Children of the Gates (28 page)

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.

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.

“It would be best,” she suggested, “not to pass directly between those.” Once more she indicated the plates on the wall. Crouching, she obeyed her own warning by going on hands and knees under the setting of the squares. Without hesitation the Raski followed her example.

They went more warily, Elossa herself now keeping a keen eye on the walls, glancing ever from one side to the other, in search of more such insets as that which had marked the coming of the Yurth in ship’s clothing. She retained a close rein on her mind, blanketing down as best she could all emanations which another might pick up if some wide-flung mind-search were in progress.

According to the message left in the sky ship the development of Yurth talent had been a latter thing with her people, a deliberately fostered attribute which the ship’s equipment had set upon them after the great catastrophe. Perhaps some of the Yurth who could might have fled before that plan had been enacted, might have escaped similar development. Yet the call had been on mental level only.

Even if there had been a body of survivors from the ship come into hiding here in the heart of these mountains, how many generations were they away from the first of the refugees? The man she had seen wearing the ship’s clothing—clothing which looked untouched by time. . . . No, he
must
have been an illusion.

They went warily, at a pace which gave them a chance to survey carefully the passage ahead. That continued to run straight, the color lines on its walls, growing wider until their edges met and there was no neutral background to be seen. Elossa felt an ache develop behind her eyes; to survey those colors as she thought it needful to do hurt so that her eyes teared and smarted.

In a queer fashion the colors themselves made her feel ill and she slowed yet more, finding it necessary to pause now and then, closing her eyes to rest them. Stans had said nothing since they had started on, but suddenly he broke the silence between them:

“There is—”

He had said no more than those two words when, in the air, suspended without a visible support, there appeared a mist which whirled about, gathering substance as it moved. From a small core it grew larger until it filled the full passage from the rock under their feet to that which roofed them overhead, spreading in turn from one side wall to another.

As it solidified it became the same monstrous mask which had surrounded the mouth hole giving passage into this underground territory. The eyes of the mist face held the same malicious glitter—even, Elossa thought, more awareness than those set in the rock. Once more the mouth was agape as if providing a door to some threatening way beyond. Though through it she could see no spread of the corridor, only deep darkness.

“Atturn!” Stans gave the manifestation a name. “The Mouth—it waits to swallow us!”

“Illusion!” The girl countered with a firmness she could not altogether feel.

There was a stir within the open cavern of that month. Though the rest of the face was now appearing very solid, the mist which it formed no longer moved as far as she could see. Out of the opening there licked a tentacle of darkness, as if some great black tongue quested for them.

Elossa, without thinking, reacted on the physical level, stabbing at that with her staff. Then she realized her mistake. One did not fight such as this with force of arm—rather force of mind. But before she could ready such counter the staff had passed through the tongue without any visible effect. And that lash of darkness closed about Stans, closed tightly and clung. In spite of his efforts to free himself, the Raski was drawn forward to where the lips quivered, awaiting him. There was an avid excitement in the eyes of that face, a kind of terrible greediness to be read about the waiting mouth. Atturn would feed and this food was now within its power.

Elossa caught at Stans, taking firm hold of his shoulder. There was no disguising the pull which drew him with a strength which they could not match, even linked in common struggle. But the girl needed that contact in order to apply her own answer.