“But the ones who stayed—Have you seen the one who calls himself Maxim?”
Sander nodded.
“He is a thing, though he knows it not. For a while yet he will serve as eyes and ears for that. It still needs humans if it would contact the uncorrupted outside, bring in fresh minds—Sander, it feeds upon men’s minds! It strips from them all their knowledge, all their spirit; then it fills them with what it wants—hate and the need for dealing death!”
“As it tried to do to you. And how were you saved?” Sander demanded.
“I am Shaman born, Shaman trained. Not as the Shamans of the White Ones, who use men’s blood and terror to summon up their power, but working with life and not against it. It could not reach that part of me it wanted most, the source of my Power. Though it might have blasted through, had you not come. And you, Sander, why did it not seek you?”
“Cold iron—it is smith’s power.” He was not sure that the band about his forehead had saved him, but he thought that it had.
“Cold iron?” she repeated wonderingly. “I do not understand—” Then once more her fear flared. “Out—Sander—we must get out! It will not let us go willingly, and I do not know what Power it can command.”
He had summoned Rhin with a snap of his fingers and was repacking the burdens. Then he lifted Fanyi once more to the riding pad.
“Can this thing of yours control the animals?” He wondered if their companions might now prove to be the weak lines in their small company.
“No.” She shook her head. “Their minds are too alien, lie beneath the range of it. Kai, Kayi tried to stop me from going. I—I used my power to hold them off.” Her face was stricken as she glanced at the fishers.
“Maxim used this on Rhin.” Sander held out the rod. “Press this and Rhin is in agony.” He indicated the stud on the side.
“How did you get it?”
“From Maxim,” Sander said with satisfaction. “I left him tied up. He gave me all his attention, so Rhin brought him down.” The smith paid credit where it was due. “And it was Rhin who traced you.”
“Let us get out—quickly!”
Sander agreed with her urging. He did not know how much to accept of the crazy story she had gabbled. This business of draining a man’s mind and refilling it— But the suspicion, which had long been his, that the Before Men had far more than the Rememberers knew, was enough to make him agree they would be much better out of this place. He had no longer any desire to learn anything connected with this complex. Fanyi’s descent into hysteria, her fear, brought grim warning that there might be far too high a price to pay for learning what lay on the other side of the Dark Time. He was willing enough to head out and away with all the speed they could muster.
The smith was not sure of the way they had come, but he depended on the koyot to nose out the back trail for them. As they went, Fanyi appeared to regain her control somewhat. Sander caught glimpses of things in the rooms through which they passed that intrigued him a little, that under other circumstances he would have paused to examine more closely.
But Fanyi looked neither right nor left. She stared straight ahead as if the very fervor of her desire to be free was forceful enough to speed their retreat.
“How many people still live here?” Sander asked, after they had gone some way in silence, during which he had found himself listening for some hint that they were not going to escape so easily, that there would be someone or something in ambush.
“I do not know. Certainly very few. It needs more to serve it. I think there is some service it cannot itself perform that keeps it alive. Therefore, it wants more empty minds to control. For the rest—it will kill. It hates—” Tears spilled from her eyes and she did not try to wipe them away. “It is sick with hate, swelled with it as a corrupted wound swells with evil matter. It is foul beyond belief!”
Sander had kept a careful lookout as they traversed the rooms. Again he was sure he saw nothing to suggest that any had been recently occupied. Was Maxim perhaps the last remaining servant the thing had? But Maxim had not considered himself so—he had spoken of a “Great Brain” that had withdrawn from communication with man.
Now the smith had a new cause for worry—this departure was far too easy. He had expected to meet some opposition before now. Fanyi claimed vast power for the thing she had met; surely if it controlled the installations here, it must be working to capture them again.
When nothing moved, illogically his wariness increased. Fanyi still rode, looking only ahead. Sander stole glances at the koyot, the fishers. They padded along at what had increased to a trot, though Sander had not urged that. The animals were alert; he saw as well as sensed that they were using their own methods of testing what lay about them. But they gave no warning of any ambush or attack.
Their party came at last to the chamber where the chairs were lined around the oval, which was not a pool. Sander pushed ahead here, ready to handle Maxim. But the chair in which he had tied the madman was now empty; not even cut or broken bonds remained. Sander swung his hammer, weighing its strength in his hand.
“He’s gone. I left him here.”
For the first time since they had started, Fanyi turned her head a little, her gaze shifting to Sander.
“We must find the way out,” she told him, and there was a new note in her voice, as if some of the hysteria was again rising in her. “The way—it can be hidden.”
Her hand moved toward the pendant and then away. “This thing—I can use it perhaps. But also—it is of this place. Through it one can be controlled.”
“Then do not try it!” he answered her. “Leave our passage to Rhin, to Kai and Kayi. I will depend upon their senses before I will on mine.”
The animals pattered on out of the room of the chairs into that which held the webs. Those that were intact blazed high with light. Rhin threw up his head to howl with a note Sander had heard out of him only once before—that time he had touched the wrong button on the shaft of the rod. To his outburst were added cries from the fishers. The animals pawed at their ears, slobbered, and foamed. Sander felt a strange pain in his own head. Fanyi held both ears, her face twisted in agony.
To this, Sander could see only one answer. Though his body was suddenly awkward and his coordination faulty, he tottered to the nearest of those flaming filaments. Raising the hammer despite an involuntary twitching of muscles he had to fight to control, he brought it down to smash the webbing.
Sparks burst; there was a throat- and nose-rasping odor in the air, but Sander staggered on to the next web and demolished it with a blow, then the next and the next.
He moved through a world that had narrowed to hold just those alien creations, his only thought that they must be destroyed. Sometimes his aim was faulty, and he did not bring the object he fronted into fragments with one blow or two, but had to stand wavering and pounding for three or four misdirected and weakened swings until he had shattered it. He had cleared one row; he was aiming now for the first installation of the second. Around his head the band was a searing brand of fire that dimmed his thoughts. Only instinct kept him going. Three—another—
Then, as it had come, so was the outside pressure gone. Sander sank to his knees, panting heavily. His head felt light; he was dazed. But the light that had hurt his eyes had ebbed.
“Sander!”
That shriek aroused his half-conscious mind, jerked him around.
Maxim was there, raising a rod. His face was contracted; there was nothing human remaining in his bulging eyes. He was going to—
Sander made the greatest effort of his life, lifting the hammer—Maxim was too far away to pound. There was no time to try for a dart or even the rod tucked in the smith’s belt. He whirled the hammer once around his head and threw it, despairingly, sure that he was already Maxim’s victim.
A furred fury burst past Sander, Kai’s shoulder striking his as the animal leaped. That touch, light as it was, knocked the smith off balance. He fell against the base of one of the machines, but not before he saw the hammer strike, not with the head but with the edge of the shaft against Maxim’s chest.