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with them till they die. He won’t let it go on any longer. He won’t bring them back. If this one dies,” he sniveled, “I won’t get him back again. And I want to keep him for a while.
    “So get him up,” he screeched.
    The corpse gang, because that’s how the Saxon thought about them now, jerked him to his knees again. The Saxon made his body go limp. He fell, fell hard.
    “Get up,” the abbot screamed, and battered him with the torch.
    The Saxon screamed and moaned but made himself lie still, then let out an absolute roar of sheer agony when the abbot pressed the torch against his side.
    I must be dead, Regeane thought. Yes, that would explain everything.
I must be dead; otherwise how could I see so well in the dark
? She was following the curve of the wall away from the room where the women had conducted her, but she was able to see the long hall around her. In fact there even seemed to be a light ahead, and she heard the distant sound of shouts and screams. Yes, there was a light. Regeane made herself hurry but found when she reached the silver glow it was only the moon shining through broken rafters above. Outside, the storm must have blown itself by. Now the moon shone fitfully through the swiftly moving cloud rack above.
    The wind slashed through the broken roof, raising goose-flesh over every exposed inch of her skin. The cold was bitter, but the breeze was clean and it deadened the smells around her. Snow had blown in through the hole in the roof and drifted on the floor. It was frozen, slippery, and she tried to ease her way around it. Her riding boots were clumsy on the frozen surface.
    “What? Woman? Are you mad? I tried to get you away from him.” The whisper came from the shadows near the patch of moonlight.
    Regeane recognized the voice, that of the old monk who’d let them in at first. “I must find my husband,” she replied.
    “Don’t repeat that lie to me,” he answered with some asperity. “I sent you away with the women to try to save you from our so-called abbot and his demonic crew, and here I find you rushing back. Are you in such a hurry to meet your doom? The man is a runaway slave. I felt his collar when he ran into me at the door. He’s no husband to a woman like you.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Regeane said. “I must help him. He tried to save me.”
    The man, only a shadow in the gloom, clutched at her arm, but she pulled away with surprising ease. Just then a terrible scream ran out.
    “No-no-no,” the old man moaned. He snatched at Regeane again, but she was already running toward the chapel. She saw big double oak doors just ahead. One was closed, the other open just a crack. Faint light spilled out into the empty hall.
    She stretched out one hand and pulled it open.
    To Maeniel, the sensation was more like flying than falling. A fall is the primal terror, yet he was still not as afraid as he might have been, because the snow-filled darkness was so thick. It seemed to him that the trail just vanished, then he was flying, then he landed. The wind went out of him in a rush. He might have lost consciousness, but he wasn’t sure. He only knew he’d been slammed hard into a pile of rocks, the wind completely knocked out of him. He did what a human would do in like circumstances: he lay very still and tried desperately to get his breath.
    While he was doing so, his vision began to clear. Not much help, he thought, since all he could see were long draperies of blowing snow whipped like gigantic lengths of fabric by the storm winds. But when he looked up, he was able to see, even in the misty gloom, that the trail was gone, wiped out by a monster avalanche that had plunged down from the glacier-bound mountain slope above.
    Regeane,
he thought, and began to struggle. But it seemed an eternity before he could manage to get to his feet. By then the light was getting better, and he was able to see what saved his life. He was on the spread of snow from the avalanche itself. The