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He had no way of judging how high they had been when they had been captured, but they had climbed steadily ever since and he was certain that they had risen much further into the mountains than the Hithans had ever been able to reach on their own.

No one had bothered to tell him what their destination was, but as they scrambled painfully upward he began to catch frequent glimpses, between the cliffs, of a single peak, so tall that it appeared to be standing alone even though in fact it rested squarely in the midst of that vast range of staggeringly high mountains. It had the shape of a great, curved fang with the very end broken off, giving it a square, blunt look. Its slopes were so steep that no snow had been able to gather there. It stood like an ancient monument thrown up by a forgotten, mighty race of giants; naked stone shouting their unending, silent defiance to the heavens.

Each time he saw it Cramp felt a strange excitement. He felt intoxicated by the sheer fact that so much solid stone could reach so high into the sky. But at the same time, on a more pragmatic level, he couldn't help but feel uncomfortable. He could only hope that their captors weren't foolish enough to try to force them to climb THAT! Hooves, feet or paws, there was no way a mere mortal could get up there without a sturdy pair of wings. But despite his doubts, it seemed that the centaurs were heading them straight for it.

Sunset in a land that was more vertical than horizontal came just about whenever it wanted to. The sky faded into a darkness swept with stars, brighter than any Cramp had ever before seen anywhere in his travels as a camp slave. Still they continued their forced march upward.

Several of the slaves and even a few of the stiffly proud Hithan soldiers collapsed, dropping onto the cold stone with barely conscious, whistling moans as they struggled to breathe in the thin atmosphere.

Their captors paused only long enough to throw them like so much dead meat over the nearest centaur's equine back before continuing their trek upward. Cramp wondered privately if it wouldn't have made more sense to just go ahead and let the weaker ride in the normal way, sitting upright with their legs astraddle the centaur's backs. But from what little he knew of centaurs, they would never agree to allow any mere human to ride them as if they were nothing more than a simple, dumb horse. Plains centaurs wouldn't, anyway, and it didn't strike him that these little mountain ponies were any less arrogant.

After all that hard climbing, the idea of a free ride did have a certain appeal. He couldn't help but recognize that he was beginning to run out of energy, and his stomach was growling with hunger. The lack of food and the high altitude were making him dizzy. But he had long since learned to live on short rations. Not that his masters back on the estate had been niggardly, but they often just didn't have the money to provide enough food for a growing boy, slave or otherwise.

At least there was plenty of water in the rushing mountain streams as they followed them uphill or occasionally waded through them, the frigid chill numbing their feet and ankles before they could get to the dry land on the far side. The centaurs drove them mercilessly but showed surprising patience when any of their captives stopped to drink from the icy streams. Perhaps they realized that the humans would never have been able to complete the journey on their own two feet if they weren't allowed to quench their parching thirst from time to time.

The light from the sun was still an iridescent strip of blue in the west when the Moon suddenly broke over the eastern horizon, causing Cramp to gasp at its breathtaking size. He had already known that the constant full-moon up there in the mountains was an impossibility of nature. But now, as it reared over the broken wolf-fangs of the mountains to the east, it had swollen until it was easily two palm's width across. Despite its size, the light it cast seemed strangely muted, more tinged with reddish-yellow than the pure blue-white of the lowlands moonlight, and the familiar, smiling illusion of a face had an oddly sinister cast.

As the band of captives and captors made their way across a broad ledge slightly curved like the bottom of an overturned pot, Cramp couldn't take his eyes from the swelling, swollen orb. Without watching where he was going, he stumbled and tripped repeatedly over the uneven stone beneath his sandals.

When he nearly fallen for the dozenth time a firm hand reached out and caught his shoulder. He turned to find himself looking into the face of a young centaur male with the same long, spiky hair as the others but with a surprisingly friendly expression on his vaguely pixie-like face. "What's the matter?" he asked in a teasing, scornful voice. "Never seen the Skull before?"

Cramp just looked at him. He didn't want to admit his ignorance but he didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. Finally the centaur gave a laugh surprisingly like the whinny of a horse. "The moon, silly!" he explained.

"Course I've seen the moon," Cramp muttered, turning away. Then he remembered that he was the captive of these people, the young ones as well as the old, and decided he'd better be a bit more forthcoming. "It just doesn't look like it does back home, is all."

The centaur laughed and twirled his weapon like a baton. Or at least Cramp supposed it was a weapon, though to his inexperienced eyes it looked like nothing more sinister than a shepherd's crook- a slender staff with a hook on the end.

"Nothing's the same here as it is anywhere else in the world," the young centaur told him confidently. "These are the Mountains of the Moon!"

Cramp wasn't impressed. He was educated enough to know at least half a dozen ranges in the Empire that the natives had given the very same name, some of them no more than low, rolling hills. "Is that what you call it?" he asked neutrally.

"It's not what we 'call' anything, " the young centaur told him scornfully. "It's what it is! These are the Mountains of the Moon, and that's the Skull, up there." He pointed to the enormous, hard-faced moon with his staff.

"Pork!" a voice called sharply. They both turned to see Apanna's lean face glowering at them from not far away. "Don't go saying too much," she warned.

"Aw, Mom," the young centaur protested. "It's not like he's gonna be telling anybody." But after giving Cramp a conspiratorial grin he spun on his hooves and trotted lightly away.

Thinking it over, Cramp had to admit to himself that he didn't find that little exchange very reassuring. Did it mean that the centaurs were determined that he would never be set free to spread their secrets in the outside world? Just what did they do with their captives, anyway? Or to them.... Thoughts of hideous tortures and cannibalism forced themselves into his mind.

As the moon rose heavily in the east they scrambled up one more long, sloping expanse of shattered, irregular stone, so steep the humans had to lean forward and use their hands (those who didn't have them tied behind them; the bound soldiers had a nightmarish time of it before finally reaching the top).

Finally they scrambled awkwardly over a bulbous lip of stone and found themselves on another wide ledge of solid stone stretching away before them for perhaps a quarter of a mile before coming up against the sheer cliff face at the base of the enormous, fang-like mountain. The broad ledge was tipped slightly to the right, creating the illusion that they were all standing leaning to one side.

As Cramp looked out across the vast stretch of bare stone his eyes became riveted on an odd structure resting at the base of the mountain, where the ledge and the solid cliff came together. In the dim light it appeared to be a series of horizontal slats, dark against the stone with a curious orange-red light shining between them.

The centaurs lined up their captives at the edge of the ledge, with the great, slanted drop inches from their heels, facing the unnatural structure cut into the living stone. Cramp had no way of judging its size, but it appeared to be several hundred feet high, perhaps considerably more.

The structure created an eerie impression he was, at first, unable to identify. Then finally he realized with a jolt just what it was. The great structure looked almost exactly like a giant rib cage with the flesh stripped away so that only the bare bones remained. The fires burning somewhere behind it added to the effect, creating the horrifying image of blood still pumping through a beating, living heart.

The sight was both gruesome and awe-inspiring. Some of the others moaned or cried out softly in what may have been terror. Cramp just stared until he heard a sudden movement behind him and turned to find that the young centaur, Pork, had returned to his side. "The Chest," he said, grinning at him in the moonlight. His intentions may have been friendly, but to Cramp's eyes there was something mocking and sinister in the way his teeth reflected wetly in the light.

Part Five 

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