The Shadow and Night by Chris Walley

Menaya. Here, I can believe this is a half-finished world, with this ripped veneer of soil and scrub over lava and rock outwash supporting, at best, a handful of species. But that thought came to him as more of a challenge than a criticism. God willing, within a few years there would be trees over much of this area, and with them, a much greater diversity of plants and animals. The issue was how to do it.
    As the brown reeds of the marsh’s edge came into sight, Merral checked his location from the diary and ordered the active navigation off. He would swing southward down the flanks of the marshes up to the edge of the Great Northern Forest. Not only was there no danger of losing his way here, but the presence of patches of marsh and swamp made such an automated navigation worse than useless.
    Merral picked his way along the slope just above where the reed beds started, watching carefully for patches of thin ice. As he rode down along the marsh’s edge his journey became easier. The wind blew now at his side rather than into his face, and the sky lightened overhead so that there was enough sunlight to cast a faint shadow. Here there was life: birdsong from within the reed beds, the whistling of the dwarf swans on the lake, and the piercing cries of the gulls. A reed heron scuttled away in front of him. In the distance he saw a herd of gray deer, a pair of otters slithered away into an ice-free patch of water at the sound of Graceful’s hooves, and a Raymont’s musk ox lurched across his path.
    As he drew near the edge of the forest, he crossed the distinctive tracks of a half-ton hexapod surveyor. They were fresh and going south with a purpose rare in surveying machines, and Merral wondered if it had been programmed to return to base before Nativity so that the samples could be unloaded before the break. Wilamall’s Farm would probably be busy today.
    An hour or so later Merral stopped and took another bearing. He wanted to be certain of striking the forest edge south of the limits of the rough lava flows. At the ragged edge of the forest, he reined Graceful in and took a last look over the Long Marshes, a great sea of tan reeds swaying gently in the wind as far as the eye could see, broken only by snaking waterways clogged with brittle ice. He would, he decided, come by again in summer and camp and linger.
    Today, though, there was something about the wastes that he found peculiarly unwelcoming, and as he entered under the shadows of the trees, Merral found himself rejoicing even more than usual. He had always loved woods, even in winter when the rowans and gray alders were bare and only the pines were green, and even these impoverished and marginal forests with their gale-tumbled trunks. So he didn’t mind that, with the branches low to the ground and the land rough, his journey was a slow one. It took well over an hour’s skillful riding to reach the support road, as he skirted around areas of impenetrable scrub and avoided the deeper streams while trying not to depart from his compass bearing. Even so, he was wondering about taking a location check when suddenly he was out of the trees, and the track—a rift of dead, yellow bleached grass between the high trees—lay before him. The road had been made two centuries or so earlier to ease the passage of the ground transporters bringing in the first trees for this part of the forest. Since then, it had been cleared periodically to maintain a line of access into the forest.
    Merral dismounted, letting Graceful graze on the remains of the grass. Then, listening to the wind whistling through the treetops, he looked at the track for signs of recent passage of men or machines but found nothing. Any woodland sampling and observer machines were too delicate on their feet to leave traces on hard ground, and if any humans had come through here lately, they had used some zero-impact machine such as a gravity-modifying sled, a hoverer, or, like him, a