The rocky escarpment loomed closer and closer as they drove their lathered maars up the boulder-strewn slope. Ylda turned for a hasty glance backward.
"They're gaining, Hardan," she shouted.
"It'll be night soon," Hardan called back, "and the Drylanders fear darkness." But his eyes probed vainly for a way of escape ahead.
His mouth twisted wryly as he recalled his plan of the preceding night. At midday a mounted party of the giant Drylanders, savage yellow-haired, apish brutes, had sighted them and for the last five hours they had found safety only in swift flight. Now, unless a gorge or pass opened in the looming grayness of the brown-splotched cliffs, they were trapped at its base.
Already the triumphant scrawling of the Drylanders sounded in their ears as the ape-things fanned out on either hand. Once that curved line pinned them against the cliff they were trapped, to be killed or, if captured alive, saved for sacrifice to the foul god of the Drylands, Thog Molog.
The sheer escarpment loomed higher and more forbidding as they neared it. Hardan felt his chest grow hollow as the last prospect of escape dwindled. All that remained now was to find a vantage point above their pursuers and sell their lives dearly. To be taken alive was unthinkable.
A huge flat-topped boulder shouldered the cliff, its rim twenty feet above the sandy soil, and toward this Hardan led the way. It was a natural fort that they might hold until darkness clamped down.
Hardan rode his maar close up to the rock, where a crevice split several feet diagonally down the face of the boulder, and swung up from the saddle. A moment later he was crouched on the rock helping Ylda to his side.
Their maars moved away only a few paces and started grazing on the sparse-leaved clumps of ossa and brel at the cliff's base. Hardan turned, facing the cliff, and now he saw an opening in the cliff wall where the boulder's flat rim touched it. It was a low oval of darkness going back deep into the cliff's heart, a cave entrance hid by the great rock.
"In, quickly," he ordered Ylda, "before the Drylanders arrive."