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Lifting her e of the star caught in it She had already forgotten hi chant of her spell So quickly, she pulled away froh a chasm had ruptured between theic? She looped her weaving around the stars known as the Holy Wo toward the west, and wove a gate to western lands He had never stood so close before He could actually hear the thruh the soles of his feet, deep in his bones The gate arced into being just as the hounds yelped with fear and skittered backward Alain raised his staff as they bounded into view Night fell

"Go!" cried Adica, caught in thethe stone cliffs around theh the threshold

"Go!" cried Adica when Alain hesitated "I will follow you"

"I won’t leave you!" he cried The hounds raced through the gateway, vanishing through the archway, abandoning them--or scared off

What on Earth was dreadful enough to rinding weight scraped along rock behind hi his body between the crevasse and Adica, but all he could see was shadow A heavy footfall shuddered the ground as one of the lion women padded past him, eerily silent

"Alain!"

A hiss answered Adica’s call A serpentine creature e sideways in the manner of a snake Except it wasn’t a snake

It had creamy-pale skin and a torso like that of a woirl newly come to womanhood, fey and curiously aloof Her hair writhed around her head as though in a whirlpool of air, or as if her hair itself were alive, a coil of hissing serpents

"Alain!" The gate gli The sphinx leaped forward to attack, and Alain heard Adica’s fading cry He ju sandstor in sand, he flailed wildly He could not breathe

Hands grabbed hi Bowed down by the force of the sandstored up a corner of his cloak to shield his face Sand dribbled down his chin Dry particles coated his mouth, and every time he sed sand scraped the ht his throat was on fire

They sturound for an eternity as sand battered the his exposed skin Certainly he could see absolutely nothing All at once he felt a ed him sideways, and he fell forward down a smooth slope and cracked his knees on stone Far away up the tunnel, wind screahed and finally vomited a little, so choked with sand that he shook helplessly His eyes stung with sand, and sand clogged his ears His hair shed gritty particles with each shudder

Where was Adica? Had she escaped the storled to his feet just as a ain in the tongue of the White Deer people, with an accent even stranger than that of Laoina but a rather better grasp of the niceties of the language

"Rise, stranger Walk forward, if it pleases you A place we have for you to bathe yourself"

Alain squinted through sand-scoured eyes A swarthy man with a proud face and an aquiline nose exa up his esture, he indicated a tunnel lit by oil burning in a ceralanced back the way he had coures hunkered down at the entrance, armed with spears They stared out into the stor in the air What they feared beyond the storm itself he did not want to consider, not after he’d seen the face of that snake woe things, like visions drawn out of the distant past The forest around Lavas Castle boasted a herd of aurochs and the occasional chance-one, and there were alolves, but the great predators that plagued huons of the north, the griffins that flew in the grasslands, did not wander the northern forests and in truth were scarcely ever seen and co more than stories made up to scare children

Maybe the three ainst their enemies, the Cursed Ones It just seeh such a storm

"Where is the Hallowed One?"

"She came before you, before the storm hit Come with me"