“Over here, Storm –” came a low call just before the Nitra pack screeched their fear and anger aloud – though no warrior ventured in pursuit. A hand caught his arm, pulled him up to the cliff wall.
“Where did you come from?” Quade demanded. “We thought you were dead!”
Storm laughed again. The intoxication that filled him still bubbled.
“Far from dead,” he said. “But we had better get out of here before they recover nerve enough to come hunting –”
His exultation held as they climbed back to the ledge of the deserted nest, worked their way around to the valley of the Sealed Cave. But at the mouth of that same cave he halted.
“Listen!” His tone was so sharply commanding that the men about him were silent.
And it was not so much a noise that they heard as a vibration, which came to them through the walls of stone, from the earth under their feet.
”The Xik ship!” Storm knew that trembling of old. He had sheltered in hiding to watch the enemy take-off from hidden ports he had been sent to locate and harass. Always there had been that shaking of the earth as the alien ships had warmed to their take-off.
“What –?” Quade demanded.
The Xik ship – it is getting ready to take off. They may be leaving Arzor!”
Quade, one arm about Logan, put his other hand to the cliff surface.
“What a vibration!”
Too much so. Storm was conscious of that suddenly. The ship he had seen in the hidden valley was no intergalactic transport – it was hardly larger than a converted scout. This tearing was too much! Another Xik craft hidden somewhere near? Only now that throbbing came raggedly –
There was a roar that filled the night, a torch of light that shot miles high from the mountains. Around them the cliffs trembled, miniature landslips started, and they crouched together, men and animals, in a terrified huddle.
The tubes – they must have blown!” Storm was on his feet again, his hand pressing against his shoulder where the sharp bite of pain gnawed once more. He had been torn out of his self-hypnotism, thrown into the weariness of near exhaustion.
“What tubes?” Logan’s question came thinly as if some muffling veil hung between them.
The Xiks had their ship partly buried for concealment. They were digging her out when you escaped. But if they were pressed for time they might have tried to take her up without being sure of thoroughly clean tubes – or else” – Storm glanced down at the ball of whimpering fur he held, one sorely frightened meerkat – “or else King pulled one of her tricks. When they tried to lift the ship, the tubes blasted it wide open!”
“So they blew themselves up!” Brad Quade squared his shoulders. “But there might be something to see to over there, perhaps some of our boys were involved and need help. It might be well to check –”
“One of those other grills in the garden cave –” Logan cut in weakly. There was a north-western one pointing in the right direction. If we could find another tunnel from that it would take us straight through –”
Whatever shaking up the mountain had received, the garden cavern remained apparently untouched. Though the newcomers were awed by the bits of strange worlds divided by the black paths, they did not linger. Gorgol sped ahead, the rest trying to match his pace. A quarter of the way around the cavern they came to the grill Logan had found on his first exploration.
They mastered the latch and were fronting another tunnel which, with its curiously dead air and blackness, engulfed them wholly, for this time there was no torch to light the way. Surra pressed on with Gorgol, eyes of cat and native not so baffled by the gloom, the others strung out behind. All were driven by a gnawing desire to be through this passage and out into the normal world of Arzor once again.
It was easy to lose one’s sense of direction here in the dark and the tunnel did not run straight. Whether it followed the easy path of some natural fault in the mountain, or whether its long-ago builders had intended the turns to bewilder, Storm could not guess. But after two twists, he was at sea. For all he could determine, they might be heading back into the cavern they had just left. Baku moved restlessly on his shoulder, he lurched to one side, scraping against the unseen wall for support, hearing close by the heavy breathing of one of his companions, and then Logan’s assurance, fiercely uttered to his father, that he could keep up in spite of his injured leg.
Another twist, and a spark in the dark ahead, a light that grew to a reflected glow as if some giant fire raged beyond. They hurried on at that promise of escape.
Now the off-worlders caught up with Gorgol and the cat, to look out into a well of fire. Those flames ate along the terraces of the valley of the ship. And the heat from the conflagration beat in at them. Gorgol wriggled through a slit of door and Storm edged after him, giving Baku her flight signal. If there were any way out along the heights, she would find it for them.
Seeing that whirl of flames below, the Terran believed that nothing within that bowl of mountain walls could have survived the blowup of the overdriven ship. Sparks came up in the suck of air as they edged about the small walled space that long ago might have been a sentry point, to put a crag between them and the full force of the heat.
Even here the light approached that of day and they discovered Surra at the head of a flight of stairs. They were hardly more than niches gnawed away by the elements, down which a man could edge only at his peril. But they were a way down with the full bulk of the peak between them and the raging inferno of the blasted valley.
Surra’s species were sure-footed. The pumas of the western continent, a breed crossed with her dune cat ancestors in the experimental laboratories, were adept at climbing cliffs and crossing ridges where neither man nor hunting hound dared to follow. However, now she was examining this drop narrowly, advancing one paw as if to test the stability of that first weatherworn step.
Something in its feel must have reassured her, for she flowed down with liquid grace until she came out some hundred feet below in a shadowed space which appeared much larger than the platform on which Storm and Gorgol lingered. Storm hitched over that drop, only he crawled down those niches on his hands and knees. The heat of the opposite valley was cut off, and when he reached the ledge, he saw that from this point a roadway took the down curve, cut into the rock in the obscurity of the dark side of the mountain.
“A road –” Gorgol signed in the moonlight. “Below – a wider one – running so –” He gestured southeast.
Perhaps this was part of that other way into the valley up which the raiders had driven their stolen horses and frawns. If so, its other end should bring them out on the plains.
“Return –” Storm signed. “Bring the others here –”
Gorgol was already climbing, his tall body ascending that ladder easily. Storm went on. Surra quested ahead, scouting in advance. The Terran had a feeling that he must keep moving now – that if he rested, as his body craved, he would not be able to move on again. He started down that narrow pathway hacked in the side of the mountain, overhung in places where the builders had bored a half-tunnel to accommodate the traveller. These peaks might all be honeycombed, he thought, by caverns and tunnels, and other hidden ways of the long-ago invaders. Sorenson had been proved right and Survey must be informed.
Surra came out of the dark and pressed against his legs, making a barrier of her body in a warning of immediate danger. Storm swayed, retrieved his balance, listened. Then he caught the faintest noise – scrape of boot on rock? Metal against stone? Someone was coming up to meet him and that lurker could be anyone from a Nitra scout to an Xik who had escaped from the burning hell of the valley.
There were voices from behind too. The Quades and the riders were coming down under Gorgol’s guidance. And the Terran believed that the creeper below must have heard them also. Steadying himself against the rocks, he leaned as close to Surra as he could.