Andre Norton - Zarsthor's Bane

The girl broke and ran. With a rising of the walls, or the sinking of the path, the way was clearer. She did not have to fight so hard to get through. By straining for sight she could see the tracks in the mould. The others—or one of them—was still ahead. Now she wanted nothing more than to be in the company of her own kind.

She hated and feared the blur of shadows. While the stench of both the broken leaves and the muck stirred up underfoot was sickening. Brixia hurried on, aware now that the path under her feet was now steady and rising, as if aiming to cross over the ridge height. Twice she slipped as that climbing angle steepened. Here there were marks in plenty to show that the others had fallen or been forced to scramble ahead with increasing difficulty.

Slightly ahead, was a tangle of broken branches, crushed leaves, some twigs still quivering. Thrusting through at the same spot she came out in the open under a lowering sky. Yet there was enough light left to hearten her a little. Before her a ledge jutted into open space. On three sides that looked to be without any escape and for a dazed moment or so she wondered if the boy and Lord Marbon had somehow fallen off this exposed perch. Having very little head for heights, Brixia (there being none to witness her lapse from confidence) drew near the left hand side of the ledge on hands and knees, even then quailing before looking down.

What she saw was astounding. There was no mistaking here the hand of man—or else that of some intelligent being who had altered nature to serve its purpose. For below, hugging what was otherwise a steep cliff, descended a flight of stairs. Weather worn, covered with lichen, those steps angled steeply down to the floor of a narrow valley. While on the cliff which side-flanked these were hollows and ridges of carving—also weather worn and mottled by lichen.

Dusk deepened fast. In the limited light those lines and depressions seemed to leer or scowl, forming faces so alien that Brixia quickly turned her eyes away from the wall. Below she heard a rattle of falling stone and saw movement. There was a curious hazy cover for the ground below—quite a distance below as if the base of this narrow valley was far under her perch, much deeper than that on the side of the ridge from which she had come.

There the shadows lay very thick. But these were not yet dark enough to mask the two who stood by an outcrop of stone. Even as her gaze centered on them, the larger broke from the grasp of the smaller. Brushing aside his companion when the other tried to stop him, the taller kept on westward, striding with the measured step used by the practiced traveler.

Determined to catch up, Brixia arose, fighting the feeling of being about to pitch forward from heights, and began to descend the stairway. One hand went out to find holds in the carvings, for the wide open space to her right made her head swim. Deliberately she schooled herself to look only at what lay immediately before her.

By the time she reached the end of that way, for she had dared not hurry, the other two were again well ahead. This second valley being strangely bare of any vegetation, she could see them in spite of an odd wavering of outline.

Brixia rubbed her eyes, thinking that perhaps it was her own sight which caused that difficulty in seeing more distant objects. For whole moments the way was clear, then again, when she looked down at her own feet or at one of the outcrops of stone (and those were many) all was a blur.

At least the air here was clear and she could breathe without drawing into her lungs the stifling stench clinging to that upper path. Here, though, the footing was hard for her unshod feet, drifts of gravel and small stones tormented even her well toughened soles. At last Brixia was reduced to a slow pace, lest she render herself too foot sore to move. She regretted those sandals lying back in her pack—abandoned in the dale. Several times she was tempted to raise her voice in a shout to those ahead, begging them to wait for her. With the dark so close upon them surely sooner or later they too would be driven to halt.

The girl had seen nothing of the cat since she had entered that passage in the keep, and Brixia wondered now if Uta had indeed come down from the upper ridge at all. Somehow it was important that Uta be one with them. She found herself worrying lest Uta had gone off on her own.

The dusk thickened, and, with that deepening of the dark, the girl became more and more wary. Perhaps that strange, invisible, charterer of the covered way did not follow here, but the sense that she was not alone, that there was that which spied upon her, gripped tighter with each hobbling step which she forced herself to take.

To halt here was more than she could do. She wanted company—any company—to banish that feeling of being utterly at the mercy of some unknown. Now and again she paused for the space of a breath or two, listening—to discover that in this valley were none of the reassuring noises which filled nights in the open. No insect chirruped or buzzed, no bird called—the silence was complete, so that her own breathing sounded loud in her ears, an accidental scrape of her spear haft against the stone as sharp as the war horn of a keep company.

There was—Brixia tried to subdue her imagination. It was not true that she walked amid a throng of unseen things! Nothing moved save herself. Shaking with more than the chill of the night Brixia steadied her body against a stone which stood shoulder high beside her.

Her fingers moved over a pit, a ridge—She turned her head to look. A face—!

What sorcery made the crude carving stand out against the stone, visible through the dark, she could not guess. It was as if her touch had awakened inanimate stone into a spark of life.

A face—? No, there was nothing remotely human in the features of that mask. The eyes were huge, round, and each was centered with a small spark of flame which formed a pinpoint of greenish white light. Where nose and mouth should have appeared there was rather sketched, in a diabolically realistic form of art, a wide muzzle-mouth a little agape, enough to show the tips of sharply pointed fangs.

For the rest—Brixia made herself look, refusing to be cowed—once she had gotten over her first astonishment—it was really but lines on stone—there was nothing more—just that mouth and the eyes. Perhaps the ones who had wrought that expected the viewers’ imagination to build the rest in their minds alone. Shame at being shaken by such a trick thing, Brixia struck the stone with her spear and then hurried on, in spite of the pain of her feet. She refused to look over her shoulder as she went, though she was troubled by a feeling that there was something in sly pursuit.

There was no doubt in her mind, that she now was traversing a place of the Old Ones. And, Brixia thought, of a species who were not inclined to favor any human encroachment on their territory. This was not, as that place Kuniggod had taken her to, a refuge. Rather it posed an abiding threat to those of her kind.

The narrow cut of the valley, as much as she could see of it in the dark, widened out into a much larger area. Once more the girl hesitated. To wander on into the night with no guide was perhaps folly. If those she sought followed a trail, she had seen no sign of such since she had descended the cliff stairway. But at least here the foot punishing gravel had given away to patches of grass.

Moving from one of those to the next she could not keep a straight line, but did save her feet from further torment. While ahead—Would those other two be foolish enough to light a fire again? Here in the open that could only center on them the attention of any prowlers abroad in the night.

The Waste had always had an evil name, and there were rumors of all kinds of non-human life which were to be encountered here. Its sinister barrenness formed a western border to the Dales which supported, of her own kind, only the outlaws and a few strange men who were attracted by remnants of what they thought they had discovered concerning the Old Ones. It was to the Waste that the lords of the Dales had, in their extremity of the seasons just past, gone for help against the invaders. And from the Waste had come that help—the wereriders—whom all men knew were not men at all but a daunting combination of man and feral beast. That story had spread even to the few contacts Brixia had dared to make, landmen in hiding, as surly and suspicious as she herself had become but sometimes willing to exchange a handful of salt for a brace of leaper skins.