A shallow bowl of valley stretched on down and away from where they had paused. And the reaching moonlight made a shimmering maze of glinting, prismatic light there. Naill shielded his eyes with his good hand. Ashla's fingers closed on his arm.
"The White Forest. . . ." Her voice was emotionless, drained, and not, he thought, by the fatigue of their journey over the broken plain of the waste.
Since that tractor beam generator had circled them back at the edge of this forbidden territory, they had marched straight on northward into the unknown, their space-suited captor in the lead, the pack of wytes padding at a distance but covering the rear—a weird assortment of travelers.
The beam had kept them docile enough, made them move in answer to the projected command of whatever lurked within the suit. And there had been no answer to all their attempts to communicate with that. Was their goal this forest?
For forest it was, if one judged that term applied to growths that arose vertically into the air from grounded roots, spread branches, grouped closely together. But this was a forest of branching, glittering crystals. No leaves rustled here, no color save the rainbow flickers that twinkled and sparkled in the moonlight. It was as if ice had chosen to reproduce trees and had succeeded in part.
The beam pulled them on, downslope, into that place of cold and deadly beauty. Because deadly it was. Ayyar memory in Naill brought fear, the terror known when a man faces something far greater than himself as an enemy—not personally, but to all his species. As early men of the Terran breed had feared the dark and what might walk in that blackness their eyes could not pierce, so did the Iftin-born hold an age-old aversion to stark light and what could dwell comfortably in its glare. But Naill and Ashla had no choice—there was no breaking that invisible pull between them and the space suit stalking forward, towing them as a man might tow a recalcitrant hound.
As they were drawn over the lip, down into that place of white light, the wytes no longer dogged them. Perhaps they, too, found this a place of terror.
Naill's boots crunched on a surface that gave in brittle fashion beneath his weight. He glanced down, saw that there was a trail of broken crystals powdered into sparkling dust. The ponderous footfalls of the suited guard were clearly marked, lying over other tracks—perhaps many of them.
Now there was another sound or sounds—a tinkling, coming from the growths or pillars making up the forest. As they drew closer, Naill could see that those horizontally branching shafts stood tall, not with the overwhelming height of the tree towers of Iftcan, but tall indeed compared to his own inches.
"The White Forest," Ashla repeated. "Tall it grows, straight it stands." Her voice held the queer singing note which Naill had come to associate with Illylle speaking through changeling lips. "But it is not real—it does not live. . . . Therefore—it is not!"
What she meant he did not understand, but oddly enough her denial of what they could both see was a lift to his spirits.
"Built—grown by a will," she continued. "It lives by a will, it will die by a will. But this will cannot make another Iftcan, no matter how it tries."
They had passed under the wide, stiffly held branches of the first "tree," and her words returned as faint, whispering echoes. The chiming tinkle grew stronger, a hiss of answering anger.
Ashla laughed. Her hand lifted to point a slim green finger at the next tree.
"Grow leaves—but you cannot! Nourish life—but you cannot! Shade the traveler—but you cannot! Feed with your fruits—but you cannot! Bend to the storm—but you cannot! Forest which is no true forest—beware the life, the storm, that which you have not . . ." Her voice sank again, and once more her hand reached for and clasped Naill's.
"Why did I say that?" she asked. "If I could only hold the old knowledge in my head as you hold the sword in your hand—then perhaps together we might follow the path of Kymon and—and . . . " She shook her head. "Even the manner of the triumph of Kymon is lost to me now. Only, I tell you, Naill-Ayyar, that had we the old knowledge we could fight. There is a secret that slips through my memory when I would have it forth. . . . Always it is just gone from me. This is a place of Power, but not the Power of Iftcan—and therefore one Power might be ranged against the other, had we only the proper key."
The hissing tinkle of the forest waxed stronger, making an odd rustling which lapped them about. But there was no change in the pace of the suit, drawing them after it in the grip of the ray-hold.
The faint path, which had wound down the slope, now led in a curling curve among the boles of the crystal trees, while the moonlight reflected and re-reflected on glittering nobs and surfaces confused and bewildered. If the lesser light of the moon proved so formidable, what would sunlight make of this mirror-trunked forest?
There was no evidence of any native life. As Ashla had accused, this was a dead place, dead without ever having held life as they knew it.
"Does Illylle remember this?" Naill appealed to the girl by his side.
"A little—far too little."
"Any idea where we may be going?" he persisted.
"No—save that it will be a place where there is peril, for this is the opposite of that which dwells in the Mirror—it balances this against that as a harvest is weighed on the Speaker's scales."
The ground still sloped down. Naill had not been able to judge during their short halt on the rim of the valley how large a territory the crystal structures covered. Perhaps whatever controlled the space-suited sentry, the wytes—the flying thing—lay in the very heart of this land.
Naill's mouth was dry; his ankle ached dully as did his arm. And he knew that Ashla must be as hungry, tired, and thirsty as he was. Food, water, a chance to rest—they needed those badly, might need them more before this journey came to an end.
Above their heads the crystal branches wove a crisscross net shutting out the night sky. They were capped over by an icy cover. Could they some way mark a trail against a possible retreat?
Naill was shocked out of that speculation by Ashla's fingers biting deep into his flesh in a convulsive grip. Startled, he looked around, but her eyes were not for him. Her gaze was fixed on a tree ahead and to the left.
"Look!" The merest whisper directed him.
Naill obeyed. By some trick of the reflecting surfaces there was a mirror of sorts. And pictured on it . . .
At first he thought that greenish figure was himself—or Ashla. Then he knew that at such an angle their own reflection would be impossible. No—that was an Ift, but a stranger! Who? And where?
They were pulled ahead two steps and that shadow image was gone, vanished as if it had never been at all. But they were left with the knowledge that they were not alone in this glittering prison.
If what or whoever walked in the space suit had seen that momentary reflection, there was no hint of it, no pause in the steady pace it set. Almost Naill could persuade himself that he had seen nothing either, but Ashla held to its reality.
"An Ift—one of us," she told him softly. "Another prisoner."
"How can you be sure of that?"
"Because—an Ift in the White Forest could only be a prisoner. To us this place is death!"
Their captor crunched on, and the invisible tow cord on which he held both of them continued its unrelenting pull. The ground now leveled out. They must be at the foot of the valley wall, close to its heart and whatever secret it did hold. Here the crystal trees stood very tall, approaching the lower "towers" of Iftcan in size. And for much of their length their trunks were unbroken by branches. Those bare limbs existed close to their crowns, forming a roof overhead, but leaving much space underneath.
Abruptly the prisoners were at the head of a stairway, much like the stairs that had led up to the mountain-cupped Mirror, but which here reached downward into a second valley or crevice bitten sharply into the earth, as if some giant warrior had struck with a sword blade to divide a furrow in soft and yielding soil. Yet here was no soil . . . the ground itself had a glassy glaze that struck back at their eyes with punishing light.
Naill surveyed that stair with foreboding. The acute angle of descent would tax a strong man. He doubted if the two of them could make it now. For the first time since it had taken them captive and turned to march into this wilderness, the space-suited leader made a move other than just walking. Its metal-mittened hands rose to chest level. It lazily cast from it another beam disk.
Ashla screamed and Naill shouted. They were whipped after that spinning disk, their feet skidding and slipping on the slick surface of that glassy verge, pulled on out into the air above the crevice—with no hope of escape.
But a swift plunge to ghastly oblivion did not follow as Naill expected. Though their feet had left the surface of the ground and they lay extended forward on what he would swear was air alone, they were not falling—they were floating, as a man might in the free fall of a spaceship, descending into the gulf, that was true, but not at a speed to crush them when they met the surface below.
The walls rising about them were cream-white, smooth save for that ribbon of stairway. Naill spun his body around with memories of how it had once been on board ship. However, when he tried to move closer to Ashla, or "swim" toward the wall stairway, he was still under inhibiting control.
Ashla was quiet after her first scream of fear, but Naill could hear her breathing heavily, see that her eyes were wide open, her features setting in a mask of naked terror. She had had no defense against the strangeness of this, no memory of free fall in space to sustain her.
"This—is—free—fall—as—on—a—ship," Naill got out. His outflung hand closed about her wrist, so that their bodies drew a little closer together. "This is controlled—perhaps by the beam disk."
It was where they were going, not how, that mattered now. Below them, all he could see was a murky billowing, darker than the walls, as if some fire steamed or smoked there. Yet there was no warmth in the air. As the first streamers of that murk engulfed them, Naill felt no change in temperature. His initial nightmare faded; they were not being wafted down into a furnace.
The murk grew thicker. He kept his hold on Ashla. Close as they now were, it was difficult to distinguish her features. They were as blind here as they would have been in broad sunlight, if for a different reason. How long had they fallen? Naill had tried to keep count of the steps in that stair but knew that he had missed out long since. And still they continued to float down. Then, breaking through the fog, came more formations of crystal. Unlike the trees of the upper forest, these appeared in clusters of roughly geometric shape—they could be towers, ramparts, the bulk of alien buildings—while through them ran small pulsing lines of light, to no pattern Naill could perceive, save that they formed veins in the surfaces, as the veins carrying the blood to serve his own body.
There was a bright flash of light at their feet while they were still above the surface of the ground. Whatever sustained them vanished in that wink, and they fell in a rush, landing in an angle between two of the now towering crystalline walls.
Naill sat up, pulling Ashla with him. The tinkling bell which had become a part of the world since they had entered the White Forest was silenced. They had ceased to note it consciously while they heard it, but the quiet that followed was so complete it awed them both.
"What is this place?" Ashla held tight to Naill, did not try to move.
"Illylle does not know?" He appealed for some scrap of memory to aid them now.
She shook her head. "Illylle sleeps—or is gone." There was a desolation of loneliness in her answer.
Naill strove to make his own contact. There was no touching any point of Ayyar memory. They were totally on their own, intruders, prisoners in an alien place. But that fact was no reason to sit and await trouble! One could choose a battlefield. And he had an idea that when the beam control had hit ground, it had broken, that they were now free of its bounds.
"Come!" He pulled her to her feet. His left arm in its splints was still fastened to his side as he had had her do before they set out. He would leave it so. At least he could use his right, and the sword he had sheathed after their capture by the ray had been left him by the space-suited enemy. What defense that blade could be against the intelligence responsible for their present plight Naill did not know. But the hilt felt good to his hand when his palm closed about it.
"Where would you go?" Ashla asked.
Her question was a just one. The fog swirled about the crystal walls, leaked through apertures in them. There was no visibility for more than a few yards in any direction. On the other hand every instinct in Naill warred against remaining where the disk had landed them. If the fog was a hindrance it might also be a help, giving them cover. He said as much.
"Which way, then?" Ashla did not protest, but turned as she stood, studying the hardly visible landscape.
"As we fell—that stairway was over there." Naill pointed. "Perhaps we can reach its foot."
"And is there also a chance of finding food"—her tongue ran over her dry, cracking lips—"and water?"
"I do not know."
"There is this, we were brought here carefully. Had our deaths been planned, what need to spare us that fall?" Ashla spoke slowly as if reasoning it out in her own mind. "So—"
"So—somewhere here is food and water? You may be right, but the price of wasting time in a blind search . . ."
"While one lives, there is always a chance. If we climb the stair, we only come out in the forest once again . . . to find that suited thing waiting—or the sun up! And the sun shining in there!"
She did not need to elaborate. To climb into sunlight blazing on those crystal trees would be climbing into sure death for Iftin bodies—even if they could drag their way up that long stairway.
"Which way, then?" Naill asked in turn.
"This is a time when perhaps we must depend upon chance." Ashla stooped to pick up an object she tossed from hand to hand. "This is what brought us here—let us see if, by the whims of chance, it can take us even farther!" She shut her eyes and turned rapidly around before she threw the disk from her.
There was a faint tinkle and they both saw the disk rebound from a wall to lie on the earth in an opening. It was an illogical and reckless way to decide their next move, but Naill accepted it. Together they went through the doorway.
It was a gate rather than a doorway, for the space beyond was as open to the air overhead as that where they had landed. This was a corridor of sorts running straight ahead. Walls of crystal stood higher than their heads, half curtained by the mist.
"Listen!" Perhaps some trick of those crystalline walls carried and magnified that sound. Ashla was already hurrying toward that unmistakable murmur of water.
They sped down that hallway, and the sound of the water grew stronger as they stumbled eagerly along. There was another doorway, and they came through it to a space Naill believed to be truly open, though he could see little of its area. Ashla sprang on.
"This way! Over here!"
What they came upon was no natural river as they had known before. Water flowed there right enough, but it swirled at a race through a trough of crystal.
"Wait—!" A remnant of Ayyar's hunter's caution made Naill call out.
She did not listen to him. Falling to her knees, Ashla plunged both hands into the flood. She might have been testing the validity of what her eyes reported. Then, the water running down her arms, she made a cup of her fingers and drank.
It might be the wildest kind of folly to trust the wholesomeness of what they found there. But Naill's resistance was swept away. He followed her example, and the moisture on his skin, the liquid he splashed one-handed into his dry mouth, smelled no different, tasted no different, from any that he had drunk from forest springs and pools. It was cold, clear—like new life flowing into his whole body.
"You see"—Ashla smiled—"in this much, chance favored us. We have found water."
Naill sat back on his heels, his first craving satisfied. "We may have found more than water." Now his wits were working again, weighing every small point that might operate in their favor.
"How?"
"The water comes—and it goes . . ."
"You mean—follow this stream to its source or its end? Yes, that is good—very good!"
"The water makes a good guide, a better one than any other we have seen here. And we have no means of carrying a drinking supply if we do leave it." He had been forced to abandon the remains of his pack, with its water bottle and food, back by the river.
"Guide and sustainer all in one. But which way do we go—upstream or down?"
Naill could see small difference in choice. Either way could serve their purpose. But before he could say that, Ashla gave a little cry and leaned out over the trough, her hand flashing down into the water, coming up with something in its grasp.
What she held was a fussan pod, empty of seed, but still fresh.
"Upstream! This came from upstream. Where there is one there may be more!"
Naill's hopes arose with hers. He got stiffly to his feet, favoring his aching arm. "Upstream it is—let us go!"