David Zindell - The Lightstone

Creatures of the dark came to devour us: we felt worms eating at our insides, bats biting us open and mosquitoes smothering us in thick black clouds and sucking out our blood. Gray shapes that looked like corpses torn from graves came to take our hands and pull us down into the ground. Even Master Juwain moaned in a tormented sleep, his meditations and allies having finally failed him. When morning came, all misty and gray, we spoke of our nightmares and discovered that they were very much the same.

'It's the Stonefaces, isn't it?' Maram said. 'They've found us again.'

'Yes,' I said, giving voice to what we all knew to be true. 'But have they found us in the flesh or only in our dreams?'

'You tell us, Val.'

I stood up from my bearskin and pulled my cloak around me. The woods in every direction seemed all the same. The oaks and elms were shagged with mosses, and a heavy mist lay over them – and over the dogwood and ferns and lesser vegetation as well. Everything smelled moist: of mushrooms and rotting wood. I had an unsettling sense that men were smelling me as from many miles away. I couldn't tell, however, how far they might be or whether they stalked the woods to the east or west north or south. I knew only that they were hunting me and that their shapes were as gray as stone.

'We can't be far from the Nar Road,' I said. 'If we ride hard for it, we should reach it by dusk.'

'You're guessing, my friend, aren't you?'

In truth, I was guessing, but I thought it to be a good one. I was almost certain that the road couldn't lie much more than a day's journey to the north, or possibly two.

'What if the Stonefaces are waiting for us on the road?' Maram asked.

'No – they left the road to follow us through the forest Probably they're as lost as you seem to think that we are.'

'Probably? Would you bet our lives on probably?'

'We can't wander these woods forever,' I said. 'Sooner or later, we'll have to return to the road.'

'We could return to the Forest, couldn't we?'

'Yes,' I said, 'if we could find it again. But likely the Stonefaces would find us first.'

Over the embers of the fire that had burned through the night, we held council as to what we should do. Atara said that all paths before us were perilous; since we couldn't see the safest, we should choose the one that led directly to Tria, which meant making straight for the Nar Road.

'In any case,' she said, 'none of us set out on this journey with the end of dying peacefully in our sleep. We should decide whether it's the Lightstone or safety that we seek.'

She pointed out that we must be nearing the civilized parts of Alonia; if we did reach the road, she said, likely we would find it patrolled by King Kiritan's men.

'We must have come as far west as Suma,' she said. 'The Stonefaces, whoever they are, would have to be very daring to ride openly against us there. It's said that King Kiritan hangs brigands and outlaws.'

Maram grumbled that, for a warrior of the Kurmak, she seemed to know a lot about Alonia. He doubted that King Kiritan kept his roads as safe as she said. But in the end, he agreed that we should strike for the road, and so he set to breaking camp with a resigned weariness.

We were all tired that morning as we rode through the woods. As well, we all had headaches, which grew worse with the constant pounding of the horses' hooves.

Twice, I changed our course, to the east and due west through some elderberry thickets, to see if that might blunt the attack against us. But both times, my sense of someone hunting us did not diminish, and neither did our suffering. It was as if the sky, heavily laden with clouds, was slowly pressing at us and crushing our skulls against the earth.

By noon, however, the clouds burned away, and the sun came out. We all hoped to take a little cheer from its unexpected radiance. But the blazing orb drove arrows of fire into the forest, and it grew stifling hot The sultry air choked us; gray vapors steamed up from the sodden earth. In the flatness of the land here, we could find no brook or stream, and so we had to content ourselves with the warm water in our canteens to slake our raging thirsts.

As we made our way north, the woods in many places broke upon abandoned fields on which grew highbush blackberry, sumac and other shrubs. Twice we found the remains of houses rotting among the meadow flowers. I took this as a sign that we were indeed approaching the civilized parts of Alonia that Atara had told of. We all hoped to find the Nar Road just a little farther on, after perhaps only a few more miles. And so we rode hard all that afternoon through forest and fields burning in the hot Soldru sun.

We came upon the road without warning just before dusk. As we were riding through a copse of mulberry, the trees suddenly gave out onto a broad band of stone. The road, as I could see, ran very straight here east and west through the flat fewest. From the emptiness of this country, I guessed that Suma must lie to our east which meant that we had bypassed this great city by quite a few miles. After some miles more – perhaps as few as eighty – we would find Tria down the road to the west.

'We're saved, then!' Maram cried out. He climbed down from his horse, and collapsed to his knees as he kissed the road's stones in relief. 'Shall we ride on until we find a village or town?' I dismounted Altaru and stood beside him along the curb of the road. The day was dying quickly, and for the first night in many nights, we had a clear view of the sky. Already Valura, the evening star, shone in the blue-black dome to the west. In the east, the moon was rising: a full moon, as we could all see from its almost perfect circle of silver. The last time 1 had stood beneath a moon so bright had been in the Black Bog. I couldn't look upon it now without recalling that time of terror when 1 had feared that I was losing my mind.

Even as I now feared that men were attacking my mind. With the coming of night, the pain in all our heads grew suddenly worse. It seemed that the Stonefaces, whatever they were, took their greatest strength and boldness from the dark.

'If we ride,' I said, 'It would be very bad if the Stonefaces were waiting on the road to ambush us.'

I looked at Master Juwain slumped on his horse and at Atara forcing a smile to her worn-out face. We were all exhausted, I thought, and growing weaker by the hour. I doubted whether we could ride half the night to the next village.

'Wouldn't it be worse if they ambushed us here?' Maram asked. 'No,' I said, pointing behind us. 'We passed a meadow less than half a mile back. We could make camp there and fortify it against attack.' 'All right,' Maram said wearily. 'I'm too tired to argue.' We mounted our horses again, and made our way back to the meadow. It was a broad, grassy expanse perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. Copses of mulberry and oak surrounded it. We hauled some deadfall from these woods to the center of the meadow where we built up around our camp a sort of circular fence. It took many trips back and forth to gather enough wood to construct such rudimentary fortifications. But when we were finished, we felt very glad to go inside it and lay out our bearskins.

It was full night by the time we finished our dinner. The moon had climbed above the meadow and silvered it with its cold light. Long, grayish grasses swayed in the gentle wind blowing in from the east. In the eerie sheen of the earth, the many rocks about us seemed as big as boulders. We had a clear line of sight fifty yards in any direction toward the rim of dark trees that surrounded us. Unless it grew very cloudy, no one could steal upon us unseen. And if anyone attacked us openly, we would kill them with arrows. Toward this end, Maram unpacked my arrows and bow and kept them close at hand. We checked our swords as well. Atara stood up against the breastwork of the fence as she practiced drawing her great, horn bow and aiming arrows over the top of it. She seemed satisfied that we had done all we could. After bidding us goodnight, she slipped down to the ground to sleep holding her bow as child might a blanket.