The walls rising about them were cream-white, smooth save for that ribbon of stairway. Naill spun his body around with memories of how it had once been on board ship. However, when he tried to move closer to Ashla, or “swim” toward the wall stairway, he was still under inhibiting control.
Ashla was quiet after her first scream of fear, but Naill could hear her breathing heavily, see that her eyes were wide open, her features setting in a mask of naked terror. She had had no defense against the strangeness of this, no memory of free fall in space to sustain her.
“This—is—free—fall—as—on—a—ship,” Naill got out. His outflung hand closed about her wrist, so that their bodies drew a little closer together. “This is controlled—perhaps by the beam disk.”
It was where they were going, not how, that mattered now. Below them, all he could see was a murky billowing, darker than the walls, as if some fire steamed or smoked there. Yet there was no warmth in the air. As the first streamers of that murk engulfed them, Naill felt no change in temperature. His initial nightmare faded; they were not being wafted down into a furnace.
The murk grew thicker. He kept his hold on Ashla. Close as they now were, it was difficult to distinguish her features. They were as blind here as they would have been in broad sunlight, if for a different reason. How long had they fallen? Naill had tried to keep count of the steps in that stair but knew that he had missed out long since. And still they continued to float down. Then, breaking through the fog, came more formations of crystal. Unlike the trees of the upper forest, these appeared in clusters of roughly geometric shape—they could be towers, ramparts, the bulk of alien buildings—while through them ran small pulsing lines of light, to no pattern Naill could perceive, save that they formed veins in the surfaces, as the veins carrying the blood to serve his own body.
There was a bright flash of light at their feet while they were still above the surface of the ground. Whatever sustained them vanished in that wink, and they fell in a rush, landing in an angle between two of the now towering crystalline walls.
Naill sat up, pulling Ashla with him. The tinkling bell which had become a part of the world since they had entered the White Forest was silenced. They had ceased to note it consciously while they heard it, but the quiet that followed was so complete it awed them both.
“What is this place?” Ashla held tight to Naill, did not try to move.
“Illylle does not know?” He appealed for some scrap of memory to aid them now.
She shook her head. “Illylle sleeps—or is gone.” There was a desolation of loneliness in her answer.
Naill strove to make his own contact. There was no touching any point of Ayyar memory. They were totally on their own, intruders, prisoners in an alien place. But that fact was no reason to sit and await trouble! One could choose a battlefield. And he had an idea that when the beam control had hit ground, it had broken, that they were now free of its bounds.
“Come!” He pulled her to her feet. His left arm in its splints was still fastened to his side as he had had her do before they set out. He would leave it so. At least he could use his right, and the sword he had sheathed after their capture by the ray had been left him by the space-suited enemy. What defense that blade could be against the intelligence responsible for their present plight Naill did not know. But the hilt felt good to his hand when his palm closed about it.
“Where would you go?” Ashla asked.
Her question was a just one. The fog swirled about the crystal walls, leaked through apertures in them. There was no visibility for more than a few yards in any direction. On the other hand every instinct in Naill warred against remaining where the disk had landed them. If the fog was a hindrance it might also be a help, giving them cover. He said as much.
“Which way, then?” Ashla did not protest, but turned as she stood, studying the hardly visible landscape.
“As we fell—that stairway was over there.” Naill pointed. “Perhaps we can reach its foot.”
“And is there also a chance of finding food”—her tongue ran over her dry, cracking lips—”and water?”
“I do not know.”
“There is this, we were brought here carefully. Had our deaths been planned, what need to spare us that fall?” Ashla spoke slowly as if reasoning it out in her own mind. “So—”
“So—somewhere here is food and water? You may be right, but the price of wasting time in a blind search . . .”
“While one lives, there is always a chance. If we climb the stair, we only come out in the forest once again . . . to find that suited thing waiting—or the sun up! And the sun shining in there!”
She did not need to elaborate. To climb into sunlight blazing on those crystal trees would be climbing into sure death for Iftin bodies—even if they could drag their way up that long stairway.
“Which way, then?” Naill asked in turn.
“This is a time when perhaps we must depend upon chance.” Ashla stooped to pick up an object she tossed from hand to hand. “This is what brought us here—let us see if, by the whims of chance, it can take us even farther!” She shut her eyes and turned rapidly around before she threw the disk from her.
There was a faint tinkle and they both saw the disk rebound from a wall to lie on the earth in an opening. It was an illogical and reckless way to decide their next move, but Naill accepted it. Together they went through the doorway.
It was a gate rather than a doorway, for the space beyond was as open to the air overhead as that where they had landed. This was a corridor of sorts running straight ahead. Walls of crystal stood higher than their heads, half curtained by the mist.
“Listen!” Perhaps some trick of those crystalline walls carried and magnified that sound. Ashla was already hurrying toward that unmistakable murmur of water.
They sped down that hallway, and the sound of the water grew stronger as they stumbled eagerly along. There was another doorway, and they came through it to a space Naill believed to be truly open, though he could see little of its area. Ashla sprang on.
“This way! Over here!”
What they came upon was no natural river as they had known before. Water flowed there right enough, but it swirled at a race through a trough of crystal.
“Wait—!” A remnant of Ayyar’s hunter’s caution made Naill call out.
She did not listen to him. Falling to her knees, Ashla plunged both hands into the flood. She might have been testing the validity of what her eyes reported. Then, the water running down her arms, she made a cup of her fingers and drank.
It might be the wildest kind of folly to trust the wholesomeness of what they found there. But Naill’s resistance was swept away. He followed her example, and the moisture on his skin, the liquid he splashed one-handed into his dry mouth, smelled no different, tasted no different, from any that he had drunk from forest springs and pools. It was cold, clear—like new life flowing into his whole body.
“You see”—Ashla smiled—”in this much, chance favored us. We have found water.”
Naill sat back on his heels, his first craving satisfied. “We may have found more than water.” Now his wits were working again, weighing every small point that might operate in their favor.
“How?”
“The water comes—and it goes . . .”
“You mean—follow this stream to its source or its end? Yes, that is good—very good!”
“The water makes a good guide, a better one than any other we have seen here. And we have no means of carrying a drinking supply if we do leave it.” He had been forced to abandon the remains of his pack, with its water bottle and food, back by the river.
“Guide and sustainer all in one. But which way do we go—upstream or down?”
Naill could see small difference in choice. Either way could serve their purpose. But before he could say that, Ashla gave a little cry and leaned out over the trough, her hand flashing down into the water, coming up with something in its grasp.
What she held was a fussan pod, empty of seed, but still fresh.
“Upstream! This came from upstream. Where there is one there may be more!”
Naill’s hopes arose with hers. He got stiffly to his feet, favoring his aching arm. “Upstream it is—let us go!”