"Do not be so sure," Karkri said.
He held his torch in the thing's mouth, and Ishmael saw that the arrow and the spear were being sucked -- or absorbed -- into the red organ. And the thing was beginning to pulse again. Or was that an illusion fostered by the eternal shaking of this world?
Then the jaws slowly closed, and the neck began to retract. The gray eyes continued to stare as blankly, and the head offered no hostility. But the men scrambled by it, watching it closely to make sure that the head did not turn toward them. When they were all in the hallway, behind the back of the thing, they paused for a moment. They looked at Ishmael as if to ask, What next?
He said, "All we can do is go ahead. But I am sure of one thing: the priests of the temple of Boorangah will not be expecting anybody to come alive through here. So we will take them unawares."
"If this does lead to the temple," Vashgunammi, a sailor, said.
"Somebody has to feed the guardian beasts once in a while, and I doubt that they enter from the other end to do so," Ishmael said. "In any event, we must go on until we win or lose."
And that, he said to himself as he turned away, summed up the mechanics of life. A living being had to keep on going, no matter what happened, until the enemy was conquered or had conquered. Even here, in this quivering world of the red sun and the falling moon, that held true.
So far they had been fortunate. If the guardians had been more vigorous, or of a slightly more belligerent nature, they might have wiped out the band of invaders. And perhaps in earlier days they might have done so. But ages had passed with no call for their talents, and they had grown older and more feeble. Their keepers, the priests, had started to neglect them, perhaps not feeding them enough to keep them fully strong. And the beasts dwelt in the long, long darkness and dreamed of their prey; when their prey was among them, they took a long time awakening. The sluggishness of millennia was not easily overcome. However, now that they were alert, they might be three times as dangerous if the invaders attempted to return this way.
They were faced with another extremely steep stairway cut into the stone. This led up and up and then became even steeper with very high rises so that Ishmael's shins brushed against the edges of the steps. Presently he was clinging to the steps with his free hand while he held a torch in the other.
Since he had entered the chambers, Ishmael had looked for signs of the keepers: dust or lack of it, footprints or lack of them where they should be, anything that would show that these rooms were used. But there was no dust and therefore no footprints. And there was not a sign of garbage or of anything left after the animals had been fed. Apparently the priests ventured into here often enough to clean up. Or the priests only cleaned up at long intervals and they had just recently done so. Whatever the situation, the chambers must have been cleaned a short time ago.
Ishmael was heartened by this, because the chances were that the keepers would not be coming for some time. Also, the fact that the beasts had been fed recently might account for their lack of all-out fury. The edge of their hunger had been taken off.
Ishmael whispered, "Perhaps you are bringing us good luck, Namalee!"
"What did you say?" she whispered back.
"Nothing," he said, lifting his free hand to signal silence. He thought he had heard a noise from above.
The others stopped climbing too, and they stood on the steps, listening.
Again the faint noise drifted down the flight of stairs.
It sounded something like chanting.
"I think we might be close to the temple," Namalee said.
"I hope we are close to the exit from this place," Karkri said. "Something is following us."
Ishmael looked back down the steps, past the torches, and strained to see into the darkness at the foot of the steps. The extreme influence of the torchlights barely reached there. Still, it was light enough for him to see the hulk that moved slowly, creakingly, from the corridor into the space at the bottom. Though he could not make out the details, he knew that it was the stone beast.
"It didn't die," Namalee said.
"And it's waiting for us," Ishmael said. "Well, it surely can't come up the steps after us."
The thing made no effort to ascend the flight. It was as motionless as the statue it seemed to be. It was waiting, and it probably was better at waiting than any creature in this world or the one that Ishmael had left.
"It's blocking the corridor," Karkri said. "And the next time it will be aroused. We have hurt it, and it won't forget that."
"You don't know that," Ishmael said.
He climbed on until he reached another narrow corridor. This led straight for about sixty feet and ended in a wall of stone. But the voices, which had become louder, had to be close by. He put his ear to the wall and could hear the chanting quite clearly. It was not in the tongue of the Zalarapamtrans.
Softly, he rapped on the wall. He was surprised to find that the wall was not as thin as he had thought. It was very thick and solid. He determined after going over the wall that the voices were filtering through openings near the bottom, the center, and the top of the wall. These were holes a quarter-inch wide drilled through the stone and spaced about a foot apart.
"They must move this wall somehow," Ishmael said to Namalee.
He pushed at various places and passed the torch over every inch of the wall and the adjacent areas of the corridor. But he could find nothing that might serve as a button or an activator to swing the wall on a pivot. He was convinced that this had to be the manner in which the wall was operated.
"Perhaps," Namalee said, "the mechanisms are all on the other side?"
"I hope not," he said, "though that would be one way of making sure that intruders did not get into the temple even if they escaped the guardians. To return after feeding the beasts, though, the priests would have to notify those on the other side of the wall to operate the mechanism. I suppose they could do so through the little holes."
Ishmael returned to the head of the stairs and looked down in the light of the torch Karkri held. It was true. The great shell of the beast was tilted upward, and the massive legs with the claws of stone were gripping the edges of a step. Slowly, and with a grinding noise, the bottom of the shell scraping against the steps, the monster pulled itself up. Its head was extended out of the shell and its jaws were opened wide. Ishmael went carefully down the steep steps until he was close enough to see into the wide yawn of the mouth. The eyeball thing inside pulsed much more rapidly than the first time he had seen it. And the arrow and spear seemed to have been absorbed into the organ. Possibly their wood had provided it with fuel. The beast's life must be comparable to a low and slow-burning fire under a tea kettle. The energy was low, but even a small fire will eventually make a kettle boil.
Ishmael went down several more steps until he was just out of reach of the beast if it should extend its neck to its limit. The head turned slightly to each side as if the thing wanted to give each of the gray granite eyes a view of its victim. Ishmael retreated one step and to do so had to turn his back on the thing. He grabbed the edge of the high riser and pulled; Namalee shrieked. Without looking back he pulled himself up swiftly and then turned.
The thing had come up more swiftly than he would have thought possible. A paw reached up and the dead-looking gray-rock claws hooked into the edge of the step. The second paw hooked, and the legs bent to pull the great body up. The hind legs spread out to brace itself. The neck slid back into the shell, but the mouth remained wide open.