“Perhaps—” Storm agreed lest he give offense.
“The sealed ones will know. They came far—far—too. Maybeso they like you—”
Gorgol spoke with the confidence of one who was acquainted with the mysterious, legendary people, and Storm asked another question:
“Gorgol knows the sealed ones?”
His question loosed a flood of story. Gorgol—three seasons back as far as Storm could determine—had left his tribe on his man-trip, to prove himself a lone hunter able to stand with the adult males of Krotag’s following. After Norbie custom he had either to engage an enemy tribesman on his own—if he were lucky enough to find a roving warrior of some clan traditionally at war with his people—or kill without aid one of the four dangerous forms of wildlife. Since his “inside man” had suggested such a path in a dream, Gorgol had headed to the eastern mountains, working his way along the same general direction the expedition was now traveling.
There he had come across the spoor of an “evil flyer,” the giant bird-thing the Norbies regarded with a wholesome aversion for its unclean habits and respect for its ferocious fighting spirit. Since he could hope for no better kill to establish himself among the men, Gorgol had spent the better part of five days tracking the creature to its nesting ledge high in the mountains. But he had been too eager at his first shot and had wounded it only.
The bird, after the manner of its species, had attacked him, and there had followed a running fight down the side of the nesting peak into a valley where Gorgol had laid an ambush that had successfully finished the flyer. Though he had been injured in the final encounter, he was not too badly wounded. He thrust his leg out into the firelight now, tracing for Storm the blue line of a ragged scar fully ten inches long.
Disabled by his hurt, Gorgol had been forced to stay in the valley of the ambush. Luckily the season was still one of rains and the big dry had not yet begun so there was a trickle of water from the heights. And during his imprisonment in the narrow cut he had discovered a walled-up cave opening, together with other objects made by intelligent beings who were neither Norbie nor settler.
He had left those finds behind him when at last he could hobble, not wishing to vex the sealed ones. But since that day he had remained certain that he had chanced upon one of the doors of the Sealed Caves.
“The sealed ones—they good to men who keep their laws. Put in Gorgol’s head how to kill flyer—send water drip to drink while leg bad. Old stories say sealed ones good to Norbies long, long ago. I say this too. Maybeso I die there did not their magic help me! Their magic big—” His hand expanded in the large sign. “They do much—sealed away from sun they sleep—but still they do much!”
“Could you find this valley again?”
“Yes. But not go there unless sealed ones allow. I follow bird. Sealed ones know I come not to disturb them, not to dig them up. They excuse. Go to wake them—maybeso they not like. Must call—then we go.”
Storm heard the conviction in that and respected it. Each man had a right to his own beliefs. But this did back up Sorenson’s story that the wizard Bokatan had offered to guide them because he believed that the sealed ones themselves were in favor of it. And since the country of Gorgol’s hunting adventures was in the same general direction as the territory into which the expedition was heading, perhaps they were going to find the mysterious Sealed Caves after all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
T
he sun was a warm hand pressing on his bared shoulders as Storm lay on top of an outcrop, his long-vision glasses trained on the pass ahead. He had shed his easily sighted frawn shirt many days ago, having discovered that his own brown skin was hard to distinguish from the rocks.
Now the path of the expedition had narrowed to one choice, a defile leading between climbing walls, a perfect country for ambush. Properly they should travel it by night, except that the footing was none too good and they dared not risk a fall for either man or horse. Already the party followed well-tried Terran precautions for advance into enemy territory, stopping in the early afternoon to graze their horses and feed themselves, and then moving on for an hour after sunset, so that their night camp site was far from the place where they had first—to any spy-scout—bedded down. Whether such elementary tactics would mislead experienced native raiders was another matter.
Storm was certain that they were under observation, though he had no real proof except the alert uneasiness of the team. And he depended upon bird and cat for his first warning against any attack.
Now Baku did come in, voicing a harsh scream, to send winging out of the brush below a whole covey of panic-stricken grass hens. There was someone coming through the defile, a Norbie riding along on a vividly spotted black and white horse. And the white star on its forehead was dabbed with red, a circle centered by a double dot—If this newcomer was not the wizard Bokatan, then he had acquired Bokatan’s favorite mount, which had been described to Storm in advance. This would not be too impossible. Storm remained where he was, his bow ready.
“Hoooooooooo!” The call was the twitter of Norbie speech prolonged into a high-pitched hoot. Out of the rock, seemingly, Dagotag arose to meet the wizard. At least the party now had their promised guide.
Before nightfall they had crossed the invisible border of the taboo land, to camp that night on the banks of a swollen stream. The water was red with silt, whirling along uprooted bushes and even small trees. Sorenson surveyed it critically.
“You can have too much of a good thing. We have to depend upon the mountain rains for water. But, on the other hand, flash floods in these narrow gorges can wipe out a party such as ours in a matter of seconds. Tomorrow we’ll have to parallel this as long as we can to water the horses. Let us hope the level begins to drop instead of to rise—”
Before noon the next day, not only was the flood dwindling but Bokatan pointed them away from it, using as a guide for their new direction something that excited them all. There was no mistaking the artificial origin of that low black ridge, running at right angles to the northeast.
Strom measured it roughly with his hand, finding it about a foot wide, though raised only a few inches from the ground. It was wedge-shaped with the narrower edge straight up. To the touch it was not stone, nor metal, at least no stone nor metal he had ever seen before. And its purpose remained a mystery. A knife blade made no impression, but under prodding fingers the substance had a faintly greasy feel, though neither dry soil nor leaves clung to its surface. Nor would Surra put paw on it. She sniffed dubiously at the ridge, plainly avoiding contact, sneezing twice and shaking her head in her gesture of distaste.
“Like a rail,” Mac commented, and whacked the first pack horse on, though that animal, too, picked a way that did not bring it close to the black ridge.
Sorenson stopped to snap tri-dee prints of the thing though Bokatan urged the party to hurry. “Up!” his fingers counseled. “Up and through the hole in the earth before sun sets—then you may look upon the valley of the sealed ones—”
Already the cliffs rose so high that the light of the sun did not penetrate to the floor of the canyon through which they passed, and gathering shadows thickened almost to dusk as they rode along by the black rail.
Death defiles, that old belief of his people haunted Storm, while his modern training denied it. A man who touched the dead, or their possessions, dwelt under a roof where death had been, was unclean, accursed. This black ridge was like a thread wrought by the dead to draw others into the house of the dead—He blinked, shrugged the blanket about his shoulders, dropping a little behind the rest as he fumbled in his belt pouch for an object he had fashioned during their noon halt.
The Terran did not dismount, but leaned far from his riding pad, holding that small sliver of wood plumed at one end with two of Baku’s feathers. It had been shaped with the aid of one of his war arrows after immemorial custom, and now he aimed its point at the alien rail—if rail it was. The prayer stick caught and held in some infinitesim
al crack of the substance, standing unwavering, its feathers triumphantly erect.
One magic against another. Storm clicked his tongue to Rain and the horse trotted on to catch up, just as a turn in the canyon brought them to what Bokatan could well term the “hole” in the earth.
If they had not been able to see the brightness of sunlight ahead, Storm would have protested against entering the place. For the tunnel opening was like an open mouth, fanged at the upper arch with regular pointed projections of the same substance as the rail that had led them here. What purpose those projections had originally served, the explorers could not guess. Now they resembled nothing so much as teeth ready to close upon the unwary. And Storm envied Baku who could wing aloft and cross the mountain barrier in the free air.
Though the tunnel was a short one, open at both ends, within it, the air was stale to taste and smell, as if no cleansing wind had ever flown through. Surra took the passage in a rush, the horses pounding after her, until they burst out into the brilliant blaze of the sun again, to find themselves at one end of a much larger valley.
“This is a leg-breaking do, if I ever saw one!” Mac exploded—rightly. For before them was a choked stretch of debris, tumbled blocks of the black material overgrown with generations of vines and brush.
Sorenson dismounted. “Some kind of a building—perhaps a gatehouse for defense—” He was reaching for his tri-dee camera when Bokatan pushed to the fore.
“Into the valley now—night come here—bad—”
Reluctantly Sorenson agreed. Storm was already afoot, his horse’s reins hooked over his arm, ready to help Mac with the pack train, while the Norbies strung out, scouting the easiest way through the maze before them. Storm, threading a narrow path between banks of the broken black material, decided this was an excellent trap, certainly not any trail to be traveled after dark.
“I’d like to know what happened here.” Mac puffed up to join the Terran, towing the gray lead horse of the pack train. “Looks like somebody got real mad and loosed a buster where it would do the most harm—don’t it now?”
Storm gazed at the ruins about them for the first time with interest in the debris itself, not just regarding it as an entanglement through which they must worm their way. He still did not care to make too close an inspection, but Mac’s suggestion was shrewdly taken. An earthquake might have reduced a stoutly built structure to this, but mere lapse of time—no. And outside of a convulsion of nature there remained only war. Yet nowhere in the tradition of the Norbies was there any reference to war as the reason for the withdrawal of the sealed ones.
“Yes—a buster—” Mac scrambled ahead. “Or maybe a good, big flood.”
“Or a series of floods—” That was Sorenson catching up as they paused to rest the horses. “Look there!” Now that he pointed out the high watermarks on the wall of the valley the others could not miss them.
“Do you suppose that tunnel acts as a drain?” hazarded Storm.
“If it wasn’t originally intended for that use, it must serve now—and has done so for a good many years. There’s a large lake in the valley according to Bokatan—a few flash floods and the overflow must seek an outlet—”
The ruins sprawled for half a mile of hard going. Then they came into the course of a dry river bed fronting a sharp upward slope. The black rail ran straight ahead, to be hidden in the earth of the slope that perhaps had accumulated since the builders of the black wedge had laid it down.
Up the slope they trudged and stood on the verge of a broad dam, which controlled the stagnant-looking, brown water of quite a sizable lake. And beyond the opposite shore of that dank lake was the rest of the valley.
Dotted in the lake itself and along its shores were mounds of weathered and overgrown debris. The remains of a city? Sorenson sighed and pulled off his hat, wiping his arm across his flushed dusty face.
“We may not have found the Caves,” he said slowly, “but we have found something. Go ahead and make camp, boys, I want all the shots of this I can get before the light is gone!”
They made camp on an inlet of the lake and Storm took over the job of dampening down the ground with insect repellent. He noticed that the Norbies did not range far away and that the natives piled their hide night shelters well within the circle of the fire glow.
Mac surveyed the wealth of mounds. “If we’re going to dig, we have plenty of places to choose from. Only maybe you ’n’ me ’n’ Sorenson’s goin’ to have to do most of it. Norbies don’t ever take kindly to usin’ shovels—”
“About all we can do on this trip is map.” Sorenson came down at last to join them. “Maybe open a test trench or two. A couple of small finds to impress the directors would help out a lot. But if this site is as good as it looks, we’d need a more permanent camp and a dozen years to really clean it out. Bokatan”—he appealed to their guide—“this water,” he signed, “does it go with the coming of the big dry, or does it stay?”
The Norbie’s hands spread in a gesture of bafflement. “Bokatan come only in wet times—no see in dry. But water much—no think go away when big dry comes—”
“I’m inclined to believe that,” Sorenson said happily. “That means we can think about year around work here.”
“If you don’t get too much water,” Storm returned. “From the evidence of those high watermarks there have been floods clear across this space.”
The Survey man refused to be dismayed by that. “If necessary we can pitch camp back against the cliffs to the north. There is an upward slope toward that end of the valley. Surely the whole place is never altogether under water. We’ve had high rains for the past month and see the size of the lake?”
He was given a chance to test his deductions before dawn the next morning, for the same kind of drenching rain that had bogged the trail herd came to flood the camp. In a hurry, they moved away from the rapidly rising lake. To take refuge on top of one of the mounds of debris was a temptation, but such a move could only prove more dangerous in the end.
While the steady downpour cut the danger of attack from a Nitra war party, the rain bothered the Norbies. Water and war were both gifts of the Thunder Drummers, but this was not good land in which to be caught by water, and, when they witnessed one landslip along the cliff wall, they pressed back to the upper and unknown northern end of the valley.
Three of the Norbies rode in search of higher ground that might lie above the old flood-level marks, and Storm and Mac, working together, pushed the pack horses steadily away from the lake, following the upward slope. Sorenson and Bokatan struck off in the direction of the reputed Caves, for the Survey man was determined to learn all he could if there was danger of their having to pull out entirely.
Usually tractable enough, the pack horses were hard to handle that morning. Storm wished he could have coaxed Surra to serve as an additional drover, but the big cat had disappeared on her own early in the rain and the Terran knew she was going to hole up somewhere out of the wet. Since he had given her no definite orders she would follow her own instincts. He had not sighted Baku since dawn.
Nearly all the horses had scrambled up a steeper rise when the Terran heard Mac shout excitedly. Hoping that the pack master had discovered a good stretch of higher territory, Storm whacked at the last horse in line, his own mare.
Then the world came apart about him. Storm had been under fire on the training range, he had witnessed—from a distance—the obliteration bombing of an enemy stronghold. But this was no man-made fury—it was the raw sword of nature herself striking unleashed.
The rain, now heavier than before, became a smothering blanket under a black sky. He could not even see Rain’s ears, head, plastered mane. The gush of water took away his breath, beat about his body.
Lightning—purple fire in jagged spears—thunder claps that left one deafened, battered—Storm’s horse reared, fought for freedom, wild with fear. Then the stallion ran through a wall of water and his rider could only cling blindly to his seat, ly
ing along the horse’s neck gasping.
They were still in the dark but the rain no longer beat on them, only the fury of its rushing filled the world with sound. Lightning again tore at the sky. And above him, in that flash, Storm saw an overhang of earth break loose and fall. Half dazed, he jumped, stumbled to his knees, and went down, as mud cascaded on him, pressing him flat under its weight until he lost consciousness.
It was dark when the Terran opened his eyes and tried feebly to move—dark with an absence of all light that was as frightening as the silence that now walled him in. But, half-conscious as he was, Storm struggled for freedom. There was a break in the cover over him, and he levered up the forepart of his body.
None of his bones appeared to be broken. He hurt all over, but he could move arms and legs, wriggled the rest of him out of the mass of soil that had imprisoned him. Storm tried to remember just what had happened in those last moments before the world caved in.
He called—to be answered by a plaintive whinny, shrill and frightened. Storm called again through the darkness in soft-voiced reassurance, using the speech of the horse tamer, which he had used with Rain since the first moment he had laid hands on the stallion. And, as he spoke, he dug at the earth still encasing his legs, until he could stand up.
The Terran explored about him with outstretched arms—until he remembered the torch at his belt. Snapping its button, Storm aimed the beam straight up. The answering light was faint, oddly paled. He stood by a rock wall—and, as the beam swept down and away from that solid surface, it was swallowed up in a pocket of darkness that might mark the interior of a cave of some expanse. But caught in the torch’s beam was Rain, white foam roping his jaws, his eyes rolling wildly.
Storm moved to run his hand along the sweating arch of the horse’s neck, conscious now of the smell of this place. Just as they had found it in the entrance tunnel of the valley, so here the air was stale, musty. As he continued to breathe it the Terran felt a growing sickness and an impulse to turn and batter his way out of this cave, or pocket, or whatever it was, that held them. He fought for self-control.
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