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.There was nothing for the General to do but exercise patience, and in that art he had had long training.The demons were gone, and in half an hour, Rostov thought, his party might be able to get moving again.Then came an all-too-familiar twisting in his gut, alerting him that the demons were coming back.He could even tell the direction now.That way, through the other tunnel.Gripping Sightblinder and setting his jaw, the General waited for his foes to show themselves.Kebbi, pushing on alone toward the light, knew such gratitude as he was capable of when he felt the presence of the demons fall farther and farther behind him.At about the time that presence vanished from his perception entirely, he found himself dimly able to sense some kind of threshold of magic not far ahead.He could hope, at least, that this would offer him a way of emerging from the City.Proceeding carefully, now standing erect, he became aware of strange presences around him at varying distances.Not that they frightened him, particularly; after the demons, these ghostly half shapes were as nothing.One moment those distant figures were insubstantial ghosts, and the next they were real forms, mundane and solid humanity.But who?Kebbi flattened himself against a wall in fear.As the folk approached, a dim and bulky shape came with them, and strange noises issued from it.A horrible squeaking.He had heard that demons' voices sounded like-He could see the people clearly now.Four of them, two men, two women, in shabby garments, and they were armed with mops and brooms.The noise proceeded from the wheels of the refuse cart they pushed before them.After that, Kebbi had little further trouble in getting out of the Temple-though on doing so he was somewhat amazed to find himself emerging from the basement door of a RedTemple quite different from the one that he had entered in the City.He was definitely not in the City of Wizards anymore.He was certainly in some city, though.A warm and muggy place, large and heavily populated.He could see palm trees.Wherever this was, he was free.The wizard had somehow struggled to his feet, but that was the most he could manage, and he was threatening to fall again.Supporting Karel with one arm, and with his soldiers, none more than half-conscious, huddling close to him, General Rostov wavedPage 104ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlSightblinder at a veritable horde of hideous demonic creatures.They had come pouring in through the tunnel entrance like so many semitransparent puffs of steam or smoke.In the boldest voice that he could manage, he roared at them all to go to hell.In terms usually reserved for blundering colonels, he directed them to get their miserable, spavined, worthless carcasses out of his way, before he decided to unleash his wrath upon them.There might have been a dozen or a score of the foul things before him, and all recoiled abjectly from his wrath.They seemed to be on the point of retreating.From the way they were cowering now, and abasing themselves before him, Rostov was suddenly sure that they were convinced he was Wood himself.The presence, just here and now, of their mighty human master sorely puzzled these foul creatures, and some of them raised hideous bone-rattle voices in an attempt tojustify their presence; but none of them were about to dare to argue with the man they were convinced was Wood.In another moment they were gone.And none too soon.The General, gasping, drenched with cold sweat, sank to the floor and for the first time in forty years allowed himself the luxury of nearly fainting.Murat lost his quarry in a maze of crawling passages, but like his quarry he eventually managed to achieve his freedom.Unknown to the Crown Prince, his experiences in finding his way out were very similar to those of Kebbi.Murat, too, emerged from a different Red Temple than the one he had so hurriedly entered.One difference in the experience of the two men was that Murat immediately knew where he was when he came out.In his early youth he had several times visited the city of Bihari.Within an hour after the demons had been routed, Rostov, Karel, and their surviving troopers were all more or less recovered from the encounter, at least sufficiently to travel.The wizard now resumed his role of guide, and led the party on.Long before they found their way out of the Temple, the Tasavaltans realized that they had somehow passed into a different building from the one that they had entered in the City.For the time being at least, Wood's force of demons had been dispersed, or had lost the scent, or were reorganizing.Against the more common difficulties and snares that one Temple or another might present to a traveler in its protected regions, Karel's own powers were more than adequate protection [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]