A quarter of a mile further on, the smell was so strong that it caught in his throat and made his eyes water. To try to control the desire to cough, he reached inside his shirt and turned the thought mirror. To his relief, it controlled the need to cough without causing the pain he had anticipated. But it also broke the feeling of contact with the chameleon men. This loss of contact also meant that he now found himself in semi-darkness.
Suddenly, they emerged from the tunnel, and the chameleon man in front of him came to a halt. Niall also stopped, then stepped backwards so quickly that he almost bumped into the man behind him. He was standing within a few feet of the edge of an abyss, and although it was too dark to see far, a wind that blew up from its depths suggested that it might be miles deep. The wind was warm, and was evidently the source of the smell that made his eyes sting. Being unacquainted with volcanic eruptions, Niall was unaware that this was the smell of molten lava.
Niall looked above his head; a sheer cliff face stretched above him, so high that it made him feel dizzy. On either side, a ledge about ten feet wide vanished into the darkness. Niall was glad he was wearing the thought mirror. He had never liked heights, and this place filled him with a queasy sense of unease. He stepped backward and braced his shoulders against the rock; that made him feel more secure.
But where did they intend to go next? He felt they were waiting for something; but now he no longer shared their minds, he was unable to visualize what it was.
Then he saw the creature that was advancing along the ledge toward them, and was glad he was leaning against the wall; otherwise his legs might have failed him. It was big — so big that it seemed to fill the ledge, and at first glance appeared to be headless. As it came closer, he saw that the head was sunk so deep into the huge shoulders that it had nothing that resembled a neck. The shape was more or less human, but a glance at the face told him that it was only distantly related to his own kind. The naked body was covered in thick hair, and the features looked as if they had been hacked out of wood, but left unfinished by the sculptor. The eyes were sunk so deep that it was impossible to see them, while the straggly beard under its chin grew in uneven tufts.
The chameleon men raised their hands to shoulder level in a casual gesture of salute; Niall inferred that they often made this journey. The giant made no gesture in return, but uttered a growl, revealing that many of its teeth were missing.
The sleep-learning machine in the white tower had stocked Niall’s memory with a great deal of knowledge about the past, but its creator, Torwald Steeg, regarded the supernatural or paranormal with total skepticism, with the consequence that Niall was unable to find any item in his memory that offered him any clues about this hairy giant. He decided, upon no particular evidence, that the creature was probably a troll.
The chameleon men stood back to allow the giant to pass, then followed it along the ledge. The great legs made Niall think of ancient, twisted trees. The skin of the enormous feet might have been made of cracked brown leather. The troll’s head was so deeply sunken between its shoulders that from behind it looked headless.
The wind from below came in warm gusts, sometimes so strong that they blew him back against the cliff face. Yet the chameleon men did not even stagger.
They walked for a mile or more, the ledge sometimes dipping, sometimes rising, sometimes twisting in or out, but always maintaining roughly the same width, so that the suspicion grew on him that it had been hacked out of the face of the cliff by living hands. This was confirmed when, after a sharp turn to the right, he found himself facing a vast flight of irregular steps. They varied in height between six inches and two feet, and although the troll continued to plod forward without breaking his stride, Niall and the chameleon men found the going far harder, often having to use their hands to pull themselves up.
The light around them was dim — about the equivalent of a starlit night. Niall kept his eyes fixed on the step ahead; but when, at some point, half a dozen steps in a row were shallow, he raised his eyes to peer upward, and felt his heart miss a beat as he realized that the ascent was almost over and that an immense bridge stretched out from the face of the cliff over the gulf from which the wind continued to roar upward. Moments later they halted on a flat platform of rock, perhaps a hundred yards across. On the far side, the ledge disappeared, probably plunging downward again. Niall suddenly found himself suspecting that they were inside a mountain.
At close quarters he could see that the “bridge” ahead was an outgrowth of natural rock, perhaps fifteen feet in width, whose upper surface was curved like a giant tree trunk. The thought of trying to walk on this in the roaring gale made his heart sink, and he was tempted to crawl on all fours. Then, as the troll led the way, he was relieved to discover that, since the gale was blowing from directly underneath, they were protected from it by the bridge itself. Only a few flurries of wind blew around them.
Although the surface of the rock was irregular, and pitted with holes and cracks, it was not difficult to maintain his balance. And since the thought mirror was now beginning to fatigue his attention, and he anticipated no problems crossing the bridge, he reached inside his tunic and turned it the other way. It took a few minutes to reestablish the mental contact with the chameleon men, but as he did so, the light seemed to increase, and he was able to see that the bridge rose in a curve toward its center, and then descended toward a flat, rocky terrain on the far side, about a quarter of a mile ahead.
Now that he was again sharing the consciousness of the chameleon men, he found he knew the answer to all kinds of questions that had been troubling him. To begin with, he was suddenly aware that the troll was the guardian of this bridge; without his permission, no one was allowed to pass. It seemed that the local trolls lived in caves that were a part of a network of passageways, such as those he had already noticed branching off the main tunnel. Generally antisocial (they particularly disliked human beings), they made an exception in the case of the chameleon men, who were able to do them some kind of favor — whose nature Niall was unable to grasp. The exception fortunately extended to guests of the chameleon men.
What puzzled Niall was that, in spite of their giant protector, the chameleon men seemed oddly tense and nervous, and as they approached the center of the bridge, were pressing forward at a pace he found exhausting. Niall could see nothing to justify their alarm, although the wind seemed to be carrying a smell that aroused unpleasant memories. A moment later he recognized it: rotting flesh, which he associated with his father’s corpse, and with bodies left to decay in the slave quarter. (When Niall first came to the city of the Death Lord, the slaves were kept in ignorance of their true purpose as spider food, and a few slave corpses were allowed to rot to allay suspicion.)
Niall blinked. The chameleon men walking ahead of him had simply disappeared. He could still sense their presence, but they had become invisible. While he was still staring in bewilderment, the smell of rotting flesh intensified, and something cold and wet struck the back of his neck, causing him to stumble onto his hands and knees. A hand jerked at his hair, frustrating his attempt to turn his head. But the hand that went on to grip the back of his neck felt more like the claw of a bird. When he reached behind him, his hands closed on a bony wrist that was icy cold. And as he twisted his head around, he found himself looking at a face that was little more than a skull, with eyes sunk deep in the sockets.
Something grasped his ankle from behind. Inspired by panic, he kicked out, yelling with alarm; whatever it was let go. He managed to turn round, and his fist struck the bony face; the grip on his hair was released. Then, to his relief and surprise, his attacker collapsed to the ground, and for the first time Niall could see it clearly. What lay at his feet seemed merely a heap of foul-smelling bones, like the refuse of a graveyard.
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