“Machines—”
“Chemicals,” added Kelemark, sniffing.
“No false Iftin, I think,” Lokatath began.
Rizak put his hand palm flat against the wall of the passage.
“Power flows here. This place is alive with energy.”
Jarvas followed his example, then snatched back his hand as if the vibration were a searing burn for his flesh.
“The crystal panels,” Ayyar warned. “I think they are alarms; we must avoid them.”
As far as he could see the passage ahead by the wan light, it was empty. He slipped past Jarvas to lead again, dropping to his knees to pass the first pair of crystals.
“This is the room where they store the bodies,” he said a little later, pausing by that door. Kelemark pushed past him and stood staring at the lines of containers.
“More—there are many more of them now filled,” Ayyar whispered. “When I was here before, only four in this line were occupied—now all are completed!”
“Where do they make the mirrors?” demanded Jarvas.
Kelemark had gone to the nearest cylinder. He put his face very close to its surface, his hands cupped about his eyes. He shook his head. “It cannot be seen—”
“The mirrors—” pressed Jarvas.
Illylle! That sent Ayyar racing down the corridor. He had to force a curb on his reckless need to get her out of this place—if he still could.
“Let me see the place where they grow the robots!” Kelemark ordered as if he were now in command of the party. But Jarvas held up his hand:
“First the mirrors!”
Ayyar was cautious enough to halt before he passed any of the doors, listening, sniffing for trouble. So far there had been nothing, no stir of any space suit in action. Save for the feeling of life in the walls about them, the Iftin invaders might have been walking through halls as deserted as those leading from the false Great Crown.
They came into the place where he had witnessed the making of the reflections. The table there was unoccupied, nor were there now any mirrors on the wall! But there were suits—two of them.
Ayyar signaled caution. The suits were humanoid, yet not of a type he knew. One had an arm twisted and snapped off short a little below the shoulder plate. The ends of that break slagged into a blob of battered metal. The other lacked a helmet.
When neither of the metal cripples moved, Ayyar decided they were harmless. Rizak crossed warily to examine them. Once an astro-navigator on a spacer, his acquaintance with such aids to stellar voyaging was far greater than Ayyar’s. But now he shook his head.
“Nothing such as these have I seen before.”
Ayyar went to the table, bent his head, and sniffed long and hard. There was odor of garthman, undisguised, and of the port men. But not Ift—at least not so lately that it had not been completely overlaid with the effluvia of the others.
Yet Illylle must have been brought here. From the deserted mirror room Ayyar sped to the laboratory, where he had witnessed the growth of the false creatures. The stench was a blow in the face, but the tables here were also empty. No jelly bubbled on a mirror bed.
Kelemark sniffed deeply, in spite of the torture to his Ift senses.
“Some form of plasta flesh—proto base—” he reported.
There was that third room Ayyar remembered in which he had seen the false Ift body being fitted with wires, up corridor. There he went now, to find it empty.
“Where—?” He knew that Jarvas, the rest, could give him no better answers than his own mind could supply. Maybe—Ayyar’s head swung sharply around—maybe not his mind but his nose!
There were other doors along the corridor, and from one of them—it must be from one of them—came that scent, so faint in this place of ugly odors, yet to be traced. Illylle—surely Illylle!
Sniffing, rejecting, sniffing, Ayyar prowled along. Illylle or Ift—but there were other smells, strong, piercing as a pain when he breathed them in. Garthpeople—here—here— Ayyar’s head swung from side to side at two closed doors facing one another across the hall.
Illylle—Ift—to the right! His hands went to the door, strove to push it, first inward, and then to either right or left. But it was as immobile under his hands as if it had been sealed by slagging. Lokatath joined him, then the others, all with their nostrils distended as they followed that same faint scent.
“Locked,” Jarvas decided.
“Wait!”
As if they could do anything else, Ayyar thought impatiently. Rizak ran back toward the chamber of the mirrors. Ayyar continued to push at that stubborn portal, but it only wore out his strength uselessly. If only that which the Mirror of Thanth had planted in him had not been so exhausted. Thanth!
He stopped his vain fight with the door and glanced at Jarvas. “You are Mirrormaster. What can be summoned now from Thanth to our aid?”
Jarvas stared back, almost as if that demand had come as a shock. Then he looked thoughtfully at the door. “If you no longer hold the power, there is naught Thanth can do—”
“No?” The Mirror had sent him here filled with the substance of its force. And Illylle had given him a double portion when she had sent him to fulfill their mission. He had failed at the fused stairway. Then the power had ebbed with every step of retreat from that failure. But now, cried Ayyar silently, I have returned. I am here to do whatever is needful to free Janus from this burden long laid upon her clean earth. I have not deserted the quest or fled battle. I have returned with fresh forces!
He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the ledge above the Mirror, the great sparkling tongue rising from its surface to touch upon Illylle and then him, choosing them as fit receptacles of whatever force did enter into Janus through Thanth. He did not know that he had drawn his sword, that its point rested on the floor of the corridor between his firmly planted feet, that his two hands were clasped on its hilt.
In those moments when he had stood before the Mirror and watched it in action, he had known awe, belief in something beyond his powers to understand or explain. How much of that was inherited from the Ayyar who had been he did not know, nor even if that belief itself was so strong in him once he was removed from the Mirror where the united worship of the others had been a part of what he had seen and felt.
The Mirror, that reaching finger or tongue of sparkling water that had risen from it—Ayyar tried to will to life that tingling which had coursed through him.
He was out—no longer in his body—but in a space like unto that where he had sat across the game table from that other presence, he had never seen, save that this space was not the same, nor was the presence he sensed now—in any way.
“Green the growth, deep the seed.
Stand high a Tree, to Iftin need.
Sweet the wind, soft the rain—
Rich the soil, without bane—”
Green growing about his feet, up and up, he did not have to see those plants. They were a part of him, like his blood, his flesh, and the bones beneath them were a part. As if he, too, put roots into the soil, drew life and nourishment from it? Around him blew a wind as caressing as the dawn winds of summer, and on his cheeks, his lips, was the soft, refreshing touch of gentle rain, satisfying all thirst, all hunger.
“Straight the sword, sharp the blade.
Bright the leaf that does not fade.
Still the Mirror, wide and deep,
High the Moon that doth keep
Silver caught within the Mirror.
Stand here, Ift, without fear.
He could not see Thanth with the eyes of his body. But it was there—deep, dark, yet silver where it caught and held the moon. That moon’s reflection shivered and broke into a thousand silver motes, free and floating. They arose and were one with the wind, the soft rain. So were they borne to him, gathering about his body—entering—
“Iftin sword, Iftin hand,
Iftin heart, Iftin kind!
Forged in the dark,
Cooled by the moon—”
That was the Lay of Kymon, Kymon who had walked the blazing white, searing paths of the Enemy, and returned therefrom with the Oath for the safety of his people. Ayyar did not sing that, the chant came from without and beyond.
“Borne by warrior who will stand—
When tree grows and That will fall.
Iftin swords, Iftin hands—
Come to save and cleanse a land!”
The sparkling silver touch of Thanth was once more within him. As he had before, he felt that strange life allied with his own, and he exalted in it. Ayyar opened his eyes to face Jarvas. And the Ift who had once been Mirrormaster and so able to call upon the power looked back with a depth of concentration, a willing. His lips moved as if he would speak, but at first he did not utter a sound. Then he said: