Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder (Beastmaster) (39 page)

“And that”—Logan pounced upon one of the damp spots—“was the toe of a boot!”

Again his tracker’s eye was right. Only the toe of an off-world boot could have left that well-defined curve. Widders? Or some survivor from the LB holding up in this mountain maze against the danger of the natives waiting outside?

“He went down—he did not come back—whoever he was,” Logan observed.

“Meaning that he might not have been able to retreat? Well, we either go on or try to break that door down with a grenade. Have any second thoughts on the matter?”

“Go on.” Logan’s answer was prompted. “We have stingers in these.” He tossed a grenade into the air and caught it deftly.

They went on, watching floor and wall for any further traces of the one or ones who had taken that passage before them, but sighted none. Only the damp increased until the air was half-foggy moisture. And where, in the upper regions, that moisture had been chill, here it was increasingly warm, warm and odorous. There was a musky taint, which set Hosteen to sniffing, hinting of life ahead.

The passage was no longer a steep descent; it was beginning to level off. And now the dripping walls supplied a thin stream of water carried in a depression down the center of the floor, flowing ahead. The torch caught the edge of an archway that led out—out where—into what?

As they went through it, Hosteen switched the beam of the torch from a diffused glow into a single spear point of concentrated light. He thought he could see a shadowy point somewhere far to the right, which could be shoreline or wall. But below was a spread of oily water on which patches of floating stuff turned rainbow-hued when the light caught them, fading into dullness as they moved out of its beam once more.

The passage, which had brought them here, ran on out into the water, as a wharf or pier of rock, obviously artificially fashioned. And along its surface at intervals were rings of the same rock standing on end as if waiting for mooring ropes. Mooring ropes—for
what manner of craft? Who had sailed this lake or river and for what purpose?

Together they walked slowly along that wharf—the bare rings, the greasy, ill-smelling flood that washed sluggishly along its side—The Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been alien—alien but not inimical. Here there was a difference. Again Hosteen could not reconcile the minds that had created the gardens and those that had engineered these borings in the mountain of the Blue.

“What kind of ships?” Logan asked suddenly. “Who were they and why did they want ships here? The Gardens—and this place—don’t match.”

“They are not the same,” Hosteen agreed. “Kwii halchinigii ’ant’iihnii—”

“What?”

“I said—this place smells of witchcraft.”

“That is the truth!” Logan commented with feeling. “Where do we go now? Somehow I don’t fancy swimmin’.”

They had reached the end of the wharf and were gazing out over the sluggishly flowing water, trying to catch some landmark in the beam of the torch. But save for those vague shadows far to the right, there was nothing to suggest this place had any boundaries beyond.

It was when Hosteen swung the torch left to pick out a continuation of the wall through which they had come that they sighted a possible exit. A beach of sorts extended along this side of the cavern—several yards of coarse sand and gravel between the foot of the wall and the lapping of the dark water. And along the wall itself were dark shadows, which might or might not contain the openings to further caves or passages. It was more inviting to investigate than the water, for Hosteen agreed with Logan’s comment moments earlier—this was not a place to tempt a swimmer. The very look of that opaque flood suggested unpleasant things lurking below its encrusted surface.

They retreated along the wharf, leaped from it to the fringe of beach. Here and there stones of some size were embedded in the gravel—or were they stones? Hosteen stopped and toed one of them over with his boot. The black eye holes of a skull stared back at
him. Curving horns rooted in the bone told him that a Norbie had died here. Some time ago he judged by the condition of the bone.

“In the Name of the Seven Thunders, what’s that?” Logan caught at Hosteen’s arm, dragged the torch forward. And again its gleam picked out details of bleached bone.

But such bone! Hosteen found it hard to picture that great head ever enclosed in flesh. Half buried in the gravel as the skull now was, the angle of that fanged jaw as long as his arm, the huge pits of eye sockets, were like nothing he had ever seen on Arzor or on fifty other planets either.

“Three eyes!” Logan’s voice sounded weirdly over the lisping lap of the water. “It had three eyes!”

He was right. Two eye sockets abnormally far to each side were centered by a third midpoint above the jagged toothed jaw. Three eyes!

On Terra there had been monsters in the far past whose bones had endured out of their own era into the time of humankind, so that man had dug them free of earth and rock and set them up in museums to marvel at. Perhaps this was one of the ancient things that had once dominated Arzor, its kind long since vanished from the planet. Yet Hosteen did not think so. Those three eye sockets were a distortion, alien.

“It must have been a monster!” Logan was down on his knees scraping at the gravel gingerly, as if he did not want to touch the bone with his bare hands. And now Hosteen surveyed the exposed skull narrowly. He went back, picked up the Norbie one by a horn, and brought it to rest beside that three-eyed thing, comparing one to the other.

“What’s the matter?” Logan wanted to know.

“Shil hazheen—”

Logan looked at him in some exasperation. “Talk so a fella can understand, won’t you?”

“I am confused,” Hosteen obligingly translated. “This is impossible.”

“What is?”

“This skull”—Hosteen pointed to the Norbie—“is crumbling
away from age, perhaps from damp. Yet it is of a native, a type of Arzoran life that exists today. Compare it with this other one. The three-eye is no different; they could be of the same age—”

“What are you tryin’ to say?”

Hosteen spoke of the early giant reptiles on Terra, of the chance that this might have been a relic of pre-intelligent life on Arzor.

“Only it doesn’t look old enough—that’s what you mean? Well, couldn’t the Norbie have been old, too?”

“That might be so—to each planet its own history. Only on Terra such monsters had vanished long before the first primitive man had evolved. And surely Norbie legends would mention these if they had shared the same world at the same time.”

“The plains people have always been afraid of the Blue.”

“But not for any reason such as monsters, for they do talk of those giant killer birds and every other known natural menace.”

“Which means—?”

“That if these things were alive only a short time ago, historically speaking, say a century or so in the past, they might have been confined to underground places such as this, known only to victims trapped here.”

“And that some three-eye could be waitin’ right around the next bend now?” Logan got to his feet and brushed sand from his hands. “That isn’t the most cheerful news in the world?”

“I could be wrong.” But Hosteen was not going to relax any vigilance on that count. And how much advantage would an antiperso grenade give him over sudden death watching through three eyes?

They went on down the beach at a slower pace, using the torch on every dark spot before them, alert to any sound. Yet the lap of the water, the crunch of their boots on the coarse gravel was all they heard.

So far none of those shadows had concealed any further openings. But they were well away from the wharf when Logan again caught at Hosteen’s touch hand, directing the beam higher on the wall.

“Somethin’ moved—up there!”

Out into the path of the light flew a winged creature uttering a small, mewling cry. The light brought into vivid life yellow wings banded with white.

“Feefraw!” Logan named one of the common berry-feeding birds to be found along any mountainside. “But what is it doing in here?”

“It could be showing us a way out.” Hosteen aimed his light straight for the spot from which the bird had come. There was an opening deeper than any of the shallow crevices they had discovered so far. The feefraw must have gotten into the mountain somewhere, perhaps down this very passage.

The bird circled around in the path of the beam, and now, as if guided by the light, went back to the hole above, where it settled down on the edge, still mewling mournfully.

“Back door?” Logan suggested.

“No harm in trying it.”

An advantage of that hole was that it certainly did not look large enough to accommodate the bulk of any creature with a skull as big as the one they had found. One could travel that road without fearing a monster lurking behind every rock ahead. Hosteen tucked the torch into the front of his shirt and began to climb toward that promising niche.

T

If this was a passage, it was not a smoothed, coated one, made ready for use by the Unknowns. Here there was no black coating on the walls, only the rough purple-red of the native stone. But there was a way before them, and as they started, the feefraw cried and fluttered along behind as if drawn by the torch light.

Unhappily the way did not slope upward but ran straight, in some places so narrow that they had to turn sidewise and scrape through between jutting points of rock. But the air was a moving current, and it lacked the strange quality of that in the alien ways.

Logan sniffed again. “Not too good.”

It was back, the musky taint that had been strong before they came out into the cavern of the river. Musky taint, and damp—yet Hosteen was sure they had not circled back. They could not have returned to the beach beyond the wharf.

The feefraw had continued to flutter behind. Now its mewling became a mournful wail, and it flew with blind recklessness between the two men and vanished ahead down the passage. Hosteen pushed the pace as they came out into a gray twilight. He snapped off the torch, advanced warily, and looked down onto a scene so weird that for a moment he could almost believe he was caught in a dream nightmare.

They were perched in a rounded pocket in the wall of another cavern—but a cavern with such dimensions that perhaps only an aerial survey could chart it. Here, too, was water—streams, ponds,
even a small lake. But the water was housed between walls. The floor of the cavern as far as he could see in the grayish light, was a giant game board. Walled squares enclosed a pond and a small scrap of surrounding land, or land through which a stream wandered. For what purpose? There were no signs of cultivated vegetation such as a farm field might show.

“Pens.” Logan’s inspiration clicked from possibility to probability.

Those geometrically correct enclosures could be pens—like the home corrals of a holding in the plains. But pens to confine what—and why?

They squatted together trying to note any sign of movement in the nearest enclosures. The vegetation there was coarse, reedy stuff, as pallidly gray as the light, or low-growing plants with thick, unwholesome-looking fleshy leaves. The whole scene was repellent, not enticing as the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been.

“This has been here a long time,” Logan observed. “Look at that wall there—”

Hosteen sighted on the section Logan indicated. The walls had collapsed, giving access to two other enclosures. Yes, and beyond was another tumbled wall. The pens, if pens they had been, were no longer separated. He stood up and unhooked the distance lenses from his belt. The light was poor, but perhaps he could see what lay beyond their immediate vicinity.

He swept the glasses slowly across the territory from right to left. Pens, water, growing stuff, the same as those that lay below them. There was a difference in the type of vegetation in several places, he thought. And one or two of the enclosures were bare and desertlike, either by design or the failure of the odd “crop” once grown there.

The walls were not the only evidence of once purposeful control, Hosteen discovered, as his distance lenses caught a shadowy pile at the far left. It was a building of some sort, he believed, and said as much to Logan. The other, taking the lenses in turn, confirmed his guess.

“Head for that?” he wanted to know.

It was a logical goal. At the same time, surveying those “pens,” Hosteen was aware of a strange reluctance to venture down into the walled squares and oblongs, to force a way through the sickly and
sinister-looking growth they held. And Logan put the same squeamishness into words.

“Don’t like to trail through that somehow—”

Hosteen took back the glasses and studied the distant building. The murky dusk of the cavern’s atmosphere made it somehow unsubstantial when one attempted to pin down a definite line of wall or a roof or even the approximate size of the structure. This was like trying to see clearly an object that lay beyond a misty, water-splashed window. And perhaps that was part of the trouble—the dank air here was not far removed from fog.

There was certainly no sign of any movement about the place, just as there was none in the pens, save the ripple of some wandering stream. Hosteen did not believe that intelligence lingered here, though perhaps other life might. And the building might not only explain the purpose of the cavern but also show them some form of escape. Those who had built this place had surely had another mode of entrance than the narrow, ragged rock fault that had led the settlers in.

“We’ll try to reach that.” When he voiced those words, Hosteen was surprised at his own dubious tone.

Logan laughed. “Devil-devil country,” he commented. “I’d like it better takin’ this one with some of our boys backin’ our play. Let’s hope our long-toothed, three-eyed whatsit isn’t sittin’ down there easy-like just waitin’ for supper to walk within grabbin’ range, and me without even a knife to do any protestin’ about bein’ the main course. Waitin’ never made a thing easier though. Shall we blast off for orbit?”