He asked: “Have you ever landed near the lake?”
“No. We have no reason to go there.”
Niall recalled that death spiders disliked water. Asmak even avoided floating above the dark surface, preferring to skirt the edge of the quarry.
Now once again they were moving toward the mountains. They were crossing a hollow land that looked like a swamp: rivulets of brown water, brown tussocks of coarse swamp grass, and areas of a bright green vegetation that reminded Niall of the Delta. Then came wooded foothills, whose twisted, olive-colored trees covered a landscape of rocky outcrops. Then came the mountains, whose green lower slopes soon turned into barren expanses of gray rock and scree which rose steeply until they vanished into the mist. They passed into a black raincloud, and Niall was aware of drops of water blowing against his face, although when he raised his hand to brush them away, he discovered that his skin was dry.
The mist flew past them, then dissolved suddenly into dazzling sunlight. The scenery below them was breathtaking: deep valleys, some of them descending to the plains on either side, bare rocky slopes with knife-edged outcrops of rock, and streams of white rushing water that plunged down the mountain side and wound their way into sky-blue lakes that filled the hollows. As they floated above one of these lakes, Niall was able to see through its crystal-clear water into the brown mud in its depths.
On the lower slopes of the mountains there were patches of woodland and an occasional ruined building; one of them looked like an ancient monastery, with its bell tower still defying the elements, another like a shattered fortress. And on the coastal plain that lay between the foothills of two domelike mountains there were even the remains of a town. Whenever such a place aroused his curiosity, the spider’s mind obligingly enlarged the object, so that Niall was able to study it in detail. Now he found himself looking down on a desolation of roofless houses and rubble-filled streets that left no doubt that the town had been deserted for centuries. It had once been fortified, for it was surrounded by an embankment of earth, with lookout posts built of stone. A closer view of the town revealed smoke-blackened walls and charred roof beams. On the banks of the river that flowed through its center lay the blackened remains of several boats. Nearby on the mud was an object that was unmistakably the ribcage of a man. A few feet away lay a human skull.
“Does this place have a name?”
“Men call it Cibilla, after their moon goddess.”
“And who destroyed it?”
“I do not know. It happened in the days of the great war between spiders and humans, long before I was born.”
“But do you people keep no records?”
“Records? I do not understand the word.”
Now, at last, Niall was able to understand why the spiders were unable to offer any suggestions about the whereabouts of the kingdom of the magician. Unlike human beings, they seemed to have no legends and traditions that enshrined the knowledge of the past. It was also clear that, in this vast wilderness of rock and barren moorland, the entrance to an underground city would be virtually undetectable, even to a fleet of a million spider balloons. The underground city of Dira had remained undetected for many years, even though its goatherds and shepherds had risked discovery every day as they drove their flocks out to graze. And these misty hills, with their caves and rocky outcrops, offered far more protection than the glaring desert landscape on the shores of the great salt lake.
“Could we go higher?”
“Of course.”
A moment later, they were surveying the same landscape from a height of at least ten thousand feet. Now he was able to see that the mountains stretched northward like a gigantic backbone, bending eventually to the northeast. To the left lay a wide flat plane that stretched toward the sea; in the eastern plain there were lakes and rivers, and beyond them, a lower range of mountains. From this height he was able to see that the backbone was broken in two places by wide transversal valleys, the nearest of which was about ten miles away.
Asmak pointed toward it. “That is the limit of the domain of the Death Lord. We call it the Valley of the Dead.”
“Who chose that limit?”
“Why, the Death Lord himself.”
“Have you ever been beyond it?”
“A few miles only. More than that would serve no purpose.”
Niall could see his point; the mountains beyond the Valley of the Dead looked more bleak and forbidding than those that lay behind them to the south.
“Please take me to the boundary.”
With the speed of thought, they were hovering over a wide green valley, in the center of which there was a long and narrow lake, from whose ends issued two rivers. The Valley of the Dead must have been carved by a glacier, for its sides were steep, towering up to a height of more than a thousand feet. But what immediately drew Niall’s attention was the battlemented wall that ran across the flat plain to the north of the lake. Niall had never seen such a wall. Its color was gray-green, like that of the landscape, and it ran from the sea coast to the west for as far as the eye could see on to the eastern plain. Its surface was smooth, unbroken by doors or other entrances. In response to Niall’s curiosity, Asmak descended until they seemed to be standing on top of the wall, which was constructed of rough slabs of stone held together by some kind of cement. It was flat and about twenty feet wide, with a low parapet on either side. The southern side, Niall observed, sloped down at an angle to its base, while the northern side was a sheer drop of about eighty feet to the plain below. At regular intervals of a few hundred yards there were square towers that rose a dozen feet above the top of the wall. They were now standing within a few feet of one of these, and Niall could see that it was a kind of guardhouse, with a passageway running straight through it. Like the rest of the wall, the structure gave an impression of enormous strength.
“Who built the wall?”
“I do not know. They say it was there before the coming of the spiders. Perhaps the men who built that place.”
Niall followed the spider’s gaze, and for the first time noticed the buildings halfway up the great cliff. They were the same gray-blue color as the rock, which is why Niall had not noticed them immediately. There were dozens — perhaps hundreds — of these buildings, carved out of the solid rock face. Niall experienced a cold sensation down his spine.
“Could that be the city of the magician?”
But the spider made a gesture of dissent. “Impossible. It has always been deserted.”
Niall gazed on the valley for a long time. Even the lake was awe-inspiring. Its steep sides plunged down to water whose black surface suggested enormous depths. It looked as if the earth had split asunder in some volcanic convulsion, and then filled with water.
“And where is the place where Skorbo crashed?”
“Over there, in the Gray Mountains.” The spider pointed to the mountains to the north. At the same time, their perspective changed, so they were looking down on them from above. This part of the range was far more wild and precipitous than its southern reaches. Some of the peaks were like needles; others had the flat tops of volcanoes. It was a phantasmagoric landscape, quite unlike the mountain landscape in the desert of North Khaybad, where Niall had spent his childhood.
The place that Asmak was now indicating was a high plateau between two snow-covered peaks; it looked bare and inhospitable, covered with broken fragments of rock.
“Did he tell you how it happened?”
“Yes. He said that he was caught in a storm, and that the wind had made him lose control.”
Niall stared at the unsheltered landscape. “What happened to the spider balloon?”
“It was torn against the rocks.”
That was easy to understand; some of the rock-shards had edges that looked like razors.
“But what did he do with the balloon?”
Asmak was evidently troubled by the question. On an open plateau like this, the material of a torn spider balloon should have been clearly visible, even from a height of a thousand feet.
“I cannot recall seeing it.”
As he spoke, Niall realized suddenly that this was not a real plateau that he was looking at, but merely the image of the plateau in the spider’s mind. He laughed at his own forgetfulness. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
But Asmak replied seriously: “You are right. None of our patrols have reported seeing the remains of the balloon. But why should Skorbo lie about it?”