Lord of Thunder Part 7

The Drummer of the village was at the north stool. Now he beat a thunderous roll on his knee drum, and two youths broke from the villagers' group, brought out between them a block of wood, square, polished with the sheen of years', perhaps of centuries', handling. Planting this before the fire pit to the north, they laid upon it a leafy branch of the sacred fal tree, then scuttled back to the anonymity of the shadows behind their Drummer.

"Speeches now," Logan half whispered in a lull of drumming.

Speeches there were, and Hosteen longed for the power to translate that whistling-twittering. In turn, the village Drummer and the Chief arose, walked to the block, struck it across the top with the fal branch, and launched into a burst of oratory, from time to time striking the block again with the fal wand to emphasize some point. Then each of the visiting chiefs and drummers followed their example.

Hosteen's head ached, his mouth was parched and dry, and he lay gasping, hardly conscious of the continuing drone at the center of the Thunder House. He wanted water and food-but more than anything, water. Twice he tried to reach Baku, Surra-to no avail. The cat and the eagle might have escaped out of the valley, and he began to hope that they had.

Any chance he and Logan might have had now diminished to the vanishing point. He had thought of Krotag and the Shosonna as possible allies. But Krotag had been the second one to make a speech. Whatever tied the Norbies together in this peace pact was strong enough to withstand any leanings toward friendship with settlers that the plains natives might have once had.

How long that conference lasted neither Hosteen nor Logan could have told. The former was afterwards sure he had lapsed into semiconsciousness from fatigue, lack of water, and the smoky fumes of the fal twigs the Norbies kept feeding into the fire. When a sharp prod in the ribs roused him into full wakefulness all traces of sunlight were gone and the gloom of night was cut again by blue torches.

One of the same youths who had dragged out the speech block leaned over him and thrust a tube through the mesh of the net and between the Terran's lips. He sucked avidly, and liquid filled his mouth. If it was water some other substance had been added, for it tasted sweet and yet sharp, like an off-world relish, and Hosteen sucked and swallowed greedily, his thirst vanishing, his mental torpor fading as he did so. Then the tube was jerked roughly from his lips, and he licked them for the last lingering drop, feeling energy creep back into his body. Logan was similarly fed and watered. Beyond the captives stood both the village Chief and the Drummer, watching the process with an air of impatience, as if eager to push on to some more important task.

A ripple of fingers on drum head brought in a guard of warriors, tough, seasoned fighting men, Hosteen judged from their att.i.tude and the bone necklets they wore. Once more the ropes holding the nets were loosed, and the prisoners, still helpless in their lashings, were rolled like bales into the full torchlight.

Another warrior came out of the shadows, bearing across his shoulder the loops of their arms belts, their canteens. It would seem that where they were going their equipment was to accompany them. And for the first time, Hosteen remembered Logan's grisly description of what he had seen about the grounded LB-sacrifices. Were they about to join the horse, to do honor to whatever power these Norbies imagined the star ship escape craft represented or held?

They had been carried into the village, but they were to walk out. Nets were whirled off their stiff bodies, a loop rope dragged tight about their chests and upper arms. Hosteen stumbled along for a step or two, trying to make his cramped limbs obey. Then two of his captors caught him by the shoulder on either side as supports and herders.

For the first time he saw the females of the village well behind the lines of warriors. Yes, some ceremony was in prospect, one intended for all the tribesmen and their visitors-for under each peace pole, which they had seen in the Thunder House earlier and which now were planted here in the open, was a grouping of strangers.

The two men were half led, half dragged along a well-worn trail leading from the village toward the dark bulk of the mountainside down which the fire had hunted them into their captors' net. Behind, as Hosteen saw when he glanced back once, trying to pick out Krotag's group, the villagers and their guests fell in to form a straggling procession, carrying torches.

As they advanced, the smell of burned vegetation battled with that of fal wood. And they crossed those curiously straight furrows where the flails of flame must have beaten, either during their own chase or earlier.

Now the drums were beating. Not only that of the village medicine man but also those of all the visiting Drummers-with a heavy rhythm into which their marching steps fitted. And the beat of the drums became one with Hosteen's pumping blood, a heaviness in his head- Hypnotic! Hosteen recognized the danger. His own people could produce-or had produced ages ago-spells as a part of their war chants and dances, spells to send men out to kill with a firm belief in the invincibility of their "medicine." This was not a pattern unique to Arzor.

He tried a misstep to break the pattern of the march. And perhaps because he had been indoctrinated during his Service training against just such traps, the Terran succeeded in part-or was succeeding-until the mountain came alive in answer to those with whom he marched.

That was what appeared to happen. Was it sound-vibration pitched too high or too low for human ears to register except on the very border of the senses? Or was it mental rather than physical? But it was as if all the bulk of earth and rock exhaled, breathed, stirred into watchful wakefulness. And Hosteen knew that this was something totally beyond his experience, perhaps beyond the experience of any off-worlder-unless Widders had met this before him.

Beat, beat-in spite of his efforts of mind, will, and squirming body held tight in the vice grip of the warriors who marched with him-Hosteen could only resist that enchantment feebly. That he was able to recognize and fight it at all was, he thought, a slender defense. Beat, beat-feet, drums- And again the mountain sighed -sighed or drew in a breath of antic.i.p.ation-which? This was no earth and rock but a beast crouched there waiting, such a beast as no human could imagine.

The stench of the burned stuff was stronger. Then there was a last crescendo from the united drums-a roll of artificial thunder echoing and reechoing from the heights. They stopped and stood where they were, facing upslope toward the unseen top of the mountain. Then, as the drums had acted as one, so did the torch bearers move, stamping their lights into the earth, leaving them all in the dark, with only the far stars p.r.i.c.king the cloudless sky.

There was not a sound as the last echoes of the drumbeats died. Would the beast who was the mountain make answer? Hosteen's imagination presented him with a picture of that creature-sky-high-waiting- Waiting as Surra could wait, as Baku could wait, with the great patience that man has lost or never had, the patience of the hunter.

The waiting Norbies-the waiting mountain-and waiting prisoners- Again that breath, that sound that could not be heard, only felt with each atom of his tense body.

Then- Lightning-great, jagged, broken blades of lightning stabbing up into the sky, lighting the slope. It played about the round k.n.o.b that Hosteen saw for the first time clearly as the crest of the mountain-k.n.o.b, one part of his mind remaining undazzled told him, that was too round to be natural. A crown of lightning about the rock head of a crouching beast. Then-the whips of blazing light cracked down, cut and fired, and the smoke of those fires carried to the waiting throng. Crack, lash-but behind that was no natural force but intelligent purpose. Hosteen was sure of that as he stood blinded by the flashes.

Xik-this could not be Xik. The installations that must govern this display were no Xik flamers, nor anything he had seen or heard of on other worlds. Yet Hosteen's mind balked at a.s.sociating this weapon for horrible destruction with the same civilization that had produced the beauty of the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens.

As swiftly as it had begun, it was over. Brush was in flames at widely separated places on the upper slopes, but the fires did not spread far. And now the drums began once again their marching tap. Hosteen's guards pushed him ahead. However, this time the bulk of the villagers remained where they were, only the local Chief, his guards, the Drummer, and their captives climbed anew.

Once more they pa.s.sed the burned frame of the 'copter. The recent fiery lashes must have struck it again, for the tail a.s.semblage was now a molten ma.s.s, glowing as the metal slowly cooled. Past the 'copter-on and up- Gorgol, Surra, Baku-had they somehow escaped both the nets of the natives and the lightning? Hosteen tried to call again, only to meet that curious deadness in response, as if there had never been any way he could communicate with those intelligent brains so different from his own.

"LB just ahead," Logan called out.

Hosteen sniffed the sickly sweet smell of decay-decay of vegetable and animal matter-the sacrifices, if sacrifices they were meant to be. And were he and Logan now being taken to join those? The Terran knew a trick or two he could use at the last, even with his arms bound- The slaughtered horse was visible in the flicker of a dying brush fire, behind it the shape of the LB. And as Logan had reported, there were no signs of a fatal crash landing. The escape boat might have been set down as easily as if it landed on the mountainside by directing radar. Survivors? Or had the survivors already gone the path he and Logan were traveling?

Hosteen so expected a battle at the site of the LB that he was startled when they did not pause there. The Drummer tapped, blew a puff of the prayer fluff in the direction of the craft, but they did not approach it.

No-the mountain was still waiting. And again in Hosteen's imagination it took on the semblance of a slightly somnolent yet watchful animal-yet an animal with a form of intelligence.

Up again-and now the slope was steeper, rougher, so that Hosteen and Logan were hauled and dragged by their guards' ropes, struggling to keep their feet at times. Once Hosteen went to his knees and refused to respond to the tugging, striving to combine his need for a breathing spell with the chance for a look about.

Since they had left the LB, they had crossed several of the burned furrows, but these were of an earlier date, since they did not smoke. And now more and more rocky outcrops broke through the vegetation carpeting the slopes. The brush was loft behind, and they were surrounded by rock. There was a narrow cleft where they felt their way up a niche stair, the prisoners sc.r.a.ped along painfully by their guards.

The cleft brought them to a ledge almost wide enough to be termed, a small plateau. In the rock of the cliff that backed it was a dark opening. But this was not their goal, for the party struck eastward to the right, following the width of ledge around a gentle curve Hosteen judged to be the base of the mountain's dome crest, though that must still climb some hundreds of feet above.

Daylight was coming, and he hoped the strange immunity that protected the village and the valley held here, too-that they need not fear the rising of the sun. Or was that to furnish the manner of their ending, death by exposure to the fury of its rays on a sacred mountain?

Already they were out of sight of the cave opening, and here the ledge extended from curving cliff wall to an edge that overhung a frightening drop to unguessed depth. The smooth path under his boots reminded Hosteen of another mountain road that had appeared to run from nowhere to nowhere in the heights at the mountain of the Garden. That had been a relic of the Sealed Cave civilization, and on it Hosteen had nearly met death in the person of the Xik aper, the last of his breed on Arzor.

The ledge road ended as if sheared off by a giant knife stroke. To their left was the circle of another doorway into the cliff wall-but this was sealed by what appeared a smooth slate of rock. The Drummer sounded his ritual signal-perhaps in salute to whatever power he deemed lurked behind that barrier.

And when the echo of that died away, the Chief of the village took the captives' arms belts from the guard. With deliberation he broke the blades of their long hunting knives and showed his familiarity with the use of stunners by crushing their barrels with a rock ax the Drummer produced. Having destroyed, the outlanders' weapons, he whistled, and two of the guards went into action.

Planting palms flat against the surface of the closed door, they exerted full strength, straining muscles on arms and shoulders.

The barrier gave, split vertically apart. Into that opening the Chief tossed the ruined weapons, the belts of the prisoners. And then the two captives were thrust forward with such force that they hurtled helplessly into a thick dark against which the light of day at their backs made little impression.

CHAPTER TEN.

Hosteen brought up against an unseen wall with force enough to bruise flesh, to drive breath out of his body in a gasping grunt. He was on his knees, trying to regain both breath and balance when Logan crashed into him, and they both went to the rock surface under them. There was absolute darkness now. The Norbies must have resealed the cave.

The Terran knew of old that particular type of airlessness, that dead feeling-It was found in the pa.s.sages of the Sealed Caves, long closed to man, perhaps always intended to be closed to his species. This was certainly a relic of the Sealed Cave civilization.

Breathing shallowly, he lay still and tried to think.

"One of the old caves," Logan broke silence first. "It smells like one anyway-"

"Yes."

"Any chance of getting loose?"

Hosteen, moving his arms, was rewarded by a slight give of his bonds.

"Might be." He continued his efforts.

"Ha!" That was an exclamation of triumph from Logan. "That does it! Here-where are you?"

A hand, moving through the thick blanket of no light, clutched at Hosteen's shoulder and moved swiftly down to the coils of rope about him.

"They weren't very clever with their knots." Logan's fingers were now busy behind Hosteen's back.

"I don't think"-the Terran sat up, ma.s.saged his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand-"we were meant to stay tied or they would have left the nets on us. Now-let's just see-"

He had no idea how big the cave was or how far they were from the outer door. Nor was he too sure in which direction that door lay. The odd quality of this dark and the lifeless feel of the air did weird things to alter a man's sense of direction-even, Hosteen, suspected, influenced his clarity of thought. He stood for a long second or two, trying to orientate himself before he moved in a shuffle, half crouched, to sweep the floor with one hand, while the other was out before him as insurance against coming up short against another wall.

"Stay right where you are," he ordered Logan.

"What's the game?"

"They threw our belts in after us, broke our weapons, but I've an atom torch on that belt. And they didn't damage that, at least not while I was watching-"

Sweep-sweep-finger tips sc.r.a.ping on stone, nails gritting-then the smoothness of hide worked into leather! The Terran squatted, drew his find to him, knew by touch it was Logan's, and looped the belt around his shoulder for safe keeping.

"Got yours," he reported. "Mine can't be too far away."

Once more sweep-sweep. His fingers were growing tender. Then they rapped against an object, and there was a metallic sound. He was holding a ruined stunner. Only a few inches beyond that-his belt!

Hosteen slipped it hurriedly through his hands, locating radar compa.s.s, a pouch of sustenance tablets, the small emergency medical kit, to find in the last loop next to the empty knife sheath the pencil-slim eight-inch tube he was looking for. He pushed its wide fan b.u.t.ton and blinked at a blinding answer of light.

"Whew!" Logan's exclamation was tinged with awe.

They were in a cave right enough, and the interior walls and roof had been coated with that same dull black substance they had seen in the pa.s.sages to the caverns of the gardens, the building material of the unknown star travelers.

In a tangle by the door, now closed so that even the seam of its opening was invisible, were objects that certainly did not date back to the period of the Sealed Caves. Hosteen went to examine the exhibits. Their own broken bladed hunting knives and Logan's smashed stunner lay there, but there were other things-another stunner, another belt, this one heavily weighted with a third again as much equipment as the one he had worn into the Peaks.

Hosteen picked that out of the dust.

"Widders!" He got to his feet and held up the torch so its glow covered as much of the cave as possible. But there was no sign of the civ-if he had preceded them into captivity here.

"Maybe there's another pa.s.sage here-" Logan drew his half-brother's attention to a jutting of wall at the left where a shadow might mask an opening. And it did-there was a dark hole there.

Logan gathered up the rope of their bonds and coiled it belt-wise about his waist. They had no weapons-or did they? Hosteen hefted the belt that had belonged to Widders. Knife and stunner were gone from their sheaths, but he remembered the off-world weapon that had subdued them when the civ had started on his mad quest into the Blue. And there was a chance some similar surprise might be part of this equipment.

"Do we go?" Logan stood at the mouth of the tunnel.

Hosteen had located a pouch envelope on Widders' belt. He shook from it into his hand a ball an inch and a half in diameter, with a small k.n.o.b projecting from its smooth surface. It had the appearance of a small antiperso grenade. He looked from it to the sealed door in speculation. A full-sized antiperso grenade was a key to unlock a piece of field armor, planted in the right way at the right time, and Hosteen had planted them so. What effect would a grenade one third the regular size have on the cave door?

"Find somethin' interestin'?" Logan asked.

"Might just be." Hosteen outlined in a terse sentence or two what he thought he held and its uses.

"Get the door down with that?"

Hosteen shrugged. "I don't know-might be chancy. We don't know the properties of this alien cave-sealing material. Remember what happened that other time?"

Months before, the back lash of an Xik weapon used miles away had reacted violently on the alien coating of just such a cave, locking them into what, except for chance, might have been a living tomb. They had escaped then, but one could not depend on personal "medicine" too long or too hard.

"I say, try the back door first." Logan indicated the pa.s.sage.

And that made good sense. Widders was not in the cave, and if he had been a prisoner here, he might have taken that way before them. There had been many indications that the Unknowns had been fond of under-mountain ways and were adept at boring them.

They sorted over the equipment, dividing up the grenades, ration tablets, supplies, water-they had no water save that in the canteens, but at least they were not exposed to the baking sun.

No pa.s.sage ran beyond that wall. They found instead a steeply sloping, downward ramp where there was no dust to cushion the black flooring. They advanced slowly, Hosteen ahead, the torch in one hand, a sweat-sticky grenade in the other.

The Terran heard Logan sniff as one might scent danger.

"Water-somewhere ahead."

For a moment Hosteen's imagination painted for him the picture of another pocket paradise like the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens. But where there had been the aromatic odors of clean and spicy things to tantalize them then, here was a dank breath not only of dampness but also of other and even less pleasant smells.

Along the walls the torch picked up beads of moisture. which gave back prismatic flickers of color. Logan ran his finger along to wipe out a cl.u.s.ter, then rubbed it vigorously on the edge of his yoris-hide corselet with an exclamation of disgust.

"Slime!" He held the finger to his nose. "Stinks, too. I'd say we might be on our way straight down into a drain-"

The drops on the wall coalesced into oily runlets, and the nephritic odor grew stronger. Yet the air was not still. There was a draft rising, bringing with it a fog of corruption.

All the way down they had seen no indication that anyone had come before them. But now they reached a point where there was a huge blotch across the slope of the wall, where the runlets had been smeared together, through which new trickles were now cutting paths. The damp had prevented the drying of the splotch.

"That wasn't done too long ago," Logan observed. He put out his own hand, though he did not touch finger to the wall, to show that the top of the smear was at shoulder height. "Someone or something could have fallen and slipped down there-"

Hosteen swung the torch closer to floor level. Logan's deduction was borne out by still undried marks.

"And that"-Logan pounced upon one of the damp spots-"was the toe of a boot!"

Again his tracker's eye was right. Only the toe of an off-world boot could have left that well-defined curve. Widders? Or some survivor from the LB holding up in this mountain maze against the danger of the natives waiting outside?

"He went down-he did not come back-whoever he was," Logan observed.

"Meaning that he might not have been able to retreat? Well, we either go on or try to break that door down with a grenade. Have any second thoughts on the matter?"

"Go on." Logan's answer was prompt. "We have stingers in these." He tossed a grenade into the air and caught it deftly.

They went on, watching floor and wall for any further traces of the one or ones who had taken that pa.s.sage before them, but sighted none. Only the damp increased until the air was half-foggy moisture. And where, in the upper regions, that moisture had been chill, here it was increasingly warm, warm and odorous. There was a musky taint, which set Hosteen to sniffing, hinting of life ahead.

The pa.s.sage was no longer a steep descent; it was beginning to level off. And now the dripping walls supplied a thin stream of water carried in a depression down the center of the floor, flowing ahead. The torch caught the edge of an archway that led out-out where-into what?

As they went through it, Hosteen switched the beam of the torch from a diffused glow into a single spear point of concentrated light. He thought he could see a shadowy point somewhere far to the right, which could be sh.o.r.eline or wall. But below was a spread of oily water on which patches of floating stuff turned rainbow-hued when the light caught them, fading into dullness as they moved out of its beam once more.

The pa.s.sage, which had brought them here, ran on out into the water, as a wharf or pier of rock, obviously artificially fashioned. And along its surface at intervals were rings of the same rock standing on end as if waiting for mooring ropes. Mooring ropes-for what manner of craft? Who had sailed this lake or river and for what purpose?

Together they walked slowly along that wharf-the bare rings, the greasy, ill-smelling flood that washed sluggishly along its side-The Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been alien-alien but not inimical. Here there was a difference. Again Hosteen could not reconcile the minds that had created the gardens and those that had engineered these borings in the mountain of the Blue.

"What kind of ships?" Logan asked suddenly. "Who were they and why did they want ships here? The Gardens-and this place-don't match."

"They are not the same," Hosteen agreed. "Kwii halchinigii 'ant'iihnii-"