A flash of light ahead. I stopped, then turned one of our Mag-Lites on and aimed it down the corridor.
Across the tunnel, just where the Snake’s Belly exited into the Crossroads, five Nomes stood, weapons aimed at us, rockworms waiting at their feet. By now, only Adam and Father were with us, Jonah having stayed back about halfway down the Belly because the signal was starting to fade. We’d probably have to leave Adam at the beginning of the Crossroads. I took a deep breath. “Guess this is it.”
I put on the headphones; Jodi did the same. We walked forward, Father and Adam following some distance back. As we approached, I heard “Turano! Turano zom ku!” in a sort of whispered voice, and the figures tightened their grip on their weapons.
When we were within twenty feet, I stopped. My heart was pounding awfully fast, and for a minute I couldn’t convince my hands to let go of my trusty iron bar. At this range, in this light, the Nomes and their rockworms were too eerie to contemplate for long. I forced my grip to relax and handed the weapon to Jodi, then took another slow couple of steps forward. They muttered something and gathered themselves. Something about the tone of voice and the way they almost bunched together actually heartened me. Why, they were afraid of us too!
“We don’t want to fight you,” I said, the microphone taking my normal voice and catapulting its sound to seventy-five thousand cycles higher.
The reaction was everything I could have hoped for. They literally jumped backward in startlement, and I couldn’t even sort out separate word-sounds from the gabble of Nome-talk that erupted from the headphones. Finally they settled down and one of them stepped slightly forward, stone sword still in his hand but lowered to a much less threatening position. “Rennka ku? Mondu okh wendasa hottai rennka?”
I shrugged. “Hey, I don’t understand you, but I get the idea you’re surprised I talk. We just found out that you did ourselves.” I reached very carefully inside one of my pockets and took out a small bag. I put the bag down on the ground and backed up a few paces to where Jodi waited.
Whatever senses they had, they’d been able to tell I did something there, at any rate. The spokesman came hesitantly forward and stopped, staring at the bag with his weird crystal eyes. Then his face snapped up, looking at me with a very human startlement visible in his pose despite the stony immobility of his features. “H’adamant! H’adamant huran zom!”
Jodi and I looked at each other, startled. “Adamant?”
It clapped fists together in what was somehow an exultant or agreeing motion. “H’adamant! H’adamant!” It scooped up the bag and emptied the three diamonds into its palm—last of Winston Slade’s original cache, saved for sentimental reasons in our safe—and held the palm out to us. “H’adamant, vu!”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Wonder if they got that word from us, or we got it from them?”
Jodi shrugged. “Don’t have any idea. But he looks like he’s coming down from his ecstasy.”
Indeed, the spokesman was now looking in his palm, and loosed a steady stream of words which included “H’adamant” as a frequent occurrence.
“Sorry, sir, but we don’t have any more of them.” I tried gestures to get the point across. “Maybe we can reach some kind of understanding?”
He finally seemed to realize no more diamonds were forthcoming. He then pointed down the corridor—clearly, whatever senses they had must have some analogy to sight, at least when used for that purpose—and made emphatic motions that I couldn’t interpret as anything except “Come with us.”
“Well, it’s what we wanted,” I said, not feeling all that comfortable with the idea.
“So long as what they want isn’t to cut us open to see if we have the rocks inside us.”
“You just had to bring that idea up, didn’t you?”
“Clint. Best get along now.”
“Yes, Father.” We started following the Nomes. Adam stayed behind at the beginning of the Crossroads. When we reached the entrance to the Corkscrew, Father knew he would have to stay behind also. He gave me an unexpected hug. “Be careful.”