Then, as he pa.s.sed the mouth of a narrow tunnel, a strong draught of air blew it out.

The air was fresh and cold. Stark felt his way into the tunnel. After a little time he saw that there was light ahead. Daylight.

It came through an arched opening at the end of the tunnel. A wild surge of hope sent Stark running toward it.

Once lookouts might have been stationed here, keeping watch over the turbulent north. Or the Children might have taken the air after their work in the museum rooms, to see again the sun and the stars they had left behind. Now there was nothing but a high solitude. The tiny balcony was no more than a niche in the northern face of the Witchfires, Far too high, and that northern face too sheer, for any thought of getting down it.

Stark saw an immense white landscape, infinitely forbidding. From the feet of the Witchfires a naked plain tilted upward, gashed with the scars of old erosions. The wind blew fiercely across it, raising snow-devils that danced and whirled. Some of them had a peculiar look; these were not snow-devils at all, but pillars of steam rising out of the ground, to be shredded and torn away.

A thermal area. Stark became excited, remembering Hargoth's words about the magic mists that hid the Citadel. He looked up across the plain, to a distant range of mountains much higher and more cruel than the Witchfires. And he saw, to the northeast, low against the mountains' flank, a great boiling of white cloud.

He stood on his high lonely perch, and looked, and swore.

He saw, when he turned his head, a string of tiny figures moving across the vast whiteness of the plain, from the direction of the Witchfires.

Gelmar, going to the Citadel.

A driven man, Stark left the small niche. Turning his back on the light, he went again into the darkness of the corridors.

Now he prayed for steps to lead him down. He had been trying from the first to work his way back to ground level, and he was appalled to find himself still so high. The devil of it was that, feeling his way along in the pitch blackness, he might be pa.s.sing any number of steps to one side or the other without knowing it Hunger and thirst became more insistent. He was forced to stop now and again to sleep, as an animal sleeps, briefly but totally relaxed. Then he would get up and go on again, every nerve and every sense stretched fine to catch the slightest hint of anything that might guide him back to life.

He had slid and stumbled along what seemed like miles of pa.s.sages, blundered horribly through crowded rooms that tried to swallow him in a tangle of relics, half fallen down infinite numbers of steps, when the faintest of faint sounds touched his ears.

He thought at first that it was only weariness, or the whisper of his own blood in his veins. Then it went away and he didn't hear it again. He had just come down a flight of steps. That was at his back. He could feel the carvings of a wall on both sides, so the corridor went ahead, and that must be where the sound had come from. He began padding along it, stopping frequently to hold his breath and listen.

The sound came again. It was unmistakable. It was music. Someone in this catacomb of dust and age and darkness was making music. Very peculiar music, atonal, tw.a.n.ging, quavering. It was the most beautiful music Stark had ever heard.

Twice more the music stopped, as though whoever was playing the instrument had halted in annoyance over a wrong note. Then it would begin again. Stark saw a gleam of light and approached without sound.

There was a carved doorway. Beyond was a small chamber well lighted by several lamps. One of the Children, an old man with slack skin and prominent bones, bent over an oddly shaped instrument with numerous strings. Beside him was an antique table strewn with ancient books and many parchments. There was also an untouched plate of food and a stone jug. The old man's fingers caressed the strings as if they were stroking a child.

Stark went in.

The old man looked up. Stark watched the slow advance of shock across his face.

"The Outside has come into the House of the Mother," he said. "It is the end of the world." And he set the instrument carefully aside.

"Not quite," said Stark. "All I want of the House of the Mother is to leave it. Is there a northern gate?"

He waited while the old man stared at him, great luminous eyes in a moth-eaten face, the fur of his crown rubbed up untidily, his whole being wrenched cruelly away from where it had been. Finally, Stark made a threatening movement.

"Is there a northern gate?"

"Yes. But I can't take you there."

"Why not?"

"Because I remember now. I was told-we were all told-an enemy, an outsider, was in the Mother's House and we were to watch. We were to give the alarm, if we should see him."

"Old man," said Stark, "you will not give the alarm, and you will take me to the northern gate." He placed his powerful hands on the frail instrument.

The old man stood up. In a soft and very desperate voice he said, "I am trying to recreate the music of Tla-via, Queen City of the High North before the Wandering. It is my life's work. That is the only Tlavian instrument known. The others are lost somewhere in the caverns. If it should be destroyed-"

"Consider yourself the guarantee of its safety," Stark said. "If you do exactly as I tell you-" He took his hands away.

The old man was thinking. His thoughts were almost visible. "Very well," he said. "For the sake of the instrument"

Stark gave him the mallet and chisel. "Here." He laid his wrists on the antique table, which had a fine marble top and seemed st.u.r.dy. He regretted the sacrilege, but there was no other choice. "Get these things off me."

The old man was clumsy, and the table was considerably damaged, but in the end the manacles came off. Stark rubbed his wrists. Hunger and thirst had become painful. He drank from the stone bottle. It was some sort of dusty-tasting wine; he wished it had been water, but it was better than nothing. The food he thrust into his pockets, to be eaten along the way. The old man waited patiently. His acquiescence had been too quick, too unemotional. Stark wondered what mischief lurked in his transparent mind.

"Let us go," he said, and picked up the instrument.

The old man took a lamp and led the way into the corridor.

"Are there many like you?" Stark asked. "Solitary scholars?"

"Many. Skaith-Mother encourages scholars. She gives us peace and plenty so that we may spend our whole lives at our work. There are not so many of us as there used to be. Once there were a thousand at the study of music alone, thousands more at history, the ancient books, art and laws. And of course, the cataloguing." He sighed. "But it is a good life."

In a short time they were back in the inhabited areas. The old man did not have far to go to find his solitude. Stark took a firm hold on his worn harness with one hand, holding the instrument precariously in the other.

"If anyone sees us, old man," he said, "the music of Tlavia dies."

And the old man led him cunningly enough, skirting the edges of the busy levels, the caverns of the lapidaries and goldsmiths, sculptors and stonemasons, the nurseries and schools for the young, the strange deep-buried farms where fungoid crops flourished in perpetual musty dampness. These lower levels, Stark noticed, were definitely warmer, and the old man explained that the thermal area extended beneath part of the Mother's House, giving them many gifts, such as hot water for the baths.

He also told Stark other things.

The nomad trail used by the Ha.r.s.enyi ran between the pa.s.s of the Witchfires and the pa.s.ses of the Bleak Mountains, the big range that Stark had seen. It was at the western side of the Plain of Worldheart; Stark remembered the little black dots of Gelmar's party moving along it. The trail was safe for the Ha.r.s.enyi as long as they did not wander from it, and they had a permanent village in the foothills, which was as close as any of them ever got to the Citadel. The plain was called Worldheart because the Citadel was built on it, or above it. The old man had never seen the Citadel. He had never seen a Northbound. He thought that they did not range too far from the Citadel unless they were attracted by an intruder. They were said to be telepaths.

"They hunt in a pack," the old man said. "The king-dog's name is Flay. At least, it used to be. Perhaps the lead dog is always Flay. Or perhaps the Northhounds live forever."

Like the Lords Protector, Stark thought.

He felt a difference in the body of the old man, where his hand touched it. It had become tense, the breathing tight and rapid.

They were in a broad pa.s.sageway, not very well lighted, obviously not much frequented. Ahead he could see the opening of another pa.s.sage to the right.

The old man said innocently, "The northern gate is there, along that corridor. It's seldom used now. The Wandsmen used to come from the Citadel more often. Now they come to the western gate, when they come at all." He held out his hands for the instrument.

Stark smiled. "Wait here, old man. No noise, not a word." Still carrying the frail instrument, Stark went noiselessly to the branching corridor and looked along it.

There was a great stone slab at the end of it, where it widened out into a guard chamber. And a guard was there. Half a dozen of the Children, male, young, armed, patently bored. Four of them were occupied with some game on a stone table. The other two watched.

The old man had begun to run. He did not even stop to see what became of his precious instrument. Stark set it down unharmed.

He took the knife from his belt and went down the corridor, moving fast, shoulders forward, all his attention fixed on that slab of rock that stood between him and freedom.

The Children probably had not had to fight in their own defense since the last of the Wandering. They were out of practice, babes comfortable and soft in the womb of the Mother. He was almost on top of them before they knew he was there. They sprang up to face him, eyes large with sudden fear, pawing for their weapons. They had not really believed that he would come. They had not really believed that if he did come he would try to kill them. Surely their six against his one- They had not really understood what killing is.

Stark slashed one of the players across the throat. He fell across the table, tangling his mates with his thrashings, making dreadful noises. They stared at the blood, and Stark struck down another with his fist and caught up the light wiry body and threw it against the others. He went past them like a bull to the slab of stone and pushed against it. It moved. Two of them came at his back and he turned and fended them off, the knife blade and his heavy furs turning most of their sword cuts; their blades were light like their bodies, made more for beauty than for killing. He kept pressing his shoulder against the slab and it kept turning and in a moment they were hitting stone and he was through the opening. He slammed the stone shut on their screaming faces, and began to run.

They would spread the word through Kell a Marg's great House that he had escaped, but he did not think that anyone would come after him, at least not very far.

Not here on the Plain of Worldheart, where the Northhounds prowled.

25.

Old Sun was below the peaks, and the northern face of the Witchfires was gray and ugly, a sheer frowning wall at his back. The mountain shadow made a long darkness across the plain. The wind was a knife, a scream, a madness bewailing eternal winter. The flogged snow-devils danced in desperation to appease it.

The region of boiling cloud that hid the Citadel was visible, small and bright against the flank of the Bleak Mountains, catching the last of the westering light.

The Citadel.

He did not know exactly how long he had been wandering in the House of the Mother, and the old man had not been able to tell him in terms that he could understand. They had their own view of time in those dark catacombs. But it was long enough for many things to have happened.

There was no point in asking himself questions for which there could be no answers until he reached the Citadel. If he reached it.

Stark fixed the bright patch of cloud as a mark in his mind's eye, northeast across the plain. He set out toward it.

The shadow of the Witchfires stretched longer and darker ahead of him. He would not outrun it. It would soon be night, and the Children were staying safe, as he had thought they would, in their Mother's House. Why risk their lives when the Northhounds would certainly deal with him? The Bleak Mountains burned with a b.l.o.o.d.y glow that dimmed quickly to ashen dullness. The first stars showed.

Stark lost his view of the Citadel-clouds and took his bearing from a star. The whole landscape faded into that insubstantial bluish-gray that comes over the snow-lands at twilight, where everything slides away at the edges of sight. The sky turned darker, turned black. The Lamp of the North rose up in it, a huge green lantern, and the plain became white again, a diminished white but much more clearly seen now that the glimmery gray-ness had gone. The first twitching of the aurora appeared overhead.

Stark moved forward as steadily as he could, watching for the plumes of steam marking the thermal areas he had seen from the balcony. The wind tore at him, beating him with hammer blows. It sent the snow-devils against him, and at these times he dropped face down on the ground until the blinding buffeting whirl of snow-dust pa.s.sed over him. At other times the wind picked up lower clouds of snow and mixed them cunningly with the thermal plumes so that all was a formless whiteness. Several times he stopped short, sensing a bareness and a tremor beneath his feet, to find a gaping blow-hole lying just ahead, ready to swallow him.

The ravines, those ancient gashes of erosion he had seen, were less dangerous. The bedrock of the plain was hard and had not scoured out too deeply. Wind and snow had worn the edges down. Nevertheless, Stark went carefully when he had to cross one. A fall here in the darkness of Worldheart could mean cheating the Northhounds of their pleasure.

He was happy, in a strange sort of way. The end of his journey was in sight, and he was free, unenc.u.mbered. His body and his skills were his to use to the limit, without regard for others. The battle against cold and wind and cruel terrain was a clean one, uncluttered by ideas, ideals, beliefs, or human spite. For the moment he was less Eric John Stark than he was N'Chaka, wild thing in a wild place, perfectly at home.

Perfectly at home, perfectly functional, wary and watchful. His gaze roved constantly, never straining against the night, never looking straight at an object but always past it, never trying to hold it steady, only sensing its shape and whether or not it moved.

Twice the wind brought him a hint of something other than the cold smells of snow and frozen ground.

The banners of the aurora snapped and quivered. The heads of the snow-devils seemed to touch them. Colors shifted, green, white, rose-fire. Plumes of steam shot high out of the rock, now to his right, now to his left, glimmering, shredding, vanishing. Sometimes he thought that dim white shapes stalked him between snow and steam. For a long while he could not be sure.

There came a time when there was no longer any doubt.

He had come, treading delicately, out of a cloud of mingled steam and snow, and he looked up along the tilt of the plain, and a great white thing stood there watching him.

Stark stopped. The thing continued to watch him. And a cold beast-thought touched his mind, saying, I am Flay.

He was big. The ridge of his spine would have reached Stark's shoulder. His withers were high and powerful. The thick neck drooped with the weight of the ma.s.sive head. Stark saw the eyes, large and unnaturally brilliant, the broad heavy muzzle, and the fangs, two white cruel rows of them, sharp as knives.

Flay stretched out a foreleg like a tree-trunk and unsheathed tiger claws. He tore five furrows in the frozen ground and smiled, lolling a red tongue.

I am Flay.

The eyes were bright. Bright. h.e.l.l-hound eyes Swift panic overcame Stark, loosened his muscles, weakened his joints, dropped him helpless on the ground with cold nausea in his belly and a silent scream in his brain.

I am Flay.

And this is how they kill, Stark thought, with the fleeting remnants of sanity. Fear. A bolt of fear as deadly as any missile. This is how they were bred to kill. The size, the fangs and claws, are only camouflage. They do it with their minds.

He could not draw his knife.

Flay sauntered toward him. And now the other shapes were visible on the tilting plain, the pack, six, ten, a dozen, he couldn't count them, bounding and leaping, running.

Fear.

Fear was a sickness.

Fear was a dark wave rolling over him, taking sight and hearing, crushing mind and will.

He would never reach the Citadel, never see Gerrith. Flay would give him to the pack and they would play with him until he died.

I am Flay, said the cold beast-mind, and the red jaws laughed. Huge paws padded silently in the blowing snow.

Far down beneath the dark ma.s.s of fear that destroyed all human courage, another mind spoke. Cold beast-mind, not thinking or reasoning, mind alive and desperate to live, mind feeling self as bone and muscle, cold and pain, a hunger to be fed, a fear to be endured. Fear is life, fear is survival. The end of fear is death.

The cold beast-mind said, I am N'Chaka.

The blood beats, hot with living, hot with hate. Hate is a fire in the blood, a taste in the mouth of bitter salt.

I am N'Chaka.

I do not die.

I kill.

Flay paused, one tentative forefoot lifted. He swung his head from side to side, puzzled.

The human thing ought now to be inert and helpless. Instead it spoke to him; it groped and tottered and rose from the ground, rose to its hands and knees and faced him.

I am N'Chaka.

The pack halted their playful rush. They formed a semicircle behind Flay, growling.

Fear, said Flay's mind. Fear.

They sent fear, deadly killing fear.

Cold beast-mind let the fear slide over it. Cold beast-eyes saw Flay, coa.r.s.e-furred Flay looming in the night-gleaming.