The noise was accompanied by panicked shouts and screams of fear from somewhere outside. Levering himself off the cot, Aradin moved over to the window, stood on the tips of his toes, and peered out through the bars. He didn’t see anything other than the multistoried wood and plaster building across from him for several long moments—then something grayish-brown, leafy, and bizarre strode past with an odd creaking sound between each thump, thump, thump, shaking the walls and the floor. An even louder sound escaped whatever-it-was, somewhere between a creak and a groan.
A rather wooden creaking, he belatedly realized. (That extra magic we poured into the aether circling the Grove, all these nights?) he reminded Teral. (I think it just bore unexpected fruit.)
(Fruit, hell,) Teral countered as something crashed and crumbled in the distance, accompanied by more frantic screaming. (I think it bore an entire tree!)
Sure enough, the huge thing came back. From this angle, Aradin could actually see partway up its tree-trunk legs. From the bits of long, slender leaves on the ends of drooping branches, he guessed it to be some member of the willow family, but the bark was thick, rugged, and much more auburn in hue than a proper willow gray. If he had to place the other parent tree, he would have guessed a redwood or some other conifer. (I hope this didn’t break off from one of the locus tree groupings.)
(That would be bad,) Teral agreed grimly. (I think we overdid it a little.)
“—I’ve got it!” he heard Shanno shouting somewhere out of sight. The youth came closer, though Aradin still couldn’t quite see. “Ignifa shoudis!”
Hissing noises sliced through the air, along with a faint glow of golden-orange light off to the left, and a whoompf sound that ended in a rising, groaning creak, the sound of a treeman screaming. Aradin wished for a stool, or that the cot could be pulled away from the wall, but it was firmly secured. Teral was a little taller and might have had more luck in his own body, but he didn’t want to risk the guards knowing he could swap faces. All he could do was listen to Shanno cast a few more spells, hear the crackling and snapping of more than just moving tree limbs, and see the glow of increasing flames reflecting off the building across the street.
“There, that should do it,” he heard Shanno proclaim in a grim, satisfied tone. Except there wasn’t any crashing reminiscent of a tree hitting the ground, just the snapping of flames . . . and the creaking of limbs. The deacon’s voice cracked in a yelp, followed by a bashing that shook the ground, but was too gentle to be the tree falling down. Sure enough, the deacon yelled, “Why won’t you fall down?”
The treeman groan-roared and smashed again. Someone else screamed, “—My house! My shop! Fire! FIRE!! Somebody help me!”
“Everything—everything’s under control!” Shanno called out. “Everything . . . Someone get a water mage out here!—Damn you, tree, why don’t you die? All those stupid bush-beasts did!”
(Because a tree is far larger than a fireball spell,) Teral answered the deacon, his words heard only in Aradin’s head.
(And because it’s covered in conifer bark, which is very thick and insulative,) Aradin agreed, remembering his Hortimancy lessons. (The exteriors of such trees might get scorched and the leaves burned off, but the core of the tree will continue to live, if it’s large enough.)
“Dammit—hudorjen hudorsomm!”
A long, heavy splashing noise was joined by a massive hissing. Moments later, a great cloud of steam and smoke billowed past his prison window. Faintly through the cracks around the edges of the glass-paned, iron-barred barrier, Aradin could smell burnt pine pitch. Shanno shouted his water-summoning spell again, splashing more liquid on the unseen battleground. The treeman thumped off into the distance, its flames hopefully extinguished.
Aradin could hear it evoking more panicked screams, and an occasional crash from its limbs swinging against whatever got in its way, or displeased it, or for whatever reason a treeman might rampage through a town, then it faded into the distance. He relaxed back onto his heels and sighed. (No, this is not good for poor Groveham . . .)
“What was out there?” one of the guards called out to him. “What did you see?”
Pushing away from the wall, Aradin crossed to the bars and braced one hand on the rune-chased metal. “What did I see? I saw very little from the window . . . but I could guess most of it from what I heard.”
“So what did you hear?” the teal-clad man rephrased impatiently.
“I heard the warped amalgamation of an utterly untamed, uncontrolled Grove-tree transformed into a living, moving, angry treeman, rampaging through the streets of your city, because I am locked up in here and am unable to do my assigned job as the Keeper’s assistant. I heard,” he continued tersely, cutting off the guard as the other man opened his mouth to speak, “Deacon Shanno utterly failing to destroy that treeman, and in fact, only enraging it further, into bashing into a house and setting it ablaze. I heard Shanno attempting to put the fire out . . . and the sounds of the treeman moving on, continuing its rampage through town unstopped.