Early the fourth day, they left the forest behind. The miles wide grassy clearings they passed over grew larger and more frequent and began joining together, forming continuous grassland in which patches of woodland stood. These copses and woody areas grew smaller and further between, until they left the last one behind and a seemingly endless grassy plain stretched ahead of them and on both sides all the way to the horizon. This was the Endless Plains, and it stretched for thousands of miles from the northern arm of the Copper Mountains to the Western Sea and Fengalla Forest to the south.

     Once, it had also spread thousands of miles east to the Silver Mountains, but the vast, central regions around the long, broad and winding river Icea had been occupied first by the kingdom of Agglemon, then by the incomparably mighty Agglemonian Empire, and now by the Shadow. The vast herds of horses and bison had been cleared to make way for the cattle ranches, and later large areas of grass had been ploughed up for farmland. The area had been the breadbasket of northern Amafryka for two thousand years, and the ranches and farms were still there today, except that now they were worked by armies of slaves to feed the vast Shadowarmy.

     As the day wore on, mile after mile of empty grassland passed by beneath them, dotted by the occasional cluster of crumbling ruins. Now and them they saw small herds of wild horses and longhorn cattle, scattering in panic as the winged predators passed by overhead, and every few miles they saw winding, reed banked rivers and the remains of heavily overgrown road. The going was sunny and pleasant, and Drake leaned back in the saddle to enjoy the ride.

     At around midday, though, a cold, unpleasant feeling began to come over him and he sat up straight, looking around nervously to see what was causing it. His fists tightened on the back of his rider's saddle when he saw that a line of darkness had appeared all along the horizon ahead of them, looking like a distant deck of cloud. The strange, sinister feeling was definitely coming from it, and it was growing worse as they approached.

     "Is that...?" he asked, noticing that the others were also looking a little uneasy.

     "Yes," said Resalintas. "The Shadow. It covers well over two million square miles, and even from this distance we can already feel its effects. It will get worse as we approach, but Our Lord is with us, and He will see that our hearts remain firm and strong." He spoke louder, again using War Whisper so that all the others could hear him despite some of them being fifty yards away. "Hear me, men! We approach the Shadow, and already we feel the tendrils of evil emanating from it, reaching into our hearts and souls. Take strength from the fact that Lord Samnos is with us. He will guard us from fear and cowardice. Have faith and fear not!" Drake saw the speech having its effect on the men, breaking them out of the almost hypnotic trances they'd begun to fall into so that they grinned nervously at each other, more scared than they'd been before but also better able to deal with that fear, strengthened by the old priest's presence. He could lead them into the Pit Itself and they would follow, he thought. Will I one day be able to have that effect on people?

     The ranger was studying the land beneath them. "We're a few miles too far south for Sanpaya," he called across to Resalintas. "We need to go a bit further north."

     Resalintas nodded, and they turned in that direction. They soon found an old road, so heavily overgrown that it would probably have been invisible from the ground, but clearly visible from the air as a line of darker, shorter grass, and Pars told them to follow it. It led directly towards the Shadow, and they watched as it grew ominously on the horizon ahead of them.

     As evening approached, they finally reached the edge of the Shadow itself. Drake had been expecting it to be something tangible with a clearly defined edge, like a cloud of smoke. To his surprise, though, he saw that it was nothing more than a region of partial darkness, an area where the light level was lower than normal. It was, literally, like a shadow, as if some huge object hanging in the air above them was blocking out the sunlight. They could see things inside it, a ruined farmhouse with a few roofless barns and a copse of trees, but it was like trying to see inside a dark room from a bright, sunlit garden. You had to concentrate hard to see it.

     As they entered, they seemed to pass through an insubstantial barrier, and suddenly the cold, unpleasant feeling they'd had all afternoon grew ten times worse, scaring them and chilling their blood. The griffins bucked in fright and tried to turn back towards the normal, sunlit lands they had just left and which now seemed to blaze brilliantly as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, and it took every ounce of effort and concentration from their riders to calm them and make them go on.

     Drake saw Resalintas growing increasingly unhappy about something, and wondered whether even he was feeling the effects of the Shadow, but something else was on the older priest's mind and a few minutes later he gave a hand signal for everyone to land. The griffins circled as they descended, looking for a good landing site, but the grass was the same everywhere and so they simply landed where their easy descent took them, the others coming down alongside the first. Resalintas then jumped down out of the saddle and strode across to the ranger. "This town we're going to, Sanpaya," he said. "You didn't say it was actually inside the Shadow. I thought it was just outside, meaning it wouldn't be necessary to bring the griffins in."

     "It was outside, the last time I was there," replied Pars. "It was over two miles outside. I don't understand it."

     "The Shadow must have grown," said the old priest gravely. "How far is it to Sanpaya now?"

     "We're almost there," replied Pars. "Less than a mile now."

     "Then it's grown three miles since you were last here," said Resalintas. "It must still be growing now! How long has it been growing? Has it been doing so at a constant rate or is it accelerating? Gods! We've been unbelievably complacent all these years, sitting on our fat backsides while the evil's been growing! We should have been sending patrols and expeditions regularly to monitor it, at the very least, and going in as far as we could to keep an eye on the inhabitants! No wonder our Lord Samnos thought it necessary to give us a kick up the backsides by ignoring us during communion and sending a pacifist cleric of Caroli to warn us of the threat, and well we deserved it!" The others kept quiet during Resalintas’s outburst, unnerved by his anger and thankful that it was directed as much at himself as at anyone else.

     "The growth of the Shadow is serious enough in itself, never mind anything else we might find here," said the old priest. "We must send someone back immediately to inform Fort Battleaxe."

      He pondered for a moment who to send. Every member of the expedition had been picked for their courage and strength of mind, people most likely to be able to withstand the effects of the Shadow, but even among this select group some were bearing up better than others. Two of Gallit's men, in particular, seemed to be showing some signs of fear and loss of nerve, so he decided to send them both back, rather than have one of them crack later on. "Penner and Weyman," he said. "You will return to Fort Battleaxe and inform General Malchor of the growth of the Shadow. You will also tell him that, in my opinion, the threat of another invasion is to be taken seriously and that preparations to resist it should begin immediately. Do you understand?"

     They said they did, and so their two griffins took off and headed back the way they'd come. The others watched enviously as they shrank in the distance and vanished. There wasn't a man among them who wouldn't have given a great deal to follow them. Drake was beginning to view the mission with misgivings as a creeping coldness began to seep deeper into his flesh and gnaw away at his mind, and even Resalintas himself was beginning to feel the effects of the Shadow, although he would have died before letting it show. The others watched him stride back to his own griffin with indomitable purpose, his back straight as a pike and his chin thrust forward with determination, and suddenly they felt ashamed of their own fears. If he can do it, so can we, they thought. So long as he's with us, we'll be all right. Every man was infused with a new strength and confidence, therefore, as the old priest's griffin returned to the air, the others following close behind.

     They reached the small town of Sanpaya a couple of minutes later and, after circling it a few times to make sure it was empty and unoccupied, landed in the town square, surrounded by the ruined, overgrown remains of the large public buildings. They hacked away at the sickly, yellow shrubs blocking the entrance to a large warehouse whose roof was still more or less intact and led the griffins inside, in case any Shadowsoldiers on flying mounts should pass overhead. The griffins seemed unusually quiet and subdued, and so didn't object to being confined within an enclosed space. As night fell, the riders bedded down next to their mounts, Pars having warned them that it would be a lot worse after dark and that the griffins might try to get away. Having their riders sleeping next to them would, hopefully, reassure them to the point where they would be able to tolerate the effects of the terrible Shadow.

     The rest of them bedded down on the ground floor of an old boarding house. It looked as though it had originally had three storeys, but the top one had vanished entirely and only parts of the walls and the bottom of a flight of stairs remained of the first floor. Parts of the ceiling between the ground and first floors remained, however, giving them a roof over their heads for the first time since leaving Fort Battleaxe.

     Pars was right, it was a lot worse at night. What little light there had been disappeared altogether, leaving them in a darkness so profound that it was almost tangible, and they had to light a small fire as a source of light for the sake of their sanity. Even so, the sense of malignant evil pressed in about them, getting stronger all the time and threatening to send them fleeing in blind panic back to the normal, starlit lands only three miles away.

     Only three miles away! thought Drake in alarm. If it's this bad this close to the edge, what's it going to be like further in? He heard a man shivering in fear a few feet away, only the rigid sense of discipline drummed into him since childhood allowing him to remain in control of himself. Drake himself had never been so scared of anything in his life. It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been something tangible to be scared of, but there wasn't. Just the fear itself, sourceless and aimless. "Have faith and fear not," he muttered to himself. "Have faith and fear not." It helped a little.

     Somehow, they all made it through the night, and some of them even got a little sleep. When the feeble light of dawn began to filter in through the broken, empty windows and the sense of evil began to fade, their relief was so great that they leapt out of bed to greet the new day with an enthusiasm previously unheard of. It was short lived, however. Hardly had Private Cheston, the first up, stepped outside into the heavily overgrown street than he gave a cry of fear. "The Sun!" he cried. "By the Gods, look at the Sun!"

     They all dashed out to see what he was shouting about, and their cries of dismay and fear joined his own. The two priests were the last ones out, and squeezed past the men frozen in the doorway to see what was going on. Resalintas remained calm and in control of himself at the sight that greeted them, but for the life of him Drake couldn't prevent himself from uttering a gasp of horror.

     Instead of the cheerful yellow sun they'd known all their lives, the orb rising in the east was a hideous, sickly dark orange. An unhealthy, diseased colour that made it look as if it were in its death throes and about to die, allowing darkness to fall for ever across the world. It gave the impression that it was leering down at them, as if exulting in the global panic and disaster that would result when it finally died, and simultaneously mocking them for daring to invade this realm of evil. What can you do against a power that can kill even the Sun? it seemed to say. If it can do this to me, just think what it can do to you! The Ilandians, seeing it, wanted to run and hide, to creep away to where it couldn't see them and cower in fear until it set. It was an abomination, a violation of all that was right and decent, and it horrified them even more than the terrible night they had just endured.

     Drake looked to the west, and saw the familiar red sun setting, entirely normal in every way. "Two red suns and no yellow sun," he muttered, making a sign of protection. "What's happened to Tharsol?"

     "Nothing's happened to it," said Pars. "That's just the way it looks from inside the Shadow. It's like looking at it through a piece of coloured glass. If you were outside the Shadow, it would look perfectly normal."

     "It's not natural!" said Bushel, one of Gallit's men, sweating in fear. "We shouldn't be here! This is no place for decent men to be!"

     "Bushel!" roared Gallit. "Get hold of yourself! I won't have you disgracing the company in front of the Captain! Any more outbursts from you and I'll leave you here to help guard the griffins. Understand?"

     "Yes Sir!" said Bushel, pulling himself together fast. To be left behind would be a terrible disgrace, one that would haunt him for the rest of his life. His fear was great but, for the time being at least, his pride was greater, and he made up his mind that if anybody was going to let down the company, it wouldn't be him. "Sorry, Sir, it won't happen again."

     Resalintas was full of admiration for the gruff, foul tempered sergeant and the pride and self discipline that he had instilled in his men. I chose well when I picked him, he thought. Even so, a few words of comfort probably wouldn't go amiss. "Men," he said, "Remember that you are Beltharan soldiers and members of an elite fighting force. If there is any fear to be experienced here, it will be the enemy being afraid of us. Any man who forgets this will answer to me, and any man who shows cowardice in the face of the enemy shall die by my hand. Have faith and fear not!"

     He saw his words having their desired effect as the men forced down their fear and went, grumbling, to collect their equipment, and he nodded in approval. They were good men, no doubt of that.

     Ten minutes later, they were ready to leave. They gathered in the wild, overgrown town square under the cover of a stunted, malformed ironwood tree that had grown since the ruin of the village and Luddin, the leader of the griffin riders, came out to see them off. "We expect to be gone for five or six days," Resalintas said. "Two days to get there, a day or two looking around the place, and another two days getting back. If, at dawn the seventh day, we have not returned, you will return to Fort Battleaxe without us. You will return sooner than that only if the inhabitants of the Shadow become aware of your presence and threaten you. Is that clear?"

     "Yes Sir," replied Luddin. "We'll be here."

     "Good, then there's nothing more to keep us. Sergeant, we're moving out."

     "Yes Sir," said Gallit. "All right you apes, let's go!"

     With sighs of apprehension, the nine of them (ten if you counted the grikon sitting on Pars’s shoulder) started walking east in single file, deeper into the Shadow, whose hideous, oppressive strength continued to grow with every step they took...