the strong of heart.
Another factor entering into the dwindling of Moriana's force was the cultural background of the men. These were northern men unused to women who could slay warriors as strong as the young mercenary captain with their bare hands. By her own testimony Moriana was a sorceress. Stormcloud's death convinced a number of her followers she was a witch.
Others had lost battles with conscience or courage as they neared the ramparts of the Mystic Mountains, low and uninviting. Now besides herself and Darl, who remained in a state of watchful quiet that was less alarming than his earlier detachment, Moriana's retinue consisted of five dog riders and eight footmen. All left in her band now, for reasons of their own, were not afraid to penetrate the citadel of mankind's ancient enemy.
She questioned none of them as to their motives. The princess wasn't sure she wanted to know why they chose to accompany her. All her attention had to be directed forward – and up, up into the Mystic Mountains.
The path mounted quickly along crooked switchbacks up almost sheer granite faces, straightening out now and again to follow the spine of razor-thin ridge.
'The drop – it must be five hundred feet,' came a fearful voice from behind. Moriana didn't turn to see who spoke.
'No, not five hundred,' came still another voice. 'By the gods, it has to be closer to a thousand.' The second speaker laughed boisterously, an action not shared by the others in the party.
For Moriana, a mere thousand-foot drop was like home. In the Sky City she often peered out from the forward prow down at the terrain as it slowly slid beneath her. No one in the City in the Sky harbored any fear of heights, not when their everyday existence depended on separation of City and ground of at least a thousand feet. Her training aboard the war eagles had accustomed her to much loftier vantage points with even less substantial footing than that enjoyed by the dog she rode.
'Your men fear,' came Ziore's quiet voice from the pouch at Moriana's side. 'Is there nothing you can do to calm them?'
'You are the emphatic one,' pointed out the blonde-haired princess.
'I have tried. It is a wearying job. The fears of several of the men are acute.' 'Those from the forest of Nevrym?' hazarded Moriana.
'Yes. They are more accustomed to the closeness of their forests. The precipitous drops of these mountains work against their courage.'
'With luck, we won't have much longer on the trail.' Her fingers lightly touched the hidden black and white stone of the Amulet around her neck.
'Darl bears up well,' added Ziore, almost as an afterthought. 'He returns to his former self.' 'With a little help from your powers?' asked Moriana.
'With very little help from my powers,' corrected the genie. 'He heals himself. It is for the best.'
Moriana fell silent then, not wanting to speak further, even with Ziore. She no longer knew what was for the best. All she knew was what she had to do. Right, wrong, it made no difference. It was what she had to do.
She fell into the slight rolling motion of the dog between her legs as the creature struggled to climb ever higher into the mountains.
The sharp igneous rock of the mountains cruelly punished the pads of the dogs' feet, causing them to become slippery with blood. On trails often no wider than a strong man's shoulders such poor footing could be fatal. Knowing something of the geology of the Mystic Mountains, Moriana had prepared for this.
'Halt!' cried Moriana after another hour of upward struggle. 'Rest a while in the clearing beyond.' She pointed ahead to what amounted to little more than a widening in the narrow trail. But the area proved a narrow canyon leading back into a sparse stand of trees. A small spring spurted from rocks and provided a much needed diversion from the sight of nothing but hard volcanic rocks.
'My Princess,' said Darl, moving to her side. 'Should we put on the leather boots now? Our dogs are beginning to suffer.'
'Aye, pull them out and see to it, Darl,' she said, pleased that the man had taken the initiative to approach her on the subject.
'And,' spoke up Ziore, 'you might boil some of the olorum root found in the crevices yonder and apply the resulting sediment to the dogs' feet before putting on the boots. It will soothe and heal their torn pads.'
'The olorum root?' asked Moriana. 'One I am unfamiliar with. Thank you, Ziore. It shall be done.' Darl bowed and silently turned to see to it. More and more he seemed his old self. Moriana hoped the change went deeper than his visible actions. It pained her greatly seeing the man suffer so – and all for her.
Several men brewed tea and others tried to ease their nerves with stinging draughts of Grassland brandy. Moriana accepted a cup of steaming tea – a pleasantly bracing Samazant strain, not the resinous amasinj of the steppes – and allowed a grinning Nevrym forester to lace it with colorless liqueur. She sat on a rock and stared back the way they'd come. The mountains fell away in toothlike peaks of gradually diminishing size, becoming foothills, spreading away to the south and west into an open plain. To her right yellow prairie gave way in the distance to the brown and pale green patchwork of cultivation; at the edge of vision the black line of the forests that had sheltered them for the vital first days of their flight swam in heat haze.
Ahead of the princess rose Omizantrim straight and stark from the plain. As always in the last weeks, a plume of smoke grew from its maw, steely gray today. By a fluke of the weather – or something more, a possibility Moriana studiously avoided thinking about – the wind blew from the Throat of the Old Ones straight into the Mystic Mountains. They had been tasting ash on their tongues all morning, and some of the dogs sported reddened, running eyes from it.
To her left, away and southward, the scrubby short-grass plain was abruptly interrupted as the land dropped a thousand feet to the Highgrass Broad below. Far-off smoke spires lifted above the tall grass prairie. The Grasslanders engaged again in their favorite sport, it seemed, which was massacring one another in internecine feuds that kept them honed for mercenary work.
Darl saw that the dogs watered and canteens were refilled from the tiny artesian spring, always making sure that no one got out of sight of the resting place without accompaniment. In more and more ways was Darl returning to his former self.
Moriana was relieved at the precaution. These mountains had a feel about them she disliked, and she knew it went far deeper than mere superstition engendered by cradle fables. The leitmotif of the Mystic Mountains was black: black soil, black-stemmed shrubs, black birds wheeling on spring thermals overhead. The anhak here grew black, more gnarled than in the woods below, and higher up grew black pine, whose very needles were as much black as green.
From the woods upslope came a screeching, a rising-falling unearthly sound. The dogs started and growled. One whined and tucked tail between its legs. The four archers with the party, three Nevrym foresters and an Imperial borderer from Samazant, looked to their bows. Moriana did likewise.
'I don't like this place.' Ziore's subdued voice came from the pouch. Neither she nor Moriana felt her misty presence would do other than aggravate the others' uneasiness over the princess's sorcery. Moriana shrugged, finished her tea and stood. 'Nor do I,' she said simply. 'Let's ride.'
Hissing, the monster lurched from a hidden draw beside the trail. The lead dog reared and leaped back, almost unseating his rider. Moriana drew the nock of her arrow to her ear in a single fluid motion. Her dog growled deep in his chest. The others set up an excited barking as the vast green shape slid across their path.
It was a monstrous lizard, twenty feet long and more. A crest of yard-long spines, yellow and curving, grew down its back, diminishing in size as they approached the tail tip – still out of sight up the gulley. Moriana recognized it as a sprawler, its immense body suspended between its legs rather than supported atop them. It turned a bony triangular head toward them and regarded them dispassionately with a yellow eye the size of a man's head.
Horrific as the creature was, it wasn't the giant lizard that drew muffled exclamations from the travellers. Three iron-hard spines had been removed where the wattled neck flowed into its shoulders. Where they had been sat a rider.
Tall and manlike, the being stared at them from within an elaborate casque of green metal that shimmered in the sun. His helmet and breastplate revealed few details of head and body, except a pair of flat black eyes as emotionless as the lizard's yellow one. On the being's left arm rested a great spiked target shield, whose rough surface suggested construction from the scaled hide of a beast such as the alien warrior rode. The right hand's
