Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/242

  to sleep when the Sayaks had appeared in the vicinity?

A glint of crimson light pierced one of the cracks in the walls. Edith's ears had been strained for a certain sound. Somewhere, beyond the mountains, the sun was rising, and she had not heard the familiar trumpet blast that resounded in Yakka Arik at dawn. Its absence was vaguely disturbing.

She was conscious of the presence of unknown forces mustering around her. This feeling was not premonition or fear—it was certainty. The world of Yakka Arik had been disturbed. The trumpets were silent Out of this silence something would come to the Kurgan. By and by Monsey noticed the evidence of dawn. He buttoned his jacket at the throat and beckoned her.

"Come! You can see now."

Her limbs stiff with cold, Edith followed him out into the still more desolate entrance chamber of the castle hold. Gray light from the embrasures illumined it. She saw a roughly made ladder of saplings resting against the massive sandstone of the wall. Up this Monsey motioned her to climb.

He followed the girl into a square hole in the ceiling. Rotting timbers on the floor below afforded evidence that once a stairway had penetrated where the ladder led. They stood in a very small, dark space. From above came a glimmer of light.

"The first floor of the tower itself," explained Monsey. "Go on."

A winding stair, broken down in places and illumined only by thin arrow slits in the wall, conducted them to the tower top—a nest of tumbled cedar timbers.