“Olllahuuu!”
Both men turned quickly at the Hunter’s call of appreciation. Rerne stood there, smiling a little.
“Your friend here looks eager for a casting,” he remarked.
The fussel mantled, raising wings wide in display, shaking them a little as if glad to be free of the cage. The clawhold on Troy’s wrist was firm, and the bird gave no sign of wanting to quit that post.
“Truly a beauty,” Rerne complimented Kyger. “If he performs as well as he looks, you have already made a sale, Merchant.”
“He is yours to try, Gentle Homo.”
“When better than now? It seems that there is an earlier demand for my services in the Wild than I had thought. I am come one day ahead of time to claim this man of yours and the bird.”
Kyger made no protest. In fact the speed with which he equipped Troy with the loan of a camp kit and the affability with which he saw them both away from the shop made Horan uneasy. He had had no chance to visit the kinkajou alone. And when he had been engaged in cage cleaning earlier that day, Kyger or one of the yardmen had been in and out of the room and the animal had remained in its tight ball. He wished that he could have taken it with him, but there was no possible way of explaining such a request. And he had to leave with a small doubt—of what he could not honestly have said—still worrying him.
Rome’s flitter was strictly utilitarian, though with compact storage space and the built-in necessities for a flyer that might also provide a temporary camp shelter in the wilderness. Oddly enough he had no pilot, and when Troy, with the fussel again in the transport cage, climbed into the passenger compartment, he found no other but the Hunter awaiting him there. Nor did Rerne prove talkative. His city finery was gone with his city manners. Now he wore soft hide breeches, made of some dappled skin, pale fawn and white, and tanned to suppleness of fabric. His jerkin was of the same, sleeveless and cut low on the chest so his own golden-tanned skin showed in a wide V close to the same shade as the garment. The rings of precious metal that had held his hair had been traded for thongs confining the locks as tightly but far more inconspicuously. And about his waist was a belt, plain of any jeweled ornament, but supporting stunner, bush knife, and an array of small tools and gadgets, each in its own loop.
Under his expert control the flitter spiraled well up above the conventional traffic lanes between villas and city and headed northeast. Beneath them carefully tended gardens or as carefully nurtured “wild” gardens grew farther and farther apart. And as they topped a mountain range, they put behind them all the year- around residences of Tikil. There was a scattering of holiday houses and hunting lodges in the stretch before they came to the Mountains of Larsh—and the territory below, as uninhabited as it looked, was still under the dominion of man.
But beyond the Larsh, into the real Wild, then man’s hand lay far lighter. The Hunting Clans had deliberately kept it so and profited thereby. Through the years they had made a mystery of the Wild, and now no one ventured without their guidance past the Larsh.
In the cabin of the flitter the quiet was suddenly broken by a call from the fussel—a cry that held a demand. As Troy tried to sooth the captive, Reme spoke for the first time since they had taken off: “Try him out of the cage.”
Troy was doubtful. If the hawk would refuse the wrist, take to wing, or try to, in this confined space, that action would make for trouble. On the other hand, if the bird was to be of any use in the future, it must learn to accept such transportation free of the cage. A fussel caged too much lost spirit. He pulled on his glove, offered his wrist through the half-open door, and felt the firm grip of the talons through the fabric.
Carefully he brought his arm across his knees, the fussel resting quietly, though its crested head turned from side to side as it eyed the cabin and the open skies beyond the bubble of their covering. As it showed no disquiet, Troy relaxed a little, enough to glance himself at that rising wall of saw-toothed peaks which was the Larsh, gnawing at the afternoon sky.
They did not fly directly across that barrier range. Instead Rerne turned more to the north so that they followed along its broken wall. And they had covered at least an hour’s flying time on that course before they took a gateway of a pass between two grim peaks and saw before them a hazy murk hiding the other world Tikil knew little about.
Reme sent the flitter spiraling down, now that they were across the heights. There was a raveling of lesser peaks and foothills, bright-green streaks marking at least two rivers of some size. Troy leaned against the bubble, trying to see more of the spread beneath. There appeared to be a fog rising with the coming of evening, a thick scum of stuff closing between the flitter and the ground.
With a mutter of impatience, the Hunter again altered course northward. And they had not gone very far before a light flashed red on his control board. When they continued on their path without any deviation, those flashes grew closer together so that the light seemed hardly to blink at all.
“Warn offl” The words were clipped, with a patroller’s snap—though the law of Tikil did not operate east of the Larsh.
Reme spoke into his own mike. “Acknowledge warn off. This is Rernes’ Donerabon.”
“Correct. Warn off withdrawn,” replied the com.
Troy longed to ask a question. And then Rome spoke, not to the mike, but to his seatmate. “To your right—watch now as we make the crossover.”
The flitter dipped, sideslipped down a long descent. There were no streamers of mist to hide the ground here. No vegetation either. In curdled expanse of rock and sand was a huddle of structures, unmistakably, even from this distance, not the work of nature.
Troy studied them avidly. “What is that?”
“Ruhkarv—the ‘accursed place.’”
Six
They did not pass directly over that outcropping of alien handiwork, older than the first human landing on Korwar, but headed north once more. Troy knew from reports that, what he saw now as lumpy pro- tuberances aboveground were only a fraction of the ruins themselves, as they extended in corridors and chambers layers deep and perhaps miles wide under the surface, for Ruhkarv had never been fully explored.
“The treasure—“ he murmured.
Beside him Rerne laughed without any touch of humor. “If that exists outside vivid imaginations, it is never going to be found. Not after the end of the Fauklow expedition.”
They had already swept past the open land that held the ruins, were faced again by the wealth of vegetation that ringed the barren waste of Ruhkarv. And Troy was struck by that oddity of the land.
“Why the desert just about the ruins?” he asked, too interested in what he saw to pay the usual deference to the rank of his pilot.
“That is something for which you will find half-a- dozen explanations,” Rerne returned, “any one of them logical—and probably wrong. Ruhkarv exists as it always has since the First-Ship exploration party charted it two centuries ago. Why it continues to exist is something Fauklow may have discovered—before he and his men went mad and killed themselves or each other.”
“Did their recaller work?”
Rerne answered obliquely. “The tracer of the rescue party registered some form of wave broadcast—well under the surface—when they came in. They blanketed it at once when they saw what had happened to Fauklow and the others they were able to find. All Ruhkarv is off limits now—under a tonal barrier. No flitter can land within two miles of the only known entrance to the underways. We do pick up some empty-headed treasure hunter now and then, prowling about, hunting a way past the barrier. Usually a trip to our headquarters and enforced inspection of the tri-dees we took of Fauklow’s end instantly cures his desire to go exploring.”
“If the recaller worked—“ Troy speculated as to what might have happened down in those hidden passages. Fauklow had been a noted archaeologist with several outstanding successes at re-creating prehuman civilizations via the recaller, a machine still partially in the experimental stage. Planted anywhere within a structure that had once been inhabited by sentient beings, it could produce—under the right conditions—certain shadowy “pictures” of scenes that had once occurred at the site well back in time. While authorities still argued over dating, over the validity of some of the scenes Fauklow had recorded, yet the most skeptical admitted that he had caught something out of the past. And oftentimes those wispy ghosts appearing on his plates or films were the starting point for new and richly rewarding investigation.