The sun sidled west and down the shadows stretched across the desert. Dusk came quickly, and was quickly night. The Highway climbed to cross a low rise. From beyond it, a little to the right, came a steady orange glow. This was the place to which the drum was calling them. Under a brilliant moon they left the Highway and started toward it. For a while the rough ground drove them apart, but then it became a strange upward slope, unnatural in its perfect smoothness. The glow came from just beyond it. This, she knew, was the end. She would never walk side by side with Ribek again.
Her voice refused to work. She moved closer and put her hand into his. He twined his fingers into hers and with his free hand stroked her arm, downward from the elbow, in a gesture of pure, natural affection. His hand reached the amulet.
He staggered and almost broke step, then stared at the amulet. She looked too. The single bead was glimmering now, as if with reflected firelight. She wouldn’t have been able to see the faint glow in the full glare of day. And once before, on the hill above Larg—something almost lost to her memory in the immense wash of magic that had then been flowing around her—it too had glinted as if with reflected firelight. But the fire had been embers. And it had been in the wrong place.
Azarod. Only for a moment had she felt the full force of his demonic magic, forgotten till now amid the storm of other happenings that night. That too, she now remembered, had been utterly different from anything else that she had met. But not different from this. And it hadn’t been Jex shielding her from it as soon as she had picked him out of the cactus. It had been the ruined amulet, just as it was doing now.
Ribek had already let go of her wrist and was marching on as if nothing had happened. As they reached the ridge she grabbed his hand and forced it against the bead.
“Wake up!” she said. “It’s a demon doing this to us! Don’t let go of my wrist! We’ve got to get to Saranja! Zald!”
His stride faltered.
“Demon,” he muttered. “Zald. Saranja. Only hope.”
“Come on! No, keep hold of my wrist. Tight. That’s right.”
She lengthened her stride and dragged him forward. Now in front of them lay an immense conical pit, its lower half filled with a dense, murky, fiery cloud.
“You go other side,” she gasped. “Get Zald. I’ll get her hand.”
They reached Saranja and fell in step on either side of her, with their arms stretched behind her back so that Ribek could still grasp the amulet. Maja could feel her inner rage blazing helpless in the grip of her compulsion. When she grasped her finger the whole arm was as limp as soaked cloth. She lifted it up and waited for Ribek to ease Zald from under Saranja’s blouse and lay it against her chest.
“Other way up,” she said, desperately patient with his dazed clumsiness as they started up the slope. “Turn it over. That’s right.”
No need to be told which stone was the demon-binder. One was already bright with the same orange glow that half filled the pit. It pulsed to the steady drumbeats. Awkwardly, stumbling to keep pace with the others’ downward march, Maja gripped Saranja’s forefinger. Using her thumb to keep the finger stiff, she circled it against the glowing jewel.
Life flowed into the arm, into the whole body. Saranja halted in her tracks. The drumbeat faltered, failed and was replaced by an agonizing howl—real, ear-shattering sound in the ordinary world of the senses. Ribek had halted too, and Benayu, and they were staring dazedly around. The glow was fading, the mist thinning. There was something vaguely tree-shaped at the center of it.
Saranja drew herself up, squaring her shoulders. She was glowing all over, as if her clothes and skin had become translucent to the anger-fires within. She pinched the fingers of her right hand against the surface of the jewel and drew forth a line of fire, which she began to coil, loop after loop, round the palm of her left hand.
The thing at the center of the hollow screamed again. Something came hurtling out of the fading mist toward her. With a cat-like sideways leap Ribek caught it two-handed, and dropped it with a yell of disgust. It was a human arm, torn savagely from the body.
“Wait here,” commanded Saranja. “Maja can hold the end of the cord. You two look after her. I’ll be all right—it can’t touch me.”
Maja grasped the cord. It seemed to have neither weight nor heat, but the power of Zald throbbed through her, like a blaze that would have been glorious if she’d not been too close to it, until she felt Jex’s shield renew itself and close round her.
“Demon magic. Poison to me in this universe. This thing is one of my own kind, poisoned long ago.”
There was horror in the voice of stone.
Saranja was already marching away across the slope, paying out the cord as she went. It didn’t then fall to the ground, but floated waist high behind her in a fiery line.
The mist thinned further, and Maja could now see what the thing at its center was—a living creature, as tall as a fair-sized tree and standing on a single dark trunk. But it wasn’t a tree trunk. Its whole surface squirmed continually in response to the squirming, chewing motion of the screaming mouth, a kind of vertical gash near the top. Blood dribbled from its lower end. Above that, instead of branches, came dozens of writhing tentacles with crab-like claws at the end, and above them a crown of twenty or more shorter flexible stalks, each bearing a single huge red eye. Two of the tentacles ended not in claws but in hoof-like growths that flailed continually against the trunk, but now produced only the faintest magical pulse instead of the terrible drumbeat that had so mastered and overwhelmed them.
A huddle of spellbound travelers was crowded against the base of the creature, some of them scrambling over each other as they struggled to get nearer, while others, loosened from the weakening enchantment, were beginning to break away and, still in the grip of the nightmare, stagger sobbing up the slope. For a last, awful moment, before everything changed, Maja caught a glimpse of what they were running from, as several of the tentacles closed around a man the monster had snatched from the pile, tore him, still living, limb from limb, and started to cram the pieces into its mouth. It continued to scream as it chewed.
Only when the mist had almost cleared did it seem to wake fully to its danger. Its glaring red eyes craned toward Saranja like weed in a running stream. Several arms snatched victims from the pile, swung back and hurled them toward her. Any one of them, if it had reached her, would have knocked her flat, but instead some force seemed to slow them in their sprawling flight and swing them deftly aside and let them tumble gently onto the ground. One by one they picked themselves groggily up, stared around until they saw the monster, gave a yell of horror, and rushed away. If they had friends or loved ones still down in the pit they didn’t stay to look. By the time Saranja completed her circuit almost all of them were gone.
She halted, took Maja’s end of the cord, knotted it round the length she was holding to form a noose and hauled it in hand over hand until it tightened around the creature’s stem. The clawed tentacles plucked violently at it, but it held firm.
She drew herself up, threw back her head and gave a shout, in a voice Maja had never before heard from her.
“Haddu! Ah! Haddu-haddu!”
She turned, and with long, loping strides, dancer’s strides, she circled the pit again, drawing the flaming cord tight as she went. The creature was too stupid to recognize the new threat. While its tentacles heaved and picked at the first loop the second loop enclosed them and bound them tight.
Twelve times she circled the pit, winding the cord steadily up the trunk. The monster continued to howl until the fiery spiral reached its mouth and bound it shut. By the twelfth circuit it was a writhing column of flame from the bole to the top, with only a cockade of eye-stalks waving frantically above.