He waited, his head turned from side to side, watching, mind seeking. The sound echoed and died. There was no answer that he could detect. But he was suspicious of those patterns now – some kind of alarm? Or was it a greeting meant to assure some people long dead? There had been Thassa-like caves along the road to the valley, but the tower seemed unlike their form of building.
The side of the tower which faced him had the dark opening of a door, though there was no sign of any windows on any level. To enter so might mean that he was an unwary smux venturing into a trap.
Smux! He had all but forgotten Toggor during the wonder of his transformation. But the smux was still with him now, claws tightly clipping his belt. Having received no intimations of life from the tower he applied touch to Toggor to see if the smux could pick up something too subtle, too far from his own species's mental processes to record. But the result was that Toggor knew nothing.
A wing-assisted leap took Farree from the circle which had brought forth that answer to the very edge about the foot of the tower where he noted the patterns did not reach. There he settled once again. There was a faint reflection of the moon and ring light. Enough to show him that there was no door here to bar passage. But the dusk which lay within was daunting. He had been foolish not to bring with him the globe. Even if he could see only a few steps ahead, he would not shrink so from investigating it.
Smux – send Toggor in again? But the creature's night sight was little better than his own. When he hunted within the walls for prey he used scent organs. And here the constant small breezes brought the overpowering odor of the flowers to kill any such clue.
There was no use lingering here – Farree would either completely explore this structure or he would have to return with the admission that he had been routed by fear. But he did not even have the slight advantage his wings gave him in the open!
Clapping those together and furling them as far as he could, Farree took a deep breath and started into the tower. He half expected a second warning of sound, perhaps even the snap of a trap. But what he did meet was a firm barrier of – nothingness.
He could not see – he could only feel as he passed his hands up and down that barrier as stout as any double-locked door. Yet he saw through and beyond it as far as the light penetrated and there was nothing – though his hands told him there was. At last he loosed Toggor but the smux was also baffled by a barrier he could not penetrate. So – the builders here had their guards after all. Perhaps this one had been alerted by his own touching of the pattern in the pavement without.
However, as he had learned in the Guild fort, there was always the roof. Urging Toggor to fasten himself once more to his belt, Farree stepped back far enough to get wingspread and then leaped upwards, with the beat of the wings indeed carrying him to where he could grasp the parapet of the tower.
Here, too, there were patterns on the surface. Farree could see no hint among them of any trapdoor such as had been his salvation before. He did not propose to get down and go exploring, not without knowing more of what he faced. Thus he set himself to studying the patterns, setting them firmly in mind.
That done, he sought out with mind reach, and the Lady Maelen, strong and clear as she had ever been, caught his cast and answered. He told her of the courtyard below, of the invisible door bar, and now of these patterns aloft.
"Show me," came her calm answer.
Trying to picture each in turn, he began with the one immediately below his perch on the parapet. It went so and so and so. While the one beyond that was thus, and this, and that. Thus he strove to set up the clearest mental pictures he could.
He felt her growing astonishment, her excitement. "Thus and thus?" came her demand with a newly mentalized design.
Farree looked, but that design was lacking. He returned that message and could sense her disappointment.
"Then this or this?"
Part of that surely – yes! But not as entire as she pictured it for him.
"Below. Look to the court below!" came her order then. As he had crouched on the wall and surveyed the patterns from a lower point, now did he again, moving with care along the parapet so that he might view all below for her. Some were so intricate in their convolutions that it was difficult for him to sort out their beginnings and endings.
"It is a maze," she returned. "But I must see for myself. I have to see."
"I cannot carry you," Farree pointed out. That his strength had not been great enough to hold her from slipping on the trail was a fact. Also, he did not believe that she and Lord-One Krip could fight their way through that wood and across the water.
"You can carry that which I may use." Back came her answer in a rush. "Come for it, Farree, come for that!"
Chapter 17.
Farree winged back across the band of tangled vegetation and set foot on the ground not far from the two who waited. Lord-One Krip was busy with that bag which had been clipped to his belt through all their journeying. What he brought out now was not food as Farree had expected but rather a shining square of what seemed to be bright metal, well polished and no bigger than Farree's own hand.
He rubbed his fingers across the upper surface as if to remove some unseen covering and passed it to the Lady Maelen, who held it firmly and looked to Farree.
"Those patterns," she said, "are protective devices of a sort, yet they do not follow those which I have learned. I must see them."
Farree shifted on his perch. The more he looked at the entangled maze of dark greenery before them, the less he could conceive of cutting any path through that without any tools. Perhaps a laser might clear the way but otherwise —
"Look." She was holding up that square of metal. "Have you seen one of these before? The tourists use them for recording sights they wish to remember clearly. It works thus – or better have Krip show you, since this is not a thing of Thassa world."
He had taken the square back from her and now flipped it over to show two impressions on the back into which a man's forefingers might fit. "Let the reflection of what you would preserve so show in the mirror and then press here. Wait for the count of five and press again at this other spot and then it will clear and you can move to the next. It is simple and there is room for twenty shots before the power is exhausted and it must be recharged."
Lord-One Krip held it out and Farree accepted it gingerly. Yes, it sounded simple enough but he was unused to such off-world wonders and he only hoped that he could follow those directions without failure. Also there was something else to mind. He stood up, the picture square in his hands. He did not look to the tower in the lake, the very top of which was visible from where he stood, but rather back along the way they had come. Those who followed – surely they must be nearing now the end of that road through the mountain and might arrive at any moment. What then? Did they have time for such a task as they had set him now? What if those others could crouch in the rubble of the way and take both of the Thassa with their long-range weapons?
"Not so," Lord-One Krip answered his unasked question. "We keep guard and they, as always, will betray themselves by the nothingness their mind shields project."
"Still they will come – " Farree was as certain of that as he was now aware that he wore wings. Nor did he believe that even those could carry their prey away from those who followed.