A Disian!
Nik splashed on, trying to move faster. If the natives had attacked! He crawled up the slope.
“Leeds! Vandy!” There was no answer to his call.
He had never thought of their not being there, never faced the possibility of coming back to an empty camp. Where had they gone? And why? Had Leeds tried to follow him? But as the captain had pointed out, he could not have made that journey and taken Vandy, too, and certainly the boy could not walk.
“Leeds!” The name came out as a harsh croak as Nik made it over the edge of the ledge.
And the ledge was bare. Bare!
Nik huddled there, too numbed by that discovery to try to think. The storm – ! On this exposed position, the storm must have broken with blasting force. Had those two been swept away by wind and water or had the captain somehow made an escape? With that very faint hope moving him, Nik sat back on his heels to look to the next rise of land. The shore cliffs were the only possibility, near enough so that with a determined effort Leeds, might have reached them. But what chance had they offered for a semiconscious boy and a man with an injured leg? No, both must have been swept away.
Only stubborn clinging to unrealistic hope made Nik start for the cliffs. There had been plenty of warning about the impending storm, and Leeds knew Dis far better than Nik. The captain must have done something! If the cliffs were the only answer, then Leeds had tried the cliffs.
A flock of the leather-winged creatures wheeled over the rocks and screamed as they landed to shamble up and down, eying Nik. He gathered they were out to clean up the storm debris. Moving abruptly, Nik was answered by their taking off again with even louder screeches. There were several flocks of them along the cliffs ahead, and some were luckier in their finds, for they settled down to feed.
Had the rugged coast been pounded by the sea that had once filled that basin, Nik could not have made the journey, but the rain lake was waveless, unless purposely disturbed, and shallow, save for a deeper pool now and then. He still walked with caution, but he was trying to move faster.
A glint of light – to his right – from the face of the cliff! Nik waded to that spot. A mass of fungoid brush had been driven into a rock cul-de-sac, and it was from that the wink came. He tore aside the slimy stuff to be faced by a weak torch beam. Perhaps the battering of the storm had affected the charge, for this was only a wan echo of the usual light, but there was no denying that the rod had been carefully wedged into a crevice to provide a guide.
They had reached here alive and with confidence enough to leave a sign for anyone following! Nik had not known how greatly he doubted their safety until relief flooded in to lighten his fear.
And the torch would not have been so carefully set without purpose. He began to search the wall for some other clue, tearing away the matted flotsam with both hands. The last mass of that came free like a released plug, and he was looking into the dark mouth of a cave.
But why – why would Leeds take to such a hole? With the water rising outside, a break in the cliff could be a trap, but Nik was sure this was the road.
He had to stoop to get in, and the torch he had freed from the crevice was very feeble. The light was still strong enough to disclose that this was not a cave, or if it were, the dimensions extended well back into the rock wall.
“Leeds!” he shouted. The name echoed with a hollow, intimidating sound, but there was no other reply.
However, there was another trace of those who had passed this way before him, the shining growing prints of feet that had tracked in crushed plant stuff to the dried floor of the cave. Two sets of those tracks, neither running straight. So Vandy had been on his feet and walking when they entered here! Nik wondered at that minor miracle.
The footprints vanished as their burden of growing slime was shed little by little. But there was only one way they could have gone – straight ahead where the walls closed in to form a passage.
An upslope to the flooring formed a vent in the cliff, angling toward the surface of the shore above. Nik wondered at Leeds’ luck in finding it – the perfect bolt hole out of the storm. But with his injured leg, how had the captain made this climb? There were places that were an effort for Nik. He stopped at each and called, certain each time he would be answered – only he never was.
He emerged suddenly into a space he sensed was large but the walls of which he could not see. And standing there, Nik was puzzled. Which way now? To find a wall and work his way around, he decided, was the best answer. The feeble glow of the torch showed him the wall to the right, and he began the journey.
Nik was several feet along before the nature of the wall itself attracted him. This was not rough stone, as were the walls of the cave passage, but smoothly finished with the same coating given to the chambers of the refuge. Here within the sea cliff was another hollowing of the Disians. Another refuge?
There was no cool current of air, just the general dankness of the outside atmosphere, but perhaps not as heavily humid as on the surface. Whatever the purpose of this room, he came across no fixtures, none of the pallid light that had been in the refuge – or had that been added by the Guild?
The size of the chamber was awe-inspiring. Nik was still walking along one wall, the expanse on his left echoing emptily to the sound of his boots on stone. Was this a gallery running within the length of the cliff?
Nik was shivering a little in spite of the humidity. This place did not welcome his kind. For whatever purpose it had been fashioned, those hollowing it had been aliens, and he was not at home here – no off-worlder would be.
“Leeds!” Once more he paused and called. This time the echo came back from all sides until it rang in his head almost as that throbbing whistle had done.
But there had been an answer! A cry that was not a real word but that echoed in turn, so that he was certain he had heard it, if not what it was.
“Vandy!” Nik faced outward into that unknown space to his left and put the full force of his lungs into that shout.
This time no answer came. He tried to think where the earlier sound had come from, but the echoes made that impossible. To strike out from the wall was dangerous. He could only keep on exploring with that as his guide. But there was a need for hurry, and Nik began to trot.
A few moments brought him to a corner and the angle of another wall to follow. This was broken by slits, which had been filled in, perhaps at a later time, with rough stones wedged and mortared together. Windows walled up? Exits closed against some peril?
His torch caught and held in one that was a dark gap, not sealed. Nik hesitated. A way out – or the way out?
He listened. Now that the faint echo of his own footfalls had died, was there anything to hear? Just as he had been alerted to the Disian ambush by those lights, so now he was uneasy because of the very silence about him. His imagination pictured only too readily something lurking there – waiting. For what? For Nik Kolherne to come within attacking distance?
The dim torch flashed within the wall cavity, giving him nothing save the assurance that it was more than a niche, an entrance to either a passage or another room. He could not stay here forever – he must either take that door or continue his wall-hugging advance. And something he could not define urged him into the passage. After all, he could always return. There was an oppression here that he connected with the humid air but that carried with it a dampening to more than just the physical senses – an oppression of spirits as well as of body. Why had he suddenly thought of it that way? Men – or at least intelligent entities – had made this place for a purpose, the desperate purpose of a refuge? Or had this existed before the time when the Disians had foreseen their world’s end and tried to last out catastrophe and chaos?