The foxes and the black cat melted into the shadows, leaving Troy to his collection of equipment. Only the kinkajou remained to watch and at last to come to his aid, dragging small objects from the wrecked flyer to pile by the dome. Troy sat back on his heels. He had been so busy that he had not had time to consider the future further than the next job to be done, for he had been driven by a sense of working against time.
“Wall—wall that cannot be seen—“ The black cat stepped out from a neighboring dome and came directly to the man.
“Wall around here?” Troy’s hand swept in a gesture to indicate the ruins.
“Yes. We have tried to cross many places.”
One of Troy’s fears had materialized. The Clans must have set a barrier about Ruhkarv. Intended to bar interlopers, it would make him and the animals prisoners within. How he had managed to pierce it with the flitter was a mystery.
“There are many dens—maybe hunting in them—“ One of the foxes drifted into the open. The cat had gone to its injured mate, was licking its head caressingly.
“Danger underground here.” Troy countered that half suggestion from the prick-eared scout.
“Not now.” The report was emphatic and Troy wondered. Before Fauklow’s expedition with the recaller had turned the name of Ruhkarv into a synonym for nightmare, the upper galleries of the strange city or structure had been explored with impunity by a handful of the curious. If it had been only the action of the recaller that had damned the place—well, the rangers had put an end to the machine’s broadcasts, according to Reme, and the undersurface passages might give the fugitives shelter for a time. He would have to have some rest, Troy knew, and perhaps here in the heart of a forbidden territory they had found temporary safety after all.
“We go then—to a safe den.”
With the food bag over his shoulder, the injured cat held as comfortably as he could manage against his chest, and the stunner ready in his free hand, Troy moved out. The kinkajou rode on his shoulder, making small twittering noises and now and then patting its two-legged steed with a forepaw as if to make Troy continually aware of its presence. The foxes and the black cat guided him to another dome, in which a large segment of wall had been cut through in the past, either by one of the early treasure seekers or by the ill-fated Fauklow men.
All the fantastic tales that had been told of this place were peopling the dusk Troy faced with a myriad of nightmares, but the readiness of the animals to explore was his insurance. Troy knew that their senses were far keener and more to be relied upon than his own, and that they would give warning of any trouble ahead. He snapped on the atom torch he had slung from his belt, watched the cone of light bob and wave across flooring and walls as it swung to the rhythm of his walk.
There was nothing to be seen but walls and a pavement of blocks, fitted together with precision and skill. At the far side of the dome was the dark mouth of a ramp leading down into the real Ruhkarv. That murk had a quality close to fog, Troy thought—as if the dark itself swirled about with independent motion. And even the atom light was sapped, weakened by it. Yet the lead fox had already padded down into those depths, and its mate and the cat were waiting for Troy almost impatiently.
“This is a place where there has been great danger,” Troy warned, combining words with the mental reach.
“Nothing here—“ He was sure that impatient over- tone came from the black cat.
“Nothing here,” Troy repeated even as his boots clicked on that sloping length of stone, “but perhaps farther on—“
“There is water.”
Troy was startled at that confident interruption. They had the supplies from the flitter, but the problem of water had nagged at him. If somewhere within this maze the animals had located water, they were even better provided for than he had dared to hope.
“Where?”
“We go—“
The ramp carried him down through three levels of side corridors, all empty as far as the beams of the atom light could disclose, all exactly alike, so that Troy began to think a man might well become lost in such a place without a guide. And he tried to set his own entrance path in his head, memorizing each corridor by counting.
Somewhere there must be an unseen air system, for the atmosphere, though dry and acrid, remained breathable, and he was sure that now and then from one of the offshoot corridors he scented a whiff of some fresh import from the surface.
At the fourth level, though the ramp continued on to Korwarian depths, Troy found the three scouts waiting for him. And now, unless his sense of direction was completely bemused, they took a way that headed directly east. For a moment he dared to wonder if some one of these long hallways might not take them outside the range of the blocking-wave wall so that they could emerge free in the Wild.
Stark walls of red-gray stone, paved footing—nothing else, save the fine sifting of centuries of dust, which arose almost ankle-high and muffled the sounds of his own footfalls. Twice only were those walls broken by round openings, but when he swung the beam of the torch in, he saw nothing save a bare, circular cell hardly large enough for a man to crouch in, without any other opening. The purpose of such rooms—if rooms they could be called—remained another of the Ruhkarv mysteries.
But their journey was not to continue so easily. The eastern corridor ended in a huge well, and again a descending ramp faced them, curving about the side of that opening, narrow enough to make Troy thoughtful, though the slope was not too steep as far as he could sight with the torch’s aid. Again the scouts moved ahead, and there was nothing to do except follow.
As he went down, there was a change in the air—not a freshness, but a rise of moisture. As the wall against which he steadied himself from time to time began to grow clammy under his fingers, he knew that the fox had been right. Somewhere below was a source of water—a large one, if he could judge by the present evidence.
As the moisture content grew, he was aware of a fetid under scent—not exactly the stagnant stench of an undrained and unrenewed pond under the sun, but the hint of something ill about that water. However, there were trickles of damp on the walls and his thirst grew.
Around and around—the coiled spring of the ramp inside the well began to form a dizzying pattern. There was no break here made by side corridors. Troy lost track of time; his legs ached, and every bruise on his body added to his punishment. He was sure now that if he should try to reverse his path and reach the surface—or even the last corridor from which this drop had issued, he would not be able to summon up strength enough to finish. There was only the need to get to the bottom of the well, out on the level somewhere where he could drop down and rest.
And finally the torch did show him a pavement. Troy reached it in a long stride and flashed the light about the bottom of the well. There was water right enough, but—as dry as his mouth now was, as much as his body cried out for a drink—he could not bring himself to approach closely that sullenly flowing runnel.
The water was a ribbon of oily black, looking as thick and turgid as if the substance were more than half slime, and it moved with sluggish ripples on its surface from one side of the pit to the other, filling to within a few inches of the pavement surface a stone trough that had been constructed to carry it.
The inlet and outlet for that yard-wide flow were large circular openings—the inlet situated under the rise of the ramp from the floor. And except for those there was no other way out—save the ramp down which he had just come. But the black cat and the foxes were at the mouth of the inflow tunnel, and when Troy walked to that point, he saw that the tunnel was larger than the stream at floor level, leaving a narrow path to the right of the water.
“Out?” he asked, and that single word echoed hollowly until the boom hurt his ears. The kinkajou chattered angrily, and the cat in Troy’s hold pressed the good foreleg hard against his chest and added a protesting wail. But the three animals before him glanced up and then away again, into the tunnel, telling him as plainly as with words or the mind touch that this was indeed the proper exit. The ripples on the water, as Troy passed along so close to it, began to take on a rather ominous and sinister significance, and he wondered just how deep that trough really was, for some of the ripples went against the current, suggesting action under the dark surface of the flood—something or things moving independently against the flow of the water. For an anxious while one such V of ripples accompanied Troy at his own pace. Time and time again he paused to flash the torch directly on that disturbance—to sight nothing in the inky liquid.