I saw that the branches were bleached, leafless, but matted together. Yet the stone pulled me toward them, as if it would have me go through that mass. I hunched down and began to saw away at the obstructions. Eet was there, his forepaws at work, snapping off smaller pieces, while I dug with the point of the knife in the soft earth under the heavier branches. We moved very slowly, pausing many times to survey the open ground between us and the sniffer. To my surprise, for I knew we were far from noiseless (in spite of our best efforts), he did not appear and Eet reported he had not moved.
It suddenly occurred to me, with a chill, what his purpose might be- that he was not alone, and that when his reinforcements moved into place there would be a charge after all.
“You are right.” Eet was no comforter. “There is one, perhaps two more, coming-“
“Why did you not tell me?”
“Had it been necessary I would have. But why add to apprehension when a clear mind is needful? They are yet some distance away. It is a pity, but the day is almost gone. To them, I believe, night is no problem.”
I did not put my thoughts into words; Eet could read them well enough anyway. “Are there any in front of us?” I bit back and curbed my anger.
“None within my sensing range. They do not like that direction. This one waits for the others’ coming, not because he fears us, but because he fears where we head. His fear grows stronger as he waits.”
“Then- let us get farther ahead-“ I no longer tried to be so careful, but slashed at branches, cutting our way through the springy wall in quick blows.
“Well spoken,” Eet agreed. “Always supposing we do not run from one danger into a greater one.”
I made no reply to that, but hoped that Eet was reading my emotions and that they would scorch him. Beyond the trees were more of the scum-rimmed pools, fallen trunks. But the latter provided us with a road of sorts. The fisherman had been armed with nothing more lethal than a club, which he could not use at a distance. He knew we fled, and it seemed to me that speed was now in order.
With Eet back on my shoulders, his paw-hands gripping the ties of my pack, I sprang onto the nearest trunk and ran, leaping from one to the next, not in a straight line, but always in the direction the stone pointed me. For I could not help but hope that it would guide me to some installation, or ship, perhaps even a settlement of those who had owned the ring, even as it had brought us across space to the derelict. The great age of that ship, however, suggested I would find no living community.
We were out of the gloom. Not only had the flood cut a swath among the trees, but the secondary growth had been undermined and was scanty. Now I could see the sky overhead.
But that was full of clouds, and while it was still warm enough to make one pant when exercising, there was no sun. Insects buzzed about, so that at times I had to swing my hand before my face to clear my vision. But none bit my flesh. Perhaps I was so alien to their usual source of nourishment that they could not.
There was no sign of any pursuit, and Eet, though he had ceased to communicate when we began this dash, would, I believed, raise the warning if it were needed. I appeared to possess some importance to him, though his evasiveness concerning that bothered me.
Again pools began to link together, forcing me to make more and more detours from the direct path the stone indicated. I had no wish to splash through even the shallows of those evil-looking, bescummed floods. Who knew what might hide below their foul surfaces? Perhaps the insects did not find me tasty, but that did not mean other native life would be so fastidious.
I had no idea of the length of the planetary day, but it seemed to me now that the cloud blanket overhead did not account for all the lack of light and that this might be late afternoon. Before night we must find some safe place in which to hole up. If the natives were nocturnal, the advantage of any encounter would rest with them.
The water pushed me back, farther and farther to the right, while the tug of the stone was now left, straight into the watery region. Its pull became so acute and constant that I finally had to slip the loop from my hand and put it back in the pouch, lest it overbalance me into one of the very sinks I fought to skirt.
There was much evidence that not only had this lake been far larger in the not too far-distant past but it was still draining away in the very direction the ring pointed. It was hard going and from time to time I demanded of Eet reassurance that we were not being followed. But each time he reported all clear.
It was decidedly darker and I had yet found no possible place to lie up for the night. Too many tracks in the mud suggested that life, large life, crawled from pond to lake, came from the water and returned to it. And the size of some of those tracks was enough to make a man think twice, three, a dozen times, before settling down near their roadways.
I had passed the first of the outcrops before I really noticed them, so covered were they with dried mud which afforded anchorage to growing things. It was when I scrambled up on one to try for a better look at what might lie ahead that it dawned on me that they were not scattered without pattern but were set in a line which could not be that of nature alone.
My foot slipped on the surface and I slid forward, trying to stop my fall by digging the point of the knife well in. But the stone resisted my blade, which came away with an almost metallic sound, scraping off a huge patch of mud.
What I had uncovered was not rough stone, but a smooth surface which had been artificially finished. When I touched it I could not be sure it was stone at all. It had a sleekness, almost as if the rock had been fused into a glassy overcoat – though in places this was scaled and pitted.
In color it was dull green, veined with ocher strata. Yet it was not part of a wall, for the stones did not abut, but had several paces distance between them. Perhaps there had once been some link of another material now vanished.
The outcrops ran in the direction the stone urged upon me, marching down to the lake, partially submerged near the shore, water lapping their crowns farther out, then entirely covered.
As I continued along the lake, now alert to any other evidence, I came across a second line of blocks, paralleling those swallowed by the water. These I took for a guide. They were certainly the remains of some large erection, ancient though they appeared. And as such they could well lead to a building, or even a ruin which would shelter us.
“Just so,” Eet agreed. “But it would be well to hurry faster. Night will come soon under these clouds and I think a storm also. If more water feeds this lake-“
There was no need for him to underline his thought. I jumped from one of those blocks half buried in the muck to the next, listening for warning thunder (if storms on this planet were accompanied by such warnings) and fearing to feel the first drops of rain. The wind was growing stronger and it brought with it a low wailing which stopped me short until Eet’s reassurance came:
“That is not the voice of a living thing- only sound-“ He sniffed as thoroughly as the trunk-nosed native.
The blocks for the first time now were joined together, rising into a wall, and I dropped down to walk beside it. It soon topped my head. There were too many shadows in its overhang, so I edged into the open.
I would have climbed again after a while for a better look at the country ahead, but the tops of these blocks were not level. Instead they were crowned with projections, the original form of which could not be guessed, for they were eroded and worn to stubs which pricked from them at meaningless angles.
On this side of the wall the signs of flood ceased, except in some places where apparently waves had spilled over the top, in a few instances actually turning and twisting the mighty blocks of the coping over which they had beaten.