The Last Guardian by David Gemmell

yours, child. Nor ever will I be.”
    Shannow rode on, pausing only to glance down at the dead beast. It looked almost exactly as Shir-ran had in those last days—the spreading lion’s mane, the hideously muscled shoulders. Shannow touched his heels to the stallion’s flanks and cantered down to the stables, where the hostler came out to meet him.
    “I’m sorry, Meneer, but I couldn’t stop them. There were eight … ten of them. They took three other horses that weren’t theirs.”
    “Who were they? The thieves?”
    “They ride for Scayse,” replied the man, as if that answered everything.
    Shannow dismounted and led the stallion into the stable. He stripped the saddle from him and flung it in a corner; then he groomed the horse, rubbing the lather from him and brushing the gleaming back.
    “It’s a fine horse,” said the hostler, limping forward. “Must be seventeen hands. I’ll bet he runs like the wind.”
    “He does. What happened to your leg?”
    “Timber cracked in the mine years ago. Busted my knee. Still, it’s a damn sight better living above the ground than below. Not so much coin, but I breathe a lot easier. What was all the shooting?”
    “They killed the lion they captured,” Shannow told him.
    “Hell, I’d like to have seen that. Was it one of them man-demons?”
    “I do not know. It ran on its hind legs.”
    “Lord, what a thing to miss! There ain’t so many as there was, you know. Not since the gates vanished on the wall. We used to see them often in the spring. They killed a family near Silver Stream. Ate them all, would you believe it? Was it male or female?”
    “Male,” said Shannow.
    “Yep. Never seen no females. Must be beyond the wall, I reckon.”
    “Does anyone ever go there?”
    “Beyond the wall?” queried the hostler. “No way. Not ever. Believe me, there’s beings there to frizzle a man’s soul.”
    “If no one goes there, how can you know?”
    The hostler grinned. “No one goes there
now
. But five years ago there was an expedition. Only one man—of forty-two who started out—got back alive. It was him that told about the sword in the sky. And he only lived a month, what with the wounds and the gashes in his body. Then, two years ago, the gateways vanished. There were three of them, twenty feet high and as broad. Then one morning they were gone.”
    “Filled in, you mean?”
    “I mean
gone
! Not a trace of them. And no mark of any breaks in the wall. Lichens and plants growing over old stones like there never was no gates at all.”
    She knew the problem and could see the results. Yet she was powerless to change the process … just as she had been powerless to save her son. The woman known as Chreena prowled the medi-chamber, her dark eyes angry, her fists clenched.
    One small Sipstrassi Stone could change everything; one fragment with its gold veins intact could save Oshere and others like him. Little Luke would have been alive, and Shir-ran would still have been standing beside her, tall and proud.
    She had searched the mountains and the valleys, had questioned the Dianae. But no one had ever seen such a stone, black as coal and yet streaked with gold, warm to the touch and soothing to the soul.
    She blamed herself, for she had carried her own stone to this distant land and had used it to seal the wall—one great surge of Sipstrassi power to wipe out the gates that would have allowed man to corrupt the lands of the Dianae. And then she had made the great discovery—manhad already corrupted them … back before the Second Fall.
    The people of the Dianae. The people of the DNA. The cat-people. There had been mutants and freaks in the world for hundreds of years. Chreena had been educated to believe they were the result of the poisons and toxic wastes that littered the land, but now she was beginning to see the true wickedness that was the legacy of Between. Genetic engineering had gone rogue in a hostile environment. New races were birthed; others,