Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

      Nothing happened.

      Damn it, he thought, shivering desperately, don’t do this to me …

      The wind must have knocked him a step or two as he’d come through. He patiently crawled upwind and tried again, and then again. The Old God—who knows everything—only knew what was in the darkness with him, or how far this Hell or enclave extended. If there was a stricture against eating anything you found in Hell there was probably not one against something you found in Hell eating you. After what felt like an hour, John located the gate again and crawled through.

      It was still dawn in the garden, delicious with the twittering of birds. And, to judge by the leaf-mold beneath the trees, the relative clarity of the paths among the shrubberies, it was still the year of the last appearance of the Dragonstar, ten centuries ago.

      Any gate that’d have a pavilion built over it, he thought, contemplating the spot in the strange little multiroofed structure where the slightly sulfurous stench lingered, can’t be the one the chaps in the yellow robes didn’t want me to walk through. Let’s take a miss on this one. The three in the walls were all neatly kept: none looked more neglected than the others, or more used. In the tangles of white-flowering shrubs that grew to either side of the central of the three gates—they were about a dozen yards apart, all on what appeared to be the north wall of the garden—he found two insects, or what looked like insects. Dead, fortunately, since they were the length of the knuckle of his thumb and equipped with the most comprehensive sets of chewing, stabbing, and gripping mandibles he’d ever seen in his life. He’d encountered such creatures nowhere else in the garden, but a search of the area around the central gate yielded five more dead ones and a live one that struck him, wings roaring, from a tree, dug its claws into the side of his face—it had gone for his eyes, but fortunately he was wearing his spectacles—and began to chew.