The point sank into soil, the shaft quivered a little. That was no illusion! Solid earth did block her retreat. She had been sucked into some kind of trap, the bait those tracks. Brixia put out her hand and retrieved her spear.
She must not panic. Though she was shaking a little, her hand so damp as it closed about the haft of her weapon that the wood turned a fraction in her grasp. She hated to turn her back on that mound which should not have been there. But she had to make a choice. To linger where she was would solve nothing at all. That courage, which she had learned as a matter of self preservation, argued that, now warned, she could do no better than go on and face what she must face—better sooner than later when fear had longer to gnaw at her resolution.
Once more she strode along the trail she had followed earlier. The boot marks were easy to read. Where had those three really gone? How long since she had been enticed from the real trail? It was useless to raise such questions now. She had no one to depend upon but herself.
But whoever had arranged that trap seemed in no hurry to announce its, or their, presence. She found that wearing, too. To be ever ready for an attack which did not come took the fine edge from her preparedness even as the edge could be blunted on a blade.
Around one mound and then another and then—
It was like stepping from a curtain darkened room into the full light of day. Earlier she had wished for desert, to be rid of the shadow throwing mounds. Now Brixia found her wish answered, but she liked the prospect far less than she believed she would.
Before her stretched open country, bare of even the tattered bushes and clumps of grass which had marked that lying on the edge of the Waste. Here was only yellow, red streaked, earth, worn by a network of channels which ran in so many opposing directions Brixia could not believe they had ever been cut by the water of some past flood.
Outcrops of stone, of a sullen red with thick veins of black, raised like protesting fists towards the sky in which hung a sun that gave a blazing heat to meet Brixia like a wave from the open door of a keep bread oven.
She gasped. To go into that, set her bare feet on that parched and furance-hot soil—such an act was impossible. Much as she distrusted the mound maze, she must return to that. Turn she did—
But where was that gap through which she had just come?
Brixia swayed, clung to the spear, set butt against the earth, as her support. She shook her head, shut her eyes, held them so closed for a long moment and then opened them once again.
What she saw must this time be truly illusion! Great weights of earth could not shift in the space of a few breaths to close the path down which she had come. Yet now, though she turned her head to look right and then left, there was nothing but a towering earthen wall, no break in its length.
Brixia flung herself at that rise which should have been a gap. She dug the spear point into the earth with one hand, with the other she grasped at a handful of the grass to pull herself up. If there was no longer any way through, then her answer was to climb up and over.
The edges of the grass were as sharp as the blade on which she had set a new edge—was it only a day ago? She gasped, and brought her fingers to her mouth, licking the blood which appeared in bright lines to drabble down her palm and wrist. And she jerked away lest her feet also have such cruel cuts.
Hunkering down where the dank earth of the mound’s foot met the bare earth, she tried to think sensibly. That something had happened which was not of human logic, there was no doubt. That it was a threat, that she must accept also. In a way totally alien to all she had ever known, Brixia had been herded, by drifts of the earth itself, to this place.
Bleakly she understood that there was no retreat. She might be able to walk along the foot of the mound wall either north or south, but there was a growing doubt that she would be allowed to so postpone whatever fate had harried her this far. This had taken on all the evil sensation of a dream out of the always to be feared DARK.
That she would remain where she was and tamely await disaster—no, she summoned her determination with that encouragement she had used many times before.
“I live,” she told the empty desert before her fiercely. “I have arms, legs, a body—I have a mind—I am me, Brixia! And I serve no will save my own!”
There came no answer to her defiance—unless the far off, harsh cry of what might have been some hunting bird provided that. She licked her dry lips. It seemed a very long time since she had drunk of the tree’s bounty. And there was no chance of water in that red and yellow land.
But into it she would go—by her own will and choice of time—not that of the intelligence which had set her to this trail. Now she pulled off her skin jacket and set to work with her knife to cut apart those strips she had so laboriously laced together. The resulting pile of skin bits she began to fashion into foot coverings, shredding the hides into lengths which could be wrapped about her feet ankle high, and secured there with the tightest knotted thongs she could improvise.
Having finished the only protection she could manage, the girl arose to her feet, and, shading her eyes against the sun’s glare with her hand, looked on across the riven land. The many sharp edged gullies formed such a network that to steer a straight course would be impossible. There were those outcrops of rock and the possibility of some shade from such. But a haze held the distance well curtained and she could not be sure what might rise, or fall, ahead.
Brixia shrugged. To wait would gain her nothing. She judged that it was well after nooning, she could hope that twilight might come with a measure of coolness. With the spear ready to use as a staff if she might have need of its support, Brixia started out into the desert.
There was enough difference in the outline of one outcrop from another that she could pick a guide ahead and so make sure she did not wander in circles. Here was one in a rounded pinnacle as if a single stumpy thumb pointed skyward. She chose that as her first objective.
Twice she had to detour because of a gully too broad for her to jump. It was like making a journey where one took three steps forward and two back. Though there were patches of bare earth here, and such were marked with tracks, none of the boot prints appeared.
The clearest of such tracks was a print with four toes, each as long as her own foot. It could be the sign of a bird—but one with such a foot—it must then stand as tall as she, even larger!
However where there were signs of life, then there must also be the means for maintaining that life. Brixia knew of no living creature which might exist without water—therefore this land could not be as dead as it looked. She stooped and chose a small red ball of a pebble and set it in her mouth, using the craft of a wanderer to serve her need.
Beside the thumb pillar she paused in the small patch of shade that provided to choose ahead another goal.
It was then that the silence of this burning waste was shattered by a scream from the air overhead. Brixia pushed back until her shoulders scraped against the sun heated rock of the outcrop. She looked up—
Across the sky wheeled a bird, not close enough yet for her to distinguish through the haze of the heat whether it was some oversize hawk such as she had often witnessed at the hunt among the hills, or a carrion eater whose domain this was.
The scream was answered. Another one of its kind planed into view. Together they circled the thumb rock and Brixia was certain that she was their quarry. As they dropped lower she gasped.
Even the gold eagle that ruled majestically in the heights of High Hallack would be as a grass warbler compared to these. If they alighted she was certain their heads with those threatening beaks agape as they now shrieked might be on a level with her shoulders.