He withdrew his head and slid through feet-first, dropping into a deep wide rocky pocket gouged out by the ravening mountain torrents. Ylda followed, slipping into his arms easily, but her face turned away stiffly as he set her on her feet. Hardan growled and turned away, disgusted at the little sarif's continued show of dislike.
"Hurry up, Kern Rensom," he said.
The Aarthman's be-whiskered face appeared. Under that brushy brown stubble his brown skin had paled to a strangely green shade.
"I don't know," he said uncertainly. "The Drylanders claim this is the abode of Thog Molog. I've seen crude pictures of their god. It's a many-armed ghastly monster bigger than a Drylander's communal yad."
Hardan too sensed the alien silence and remoteness of this close-cropped expanse of sward. Almost he expected to see a flock of the woolly, vari-colored bladts grazing there, so close was the brook-watered grass trimmed to its roots. Something, ancient foul things, must lurk in those brooding ruins and come out in the moonlight to eat. No grass could grow so uniform and short.
So they moved together, speaking no more, through the hushed silence of growing dusk, into the shadows of the vast vertical mass of the ancient wall that dipped southward. They searched for a way to scale that soaring obstacle, vainly.
The rim of the upper sea, the false sea that was vurth floating lightly above the true sea far below, they reached and Hardan felt the tingling thrill of a stranger returning home as the delicate moist tendrils contacted his exposed flesh. He heard Ylda's sigh of sensuous ecstasy as she sucked in the dank richness of the confined atmosphere, and he heard the Aarthman breathing unsteadily as though half-choked.
"How you can stand this pea-soup," came the little man's strangled voice, "is beyond me. It's like walking underwater; yet breathing."
Hardan laughed and slipped out of his cumbersome padded garb. Now he could climb the wall or fight more freely. The intangible unseen menace of the walled city and fields now struck him with returned power. He bound the suit into a pack on his shoulders and set about examining the damp and crumbling wall. The moisture had loosened its ancient bonding material and he found many foot and hand holds.