“What is wrong?” Polynices asked, noting the strange look that had come over the man’s face.
“The sky was clear when I entered the pass,” the ranger said, “but now it is overcast and it appears as if it will storm.”
Polynices looked up. He could see no stars and the moon had not yet risen. There was a flicker of lightning inside a cloud above them. Polynices could have sworn the sky was clear just a moment ago when the skiritai arrived. A gust of wind blew off the mountain causing the ache in his old bones to match the pain from his feet and hands. He slid off the wall, wincing despite his best efforts as his feet hit the hard ground.
“Back to work!”
As if to emphasize the command, a long peel of thunder echoed off the mountainside above the three hundred.
Leonidas pulled his cloak tight around his body, but the thin material did little to stop the freezing wind that found every niche in his armor and swirled underneath.
“Come on!” Cyra was ten feet ahead of him, gesturing. “Hurry!”
Leonidas dug the hard edge of his ox-hide sandals into the side of the horse. The animal was loath to move forward, fighting him as it had been for the past mile. They were on a narrow track in the mountains. To the left a rock face reared up almost vertically disappearing into the black clouds. To the right, the slope was almost as steep into a narrow valley.
Leonidas sensed that something wasn’t quite right about the land and as he tried to keep the horse moving he opened up his five senses to coalesce into the sixth sense he had been taught — the sense that was the unconscious mind picking up something from the senses that the conscious mind hadn’t yet acknowledged. After a few moments he realized what was wrong. There was no sound of water. Leonidas had been on many, many mountain paths that paralleled a ravine or valley and there was always the sound of water making its way downhill inside the low ground. He cocked his head to the right, thinking perhaps the sound of the wind was too much, but he realized there was no water in the low ground to his right.
The horse finally stopped dead and no amount of kicking or coaxing could make it go further. Leonidas leapt off, noting that Cyra’s horse had also refused to move.
“Do they know something we don’t?” Leonidas asked as he moved up next to the priestess. Both animals bolted back down the trail and were immediately out of sight.
“We’re near the Gate,” Cyra said.
“Gate to where?”
“Gate to the tunnel that will take us to the Gates of Fire,” Cyra began walking forward into the stiff wind, still moving up the path.
Leonidas felt the same sense of dread he had experienced at Delphi and on the Gulf when they met the Theran Oracle. He drew his xiphos and followed the priestess closely. The path was narrowing. From the worn stone beneath his feet he could tell it was an old path, but the untrammeled vegetation that grew among the cracks indicated it was rarely if ever used in the present.
The path appeared to end abruptly in a cliff face. Leonidas almost bumped into Cyra when she halted. The priestess turned to the right, and the King now saw that a narrow set of stairs were carved into the side of the mountain leading down. He stayed right behind Cyra as she descended. He counted as they went down and they reached the bottom after a hundred and twenty steps. They were in a streambed, but as Leonidas had noted, there was no water. Cyra turned to the left.
“This way,” she pointed.
“Where’s the water?” Leonidas asked.
Cyra shrugged. She began climbing through the stones and boulders, moving in what would have been upstream. The feeling of dread was growing stronger and Leonidas peered ahead into the darkness, searching.
Cyra abruptly halted. “There.”
At first Leonidas couldn’t discern what she was pointing at. Then he realized that there was a blacker circle in the darkness ahead. A blackness that seemed to absorb even the night air about twenty feet ahead of them.
“The Gate?” he asked, hoping that she would answer in the negative, but knowing better.
“Yes.”
Leonidas started to move toward it, but Cyra put a hand out and stopped him. “Not yet.”
Leonidas then realized something — he could hear water now. Splashing against rock, making its way downslope close by. But the trough underneath his feet was still dry. While he was still puzzling over this, the landscape was lit by a bolt of lightning. Leonidas could see that the black circle was about eight feet in diameter and at the lowest part of the streambed. He blinked because he could have sworn that behind the circle and to the left, where the notch in the side of mountain curved slightly, he had seen a waterfall of water coming down. A second bolt of lightning confirmed that, which confused Leonidas because the water had to be going somewhere.
“Soon,” Cyra had her hand on his shoulder and they edged closer to the circle.
“Where does this go?”
Her eyes were glazed over and her mind seemed elsewhere. “To the Gates eventually.”
“Eventually?”
A third bolt cut the sky.
Cyra nudged him and stepped forward. “Now.”
Leonidas had advanced toward enemy lines bristling with steel several dozen times in his life, but he was surprised to find his legs reluctant to move, as if they had picked up some degree of common sense from the horses. Still he forced his way forward behind Cyra. She reached out a hand and it disappeared into the black. She glanced once over her shoulder at him, nodded, and then stepped into the circle and was gone.
Leonidas took a deep breath and then followed. The blackness hit his skin with icy coldness, far chillier than the cold wind, which was suddenly gone. All was black and he felt pressure all around his body, then the next thing he knew, he was almost waist deep in water.
He blinked, looking about. There was light coming from above, but he couldn’t see the source. He was standing in the middle of a stream that also came out of the black circle just behind him. On either side was black land. The stream ran straight ahead toward a body of water so large that he could not see the other side.
“Come.” Cyra was to his right, standing on the black soil. Leonidas stepped through the water and then looked back. Seen from the side, the black circle had almost no thickness, less than a finger’s width. The water just came out of the one side, with nothing going on. Leonidas realized he was seeing the water that had been coming down the mountain on the other side of the gate, yet they had both come out facing the same way. He was confused, but had no time to ponder this bizarre situation.
“Hurry,” Cyra was tugging at his arm and speaking in a low voice. “This is a dangerous place.”
“Where are we?” Leonidas realized he was whispering also, a strong sense of dread tightening his guts.
“The Oracle called this place the space-between,” Cyra was heading along the shore of the dark sea.
“Where is this?”
“I don’t know,” Cyra said. “I think we are between our world and the world of the Shadow.”
“Where are the Gates of Fire?” Leonidas asked.
“We must pass through another gate like the one we just traversed to get there,” Cyra said.
Leonidas paused as he noted a pillar of black ahead and to the left. “What is that?”
“Another kind of gate,” Cyra said.
“The one we seek?”
“No.”
Leonidas grabbed Cyra and pushed her down into the black sand. “Valkyries,” he warned, as two figures in white floated across the black sand about a quarter mile in front of them, heading for the water.
CHAPTER 17
Dane was finding moving inside the Valkyrie suit most annoying. He moved his legs as if walking but instead of actual leg movement, the suit simply moved forward. To change direction, he had to twist at the waist, the upper body pointing in the correct direction, the lower following. It didn’t take much effort to move the suit and he realized that was necessary given the atrophied condition of the bodies they’d taken out of them. He had the Naga Staff while Earhart carried a backpack with Sin Fen’s skull tucked inside.