The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,43

Then he saw the slashes cut into the end of the stones, scoring them like claws. The makers of this place had had the same grim humor as the builders of the city. The traveler who would shelter for the night must walk in between the dragon’s paws.

Sword in hand, Ilbran stepped softly as he climbed the nine steps and entered the shelter. Movement? A person standing in the corner? He whirled to face it. No person, but a statue so real that she seemed ready to move and speak if he would once look away. The sculptor had carved her naked and serene and beautiful. Necklaces and bracelets of thornfruit flowers and strands of blaggorn were all she wore. Her eyes were inlaid dark and light with bits of stone—strange eyes that seemed to follow him as he moved.

Ilbran looked out to the forest again. The trees were tall, their branches were wide. A safer shelter, it might seem, than this place. But he was not so foolish in the ways of the forest. Besides, he had the warning of the other man who had reached this place—his pack of travel food lay in the corner—and had gone out from it and died, away from shelter.

He looked again at the statue, so clean and finely shaped. He looked at the rough walls, as crude as any cave of the hills. Two minds had been at work here.

It was the work of those long gone. He wondered, with a passionate and sorrowful curiosity, who they had been. The city where he had spent his life had been built also by alien hands, but it had never touched his imagination so. He had been too busy, too set in the knowledge of what he must do, to wonder about unnecessary things.

The stones of this shelter were a blue-black like the night sky, veined in creamy cobwebbing, star-trails. Though the houses in the city were built of many kinds and colors of stone, he had never seen ones like this.

But there were many things he had not seen in his short life. He took food from the dead man’s pack, muttering his apologies once again to the spirit of the dead. He was careful also to break off bits of the stale blaggorn cakes and sprinkle them in front of the statue. Half-shamefacedly, he muttered, “At least, they will serve to feed the mice.”

Night came slowly. The twilight filtered through the trees for a long time. Ilbran stepped outside the shelter and stood on the top step of the platform, looking up at the stars. He was no grizane, to read their meaning. His only guide was dead and turned to dust.

He shivered as the night air grew colder. Was there wind blowing in the distance, roaring through the trees, or was it the ocean, closer than he could have dreamed? No, the leaves were still; the sea was far away. But there were sounds moving in the forest, or inside his own head, that would drive a man to madness.

Hardly knowing what he did, he ran back into the shelter, his back set to the wall, holding the sword out before him as though it could save him from what hunted in the night.

The howling grew, fiercer than wild coursers or wolves of the high mountains. It became stronger, ecstatic, and he knew that they, whatever they were, had found his scent.

They were creatures formed of darkness, the ones who flowed from the shadows and ringed his refuge. As he stared straight ahead, he could see nothing, but his side vision caught glimpses of motion, creatures darker than the shadows. They did not sit quietly and bay their quarry, but wove a ring of motion like a school of fish boiling in a fisherman’s net. And their deadly joy sang itself to the treetops, to the stars.

Perhaps their weapon is fear alone, he thought, as their song went on, and they did not venture within two paces of the steps. Then the howling died away to silence, but a silence full of great terror. Their masters came.

They were tall, and robed in black, but their faces and hands shone with light. It was not the pure light of sun or starlight, torch or lamp or candle even, but the phosphorescence of rotten wood. A score of them gathered, stepping slowly from the forest. At last one came forward.

If it were not for that deathly glow of face and hands, he might