“Where is it then-?”
Hory must have known I would not answer that. The screen now showed a wider break in the growth. Beyond the ground our descent had scorched was a slope of yellow sand, of so bright and sharp a color as I had not seen elsewhere on this dusky world. That provided a beach for a lake. The water here was not slime-ringed, murky, and suggestive of evil below its surface; it had not been born of any dying flood. This was as brightly green as the sand was yellow, so vividly colored both they might have been gems set in dingy metal.
“It is the nature of these stones” – I made a lecture of my explanation, supplying nuggets of truth in a vast muffling of words – “that they seek their own kind. One can actually draw you to another. If you will yield to the pull of the one you have. Eet took the ring just before the Guild ship landed. We had been following such a pull, and he continued to follow it. He found the source of the attraction-“
Eet gave no sign he heard my words. He was still watching the screen in complete absorption. Suddenly he made one of the few vocal sounds I had ever heard from him. His lips parted to show his teeth, cruelly sharp, and he was hissing. Startled, I looked at the view on the visa-plate.
SIXTEEN
The viewer swept on. What we now saw must be on the other side of the ship. And if the rest of the landscape had been free of any signs that intelligence had ever been there, that was now changed.
An arm of the lake made a narrow inlet. Set in the middle of that was a platform of stone blocks. It was ringed by a low parapet, on which stood stone pillars in the form of heads. Each differed from its fellows so much as to suggest that if they did not resemble imagined gods, they had been fashioned to portray very unlike species. But the oddest thing was not their general appearance, but that from those set at the four corners there curled trails of greenish smoke, almost the shade of the water washing below. It would seem that those heads were hollow and housed fires.
Yet, save for that smoke, there was no sign of any life on the stone surface of the platform. We could see most of it, and unless someone crawled belly-flat below that low parapet, the place was deserted. Eet continued to hiss, his back fur rising in a ridge from nape to root of tail.
I studied those heads, trying to discover in any one of them some small resemblance to something I had seen before on any of the worlds I had visited. And, in the fourth from the nearest smoking one, I thought that I did.
“Deenal!” I must have spoken that word aloud as I recalled the museum on Iona where Vondar had been invited to a private showing of a treasure from remote space. There had been a massive armlet, too large to fit any human arm, and it had borne such a face in high relief. Old, from one of the prehuman space civilizations, named for a legend retold by the Zacathans – that was Deenal. And about it we knew very little indeed.
Yet that was the only one – I counted the heads – out of twelve that I had any clue to. And each undoubtedly represented a different race. Was this a monument to some long-vanished confederation or empire in which many species and races had been united?
We have nonhuman (as we reckon “human”) allies and partners, too. There are the reptilian Zacathans, the avian-evolved Trystians, the strange Wyverns, others – a score of them. One or two are deadly strangers with whom our kind has only wary contact. And among those aliens who are seemingly humanoid, there are many divisions and mutations. A man in a lifetime of roving may not even see or hear of them all.
But Eet’s reaction to this place was so astounding (his hissing signs of hostility continued), that I asked:
“What is it? That smoke – is there someone there?”
Eet voiced a last hiss. Then he shook his head, almost as if he were coming out of a state of deep preoccupation.
“Storrff-“
It was no sound, nor any word I recognized. Then he corrected himself hurriedly, as if afraid he might have been revealing too much in shock.
“It does not matter. This is an old dead place, of no value-“ He could have been reassuring himself more than us.
“The smoke.” I brought him back to the important point.
“The sniffers – they take what they do not understand to make of it a new god cult.” He appeared sure of that. “They must have fled when we landed.”
“Storrff-“ Hory voiced that word which Eet had planted in our minds. “Who or what is Storrff?”
But Eet had himself under complete control. “Nothing which has mattered for some thousands of your planet years. This is a place long dead and forgotten.”
But not to you, I thought. Since he did not answer that, I knew it was another of those subjects which he refused to discuss. And the mystery of Eet deepened by a fraction more. Whether the Storrff were represented by one of those heads, or whether this place itself was Storrff, he was not going to explain. But I knew that he recognized it or some part of it, and not pleasantly.
Already the screen was sliding past, returning to our first view of the cliff wall. Eet climbed down the webbing.
“The ring-“ He was making for the ladder.
“Why?”
But it seemed that was another subject on which he was not going to be too informative. I turned back to Hory with the restorative. I broke off its cap and held it to his mouth while he sucked deeply at its contents. Must we keep him prisoner? Perhaps for the time being. When he had finished I left him tied in the seat to follow Eet.
The ring was no longer affixed to the top of the box. There was a spot of raw metal where it had been. Eet stood at the wall on the other side of the cabin, his forefeet braced against that surface, staring up at a spot too far above his head for him to reach.
There clung the ring as tightly as if welded. But it was not a cementing of the band which held it so. Instead the stone was tight to the metal. And when I tried to loosen it, I had to exert all my strength to pull it free of the surface. All the while it blazed.
“That platform in the inlet-“ I spoke my thought aloud.
“Just so.” Eet climbed up me. “And let us now see where and why.”
I stopped by the arms rack inside the hatch, the ring, in my palm, jerking my left arm across my body at a painful angle. A laser in my hand would give me more confidence than I had felt earlier.
The ramp cranked out and down and we exited into bright sunlight, my hand pulled away from me. The charred ground was hot under my lightly-covered feet, so that I leaped across it. At the foot of the cliff I turned toward the inlet, allowing the ring to pull me.
“Not a cliff mine.” I still wondered about that.
“The stone is not from this world.” Eet was positive. “But – there is that out there” – he indicated the platform – “which has more draw than the cache in the ruins. Look at the ring!”
Even in the sunlight its fire blazed. And the heat from it was enough to burn my hand, growing ever more uncomfortable, though I dared not loose my hold on it lest it indeed fly through the air, not to be found again.
I plowed through sand which engulfed my feet above the ankles. It was a thin, powdery stuff into which I sank in a way I did not like. Then I came to the water’s edge. In spite of its brilliant color, it was not transparent, but opaque, and I had no idea of its depth. The ring actually jerked me forward and I had to fight against wading in. Nor could I see any way of climbing up to the platform, since it would be well above the head of one in the water and there was no break in its wall.
Had I followed the pull instead of fighting it until I wavered back and forth on the bank, I might have fallen straight into one of the traps of this planet. Only the trap became impatient and reached for me. The emerald surface broke in a great shower of water, and a head which was three-quarters mouth gaped in a hideous display of fangs and avid hunger.