9

Fanyi caught the head, first of Kai, and then Kayi, holding them between her palms as she gazed into the eyes of each fisher in turn. Then she spoke:

"They have found no sign of others here. In this much, fortune continues to favor us."

Perhaps fortune favored them, Sander decided somewhat grimly, yet he was still uneasily aware that in this broken land a whole Mob might move silently and unseen. There was no reason to relax their watch.

Again they shared out sentry duty for the night. He sat in the early morning hours, feeding the fire now and then. Rhin watched beside him as he listened to the sound of the river below and to noises out of the dark.

The attack came suddenly—between one breath and the next—not springing from the shadows, but somehow within his own mind. Sander could not even cry out against that invasion, and he had no defense to raise. Instead he felt as if he stood in another place, the features of which were veiled from him, even as he could not see the one—or thing—that had summoned him, overbearing his will as easily as a man might overbear in strength a child.

This was a sensation he could not find words out of past experience to describe. His very thoughts were seized upon ruthlessly, to be sifted and drained of what the other wished to learn. Sander had confused mental impressions of scenes—broken buildings, movement in and among those. Yet when he fought to see clearly any part of that, all faded, dissolved, changed.

Then there was only the fire with the night beyond. Yet Rhin's head was up, the koyot's eyes blazing with reflection from the flames. Beside him the fishers had reared, all turned to face Sander. Alone of their party, the girl still lay quietly asleep.

Sander heard Rhin growl softly, deep in his throat. A light hiss came from at least one of the fishers. The smith raised his hands feebly to rub his forehead, feeling weak and frightened. No hint that such could happen to any man had ever come to his people, been hinted at by a Rememberer. He had been in two minds over Fanyi's claim of unseen, intangible power—was this what she had meant by "seeking thought?" Who had so sought him and for what purpose? Sander felt violated by that invasion of his mind.

Kai hissed, baring teeth in Sander's direction. The smith flinched from the beast's open enmity. Rhin—Sander glanced quickly to the koyot. There still came that low growl from the animal. Yet, when Sander's eyes met Rhin's squarely, the sound died. The smith, who had never tried to communicate with the koyot after the same fashion Fanyi used with her fishers, had now an impression that Rhin had detected the mental invasion but now accepted that Sander was again himself.

The smith longed to shake Fanyi awake, to demand of her what could have caused this attack that was certainly of some Shaman's brewing and not of normal man. As his first fright and dismay faded, he knew a rising anger. No one must know that he had been so used. He sensed there had been contempt in that exploration of his thoughts, that he was deemed to count for little in the estimation of whoever had netted him for a moment or two with that invisible mind control. No, he would not ask her.

Instead, Sander began to rummage in his smith's bag. As he did so, he repeated mentally one of the secret working chants. Dimly he recalled something his father had once commented upon. There were supposed to be places from the Before Time where strange influences could seize upon a man, bend him to an unknown service. But there was an answer to such, a defense that was part of a smith's own secrets.

Sander's fingers closed upon some of those lengths of wire he had ripped loose in the old ship. Measuring them, he began to wind the strips into a braid as tight as he could pull them. Then he fitted the loop around his own head, so that a portion of it crossed his forehead directly above his eyes. That done he pulled it free once more to weave the ends and make it firm.

Iron—cold iron—had a meaning reaching from the Before Times. It could be a defense when worked in certain ways. He had never had reason to test that belief, though many of the Mob wore amulets of cold iron. Some he had fashioned himself according to their desires. Then he had secretly thought it a baseless superstition, only in favor because having such toys about them gave men a feeling of security within their own minds.

Now—now he could accept the idea that there were enemies—or an enemy—here who were in some way to be more greatly feared than monster, White One, or jealous Trader.

Having finished his crude diadem of rusty metal, Sander set about weaving some smaller bits into a complicated knot that he strung on the thong of hide. This for Rhin. He did not know whether the koyot might be influenced by the same invasion that had shaken him, but what precaution he could take, he would.

There remained Fanyi and the fishers. The animals, Sander believed, might not let him near them. They were an aloof pair, tolerating man and koyot only because of the urging of Fanyi. While the girl—she had seemed excited, even pleased when she had caught a suggestion of that "seeking thought," making it clear she welcomed contact with any who could use it. He supposed that was the result of her Shaman training. But if such contacts were accepted as normal and right by the Shamans—! If he had his way, he would leave her at this moment, strike out into the dark.

Outrage and fear pulled him strongly. However, such emotions he would not yield to. No, they would continue to travel together until—until Fanyi might give him reason to believe that she was far more akin to that—that seeker—than she was to him and his kind.

The metal pressed harshly against the skin of his forehead. Sander still repeated mentally the words of power that must be said at the fashioning of any tool or weapon. Now he fed the fire again. The fishers settled quietly once more beside Fanyi. Whatever influence had invaded their camp to strike at him must have withdrawn.

Sander lashed shut his smith's bag, stowed it with his gear. He could see the dawn light slowly creeping up the sky across the cliffs that banded the river, and he hoped this day's journey would bring them to the end of the city, or, if not that, to the goal Fanyi sought. He had begun to dislike heartily this maze of mounds and wreckage. If earth-bound spirits did exist, then surely uncounted dead walked here. And since it was unlikely that any man had done them honor at their burial, they would be answerable to no restraints.

Sander shied away from such thoughts. He did not believe in any earth-bound part of the dead. And he would not now be reduced to a child who fears the dark because his imagination peoples it with monsters. No—no—and no!

Fanyi stirred, opened her eyes slowly. Her expression, Sander noted with a return of uneasiness, was much like that she wore when she fondled the pendant at intervals and seemed to retreat from the outer world.

"It is there—he is there—" Her voice trailed away. She blinked as if throwing off the last remnants of a vivid dream. Then, as she sat up, her face was alight with an eagerness he had never seen before. The excitement she had shown when she had caught the "seeking thought" was but a pale illusion compared to this.

"Sander—it is there! Do you hear me?" She caught at his arm, shook him with a fierce energy. "I have had a foreseeing!" Her face was still alight with excitement and joy. "We shall come to it soon—the secret place. And there will be someone there, someone important."

"Who?" he asked flatly.

A small shadow of bewilderment crossed her face, driving out the joy.

"I—do—not—remember. But—this was a true foreseeing. We shall find what we seek!"

Her enthusiasm daunted him. Had she had reservations all these days behind the confidence she seemed to draw from her pendant? Was it that she truly had not been sure that it would lead her—them—anywhere? He guessed so, but said nothing. It was plain that she now was very sure indeed of success.

"What," she asked, "is that you are wearing?" Her gaze was fastened on the band he had braided. "It is made of metal wire. Why did you make it? Why do you wear it?"

"That is my own secret," Sander answered stolidly. He had no intention of letting her know what had happened. "A smith's secret."

She accepted that. Nor did she question it when he fastened about Rhin's throat the other bit of twisted metal, though he knew she was watching him closely.

The fishers flowed away with their usual speed. And after eating, Sander reloaded the koyot, making fast the back burden in such a way that not more than two jerks of a single cord could loosen it. If they were to face danger, Rhin was not to be handicapped at the onset of any fight.

Fanyi led out, her eyes ever seeking the pendant. The mounds of rubble were thinning, with more space between them to give room to a stronger growth of first brush and then trees, the latter thickening in girth the farther they went. They continued to parallel the river bank and gradually the land sank, so that the cliffs which hung above the water were no longer so high.

Not long after leaving camp they came into a wide, open stretch rutted with the marks of carts. Rhin lowered his nose to sniff, but he did not growl. To Sander's trail-wise eyes, these all looked old, made some time ago. But there were so many of them, crossing and recrossing, that it was plain in the past there had been a great deal of traffic in and out of the city. Also the deep impression of most ruts hinted at heavy loads.

He caught no sign of any koyot pad tracks mixed up with the cut of cart wheels. Rather there were others—those of the famous greathounds of the Traders. For the first time since they had left their night camp, Sander broke the silence, though he believed Fanyi had been so intent on her own thoughts, perhaps mulling over the dream she termed a "foreseeing," that she had hardly been aware he and Rhin were with her.

"If your sign points us in this way," he observed, "we may not be the only ones to find your storage place. The Traders, or whoever has combed this city, seem to have passed here in force."

The girl shook her head. "I do not believe that any Trader knows of what we seek. It is not metal, the work of Before Men's hands, rather it is work of their minds. I know of no Trader who would concern himself with such."

"Do you know of all the Trader clans?" he countered. "We, on the plains, have contact with four bands who come regularly, nearly thirty men in all. We have never seen their women. How many came to Padford?"

"I can remember twenty," she answered promptly. "And my father—but he was no Trader. There may be others like him, seekers of knowledge."

"Yet he traveled with the Traders," Sander pressed. "And it is known that that is not their way, to allow any not of their kin to follow their trails."

"My mother said that those who brought him treated him oddly, almost as if they feared him in some manner. Yet he was not a man who carried his weapons loosed or who quarreled easily. She said she was sure that the Trader chief was pleased when they left and my father chose to remain behind for the winter. Yet he said he would go with them when they came again, for he thought to travel even further to the south to learn what lay there. And they did not refuse him when he spoke."

Sander grew a little tired of this mysterious father who had been laid in his grave place before even Fanyi was born. He seemed to have made such an impression on the Shaman mother who had taken him to her house that she treated him with a reverence and awe that was not usual among her sex.

The women of the Mob chose their mates. Yes, and discarded them if they were not satisfied with their bargains. His father had been chosen twice. But the latter time he had declined the proposal, for he already had a son to learn his mysteries. And no smith wanted to divide his power when the days came that his own arm was no longer strong enough to swing the greatest hammer. Sander had been raised mainly in a household of men: his father, his uncle, who had so sharp a tongue and narrow a mind that no woman had ever looked upon him with favor, himself who was apprentice.

Any tenthold was eager to supply a smith with well-worked clothing, a portion of baked meal cakes, blankets woven from the wool of the herds, in exchange for what his father could fashion in return. Those of their own tent had never gone empty of belly or cold of body, even though no woman's loom or cooking pots rode in their travel wagon.

But for the most part a man owned only his weapon and his tools, all else belonged to a woman. It was she who fitted out her daughter, when the maid came to choose, and counseled her to choose wisely and with an eye for the future, mainly among the older men and not the youths whose skills were yet unproven.

Was this custom also held among Fanyi's people? If that were true, and Sander expected it was, then the women of Padford could well have drawn aside from a stranger such as her father, seeing no security in such a union that was bound to be a short one. However, their Shaman had welcomed him, spoke of him with unusual respect, nursed him until his death. The unknown traveler must indeed have had some force of character to win such a response.

"It is not usual," Fanyi continued, "for a Shaman to wed. Her powers should not be limited by showing favor to any one man. Yet it is also necessary that she breed a daughter to follow her in her craft. Therefore, when my mother chose a far traveler, the village was content. Only she found him to be much more than she supposed. And when he died, her mourning was not of ceremony only but from the heart."

"You say"—Sander felt a little uncomfortable at that note in his companion's voice, as if he had walked into the private portion of a tent without being so urged by its owner—"that a Shaman must bear a daughter. But what if there comes a son—?"

Fanyi laughed. "That will never happen, smith. We have our own secrets and in some things we can even outwill the ways of nature. The first of my clan, she who survived the Dark Times, had a learning new even then. And this she gave to her daughter, and from daughter to daughter that was passed. We do not breed sons, only daughters—and only one to each generation. For that is our will—though it can be altered if we are minded, only we are not. For there is no place for a boy-child in a Shaman's house."

As they were journeying, the land had opened out before them. The outline of an abrupt rise ahead showed such sharp pinnacles, such knife-edged clefts as Sander had never sighted before. Here the river rushed faster, with a roar. They rounded a point to see before them a mighty falls, a mist half-veiling the falling water, spinning out in filmy threads to hide the full length of that downpour.

On the other side of the river the land lay more level, those nodules of saw-edged rock less discernible. Sander halted in some dismay as he sighted plainly what lay ahead. Some great force had twisted and rent this land. Flows of lava had caught blocks of stone, tangles of warped metal, now rusted and eroded. The landscape was such a gigantic mixture of things made by man held captive by nature, frozen into what seemed an impenetrable barrier, that it daunted them.

Yet the ruts of the cart tracks headed directly forward into a country they would have sworn no wheel could cross. Fanyi stared at that jumbled barrier across the land.

"A wave—a wave that swept in from the sea," she murmured. "A wave as high as a mountain. A wave that carried with it most of the city—a wave that broke here and so lost its hold upon that which was heaviest. Such a wave as it is said carried the ship of my people inland. Now I marvel that they survived—unless their wave was smaller."

"It does not matter how this was made." Sander came directly to the point. "We are concerned with finding a way through, if your guide still tells us that must be done."

She studied the pendant and then nodded. "The indicated path still lies straight before us. But these"—she pointed to the wagon ruts—"say that others must have found a road, one large enough to take their carts."

Sander did not point out that traveling such a well-marked path might well be inviting ambush. For the moment he could see no other chance of penetrating that unbelievable mass ahead.

"Look!" Fanyi pointed. "A building!"

For a moment he was startled by what she pointed out. Then he saw the wreckage was not a complete building, merely blocks still perhaps connected by the metal sinews the Before People used to tie together their masses of stone; but enough of those blocks were intact to make a shell of sorts hard-rammed against a pinnacle.

The hugeness of the disaster that had left its own monument here was overpowering. He had accepted all his life the tales of the Dark Times, of the titanic forces that had overpowered the Before World; he had seen the rubble of tumbled cities, the sea-desert. But not until he stood before this breath-taking crumbled mass that been thrown by the force of a raging sea upon tormented and shaken earth, there to be rooted after the water's retreat, had it even been directly brought home to him what fury had been loose upon his kind and their world. As Fanyi had said, it was hard to believe that any man could have escaped what had struck in the Dark Time. Even the chants of the Rememberers did not reveal the deep despair of those who must have fled, only to be licked away by water or engulfed when quakes opened the very land under their feet.

Fanyi had covered her face with her hands.

"It is—" She could not find words, he realized. Any more than he could summon them at this moment.

He put his arm about her shaking shoulders, drew her against him, two small humans standing before the death sign of a world.

At length Sander, with difficulty, wrenched his gaze away from that incredible wall.

"Do not look at it," he told her. "Watch the ruts; maybe you are right and those will guide us through."

Resolutely, he stared down at the rough marks on the ground. Here and there were bared lumps of stone over which the wheels must have grated. The way turned farther from the cliff edge, away from the falls. Those, too, Sander would not look upon. There was a kind of horrible fascination about the down-dash of that water, as if a man observing it too closely might be led to leap, following the flow. The thunderous sound beat louder and louder in their ears as they half stumbled, half fled along the path.

Sander noted that Rhin was now running, nose to the ground, as if on a hunting trail. The koyot did not even appear to notice the horrible mountain range of debris. Of course, the smith understood, to Rhin's mind, intelligent as the animal was, it would have no meaning. Only to man who had lost so much would the sight deliver a hard blow out of the past.

Now the wagon track narrowed. They drew opposite the falls, and the sound was such they could not have heard each other, even if they had tried to exchange some form of encouragement. There was a single set of tracks and those ran perilously close to the drop. Sander edged his back to the wall of the heights, facing out, drawing Fanyi with him. Their clothing, hair and faces, were wet with spray as they moved along crabwise, as far back from the edge as they could push. Rhin had bounded ahead, but they moved by slow degrees. Sander felt giddy, he fought a desire to leave that mass of stone and tangled debris behind him, to advance to the water side. If he did that, he believed, he would be lost.

Fanyi with the fingers of one hand gripped his furred overjacket so tightly her knuckles were bleached pale. In her other hand she had palmed the pendant, and her lips moved as if she recited some Shaman's words of power.

Their journey seemed to last forever. Twice they dropped to their bellies and crawled in order to continue to hug the side wall, for masses of stone or rusty, broken metal projected outward. Yet the wagon ruts continued, and Sander knew a vast respect for those who had dared to drive along this way, or else the others had done this so often that the first surge of terror in the face of the overwhelming disaster of mankind had been long since forgotten.

To the right, now that they were at last past the falls, there spread a lake, dotted with islands of rock and a reef or two of long-cooled lava. On the far side of the lake, which they could only just sight, was an opening that must lead to another river, as if the lake had two outlets.

A second wall of debris began to rise, this time between them and the lake. Here Sander saw evidence that the road had been opened partly by man's labor, using tools that had left marks on stone blocks, or cut away masses of metal. The space so cleared was hardly wider than a wagon, a small wagon, while the labor it must have cost could only make Sander believe there must lie at the end of this trail some rich reward equal to such effort. Having passed the falls, Sander began to trot, Fanyi running lightly on beside him. He sweated as he went, his heart pounding as he refused to look any higher than the surface of the very rough way before them. It began to slope downward.

They had passed beyond that portion where the road had been cut by man. The way opened out again. Ahead they could see that this slope continued down nearly to the level of the lake's water.

On their side of the lake there was no sign of vegetation. This grim and deadly mass supported not even the most stunted bush. But across the lake the yellow and red of trees in fall leaf showed, and a green line along the shore where reeds might be growing.

It was as they dropped down into this lower way that they met Rhin and the fishers. All three animals stood barring their path as if in warning.