Then he stiffened as he drew from memory something the Guardian of the Way had said not too long ago — something about Light in Paradise touching everything and bringing to man total knowledge of all things about him. But, certainly, that material the monsters produced and hurled against the wall couldn’t be the Almighty! And that corridor couldn’t have been Paradise!
No. It was impossible. That meager stuff thrown so casually about the passageway by the manlike creature hadn’t been Light. Of that he was finally and unalterably positive.
As they continued on along the rugged tunnel, his reflections turned to another matter of concern. For the moment it seemed he could almost put his finger on something that there was less of in this very passage! But it was too vague a concept to encourage further speculation. It must have been only wishful thinking, he decided, that was suggesting he might accidentally stumble upon Light’s opposite, Darkness, in this remote, deserted corridor.
Della drew up before an opening in the wall and pulled him over beside her. “Just ziv this world!” she exclaimed buoyantly.
The wind rushing into the hole was cool against his back as he stood there listening to the delightful music of a gurgling stream and using the echoes of that sound to study other features of the medium-sized world.
“What a wonderful place!” she went on excitedly. “I can ziv five or six hot springs and at least a couple of hundred manna plants. And the banks of the river — they’re covered with salamanders!”
As she spoke her rebounding words set up an audible composite of their surroundings. And Jared appreciatively took in several natural recesses in the left wall, a high-domed ceiling that insured good circulation, and smooth, level ground all around them.
She locked her arm in his and they walked farther into the world. The wind sweeping in from the corridor gave the air a refreshing coolness that was superior to the Lower Level’s.
“I wonder if this was the world my mother was trying to reach,” the girl said distantly.
“She couldn’t have found a better place. I’d say it would support a large family and all its descendants for several generations.”
They sat on a steep bank overhearing the river and Jared listened to the swishing of large fish beneath the surface while Della parceled out food from her case.
After a while he probed audibly beneath her silence and caught the suggestion of yet another area of uncertainty.
“There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?” he asked.
She nodded. “I still don’t understand about Leah and you. I can hear now that she did visit you in your dreams. Yet, you yourself said she couldn’t reach the mind of a Zivver.”
Now he was certain she didn’t know he couldn’t ziv. For if she were out here for some treacherous reason, the last thing she’d do would be to let him find out she suspected him.
“I’ve already told you I think I’m a little different from other Zivvers,” he reminded. “Right now I’m zivving a halfdozen fish in the river. You can’t ziv a single one.”
She lay back on the ground and, out of crossed arms, made a cushion for her head. “I hope you’re not too different. I wouldn’t want to feel — inferior.”
Her words struck home with unintended mockery. And he knew that being inferior to her was what he had resented all along.
“If we weren’t hunting for the Zivver World,” she offered, yawning, “this would be a nice place to settle in, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe staying here is the best thing we could do.”
He stretched out beside her and, even from the negligible echoes of his breathing, he could hear the attractive composite of the girl’s face, the gentle, firm contours of her shoulders, hips, waist — all veiled in the whispering softness of near inaudibility.
“It might be a — good idea,” she said drowsily, “if we — decided—”
He waited. But from her direction came only the slight body murmurs of sl p.
He turned over, crooked an arm under his head and banished the maudlin, wistful thought that had begun to obscure his purpose. He had to concede, though, that it would be pleasant to remain here in this remote world with Della and put out of his mind forever the Zivvers, human monsters, soubats, Upper and Lower Levels, Survivorship, and all the chains of formality and restrictions of communal law. And, yes, even his hopeless quest for Light and Darkness.
But such an arrangement was not for him. Della was a Zivver — a superior Different One. And he would always have to listen up to her and her greater abilities. It would never do. What was it he had once overheard one Zivver tell another during a raid? — “A Zivver down here is the same as a oneeared man in a world of the deaf.”
That was it. He would always be like an invalid, with Della to lead him around by the hand. And in her incomprehensible world of murmuring air currents and psychic awareness of things he could never hope to hear, he would be lost and frustrated.
Even from the depths of sleep he could tell that he had lain there beside the girl a long while — perhaps the equivalent of a slumber period or more. And he surely must have been close to wakefulness when he heard the screams.
Had they been Della’s, they would have jolted him from sleep. That he continued to hear them without awakening was a measure of their psychic quality. They seemed to come from deep within his mind, spawned in a vortex of projected terror.
Then he recognized Leah behind the desperate, silent outcries. He tried to distill concrete meaning from the hodgepodge of frantic impressions. But the woman was in such a panic that she couldn’t put her fright into words.
Digging into the emotions of terrible astonishment and dismay, he intercepted piecemeal impressions — shouting and screaming, rushing feet and roaring bursts of silent sound that played derisively across walls which had been such a warm and real part of his childhood fantasies, an occasional zip-hiss.
The composite was unmistakable: The human monsters had finally found Leah’s world!
“Jared! Jared! Soubats — coming in from the passage!” Della shook him awake.
He grabbed his spear and sprang to his feet. The first of the three or four beasts that had winged into the world was almost upon them. There was scarely time to hurl Della to the ground and plant his spear in readines for the initial impact.
The lead creature screeched down in a vicious dive and took the point of the weapon full in its chest. The lance snapped in half and the beast struck the ground with jarring impact.
The second and third hateful furies began their plunge.
He hurled the girl into the river and leaped in after her. In less than a beat the current, immensely swifter than he had estimated, was sweeping her away — toward the side wall where the stream rushed into a subterranean channel.
He heard that he couldn’t overtake her in time, but he swam ahead anyway. A soubat’s wingtip thrashed the water in front of him, talons barely missing their mark in a swooping attack.
At the beginning of his next stroke, his hand touched Della’s hair, frothing on the surface of the water, and he secured a grip on it. But too late. The current had already sucked them into the subsurface channel and had drawn boulders of water in behind them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Savage undercurrents flung him to the right and left and finally sent him plunging into the depths. He caromed against the jagged bed of the stream, then swirled upward. Jared found no air for his bursting lungs as he crashed into the submerged ceiling. Yet, he managed to maintain his grip on Della’s hair.