James Axler – Demons of Eden

The wolves howled in unison, a quintet wail full of menace.

J.B. scanned the darkness, holding his Uzi in both hands. “Getting closer, sounds like. Surrounding us.”

Joe suddenly wheeled toward Ryan, lowering the golden slice of metal from his forehead. He spoke in a brisk whisper. “A force of Wolf Soldiers is on its way to cut us off inside the pass. My warriors can’t reach us in time to help.”

“How did you come by that tidbit of knowledge?” Doc asked.

Joe didn’t answer him. He continued urgently, “We must get through the pass and into Ti-Ra’-Wa before we’re encircled.”

Ryan exchanged baffled glances with his companions, then faced Joe again. “What kind of opposition can we expect? How many men?”

“Perhaps not so many men, but they have many warriors.”

“More crazy talk,” Jak said disgustedly. “Means animals come against us.”

“They may use trained wolves as fighters, like the one that was set on me in Amicus,” Ryan said. “Not too crazy, but damn messy if they catch us in a narrow pass.”

He made a snap decision. “Let’s get moving. Whatever’s waiting for us, we’ll be better off meeting it in the valley than down here or in the pass.”

Joe remounted and led them up a trail that twisted among giant boulders and gaunt fir trees. As they climbed out of the gully, the moonlight allowed them a glimpse of a crack splitting the stone rampart towering above and ahead of them.

A pulse-quickening sense of danger filled Ryan as he urged his horse upward along the rock-littered trail. They came up clear of the last trees and onto naked granite shelves and ledges. The lofty rampart loomed before them. The pass was a narrow crack, barely twenty feet wide, shaped like a lopsided, upside-down triangle.

The seven people, their horses and two mules moved into it in single file. It was a place of deep, cold shadows and heavy silences. Only the sound of hooves clattering and clinking on loose pebbles broke the brooding quiet.

The pass wasn’t long, barely an eighth of a mile, and ran a fairly straight course. They emerged onto a wide, shelflike ledge splashed with moonlight. Joe reined his pony to a stop and gestured with a sweeping wave of one arm.

“Ti-Ra’-Wa.”

A gasp was torn from six throats.

Chapter Seventeen

Ryan found himself looking down on a place he had never visited, yet had always known in his dreams. He sat in the saddle and stared, not moving, not thinking, not blinking, not even breathing. He looked upon a land magically silvered by the moon and the shining, wheeling constellations overhead.

It was a bowl-shaped valley at least twenty miles in diameter, completely and protectively enclosed by towering ranges that rose up toward stupendous, snow-crowned peaks. The valley was a breathtaking vista of green pastures, forests, ponds, lakes and a river. It smelled clean and fresh, untainted by blood or greed or anger. For a moment he felt dizzy. His skin tingled; his heart raced.

J.B. reined in his horse beside Joe’s. “Where’s the encampment of your people?”

Joe pointed in a southwesterly direction, toward the forest. “That way.”

Straining his eye, Ryan discerned shapes and light, a collection of dimly glimmering structures, strangely interconnected with the surrounding tree line. Though he could pick out no details, it looked like no Indian village he had ever seen.

Joe gestured to the northwest. “The lair of the Wolf Soldiers is there.”

Ryan followed his pointing hand. The river that flowed across the valley, the loops reflecting the moon, bent toward a little cluster of flickering lights on the far side. Beyond those dancing pinpoints of fire, seemingly against the foothills of the upthrusting ramparts, was another light. It shimmered, seemed to vibrate, a vague, unreal, green-yellow glow.

The blood-freezing call of hunting wolves echoed through the pass behind them. The horses shifted nervously as the howl was answered faintly from the great moonlit valley below.

Joe jerked his pony’s head to the left. “They’re signaling to the other warriors. We must ride like the wind.”

“The pack mules can’t go like the wind,” Mildred objected.

“Leave them!” Joe snapped, heeling his mount’s ribs.