The pain vanished immediately, before either one of them could draw enough breath to gasp.
Frog-boy said again, “Climb.”
Neither Kane nor Grant smirked this time. The demonstration of the harp’s capabilities proved that a rebellious attitude would earn only agony, if not death. Other than the devices, the two men weren’t accustomed to zero gravity and they feared the rarefied air would cause them to faint if they expended much energy in a struggle.
Kane grasped a tie bar and began to climb, though he felt more like a worm wriggling up a string. A troll preceded him, and two placed themselves behind him, between him and Grant. The other three men followed Grant, the female bobbing alongside them, swimming easily through the null gravity.
The rope extended through the opening and into a completely round chamber, featureless except for white-glowing light tubes bracketed to the walls.
Kane’s headache worsened once he climbed out of the ovular cell, and he clung to a tie bar, wheezing and panting, his legs drifting upward. Frog-boy floated past him, his foot slapping him lazily across the cheek.
“Let’s go,” he piped. “Keep it up.”
Relaxing his grip, Kane rose upward. In the domed ceiling, Frog-boy clung to a wheel lock by his feet, turning it expertly. His coarse black hair puffed around his head like clot of rancid seaweed stirred by ocean currents.
Grant bobbed up beside Kane, jostling him with a shoulder, sending him into a slow somersault. Kane started to swear, realized he didn’t have the breath to waste and tried to straighten himself out. A pair of trolls grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him upright and gently pushed him back toward the hatch.
Frog-boy opened it and kicked himself through the opening. Kane followed a moment later, finding himself staring at the stinking, dirty, callused soles of Frog-boy’s feet. They were anchored on a staple-shaped rung bolted to the inside of a long, straight tube, barely wide enough to admit Kane’s shoulders. Looking up the shaft past the troll, he was reminded of an unbelievably long blaster barrel.
Frog-boy scampered up the shaft, clutching and kicking off the rungs. Kane came after him, imitating his method of propulsion. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. The troll’s small stature allowed him more clearance to move around, and Kane scraped his back on the tube wall and banged his chin on the metal rungs more than once.
Grant underwent the same painful experience. The hollow shaft echoed with his breathless curses.
Kane lost all track of time. He had no idea how long he squirmed his way through the shaft. He focused only on putting one hand after the other on the rungs of cold steel.
After a long, miserable period, he realized the climb was requiring more effort, more muscular tension and strain. He felt a growing pressure against his eardrums. Chains seemed to weigh down his limbs.
Although his thoughts moved sluggishly, he understood his body was reacting to a return of gravity. The longer he climbed, the more it settled on and over him like a heavy cloak. He wasn’t certain if he was happy about it, since the increased gravity doubled the difficulty of scaling the ladder. He had to work at it, and the hand-over-hand process became strenuous. His knife cuts stung, and his right knee throbbed.
However, he smelled fresher, richer air, and his respiration slowly became less laborious and painful.
At a scuttling, clanking sound above him, Kane craned his neck, looking up just as Frog-boy’s grotesque feet slipped out of sight over the lip of an open hatchway.
Kane sighed in relief, caught himself, fought back a cough and hauled himself up the last yard. He thrust his head out of the metal-socketed hatch and stared directly into the grim, graven face of a god.
Chapter 16
The room was enormous. It had to be in order to contain the gargantuan head. It loomed above Kane, silently judging him and finding him wanting.
Kane blinked, and by degrees he saw the head was a colossal effigy made of stone or rockcrete, supported within a taut webwork of steel cables. He followed them with his eyes, noting how they were anchored to eyebolts driven into metal girders running the length and breadth of the high, domed ceiling.
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