The Walls of Air Page 0,81

to Hoofprint of the Wind, 'and I may be mistaken - but I believe there's an ice storm coming.'

It was the first time that Rudy had seen the implacable Raiders show any emotion at all. Fear sparked into the chieftain's amber eyes. 'Can you be sure?' he asked and made a quick sign to the warriors behind him, a swift hand gesture that sent a ripple of whispers and motion through them like a stone dropped in still water. They, too, were afraid.

'No - . Yes. Yes, I am sure.' Ingold looked in one direction and then another, the lines of his face deepening with concern.

Not, Rudy suspected, so much because we're all going to get turned into popsicles in the next sixty seconds, but because he

doesn't understand why it should happen this far south, for Chrissake.

'Don't!' the wizard called out as one of the Raiders wheeled her horse to flee. 'You'll never outrun it.'

'No,' Hoofprint of the Wind agreed. 'We are with you after all, Desert Walker.' He urged his mount down the bank at a quick, slippery trot and across the stone pavement toward the stairway and the pit, the others streaming down behind him. Ingold strode after them, with Rudy limping in his wake.

'How soon?' Rudy whispered, glancing up at the pale, empty sky. He could feel nothing, sense nothing but the chill lour that had prickled his hair all day.

'Very soon.' Ingold switched his staff from his right hand to his left as he came to the group of Raiders and horses, and Rudy grinned a little to himself. Like the old Western gunfighters, Ingold did a lot of things with his left hand.

Rudy had heard Gil speak of the stairways of the Dark, but before now he had never understood the eeriness that surrounded them, the sense of alien and incomprehensible gulfs of time. Even deserted - if it was deserted - there was something about that black and terrible stair that tensed his backbone with a sense of watching and malicious cold. Light had never touched that blackness, any more than it had the darkness of the remoter fastnesses of the Keep of Dare. Those who could bear no light could come and go at will in that darkness, as silent and undetectable as the air on which they drifted. And the stairs looked so worn. The whole emptiness of the half-buried, dark pavement was foot-smooth and slick, unreflective of the hard, white sky. How many little bare feet had been drawn over that open space? he wondered. How many had followed that whispering call to their deaths in darkness? And over what terrible span of years?

And yet Rudy noticed that the Raiders would rather go down a supposedly empty Nest of the Dark than stay topside on the

off chance that Ingold might be wrong about the storm.

Ingold's staff flickered into phantom brightness as he descended the stair ahead of them. Like phosphorus, it illuminated the narrow walls, the curve of the low roof, and the endless, twisting steps. Even as he crossed the threshold on the wizard's heels, Rudy could catch the smell from below, the sweetish reek of old decay that made the horses shy and the men look askance at one another. That smell clung around them like a vapour as they wound their way toward the centre of the earth.

They turned a corner, and the wan daylight was lost behind them. The pallid gleam of the staff flashed glassily and green in the eyes of the horses, and the surrounding silence whispered with the fears of the men. Looking up at the black ceiling overhead, Rudy saw that it had been carved with long, chiselling strokes upward from below. The steps were straight but disturbingly irregular as to height and width, as they would be, to have been carved out by those who had no feet. Cool, damp air wafted upward to touch his face and bore on it a death reek, the stench of ancient corruption. He shuddered, taking what comfort he could in the living smells of men and horses around him and in the warmth of the crowding bodies and the whispers and occasional soft nickerings that broke the deadly silence of underground. Once or twice he heard the scritching of rodent claws on the walls nearby and caught a glimpse of lean, wary scavenger rats slipping like furtive shadows into the fissures in the dark walls.

Whatever lay below, it was dead, dead and rotten, the stink