Free Dai-San - 03 by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

to each other. No other sounds.
    For long moments he stood staring in dumb fascination at the statue, hearing, perhaps, some dark, faraway call. He felt an unknown power seeping into his body as if from the glade itself or his proximity to the stone structures. Too, he became aware of an incipient urgency.
    Then he turned slowly away, into the rustling, steamy shadows of the jungle.
    He lifted his eyes for one last look.
    Somewhere close, above his head, feathered wings spread and took off into the clear, calm night.
    Outside, away from the overhanging foliage, the vast geometrical plain was lit below the black bowl of heaven by the full moon and the myriad dancing stars. Away to the east, far down near the horizon, the wide belt of thickly clustered stars stretched in an attenuated arc. Far, far away was fragrant Sha’angh’sei and the yellow citadel to the north, Kamado, where the Kai-feng had already commenced.
    In the building on the north edge of the acropolis, Ronin closed his eyes, waiting for Moichi to return.
    Angrily he stalks the corridors of a corroded, forgotten house. The way is narrow and dark so that he is continually forced to peer ahead in order to guide himself. Because of this, he has no time to look into the doorways which parade past him mockingly on either side, although this is what he wishes to do. Or perhaps not. But in any case, as he strides along, his anger grows, a deep, fierce, nonrational rage. He sees himself in a mirror then and recoils from his image, stumbling away.
    He plunges onward, downward into blackness, along the corridor. There are no others. Soon the doorways end and solid walls rush by him as he begins to run, faster and faster, his boot soles echoing, echoing like drumbeats, a strange cadence to some long hidden song. This is not prudent, he thinks in the lightlessness. Chill take it! As the rage burns like a spreading fire. Out of control; a rush of doom like black, leathery wings. Faster he rushes down the narrow corridor.
    Down and down all in a blur as he feels slightly vertiginous. And now he realizes that the ceiling has been lowering. Stooped and bent uncomfortably, he stumbles forward. Faster.
    He trips, tumbling head over heels through the blackness. Fetched up suddenly, his arms flung over his head, his fingers gripping tightly.
    He hangs, suspended in space, grasping a bar which is the nethermost lip of the corridor-tunnel-funnel, arcing downward like a spout, trying to spit him out. And down.
    Hot and sweating, he holds desperately on while below him a space of incalculable depth and width. Yawning.
    Great clashings and groanings issue forth from the deep. A dimly seen scaffolding somewhere below him, too far to drop, perspective dwindling it to the width of a sword tip.
    Explosions, dull and booming, rising towards him, painful to the ears.
    Still he peers downward, fascinated, terrified, unable to break his gaze away.
    A writhing form appears, glutinous, tentacled, writhing upon a translucent ellipse. A great dark form materializes from out of the deep. Formless, it bends over the monstrous creature, encysting it within its corpus. The tentacles emerge with the thing’s great head, shivering. Two eyes burn, lidless, their pupils jagged shards of obsidian.
    Then, far too rapidly for him to comprehend, the face flickers with changing features, ten thousand within each instant until a single eye is formed long enough for him to be lashed to its baleful unblinking gaze, bound and broken and helpless.
    Heat like a cry. His eyeballs seared, his struggling body cooked and blackened; burning, burning. And a stench, rising …
    ‘I heard you cry out,’ she said, bending over him. He stared sightlessly at her great furred head, grotesque, distorted shadows racing across its pelt in the flickering, dim light of the reed torches in the corridor beyond his doorway.
    Ronin rose to one elbow on his straw pallet, wiped the sweat from his face.
    ‘Are you ill?’
    ‘No. No,’