David Zindell - The Lightstone

'Perhaps it's only an eclipse,' Master Juwain said to encourage me.

I looked at him and smiled as I shook my head. And then, as Maram let out a shriek of terror, I looked up at the sky again, and the moon was completely gone.

'Let's ride,' I said. 'Let's find a way out of here before we all lose our minds.'

And so yet again we set out in a direction that might have been north, south, east or west – or some entirely new direction that would take us nowhere forever. We rode hard for what seemed many hours. There was nothing to do but listen to the splashing that the horses made and breathe the chill air. Once, the stars returned to their familiar positions within their ancient constellations, and more than once, the full moon again burned a silvery circle through the black sky. We might have taken comfort from this bright disk, but then, as we were gazing up at it, a dark shape like that of a dragon or an impossibly huge bat flew straight across it. And then a moment later the moon vanished, and the mist closed around us like a wet, gray shroud.

'Val,' Maram said to me in a low voice, 'I'm afraid.'

'We all are,' I told him. 'But we have to keep going – there's nothing else to do.'

And then, seeing that my words had done little to cheer him, I nudged› Altaru closer to him and gripped his hand in mine. I said, 'It's all right -I won't let anything happen to you.'

As we rode on in silence over the socking mosses, I was very afraid that the pain and fever of my wounded side would soon set me to screaming. But even worse than this throbbing agony was the sensation of something squirming in my head, clawing my eyes from inside. I could still feel something or someone following us through the mist. And something else – It felt like a vast, black, bloated spider – was watching us and waiting for us even as it somehow called us toward the darkest of places at the bog's very center. The more I tried to evade this dreadful thing, the closer I seemed to be drawn to it – and Maram and Master Juwain with me. It was only a matter of time, I thought, until it seized me and tore me open to suck out my mind.

Before fear maddened me completely, I tried to use my mind to reason our way out of the bog, Hadn't we been traveling through it for at least twelve hours? Shouldn't we men have covered at least forty miles and not merely the four or five miles of the bog's true width? Were we moving in circles? Was the black, rippling mere to our right new to us or one that we had left behind many miles ago? And if we kept the mountains of the Shoshan Range always to our left – during those rare moments when the mist lifted and we could see them – shouldn't we have long since found our way into Anjo?

'Val, I'm so tired,' Maram said to me as our horses stepped through a patch of sodden grasses. He waved his hand in front of his face as if to dispel the mist nearly blinding us. ' Will this night never end?'

No, I suddenly thought, the neverness of night has no end.

'Where are we?' he asked. 'Why can't we find our way out of here?' Master Juwain, riding beside him, touched his arm to steady him. But he had no answer for him, and neither did I. I had no answers for myself, and no hope, either. My command of direction, on which I had always prided myself, seemed to have abandoned me utterly. I could neither see nor sense my way out of this forsaken place. Perhaps there was no way out even as Lord Issur had said. Soon, we would all slip off our horses and have to rest. We might awaken, once, twice, or even twenty more times to continue our journey into the endless night. But in the end, our food would run out and we would weaken beyond repair we would fall into the sleep from which there is no awakening, even as the poor knight had. And then we would die in this desolate bog -I was as certain of this as I was of the fever eating through my side into my mind. Perhaps someday another knight would find our bones and behold the fate that awaited him. At last, I slumped forward in my saddle and threw my good arm around Altaru's neck to keep from myself plunging down into the wet earth. And then I whispered in his ear, 'We're lost my friend, we're very lost. My apologies for bringing you here. Now go where you will, and bring yourself out, if you can.'

I closed my eyes then, and tried to hold on to his thickly muscled neck as the long column of it vibrated with a sudden nicker. He seemed to understand me, for he nickered again and surged forward with a new strength. Master Juwain's and Maram's sorrels, tied to him along with the pack horses, followed closely behind him. As I felt the rocking of Altaru's great body, my mind emptied and I drifted toward sleep. I was only dimly aware of him pausing before various meres and sniffing the air as he circled right or left and wound his way across the squishing mosses. My only thought was to keep hold of him and not let myself fall into the bog.

How long we traveled this way, I couldn't say. The heavy mist devoured both moon and stars. The darkness of the night seemed ever to deepen into a blackness as thick as ink. Although I knew that the fever must be working at me, my entire body felt as cold as death, and I couldn't stop shivering.

On and on we rode for many miles. I fell into a sleep in which I was strangely aware that 1 was sleeping. I dreamed that Altaru somehow found true north, and I felt the ground beginning to rise beneath us. And then this horse that I loved beyond all others let loose a tremendous whinny that shook me fully awake. The mist fell away from me. 1 opened my eyes to see both moon and stars and the jagged mountains of the Shoshan rising up to the west. Behind us – we all turned to look – the hazy bog steamed silver-gray in the soft light. But ahead us, a mile away on top of a steep hill, a castle stood limned against the glowing sky. Maram called out that we were saved, even as I let out a cry of joy. And then I finally let myself slip from Altaru's back, and I lay down against the hard, rocky, sweet, beautiful earth.

We were awakened from our sleep by the sound of trampling horses. With the sun dipping low toward the high mountains to the west, I guessed that we had slept all through the day and into the late afternoon. A mile behind us, the bog waited like a sea of dark green. In the clear daylight, it didn't seem nearly so threatening. Ahead us, however, up through the valley toward the castle on the hill, a small company of knights rode straight toward us across the rock-studded heather. There were five of them, and they seemed more worrisome. As I stood to greet them, I grasped the hilt of my sword because I didn't know their intentions.

'Who are these men?' Maram whispered to me as he stepped over to my side.

'Where in the world are we?'

The knights drew closer; I saw green falcons emblazoned on their shields and surcoats. I searched my memory for the lore that my father's heraldry master had taught me. Hadn't the Rezu clan, I wondered, taken the green falcon as its emblem?

'We must be in Rajak,' Master Juwain confirmed. Rajak, I recalled, was the westernmost duchy of Anjo. 'These must be Duke Rezu's men.'

The five knights rode straight up to us. As they drew nearer, I saw that only their leader wore the two diamonds of a full knight in his ring. He wore a suit of mail, even as I did, and his hand rested on the hilt of his sword. He had a sharp face and sharp eyes that flicked back and forth from our tired horses to our mud-spattered garments. He gazed for a long moment at my bandaged arm and even longer at the emblem that I wore.

'Who are you?' he called out in a rough but steady voice. 'From where have you come?'

'My name,' 1 said hoarsely, 'is Valashu Elahad.' Then I turned to present Master Juwain and Maram. 'We've come from Mesh.'