There was an overgrown path up to the moor land where the Dancers stood, even though it was only a few miles from the town. Hunters tracked up there sometimes, but only by accident. It wasn't that the hunting was bad but, well - there were the stones.
Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the mountains. Druids built them as weather computers and since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one there were generally plenty of ancient ones around.
No druids ever came near the Dancers.
The stones weren't shaped. They weren't even positioned in any particularly significant way. There wasn't any of that stuff about the sun striking the right stone at dawn on the right day. Someone had just dragged eight red rocks into a rough circle.
But the weather was different. People said that, if it started to rain, it always began to fall inside the circle a few seconds after it had started outside, as if the rain was coming from further away. If clouds crossed the sun, it'd be a moment or two before the light faded inside the circle.
William Scrope is going to die in a couple of minutes. It has to be said that he shouldn't have been hunting deer out of season, and especially not the fine stag he was tracking, and certainly not a fine stag of the Ramtop Red species, which is officially endangered although not as endangered, right now, as William Scrope.
It was ahead of him, pushing through the bracken, making so much noise that a blind man could have tracked it.
Scrope waded through after it.
Mist was still hanging around the stones, not in a blanket but in long raggedy strings.
The stag reached the circle now, and stopped. It trotted back and forth once or twice, and then looked up at Scrope.
He raised the crossbow.
The stag turned, and leapt between the stones.
There were only confused impressions from then on. The first was of-
-distance. The circle was a few yards across, it shouldn't suddenly appear to contain so much distance.
And the next was of-
-speed. Something was coming out of the circle, a white dot growing bigger and bigger.
He knew he'd aimed the bow. But it was whirled out of his hands as the thing struck, and suddenly there was only the sensation of-
-peace.
And the brief remembrance of pain.
William Scrope died.
William Scrope looked through his hands at the crushed bracken. The reason that it was crushed was that his own body was sprawled upon it.
His newly deceased eyes surveyed the landscape.
There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now you realise you're going to have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you're sober now and so are they but you can both remember.
“Oh,” he said.
The landscape flowed around the stones. It was all so obvious now, when you saw it from the outside. . .
Obvious. No walls, only doors. No edges, only comers-
WILLIAM SCROPE.
“Yes?”
IF YOU WOULD PLEASE STEP THIS WAY.
“Are you a hunter?”