That this world might have secrets was, indeed, not impossible. Elossa turned her head to look up at the hills about them. They could go back, put into some corner of their minds to be walled there, all that had happened, all they had learned concerning themselves and their people. But she did not believe that was possible. To go on was to venture into the totally unknown. Yet she had a certainty growing within her that this was what could be the only road for her.
“We must go on,” Stans said. “There is that-it is like Kal-Hath-Tan-it draws. Or does not that drawing touch you, Lady? I know that you may have no trust in me now, yet in some manner we are bound together.”
Elossa tried to summon the talent-to judge-perhaps to feel what he said lay upon him. But she was too exhausted. If she went it would be going blind for a space until her energy was renewed. Resolutely she pushed away from her support.
“I have found water, also the path to the Mouth,” he said then. “It is not far.”
“Then let us go.” So she chose a new road for the second time.
10.
So this was the Mouth. Elossa hitched the carry cord of her supply bag up higher on her shoulder, studying the opening before her. Undoubtedly the place had been, or was, some cave opening, natural in these heights to begin with. But there had been the work of man overlaying that of nature. A portion of rock surrounding the opening had been smoothed to provide a surface into which were deep carven, strange mask-like faces.
Or were those separate faces? Rather, it seemed to the girl that they were the same face expressing different emotions, mainly, she decided, malignant ones. Now she asked of her companion, breaking the dividing silence which had lain between them since they had begun the climb to this place:
“You name this ‘Mouth of Atturn,’ who then-or what then-is Atturn?”
Stans did not glance toward her at all. Instead he faced the dark opening of the Mouth, into which daylight seemed reluctant to reach, with a faint shadow of fascination on his face. The Raski did not answer at once, as if her words reached him so faintly he scarce heard them at all.
“Atturn?” Now his head did turn slowly, reluctantly. “Atturn-Lady, I do not know. But this was a place of power for the ruling House of Kal-Hath-Tan.” He rubbed one hand across his forehead.
“One of your legends? But there must be more,” Elossa prodded. Before she entered such a place she wanted to learn all she could. Her experience with Stans in that other underground place beneath the ruins was not such as to encourage her to try a new venture into unknown darkness.
“I-no, I have not heard of this place. But how could that be?” He was plainly not asking those questions of her, rather of himself. “I knew, knew the way to this place, that it lay here, that it was shelter. How did I so know that?” That last question was aimed at her this time.
“Sometimes things heard sink into the memory so deeply that only a chance happening calls them forth again. Since the House of Philbur, as you have said, was made protector of the secrets of Kal-Hath-Tan it may well be true that this is another scrap of knowledge you ingested without remembering clearly.”
“Perhaps.” By his expression he was not convinced. “I only know it was necessary for me to come here.” He stepped forward as one obeying an order he could not refuse, to pass under the band with its faces on into the Mouth.
But Elossa had one last trial to make. Though her store of energy had been sadly depleted, still she must draw what she could for this testing. She summoned mind-search and loosed a probe into the cave. Stans she could pick up instantly, though she made no attempt to contact him-he was merely a registration of consciousness. There were other flickers of lifelight-far down the scale-perhaps insects or other things for whom the Mouth was hunting ground and home. But nothing approaching larger beast or human.
So reassured, she followed on into the dark. For dark it was beyond the small apron of light by the entrance. It was not a cave after all-rather the door to a tunnel.
“Stans!” She paused to call out, having no mind to go blindly on alone. In these heights there must be other caves, ones unused by ancient custom, clean of any man-taint. She knew so little about Raski beliefs. But there was a fact which all Yurth accepted: a place which had been the focus for any emotional experience (and that included temples and ancient dwelling places high on such a list) gathered over the years an aura of force to which those sensitive enough to possess the talent of her people were drawn, maybe even influenced by.
Elossa, remembering that, instantly closed her mind. Until she could be sure no such influences lay here she could only depend upon her body senses. And she felt as one crippled as she hesitated before the dark boring.
“Stans!” she called again.
“Hooooo!” The sound was so echoed and distorted that she could not even be sure the Raski had voiced that call. Then it came again.
“Commmmeee!”
Elossa moved on, cautiously and slowly. She so longed to loose the talent. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she saw very pale bits of radiance along the way. One of those moved and she stopped, startled, stared closer.
A moth or some like winged creature near the size of her own palm was struggling in a web, fighting frenziedly for freedom. It was the lines of that web which gave off the faint light. Then there dropped down toward the fighting prisoner a blackish ball to strike full upon the moth.
Elossa shuddered. Now she could see other spots of the pale light-more webs spun to catch the unwary. Perhaps their light was the lure to bring their victims closer.
She kept well away from the webbed walls as she went, still slowly. Her staff was now her protection, for she swung that ahead in a slow sweep from side to side to make sure that the way was open. Imagination kept painting for her a picture in which such a web, only a thousand times larger and thicker, might be set across the tunnel itself.
Stans had gone this way, she told herself. Sense did now, however, banish such erratic trails of fear. How had he gotten so far ahead? He must have quickened pace considerably since he had left her company.
Elossa longed to hear his voice, but something kept her from another call. She walked a little faster. Now the lighted webs were missing. Perhaps they only hung where flying things who had blundered in from the outer world could be enticed.
The darkness was very thick. She felt as if she might reach forth a hand and gather folds of it into her grasp, as one did a shrouding curtain. But the air she breathed was fresh enough and she was aware that there was a small steady current of it now and then touching her cheek.
There came a glow-a sudden leap of red-yellow flames. After the time in the utter dark these seemed nearly as bright as full sunlight and she blinked to protect her eyes against that glare.
Stans stood there, and in his hands was a torch burning bravely. He was thrusting the butt end of that into a stone ring jutting out of the wall as if he knew very well what he was doing. His past denials of such knowledge now made Elossa doubly uneasy.
The torchlight revealed a chamber which must have begun as a cave. But here man’s hands had also smoothed and labored to pattern the walls. What the light shone the strongest on was a giant face which covered near the whole of the wall directly ahead. The mouth about a third of the way up from floor level was wide open, a dark cavity into which the light of the torch did not penetrate far.
Eyes as long as Elossa’s forearm were pictured wide open. Those did not stare blindly ahead as might those of a statue. Rather they had been fashioned of material which gave them a glitter of life so that she felt that the thing not only saw her but derived some malicious amusement from her presence.
Stans lighted a second torch which he pulled from a tall jar to the left of the face. When he placed that in a twin ring on the opposite side the light was enough to give even more of a knowing look to the stone countenance. The other two walls were bare so that all attention was focused entirely on the leering, jeering face.