When he looked to the sides, he saw massive piles of rock, many of them covered with the same whiteness that was currently numbing his feet and legs. They were countless, those monstrous mounds, and seemed to stretch into a distance that was so vast he couldn’t even begin to comprehend it. He could count well for an Aghar-all the way up to two-and as regarding distance, he knew two miles was a vast length of space. However, his best guess was that the neighboring pile of rock was at least two miles away, and there were many other such obelisks beyond that, by extension another two miles away.
The one he was standing on, he reckoned, was the biggest one of them all. His mind whirled. Where was he? And how could the place be so large that he couldn’t even make out the ceiling over his head?
Another bout of shivering wracked him, and despite his many questions, Gus was forced to accept one unpleasant truth: if he stayed there, he would die. But where should he go? In every direction, the ground sloped downward, so it didn’t seem to make much difference except that, when he started walking, he noticed the ground in front of him seemed to drop away steeper and steeper until, with frightening abruptness, it just seemed to vanish.
He stood at the lip of a precipice. Far below he could see the faint outlines of lakes, and those, at last, were features that looked familiar to him. In his experience, lakes were a promising source of food, so he decided to go down there. But he couldn’t take a straight path unless he wanted to fall all the way to his destination. So he started along the edge of the cliff, slipping and shivering in the cold, white slush, looking for some way down. He walked for a long two minutes until he saw a ridge descending from this auspicious height. That, at least, seemed to promise a possible route, so he made his way onto that ramp and, still slipping occasionally, started to climb down off the massive pile of rock.
He had not gone very far when some sixth sense prickled the hairs on his neck. Gulping, he turned around, looking back toward the summit he had just vacated. A shadow stretched black across the whiteness, hampering his view. He shrank down and tried to make himself invisible as he stared, eyes agog, at that shadow that had such an air of menace.
It was not merely a shadow, but some sort of creature: something terrible that was lurking there. He made out the shape of a being with large black wings and a gaunt, nearly skeletal body. It turned its face this way and that, and when that visage swiveled in the gully dwarf’s direction, Gus froze, caught by a pair of fiery, crimson eyes.
Immediately those eyes seemed to bore into him, and the mighty wings pulsed, giving flight to the ghastly shape. Shrieking, Gus turned and ran, quickly falling on his face as his feet got caught in the slushy white stuff. Clawing his way upright again, he cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that the flying beast had already covered half the distance to him and, as he feared, the gully dwarf was clearly its quarry.
Gus trudged and tromped and struggled through the clinging whiteness, which seemed to be much deeper on the steep-sided ridge than it had been near the top of the rock pile. He didn’t squander another look behind him, but he could feel the creature coming closer, and when that feeling became terrifyingly imminent, he darted to the side, plunging face-first into the icy material and burrowing into the chill wetness.
He felt a terrible pain in his shoulder as one talon dragged across his body, tearing through his ragged shirt. But his face-down plunge had saved him, at least for the moment, as the flying monster couldn’t quite get a grip on him and, thus, swept past, spreading those wings again as it came around to make a long, banking turn. Those red eyes sought, and found, the hapless gully dwarf, and the flying creature dived close again.
On his knees, Gus quaked and trembled. He was too exhausted to rise to his feet, to try to flee farther. There was something hypnotic in that evil gaze; a compulsion seemed to root him to the spot. Wide-eyed, blubbering in terror, he could feel the creature’s awful presence as it swept closer. When it was almost upon him, he threw himself facedown again onto the chilly whiteness, burrowing like a grub into the soft material.
Once again, his last-minute plunge caused the monster to miss its grab. Gus scrambled to his feet, feeling his doom descending. He tried to run in two directions at once, but that only caused him to stumble again. In its rage, the monster opened a beaklike maw and uttered a harsh, penetrating screech as it dived once more.
But when that sound struck the white-crested ridge, all of that whiteness-and the gully dwarf clawing his way into it-suddenly broke free and began to crumble. Gus was immediately swallowed in the churning, frosty mix that was not rock and not mud. There were infinite grains of it, like powder, flooding against his skin, and the sensation of falling was muted by the fact he was trapped within a great, thundering avalanche; he was falling as part of a big slide, not like a pebble bouncing down an otherwise solid slope.
Down became up, and up became down. He inhaled and coughed out bits of whiteness. Those bits he didn’t cough out became water in his mouth. He was thirsty, Gus realized as he tumbled through a succession of somersaults, and the water felt cold and refreshing. Still, it was hard to drink while falling. Come to think of it, it was hard to do much while falling-except fall.
He flailed with his hands and feet but couldn’t make contact with anything solid. Once, he bounced to the very top of the avalanche and saw that the whole mountainside seemed to be sliding toward the valley. The Aghar whirled crazily atop it for a moment, thinking, Whee! This is not so bad. He spied the black flyer in the sky, hunting for him. It was far away, for the moment.
Then the whiteness swallowed him again, and he could see nothing. The sense of movement rumbled and grew into an implacable force, gaining momentum, carrying the little Aghar along in its irresistible sweep. Once Gus smacked into something that felt like a real rock, not the soft, white, wet kind, and that blow stunned him. Still he kept falling.
Gradually, the momentum of the avalanche faded away. He was sliding a little; then he was still. He tried to move his arms and legs, but they were immobile, trapped by the white stuff packed tightly all around him. Gus’s head throbbed, but he couldn’t see the flying monster-he couldn’t see anything, truth be told-and that, at least, was a relief.
In fact, his recent adventures had drained him more than he had realized. It felt strangely safe there in his icy prison, and he was very, very tired.
It seemed only natural to simply go to sleep.
Gus could feel the talons reaching, scratching for him. It was that terrible sensation that woke him up, at which time he quickly realized he was still imprisoned in the icy pack of white stuff. He felt numb from the cold and utterly helpless. He heard terrible clawing, relentlessly scraping away at the surface above his face, the sounds of the talons coming closer, increasingly closer. He struggled, gasped, groaned, and kicked, but he might as well have been encased in stone for all the movement he could manage.
Still the noise came closer. He saw a burning brightness-he was lying on his back-and he presumed he was experiencing the fiery fury of the winged monster’s eyes. Even so, those eyes seemed impossibly brilliant, as if the creature’s eyes were a mighty bonfire, the kind of pyre that could light up the whole of the Urkhan Sea.
Then one talon penetrated all the way through the white slush, scraping painfully across Gus’s face, and the light swelled to a truly excruciating brightness. It was as though a huge fire had surged right in front of the Aghar’s eyes, and he was virtually blinded. In that, Gus actually found some comfort since he was utterly helpless to escape, at least his blindness would spare him the horror of watching the monster devour him. Again, those talons clawed across his face, and he shuddered at the thought that his flesh was being ripped away, perhaps his eyes torn out, his bulbous nose severed.