“Yes. I saw something. From a god or from my own mind, I do not know. Whichever it is, I will work it out for myself.”

Shef rose to his feet, stretched. The rest had done him good. The rest and the exhaustion of the morning. He felt as if he had sweated out the soft living and the mental strain of the years of rule. He felt like a drengr again, like a carl of what had been the Great Army: young, strong and cruel.

“Cwicca,” he hailed. “See that barn door over there? Think you can hit it? You and your mates, put four quarrels each into the middle of it, as fast as you can shoot.”

Shef watched impassively as the crossbowmen, not understanding but ready to show their paces, sent iron bolt after iron bolt thudding deep into the middle of the door. The villagers who had been quietly watching, their own bows and spears never far from hand, stared uncertainly.

“Styrr,” Shef shouted when they had finished. “Take your axe. Go chop those bolts out and give them back.”

Grinning, Styrr walked over, axe swinging loosely. He was glad of a chance to show his mettle after the near-collapse of the morning. The axe whirled and struck like the hammer of the gods, chunks of old oak flying with every blow. Shef could see the villagers staring uncertainly at each other. Styrr did not look like a man who could be brought down by a collection of half-armed shepherds. Professional warriors in armor would filter to the rear rather than face his axe.

“They are poor people,” whispered Svandis, “and wood is scarce up here. You are destroying their door.”

“I thought you said they were savages and devil-worshipers? Well, whatever they are, I know this. Time for them to worry about us. Not just us worry about them.”

Shef turned from the demonstration as Styrr walked back to Cwicca with a score of bolts in his enormous Brand-like hand. He patted Svandis gently, still less than decent in her rags. “I am going to sleep now. Come lie next to me.”

The sun was no more than a hand's breadth from the horizon when the guide came for him: a burly man in the sweaty woolens of a mountain shepherd. Svandis snarled at him as he came towards the northerners. “That is the one Thierry,” she muttered.

He looked down at Shef, sprawled on the grass, and said without expression, “Viens.”

Shef rose, reached for his sword-belt standing propped against the barn wall. For this trip he had armed himself with one of the issue weapons of the Fafnisbane, a plain brass-hilted broadsword. The guide shook a finger from side to side. “Non.” The rest of what he said made no sense to Shef, but the tone was unmistakable. Shef put the weapon back, straightened himself, made ready to follow. As the two men walked off, Shef heard a hail from Cwicca. The guide turned, alerted by the menace in the tone. Cwicca stared at him, pointed deliberately first at Shef, then with a sweeping gesture at the village around. He pointed again at Shef, jabbing a finger imperatively. Then swept his arm at the village, and drew the edge of his hand across his throat. “Bring him back,” it meant. “Or else…”

The guide did not respond, but turned again and led Shef at a fast walk away across the little patch of land and immediately up a stony trail into the mountains. Shef followed, his legs stiff from the morning's climb, but working off their pain as he strode out to keep up.

The path, if it could be called a path, led them from stony outcrop to stony outcrop, climbing slightly, but mostly going across the side of the mountain, over patches of boulder, shifting scree, and again and again, round the head of craggy ravines. From time to time the mountain sheep, browsing everywhere as if they were goats, raised a head or bounded away at their passage. It reminded Shef of the path he had taken to the house of Echegorgun, years before. Only here the sun warmed the stone instead of merely casting a pale light on it, and the air was full of the scent of mountain thyme. The sun sank further, touched the horizon and crawled beneath it. Still there was light in the sky, but fading. If he were left alone on the slope, Shef decided, he would make no attempt to return. Find a flat stretch and wait for day. As he walked he began to mark possible resting-places near the path. Not a place for explorations in the dark.

His eye left Thierry the guide as he hurried on five or ten paces ahead. The path kinked abruptly left, round the side of yet another stony mass jutting out of the side of the mountain. Shef stepped round it. Found himself alone, on the edge of a steep fall down to dry rocks below. He halted, stood stiff and alert. Where had the man gone to? Was this a trap?

Too complex to be a trap. If Thierry had wanted to push him over an edge he had had a dozen chances already. And Thierry knew he had left hostages behind. Shef looked round carefully. A crack in the stone, a black line in the fading light. Of course, a cave-mouth. And Thierry standing just inside it, watching him. Shef walked over to him, gestured to him to lead on.

Inside the cave-mouth, a mere split in the rock barely three feet wide, someone had left a candle. Thierry struck sparks from flint, lit it, walked on, now moving more slowly. Shef followed the little patch of light. As he walked on he began to feel, through the worn leather soles of his shoes, that he was treading on loose rock. Loose rock with sharp edges. He bent, picked one up, studied it in the faint light of the candle a few feet ahead. It was flint, sure enough. Shaped flint, stone chipped and flaked to produce a kind of point, like a spear-point. Echegorgun had done the same. Only his points and implements were four times the size, made for the race of trolls. Shef threw it down, walked on.

The cave led on and on, with every now and then the black line of some branching passage showing momentarily in the light. Shef began to feel more anxiety than he had done so far. If he were abandoned now, in the dark, the chances were he would never find his way out. Retracing his steps in the dark might seem easy, but he would be feeling his way. Easy, indeed unavoidable, to take a wrong turning. Then he would wander in the blackness till thirst took him. His lips dried at the thought, remembering what thirst had felt like only that morning. Better than the sword would have been a water-skin and tinder-box.

Thierry had paused to let him catch up. In the candlelight Shef saw something else on the walls, signed to Thierry to move the light closer.

Paintings. All over the one flat wall on the left of the passage, paintings of animals, done with perfect fidelity, not like the half-abstract dragon- and beast-shapes of the North. A bull, Shef could see. The sheep of the mountains, just like the ones wandering outside. And there, on its hind legs, what seemed to be a massive bear, a black bear as big as the white ones of the Arctic. A spear jutted from its chest, and round it pranced tiny stick-like man-figures.

“Pintura,” said Thierry in an echoing rumble. “Pintura de los vechios. Nostros padres.” His voice contained in it a note of pride. He walked on. Stopped, at the end of the gallery, at what seemed to be a blank unbroken wall. He pointed at himself, shook his finger negatively. Pointed at Shef, made pushing gestures. “I stop. You go on.”

Shef looked at the blank wall carefully. At its base there was again a black crack, an opening. It did not seem deep enough for a man. But that must be the way through. A crawl, not a walk. As he realized what was meant Thierry began suddenly to walk away, took five paces with Shef beginning to reach out after him, then blew out the candle and vanished.

Instantly Shef stopped dead. If he ran after Thierry in the dark he would lose his bearings, perhaps never come back to the wall and the gap. Yet there must be a way through there. That was safety, or at least the way through to the test. And if there was a test, there was a way to pass it. Better do that than struggle in the dark.

Slowly Shef turned, careful to retrace his movements exactly as he remembered them, groped his way back to the wall, felt till he could touch the edges of the crack. Very faintly he could feel air blowing through. So there was something on the other side. Dropping on to his belly he began to squeeze forward under the lip of rock.

Halfway through, his groping hands met hard rock. He felt to either side. Rock as well, and no opening below. The edge of the rock lip under which he had crawled ground painfully into the small of his back. He did not think he could push himself back now, his ribs would catch. If he did not find a way through he would lie here under the mountain till he moldered away.

But he had been in this situation before. The makers of the old king's barrow from which he had rescued treasure and scepter, they had used the same trick. Maybe all treasure guardians used it. He was in a bend like the shape of the U-rune, and there would be a passageway above his head. Sure enough, the groping hand he could

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