"Earl, you can't be serious. We can't stay in the open. We have to find shelter before it's dark."
"Here?" He looked around, seeing nothing but the barren slope of the hill, the wreck of the raft.
"We must! Earl, we must!"
"Because of your bogey-men?"
"The Sungari! Earl, for God's sake believe me! If we are in the open at night we'll never see the dawn!"
Valid or not her terror was real. Dumarest looked at her, recognizing her near-panic, her incipient hysteria.
Quietly he said, "In that case we'll have to find somewhere to spend the night. Look around for a place while I go back to the raft."
"Why, Earl? What good can it do? The thing is a wreck."
But one which held sharp scraps of metal, wire, fabric, ribs-all things which could spell survival in a wilderness.
Dumarest examined it. The floor had been of metal covered with a coarsely woven fabric held with strips. He ripped them away, lifted the material and slashed it free with his knife. A coil of wire followed, some rods, a section of foil which he rolled into an awkward bundle. By the time he had finished the suns were resting on the horizon and Lavinia was desperate.
"I can't find a place, Earl. There aren't any caves. I don't even know in which direction the nearest stop-over is. The Sungari-Earl!"
He dropped his burden and held her in his arms until the quivering had stopped and she was calm again.
"If we can't find a place to stay then we'll make one." He gestured at the things he had assembled. "Need it be strong? Do the Sungari actually attack? Are they large or what?"
She didn't know as he had expected. Her fear was born of rumor and whispered convictions of a knowledge based on a lack of evidence. But, unless he were to end with an insane woman on his hands, he had to pander to her delusion.
As they worked she said, "Why couldn't we have used the wreck? Couldn't it have been easier?"
"No." Dumarest adjusted the fabric which he had stretched over the curved rods and lashed with wire. Rocks surrounded the crude tent and now he covered it with a thin layer of sand. "It was too big," he explained. "Too heavy to move and too awkward to seal. And I don't want to be there when they come looking for us."
"Looking?" Her eyes widened, filled with purple from the dying light. "Who? Gydapen?"
"A clever man." Dumarest dusted more sand over the shelter. "He knew you would be eager to get back home and, if we'd crashed over the Iron Mountains, we'd have stood no chance. He even guessed that you might suspect him and head for a stop-over but, as you said, you'd have to ride high to spot one. Either way he couldn't lose."
"The explosion," she said, dully. "He sabotaged the raft."
"Which is why he insisted that we take wine with him and kept us busy with his cat and mouse game. He needed time to set the bomb and he wanted it to be late when we left." Dumarest looked at the woman. "He wanted to kill you," he said, evenly. "And he will want to be certain you are dead."
Would already be dead if it hadn't been for him. Lavinia had a sickening vision of herself, broken, bloodied, the prey for scavengers. It had been so close! If Dumarest hadn't suspected, hadn't acted when he had-and even then it had been close.
She felt a momentary weakness and closed her eyes, thankful she wasn't alone, thankful too that it was Dumarest with her and not Roland or Alcorus or even Charles when alive. Charles-how ignorant she had been! And Gydapen -how stupid!
She heard the rasp and scrape of stone against steel and turned to see Dumarest squatting, knife in hand, sparks flying from the blade. Some finely fretted material lay before him on a small heap of whittled twigs. A nest which caught the sparks and held them as, gently, he blew them to flame.
A fire-but why?
Watching, she saw him feed the glow, building it to a blaze which he lifted with the aid of metal torn from the roll of foil and carried to a place between rocks well to one side. More foil, the rest of the roll, made a humped shape behind it.
"A decoy!" Finally she understood. "If anyone should come they will see it and think we are with it. But no one will come at night, Earl."
"Can you be sure of that?"
"How could they spot the wreck?"
"There are ways." He added more fuel to the blaze. Smoke wreathed his face making it cruel in the crimson light. "We found the bomb but a tracking device could have been fitted."
"They won't come at night," she insisted. "Not even Gydapen."
Perhaps not, but the man wasn't alone and mercenaries had few compunctions as to how they earned their pay. Gnais would be free of the planetary phobia concerning the dark. Infra-red devices could be available to track down the living if they had escaped death in the wreck. The fire would confuse such apparatus and mask their own body heat.
Things he explained. Lavinia listened, nodding when he had finished.
"You're clever, Earl. Now, for God's sake, let us get out of the night!"
Chapter Fifteen
The shelter was small with barely enough room for them both. Without light, the walls pressing close, Dumarest was reminded too strongly of a tomb. Carefully parting the opening of the flap he looked outside.
The suns had vanished, the sky now blazed with stars, the pale, ghostly luminescence painting the rocks, the tufted vegetation with frosted silver. The glow of the fire was a dull reflection caught and dimmed by facing rocks. A ruby nimbus of shifting light in which figures moved in an intricate saraband.
A man in armor, gilt and tinsel over red and green, a helmet framing a skull in the eyeholes of which worms crawled and lifted heads which sighed with ancient yearnings. A fancy, gone even as seen, replaced by another which spun like a pinwheel, semi-transparent, a cut-out which danced, a face filled with bulging eyes. Red stained the mouth and ears, more the nose and cheeks. Tears of blood which dripped and left a trail in which paper-thin fingers dabbled and rose to trace symbols on the air.
Chagney!
Wheeling on his eternal journey among the stars.
His eyes bulged at the sight of unimaginable glories. His blood was a benediction to all who had spilled their lives in the void. His appearance was an accusation.
As was the woman with hair of flame.
Had he loved her, the real woman, or merely the shell she had worn?
Had she known and, knowing, taken a subtle revenge?
Kalin-had she lied?
Dumarest closed his eyes, shutting out the imaginary figures, feeling the tension at the base of his skull, the inward pressure. Something… something… but it was so long ago and now was not the time to remember.
Now was the time of the Sungari.
"Earl!" Lavinia was beside him, pressing close, her breath warm against his cheek. "Close the opening-please!"
Had they never built strong rooms fitted with thick windows? Were they afraid of the madness such rooms would bring?
"Earl! Please!"
Dumarest drew in his breath, shuddering, conscious of the ache at the base of his skull, the pressure. The hallucinations had been too real, too accusing. Fragments of the past, enhanced, given the acid sauce of hindsight, the torment of what might have been. A blur of images of which only a few had been prominent but, behind those few, ghostly yet horribly alive, had thronged others.
A man lived every second of every hour since the time of his birth and each of those seconds held all that had happened to and around him.
A vastness of experience. An inexhaustible supply of terror and pain and hopeless yearning. An infinity of doubt and indecision, of ignorance known and forceably accepted, of frustration and hate and cruelty and fear.
A morass in which glowed the fitful gleams of transient joy.