Ayaan followed him in and emerged into a brightly-lit place where the underbrush grew wild but the trees had all been pruned back. Piles of gray deadfall ringed the open space, a few dead leaves still fluttering on the fallen branches. Ayaan had grown up in a desert land but even she could tell that trees didn't form such a clearing naturally.
Then there was the goat. He lay in the middle of the clearing, staked to a low hillock. He was dying, his fur littered with bits of decaying leaves, his eyes milky and lost, the long sideways pupils very much dilated even in the bright sun. He had kicked over his water dish and Ayaan could count the ribs sticking out of his side. Only his horns, which rose from his head in a thick, curlingV looked healthy.
'Someone has left me a snack,' the green phantom announced, cheerfully. Ayaan could feel the goat's energy herself, flickering away slowly but still golden and almost irresistible. She put out a hand to stop the green-robed lich, though.
'Why hasn't some wandering ghoul finished this animal off long ago?' she asked.
'Maybe there aren't any nearby.' He looked down at her arm as if he would happily chew it off to get to the goat.
'Not any more, there aren't.' With her free hand Ayaan pointed to piles of bleached bones'human bones'mixed in with the woody deadfall at the edges of the clearing. Then she pointed out a shallow depression in the grass on the far side of the goat's mound. Once one knew to look for it it could be seen that broken vegetation pointed away from the defile in a radial pattern. A similar crater dipped down not more than a dozen feet from where they stood. 'Have you ever seen a minefield before?' she asked.
'Ridiculous,' the green phantom rasped. Behind him Erasmus came up with a large rock in one furry hand. Before Ayaan could stop him he tossed the rock deep into the clearing. Metal sprouted from the ground like an evil weed and then a flash of light pressed up hard against Ayaan's side and nearly knocked her over. Hot dirt and bits of shredded goat meat splattered her leathers.
'I didn't expect that big an explosion,' Erasmus said, spitting dirt and pebbles out of his mouth. All three of them had been caught by metal shrapnel, ruining their clothes. Had they been any closer their brains would be strewn around the trees behind them.
'That,' Ayaan said, fingering a hole in her skull-print leather jacket, 'was a Bouncing Betty. It was spring-loaded to jump in the air when detonated. This spreads the shrapnel over a much wider area and dramatically increases the kill radius.'
'You've seen these before?' the green phantom asked.
'Friends of mine have. From closer up.' Ayaan peered through the smoke that filled the clearing. 'Mines. There are better ways to keep out strangers, but few that make as much noise. They will know we're coming now if they didn't before. We have to move faster. That's probably the quickest way in,' she said, pointing at a continuation of the trail on the far side. 'It's probably booby-trapped, every step of the way.'
'So we go around.' The green phantom turned away from the minefield and headed back into the darkness of the forest. He had a small compass and while they lacked a map he could at least tell if they were headed in the right direction. Erasmus went first, his vicious claws effective at clearing the overhang like ten little machetes. Ayaan followed and was followed in turn by the green phantom. The handless ghouls brought up the rear, so silent Ayaan kept forgetting they were even there.
They'd been moving for the better part of half an hour, pushing westward and southward when they could, when Erasmus stopped short and Ayaan's face collided with his furry back. 'Hold on,' he said. 'There's something... there's some energy up here.'