Ishmael kept on retreating while the stone thing clambered after him. When he was near the top, Ishmael stopped. Once that monster came over the edge and had a stable footing on the corridor, it could advance on the party. And, due to the narrowness of the corridor, not more than two men could fight it at one time.
Ishmael turned and said, "Hurry up! Try to find how to get out, or..."
He didn't need to finish. The others could see what might happen. Karkri came to his side and looked down. He said, "The beast has a precarious hold."
"There's only one way to keep it from getting up here," Ishmael said.
They went down four steps and stood just out of reach of the head if the neck should extend further. They whispered together and then, as they saw the beast reach out its right paw to grip the next step, they leaped outward with all their force.
With a speed that neither man had reckoned on because they considered the creature to be of stone, and stone had to be slow, the neck thrust the head at them. It was fortunate only that the beast chose Karkri and not Ishmael. If it had been the other way, that head, launched on a neck as swift as a line singing out at the end of a harpoon deep in a whale just struck, would have closed its jaws on Ishmael.
But they ground down like millstones on Karkri's feet as he leaped forward.
Ishmael's feet struck the shell just beside the right side of the neck.
Karkri screamed as his leg bones were ground together and his back struck the edge of a step.
The monster, borne by the impact of the two bodies, rose up and backward. Its hind feet slipped and, still holding the screaming Karkri in its jaws, it fell back. Karkri was flipped up and over through the air as if he were a weight on the end of a cracked whip. He described an arc and smashed into the steps below the monster, which then fell upon him on its back.
Ishmael leaped down again and drove his feet against the side of the beast, which had turned as if on a pivot on the high part of the shell. His driving legs spun it on around and it slipped on the edge of another step and crashed down the steps. At the bottom it turned over and fell upon its back, and there it stayed, kicking its short legs, unable to get back onto its feet, just like a tortoise of flesh.
This time Karkri was almost on top of the beast. He lay face-down while blood ran from him down the steps and formed a pool around the shell of the beast's back.
Ishmael took a few seconds to determine that Karkri was past saving. He climbed back up the steps and returned to the wall. Though the beast had made a great crashing noise when it went down the steps, the noise had apparently not been heard on the other side of the wall. The chanting was louder than before.
Everything that they could think to do had been done, and still they had discovered no means for opening the wall. They could not just sit there and wait because they would starve to death. Moreover, step two of the plan would be set into motion, and if Ishmael's band was within the temple the raid would be a failure. It still was not too late to return to the boats and try to enter from the upper part of the ledge. But Ishmael had no heart for that and neither, he was certain, did any of his band. Surely there was a key to entrance into the temple. It was just that they were ignorant or blind.
He looked through one of the shafts in the wall. There was a dim light on the other side the source of which he could not see. About twenty or so feet beyond the wall was another gray stone wall. The voices seemed to be coming from the right. He doubted that the chanters were in the room he was looking into, but the voices had to be close to penetrate the shafts.
Ishmael clamped his teeth together as if he were biting down on time to shake it, as a terrier shakes a rat.
"Perhaps we should put out the torches," Namalee said. "If they should go by the wall and see the light through the shafts.. ."
Ishmael cursed to himself because he had not thought of that. He ordered the torches doused with a heavy powder which one man carried in a pouch for this purpose. Another man carried a small bag of oil with which to soak the torches and matches of weed and chemicals derived from some ground plants. Ishmael checked that they still had these before he allowed the flames to be put out.
Then they were in darkness and silence. The voices had stopped.
Ishmael put his ear to a shaft. After a while he heard a cough. Despite his situation, he smiled. There was something comfortable and comforting in that cough. Doubtless the congregation, or choir, was silent while waiting for a final benediction or statement of dismissal. And, as always happened in a church meeting, someone coughed.
The earth never stopped shaking and the seas were dried up, the sun was a giant dying and the moon was falling, and most of life had taken to the air, which was itself disappearing. But human nature had not changed as swiftly as the world in which it existed.
Then he lost the smile as someone shouted a few words and there was the sound of many feet shuffling and a murmur of voices. The meeting was breaking up.
A minute later a torch brightened the room on the other side of the wall, feet shuffled, and two men talking in low voices, one holding a torch, went by. They were robed and hooded in a scarlet material and would have passed for the monks of his day if their faces had not been tattooed with bright greens and reds.
Other men, always in pairs, followed them. Ishmael counted ten couples, and then there were none. But he was sure that the room in which they had chanted had held many more than that. The others must have gone off to other places or else were still in the chantry. But, if they were, they were silent.
He waited. The silence became a singing. The darkness settled as if it had substance and weight and a mindless, malign purpose. Once there was a clank from behind him and he jumped, along with the others. But it was the beast grating its stone claws against the steps in an effort to get onto its feet.
Namalee sniffed suddenly and put her nose to the end of a shaft and breathed deeply again. Then she said, "I thought I smelled it. It's the odor of the gods. The sacred room of worship must be very close indeed. But it might as well be a thousand miles away."
Ishmael sniffed but could detect nothing. However, he had not been brought up in the odor of sanctity and so lacked a trained nose. And if he did not soon track down the secret of unlocking the doorway to the next room, he would lack more than just a nose.
Ishmael listened but could hear nothing from the other side. He ordered that one torch be relighted. When the flame sprang out, causing him to blink with the light, he took the torch and held it so that its light fell through the length of a shaft. One by one, starting from the upper right-hand corner, he examined the interior of each shaft, searching for some difference in color of the stone, some lines, however faint, which might indicate a plate set in the hollow, or anything that was even in the slightest suspicious. But he found nothing.
As he did so, he heard a slight squeaking sound, and he whirled. Krashvanni, the man who held the bag of powder with which to put out the torch, reached out for his flame. But Namalee said, "The wall is moving!"
It was true. It was not turning upon a vertical pivot, as he would have expected. It was revolving on a horizontal rod, its lower part moving upward.