Dravig was looking among the bushes. Niall pointed to the rope tied round the base of the stunted tree.
“This is the other end of the rope they used. Someone must have cut it as Skorbo came out of the doorway.”
Whatever had been used to cut the rope — either an ax or a knife — had been razor-sharp; there were no frayed ends.
Dravig asked: “Have you any more observations?”
Niall considered. He allowed himself to remain silent for a long time, aware that the patience of spiders is far greater than that of human beings. He said finally: “Whoever did this planned it carefully. In my opinion there must have been at least three of them. And for some reason they hated Skorbo.”
“You believe that Skorbo was the intended victim?”
“I am inclined to think so.” Niall decided against explaining why Skorbo was disliked; it would have seemed discourtesy toward the dead. And Dravig, who sensed that Niall had more to say, was too tactful to press him.
Niall said: “They probably entered by the front door. But they did not leave by it. They had propped it closed with a balk of timber. That means they must have climbed over the wall. . . Ah yes.”
He had pushed himself through the gap between the bushes and the left-hand wall, and now found a low gate in the wall. It was made of iron, and was rusted. Yet when he pushed it, the gate swung upon its hinges without a creak. A glance at these hinges showed that they had been greased.
The gate led into a narrow lane, which ran between two garden walls. It had obviously been constructed to afford entrance into the gardens, and a few yards from the gate, it terminated in the wall of the house. In the other direction, it ran on for about a hundred yards before it was blocked with rubble where a wall had collapsed.
Dravig had found it easier to step over the wall than to squeeze his bulk through the gate; now he stood beside Niall in the snow-covered lane. Any footprints that had been left behind had been obliterated by the more recent snowfall. Both stood there silently; Niall had discovered that being with a spider placed him in a calm and contemplative frame of mind, and that this sharpened his powers of intuition. So far his mind had been full of questions and observations, and this made him abnormally aware of his physical surroundings, as if they were thrusting themselves insistently against his senses. Now, quite suddenly, he relaxed, and it was as if the physical world had receded. The discomfort of his cold hands and feet became irrelevant, as if they belonged to someone else. In this new silence, he experienced a kind of awakening of attention, as if some unusual sound or smell was hovering on the edge of his perceptions. As he stood there, totally relaxed, it became stronger. There was something unpleasant about it, something distinctly menacing.
Dravig also stood motionless, without a hint of impatience; yet Niall’s contact with his mind told him that the spider was completely oblivious to this sense of unpleasantness. It had often struck him as curious that, in spite of their telepathic powers, spiders seemed oddly lacking in intuition. Perhaps it was because they had so little to fear.
Niall walked on slowly, his head averted as if listening. Because his eyes were on the ground, he noticed the footprints close to the left-hand wall. There were half a dozen of them, and they were pointing in the opposite direction; whoever made them had wandered to one side of the path for a few steps, then returned to the center. Because the breeze had been blowing from the north, the footprints had been protected by the wall, and were covered with only a light powdering of the snow that had fallen later. Now Niall paused and examined them closely, kneeling down in the snow. The first thing that struck him was that they had been made by sandals — or shoes — of excellent workmanship. Most of the sandals worn by the workmen of this city were poorly made; thick leather soles held on to the foot by leather thongs or strips of reinforced cloth, which were threaded through holes in the leather. In order to prevent these thongs from becoming worn where they made contact with the ground, holes were countersunk in the sole to minimize the friction. So a footprint made by a workman or a slave was quite distinctive, with its three pairs of holes. On the other hand, the human beings captured from Kazak’s underground city wore more elaborate footwear. Having far more time at their disposal, the shoemakers of Dira took pride in their craft, and sewed broad leather straps to the sole with waxed thread. The soles themselves were shaped to correspond exactly to the outline of the human foot. It seemed likely, then, that these footprints in the snow had been made by a man of Dira.
Dravig asked: “These are the footprints of one of the assassins?”
“Yes.”
“They seem to interest you.”
“I am puzzled. If you look at my own footprints, you will see that they have been made with an even pressure — the heel and the sole are of equal depth. In these, the heel is far deeper than the sole.”
“I see that.” Dravig’s tone was polite, but Niall sensed that the spider found his interest incomprehensible. The spider mentality seemed averse to mathematical logic. “And what do you infer?”
Niall straightened up, shaking his head. “That he was carrying something heavy.” But he was far from convinced by his own reasoning.
Fifty paces further on, the path was partly blocked with rubble where the left-hand wall had collapsed. On the other side of it there was an overgrown garden; the house to which it belonged had once been large, but had now fallen into ruin. Niall paused and stood looking at the house. Once again he had the sense that something was hovering on the edge of his perceptions, like a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Stepping carefully, he made his way over the fallen stones and into the garden. Instinct told him to turn left and make his way toward a gap in the shrubbery. It was only when he was there that he noticed that there was less snow on these bushes than on the surrounding ones, and that somebody had probably brushed past them, shaking the snow onto the ground.
A dozen yards from the house, he found his path blocked by an empty swimming pool. Its plastic material had long ago become cracked and coated with black mildew; only in places were there glimpses of its original blue color. The bottom was covered with rubbish: dead leaves, fallen slates, and broken glass. But what immediately attracted Niall’s attention was the pile of more recent rubbish on the side nearest the house. In the corner of the pool, at the foot of an aluminum ladder that was still firmly attached to the side, there were dead branches, pieces of rotten timber, and a quantity of fallen leaves mixed with snow.
Dravig was standing silently behind him. Niall asked: “Do you notice anything?”
“No.” The spider’s antennae were directed toward the pool.
“There’s almost no snow on that lawn. Somebody has gone to the trouble of gathering all the dead leaves” — he pointed down into the pool — “and throwing them in there.”
He went around the pool and clambered down the ladder; as he did so he noted that the steps were almost free of snow. Standing at the bottom, he reached out and grabbed the end of a length of decaying timber that looked as if it had once been the frame of a door. As he heaved it free, and a dead bush also came away with it, he saw what he had been half-expecting: a human leg protruding from the wet leaves.
A moment later, Dravig was beside him, clearing away the dead branches. The corpse that was exposed was naked; it was a man, and his head and limbs were swollen to almost balloon-like proportions. The face had turned black, and looked as if it was made of shiny leather. Niall felt the energies drain from his heart; it reminded him of his father’s corpse as it lay across the threshold of their underground home in the desert.
Dravig said with satisfaction: “Skorbo managed to kill one of them before he died.”
Niall leaned forward cautiously until his nostrils assured him that, in spite of its bloated appearance, the corpse had not yet started to decay. He took hold of the foot and pulled the body clear of the dead leaves. The eyes were open and the lips drawn back from the teeth; he had obviously died in agony. The knees were bent grotesquely in rigor mortis.