these columns in the hall. I walked past the stone giants, feeling like a pitiful little bug. The morose gray monsters soared upward out of the light, hanging silently over the uninvited guest and threatening to drop the distant vault of the ceiling on his head.
A vague sense of alarm stayed with me all the way through this place, with its constantly howling wind—
Far, far away, at the very beginning of the columned hall, there was a faint sprinkling of orange dots. There could be no doubt that they were torches. I could see several dozen of the bright blinking points. They would disappear behind a column and then reappear again, advancing slowly but surely in my direction.
I would have wagered my soul that the torch-bearers couldn’t be Balistan Pargaid’s men. There couldn’t be many left from the group that had come down into the Palaces of Bone with Lafresa.… But this group numbered fifty or sixty. So it was someone else parading through the hall.
Hoping that I’d managed to hide the light in time and the strangers hadn’t noticed it, I darted behind a column close to the wall and as far as possible from the center of the hall. Were the strangers actually looking for me or was this their regular daily stroll around the local sights? Just to be on the safe side I got the crossbow ready, pulled my hood up over my head, and pressed myself back against the wall.
The wind of the ancient halls sang a lullaby to the slumbering gloom of eternity. The sound of the wind was a faint dreary note in my ears and the only thing I could hear above it was the desperate pounding of my heart. For a long time there was no other sound but my heartbeat and the lullaby of the wind. And then the Halls of the Slumbering Darkness shuddered and the night awoke.
The steps came closer and closer.… First an orange glow appeared on the distant columns, and then I could hear the strangers’ heavy snuffling as they breathed. On the one hand that was good—if they snuffled, it meant they were alive. But on the other hand …
I didn’t finish what I was thinking, because at last I saw
Half birds, half bears that even the Order didn’t know about (I was sure of that!). The creatures walked past me—tall, about the same height as an ogre, massively built, almost square, with thick arms and legs and bare clawed feet. Large, elongated heads rather like a bear’s, with little ears, round birdlike eyes, and small curved beaks that gleamed like steel in the light of the torches.
These strange, in fact absurd creatures were dressed in loose violet robes. The shapeless tunics almost completely covered their bodies, leaving only the hands, feet, and heads exposed to view, all covered with reddish fur. Or perhaps it wasn’t fur, but feathers. From that distance it was hard for me to tell.
No jewelry and no weapons. I could sense that the creatures were strong, confident, and … old. Not even old, but ancient—their age could rival eternity itself.
“They are the world,” Valder suddenly whispered. “They came to Siala at the moment of its birth. The firstborn were not the ogres and certainly not the orcs.… These beings lived at the very beginning of the Dark Era. A race that was once mighty, and alien even to the ogres, now condemned to live here. Quite different from us. Absolutely alien … Look, Harold, there they are—the firstborn of this world.”
I didn’t know how the archmagician knew about the half bird, half bears, but I literally gaped wide-eyed at the beasts.
They were walking past, only fifteen yards away from me. Walking in single file, snuffling loudly, and waddling from one foot to the other. Every third one was carrying what at first I had taken for torches. In fact they were knobbly black wooden staffs, polished until they shone, and set on the top of every one was a skull. Skulls of elves, orcs, men, and even ogres—they gave out an orange light very similar to the light of an ordinary flame.
One figure followed another until it seemed the procession would never end. The sound of snuffling, footsteps, claws scraping on the stone slabs of the floor. They drifted past me, these ships of ancient, bygone glory that had sunk to the bottom of the centuries, and their huge shadows slid ominously across the bodies of the columns. Finally the last of them, the eighty-sixth wayfarer, walked past me, and darkness fell.
Where had these creatures come from, what obscure depths of the Palaces of Bone had they lived in for all the millennia of Siala’s existence, what did they want, what did they aspire to? I didn’t know if they were dangerous, but, Sagot be praised, they had missed me. Darkness only knew how the firstborn (the genuine firstborn!) would react to an uninvited guest. Perhaps they’d greet him with open arms and lead him along a safe route straight to Grok’s grave and the Rainbow Horn, or perhaps they’d simply turn my skull into a new lamp without thinking twice about it. Something told me the second alternative was far more likely than the first.
But even so, I couldn’t just stay where I was. The column of creatures was moving in the direction I had to go in, and so I set out very quietly, scarcely even breathing, after the Ancient Ones.
I kept my distance so that—Sagot forbid—I wouldn’t be heard or, even worse, get caught in the circle of light from the skull-lamps. I crossed the entire gigantic hall, running from column to column. The string of lights ahead of me trembled and divided into three parts that flowed off into the labyrinthine corridors, and the hall went dark.
In all this time I didn’t hear a single word from the creatures. Where had the bird-bears gone, what goals were they pursuing, what did they want? Naturally, I didn’t go chasing after them to ask stupid questions. Wherever the creatures had gone, they weren’t going my way. In the literal or the figurative sense. My path led into a barely noticeable narrow corridor that began between the last two columns of the hall, but the three bands of Ancient Ones had taken other roads.
I felt a strong temptation to take out the maps and see where these creatures could be heading, but I ruthlessly suppressed this impulse of treacherous curiosity. The less you know, the better you sleep. I had no doubt that the bird-bears who had just walked through the columned hall had come to it from the depths of the levels without names, where no one had dared to go for the last seven thousand years.
“What do they want, Valder?” I blurted out.
Surprisingly enough, this time the archmagician condescended to answer me.
“They’re waiting, Harold.”
“Waiting? What for?”
He said nothing for a long time. A very long time. I thought I was never going to get an answer.
“A chance. A chance to come back to our world. They are a mistake of the gods, or perhaps of the one they call the Dancer in the Shadows. They were created as … as an experiment, as the first creatures, and they almost destroyed Siala, and were punished for it.… They are waiting for someone to smash the fetters that hold them in the bowels of the earth. Waiting and dreaming of
The dead archmagician’s words struck me like a physical blow.
I realized what he was hinting at.
“The Rainbow Horn?”
“Most likely. They were the ones who awoke the evil that was sleeping here. Their own evil. They can sense that the time is near.…”
“But how do you know all this?”
No reply. Valder disappeared, leaving me to my questions and doubts.
A meager supper, sleep that brought almost no relief, and back to the journey. The corridor led me into a cave where at last I could stop wasting lights and banging my nose against the wall.
It was every bit as large as the hall with the columns. Reddish orange walls, a ceiling with light beaming down from it and lighting up the whole place magnificently. And I could have sworn it wasn’t magical light, but absolutely genuine sunlight.
For the first two minutes my eyes, which had grown completely unused to anything like this, simply couldn’t
