“The stone,” she spoke aloud, not using mind-touch lest she disturb his concentration, “it is coming to life!”
“Then we must be near—“ His voice was very low, hardly above a whisper.
But if the sea covered—
Ziantha moved closer to the vision port, tried to see ahead. The sun’s reflection from the waves was strong but — A dark shadow, rising from the sea!
“Turan, an island!”
The flyer circled it. What Ziantha could see was forbidding; jagged spires of rock, no vegetation. Where could they land? Had this been a flitter of their own time and world they would need only a reasonably open space to set down. But she had seen the take-off of these ancient machines and knew they required much more.
As Turan circled he spoke:
“It is larger than I expected. Either the report was wrong, or more of it has arisen since the first upheaval.”
“Look!” Ziantha cried. “To the south—there!”
A stretch of great blocks of masonry locked together, stretching from the cliffs of the inner portion of the island out into the waves. Those dashed against it, leaving it wet with spray. It might have been a pier fashioned to accommodate a whole fleet of vessels.
“Can you land on that?”
“There is one way of proving it.” And it would seem Turan was desperate enough to try.
This time Ziantha did shut her eyes as he banked and turned to make the run along that strange sea-wet roadway, if road it was. She felt the jarring impact of their first touch, the bumps and bounces as they hurtled along a surface that was plainly not as smooth as it had appeared from the air. Then the vibration of the motor died. They came to a stop without crashing against a rock or diving headlong into the waiting waves.
When she dared to look she saw the vision port wet with spray. The flyer rocked slightly under the pound of water, diffused though that was by the time it reached them. They were safely down.
“Turan!” She glanced around. He had slumped in his seat. She caught his shoulder, shook him. “Turan!”
He turned his head with painful slowness. There was the starkness of death in his eyes.
“I cannot hold—much longer — Listen, open your mind!”
Stiff with fear, she dropped the focus-stone into her lap so that no emanation of that could befog reception for her and leaned forward, set her hands on either side of his head, held it, as if he were some artifact she must read for her life’s sake.
Information flooded into her mind—all that he had picked up from the armsman, how to fly them away when what she had come to do was finished, and what she must do afterward if she were successful here.
She accepted this. Then she protested:
“Hold fast! You must hold fast. For if you cannot—then—“
To be entrapped here forever! In a way that was worse than death. Or would death free him when it took back the body it had never fully released to life? Ziantha did not know. All she was sure of was that she could not allow him to die here. That she must, if she could, not only find the key for her return, but also for his.
She leaned closer to him, and instinct moved her to another kind of touch, one that carried in it the seeds of vigorous life as her kind knew it. As her lips met his cold, flaccid ones, she willed her energy into him.
“Hold!”
But there was so little time. Ziantha struggled with the catch on the cabin door, forced it open, stepped out. She cupped the focus-stone to her breast and started back along the causeway. From the air it had looked shorter than it was. The flyer had come to a halt about halfway along it, and there was a wide stretch to traverse before she would reach the sharp rise of the main portion of the island.
It was plain that this roadway was not natural but the work of hands, and also that it had been long under the sea. It was encrusted with shells, and there were patches of decaying water weeds still rooted to it. The stones from which it was fashioned were huge blocks, some fully the size of the flyer in length, and so well set together that even the centuries and the sea had not pulled one from the other.
The draw of the focus-stone was now so strong that she felt as if a real cord were looped about the gem dragging her forward. Somewhere ahead lay the other end of that cord. But where in that maze of rock could it be?
Her road ended in a jumble of huge blocks, as if some structure had been shaken down there, yet the focus still pulled. Ziantha began a painful climb in and among the stones. The clothing she wore had never been intended for such usage. And her knees were scraped and bleeding after two unlucky falls, two of her fingernails torn to the quick, her palm gashed by a sharp shell edge.
But she fought her way on and up that mountain of tumbled stone until she reached a point above. And there—
Although the cord continued to pull there was no further advance. For before her was another of the incredibly ancient structures, only this had no break. It was a smooth wall projecting from the cliff behind it.
Ziantha ran her bleeding hand across its surface, seeking an opening her eyes might not be able to detect; there was nothing to meet her touch. Yet she knew that behind this lay what she sought. With a whimper of despair, the girl sank down at the foot of the wall. Her hands could not tear a way through that. Perhaps there was some weapon or tool in the flyer—but she doubted it. This masonry which had withstood sea burial for centuries could not easily be broached.
There was only one way, and she dreaded it. She could not depend on any backing. To call upon Turan to support her through a trance might mean his death. Yet she must take this final step, or they would fail, and failure would mean they would end here. That inborn spark of refusal to accept death without a struggle that was the heritage of her own species stiffened her resolution. She set the focus-stone to her forehead.
Once more she was in that nacre-walled room. The Eyes in their band rested heavy on her forehead, just as a weariness which was of the spirit as well as of the body weighed on her heavily. There was fear as dark about her as if shadows drew in from the gleaming walls to smother her.
The storm—she had lasted out the storm, kept the Lurla to their labor of strengthening the walls—but just barely. They had resisted—resisted! With a small hiss of breath she faced what that meant. Her power, her control over the Eyes, must be fading. And it was time for her—
No! It was not time! She was not that old, that weak! The storm had been greater than any they had known before, that was all. And the Lurla had tired. It was not her control slipping. She looked down at her still-rounded body, firm under the veiling of her shell-string clothing. No, she was not ready to put off the Eyes, to take the next remorseless and inevitable step her abdication would lead to.
D’Eyree crossed to the window slit. Now storm-driven waves had subsided for this time. Still the sea looked sullen, angry, and even the tint of the sky was ominous. If the calculations of D’Ongi were right—
Through the sighing of the sea, she heard a slight sound behind her, turned to face a woman standing at a door that had opened in the apparently seamless wall. She was slight, her coarse hair the darkest green of youth. Her body was bare, sleek, and glistening from recent immersion in the sea, her neck gills still a little open.
“Honor to the Eyes,” the woman said, but there was mockery in that hail. “There is good gleaning in the storm leavings. Also, D’Huna has spoken—she finds the burden of the Eyes now beyond her power.”
And all the time she watched D’Eyree with cruel and greedy eyes.
Ah, yes, D’Atey, how much you wish that I would also resign this power! D’Eyree forced herself not to put hand to the Eye band. D’Atey, you have never rested content since the Eyes came to me and not to you, and you have so carefully provided that your sister-kin will have the next chance to stand for warden. But D’Huna—she is five seasons younger than I! And that will be remembered. I am not loved too greatly in Nornoch. It has been my way to walk a lone path. Yet that I cannot alter, for it is a part of me. Only now—who will stand to my back if clamor grows?