Diskan did not notice the device hung at his belt. On the dial the needle quivered, fluttered; the clicking was a solid purr that did not reach his deaf ears. All that was real for him now was what lay out there in the night, stirring, moving. And this time—surely this time—he was going to learn what it was!
Chapter 10
Not a sound but a vibration in the air, through his body, was transmitted by the stone on which he crouched. A summons? After it, a quiver, as if each and every heavy stone in these walls strove to answer, only had no way of giving voice. Diskan waited tense, yearning—
Again!
His body obeyed without any command from his brain as he stood up. In his veins, the blood flowed more quickly; he felt alert, ready for anything that might come. The deadening fog of fear had been rent into tatters, was shriveling from him.
In the dark, needing no physical sight as a guide, Diskan found the stairs, began to descend. Beat—once again! A heart awakening into life—Xcothal's heart? In his eagerness, he stumbled, almost fell, and that mishap taught him caution. Round and around, down, always waiting for that beat of life within the core of ancient death.
He was on the threshold of the wedge-shaped chamber when it vibrated for the fourth time. And he saw the furred ones moving up the steps, slipping around and about him, as if he had no existence in their eyes. There was no reckoning the number of their dark shapes in this pale light. Diskan only knew that they were many and that they came from all directions, pressing with purpose up the outer steps, toward the wedge chamber. The brothers-in-fur! But they could not be alone—there must be the others!
Bewildered, Diskan drew to one side just within the doorway, his eyes searching for what he felt must be there, though what he sought, he could not explain. The interior of the huge hall, which had been so dusky, was now growing lighter. Sparks hung in the air here and there, always above the mass of furred bodies, reared up on their broad haunches, their heads all turned to the narrow far end, as if fixed in a hypnotic stare on some point or thing he could not see. There were so many of them!
Now their heads moved, a rhythmic ripple that ran back like a breaking wave to Diskan's place by the door. And following that ripple came the vibration, stronger now, a beat that shook the building, the living things in it, as if the very earth heaved.
Ripple, ripple. With a start, Diskan became conscious his own head had joined in the slow bend forward and back. The sparks in the air grew brighter. They were of different colors, gems tossed aloft to hang in brilliant array—green, blue, orange, scarlet, violet, shades in between, dazzling to watch.
From over the heads of the animals, the lights moved out and away, drifting to the bare walls. But where they touched the stone they melted, spread in glistening runnels and shooting trails of jeweled fire. And they were not still, those runnels and trails, but moved, interweaving, loosing, weaving again another design, as had the dusky shadows. Only this was the splendor of which that had been the dying ashes.
Diskan shaded his eyes with his hand from what was close to searing brilliance. He longed to watch, and yet he could no longer do so. He was on his knees, his head moving in time with those of the animals about him. And from them, a vast wave of ecstasy, which was also expectancy of some greater wonder to come, rose about him.
Boom! Boom! Xcothal awakening—the past returning to flower again.
Yes! Yes! Diskan's lips shaped the words he could not voice aloud. To know—to be in Xcothal in this hour! This was what he had sought without understanding. He stood on a threshold; take only one step and wonder beyond reckoning was his!
A scream—
The fabric of lights, of rapport with the animals, was rent as if a knife had slashed it. Dazed, Diskan shook and shivered. He fell forward, and that saved his life, for over him a blaster bolt blazed, to strike the wall and scar it with a core of crimson destruction.
Diskan twisted, still too much under the spell to know more than that it had been broken. He stared up, bemused, at the smoking evidence of that shot. Then he was knocked down and rolled over by furred bodies launched at him. And by the time he fought his way free of those, his wits were back.
Had he really been attacked by the animals? Diskan thought not as he sat up, back against the wall, well out of line of the doorway from which that blast must have come. His companions in that ritual had merely removed him speedily from the line of fire.
Fire from an off-world weapon! Now a piercing buzzing from his belt! Had the device guided the enemy here? Diskan unhooked it and almost threw it from him, his grief and anger at the interruption turning into a smoldering rage. No, he would hunt that other down! He had been close to dying in that ray, yes. But what was worse, he had lost that which had been almost within his grasp here. And for that there was no pardon! This thing he held in his hand, it could perhaps guide him to his attacker.
However, as he scrambled up, the animals pressed about him, imposed their bodies as a barrier between him and the doorway.
"No!" Diskan strove to elude their guard. "Let me through!" He thrust against them. Then he remembered the stunner, dragged it out, and sprayed widely with it.
That cleared a path as the animals went down, temporarily paralyzed. Diskan ran into the night, the com device in one hand, the stunner in the other. Free of the chamber, he paused. To charge ahead into a blaster was stupid. Logic took over, forced control that his rage had broken. Do not run into death—hunt, trail, use what cunning he had.
He studied the dial on his palm. The needle swung to his left, in the general direction of the ruined chamber in which he had found the dead man. Here it was dark; his sight was still dazzled by the lights that had snapped into nothingness at the firing of the blaster. But the dark could be a cloak as well as a disadvantage. Also he remembered the way well enough. With his shoulder against the wall, Diskan crept along the curve.
The buzz of the device was less strong; his quarry must be well ahead. But the needle pointed fixedly on. And he would find him—most certainly he would find him!
Behind him forces he did not sense stirred.
He was close; he must not get away. So close we were, brothers!
Let him go; he is useless to us now. To himself he has returned. Perhaps he is not for our shaping.
Close! There was a chorus of that, beating down doubts.
Until he comes again to the threshold by his own wish, he is useless. Let him seek now his kind; let that be the test.
There was opposition, ready and hot, but it was overruled.
If he goes to his death, then that is the ordained pattern, and we cannot change it by all the arts. We cannot be whole with that which is flawed. He must aid in his own shaping, or the shape will be imperfect. Let him go free to do what is in him to do. Only when he has freed himself can he enter the portal we open to him. We watch, we wait, but we cannot move until he is again with an open mind and heart.
So close—Wistful, regretting.
Close, yes. But now, waiting—Our renewal is delayed; we cannot change that, for any recharging will take time, much time.
Diskan entered the room with the broken walls, his eyes turned away from the pile of stones that was now a tomb. In the dim light of the room, he could see the needle pointed to one of the wall rents. Crazy to go in there without a torch, without any hope of seeing what lay ahead, while the one he hunted could be in ambush. But, crazy or not, he was going!
An incautious step among the rubble, and he fell heavily. As he lay there for a moment, he heard a sound ahead, and the com buzzed more loudly. His teeth clenched, Diskan crawled on, taking that one small precaution against a blast.
Oddly enough, as he thrust head and shoulders through the hole, he did not come into absolute darkness such as he thought existed beyond the walls. Instead, once past that barrier, he found gray half light, and he was not far from another stair. But this curled down and not up.
Reaching that, Diskan lay flat, his ear pressed to the floor. Fa
int sounds—feet on the steps? The enemy was moving away. But to be trapped on the stair, a target from raying from below—
He waited until the sounds were so faint that he could hardly distinguish them. And then he swung over, planted his feet on the steps, and began to descend, but with caution.
The buzz of the device was faint, a click instead of a steady beat. When he held it to his eyes, the needle changed with every curve of the stair.
Round and around, down and down. He was already certain he must be well below the level of the streets without. There was damp rising from the stairwell, and with it an unpleasant odor of decay, such as might issue from a swamp. Perhaps there was some underground outlet on the marsh bog that had come to partially swallow Xcothal.
He had to slow his descent; the rounds of the stair were making him dizzy. And once, during one of those pauses, he heard a sound from behind. Diskan pushed against the wall, his head up, peering up the corkscrew.
Outlined in the dim light was a round furred head. The animals! At least one of them was trailing him. He had used the stunner freely back there in the chamber. Had his art turned friend into enemy? But when he halted, that one halted, too, did not strive to draw closer. After a long moment, Diskan relaxed. In a way, this was a return to his first days on this world of mysteries, when he had been dogged across the ridge by just such a follower. He began to descend again.
How deep was that curl of stairway? He had not tried to count the steps, but at long last, they brought him to a firm footing from which a passage ran. And here the swamp had thrust exploring fingers.
The dank air was filled with evil odors. There were unwholesome, faintly glowing growths on the wall in leprous patches, others noduling up from the floor. Diskan had never seen a place he liked less. Yet the device told him his way lay ahead, and he could see traces of another's passing—broken fungi growths and smears on the slimy floor.
Those ragged wall growths made it difficult to see clearly. Diskan picked a very slow and cautious path, listening always—for the sound of footsteps before him, to the buzz of the com, for the animal behind. The latter he did not hear at all, but the ticking of the com approached a steady purr once more.
It was lighter down here than it had been aloft, from the luminescence of those monstrous and contorted growths. So foul was their general appearance that Diskan took every precaution to avoid any direct contact with them. But he inadvertently brushed the back of his hand against a spike of fleshy stuff broken by the passing of the one he trailed.
He might have put his hand into flames, the pain bringing back a swift memory of the hurt he had taken to dis-con the watcher robot. Then the powers of the ship had healed his wound. Now he could only rub his knuckles across the skirt of the parka, hoping he was removing the irritating ooze, not smearing it in. There was an angry puffing at the base of his fingers, and he felt sharp stabs of pain when he tried to flex them.
More of the broken "branches" hung ahead, making him squirm and twist to avoid their dripping poison. Why had the enemy not used his blaster to burn clear a passage?
Diskan knew very little about those weapons. Legally, they could be worn and used only by off-worlders on planets certified dangerous, and by those of the Service. The ordinary galactic citizen had no reason to use them. He presumed they were charged much the same as the stunners, with a measure of energy that would become exhausted. And if the man ahead had not used his now to burn off this fungi for a clear passage, it could mean that his present blaster charge was low.
For the first time in hours, Diskan examined the pointer on the stunner. He had used it on the scavenger and had sprayed his path clear with it above. And it had read only half charged when he had found it. Now that small black line rested very close to the red "empty." So if the enemy lacked weapon power, he was hardly any better off. Still, he had no intention of retracing his way up into the open.
What had brought the man he tracked down into this hell hole? Flight from a stronger party? If so, where had that enemy gone? The animals? No, the dead man aloft had been blaster-killed, and up in the great hall, the blaster had been aimed at Diskan, not into the mass of furred ones among which he had knelt. So the other must have believed him part of the threat that had driven him into hiding.
Ahead was an open space cleared of all the growth, save for some shriveled tendrils and ash on the floor. A blaster had been used here systematically, to clean a long stretch of wall on both sides of the passage. And carvings had been laid bare by that burning—not eroded into faint shadows as they had been above, but deep and clear, though discolored by the countless years the fungi had rooted over them.
Not pictures but runes, truly runes! Only the sweep of those markings held no sense as they followed curves not lines over the walls, both horizontally and vertically, in such an involved massing that it was very difficult to separate any one mark from the rest.
Four blocks, two to a wall, faced each other. And smashed before one lay a mass of glass and metal, which was surely off-world in origin. Beside it a broken coil of voice tape, snapped and snarled upon itself, coiled in a never-to-be untangled knot. Diskan's com device was purring in a rising beat. He avoided the tangle of tape and reached the part of the passage beyond where the growths began again.
"Grufa na sandank—forwarre!"
That shout could have come from anywhere ahead, but Diskan thought it sounded close, too close. And the words had no meaning. He took shelter behind a bulge of fungi. That could have been nothing but a warning. The high voice had held a note of hysteria, which was a further deterrent to plunging headlong up the passage. This place was enough to turn a man's mind. Diskan could well believe that whoever shouted might ray anything or anyone who had him cornered.
"Who are you?" Diskan tried to make that sound calm and natural. He spoke Basic and waited for an answer he hoped might make sense.
"You make no fools of us, Jack Scum. Come on and you'll be rayed!"
Basic was used for reply this time, but that did not make any more sense as far as he was concerned.
"I don't know who your Jack Scum may be," Diskan called. "I don't know who you are either. I am a wreck survivor landed here by chance. My name is Diskan Fentress."
"Wearing a Jack coat?" There was scornful disbelief in that. "You have to the count of five; then we shall fire the wall growths. The smoke of their burning will stifle you!"
"Wearing a coat I found in a survivor cache," Diskan returned hurriedly. So that was why he had been rayed up there. His parka labeled him one of the enemy. "I tell you—my spacer cracked up here. I've been wandering around—"
"I don't believe you. Kal nadra sonk!"
"All right, I'm going." He stepped back into the cleared space. This business of the smoke from burning wall growths being suffocating could be true, but if his guess was right, they would not waste blaster fire.
He glanced around. Carefully, in the middle of the passage well away from the walls, stood one of the animals, its head up, watching him. It moved a step or two, limping, and Diskan knew it for the one that had shared the fight in the pass. It came on slowly to stand beside him, facing down passage. And Diskan had the feeling that again they were ranged against a common foe.
A murmur from beyond, not loud enough for him to distinguish words, just enough for him to guess that there were more than one waiting up there.
"No—you cannot! Please, High One, come back—please!"
That high voice, again strung to nervous protest. There was movement ahead. A figure lurched, apparently out of the wall, with another and slighter one dragging back at it. The larger took a step or two in Diskan's direction, then crashed on the slimed floor, pulling the other with it. Diskan sprang forward, using the stunner, knowing this was his chance.
Both of the figures lay still, caught in the bonds of the beam. A moment later he was standing over them, stooping to search for their weapons.
A Zacathan! The soft folds of the neck and head frill
spread out behind the alien's head. His yellow-gray skin almost matched the color of the growths. The large reptilian eyes stared up at Diskan, though there was an oddly unfocused quality in them. Above the alien's waist the tight fabric of a protecto-suit had been cut away to allow bandaging of his torso; then plasta-skin had been poured over the wide folds.
His smaller companion also stared at Diskan as he rolled the body over, but those eyes were very aware, filled with fear and loathing. A girl, her hair tumbling out of a net, her protecto-suit smeared and scraped—and in her belt what he was seeking, the blaster. He transferred that before he looked around.
There was a gap in the wall, a rough-hewn doorway. They must have come through there. He moved to explore the space beyond. He found two supply bags, a bedroll spread out, an ever-burn lamp, and a jumble of other things piled against the far wall—but no one else.
Diskan lifted the girl and carried her in, to drop her on the bedroll. Then he made the same trip with the Zacathan, whom he stretched out on the floor. The alien's skin was harsh and dry to the touch; he was manifestly fevered, perhaps seriously hurt.