst from the surge of energy using her as a conduit. Collin’s eyes were squeezed shut, his lips drawn back. He groaned at the strain of the impossible effort.
    The trees shuddered with a last gasp of their own energy. Gold bark scales flaked away, and the tree trunks split open with a resounding crack. Gaps in the heartwood spread wider, yawning like dark and dangerous mouths in the thick trunks. The frond tentacles that held the struggling voidpriests scooped them into the gaps. Thrashing, the dark priests fell into the wooden maws of the angry trees, which swallowed them like predators devouring prey.
    It took only seconds, but one by one, all of the tainted voidpriests were swept into the yawning gaps, and the openings snapped shut again with a loud crack.
    Arita gasped, and Collin still clung to her. They collapsed, shaking, onto the tangled platform high in the trees where the isolationist priests had made their home. Arita didn’t understand what she had just experienced, but now she dared