"Come and see," invited the girl, keeping her voice so low that it
might have been any girl.
Kansi strode over with quick, worried steps, the picture of a man torn
between opportunity and duty.
Yorgh's big fist shot out of the darkness to take him behind the ear
with a solid thunk! He went down without a sound.
Back in the village, there were symptoms of a growing hue and cry.
Torches began to move out along the trail.
"Hurry!" said Yorgh.
"What will you do when we reach the top?" asked Vaneen.
"That I will tell you when I see what is there. Perhaps, if we are
in possession of their precious shrine, they will think twice before
egging us on to destroy it!"
The steps led upward, then doubled back around a narrow turn to rise
further. They were on the fourth such flight and still almost directly
above the trail when the first Raydowers set up a howl of rage at
discovering the unconscious sentries.
"Yorgh!" shouted a voice that sounded like Ueln's. "Come down! This is
no joking matter!"
Yorgh reached back an arm to sweep Vaneen close to the rock out of
which the steps were cut, and kept climbing. He guessed that they were
more than a hundred feet up.
Then, they turned onto a flight that stretched upward without a landing
as far as they had already come, and curled past a corner of the cliff
out of sight.
Some bowman below, with the eyes of a night-roaming ponadu, caught
sight of the fleeing pair at a place where the stairway narrowed to
a mere two feet. It seemed to Yorgh that a section of rock must have
been broken away by a fall of stone from above, but he put aside his
speculation as an arrow hissed up from below and snapped against the
face of the cliff less than ten feet ahead.
"They're coming up the steps too!" Vaneen reported breathlessly.
"Hurry!" urged Yorgh, grabbing her hand. "They seem to think we're
breaking a greater taboo than killing!"
He heard more twanging of bows below, but only two more arrows came
close. Then they were past the narrow spot and protected by the bulge
of rock around which the steps curved.
Yorgh groaned when he looked ahead.
"Have they been guarding steps that lead only to a place to jump from?"
Then he saw the dark hole in the rock where the stone footway ended.
"A cave!" gasped Vaneen. "Yorgh, must we go in?"
Little liking the idea himself, he said nothing. His exploring fingers
found that the walls, near the entrance at least, were curiously
smooth. He edged into the blackness, groping ahead cautiously. Guiding
Vaneen's hand to a grip on his belt, he drew the bronze knife and held
it--blade upward and ready--in his right hand.
About thirty feet straight into the mountain, he tripped.
"May the Three Moons sink into the sea!" he growled as he felt about in
the dark. "More steps!"
"They're coming," said Vaneen.
"I know it," snapped Yorgh, wondering how patient a man had to be in
the face of eating a sheaf of arrows.
Then it occurred to him that it would probably be worse for the girl if
they were caught, and he decided that she was being reasonably patient
too.
There were three short flights of steps, leading to a short corridor
only a few feet wide. This ended in a blank wall, as Yorgh discovered
by bumping his head against it.
As his exploring hands reached out on all sides and confirmed that
the passage was squared off to a dead end, he growled a particularly
obscene oath he had heard among the Sea People. Then he hesitated.
"Vaneen," he whispered, "can you see anything?"
"Where?" came her whisper over his shoulder. Then he heard her gasp.
"Oh, Yorgh, it doesn't look solid! I can see shadows!"
"It must be some kind of door," Yorgh declared. "If I only had a light!
There's some kind of round bump but I can't find any handle."
He threw his weight against the smooth surface but it did not even
quiver.
"Well," said Yorgh, "I was tired of letting that rabble chase me
anyway."
It bothered him, however, not to know what had trapped him, what sort
of barrier it was.