Children of the Gates (26 page)

He no longer looked at Elossa. It was as if she were invisible. Nor did he speak. What would happen now? Her distrust of the Raski had awakened once again. Perhaps there was too great a gulf between their two races for any amount of good will to bridge.

Restoring his bolts to their quiver Stans got to his feet again. Now he did face her. There was a shade of expression on his dark face but she could not read it.

“Life for life.” He spoke those three words as if they had been forced out of him against his will. What did he mean? That this was in payment of the succor she had given him when he had been clawed by a similar beast on the journey to Kal-Hath-Tan? Or had he saved her now because his attempt in the night had failed and he would be quit of the memory of that? She felt blind when she could not mind-probe for the truth.

“Why,” she said at last, “why would you take knife to me? Is your hate from the old days still so strong, Stans of the House of Philbur?”

He opened his mouth as if about to answer and then closed it firmly once more. There was about him an aura of wariness as if he were fronting a possible enemy.

“Why must you take my life, Stans?” she asked again.

He shook his head slowly. “I do not kill,” he began and then his head came up proudly and he met her in a fast locking of eyes.

“It was not I. This is a haunted land. It had secrets of things we Raski have long forgotten, which perhaps even you Yurth, with all your dark powers, never knew. There was another will taking over my body. When it did not win what it wished, it left me. I—” Again he frowned. “I think it is different—not Raski as I know, not Yurth. . . . It is very dangerous—perhaps to the both of us.”

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.

Such objects in themselves have little or no natural evil—that comes from without. To say that a carving on the wall was evil was to impute to stone a quality it did not and never had possessed. But to say that an image which had been wrought by those who wished to give evil a gateway into the world was malign was not opposed to that basic truth.

Whoever had carved the face on the wall had been twisted mind and spirit. Elossa had stopped short only a step within the cave room. The illusions which haunted the road to Kal-Hath-Tan had been horrible—born of human suffering to leave the imprint upon the very earth itself. This, this had been cunningly and carefully constructed, not out of great pain of body and shock of spirit, but from a deep desire to embrace all the dark from which man naturally shrinks.

Stans had taken a stand before that face, his arms hanging by his sides, gazing up into those knowing eyes with visible concentration. Almost, Elossa thought, as if he were indeed in communication with whatever power that brutish carving represented.

She kept tight rein upon her talent here, having a feeling that if she loosed even a little—sent out any probe—what might answer would be. . . .

Elossa shook her head. No! She must not allow her imagination to suggest terrors which could not exist. That this may have been a “god,” the focus for some horrible and evil religion, and so have drawn to it the energy sent forth by the worshipers, perhaps even the terror of sacrifices, that was the truth. But in itself it was nothing but cleverly fashioned stone.

“Is this Atturn?” She felt the need to break the silence, to shake Stans out of that concentration. He did not answer. She dared to go forward, and, putting aside the distaste of the Yurth for body contact, she laid her hand upon his arm.

“Is this then Atturn?” she repeated in a louder voice.

“What?” Though Stans turned his head to look at her Elossa felt he did not really see her at all, that his gaze did not meet hers but in some manner still set upon the face.

Then there was a flicker of change in his expression. That deep concentration broke. That he came alive again was the only way she could explain the change in him to herself.

“What?” He swung away from her to look once more at the face, so well lighted by the torches he had set “What? Where? Why?”

“I asked . . . is this. . . .” Elossa gestured to the face. “Atturn. He . . . it . . . seems certainly to have a mouth.”

Stan’s hands covered his eyes. “I—I do not know. I cannot remember.”

Elossa drew a deep breath. Last night this Raski had tried to kill her as she slept. In the light of morning, after she in turn had been possessed (for what other than possession had sent her sleep-walking then into the path of the sargon) he had saved her life. He had brought them here, plunging through the darkness of the tunnel as if he knew what lay at its end, lighted the torches with the surety of one who knew exactly where to find the waiting brands and the strike stone.

“You know this place well indeed,” Elossa continued, determined to pin the Raski to some admission. “How else could you have found those?” She pointed to the torches. “A hidden temple for your ancient vengeance to which you have brought me for slaying.”

She did not know why she chose to make that accusation; it was out of her mouth almost before she realized what she said. But the possible truth of it alerted her to a danger which might also be real.

“No!” He threw out his hands as if he were repulsing that gap-mouthed face, repudiating all that it might mean. “I do not know, I tell you!” His voice was heating with anger. “It is not me . . . it . . . is something else which makes me its servant. And . . . I . . . will . . . not . . . serve . . . it!” He said that last sentence slowly and with emphasis upon every word as heavy as a blow he might seek to deliver against an enemy’s body. That he believed in what he said now Elossa did not doubt. But that he could summon any defense against the compulsion which had twice ruled him, of that she had no surety at all.

The Raski swung around, his back to the face. There was a demand for belief in his expression. His mouth firmed into a thin line of determination, his jaw squarely set.

“Since I cannot control this—this thing which moves me to its will—then it is better that we part. I should walk alone until I can be sure that I am not just a tool.”

That made good sense—except for one thing. The night before she had in turn been moved unknowing, walking in her sleep, straight toward death. Yet her race had bred into them, or she always so believed, mental barriers against any such tampering. No Yurth could master the mind of one of his fellows, nor could he control even a Raski, who had no such safeguards, for more than the building of short-lived hallucinations.

This was not a matter of hallucinations, it dealt with mental power of sorts on a level totally foreign to Elossa. And that aroused a sickly dread within her. Yurth talent had always seemed supreme, perhaps they had grown unconsciously arrogant in what they knew and could do. Perhaps even, her mind produced a very fleeting thought, it was the burden of the old sin which hovered ever over them as a true necessity to preserve their code of what the talent might and might not be used for.

Was it because she had shrugged aside Yurth Burden that she had somehow also fallen under the command of this unknown factor which Stans recognized and which she must believe had some existence? If that were her fault, then it was true she, as much as the Raski, had assumed a new burden—or curse—and must learn either to dispel or bear it.

“It moves me also,” she said. “Did I not nearly walk into the jaws of a sargon without being aware of what I did?”

“This is not Yurth.” He shook his head. “It is somehow of Raski—of this world. But I swear to you, on the Blood and Honor of my House, I know nothing of even any legend of this place, nor how I have been led to where it lies, nor why I am here. I do not worship devils, and this is a thing of evil. You can smell its stench in the air. I do not know Atturn, if this is Atturn.”

Again she must accept that he spoke what was to him the utter and complete truth. Raski civilization had ended once in the great trauma of the destruction of Kal-Hath-Tan, the which she had witnessed herself in a vision. Though the people lived on, some inner spring of their courage, pride, and ambition had been broken. Much which must have been known in the days before the Yurth ship had blasted their city certainly was now lost.

Yet they stood now in a center of power. She could detect its force, like small fingers sliding over the shield she kept upon her mind, as if something curious and very confident strove to find an answer to the puzzle she presented. The farther they could get from this place, the better.

Elossa swayed. Through that mental shield, seemingly through her body, too, with a flash of pain as might follow a stroke of enemy steel had come that cry, Yurth! Somewhere—not too far away—one of Yurth blood was in danger, had loosed the call which was the ultimate in pleas, that was used only when death itself must be faced.