The Walls of Air Page 0,72

on its treelike hind legs, and seemed to hover, weightless, over the pit in which Rudy sat, trapped and immobile with terror. Then, like a mountain avalanche, it fell.
Chapter 9
At firs! there was only utter stillness and the low, incessant moaning of the wind. Rudy was aware of diffuse dappled light, the smell of cut mesquite and blood, and the damp cold of earth beneath his bruised cheek. He sighed and choked his breath short at the pain in his cracked rib. He tried to move and couldn't. To hell with it, then, he decided, and lay still. His head ached, but without the hallucinatory confusion of last night's chaotic dreams. Horses, noise, and the slow, graceful flight of a detached arrow against a twilight sky merged together in his mind, but his last clear memory was of that monstrous mountain of writhing, screaming flesh plunging down into the pit on top of him, blotting out the last of the light. He took two very slow, very careful breaths and did a mental stocktaking of his body, isolating it limb by limb, as Ingold had shown him how.

First, he was alive, a circumstance that rather surprised him. His head ached, and he had a massive lump on one side. His left leg felt weak and painful, but no worse than it had yesterday, and he thought, though he couldn't be sure because he could not move his hands to check, that there were a few more ribs cracked. And that brought up the last point - he couldn't move his hands.

They were tied behind him.

For a few moments, he wondered if the White Raiders had merely tied him up and left him for the scavenger rats. But a drift of smoke reached his nostrils from the other side of the cut brush that walled him in, and he heard the muted nicker of horses. He lay face down in some kind of brush shelter; that much he could gather, but his face was turned toward the wall, and all he could see was the tangle of grey-leafed twigs and the chain of ants that crawled inoffensively along them. He wondered if he was alone, but didn't particularly want to give

himself away by looking.

He listened instead, letting his mind grow quiet and his breathing still. He found that this emptying of the thoughts was easier after the days he had spent in the loneliness of the desert. All things receded except his sense of hearing. Slowly the sounds came to his listening ears -the soft scritch of dry grasses in the wind, the clicking of dead leaves, the infinitesimal whisper of feet passing close to his shelter, and the silken, crinkling shear of a skinning knife separating hide from flesh, accompanied by the sudden strong renewal of the blood-smell. Skinning the mammoth? There was a faint stirring of a garment nearby, and the thin creaking of leather as the guard at the door of his shelter shifted his weight. So there was a guard.

Rudy extended his senses, sending them like runners along the ground, blindly seeking by touch the nature and bounds of the camp. Some sounds made no sense to him soft little shaving noises and then the muffled tap of rock on wood. He became aware of more feet and the smoke and wood smells of a fire being stirred. A gust of wind chilled through the camp, bearing a distant scent of snow, and he heard a kind of glittery clinking sound that he thought was familiar, like a wind chime made of bones.

For some reason, the sound frightened him.

Soft feet swished in the sand, with a smell of feral grime and sweetgrass. He heard another, almost soundless creak of leather as a second guard stood up. He heard no voices maybe they talked in sign? - but he knew the roof of the shelter was too low to stand under. They would both be outside. He turned his head cautiously to be sure and saw two pairs of soft-booted legs visible through the low arch of the shelter's opening; beyond was the ghostly flickering of a pale daytime fire. On the other side of the fire stood a glass-festooned magic-post, its streamers twisting faintly in the wind, like a scarecrow set to frighten away the legions of Hell. In front of it, a woman warrior with long barley-coloured braids was driving stakes into the ground for a sacrifice.

Rudy had a bad feeling about whom they'd elected for