Beast Master's Planet: Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder Read online

  Hosteen so expected a battle at the site of the LB that he was startled when they did not pause there. The Drummer tapped, blew a puff of the prayer fluff in the direction of the craft, but they did not approach it.

  No—the mountain was still waiting. And again in Hosteen’s imagination it took on the semblance of a slightly somnolent yet watchful animal—yet an animal with a form of intelligence.

  Up again—and now the slope was steeper, rougher, so that Hosteen and Logan were hauled and dragged by their guards’ ropes, struggling to keep their feet at times. Once Hosteen went to his knees and refused to respond to the tugging, striving to combine his need for a breathing spell with the chance for a look about.

  Since they had left the LB, they had crossed several of the burned furrows, but these were of an earlier date, since they did not smoke. And now more and more rocky outcrops broke through the vegetation carpeting the slopes. The brush was left behind, and they were surrounded by rock. There was a narrow cleft where they felt their way up a niche stair, the prisoners scraped along painfully by their guards.

  The cleft brought them to a ledge almost wide enough to be termed a small plateau. In the rock of the cliff that backed it was a dark opening. But this was not their goal, for the party struck eastward to the right, following the width of ledge around a gentle curve Hosteen judged to be the base of the mountain’s dome crest, though that must still climb some hundreds of feet above.

  Daylight was coming, and he hoped the strange immunity that protected the village and the valley held here, too—that they need not fear the rising of the sun. Or was that to furnish the manner of their ending, death by exposure to the fury of its rays on a sacred mountain?

  Already they were out of sight of the cave opening, and here the ledge extended from curving cliff wall to an edge that overhung a frightening drop to unguessed depths. The smooth path under his boots reminded Hosteen of another mountain road that had appeared to run from nowhere in the heights at the mountain of the Garden. That had been a relic of the Sealed Cave civilization, and on it Hosteen had nearly met death in the person of the Xik aper, the last of his breed on Arzor.

  The ledge road ended as if sheared off by giant knife stroke. To their left was the circle of another doorway into the cliff wall—but this was sealed by what appeared a smooth slate of rock. The Drummer sounded his ritual signal—perhaps in salute to whatever power he deemed lurked behind that barrier.

  And when the echo of that died away, the Chief of the village took the captives’ arms belts from the guard. With deliberation he broke the blades of their long hunting knives and showed his familiarity with the use of stunners by crushing their barrels with a rock ax the Drummer produced. Having destroyed the outlanders’ weapons, he whistled, and two of the guards went into action.

  Planting palms flat against the surface of the closed door, they exerted full strength, straining muscles on arms and shoulders.

  The barrier gave, split vertically apart. Into that opening the Chief tossed the ruined weapons, the belts of the prisoners. And then the two captives were thrust forward with such force that they hurtled helplessly into a thick dark against which the light of day at their backs made little impression.

  CHAPTER TEN

  H

  osteen brought up against an unseen wall with force enough to bruise flesh, to drive breath out of his body in a gasping grunt. He was on his knees, trying to regain both breath and balance when Logan crashed into him, and they both went to the rock surface under them. There was absolute darkness now. The Norbies must have resealed the cave.

  The Terran knew of old that particular type of airlessness, that dead feeling—it was found in the passages of the Sealed Caves, long closed to man, perhaps always intended to be closed to his species. This was certainly a relic of the Sealed Cave civilization.

  Breathing shallowly, he lay still and tried to think.

  “One of the old caves,” Logan broke silence first. “It smells like one anyway—”

  “Yes.”

  “Any chance of getting loose?”

  Hosteen, moving his arms, was rewarded by a slight give of his bonds.

  “Might be.” He continued his efforts.

  “Ha!” That was an exclamation of triumph from Logan. “That does it! Here—where are you?”

  A hand, moving through the thick blanket of no light, clutched at Hosteen’s shoulder and moved swiftly down to the coils of rope about him.

  “They weren’t very clever with their knots.” Logan’s fingers were now busy behind Hosteen’s back.

  “I don’t think”—the Terran sat up, massaged his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand—“we were meant to stay tied or they would have left the nets on us. Now—let’s just see—”

  He had no idea how big the cave was or how far they were from the outer door. Nor was he too sure in which direction that door lay. The odd quality of this dark and the lifeless feel of the air did weird things to alter a man’s sense of direction—even, Hosteen suspected, influenced his clarity of thought. He stood for a long second or two, trying to orientate himself before he moved in a shuffle, half crouched, to sweep the floor with one hand, while the other was out before him as insurance against coming up short against another wall.

  “Stay right where you are,” he ordered Logan.

  “What’s the game?”

  “They threw our belts in after us, broke our weapons, but I’ve an atom torch on that belt. And they didn’t damage that, at least not while I was watching—”

  Sweep—sweep—finger tips scraping on stone, nails gritting—then the smoothness of hide worked into leather! The Terran squatted, drew his find to him, knew by touch it was Logan’s, and looped the belt around his shoulder for safe keeping.

  “Got yours,” he reported. “Mine can’t be too far away.”

  Once more sweep—sweep. His fingers were growing tender. Then they rapped against an object, and there was a metallic sound. He was holding a ruined stunner. Only a few inches beyond that—his belt!

  Hosteen slipped it hurriedly through his hands, locating radar compass, a pouch of sustenance tablets, the small emergency medical kit, to find in the last loop next to the empty knife sheath the pencil-slim eight-inch tube he was looking for. He pushed its wide fan button and blinked at a blinding answer of light.

  “Whew!” Logan’s exclamation was tinged with awe.

  They were in a cave right enough, and the interior walls and roof had been coated with that same dull black substance they had seen in the passages to the caverns of the gardens, the building material of the unknown star travelers.

  In a tangle by the door, now closed so that even the seam of its opening was invisible, were objects that certainly did not date back to the period of the Sealed Caves. Hosteen went to examine the exhibits. Their own broken bladed hunting knives and Logan’s smashed stunner lay there, but there were other things—another stunner, another belt, this one heavily weighted with a third again as much equipment as the one he had worn into the Peaks.

  Hosteen picked that out of the dust.

  “Widders!” He got to his feet and held up the torch so its glow covered as much of the cave as possible. But there was no sign of the civ—if he had preceded them into captivity here.

  “Maybe there’s another passage here—” Logan drew his half-brother’s attention to a jutting of wall at the left where a shadow might mask an opening. And it did—there was a dark hole there.

  Logan gathered up the rope of their bonds and coiled it belt-wise about his waist. They had no weapons—or did they? Hosteen hefted the belt that had belonged to Widders. Knife and stunner were gone from their sheaths, but he remembered the off-world weapon that had subdued them when the civ had started on his mad quest into the Blue. And there was a chance some similar surprise might be part of this equipment.

  “Do we go?” Logan stood at the mouth of the tunnel.

  Hosteen had located a pouch envelope on Widders’ belt. He
shook from it into his hand a ball an inch and a half in diameter, with a small knob projecting from its smooth surface. It had the appearance of a small antiperso grenade. He looked from it to the sealed door in speculation. A full-sized antiperso grenade was a key to unlock a piece of field armor, planted in the right way at the right time, and Hosteen had planted them so. What effect would a grenade one third the regular size have on the cave door?

  “Find somethin’ interestin’?” Logan asked.

  “Might just be.” Hosteen outlined in a terse sentence or two what he thought he held and its uses.

  “Get the door down with that?”

  Hosteen shrugged. “I don’t know—might be chancy. We don’t know the properties of this alien cave-sealing material. Remember what happened that other time?”

  Months before, the back lash of an Xik weapon used miles away had reacted violently on the alien coating of just such a cave, locking them into what, except for chance, might have been a living tomb. They had escaped then, but one could not depend on personal “medicine” too long or too hard.

  “I say, try the back door first.” Logan indicated the passage.

  And that made good sense. Widders was not in the cave, and if he had been a prisoner here, he might have taken that way before them. There had been many indications that the Unknowns had been fond of under-mountain ways and were adept at boring them.

  They sorted over the equipment, dividing up the grenades, ration tablets, supplies. Water—they had no water save that in the canteens, but at least they were not exposed to the baking sun.

  No passage ran beyond that wall. They found instead a steeply sloping, downward ramp where there was no dust to cushion the black flooring. They advanced slowly. Hosteen ahead, the torch in one hand, a sweat-sticky grenade in the other.

  The Terran heard Logan sniff as one might scent-danger.

  “Water—somewhere ahead.”

  For a moment Hosteen’s imagination painted for him the picture of another pocket paradise like the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens. But where there had been the aromatic odors of clean and spicy things to tantalize them then, here was a dank breath not only of dampness but also of other and even less pleasant smells.

  Along the walls the torch picked up beads of moisture, which gave black prismatic flickers of color. Logan ran his finger along to wipe out a cluster, then rubbed it vigorously on the edge of his yoris-hide-corselet with an exclamation of disgust.

  “Slime!” He held the finger to his nose. “Stinks, too. I’d say we might be on our way straight down into a drain—”

  The drops on the wall coalesced into oily runlets, and the nephritic odor grew stronger. Yet the air was not still. There was a draft rising, bringing with it a fog of corruption.

  All the way down they had seen no indication that anyone had come before them. But now they reached a point where there was a huge blotch across the slope of the wall, where the runlets had been smeared together, through which new trickles were now cutting paths. The damp had prevented the drying of the splotch.

  “That wasn’t done too long ago,” Logan observed. He put out his own hand, though he did not touch finger to the wall, to show that the top of the smear was at shoulder height. “Someone or something could have fallen and slipped down there—”

  Hosteen swung the torch closer to floor level. Logan’s deduction was borne out by still undried marks.

  “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 we
irdly 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.”