David Zindell - The Lightstone

'Val,' Maram called out from behind me, 'I feel sick – it's like I'm falling.'

I, too, felt a strange, sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. It was something like the time Asaru and I had jumped off the cliffs above Lake Silash into the dark, freezing waters. It seemed mat the bog was pulling at us, pulling us down into the inconstant earth, even though at no point did its seeping water rise much above the horses' fetlocks.

'It will be all right,' I said as the mist slid along the ground and wrapped its gray-black tendrils around us. 'If we keep moving, it will be all right.'

And then, even as the mist opened slightly and I looked up at the sky, I knew that it would not be all right. For something about this accursed opening in the earth was distorting the sight of the very stars. The brightest of them – Solaru, Aras and Varshara – seemed strangely dulled and slightly out of place. I blinked my eyes and shook my head in disbelief. And the feeling of falling down into an endless dark hole grew only stronger.

'Maram,' I said. 'Master Juwain – there's something wrong here!'

I turned to tell them that we should stay close together. But when I peered through the swirling mist, I couldn't see either of them. And that was very strange because I had thought they were no more than ten yards behind me.

'Maram!' I called out. 'Master Juwain – where are you?'

I stopped Altaru and listened as carefully as I could. But the bog was quiet and deathly still. Not even a cricket chirped.

'Maram! Master Juwain!'

The shock of being suddenly alone was like a hammer striking me beneath my ribs.

For many moments, I had trouble breathing the dank, stifling air. Had both Maram and Master Juwain, I wondered, plunged into a quicksand that had instantly sucked them down without a sound? Had they simply vanished from the earth?

I felt the sweat beading along my skin beneath my layers of armor and clothing. My whole body felt icy cold even as I shivered uncontrollably. For a moment, I covered my forehead and rubbed my fevered eyes. Was I mad, I wondered? Was I ill to my death and forever lost in this choking mist?

'Altaru,' I whispered as I stroked the coarse, long hair of his mane, 'where are they?

Can you smell them?'

Altaru nickered nervously, then turned his head right and left. He pawed the sodden ground and waited for me to tell him what to do.

'Maram! Master Juwain!' I shouted. 'Why can't you hear me?'

There came a booming sound then as if the whole earth was shaking. It took me a while to realize that it was only the beating of my heart and not some gigantic drum.

And then Maram called to me – but not from behind me as I had expected. A moment later, the mist parted again, and I could see him and Master Juwain riding their horses barely twenty yards ahead of me.

'Why did you leave me?' I called out as I rode up to them.

'Leave you?' Maram said. He leaned over on his horse and grasped my good arm with his as if to reassure himself that I was really there. 'It was you who left us.'

'Don't play games, Maram,' I said. 'How did you get ahead of me?'

'How did you get behind us?'

Because I had no strength to argue, I just sat astride Altaru looking at him in relief. I had never thought that the sight of his thick, brown beard and weepy eyes could please me so greatly.

Then Master Juwain came over to us and said, 'There is something wrong with this place. I've never heard of anything like it. Why don t we tie the horses together and stay closer to each other now?'

Both Maram and I agreed that this was an excellent idea. With some rope that we found in one of the horses' packs, we tied the sorrels close behind Altaru, and the pack horses behind them.

'Let's go,' I said, not wanting to spend another minute there. 'We must have come at least a couple of miles. It can't be much more than that to drier ground.'

Again, with me in the lead, we moved off toward what I thought was due north. In places, the mist was so thick that we couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction.

The ground beneath us now was mostly of large, spongy mosses that made sucking sounds as the horses trampled over them. The air was cold and wet and smelled of dark scents that were strange to me. There were no animals to be seen or to be heard either. Even so, as we made our way across the drowned sedges and grasses and muck, I felt something following us. Although I thought that it couldn't be an animal – and certainly nothing like a wolf or a bear -It had an uneasy sensation that it could smell me from miles away even through the thickest of mists. And then I closed my eyes for a moment, and I was certain of nothing at all. For in my mind, I could see gray shapes on horseback riding hard in our pursuit. I was afraid that Lord Issur had changed his mind after all, and was coming to murder us.

I pressed Altaru more urgently then; the other horses, tied to my saddle with short lengths of rope, quickened their paces. We rode in near-silence for what seemed a long time. I couldn't guess how many miles we covered, for both time and distance in this terrible bog seemed to be different from that of the mountains and valleys in which I had spent my whole life. With every bit of sodden ground that we passed over, the sense that something or someone was following us grew stronger. I couldn't understand why we hadn't found the bog's northern edge and the safety of Anjo. And then, even as the mist thinned a little, Maram let out a cry of terror because he had found something else.

'Look!' he said as he pointed at the ground ahead of us. 'Oh, my -oh, my Lord!'

Now the moonlight seemed to wax stronger for a moment as it fell upon a form half-sunken into the mosses and muck. It was a man, I saw, or rather the remains of one. His bones, gleaming a dull white, were spread out along the ground. His eyeless skull seemed to stare straight at us, and his finger joints were gapped around the hilt of a great, rusted sword. Almost the whole of his skeleton was encased in a suit of slowly rotting, diamond-studded armor. Its hundreds of stones, although smeared with mud, still had some fire to them. They caught my eye with their sparkle even as Maram and Master Juwain drew up beside me.

'Look!' Maram said again. He pointed to the nearby skeleton of a horse lying down among the mosses. 'How long do you think this knight has been here?'

I looked at the style of the armor, particularly at the aventail that hung down from the back of the knight's helmet, and I said, 'Perhaps a hundred years – perhaps more.'

'Why do you think he came here?'

'That's hard to say.'

'What do you think killed him, then?'

I studied the knight's armor, looking for any sign that it had been pierced or crushed.

I shrugged my shoulders, then shook my head.

'Do you think he got lost?' Maram asked, 'Do you think he ran out of food and starved to death?'

There was a note of near-panic in his voice, and Master Juwain took hold of his arm and gently shook him. He said, 'There are some things it's better not to ask and better not to know. Now let's leave this place before we unnerve each other completely.'

Although Maram quickly agreed to that, he was already so unnerved that he didn't even suggest looting the knight of his armor, as I feared he might. We rode hard then for an hour or so. At those rare moments when I could see the sky, I tried to steer by the stars. But they kept shifting about in strange new patterns that didn't make sense to me. Master Juwain suggested trying to fix our position by the bright disk of the moon, and this I tried to do. But then, some miles from the spot where we had left the knight, I looked up to see half the moon missing as if some great beast had taken a bite out of it. I shook my head in disbelief, and sat there on top of Altaru blinking my eyes.