Mirror 04 The Way Between the Worlds (7 page)

explosion ofbroken stone. Part of the wall collapsed behind it. The wind
howled in through the new opening. Karan crawled into the rubble pile as other
creatures strained against the gossamer walls of the Forbidding. She was too
exhausted to blink.
The dark moon shone straight down through the broken roof of the tower - it
was midnight. Momentarily Rulke
wrestled with some hideous, many-clawed and fanged beast that appeared out of
nowhere. It got away from him and leapt towards Karan, who scurried up onto
the rubble, desperate to get out of its reach. 'Karan, here!' Rulke shouted,
tossing her the knife he had taken a week ago.
She caught it and ran up a slender beam, but the creature jumped on the other
end, flicking her hard against the wall. The knife fell into the rubble, out
of reach. She lay winded as the creature crept toward her.
The commotion had brought a squad of Ghashad racing up the stairs. 'To me!'
Rulke roared, and they ran to his aid with swords and spears. Together they
forced Karan's assailant back through the Wall.
Karan picked herself up, wondering if her ribs were broken. Now only Rulke's
strength held back the things that clawed at the Wall. If he were overcome,
they would pour in until they choked all Santhenar. And she had helped to make
this disaster.
Out of the vent surged other beasts, smaller than the thranx but seeming
equally cunning. They appeared more or less human, though immensely hairy.
They separated, one feinting and slashing at Rulke with unnaturally long arms,
while another sprang up on the construct. A third bailed up the Ghashad on the
other side of the room.
'Lorrsk!' said Rulke. 'And I'm already spent.'
These were not dumb beasts either. The one on top slammed into the seat and
gripped the levers of the construct in a very knowing way, with feet that were
like huge clawed hands. Its bucket-sized mouth grinned at Rulke, flashing many
yellow teeth.
Rulke swung a jagged length of wood at the first lorrsk, clouting it over the
side of the head and sending it sprawling into the rubble. It staggered out,
blood pouring from a gash in its thigh to pool on the floor, then abruptly
flung itself on Rulke and wrestled him to the ground. They rolled over and
over, grunting and groaning. Karan found another billet of
wood and whacked the lorrsk over the head, but it hardly noticed.
The other beast banged the levers forward. The construct groaned, lurched
backwards and sideways, then began to sink down until the lower side was below
the level of the floor. The stone appeared to have softened beneath it. The
lorrsk chittered, flinging the levers opposing ways. The construct bucked and
blurred, seemingly trying to rearrange its component atoms. Molten yellow
gushed out of an aperture at the front, splashing golden on the floor.
Karan had not appreciated how the Forbidding protected them. Fragments of
tales burst in her mind - myths and fairy stories from the distant past. This
was all too horrible! She danced around the wrestling pair like a dervish and,
seeing an opportunity, stabbed the lorrsk in the ear with the jagged end of
her billet. It yelped.
It was the chance Rulke needed. Gaining the upper hand in his wrestling match,
he slammed the lorrsk down on its back. He manipulated something with his
fingers, whereupon the construct bucked. The second lorrsk described an arc in
the air, still holding onto one lever. The construct flung itself upwards. The
lorrsk soared through the air to land on its hairy backside right in the
molten puddle. It screamed so harsh and shrill that Karan had to stop her
ears. An awful smell of burnt hair and charred flesh filled the room. The
lorrsk moved away, its buttocks sweating blood like meat on a hotplate, and
fell through the embrasure.
The other lorrsk flung Rulke on his back, slammed its knee into his belly then
lunged, trying to bite his throat. Karan yelled and pronged it in the ear
again, snapping its head sideways so hard that its teeth jarred. With a
superhuman effort Rulke hurled it off him into the rubble. He staggered to his

feet, wrenched a long jagged beam hanging down from the roof and tried to
spear the creature with it. It yelped, rolled flat head over pointy heels,
ended up near an embrasure and tumbled out head first.
Karan slid to the floor, panting, wrung dry. The broken roof groaned where
Rulke had pulled the beam out. Two of the Ghashad and the third lorrsk lay
dead. Three Ghashad heaved the body out the window while the others tried to
hold the roof from collapsing completely. Rulke flopped on his face, so
exhausted that he could not even stand. I'm free, she thought, if I can hold
off the aftersickness.
Rulke's vacant stare touched her. 'Too. .. hard,' he gasped, scarcely able to
frame the words. 'I was not strong enough.'
'You overreached yourself and betrayed my trust,' she shouted.
'Not intentionally . . .'
Karan realised that she could hardly hear on her left side. She put her hand
to her ear. It came back all bloody. 'I've finished with you!' she screamed.
'I've paid my debt.'
'Not until I say so.' Rulke raised his hand weakly, but could not hold it up.
'Aftersickness is like a fire in my brain,' he mumbled and collapsed.
The broken roof rumbled and slid further down, to halt just over Rulke's head.
The Ghashad struggled frantically to manoeuvre a prop under it. The Wall faded
almost to nothing. Out of the corner of her eye Karan saw something ease apart
the ragged hole.
'You'd better seal that up, quick!' she shouted. Scooping up pack and cloak she'd not survive outside without them - Karan hurtled down the stairs.
Near the bottom she saw that one wall of the tower had collapsed below as well
as above, though the stairs and most of the floor still hung there. There was
a hole in the wall three arm-spans wide. Lights shone out onto the snow. Below
was a huge gouge where the thranx had landed, and a white mound thrown up
against the outer wall.
Karan was just about to take a flying leap down when she realised that the
mound was made of rubble, and a broken ankle was the most likely result. The
freezing wind roared in, pressing her against the wall. She wrestled the cloak
around her and continued down. On the ground floor she raced toward the front
door, then stopped dead. A thranx stood by the doorway. Further down an
odd-shaped hall, other creatures clustered together. With a squawk of terror
she turned the other way, saw more in front of her, then realised that they
were just bronze statues.
As she edged by, half-expecting them to come to life, the first spasm of
aftersickness doubled her over. Not now! she thought, tearing at the brass
bolt. Her skin stuck to the frigid metal. Karan peeled her fingers off,
hastily put on gloves and slammed back the bolt.
The wind flung the door open and a blast of snow blinded her. She ran out,
peering all around from the wide landing, hoping to see the company. There was
no one in sight. They'd fled. She would never catch them. In her condition she
might not even reach the amphitheatre. Where could she go?
Something screamed upstairs, and she knew that it was some thing, a creature
out of the void. No human throat could have formed that wailing screech, no
human mouth shaped it into such an ululating cry. They must still be coming
through the Wall!
The night was punctuated by a series of thuds that shook the building and made
the metal gate rattle. It could have been one monstrous creature battering
another against the walls. The scream sounded again.
'To me!' came a feeble shout from above. That was Rulke, crying for his
remaining Ghashad.
Karan began to go down the steps, then stopped, smelling blood. There was a
body beside her, all broken, mangled and partly eaten. Llian? No, it was a
tall soldier. 'Llian,' she shouted, 'where are you?' Just to think of him out
here hurt her. She could not sense him at all. Karan tried to renew the link
but instantly felt Rulke's presence on the edge of her mind.
As she began to creep down, across in the amphitheatre a flare illuminated a

flying, thranx-like shadow. Her courage
failed her. Karan turned back up the steps, and the bloody moon touched a pair
of the creatures between her and the doors of Carcharon.
She stood there for a full minute before realising, from their unnatural
stillness, that they were also statues. An awful scream echoed across the
ravine. Perhaps it was the injured lorrsk. Karan ran in through the doors and
bolted them behind her.
Where could she go? The cold outside was terrible, as bad as the night she and
Llian had almost frozen to death on the way to Shazmak last winter. Karan knew
how to survive in the mountains, but she must be prepared. She had to
disappear. Where? There was nowhere to hide on the ridge path. She heard
footsteps on the stairs. Racing down the back, she ducked into a dark room
next to the galley. It smelled like a larder. There was only one way to go now

-up the mountain!
Karan felt around, finding something long and bony that reeked of smoked fish
or eel. The smell was unpleasant but it was better than nothing. She scooped
up several lengths, along with a cheese shaped like a breadstick, a string of
onions, another that seemed to be giant radishes, and some dried fruit, hurled
the lot into her pack and turned to run.
There was another cry from upstairs, then a bellow of rage and shouting in a
language she did not know. It sounded as if Rulke was recovering. Boots
scraped on the stone. The door out into the yard banged. She pressed back
against the pantry wall as several Ghashad ran past. They too headed up the
stairs.
Karan ran out into the yard, pulling on her overgloves. It was so cold! The
wind was a blast, a gale of roaring snow that made it impossible to see. Where
could she go? She tried to recall the layout of the yard. She'd looked down on
it many times in the past week, but what she'd seen fitted poorly with the
blizzard-struck geography she was confronted by now.
There were several places where she might get onto the wall. One was up the
back of the yard, a steep stair beside lean-to sheds. She felt her way across,
conscious that there was a cistern here somewhere and if she fell in she would
go straight through the ice and be dead in a minute.
In the dark her progress was painfully slow. Behind her came a Boom! The wind
crushed it into insignificance, but immediately a column of light lit up the
tower, the embrasures flaring yellow. Karan jumped and cracked her knee
against stone. She put out her hands to steady herself. It was the cistern;
she could feel the smooth convexity of the rim. The stairs must be to her
right.
They could not have seen her. Not even that light could have picked her out in
the snowfall, but she was frightened, ill and becoming flustered. Hobbling
around the edge of the cistern, Karan tripped over something in the dark. The
fall jarred the wrist she had broken last year and the food spilled out of her
pack - she'd forgotten to tie the flaps. She felt around in the snow, stuffing
what she could find back in, but it might have been stones for all she could
tell. There came a cry from behind her, an answering cry to one side. They
were searching the yard.
Forget the food! Even in this weather she couldn't hide here. Rulke would be
able to sense her, so close had their minds been. Lights moved toward the
cistern. She groped along the wall, the pain in her knee and wrist forgotten.
Karan found the steps with her shin, then heard, even above the shriek of the
wind, the sound of heavy feet running along the top of the wall. The cries
came from several places now but the feet stopped directly above. She cursed;
they were cutting off the exits from the yard. She fumbled around on the
ground for a stone, crept halfway up the stairs and heaved it to her right. It
clattered against one of the sheds. Almost immediately a flare erupted over
that way. She heard the Ghashad calling but could not tell where they were.
Karan went up the stairs as fast as snow, ice and darkness
would allow, but at the top heard Rulke's voice, an angry shout, and the
footsteps came running back. She felt the force of his will too, exhausting

and confusing her. She crouched at the top of the wall. The footsteps were
close -another flare and they would have her. She rolled over and the guard
caught a foot on her hip and went sprawling. Metal clattered on stone. A
woman's voice swore in pain. Karan kept rolling and suddenly there was nothing
beneath her. She fell silently into darkness.
It was a long way down, eight or ten spans. She landed whoomph in the powdery
snow of the deep drift below the wall. The snow fell back on her head. Her
first impression was that it was much warmer than she had expected. The next,
that she could easily suffocate. Karan packed the loose snow away from her
nose and mouth and pushed her arm up to make an air hole. Then she lay back
for a few minutes' rest, lest illness overcome her completely.
Muffled shouting came from above, and the dull flash of flares, but they moved
away. In darkness it was too far down to see the slight impression, almost
closed over, that she had made in the snow. The search moved back inside the
yard, though Karan knew this fortunate state of affairs could not last.
Climbing out was exhausting, and walking through the drifts almost impossible.
Karan, who had hiked in these mountains since the time she could walk,
understood that very well. She was above the steepest slope of the deep valley
between Carcharon and the adjoining ridge, the ridge up which wound the
eastern way leading eventually to Shazmak, the path her father had come down
just before he died. She could still remember the day they brought his body
back.
Enough of that! She had to get well away before looking for a place to hide.
The only sensible way out of this wilderness was down, but that risked sheer
falls of hundreds of spans into the rocky bottom of the gorge. They would
expect her to head east down the ridge, toward the hard snow, the path and
Gothryme Forest.
Perhaps they were already hunting down there. Certainly they would be in the
morning, and they would find her easily enough once the blizzard let up. Karan
turned in the other direction, up the ridge.
There was no protection from the wind on this side. It was wild and gusty,
occasionally dropping to nothing so that the flakes settled, then rising again
to a shrieking blast that plastered hard pellets of snow to the side of her
hood. The snow was piled against the wall of Carcharon in drifts higher than
her head, though on the very edge of the precipice the ledge had been scoured
bare. Karan picked her way carefully along the rim. She recalled that the wall
ran west up the ridge for a few hundred paces before looping back down the
other side. Beyond, the ridge went up and up, to become a spur of the
mountains.
Up there she would have plenty of warning of their coming. Karan followed the
bare rock on hands and knees, feeling every step of the way ahead, afraid that
the ledge would run out and leave her nowhere to go.
Then an image of the country flashed into her head as she had seen it from a
window a few days ago. She knew exactly where she was. Ahead was a rocky
gully, not much more than a ditch, and beyond that a broken cliff ran behind
the western wall of Carcharon. On this side it swung sharply to the west,
blending into the precipitous rim of the ravine a little to her left. She
would have to be careful there.
On she crawled. Her hands were stiff, unfeeling blobs and her knee hurt. So
did her ear. By the time Karan reached the top it was beginning to get light,
a slow seeping greyness, the air so thick with driven snow that she could see
only a few steps ahead. But that was enough. Any more and her enemies could
see her, for she was still so close to Carcharon that she could have hurled a
pebble over the western wall.
On the steep slope above her the loose snow had been
scoured away by the wind. What remained was a rough crust that was quite hard.
By mid-morning she was high above Carcharon. Further up, the ridge was dotted
with boulders and outcrops. Karan planned to make a snow shelter in the lee of
one of these, where there were snow drifts.
After much searching she found a long outcrop that was eroded underneath. Snow