Cold sweat drenched him. "How can they live without air?" he whispered. "And why didn't they see us?"
There was no answer. But they were safe, for the moment. The light, a shifting web of prismatic colors, showed nothing moving.
They stood on a floor of the glassy black rock. Above and on both sides walls curved away into the wild light—sunlight, apparently, splintered by the shell of the planet. Ahead there was a ebon plain, curving to match the curve of the vault.
Falken stared at it bitterly. There was no haven here. No life as he knew it could survive in this pit. Yet there was life, of some mad sort. Another time, they might not escape.
"Better go back," he said wearily, and turned to catch the rope.
The cleft was gone.
Smooth and unbroken, the black wall mocked him. Yet he hadn't moved more than two paces. He smothered a swift stab of fear.
"Look for it," he snapped. "It must be here."
But it wasn't. They searched, and came again together, to stare at each other with eyes already a little mad.
Paul Avery laughed sharply. "There's something here," he said. "Something alive."
Falken snarled, "Of course, you fool! Those creatures...."
"No. Something else. Something laughing at us."
"Shut up, Avery," said Sheila. "We can't go to pieces now."
"And we can't just stand here glaring." Falken looked out through the rainbow dazzle. "We may as well explore. Perhaps there's another way out."
Avery chuckled, without mirth. "And perhaps there isn't. Perhaps there was never a way in. What happened to it, Falken?"
"Control yourself," said Falken silkily, "or I'll rip off your oxygen valve. All right. Let's go."
They went a long way across the plain in the airless, unechoing silence, slipping on glassy rock, dazzled by the wheeling colors.
Then Falken saw the castle.
It loomed quite suddenly—a bulk of squat wings with queer, twisted turrets and straggling windows. Falken scowled. He was sure he hadn't seen it before. Perhaps the light....
They hesitated. Icy moth-wings flittered over Falken's skin. He would have gone around, but black walls seemed to stretch endlessly on either side of the castle.
"We go in," he said, and shuddered at the thought of meeting folk like those who hunted the flaming-eyed colossus.
Blasters ready, they went up flat titanic steps. A hall without doors stretched before them. They went down it.
* * * * *
Falken had a dizzy sense of change. The walls quivered as though with a wash of water over them. And then there were doors opening out of a round hall.
He opened one. There was a round hall beyond, with further doors. He turned back. The hall down which they had come had vanished. There were only doors. Hundreds of them, of odd shapes and sizes, like things imperfectly remembered.
Paul Avery began to laugh.
Falken struck him, hard, over the helmet. He stopped, and Sheila caught Falken's arm, pointing.
Shadows came, rushing and wheeling like monstrous birds. Cold dread caught Falken's heart. Shadows, hunting them....
He choked down the mad laughter rising in his own throat. He opened another door.
Halls, with doors. The shadows swept after them. Falken hurled the doors open, faster and faster, but there was never anything beyond but another hall, with doors.
His heart was gorged and painful. His clothing was cold on his sweating body. He plunged on and on through black halls and drifting shards of light, with the shadows dancing all around and doors, doors, doors.
Paul Avery made a little empty chuckle. "It's laughing," he mumbled and went down on the black floor. The shadows leaped.
Sheila's eyes were a staring fire in her starved white face. Her terror shocked against Falken's brain and steadied it.
"Take his feet," he said harshly. "Take his feet."
They staggered on with their burden. And presently there were no more doors, and no roof overhead. Only the light and the glassy walls, and the dancing shadows.
The walls were thin in places. Through them Falken saw the dark colossus with its flaming eyes, straining through the spangled light. After it came the hounds and hunters, not gaining nor falling back, riding in blind absorption.
The walls faded, and the shadows. They were alone in the center of the black plain. Falken looked back at the castle.
There was nothing but the flat and naked rock.
He laid Avery down. He saw Sheila Moore fall beside him. He laughed, one small, mad chuckle. Then he crouched beside the others, his scarred gypsy face a mask of living stone.
Whether it was then, or hours later that he heard the voice, Falken never knew. But it spoke loudly in his mind, that voice. It brought him up, his futile blaster raised.
"You are humans," said the voice. "How wonderful!"
Falken looked upward, sensing a change in the light.
Something floated overhead. A ten-foot area of curdled glory, a core of blinding brilliance set in a lacy froth of fire.
The beauty of it caught Falken's throat. It shimmered with a sparkling opalescence, infinitely lovely—a living, tender flame floating in the rainbow light. It caught his heart, too, with a deep sadness that drifted in dim, faded colors beneath the brilliant veil.
It said, clearly as a spoken voice in his mind:
"Yes. I live, and I speak to you."
Sheila and Avery had risen. They stared, wide-eyed, and Sheila whispered, "What are you?"
The fire-thing coiled within itself. Little snapping flames licked from its edges, and its colors laughed.
"A female, isn't it? Splendid! I shall devise something very special." Colors rippled as its thoughts changed. "You amaze me, humans. I cannot read your minds, beyond thoughts telepathetically directed at me, but I can sense their energy output.
"I had picked the yellow one for the strongest. He appeared to be so. Yet he failed, and you others fought through."
Avery stared at Falken with the dawn of an appalled realization in his amber eyes. Falken asked of the light:
"What are you?"
The floating fire dipped and swirled. Preening peacock tints rippled through it, to be drowned in fierce, proud scarlet. It said:
"I am a child of the Sun."
* * *
