They shifted again, when the glittering sun was a few degrees past meridian. There were no markers to define this new, cliff-walled path, but a certain evenness and regularity implied that it had, at one time, been meant for traffic.
Duffy was near panic. Where are these things taking me? he almost whimpered aloud. We’re still moving roughly east, thank God, but we’re now several miles north of where I should be. Can I possibly ditch these beasts? And having done that, could I retrace the way back to the original path?
Their steep road changed direction several more times, and seemed with every league gained to become straighter and more consistent in width and surface. It was late in the afternoon, and Duffy was trying to work up the nerve to nudge his horse out of the procession, when, simultaneously, all of the hitherto-silent creatures joined voices in what might have been called song. It was a number of sustained single notes, like undiminishing reverberations of a dozen gigantic gongs, and the chord they combined in, echoing up and down the rock-walled pass and ringing away into the empty sky, actually filled the Irishman’s eyes with tears, so great was the sense it conveyed of inhuman grandeur and loneliness. And as the song swelled, and rose by tremendous steps up some alien scale, the ascending pass levelled out onto an expansive plateau of snow-dusted stone.
Despite his profound surprise, Duffy simply closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again to stare. Tremendously old, weather-rounded pillars of uneven height stretched away across the top of the mountain, in two columns separated by nearly half a mile of crumbled pavement. Even the shortest of the pillars presented its eroded top to the sky a dozen feet over Duffy’s head, and every one of them was wide enough to have housed a small temple.
The two guides ahead of him stepped aside, and Duffy’s horse moved forward unprompted to take the lead. At a stately pace Duffy and his weird retinue proceeded down the center of the vast lane defined by the two ranks of pillars. The red sun hung directly behind, and the Irishman realized that if one were standing at the other end of the plateau, staring this way, the sun would be seen to sink precisely at the western end of the gargantuan, unroofed hall.
By God, said Duffy to himself, I wonder what this place looked like when it did have a roof, however many thousand years ago? Picture hundreds of torches carried by the congregation assembled on the exquisitely worked mosaic pavement; the images painted on the high, arched ceiling; and up front, the marble altar, taller than a man but dwarfed by the towering statue that stood behind it, the statue of a woman looking out over the heads of the faithful, directly into the eye of the setting sun...
Duffy breathed deeply several times, fearing that the rarefied mountain air might be inducing delirium. Take it easy, lad, he pleaded with himself—you were on the verge of losing the distinction between imagining and remembering.
The walk across the plateau face took nearly an hour, and when the Irishman reached the other side his yards-long shadow had preceded him by several minutes. A wide square mark lay before him, and looking closely he saw that it was a gap in the crumbled paving, as if someone had carefully ripped up a square section of it... or, it occurred to him, as if something had stood there before the floor was put down, but had since been removed. Nervously he glanced left and right, and his heart sank to see two weathered columns of stone that, despite the blurring imparted by the storms of thousands of Alpine winters, were clearly the feet and ankles of a vanished colossus.
Duffy found that he was trembling, and reached around into a saddlebag to fish out the brandy. He unstoppered the bottle, but before he could raise it to his lips the horse carried him across the dozen yards that separated the two stone feet, and his chill abruptly left him. Since it was in his hand, he took a swig of the liquor—warm from having lain next to the horse’s flank—but now it was a sip to help savor the beauty of the place, and not a gulp of oblivion to drive it out of his mind.
An old stairway, wind-buffed to a sort of bumpy ramp, led away down the mountain side from the end of the plateau, and Duffy looked at the high peaks still lit by the sun, seeming to see in their outlines the shapes of primeval walls and battlements. He was in the shadow now, and the Alpine cold was gathering intensity along with the darkness, so he nudged the horse into the shelter of a leeward alcove, dismounted, and set about bedding down for the night. At last he lay wrapped in his cloak, wedged between the blanketed body of the horse and the wall of rock, watching the sky darken behind the stony silhouettes of his guides until all was a uniform black.
Chapter Four
FIVE DAYS LATER Johannes Freiburg sat in the taproom of the St. Mungo Inn and, putting down his mug of ale, nodded to the wide-eyed old man sitting across the table from him. “That’s what I said. Escorted by every demon in the Alps. It was just at sunset, and I was crossing the Drava bridge with my goats, when I heard all this singing—hundreds of voices, all glass-rim high, whirling like birds around this one weird tune—and I figured for a second it was God and all the saints, come for me at last. So I turned around, back toward the moutnain, and here comes this tall, gray-haired man on a limping horse, riding down the path with the red sunlight on him like his own personal lantern; and behind him, perched on every ridge and crag, there were ranks and ranks of demons with bird heads, and wiverns, and every damned kind of monster you ever heard of, all singing like a church choir.”
The old man crossed himself and gulped. “More ale here,” he quavered to the innkeeper. “So who was he?” he asked his companion. “Beezlebub?”
“I don’t know. I took off pretty quick—didn’t want to let him get close enough to bewitch me—but he looked... Oh my God, that’s him just walked in the door.”
Duffy didn’t even notice the old man who clapped his hands over his face and, squeaking shrilly, bolted out of the room as he entered it. The Irishman crossed to the bar and calmly asked for a cup of beer. His face was haggard and there were new wrinkles around his eyes. When his beer had been drawn he took it to a back table and sat down to drink it slowly, unaware of Freiburg’s intense, awed stare.
Well, thought Duffy, I can’t pretend that was delirium tremens—not lasting six days like that. He sighed and shook his head. I really was escorted through the Predil Pass by a crew of fantastic beasts only hinted at even in mythology. They guided me, led me around areas I later saw to be unstable snow, kept me on whatever track that was. They always maintained a respectful distance, too, and bowed when I approached them! It was as if... as if I were a revered and long-absent king passing through their district.
He remembered the odd fear he’d felt a week ago in that mad tavern in Trieste—a fear of recognizing or remembering something. That’s another thing to worry about, he thought; maybe the goat-footed man was real, not a hallucination at all. Hell, he was an everyday sight compared to the company I’ve kept during these past six days.
The tavern door swung open and a stout, bearded man clumped in, wearing flared-top boots that came up to his thighs. He glanced angrily around the room. “Damn it, Freiburg,” he growled, “have you seen Ludvig? He said he’d be drinking in here.”