Wriggling things burst from the seeds, writhed reptile-like around the ladder, clinging to it. Water alone would have brought life from those seeds, but sap made the growth twice as rapid. It seemed as if those stems reached into nothingness, caught emptiness to them, wove substance of it. From finger size they swelled into lengths as thick as Ayyar’s wrist, putting forth all the time more and more tribute vines. They seized upon the ladder as a trellis, leaping up its steps at a speed Ayyar could hardly believe, filling it in, winding about it to choke the opening.
From the vines came a thin orange light. This streamed upward, revealing itself as a cloud of dancing motes. Each of the Iftin in the passages snapped up the edges of the cloaks, shielding their own bodies from that cloud. But the motes did not drift much laterally. Following their nature, they rose vertically, drawn by the promise of outer air in the roof opening.
The Iftin heard nothing as they huddled behind the cloaks. Whether the false Iftin had already been attacked by the motes as living flesh would have been, those in hiding could not tell. But they had put an efficient stopper in the passage to form a rear guard. Jarvas motioned. Ayyar saw Kelemark raise his portion of the cloak yet higher, slide under it, creep to the ladder hole and descend, the others holding steady as he moved.
Ayyar went next, finding that way of escape a stifling one, yet he dared not hurry. He tried to hold his breath, fearing some seepage of motes; inhaled, they would root and grow within a body. Then he was through the bolt hole, waiting for Lokatath, and last of all, Jarvas.
“No sound up there,” their leader reported as he came. Above him the cloaks heaved, bulging downward under the weight of what grew there. They had made their escape just in time. Lokatath watched with satisfaction.
“It feeds, or it would cease to grow,” he murmured.
“It closes the door, whether it does aught else,” Jarvas commented. “Well, so now we must go hunting another way.”
There was a ripping overhead. A white serpent of root wriggled free, swung in the air, then writhed and curled up to force its tip back through the same hole, seeking the air above rather than that of the burrows below.
Ayyar relaxed. He knew the nature of the thing they had loosed, but the small fear that it might follow them down had been with him after he had witnessed that frenzied growth. As Lokatath said, it must have fed enough to give its spread further impetus. Robot or not, the false Iftin had not been immune to balweed.
They went to where the others worked on the door. A hole now gaped in the wall, but Drangar looked at the mass of wiring so disclosed and shook his head.
“How goes it?” asked Jarvas, after a brief explanation of what had passed overhead.
“Thus—” Drangar displayed four broken tools. “We do not have what is needed here now.”
“But elsewhere there is plenty!” Rizak broke in eagerly. “Those machines stored under the false tree. Among them should be maintenance tools.”
“Worth trying.” Drangar sat back on his heels. “Let us go—”
He would play guide so far, Ayyar decided, but once there, he would keep on, across that ill-omened wood, back to the place of the captives. And Lokatath, at least, might go with him.
They hurried down the passage into the place of racked mirrors. There they paused several times to wipe away the coating to look upon the reflections.
“How many—?” Kelemark looked about. “There must be hundreds!”
“Or a nation,” returned Rizak soberly. “Maybe more.” He had halted by one Ayyar had earlier uncovered and was looking at what was not humanoid but furred, with a narrow muzzle. “What was this, another species of intelligent being, a pet—?”
“On!” Ayyar urged, and they quickened pace after him.
They came below that opening in the floor of the place of machines. One standing on another’s shoulders, a third using them both for ladder, then Ayyar was above, fitting together the lengths of sword baldrics to give them all a way up and out. They swept aside the dust with impatient hands, explored the vehicles, forcing open long closed spaces that might have been intended to hold cargo or passengers or both. The designs were alien to what their off-world memories could recall, and only dire need kept them at their search, since the revulsion operated here also.
But in the end Drangar had a selection of tools, oddly shaped, perhaps intended for work far different from the use they would be put to now, but better than those they had brought with them.
“These—but—” He glanced at Jarvas. “We could do better with one of the blasters the suits carry.”
“Yes, if we can find them. Start with these. We shall do what we can.”
At least the space suits and Illylle lay in the same direction, Ayyar thought. They would not put him off again!
Rizak, Jarvas, Kelemark, Lokatath, himself—five to face whatever concentration of power there might be in the burrows. Ayyar did not wait to watch the others take the back trail. He was already at the doorway into the place where Iftin and Larsh faced one another for endless time. Between those lines he sped. There was still the false wood and its pitfalls waiting.
He did not linger, if the others did, to look upon those figures. Now he was in the narrow way down which he had fallen on his race to the false tree, hoping he could find again the spot where he had made that unplanned descent.
Lokatath caught up with him as he was forced to cut his pace to search the other rim for some landmark.
“Where now?”
“Up there. But I do not know just where—”
The other was looking back at the rise of the tree.
“That—that is one of the Crowns—” There was an odd note in his voice. Ayyar glanced from the ridge top to his companion.
Lokatath stood staring at the tree, a kind of hunger, even a shadow of rapture on his face. He began to walk back and down the cut toward it. Ayyar caught his arm and held him so as the other three joined them.
“Do not look at it,” he ordered. “It is a lure to pull you!”
Involuntarily the others looked up. But Jarvas instantly turned his face away. Like Ayyar with Lokatath, he caught at Kelemark and Rizak.
“He is right. That is a deadly thing for us! Turn!” He pulled and shoved them along. “Do not look at it!”
Yet the temptation worked in them all and had to be fought. Ayyar no longer tried to locate the right place on the opposite earth wall. He merely wanted to get up, anywhere.
Again they stood one upon the shoulders of another and so reached the top. Each aiding the other—so they came into the wood. And there might be other pitfalls than those Ayyar had already encountered.
Single file they worked their way under the canopy of green that was false in its welcome, where they must look upon all as suspect. Following Ayyar’s example, when they reached the real trees, they climbed aloft, using every patch of shadow as cover in reaching the distant wall and the entrance to the burrows.
XVII
There was a difference in the wood. Those sounds that had lulled Ayyar’s suspicions were now stilled. The Iftin moved in silence, save for the noise made by their passing. Yet it was not a waiting silence, as if a trap beckoned them. Rather it was as if that which had animated this place had been turned off or withdrawn. And Ayyar commented on that to the others.
Jarvas steadied himself on a wide branch before making another leap. “Withdrawn?” he repeated thoughtfully. “As if, perhaps, there were a need for concentration elsewhere. But where?”
“At the door Drangar seeks to force?” suggested Lokatath.
“Perhaps. Yet I am not sure. That makes a bid for power, all power now. It is sending Its servants out, rather than massing them here for defense.”
“All the more reason for us to hurry.” Ayyar led the way up the slope. Already they were skirting the place where the poison vines hung heavy in the trees. He found himself listening, watching, for the false Vallylle. But if she still walked this evil wood, she did not seek their company. And, somewhat to his surprise, they reached the wall below the burrow mouth with no challenge from any creature of the Enemy. The passage down the cliff was still missing. But they did not hesitate to hack at the trees, trimming their spoil to make a crude ladder.
As they entered the burrow above, they hesitated, nostrils wide, eyes alert. Disgusting odors in plenty, or so they seemed to Ift, came out of the corridor. It was hard to identify any one smell. Jarvas spoke: