Page 11 (1/2)

In spite of his dashing attempt at Errolflynnery, Rudy had never been on a horse before his arrival in this universe On the road down froone with a patrol of the Guards to investigate a farmhouse burned out by the White Raiders The memory of what he&039;d found there still turned him sick But, raised as he had been on Maverick and Paladin, he had been under the i aboard a horse and thundering away into the sunset He had recently found out he rong

The horses of the White Raiders were taller and longer-liing on the scant saltbush and wiregrass of the desert, they were narrow-built and of prominent vertebrae They were also skittish and half-wild, and Rudy&039;s humiliation was co desert dawn, he got chucked unceremoniously off the mildest old mare of the herd, the one Hoofprint of the Wind had chosen for hientleness He looked up fro a fire-snorting buckskin stallion like a patriarch of the Cossacks

&039;Were you ever in the cavalry, by any chance?&039; he asked, as several of the Raiders went to catch the loo,&039; the wizard replied cryptically His breath sle rawhide rein in one h

Rudy reold&039;s having been in his youth a slave in the Alketch and he also re chained to a practice post and having the local

hotshots try sabre charges at hi much; but, if the story were true, it would sure as hel! account for the old man&039;s iron nerves He ures&039;

The Raiders returned, soleentlenorth before dawn and continued throughout the day The clouds that had broken the previous afternoon regathered, and the day grew colder instead of waralloped north beneath a pale and heatless sky At midday their breath was visible s Patchy snow covered the red sands and grew thicker as they proceeded north Here and there Rudy saw tracks unfaold told hin of creatures native to the far north But deeper andthan the cold was the silence that covered the land Nothing seemed to move or live in these wastes of sand and snow At a casual look, even the winds that whirled like dust-devils across theone When the riders stopped to rest or to change horses froht, Hoofprint of the Wind prowled restlessly on the edges of the group, talking softly with the dozen or so of his warriors who acco across the plains for some sound Rudy could not hear The warriors who had cohtning, keeping close together in the endless expanses of the snoaste

There,&039; the chieftain whispered, pointing to where the mottled red and white of the land seemed to slope upward to a far and hazy horizon &039;There it lies&039;

Rudy shaded his eyes against the distance He could h he wore a coat of buffalohide that the Raiders had given him, he felt suddenly cold

&039;Do you have such places in your hoold asked Hoofprint of the Wind as they turned the heads of their horses toward the dark gleam

&039;Not in our own lands,&039; the chieftain of the Twisted Hills replied &039;The Lava Hills People to the south of our runs, they had such a place The tuar, they call them, and others spoke of them, out in the Salt Plain to the east&039;

&039;Tuar?&039; the wizard said curiously &039;Seeing?&039;

&039;At such places it is said that the sha hosts of the Earth, can see far away They say, too, a the Lava Hills People that once they hunted in this fashion, the wisethe people to the track of the antelope; but they hunt so no arnalhotep shook his head They do not say Healing there was also, worked upon those spots&039;

Ingold fell silent, deep in thought, and thus they came to the entrance of the home of the Dark

It was the first such place Rudy had seen, an entrance such as all must have been before huht of early temples and forts A vast plaza, hundreds of feet to the side, lay before thelass In its centre gaped a rectangle of shadow, like an open and screa throat pointed at the sky From it, worn stairs led down to the depths of the world Rudy shivered, at once repelled and curiously attracted, a fear that was oddly like acrophobia co over him He felt an uneasy desire to cover that inky pit, to cover it and chain down the cover, and to mark it with the rune of Darb, the rune that would not let evil pass But side by side with the repugnance was the fear that, if he got too near, he would descend those stairs and, against his conscious will, go freely to the Dark

The riders drew rein where the snowy ground sloped doard to that glassy paveed his horse forward down the slope, and the hooves clicked loudly on the stone as he rode to the very brink of the pit

There he dismounted and took his staff from where it had been tied across the horse&039;s withers; he had fetched it when they&039;d brought the burro Che into the caround where he sat his horse a a kind of eerie uneasiness as Ingold stood for a fewas Zyagarnalhotep had listened to the wind Then he descended a few steps and listened again, his hands in their incongruous blue mittens folded around the wood of the staff, the white sky vast above his head

Hoofprint of the Wind called out, &039;What think you,

Desert Walker?&039;

Ingold looked up and pushed his hood back from his face &039;I hardly knohat to think,&039; he said He ca wasteland of cold, and his horse- followed hi &039;I feel that they are gone In fact, I do not believe there is anything living down there, good or evil Will you come doith me, Hoof print of the Wind, to see this for yourself, or will you reo?&039;

The Raider looked uneasy, a feeling which Rudy heartily shared He trusted Ingold implicitly and had never seen hi down there, he was probably right On the other hand, Rudy knew that the Dark had old rong And if Rudy was jumpy about it, somebody who knew the old man only by reputation could hardly be expected to follow him down to the very heart of the darkness, no ht, and there is nothing below,&039; the chieftain

said, &039;better would it be that we reuard the road at your back&039;

&039;Even so,&039; Ingold agreed without irony, since this was, after all, his expedition to begin with &039;Rudy?&039;

&039;Uh - &039; Rudy said &039;Yeah Sure&039; He slid down from his horse&039;s back, astonished at how sore he was Nine hours of fast, steady riding was no joke for a novice He wondered if he&039;d be crippled for life He disengaged the spear shaft he&039;d been using for a walking stick from behind his saddle blanket and limped down the bank to join the wizard on the paveold turned back toward the stairway Then he froze, like a wolf startled by so his head as if at soht reflected, flat and white, off his eyes as he scanned the sky &039;It can&039;t be,&039; he said softly to himself Rudy looked about nervously &039;What can&039;t be?&039; &039;We&039;rethe horizon, his brows draith worry and puzzlement At the same time one of the horses on the bank threw up its head with a snort and began to prance fretfully

Too far south for what?

Ingold turned back to the Raiders &039;I&039;m not sure,&039; he said to Hoofprint of the Wind, &039;and I may be &039;

It was the first time that Rudy had seen the implacable Raiders show any emotion at all Fear sparked into the chieftain&039;s amber eyes &039;Can you be sure?&039; he asked and esture that sent a ripple of whispers and h them like a stone dropped in still water They, too, were afraid

&039;No -Yes Yes, I aold looked in one direction and then another, the lines of his face deepening with concern

Not, Rudy suspected, so et turned into popsicles in the next sixty seconds, but because he

doesn&039;t understand why it should happen this far south, for Chrissake

&039;Don&039;t!&039; the wizard called out as one of the Raiders wheeled her horse to flee &039;You&039;ll never outrun it&039;

&039;No,&039; Hoofprint of the Wind agreed &039;We are with you after all, Desert Walker&039; He urged his mount down the bank at a quick, slippery trot and across the stone pave down behind hi in his wake

&039;How soon?&039; Rudy whispered, glancing up at the pale, e but the chill lour that had prickled his hair all day

&039;Very soon&039; Ingold switched his staff froroup of Raiders and horses, and Rudy grinned a little to hiold did a lot of things with his left hand

Rudy had heard Gil speak of the stairways of the Dark, but before now he had never understood the eeriness that surrounded theulfs of ti about that black and terrible stair that tensed his backbone with a sense of watching and ht had never touched that blackness, any more than it had the darkness of the remoter fastnesses of the Keep of Dare Those who could bear no light could coo at will in that darkness, as silent and undetectable as the air on which they drifted And the stairs looked so worn The whole emptiness of the half-buried, dark pavement was foot-smooth and slick, unreflective of the hard, white sky How many little bare feet had been drawn over that open space? he wondered Howcall to their deaths in darkness? And over what terrible span of years?

And yet Rudy noticed that the Raiders would rather go down a supposedly empty Nest of the Dark than stay topside on the

off chance that Ingold old&039;s staff flickered into phantohtness as he descended the stair ahead of them Like phosphorus, it illuminated the narroalls, the curve of the low roof, and the endless, twisting steps Even as he crossed the threshold on the wizard&039;s heels, Rudy could catch the smell from below, the sweetish reek of old decay that made the horses shy and thearound them like a vapour as they wound their way toward the centre of the earth

They turned a corner, and the wan daylight was lost behind thereen in the eyes of the horses, and the surrounding silence whispered with the fears of theoverhead, Rudy saw that it had been carved with long, chiselling strokes upward froular as to height and width, as they would be, to have been carved out by those who had no feet Cool, damp air wafted upward to touch his face and bore on it a death reek, the stench of ancient corruption He shuddered, taking what co smells ofbodies and the whispers and occasional soft nickerings that broke the deadly silence of underground Once or twice he heard the scritching of rodent claws on the walls nearby and caught a gli like furtive shadows into the fissures in the dark walls

Whatever lay below, it was dead, dead and rotten, the stink of it laid by the cold Yet it seemed that they descended for hours The stairs curved and doubled back, and the only light was the faint foxfire glow that fell on the shoulders of the old s ached, then burned, while his mind and senses strained to catch some sound, so - only the faint fetor of decay

Just as Rudy felt that his legs couldn&039;t stand anyold said, &039;Stop!&039; He halted so abruptly that Rudy al, Hoofprint of the Wind slipped forward fro his troops to join them Rudy tried to take another step to see what lay in the darkness beyond, but Ingold put his are to block hiestured with his staff out over the void

There were no steps beyond the one on which they stood -only darkness, heightless, widthless, and bottouide thely In that Stygian pit, Rudy could hear the slip and skitter ofsqueaks; he could s whiffs of old and distant putrefaction Then Ingold held his staff out over the darkness, and the glare of it slowly increased until it burned with the dianesiuloo of the world, and it did so slowly, touching the lines of floor and arch and pillar shyly, like a hesitant lover, unwillingly deliht

Rudy had meant to sound facetious, but awe conquered him, and his voice was barely a whisper &039;Holy hellfires, Bat eyebrow at him

&039;These hellfires, as you say, are holy indeed,&039; the wizard replied quietly &039;For you look upon what only I have seen and lived to speak of This is the domain of the Dark Ones beneath the earth&039;