'Do you have such places in your home in the north?'
Ingold asked Hoofprint of the Wind as they turned the heads of their horses toward the dark gleam.
'Not in our own lands,' the chieftain of the Twisted Hills replied. 'The Lava Hills People to the south of our runs, they had such a place. The tuar, they call them, and others spoke of them, out in the Salt Plain to the east.'
'Tuar?' the wizard said curiously. 'Seeing?'
'At such places it is said that the shamans, the wise men of my own people, can stand and, having made proper respect to the ghosts of the Earth, can see far away. They say, too, among the Lava Hills People that once they hunted in this fashion, the wise man seeing and leading the people to the track of the antelope; but they hunt so no more.'
'Why not?'
Zyagarnalhotep shook his head. They do not say. Healing there was also, worked upon those spots.'
Ingold fell silent, deep in thought, and thus they came to the entrance of the home of the Dark.
It was the first such place Rudy had seen, an entrance such as all must have been before humankind had used the deep-founded stones to bear the weight of early temples and forts. A vast plaza, hundreds of feet to the side, lay before them, like a football field floored in black and shining glass. In its centre gaped a rectangle of shadow, like an open and screaming throat pointed at the sky. From it, worn stairs led down to the depths of the world. Rudy shivered, at once repelled and curiously attracted, a fear that was oddly like acrophobia coming over him. He felt an uneasy desire to cover that inky pit, to cover it and chain down the cover, and to mark it with the rune of Darb, the rune that would not let evil pass. But side by side with the repugnance was the fear that, if he got too near, he would descend those stairs and, against his conscious will, go freely to the Dark.
The riders drew rein where the snowy ground sloped downward to that glassy pavement. Ingold nudged his horse forward down the slope, and the hooves clicked loudly on the stone as he rode to the very brink of the pit.
There he dismounted and took his staff from where it had been tied across the horse's withers; he had fetched it when they'd brought the burro Che into the camp last night. From the bank of snowy ground where he sat his horse among the Raiders, Rudy watched him, feeling a kind of eerie uneasiness as Ingold stood for a few moments on the lip of the stair, his head turned, listening as Zyagarnalhotep had listened to the wind. Then he descended a few steps and listened again, his hands in their incongruous blue mittens folded around the wood of the staff, the white sky vast above his head.
Hoofprint of the Wind called out, 'What think you,
Desert Walker?'
Ingold looked up and pushed his hood back from his face. 'I hardly know what to think,' he said. He came back toward them, like a ghost himself in the blowing wasteland of cold, and his horse- followed him like a dog with its single rein trailing. 'I feel that they are gone. In fact, I do not believe there is anything living down there, good or evil. Will you come down with me, Hoof print of the Wind, to see this for yourself, or will you remain on guard up here while I go?'
The Raider looked uneasy, a feeling which Rudy heartily shared. He trusted Ingold implicitly and had never seen him err. If the wizard said there was nothing down there, he was probably right. On the other hand, Rudy knew that the Dark had magic of their own. There was just the outside chance that Ingold was wrong. And if Rudy was jumpy about it, somebody who knew the old man only by reputation could hardly be expected to follow him down to the very heart of the darkness, no matter how macho he was.
'If you are right, and there is nothing below,' the chieftain
said, 'better would it be that we remain to guard the road at your back.'
'Even so,' Ingold agreed without irony, since this was, after all, his expedition to begin with. 'Rudy?'
'Uh - ' Rudy said. 'Yeah. Sure.' He slid down from his horse's back, astonished at how sore he was. Nine hours of fast, steady riding was no joke for a novice. He wondered if he'd be crippled for life. He disengaged the spear shaft he'd been using for a walking stick from behind his saddle blanket and limped down the bank to join the wizard on the pavement below.
Ingold turned back toward the stairway. Then he froze, like a wolf startled by some sound, raising his head as if at some far-off scent of smoke. The daylight reflected, flat and white, off his eyes as he scanned the sky. 'It can't be,' he said softly to himself. Rudy looked about nervously. 'What can't be?' 'We're much too far south.' Ingold swung around, scanning the horizon, his brows drawn down with worry and puzzlement. At the same time one of the horses on the bank threw up its head with a snort and began to prance fretfully.
Too far south for what?
Ingold turned back to the Raiders. 'I'm not sure,' he said to Hoofprint of the Wind, 'and I may be mistaken - but I believe there's an ice storm coming.'
It was the first time that Rudy had seen the implacable Raiders show any emotion at all. Fear sparked into the chieftain's amber eyes. 'Can you be sure?' he asked and made a quick sign to the warriors behind him, a swift hand gesture that sent a ripple of whispers and motion through them like a stone dropped in still water. They, too, were afraid.
'No - . Yes. Yes, I am sure.' Ingold looked in one direction and then another, the lines of his face deepening with concern.
Not, Rudy suspected, so much because we're all going to get turned into popsicles in the next sixty seconds, but because he
doesn't understand why it should happen this far south, for Chrissake.
'Don't!' the wizard called out as one of the Raiders wheeled her horse to flee. 'You'll never outrun it.'
'No,' Hoofprint of the Wind agreed. 'We are with you after all, Desert Walker.' He urged his mount down the bank at a quick, slippery trot and across the stone pavement toward the stairway and the pit, the others streaming down behind him. Ingold strode after them, with Rudy limping in his wake.
'How soon?' Rudy whispered, glancing up at the pale, empty sky. He could feel nothing, sense nothing but the chill lour that had prickled his hair all day.
'Very soon.' Ingold switched his staff from his right hand to his left as he came to the group of Raiders and horses, and Rudy grinned a little to himself. Like the old Western gunfighters, Ingold did a lot of things with his left hand.
Rudy had heard Gil speak of the stairways of the Dark, but before now he had never understood the eeriness that surrounded them, the sense of alien and incomprehensible gulfs of time. Even deserted - if it was deserted - there was something about that black and terrible stair that tensed his backbone with a sense of watching and malicious cold. Light had never touched that blackness, any more than it had the darkness of the remoter fastnesses of the Keep of Dare. Those who could bear no light could come and go at will in that darkness, as silent and undetectable as the air on which they drifted. And the stairs looked so worn. The whole emptiness of the half-buried, dark pavement was foot-smooth and slick, unreflective of the hard, white sky. How many little bare feet had been drawn over that open space? he wondered. How many had followed that whispering call to their deaths in darkness? And over what terrible span of years?
And yet Rudy noticed that the Raiders would rather go down a supposedly empty Nest of the Dark than stay topside on the
off chance that Ingold might be wrong about the storm.
Ingold's staff flickered into phantom brightness as he descended the stair ahead of them. Like phosphorus, it illuminated the narrow walls, the curve of the low roof, and the endless, twisting steps. Even as he crossed the threshold on the wizard's heels, Rudy could catch the smell from below, the sweetish reek of old decay that made the horses shy and the men look askance at one another. That smell clung around them like a vapour as they wound their way toward the centre of the earth.