Cree Bega sidled up to her. “The little peopless are all ssafely locked away,” he hissed.
“Leave five of your rets to make sure they stay that way,” she ordered. “Commander Kett will assign two of his crew to watch over the ship. The rest of us will take the Black Moclips after those already ashore.”
I’m coming for you, Druid, she thought triumphantly. Can you feel me getting close?
She climbed down from the pilot box, wrapped in grim fury and fierce determination, and walked back through the mist and gloom.
when the attack came, Walker was a little more than halfway between the others of the company and the obelisk, deep inside the maze of half walls and partitions. He heard a sharp click, like a lock opening or a trigger released, and he threw himself down just as a slender thread of brilliant red fire lanced overhead. Without even thinking, he turned the Druid fire on its source and fused the tiny aperture through which the thread had appeared.
Instantly, a dozen more threads crisscrossed the area in which he lay, some of them burning paths across the metal carpet, seeking him out. He rolled quickly into the shelter of a wall and burned shut one opening after another, snuffing out the threads, exploding apertures and entire sections of wall, filling the hazy air with smoke and the acrid stench of scorched metal.
Then he was on his feet and moving swiftly toward the obelisk, sensing that whatever controlled the fire could be found there. His robes hindered his progress, prevented him from running, and kept him to a quick shuffle. Ribbons of fire. He repeated the words as he angled his way through the maze, ducking behind walls and through openings as the slender threads sought him out, Ryer Ord Star’s vision come to life.
He had gotten maybe twenty yards deeper into the maze when the walls began to move. Without warning, they started to raise and lower, a shifting mass of metal that cut off some approaches and opened others, whole sections materializing out of the smooth, polished floor while others disappeared. It was so disorienting and unexpected that he slowed momentarily, and the ribbons of fire began to close on him once more, new ones stabbing out from sections of wall closer to where he hesitated, old ones shifting to target him. In desperation, he threw a wide band of his own fire back at them, knocking some askew, destroying others He heard shouts behind him, rising from behind a screen of smoke and mist, from out of a well of emptiness and darkness.
“Don’t come in here!” he shouted in warning, hearing the echoes cried of his voice come back at him.
Fire lances burned in faint glimmerings through the haze, penetrating the darkness with killing quickness. Screams rose, and he felt his heart sink at the realization that at least some of those he led had not heard him. He started back for them, but the walls shifted anew, the fire threads barred his path, and he was forced to back away.
Get to the obelisk! he screamed at himself in the silence of his mind.
Heat radiated through his body as he turned and hurried ahead once more, sweat mingling with beads of mist on his taut face. Something moved to one side, and he caught the sound of skittering, of metal scraping metal. Fire exploded next to him, barely missing his head, and he ducked and moved faster, twisting and turning through the shifting walls, the changing maze, losing track of everything but the need to reach the obelisk. He felt a stickiness on his hand, and glanced down to find his fingers red with his blood. A fire lance had opened a gash in his arm just above his wrist.
Ignoring the wound, he glanced up to find the obelisk directly in front of him. Impulsively, he darted out from behind the wall that had sheltered him right into the path of a creeper.
For a second he was so stunned he just stopped where he was and stared, his mind a jumble of confusion. What was a creeper doing here? Wait, it wasn’t a creeper at all, it just looked like one. It was spidery like a creeper, had a creeper’s legs and body, but it was all metal with no fusing of flesh, no melding of animate and inanimate, of matter and material .