His guides were the sun and the strange shimmer in the air beyond the trees. The sun moved across the sky but the shimmer did not and, fortunately, the trees were wide-spaced enough to allow fairly good vision. Even so the going was hard. The eerie silence of the forest began to play on their nerves and moving shadows gave the impression of watchful menace.
The wind fell and the snow vanished. Night caught them and they took turns to sleep, one watching while the others sprawled in the narrow margin of safety. With the dawn came a raging thirst adding to the weakness caused by cold and lack of food. The cold could be combated by exertion, but the thirst could not. Twice Yalung called a sharp warn shy;ing as Lallia staggered and almost left the path. The third time Dumarest halted and looked into the strained lines of her face.
"I'm sorry, Earl," she said. "I couldn't help it. It's got so that I seem to be walking in a dream." She looked around, shuddering. "It's so damn quiet. If only something would make a noise. And," she added with feeling, "if only there was something to drink."
"Stay here." Dumarest turned and walked on to the next area of grass. Dropping he reached out with his boot and scraped it towards him. As he tore at the grass explosions blasted the air and shafts rained towards him. His boots were strong and, like his pants, resisted penetration. Picking up the clump of grass he returned to the others. "Chew on this," he said. "It might help."
Dubiously Lallia took the tangled vegetation. It was a mass of thick, juicy strands, the ends seeping where it had broken away. Sight of the liquid inflamed her thirst and she thrust some of the grass into her mouth, chewing and swallowing, sap staining her lips as she helped herself to more.
"It's good," she said. "Have some."
Yalung said, quietly, "Thank you, no. I can continue for a while yet."
"Earl?"
"Later, maybe. Now stick to the path and don't start day shy;dreaming."
They reached the edge of the forest as the sun kissed the horizon, long shadows streaming from the ranked trees and hiding the terrain so that they were clear long before they realized it. Now they walked on close-cropped grass dotted with low bushes, bearing flame-colored berries and thorned leaves. A tiny lake yielded water of crystal clarity, cold but more delicious than wine. Later Dumarest managed to kill a small animal, spearing it with his knife at thirty feet, clean shy;ing the beast and jointing it, using the fur to wipe the blade.
Chewing on the raw gobbets of meat they walked on to where the shimmer hung against the blossoming stars.
They were few and Dumarest looked at them with a strange nostalgia. So had the stars looked from Earth when he had been very young. Not the shimmer and glare so com shy;mon in and close to the Center, but a scatter of burning points separated by wide expanses of darkness. They had formed patterns, those stars, and the broad swath of the galactic lens had traced a shining path across the heavens. But they had been scattered by distance and not, as the stars in the Web, by the cloud of shielding dust.
"Look," said Yalung softly. "A ship."
It fell wreathed in the misty blue of its field, a tiny mote incredibly far, falling as a meteor to a point beyond the horizon. Landing at the sacred place which, so Nimino had said, was protected by strange guardians. The trees? Dumarest didn't think so. They were guardians of a kind but not the ones the navigator had meant.
He paused as a thin trilling stirred the air, the ghostly echoes of a crystal chime, sounding high and shrill and far away.
A sweet and soulful sound, unbearably poignant, arousing memories better left undisturbed.
"Earl!" Lallia came close to him and caught his arm. "Earl, what was that?"
It came again as she fell silent, thin, hurtfully pure. A third time and then the night settled into unbroken silence.
"A signal," said Yalung thoughtfully. "It must have sounded when the ship landed. A summons, perhaps?" He sucked in his breath with an audible hiss. "Look! The sky!"
Ahead, where the shimmer had disturbed the cold beauty of the stars, leaped a vibrant cone of coruscating brilliance. It lasted for perhaps half a minute and then, as abruptly as it had come, was gone.
The ship left at dawn. Lallia watched as it rose, tiny in the distance, the blue mist of its field almost lost against the brightening sky. Her face was haggard as she looked at Dumarest.
"Earl! We're too late! It's gone!"
"There will be others," he said. "Ships must come here all the time."
"They come," agreed Yalung. "But will they take any who ask for passage? Will they be allowed to? This is a strange world."
He halted, brooding as he studied the sky. They had been walking for hours, using the stars as a guide, avoiding the thorned bushes more by instinct than actual sight. They had found no more lakes and there had been no more game.
"How much further do you think we have to go?"
"A long way," said Dumarest. The ship had been small, their progress of the night had been negligible, the faint shimmer in the sky seemed no closer. "A week, perhaps, even longer, but we'll get there in the end."
"If we can stay alive that long." Fatigue had made the woman sharp. "There's something crazy about this place. We've been walking for miles and seem no closer now than we did at the start. Maybe we'll never get closer. We could be moving in a giant circle."
"No," said Dumarest. "Not that."
"Then why are we so far? We-" She broke off and then said, wonderingly. "Look, Earl. Birds."
"The first we have seen," said Yalung quietly. "But -are they birds?"
They came from the direction in which they were head shy;ing, winged motes against the sky, wheeling and circling before swooping down at the travelers. There was something odd about them. Dumarest watched as they came, eyes like jewels and feathers rustling like metal, wide wings throwing shadows on the ground. They were big, their wings ex shy;tended fully twenty feet, their bodies as long as the height of a man. Their beaks were glinting spears and their clawed feet stretched as if to engulf barrels. From halfway down their bodies stretched limbs ending in long, prehensile finger-like claws. Three of them landed just ahead, the rest circling watchfully above.
The guardians?
Dumarest studied them as they stood, wings folded, ap shy;parently waiting. Mutated biological mechanisms, he thought, fed on a diet heavy in metallic oxides and silicon. That would account for the rasping of the feathers, the sparkling gleam of bone and scale. Multilimbed creatures produced in order to fly, to walk, to grip and tear. Or perhaps they were a natural sport of this peculiar world. It didn't matter. To resist them would be suicide.
"They are barring our path," said Yalung. "A warning?"
"We can't turn back!" Lallia's voice held near-hysteria. "Earl, we can't turn back!"
Dumarest looked at the other winged shapes circling over shy;head. Reenforcements, perhaps, if they should somehow manage to overcome the three ahead. With lasers they could have killed them all but they had no weapons aside from his knife. And, even if they could have destroyed the birds, would that end their danger?
Slowly he walked forward to stand before the three silent images. They were like statues of burnished metal and shin shy;ing crystal, the idols of some ancient temple, utterly remote from human comprehension. The light of the rising sun shone redly from their eyes, beyond them the enigmatic shimmer quivered in the silent air.
Dumarest said, "We are survivors of a wrecked vessel. We wish to go to the field, there to obtain passage from this world."