From the sky the flitter was descending, and then from it came the unmistakable mind send of the Lord-One Krip.
"Stand ready!"
Farree was sure that this was no trick of the Guild. A man's voice might easily be imitated but he had never heard that a thought pattern could be concealed. That was Krip Vorlund overhead and he – he was to stand ready!
It was not too dark to see now that a rope ladder had fallen from the belly of the flitter. Farree thrust his bone splinters and the knife into his belt, settled Toggor with almost rough haste within his shirt, and waited.
To climb a swinging ladder in the air – his mind flinched from even imagining such a feat. But this was the way out he had longed to find that until now there had been no hope of discovering. The flitter hovered overhead, and he was able to grasp the ropes in his hands. There was a third, he suddenly discovered, one equipped with a hook, and he clasped that into his belt before he started the dizzy ascent into the evening sky.
"Hold tight!" As he clung desperately to the ladder the flitter lifted and swung him on, through the air, toward the outer wall and away from the trapdoor and whoever might try to reach him now. The ropes cut his hands, so tight was his grasp, and he dared not look down. Then he heard another order: "Climb!"
At first Farree thought that he could never loosen his grip, never reach for the next hold bobbing above him. Somehow his body obeyed, while his mind remained frozen by such fear as he had never known before. Only climb he did.
There was a surge of power from the flitter, and now the wind tore at him. A brilliant white beam cut through the air where he had dangled only moments earlier. Someone was alert, free of the ruins, and aiming a laser.
A hand reached down to him from the opening in the belly of me flitter, promising safety. He was not even aware he had climbed far enough for the hand to reach him. But fingers gripped tightly at the cloth across his hump. The flesh beneath answered with white-hot flashes of pain, but he was dragged on up and into the flitter. He looked up into the face of the Lady Maelen. She reached over his prone body and pressed a lever which closed the opening as he remained where he was, too weak with relief to move.
The small craft was shaking, and Farree guessed that it was being driven to the full extent of its power away from the ruined keep. Whether they were bound back into the Thassa country of the high cliffs he could not tell.
For the moment he was content to lie where he was, breathing heavily. Toggor crawled out of his shirt and squatted on the deck beside his head, all eyestalks erect and turned toward him as if the smux knew concern.
"We are descending now," the Lady Maelen said in trade tongue. "We cannot enter the inner places in this off-world craft."
The inner places? Had it taken so short a time to reach the heart of the Thassa country? Apparently the swift flight of the flitter had been even more speedy than he had imagined. For they were setting down. As they bumped to a halt, which jarred Parree's body and brought an answering thrill of pain from his hump, the Lady Maelen moved to open the cockpit door. But the Lord-One Krip did not rise from the pilot's seat.
Instead he was leaning over the panel before him, drawing his stunner. Reversing the weapon and making of it a club, Lord-One Krip calmly hammered at the dials on the panel of controls, splintering their protective covering, and then the dials themselves, until he had bared a network of wiring which he proceeded to tear loose and twist out of shape.
"It will be a long day – several of them – before this ever flies again," he commented when he was done. "It is better that we be on our way."
Once outside, they looked up. Evening was fast becoming night but the sky was alive with the glory of the third ring, and Farree saw the Lady Maelen gazing up at it, her hand raising to gesture in the air as if she truly gathered that light and brought inward a portion of it clasped between her palm and fingers.
Before them was the entrance to the place of the hall. There were heavy ruts in the soil, from the regiment of carts that had passed that way before them. Lord-One Krip's touch on his shoulder headed Farree in that direction.
Once more he came into that place where the cliffs themselves were honeycombed with the very ancient doorways and the hand of time lay heavy on the half-arid land. But they did not go to the hall again, rather made their way to a lesser opening that was hardly higher than the heads of the two who escorted Farree. Within the entrance to which there was no bar or door shone a pale light which might be a portion of the third ring blazoned proudly across the evening sky.
They were waiting there, the four who had stood on the dais of the hall, though they were not standing in judgment now. There was a subtle difference that Farree could sense without being able to set name to it, but he thought that whatever difference the Lady Maelen had had with these, the leaders of her people, had either been resolved or postponed to handle a more immediate problem.
"Welcome, little one." The voice he knew. It had cut into his thoughts too many times since this venture on Yiktor had begun for him to mistake it, or the speaker: the woman who stood a step before the other three.
"What have you learned that you could awake the Eor-fog?"
"The Eor-fog?" he repeated aloud in the trade tongue. All at once fatigue hit him hard. He wanted nothing so much as to curl up in sleep, a sleep without dreams, and remain unwaking for a long, long time.
The mental picture which flashed into his mind in answer to that question was of the thick green smoke which had issued from the powder in the box. He replied speedily with the truth, that he had found the box and that its contents had had no meaning for him.
"A nesting place of the grok. But those have been gone from here for many seasons. Fortune stands at your shoulder, little one, that such a thing could have happened."
He thought that he could well echo her statement. Looking back now, he could see that luck which had abided with him in the time he had been captive to the Guild. Perhaps the old superstition was the truth and his hump was a mark of luck – though one he would do without if he could.
"They thought to use me for bait." He brought out his only explanation for his remaining alive and in good condition.
"Yet the trap sprang on them," the Thassa leader said.
"They have lasers." He would not have her believe that perhaps they had seen the last of that company in the ruins. Whatever else the Thassa could mount in the way of offensive weapons, he could not tell.
"They could well have great weapons," Lord-One Krip spoke across his head in warning. "If they believe that we control some major find – "
"They may have what they please," the woman returned shortly. "Thassa control is now sealed to them."
Farree dared then to raise his voice in his own warning. "They may have patience, too. And can your land" – he thought of the arid country about – "give sustenance to all your people indefinitely?"
"Perhaps not. But there are other places to hunt for olden weapons besides a grok nest, little one."
He thought she was entirely too confident. As if she were the Commander and her forces set to harry a people who seemed, as far as he could determine, ready to depend upon intangibles for defense. Though he remembered how the flitter had been forced into another flight pattern the first time it had flown a scouting mission near the Thassa valley.