"Of course, Captain," Acorna agreed.
After Becker, the high priest, and Acorna left, Miw-Sher stood staring at the lake.
A priestess laid a gentle hand on the girl"s shoulder.
"I want to look at this forever," Miw-Sher said wonderingly.
"I have the perfect room for you. Do you see that little balcony?" the priestess asked, pointing up to the outside of the Temple, which was a bit more ornate on the lake side, studded with stones only slightly smaller than the magnificent ones these Temple priests and priestesses wore around their necks. Miw-Sher nodded. "You may sleep there. The guardians will sleep where they choose, of course, but there is room there for the kittens and their mother, and any others who choose to stay with you. We will help you make a bed there. But first, before you rest, I think you must have something to eat. Come."
Twenty.
Kando grabbed for Nadhari, but his fingers found only a blast of sand exploding through the open hatch. Her triumphant laughter choked off in a blast of sand.
He wasn"t about to go after her in the storm. Such a dreadful waste, but it was her own doing. She"d had her chance to be his consort. Now her bones would bleach on the desert sands-and he suspected she would be sc.r.a.ped down to the bone in a matter of minutes in this storm.
He punched the hatch door and it closed again, but not entirely, and not before it had admitted a layer of sand over an inch deep that covered the controls. But he was able to access the controls -thank goodness he remembered that much from his Federation training - and get the flitter off the ground again before it was completely buried in the storm. Beside him, Macostut stirred and muttered. Edu dragged the man to his feet by the hair and put him in the pilot"s seat. He slapped him to wake him up and get his attention.
"Get us out of here."
"Okay, okay." Macostut engaged the engine and the flitter lifted jerkily. "I"ll try to gain some alt.i.tude. The higher we go, the less sand there will be."
"That beats sitting here being buried forever in a sand dune," Kando snapped. "Let"s go."
With much bucking and creaking, the flitter gained alt.i.tude. Once Macostut tried to climb so sharply that the flitter almost flipped backwards, but an adjustment of the incline eventually took them up until the sand was little more than a sheer veil over the night sky. The turbulence diminished.
The flitter finally outdistanced the storm. As the sand cleared, the full effect of the shadow-bisected moons stared Kando and Macostut in the face.
Macostut swore. "I never saw them do that before," he said, his voice quivering very slightly with awe and - could that be fear? Kando grinned.
"Really, Dsu, you should have been raised here and I should have stayed in the Federation. It"s just a cosmic event, probably a trick of the ring shadow that happens every hundred years or so. Or so I"m informed by the more learned among my pious brethren. It is NOT, however, the Star Cat or anything else supernatural."
"Of course not," Macostut said gruffly. "I"m perfectly aware of that. It just took me by surprise. Must have been being kicked in the head by your charming cousin."
"I"m very glad to hear that, because although it isn"t supernatural, it is something else far more helpful."
Macostut seemed to be tiring of his role as executive officer to Kando"s command. He said, "I a.s.sume you"re going to enlighten me." He did not sound friendly.
"It is a navigational aid. If, while the moons are arranged on the horizon exactly as they are now, you head straight for the place between them, you will come in time to the Aridimi Stronghold."
"You know this to be true?" Macostut asked.
"It says so in all of the legends and holy books," Kando told him.
"Why haven"t more people found the Stronghold, then?"
"The moons are in this configuration only once in a hundred Standard years. And it takes time to follow the omens across the desert. By the time any of us made the crossing, the moons would be in some other phase. It"s poetic information, but hardly useful in a primitive culture with so many restrictions. But that"s no reason to suppose it"s inaccurate."
They flew toward the moons without speaking. Kando filled the time by unpacking the chemical bombs with which he intended to treat the lake. These were used in the galactic mining of the cat"s-eye chrysoberyls, and should also serve to either poison the priests or drive them out of the stronghold, where they would perish in the waterless vastness of the desert. True, they were used to doing without much water, but they would not be able to survive with none at all. He wondered if the Temple would make a decent initial processing plant and packing facility. After the flitter had continued flying for some time, though, he began to lose faith in the moons as a navigational aid. Such directions were imprecise, after all, and fraught with the kind of mysticism that he hated.
Macostut, on the other hand, seemed to be overtaken with awe at the vastness of the desert landscape. "Will you look at that crater!" he cried, nodding to the black hole beneath them, full of rock and little else.
Kando was delighted. "Aha! We"re near now. The stronghold is near a crater, and the lake is said to be nearby as well." "Maybe I should fly around a little and look for it?" "No, keep straight between the moons," Kando said, though he was sorely tempted by the idea of exploring the crater.
His perseverance was soon rewarded, although both he and Macostut almost missed spotting their target. As they flew over the crater and back into the Serpent"s Spine ridge, the land was split between the ridge"s vertebrae. The flitter was nearly past the split directly on their route when he looked directly down and saw that the s.p.a.ce in the split gleamed in the moons" light.
"The lake!" he cried, pointing. "There it is. Take us down there."
The flitter pa.s.sed through the crack in the ridge with barely two meters on each side of the craft to spare.
Silently it descended, and Kando gazed with wonder at the deep clear waters, within whose depths even now he could see the eyes of the chrysoberyls shining through the ripples. The moons" reflection seemed to blink in answer to his gaze as the slight turbulence from the flitter"s descent ruffled the surface. Behind the flitter, the Temple was shadowed by the rocky face of the cliff, but its windows, though darkened, mirrored the water and the moons. Just beyond the flitter, stands of tall trees and gra.s.ses fluttered and waved.
"It"s the most astonishingly beautiful place I"ve seen since I"ve been here," Macostut breathed.
"Right," said Kando, and opened the hatch to heave the first chemical bomb into the pristine waters.
Acorna followed the flickering torch carried by the old priest as he led her through the bowels of the Temple. It was very quiet now, with everyone off to bed, and all she heard was the soft shuffle of the old priest"s steps, the crackle of the torch, her own footsteps and heartbeat, and the sound of running water.
The priest led her up and down stairways and through walls that seemed to contain no doorways until, as they pa.s.sed through the last of these, she saw the water that had been making the sound. A broad, lively stream ran beside the narrow walkway. Acorna guessed it must feed into the lake. The Temple was built with its foundation underwater. The corridor through which she walked was inscribed with drawings as the other cave had been. It was ancient and did not appear to have been constructed. Possibly the earliest temple structure had simply made use of another lava tube like the one containing the lake. Volcanic ranges were full of such holes, some small,
but as in this case, some of great depth and volume. The one containing the lake was cracked open at the top, but at one time far back in the planet"s prehistoric times, the waters would have been deep inside the mountain.
Her head began to throb with the rush of the water, the flicker of the torch, the closeness of the tunnel.
Then suddenly the priest stopped directly in front of her.
She stopped, too. He pointed the torch at a rough white column set in the middle of the stream.
Sensing that she didn"t understand, he moved in closer, and now she saw the shape was not a column, but a statue set upon a pedestal with the well that was the mouth of the stream bubbling up at the foot of its base. It was very tall and white, like the stone from which the Serpent"s Spine ridges were made, not the cats-eye stone used more often in Temples for ornament. The first thing she saw was the outstretched hand. Its carved fingers bore, like her own, just one knuckle. The statue"s feet were cloven hoofed, with carved feathery hairs curling up the calves, just as such feathers curled up her own calves. The statue had hair that curled around a face and the deformed and slightly stunted horn that adorned it. She recognized the statue"s features and posture-all except for the eyes, into whose sockets cat"s-eye stones had been set, skewing the otherwise excellent likeness of Aari. But as she faced the statue full on, she realized that these particular chrysoberyls had wider stripes in the middle than usual, giving the eyes a less feline appearance than they might have otherwise, and the face could have been that of her mate when he was lost in thought.
"Aari," she said. Definitely Aari, just as in her dream.
The priest turned and beamed at her. "The Companion."
She was about to ask all of the questions in her mind when they were replaced by a rush of intense pain and an agonized cry, (Acorna! Help! Please, I escaped Edu, but he is on his way to the sacred lake to poison it, and then wipe out the Aridimi priesthood. You have to stop him.)
The feelings engendered by the cry were so intense that Acorna fell against the wall before she could regain her balance. The old priest turned, alarmed at what he saw in her face, but she "was oblivious to him. (Nadhari!) she mind-called. (You"re wounded. Where are you?)
(Never mind about me. You have to stop Edu and Macostut. I don"t know how long I was unconscious. It may be too late already.)
(It may be too late for you if we don"t get help for you. There are many people here to protect the lake.)
(He has poison, Acorna. Do something!)
(I will. But, Nadhari, I need you to concentrate now. Where are you? How long did it take you to get there? Did you happen to notice the coordinates again shortly before you left the flitter?)
(No-yes, there was a sandstorm. A terrible storm. I was sucked out into it "when I tried to overpower Edu and Macostut and take over the ship. I dove into a drift of sand to escape having my skin stripped off, but I"m still pretty raw and moo thirsty. The storm is over now, though, so it isn"t so bad.)