Page 4

He thought about that, and nodded. "I'll be as ready as I'll ever be," he said. "I can't stand here much longer anyway. I'd freeze."

She grinned. "That's one advantage of being a demon. Heat and cold don't bother us. Come along."

He followed her up the steps, his breath turning to ice crystals in the air before him.

"In here."

In the deep shadows of the corridor, he couldn't at first see where she was. Then she reached out and pulled at his arm. "There's a passage here, and steps going down. Be careful, it's pretty dark."

That, he discovered, was an understatement. The stairs were steep and narrow, and so dark that if it hadn't been for the amber glow of her skin he would have been descending in the pitch blackness. The stairs descended in a tight spiral, and he had a sudden mental image of a fort somewhere, with a staircase like this and slit windows in the wall. He had known the fort well, and there were things there that he...

His foot slipped on a stair, and he might have fallen had he not had his hands on the wall on either side. Angrily, he pushed the half-formed memory away. This was no time to be wool-gathering.

A moment later, something stepped out on the stairs below.

It was gigantic. It was at least twice as tall as a normal man, and broad to match, and when it moved he heard the chink of chain mail. He glimpsed it a moment in the glow of the demon's skin before she was thrust aside - armour black as night, dark as the gulf between the stars, surmounted by a helmet from whose vision slit two red eyes glowered furiously.

It spoke words. What the words meant, the man had no idea, but the intent was clear enough. It advanced, its metal shod feet clanking on the stairs, and raised a hand. In the hand was a sword big enough to cleave the man to the chest, helmet and all.

For a long, perilously long moment, the man stood frozen. His mind was filled with the image of another iron-clad head, another upraised arm, and he remembered, suddenly and awfully, freezing in fear - long enough for a spiked ball on a chain to begin a crushing descent. He remembered, and he was frozen again. Not even the breath moved in his lungs.

"Man!" the demon screamed. "Man, watch out!"

The man ducked. He began ducking even before the sword rose to its full height, and before it had come halfway down he was throwing himself as far to the side as he could, against the wall.

The armoured figure was fast, much faster than its bulk suggested. The heavy shoulders pivoted, and the sword changed course in mid-fall, and it still would have caught the man against the wall and cut him in two.

But the man was no longer there. He'd hardly touched the wall before he threw himself the other way, and at the instant the sword bit into the stone, he was already scrambling back up the stairs to a higher level. A second swipe of the sword across the stairs missed - he was already too high up.

With a roar, the armoured giant began climbing the staircase in pursuit.

It did not climb far.

The man jumped. He jumped with all his might, bracing his hands against the wall on either side to propel himself. He hurtled through the air like a missile, his boots smashing into the gigantic helmet, all his weight behind it.

Like a great tree cut away at the roots, the giant fell.

It fell in a crash of armour so deafening that the man cried out. His momentum had carried him over the toppling head of the thing, so that he hit the stairs too far away to have it descend on top of him. He fell, already rolling, and twisted in his fall to brake himself against the wall. He'd hardly stopped before he was up already, turning, to meet what the giant would do.

But the giant would not do anything. There was no giant on the stairs, just a jumble of immensely heavy armour, piled and scattered. The helmet he'd kicked rolled down the stairs to his feet, and stopped. It was empty.

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