about solved.”
“Good enough.” Soriki pulled out his bed roll. “We’re out of touch with the ship—”
There was a second of silence, unduly prolonged it seemed to Raf. Then Hobart spoke:
“We couldn’t expect to keep in call forever. The best com has its range. When did you lose contact?”
“Just before these wrapped-up heroes played with fire back there. I gave the boys all I knew up until then. They know we were headed west, and they had us beamed as long as they could.”
So it wasn’t too bad, thought Raf. But he didn’t like it, even with that mitigating factor. To all purposes the four Terrans were now surrounded by some twenty times their number, in an unknown country, out of all communication with the rest of their kind. It could add up to disaster.
CHAPTER 9
Sea Gate
“What is it?” Dalgard asked his question as Sssuri, his attention still on their back trail, stole along cautiously on a retracing of their path.
But that retreat ended abruptly with the merman plastered against the wall, his whole shadowy form a tense warning which stopped Dalgard short. In that moment the answer flashed from mind to mind.
“There are those which follow—”
“Snake-devils? Those Others?” The colony scout supplied the only two explanations he had, sending his own thought out questing. But as usual he could not hope to equal the more sensitive merman whose race had always used that form of communication.
“Those who have long haunted the darkness,” was the only reply he could get.
But Sssuri’s actions were far more indicative of danger. For the merman turned and caught at Dalgard, pulling the larger colonist along a step or two with the urgency of his grip.
“We cannot return this way—and we must travel fast!”
For Sssuri who would face and had faced up to a snake-devil with a spear his sole weapon, this timidity was new. Dalgard was wise enough to accept his verdict of the wisdom of flight. Together they ran along the underground corridor, soon putting a mile between them and the point where the merman had first taken alarm.
“From what do we flee?” As the merman began to slacken pace, Dalgard sent that query.
“There are those who live in this darkness. By one, or by two, we could speedily remove them from life. But they hunt in packs and they are as greedy for the kill as are the snake-devils scenting meat. Also they are intelligent. Once, long before the days of burning, they served Those Others as hunters of game. And Those Others tried to make them ever more intelligent and crafty so they might be sent to hunt without a huntsman. At last they grew too knowing for their masters. Then Those Others, realizing their menace, tried to kill them all with traps and tricks. But only the most stupid and the slowest were so disposed of. The others withdrew into underground ways such as this, venturing forth only in the dark of night.”
“But if they are intelligent,” countered the scout, “why can they not be reached by the mind touch?”
“Through the years they have developed their own ways of thought. And these are not the simple creatures of the sun, or such as the runners. Once they were taught to answer only to Those Others. Now they answer only to each other. But”—he spread out his hands in one of his quick, nervous gestures—“to those who are cornered by one of their packs, they are sudden death!”
Since they could not, by Sssuri’s reckoning, turn back, there was only one course before them, to follow the passage they had chanced upon. The merman was certain that it underran the river and that eventually they would reach the sea—unless some side turn before that point would make them free in the countryside once more.
Dalgard doubted if it had ever been a well-used way. And the presence of earth falls here and there, over which they stumbled and clawed their way, led him to consider the wisdom of keeping on to what might be a dead end. But his trust in Sssuri’s judgment was great, and as the merman plowed forward with every appearance of confidence, he continued to trot along without complaint.
They snatched moments of rest, taking turns at guard. But the walls about them were so unchanging that it was hard to measure time or distance. Dalgard chewed at his emergency rations, a block of dried meat and fruit pounded together to an almost rocklike consistency, and tried to make the crumbs he sucked loose satisfy his growing hunger.
The passageway was growing damper; water trickled down the walls and gathered in fetid pools on the floor. Dalgard’s dislike of the place grew. His shoulders hunched involuntarily as he strode along, for his imagination pictured the rock above them giving away to dump tons of the oily river water down to engulf them. But though Sssuri avoided splashing through the pools wherever he might, he did not appear to find anything upsetting about the moisture.
At last the human could stand it no longer. “How much farther to the sea?” he asked without any hope of a real answer.
As he had expected him to do, Sssuri shrugged. “We should be close. But having never trod this way before, how can I tell you?”
Once more they rested, choosing a stretch which was reasonably dry, munching their dried food and drinking sparingly from the stoppered duocorn horns which swung from their belts. A man would have to be dying of thirst, Dalgard thought, before he would palm up any of the stagnant water from the passage pools.
He drifted off into a troubled sleep in which he fled beneath a sky which was a giant lid in the hand of an unseen enemy, a lid which was slowly lowered to crush him flat. He awoke with a start to find Sssuri’s cool, scaled fingers stroking his shoulder.
“Dream demons walk these roads.” The words drifted into his half-awake mind.
“They do indeed,” he roused to answer.
“It is always so where Those Others have been. They leave behind them the thoughts which breed such dreams to trouble the sleep of those who are not of their kind. Let us go. I would like to be out of this place under the clean sky, where no ancient wickedness hangs to poison the air and thought.”
Either the merman had miscalculated the direction of their route or the river mouth was much farther from the inland city than they had believed, for, though they pushed on for what seemed like weary hours, they came to no upward slope, no exit to the world they knew.
Instead Dalgard began to realize that just the opposite was true. At last he could stand it no longer and broke out with what he feared, hoping that Sssuri would deny that fear.
“We are going downhill!”
To his disappointment the merman agreed. “It has been so for the last thousand of our paces. It is my belief that this leads not to the sun but out under the sea.”
Dalgard missed a step. To Sssuri the sea was home and perhaps the thought of being under its floor was not disturbing. The land-born human was not so prepared. If he had experienced discomfort under the river, what would it be like under the ocean? His terrifying dream of a lid being pressed down upon him flashed back into his mind. But his companion was continuing:
“There will be doors, perhaps into the sea itself.”
“For you,” Dalgard pointed out, “but I am no dweller in the depths.”
“Neither were Those Others, yet they used these ways. And I tell you”—in his earnestness the merman laid his hand once more on Dalgard’s arm—“to turn back now is out of the question. The death which haunts the darkness is still sniffing out our trail.”
Dalgard glanced involuntarily over his shoulder. By the faint and limited light of the purple disks he could see little or nothing. An army might creep there undetected.
“But—” His protest was in answer to the merman’s seeming unconcern.
Sssuri at the first intimation that the hunters were behind them had shown wariness.