In a little while the aliens sorted themselves into two groups. One, a small bunch of seven or eight, were clustered around Meeva and her men. The other one of about fifteen, including the gargoyle and Chell's people and the two hairy giants from Allamar, had moved over around Fife.
Lurgh said, “To go is dangerous. But we think that nothing will come of sitting here."
"Good,” said Fife. “Now we must think.” He rose and began to pace up and down, his eyes bright, the tip of his pointed tongue flicking back and forth over his lips. Suddenly he turned and pointed at Meeva.
"Since you won't risk your person, you can contribute your clothes. The humans must be dressed. The Vellae will know at first glance we're slaves, but the humans must be able to pass as masters."
"No!” cried Meeva. “Never!” But Fife nodded to Chell and Lurgh and the gargoyle. They moved in swiftly. Fife paced, never looking toward the angry shrieking.
"You two men will have to provide for yourselves,” he said. “Guard uniforms, first of all. And a cone would help a great deal if you could get hold of one."
'Cones?” said Horne. “In the tunnels?"
"Oh, yes. One-man cones that are adapted to their special functions. How else do you think the work could be supervised and the slaves ordered and controlled? Yes, a cone. That will be necessary. We can't hope to get all the way to Rillah without meeting someone, even in the older galleries. If we can make it look as though we're a regular work-party of guards and slaves…"
The purple gargoyle, whose name was D'quar, came back with Chell, holding a streamer of blue cloth. Fife took it and the strip of embroidery and tossed them to Yso.
"I hope you appreciate them,” he said maliciously. “Meeva used to work quite naked to save her costume, and even here she only put it on once in a while when she wanted to play priestess."
Yso looked unhappily toward Meeva and said, “I'm sorry…"
Meeva, held forcibly in the enormous hands of Lurgh, screamed a torrent of words, and Fife laughed.
"She never learned that kind of language in any temple. Shut her up, Lurgh."
Lurgh shook her, and she was quiet. So were the two men of her race, who were nursing bruises now.
"We'll sleep for six hours,” Fife said. His sharp eyes had been appraising the two men and the woman. “You're too worn out now to be any good to us. You'd never even make it to Rillah. Meanwhile, those who are not going with us can make a fair sharing of the food and fill the water flasks."
Horne, Ewan and Yso went over and stretched out at the farthest end of the big rock chamber. Despite his crushing weariness, Horne could not close his eyes at once. The spectacle in the big cavern fascinated him, a phantasmagoria of impossible shapes and weird, enormous shadows coming and going around the lantern. Shifting spheres that floated with their tentacles reaching, gargoyle faces looking solemnly through the gloom, the sharply unhuman silhouette that was Fife and the brown-furred looming bulk of the giant creatures from Allamar, arms and antennae, chitin, hide and feather, mixing and meeting and clacking and whispering in the light and darkness…
A sudden feeling of nightmare gripped Horne. What was he doing in this place — with these creatures so far removed from human? He thought, not for the first time, that men had gone too fast and far from Earth, that they weren't ready yet for this sort of thing. It seemed to him that he watched an unearthly Sabbat of diabolical celebrants, and he could almost hear Berlioz’ mocking, blasphemous music. He wanted to get out of here, to leave sleeping Yso and Ewan and their problems, to leave these children of nightmare, to get off the world and go home, go home…
A thought checked Horne's shuddery reaction. Alien and creepy as the shadowy horde were, they all wanted just the same thing as he. To go home. They had been dragged here by force, by the slavers of the Vellae. They had labored, endured and finally escaped, and their simple minds yearned for the mists of Chorann, and the sad forests of Allamar, and all the other wild Fringe worlds they came from, just as he longed for Earth. A hatred for the Vellae for doing this ruthless thing — a hatred that for the first time was not connected with his own wrongs — came to Horne. And why had the Vellae done it? What mysterious thing were they doing with the slaves that even their own men thought was so evil?
The strange silhouette of Fife came toward him, against the Light. The little alien had not missed the fact that Horne was wakeful. He came and looked down at him with his yellow eyes.
"You watch us,” he said, and there was suspicion in the statement.
Horne nodded. He said, “Yes, Fife. I watch you."
There was a silence. Whether Fife was partly telepathic or not, or whether he read Horne's changed feelings by some other means, Horne could not know. But when Fife spoke again it was in an altered tone.
"Sleep, human. There will be no rest for any of us on the way to Rillah."
CHAPTER XII
The gallery was cut wide and high through the living rock.
It was dry and well-ventilated, partly through shafts that bored upward to the outside air. Horne figured that they must be hooded against rain and therefore against light too, because no light came through them even though he knew that it was day again in the outer world. Some of the slaves had had their work-lamps with them when they escaped. The purple gargoyle, D'quar, stalked ahead, wearing an incongruous star on his hideous brow, a guiding light to the rest of them.
At intervals along the gallery, steel hatches were set into the right-hand wall — the inner wall, if Horne had figured rightly. They were coated with an anti-corrosive plastic and locked with curious-looking locks. Even Fife did not know what the hatches were for. He only knew that they were deadly dangerous to tamper with. Horne was not tempted to bother with them.
They had come a long way from the refuge in the badlands, working their way by forced marches during the dark hours along the rim of the foothills until they reached the base of a particular bald, humped mountain that was, Ewan had said, close to Rillah on the other side.
While the slow dawn was breaking, Fife led them up a maze of canyons and rising ridges which made for such arduous travel that Yso's strength gave out temporarily. Lurgh, the big brown-furred creature from Allamar Two, had carried her along for a while, not seeming in the least bothered by her weight. By the time she had her strength back, they were entering the mouth of an old boring half hidden by a slide.
"This must have been part of a mine once,” Fife said. “This side of the mountain is full of them, I believe, but this is the only one I know. Some of them connect with the outer galleries of the Project, and that is how we few managed to escape. I think even most of the Vellae have forgotten these borings are still here."
He added, “Go softly. The roof is liable to fall."
They wormed their way through a claustrophobic nightmare of rubble and rotten shorings, with sand and pebbles sifting ominously down their necks, until a narrow opening let them into the dry, solid gallery cut in the deeper rock. That had been, Horne thought, a devil of a long time ago and they had been climbing ever since. By now, they must be close to the top of the mountain, just inside the curve of the south shoulder.
Tunnel in the rind of a mountain, with doors in it. What for? Even preoccupied as he was with Ardric and his intense need to find him, Horne could not help wondering now and again just what was hidden behind those locked doors in the vast bulk of the mountain.
Yso and Ewan were feverish in their desire to know, and they had been restrained only by the grim warnings of the alien slaves from trying to find out.