It was not the shock of the attack which had rendered her helpless for the moment, rather the understanding that nothing, no one, had fronted her. By the evidence of the mind-send there had never been any Yurth there at all! But the weapon? That had been no part of any hallucination-surely it could not!
She gathered her wits, struggled against the hold that Stans had on her. There was no Yurth-there could not be! She pulled around to find she was right. The passage was empty. But-on the floor-only a little beyond where she lay now with Stans’ weight still half over her, was the tube weapon the stranger had carried.
“He. . . it. . . is gone!” Stans loosed her and arose to his feet. “What. . .”
“Hallucination.” she said. “A guardian. . . .”
Stans bent over the tube but did not touch it. “He was armed-he shot fire with this. Can a hallucination do such things?”
“Such can kill, yes, if he or she who sees them believes that they are real.”
“And they carry such weapons-real weapons?” Stans persisted.
Elossa shook her head. “I do not know. It is not known to my people that they can do so.” She eyed the tube. It had not vanished with its owner, or user, but still lay there, concrete evidence that they had been fired upon.
To take that up would equip her with a weapon far better than any defense she had ever had. But at the same time she could not bring herself to touch it. She got to her feet, leaning on her staff for support Stans reached for the tube.
“No!” she cried sharply. “We do not understand the nature of that. Perhaps it is not of our world at all.”
Stans sat back on his heels and looked up at her, frowning a little.
“I do not understand this talk of hallucinations. Nor can I believe in a man who stands there, fires death at us, and then vanishes, leaving his weapon behind. How does Yurth come into the Mouth of Atturn, and what does he here, besides striving to put an end to us?”
Again Elossa shook her head. “I have no answer for you. Save that it is best not to take to yourself anything such as that” With her staff she pointed to the tube. “And. . . .”
But she just caught sight of something amid that banding on the wall. There was a difference in the texture there-yes! And directly across from it, on the opposite side, another such spot. She reached out with her staff and, not quite touching the wood to the wall itself, outlined a square on either side about breast high and the size of her two palms flattened out together.
“Look!”
Stans slewed around at her command, gazing from one side of the corridor to the other.
“Did not the Yurth stand between these two?” the girl demanded.
His frown deepened. “I think so. But what of it?”
“Perhaps not a hallucination.” She was trying hard to remember fragments of old stories from her people. Though they had never spoken of Kal-Hath-Tan and the Burden of Yurth to those who had not made the Pilgrimage which set upon them the seal of responsibility and maturity, yet they had tales of long ago. She had always known that there was little in common between her people and the world on which they were uneasy prisoners. They had had a far more glorious past than they dared hope to achieve ever again.
On the buried sky ship she had learned just how adept the Yurth had been in strange powers. It could be that what they had seen here had not indeed been a hallucination after all, but a real Yurth transported by some means now beyond her comprehension to defend a hiding place against Raski invasion-transported by mechanical means and now returned to his hiding place.
If the Yurth in such concealment had had no contact with the rest of their people then to such a one she would seem a Raski even as was Stans, thus an enemy. How could she communicate with these hidden Yurth?
But, why had the mind-touch registered as if there had been no one there? Could she begin to imagine what powers these ship people had had in their time-the knowledge they had put aside when they had taken up the heavy burden of what they believed to be their great sin against this world?
“If it were not a hallucination,” Stans broke into her absorbed whirl of thought, “then what did we see? A spirit of the dead? Do spirits then carry weapons which they can use? We might have been cooked by that fire!”
“I don’t know!” Elossa snapped, out of her own ignorance and awaking anger. “I do not understand. Save there are plates on the wall here and here.” Once more she indicated those with her staff. “And he whom we saw stood between them.” Now she dared to use her staff to probe at the rod on the floor, turning it over. Even in the limited light from the bands on the wall they could both see now that, though it had thrown a lethal beam at them, it could never do so again. The under side of the cylinder so exposed showed a hole melted, as if some great heat had eaten away the metal.
“It must have been very old,” Stans drew the first conclusion from that evidence. “Too old to use-as old as the sky ship.”
“Perhaps.” But the useless weapon was not the important thing. That was the appearance of the Yurth, and that cry for help which had brought her here. She had not been mistaken in that. Somewhere Yurth still had being and was in danger.
“You must know more,” she rounded on Stans, “of your own history seeing those of your House were pledged to watch Kal-Hath-Tan, to seek out Yurth who came and demand satisfaction from them for your city’s death. Where we stand you say is the Mouth of Atturn. Who is or was Atturn? What had Yurth to do with such a place? If this was a temple. . . .” She drew a deep breath, remembering now some of the things which had flitted ghost-like through the mounds of Kal-Hath-Tan-the hunting to horrible deaths of the ship’s people who had tried to render aid to the city they had destroyed by chance. Had Yurth been dragged here, to be sacrificed in torment to some Raski god or force? Was that the plea, sent thundering down the years by dying men and women, which indeed lingered now to entrap her also?
“Was Yurth blood shed here?” She ended her demand harshly.
Stans had risen once more to his feet, though he kept a careful distance, she noted, from the two plates in the walls, apparently having no desire to pass between those.
“I do not know,” he answered quietly. “It may well be so. Those of Kal-Hath-Tan were maddened, and they carried into madness their hatred. I cannot remember anything of Atturn nor why I was drawn to the Mouth. In that I speak the full truth. Enter into my mind if you wish, Yurth, and you will see that is so.”
He called her “Yurth,” she noted; perhaps their precarious partnership might not long survive. But she did not need to obey his suggestion and mind-probe. It was an offer he would not have made if he had anything to hide. The Raski hated too much the powers they believed Yurth used ever to speak as he had except in complete truth.
The corridor still stretched ahead. To retreat might be the way of safety. Only with the Yurth call still in her mind Elossa could not take the first step back. Too long had those of her blood been conditioned to support each other, to answer to such a plea with all the help they might give.
“I must go on.” She said that to herself rather than to the Raski But now she added to him, “This is no call that you are in honor pledged to answer. You saved me from flame death which some manifestation of my own people turned upon me. If you are wise, Stans of the House of Philbur, you will agree that this is no quest of yours.”
“Not so!” he interrupted. “I can no more turn from this path than can you. What drew me to the Mouth still works in me.”
He was silent for a breath or two, and when he spoke again there was the heat of anger in his voice. “I am caught in something which is not of my time. I know not what power holds me but I am surely as captive as if I wore the chains of an overlord on my wrists!”
He was eyeing her with the suspicion and rage which had been a part of him when they had fronted each other in the sky ship. The fragile meeting of minds which they had carried from that encounter might be entirely broken, Elossa decided unhappily. To face the unknown with a potential enemy by one’s side was to compound all peril lying in future. Yet surely they were tied together in some strange fashion.