Sometimes they had to scramble up a steep rise, climbing as if the way were a chimney. Again there came a sharply right-angled turn left or right. Then a last effort issued them into a second rough cave.
The torch was sputtering near its end. Elossa was well aware that they had been traveling a long time. She was hungry and, though they had taken sips of water from their journey bottles (filled to the brim at the stream Stans had found before they entered the mouth) there was a dryness which seemed to come from the very air of this maze to plague their mouths and throats.
This new cave was small and what they faced along one side was a wall, plainly built by purpose to be a barrier. The stones which formed it were not laced together by mortar. But they had been wedged and forced solidly into a forbidding mass.
Stans worked the butt of the torch into a niche at one end of that wall, then ran his hands along its rough surface.
“It is tight enough,” he commented. “But. . . .” He drew his long-bladed hunting knife to pick carefully with the point at a crevice between two rocks near his shoulder level. “Ahhh. . . .” Holding the knife between his teeth, he wriggled the larger of the two stones back and forth and then gave a sudden jerk which brought it out of its setting.
With that gone two more rattled down and Stans kicked them back toward the way they had come. “It looks stronger than it is,” he announced. “We can clear this without trouble, I think.”
The space was cramped so that only one might pick at the wall at a time. They took turns at that labor, passing the freed chunks to the other to be cleared away. Elossa’s arms and back began to ache. She was as hungry as one at the mid-winter fasting. But at present she had no wish to suggest that they pause either to rest or to share the fast dwindling supplies she carried. To be out of this underground hole was far more important.
When they had cleared a space large enough to squeeze through Stans collected the torch once again. He thrust that ahead of him into the aperture and a moment later Elossa heard him give a surprised exclamation.
“What is it?” she demanded trying to edge closer.
He did not answer; instead he forced his way beyond and she was as quick to follow. Again they passed from cave to man-made way. Not only were the walls of this new and wide passage smooth, but they also appeared to have been coated with a substance which gave off the sheen of polished metal. The torchlight brought color to blaze also-ribbons and threads of it wove long, curling strips on the smooth surface. Gem bright those appeared-scarlet, deep crimson, flaunting yellow, rust brown, a green as vividly alive as the new leaves of spring, a blue as delicate as the shading on the snows of the mountains.
There was no design in it Elossa could see, just a rippling of long lines and bands. Nor did the color of any one of those remain the same-yellow became green, blue deepened to red.
At first she had welcomed this change, finding in it a certain relief after the drab gray of the rock. Then she blinked. Was there something alien about those bands, threatening? How could color threaten?
She remembered the colored towers, palaces, walls of Kal-Hath-Tan as it had stood in her vision before death descended upon it. The city had appeared a giant chest of jewels spilled idly across the land. Just as bright as these bands. But there was a difference.
Stans swept the torch closely along the wall fronting them. The bank he chose so to illumine began green, became abruptly scarlet, continued orange, then yellow. He reached out and tapped a nail against that colorful ribbon and Elossa, in the silence of this passage, heard the fault answering click-click.
“This is of Kal-Hath-Tan?” she asked. She shielded her eyes a little with her hand. It appeared, she thought now, that the colors held the torch-light, brightened it. It certainly could not be only her imagination that her eyes smarted as if she had gazed too long into some source of light far stronger than the torch.
“I do not know. It is unlike anything I have ever seen. It-it seems as if it should have a meaning of importance, and yet it does not. Only there is the feeling. . . .”
She did not know how sensitive one of his race might be to influences designed by his own kind. But that this place made her more and more uncomfortable could not be denied. The sooner she-they-found a way out the better.
“Which way do we go?”
Stans shrugged. “It seems to be a matter for guessing.”
“Right, then.” Elossa said quickly, since he made no move to do any of that guessing.
“Right it will be.” Almost like a fighting man on parade he gave a half turn and started right.
The passage was much wider, they could walk abreast without any difficulty. But they went on in silence. Elossa took more and more care to keep her eyes strictly ahead, trying not to glance at the bands of color. There was a pull there, like the beginning of some illusion.
Also, the farther they went, the wider the bands became. Those which had been the width of a finger at the point where they had broken into the passage were now palm size. Others could span her arm, shoulder to wrist.
The colors could not glow any brighter, but their change from one hue to another was far more abrupt, creating a dazzlement which reacted more and more on her sight. She walked now with hands cupping eyes to cut out the side view.
Perhaps it was affecting Stans also, though he said nothing, for he was quickening pace, until they moved at a steady trot. As yet they had discovered no break in the walls, and in the shadow beyond the reach of the torch the way seemed to continue endlessly.
Elossa uttered a small cry, staggered toward the wall on her right.
Yurth call-so loud and clear that he or she who had uttered that cry might be standing just before them. Only there was no one there.
“What is it?” Stans’ hoarse voice held a note of impatience.
“Yurth-somewhere close. Yurth and danger!”
Now that she was so certain that they must be very close to that which had drawn her here, Elossa called, not with the mind-send this time but uttering one of the carrying summons which her people used in their mountain faring, each clan having its own particular signal.
There was movement in the shadows which lay ahead. Stans held the torch higher, took a step or so forward to see the better.
A figure, yes. Human in that it stood erect and came walking toward them. Elossa’s hand arose in the greeting between Yurth and Yurth.
12.
Yurth in feature the stranger certainly was. But his clothing was different. In place of the leggings, the coarse smock, the journey cloak, all of drab coloring which made up the uniform body covering of her kind, this newcomer’s slender form was covered with a tight- fitting suit which left only the hands and the head from the throat up bare. It was of a dark shade which could have been either a near black-green or blue, and so fitted to the flesh and muscles it covered that it seemed another skin.
She had seen such before.
Elossa’s hands tightened on her staff. Yes! This she had seen before, both in the pictures painted by the hallucinations guarding Kal-Hath-Tan and in those she had witnessed in the sky ship when she had learned the true meaning of the Yurth Burden. This Yurth wore the dress of the ship people-as if he had not been here generations but had this very hour stepped from his space voyaging ship, now half buried in the earth which was Raski world.
“Greeting. . . brother. . . .” She used the speech of her people, not the common tongue which they shared with Raski.
But there was no lightening of expression on that other’s face, no sign that he knew her as one of common heritage with himself. Rather there was a glitter in his wide-open eyes, a set to his mouth, which awoke in her the beginnings of uneasiness. She tried the mind- speech.
There was-nothing! Not a barrier, just nothing she could touch. Her amazement was so great that she was frozen for a second or two, while the hand of the Yurth moved, bringing into line with her breast a rod of black which he held.
“No!” Stans crashed against her, the weight of his body bringing them both down on the hard stone under their feet with a bruising force. Across where she had stood moments earlier there swept a beam of dazzling light. Heat crackled through the air so that, even though Elossa lay well below where the beam had sped, still she felt the touch of its fire through her thick clothing.