No. I suspect they are using it to dig. Now let me concentrate.
Down and down and down they went, until the guard-beast reached a room where corpses were being loaded into the huge corpse basket to be winched to the top by more of the neckless, mushroom-colored men. The dead were being unloaded from ore wagons pushed by more servitors, and the guard-beast followed the dirt track of the wagons down into darkness.
They were still descending, but this slope was more gradual so that the haulers could push their carts up it. The wagons were not just bearing bod¬ies, either: at least ten times as many were coming up from the depths full of dirt and chunks of raw stone, but these were being rolled away down an¬other branch of the tunnel..
Barrick could almost feel Vansen and Gyir trying to make sense of the arrangement, but he was already feeling queasy from the depth, the heat, and the frequent rumble of the concussive, hammering sounds farther down in the deeps. If they put me to work here, he thought, I wouldn't last long. Barrick Eddon had fought all his life against being called frail or sickly, but living with a crippled arm had made him hate lying to himself as much as he hated it when others did it to soothe him. I could not do what these crea¬tures are doing, working with hardly any water in this dreadful, dust-ridden place. I would die in a matter of hours.
The guard-beast trudged downward into an ever increasing throb of ac¬tivity. The inconstant thundering of what Gyir called Crooked's Fire was much stronger now, so loud that the staggering guard-beast almost fell over several times. Hundreds of prisoners pushed carts past him up the long, wide, sloped passage, but no matter how monstrous their burden, they al¬ways moved out of the guard-beast's way.
At last Barrick saw the end of the passage, a huge, low arch at least twice as wide across as the Basilisk Gate back home. When the guard stepped through it into the cavern beyond, a monstrous chamber which dwarfed even the cave that housed the corpse-pit, Barrick could feel hot air rush up at his host, tugging the matted fur, bringing tears to the creature's already blurry vision. A line of torches marked the broad track down through the swirling dust and marked off the cross-paths where other guards and pris¬oners labored with the weight of ore carts. To Barrick each step seemed to take a terrible effort-the powerful discharge of hot air he had felt at the
doorway continued to buffet the guard-beast at every.step, as though he walked down the throat of a panting dragon. It pressed at Barrick's thoughts like crushing hands and Barrick thought he might faint away at any mo¬ment, simply swoon into insensibility like the frailest girl-child.
Can't you feel it? he cried to the others, his thoughts screaming. Can't you? This is a bad place-bad! I can't hold on anymore!
Courage. Gyir's thought came with the weight of all his power and knowledge, so that for a moment Barrick remembered what it was to trust him completely.
I'll try. Oh, gods, don't you and Vansenfeel it?
Not as powerfully as you do, I think.
Barrick hated being weak, hated it worse than anything. All through his childhood nothing could more easily prompt him to act foolishly than the suggestion, however kindly meant, that his crippled arm or his young age might give him an excuse to avoid doing something. Now, though, he had to admit he could not hold out much longer. No amount of steadying words could obliterate the cramping pain from his stomach, the queasiness that did not grow any less wretched by having been nearly constant since they had reached this place.
Why do I feel this way? I'm not even really here! What is doing this to me? This was more than just pain and weariness-waves of fear rolled through him. He had spoken a truth to Gyir that he could feel in his bones, in his souclass="underline" this was a bad place, a wrong place.
We don't belong here. He might have said it so the others could hear. He didn't know and he didn't care. He wasn't even ashamed anymore.
The air grew hotter and the sounds grew louder. The guard-beast was clearly familiar with it all, but still seemed to feel almost as frightened as Barrick did himself. The rising stench was not that of spoiling bodies and unwashed slaves, although there was a hint of each-Barrick could clearly recognize them even through the alien thoughts of the guard. Instead something altogether stranger billowed over him, a scent he could not identify, something that had metal in it, and fire, and the tang of ocean air, and something even of flowers, if flowers ever grew in blood.
The edge of the pit was just before him now, glaring with the light of hundreds of torches, swimming in the haze of the burning, dust-laden air. If he could have hung back while the other two went forward, he would have-would have happily acknowledged himself a coward, a cripple, any¬thing to avoid seeing what was in that chasm before him. But he could not
leave them. I le no longer knew how. He could only cling to the idea of Gyir and the idea of Vansen, cling to the creature that carried them as if it were a runaway horse and wait for it all to end. The chaos in his head was constant now and seemed to have little to do with what was actually around him-mad sounds, unrecognizable voices, moving shadows, flashes of ideas that made no sense, all hissing in his skull like angry wasps.
The light was bright. Something sang triumphantly in his head now above all the other noise, sang without words, without a voice, but sang. He stumbled forward, or the thing that carried him stumbled forward, like a blind man into a cave full of shrieking bats. He stood at the edge and looked down.
The great hole in the stone had been dug almost straight downward. Far below, the bottom of the pit was alive with the beetling bodies of slaves like a carcass full of maggots, hundreds of them with sweating, naked bodies and rags around their heads and faces. In the center, its peak half a hundred feet below him, sunk into the very stone of the wall and only half-uncovered by digging, was a strange shape that Barrick could not at first understand, something upright and unbelievably huge. It gleamed strangely in its ex¬posed matrix of rock, a monstrous rectangle of black stone trimmed with dull gold and fishscale green beneath the shroud of dust and stone that clung to its exposed surface. It was astonishingly tall-almost as high as Wolfstooth Spire and far, far wider. Somebody had carved a rune deep into the black stone, a pine tree that covered most of the black rock face. An¬other carved shape, a crude bird with two huge eyes, had been superim¬posed over the tree. The far-distant shape looked immensely old, like something that had fallen down to the earth from the high stars. In the chaos of his thoughts, Barrick struggled to make sense of it, then abruptly saw it for what it was.
A gate-a gigantic stone portal scribed with the ancient signs of the pine tree and the owl. The symbols of Kernios, god of death and the black earth.
Dizziness at its sheer size overcame Barrick then. He let go of Gyir, let go of the guard-beast's dull, terrified thoughts, and fell away into emptiness, unable to look at the blasphemous thing a moment longer.
29
Bells
At last, after battling each other for a year without stopping, Perin Skylord
defeated Khors the ravisher and slew hint. He cut the Moonlord's head
from his body and held it up for all to see. At this Khors' allies fled or
surrendered. In the confusion, many of those evil ones called the Twilight
People hid themselves in forests and other dark places, but some fled to the
chill and deadly northern wilds and raised themselves there a black fortress
which they called Qul-na-Qar-home of the demons.
— from The Beginnings of Things The Book of the Trigon
H
ER DREAMS WERE BECOMING STRANGER every night, full of shadows and fire and the movements of barely seen pur-. suers, but all distant, as though she watched events through a thick fog or from behind a streaked and dirty window. She knew she should be frightened, and she was-but not for herself. They will catch him, was all she could think, although she did not know who he was, or who they were, for that matter. The boy she had dreamed about, the pale one with red hair in sweaty ringlets-was he the quarry of the shadowy creatures? But why should she dream repeatedly of a face she did not recognize?