The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Vampires, Fantasy fiction, General, Fantasy, Sagas, Horror fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780441010813
Publisher: Berkley Pub. Group
Published: 2003-06-24T02:48:48+00:00

12

The Cleft of Ronda was breathtakingly beautiful from the vantage point offered by the New Bridge. The Carling sisters remained on the bridge for nearly fifteen minutes as Nancy took photographs of the vistas offered on both sides. From the western view she could see the remains of centuries-old battlements in the foothills below the cliffs of the plateau, and to the east the Guadalevin River flowed through a sprawl of whitewashed houses surrounded by lush trees and other greenery.

Perhaps most startling—and it was a sight Paula insisted Nancy take several photos of—was the view available to them when they had reached the other end of the bridge. Looking back from the Old City to the comparatively new, they could see the back of the government-owned luxury hotel that loomed at the edge of the plateau, and the craggy drop below. They could, in fact, see all around the western part of the plateau, the outcroppings of rock and the striations in its composition, the ledges where dense shrubbery grew, the steep cliff face that made Nancy think that a leap from that height would feel like falling forever.

Not that she had any plans in that regard.

“So,” she began, glancing at her sister. “You’ve got the map. Where to first?”

Paula smiled. “Sure you don’t want to toss the map over the bridge?”

Nancy held out her hand. “Try me.”

“I don’t think so.”

While her sister perused the map of Ronda and the descriptions of the various sights in the Old City, Nancy watched the cars and mopeds rumble past. People walked across the bridge as well and she struggled to hear their voices. She heard Spanish, of course, as well as Italian and German, but only one fortyish couple speaking English, and them with British accents, not American. Ronda seemed out of the way, the sort of place that people here knew about but that was not a destination the way other Spanish cities were. Americans had not really discovered it yet, it seemed. She liked that.

“Let’s start up this way,” Paula said.

Together they set off to the east along a road that ran parallel to the Cleft on one side and what the map identified as the family home of the Counts of Santa Pola. The street ran steeply upward and it narrowed the farther they went, their path taking them on a jag to the right, between two rows of beautifully restored buildings that appeared to have been renovated into apartments. At the northeastern edge of the Old City, not far from the protective ramparts, they found a beautiful archway and an ancient Moorish bridge whose actual age, according to the map, could only be guessed at.

Only a stone’s throw away the sisters came upon a strange structure, an array of stone upheavals in the ground with small rounded windows built into them.

“Moorish baths,” Paula informed her sister after consulting the map. “The best preserved in the country, according to the write-up. Built at the end of the . . .

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