Anthony, Piers If I Pay Thee Not In Gold

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creature, or one like it, knew they were here, and was coming for them.
With a curse, she urged her mule onto the bridge; it scrabbled up onto the slope with clattering hooves,
its ears laid back, but perfectly willing to move. Faro's was right behind her, and Ware's stallion ahead of
her. The men scrambled to get off the bridge and out of the way.
Ware shouted to the drivers to take the wagons deeper into the rock-and growth-covered landscape on
the other side. "Move those wagons out of here!" he called, his voice somehow amplified and carrying
above the sounds of panicked shouting, mules braying, and running feet. "We don't know how far in it
can go!"
Now there was no order to their retreat; it was something of a panicked rout. The drivers whipped up the
mules, who were not loathe to move; they rolled their eyes and brayed, but threw themselves into the
harness to haul the wagons over the smaller rocks and deeper into what Xylina hoped was a safe zone.
If the different color of sand meant that the sand-creature could not come there, they would be safe. If
not-
First they had to get off the bridge! For the moment, that was all that mattered; Xylina's mule strained
beneath her, sweat streaming down its sides, panting with exertion. The men on foot scrambled over the
opposite side of the bridge and down onto the rocks, just as the three riders crested the top of her
creation. Xylina dared a glance to the side, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw how near the
mounding sand was.
She laid her whip along the mule's withers, heedless of how he got to the other side so long as he did so.
"It's coming!" she screamed to the other two. "I think it's going to ram-"
The mule slipped, his haunches slinging sideways-but he sensed the nearness of danger, and did not stop
for a second. They were nearly off the bridge, their mounts scrambling for a free space among the
fleeing men. And at that precise moment, whatever it was beneath them reared up.
Something as white and glistening as the sand rose nearly the height of the bridge; sand poured from it
in a cascade, and the dogs in the last wagon shrieked as if they had been disemboweled. The white
shape, still clothed in sand, rammed into the middle pillars of the bridge.
She never really saw what it was or anything other than that vague white shape: only flying sand and
something huge. But there was no doubt of the result.
The bridge shuddered, sending all the support pillars tumbling with an avalanche-roar, and then fell over
sideways. The crash nearly deafened them all, and the dogs howled again, yet were too panic-stricken to
flee the shelter of the wagon. As they cowered behind a bale of supplies, another cresting wave of sand
reared up and fell down over the toppled bridge, and engulfed it. There was a grinding noise, and the
sand where it had been churned wildly in a kind of whirlpool.
Xylina's mule had fallen to its knees, and she had been thrown against the saddlebow, knocking the
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breath out of her. She somehow managed to stay in the saddle; she was afraid that the mule might freeze
in terror, but it wanted no part of whatever was underneath that churning maelstrom, and it staggered to
its feet without any undue urging on her part. It bolted to the hoped-for safety of the wagons, in
company with every other member of the expedition. By the time Xylina reached the wagons and dared
to look behind her, the last pillars and the ends of the bridge were sinking into the sand, as if they were
being pulled down by something beneath the surface.
But whatever it was did not venture into the area of the black sand and rocks.
When they were certain it was not going to follow them, they were able to collect their scattered wits
and breath. With a feeling of awe and amazement, they watched while it finished the work of
demolishing the bridge, then turned and churned off back the way it had come.
The new zone seemed free of hazard, and extended for some distance. The mist remained, however,
obscuring whatever lay beyond this zone. Although Xylina and Faro strained eyes and ears, and Ware
made whatever arcane efforts were possible for demons, they were unable to detect any invisible threats.
That left only the visible ones, and there did not seem to be anything large enough here to count as such.
What life moved and crawled through here was all small. There might be snakes, scorpions, or some
kind of equivalent, but there was little cover to hide them, and they should, by all rights, be easy to
avoid.
This place looked rather like an odd rock-garden, in fact, and not like anything natural at all. It was full
of strangely shaped boulders, collections of stones, and rock formations, none of which looked as if they
belonged here, or matched the brown-black sand beneath them. These stones were of so many different
kinds of rock that Xylina could not imagine how they had all come to be here. Some even looked as if
they had been freshly chiseled from an alabaster cave: huge icicle-formations of stone, gleaming pale
and wet in the sunlight, thrusting upwards from their soft beds of dark sand.
The stones were bewildering shades of color, everything from the red-orange of the Pacha country to the
black of obsidian flows. There were huge boulders of green marble beside rough slabs of blue-gray
slate; broken sandstone tumbles, water-smoothed quartz, and monoliths of granite. Schist and gneiss,
porous limestone and chunks of coquina. And yet their variety paled beside that of the strange growths
that flourished among them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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