Gaba Alam

The forest begins about three miles east of Loshev’s ancient bridge and runs days inward. It is deciduous and coniferous mixed, and the trunks stand far enough apart to ride between rather than lead a horse through, which is the only comfortable thing anybody says about it. People do not come out this way. The reason given in Loshev is that the woods are haunted, and the phrase is used in exactly the same words by the people who believe it and the people who do not. Beasts, fiends and Fey are all named in the telling, by nobody who has met one.

The name belongs to Yaser, a fence taken alive out of a bandit crew, who remarked while a crossbow bolt was being cut out of him that most people think these woods haunted, true or not, and that Gaba Alam is known to be haunted woods.

What has actually been seen in it is thinner than the reputation. Koa, hired to guide a merchant family west through the wood, watched a big fire burn well to the north one night and said so to the man who had hired him. Some nights later he watched lights to the south move in and out of view behind the hills, holding a formation and breaking it the way men do who are following a path. He weighed will-o’-the-wisps against moonlight on polished armor and settled on the armor. He let the family sleep rather than frighten them over something that was moving away, and told them in the morning he had seen soldiers. Whose they were was never discovered.

The Sodden Stretch

There is a stretch of it that looks like the rest of it and is not. Everything carried through that ground takes water: wine turns watered, bread turns sodden, hardtack crumbles, and clothing soaks through to the skin. The Valiant Few accused one another of tampering with the drink before it became plain that the forest was doing it. Walk clear and the leaf litter crunches again, and the water drawn on the far side runs impossibly clean. Koa came out of it with a cough he could not put down for days.

That stretch is the Water mote: a place where the veil between this world and the plane of Water has worn thin enough for the plane to come through. Of the four elemental motes it is the only one anyone has walked. It is a zone inside the forest and not the forest itself, and the rest of Gaba Alam is ordinarily dry.

It no longer keeps to a mile or two. Walking the Loshev road home from the Twisted Grove after the keeps were broken, the Valiant Few took the wet cold of it a good distance outside the ground it had ever been felt from before. Their own reading of that is that the positive and negative energies fighting over Idir have collapsed in on each other and left more room for the planes to press through, which would make the motes larger; it is a theory, and the thing they cannot rule out is that they simply passed nearer the sodden ground than they had before. They chose not to walk in and find out. Mikhail shut the idea down quickly and badly enough to be caught at it, and admitted the water bothers him a little. He nearly drowned in that place.

What Is in It

Game is plentiful and men are not. Past the sodden ground there were Idiran deer in numbers and no human track at all. Where men do use it, they use it hard: bootprints, branches hacked apart with shortswords rather than cut, a lookout tree scored with climbing marks and fitted out with rope, a plank seat and iron spikes driven into the trunk above a bend in the trail, and a ring-of-stones camp with a wolf trap set under the leaves.

Two rivers run either side and close on Haudh-Gwenn like a pair of arms, so the whole wood sits inside them. Its north end runs up into the ruined town below the Twisted Grove, and the razorleaf of that place reaches this far south: a bed of spiked vine hidden under leaf litter, and then the same vine grown across a path walked clean an hour before.