Rakhal looked at the conventionalized idols with curiosity, but said only, "Cover them up in the street, then. Rindy, find her something to put over her dress."
When we reached the street-shrine, Miellyn admonished: "Stand close together on the stones. I"m not sure we can all make the jump at once, but we"ll have to try."
Rakhal picked up Rindy and hoisted her to his shoulder. Miellyn dropped the cloak she had draped over the pattern of the Nebran embroideries, and we crowded close together. The street swayed and vanished and I felt the now-familiar dip and swirl of blackness before the world straightened out again. Rindy was whimpering, dabbing smeary fists at her face. "Daddy, my nose is bleeding...."
Miellyn hastily bent and wiped the blood from the snubby nose. Rakhal gestured impatiently.
"The workroom. Wreck everything you see. Rindy, if anything starts to come at us, you stop it. Stop it quick. And"--he bent and took the little face between his hands--"_chiya_, remember they"re not toys, no matter how pretty they are."
Her grave gray eyes blinked, and she nodded.
Rakhal flung open the door of the elves" workshop with a shout. The ringing of the anvils shattered into a thousand dissonances as I kicked over a workbench and half-finished Toys crashed in confusion to the floor.
The dwarfs scattered like rabbits before our a.s.sault of destruction. I smashed tools, filigree, jewels, stamping everything with my heavy boots. I shattered gla.s.s, caught up a hammer and smashed crystals. There was a wild exhilaration to it.
A tiny doll, proportioned like a woman, dashed toward me, shrilling in a supersonic shriek. I put my foot on her and ground the life out of her, and she screamed like a living woman as she came apart. Her blue eyes rolled from her head and lay on the floor watching me. I crushed the blue jewels under my heel.
Rakhal swung a tiny hound by the tail. Its head shattered into debris of almost-invisible gears and wheels. I caught up a chair and wrecked a gla.s.s cabinet of parts with it, swinging furiously. A berserk madness of smashing and breaking had laid hold on me.
I was drunk with crushing and shattering and ruining, when I heard Miellyn scream a warning and turned to see Evarin standing in the doorway. His green cat-eyes blazed with rage. Then he raised both hands in a sudden, sardonic gesture, and with a loping, inhuman glide, raced for the transmitter.
"Rindy," Rakhal panted, "can you block the transmitter?"
Instead Rindy shrieked. "We"ve got to get out! The roof is falling down!
The house is going to fall down on us! The roof, look at the roof!"
I looked up, transfixed by horror. I saw a wide rift open, saw the skylight shatter and break, and daylight pouring through the cracking walls, Rakhal s.n.a.t.c.hed Rindy up, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders. I grabbed Miellyn round the waist and we ran for the rift in the buckling wall.
We shoved through just before the roof caved in and the walls collapsed, and we found ourselves standing on a bare gra.s.sy hillside, looking down in shock and horror as below us, section after section of what had been apparently bare hill and rock caved in and collapsed into dusty rubble.
Miellyn screamed hoa.r.s.ely. "Run. Run, hurry!"
I didn"t understand, but I ran. I ran, my sides aching, blood streaming from the forgotten flesh-wound in my side. Miellyn raced beside me and Rakhal stumbled along, carrying Rindy.
Then the shock of a great explosion rocked the ground, hurling me down full length, Miellyn falling on top of me. Rakhal went down on his knees. Rindy was crying loudly. When I could see straight again, I looked down at the hillside.
There was nothing left of Evarin"s hideaway or the Mastershrine of Nebran except a great, gaping hole, still oozing smoke and thick black dust. Miellyn said aloud, dazed, "So _that"s_ what he was going to do!"
It fitted the peculiar nonhuman logic of the Toymaker. He"d covered the traces.
"Destroyed!" Rakhal raged. "All destroyed! The workrooms, the science of the Toys, the matter transmitter--the minute we find it, it"s destroyed!" He beat his fists furiously. "Our one chance to learn--"
"We were lucky to get out alive," said Miellyn quietly. "Where on the planet are we, I wonder?"
I looked down the hillside, and stared in amazement. Spread out on the hillside below us lay the Kharsa, topped by the white skysc.r.a.per of the HQ.
"I"ll be d.a.m.ned," I said, "right here. We"re home. Rakhal, you can go down and make your peace with the Terrans, and Juli. And you, Miellyn--"
Before the others, I could not say what I was thinking, but I put my hand on her shoulder and kept it there. She smiled, shakily, with a hint of her old mischief. "I can"t go into the Terran Zone looking like this, can I? Give me that comb again. Rakhal, give me your shirtcloak, my robes are torn."
"You vain, stupid female, worrying about a thing like that at a time like this!" Rakhal"s look was like murder. I put my comb in her hand, then suddenly saw something in the symbols across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Before this I had seen only the conventionalized and intricate glyph of the Toad G.o.d. But now--
I reached out and ripped the cloth away.
"Cargill!" she protested angrily, crimsoning, covering her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s with both hands. "Is this the place? And before a child, too!"
I hardly heard. "Look!" I exclaimed. "Rakhal, look at the symbols embroidered into the glyph of the G.o.d! You can read the old nonhuman glyphs. You did it in the city of The Lisse. Miellyn said they were the key to the transmitters! I"ll bet the formula is written out there for anyone to read!
"Anyone, that is, who _can_ read it! I can"t, but I"ll bet the formula equations for the transmitters are carved on every Toad G.o.d glyph on Wolf. Rakhal, it makes sense. There are two ways of hiding something.
Either keep it locked away, or hide it right out in plain sight. Whoever bothers even to _look_ at a conventionalized Toad G.o.d? There are so many _billions_ of them...."
He bent his head over the embroideries, and when he looked up his face was flushed. "I believe--by the chains of Sharra, I believe you have it, Race! It may take years to work out the glyphs, but I"ll do it, or die trying!" His scarred and hideous face looked almost handsome in exultation, and I grinned at him.
"If Juli leaves enough of you, once she finds out how you maneuvered her. Look, Rindy"s fallen asleep on the gra.s.s there. Poor kid, we"d better get her down to her mother."
"Right." Rakhal thrust the precious embroidery into his shirtcloak, then cradled his sleeping daughter in his arms. I watched him with a curious emotion I could not identify. It seemed to pinpoint some great change, either in Rakhal or myself. It"s not difficult to visualize one"s sister with children, but there was something, some strange incongruity in the sight of Rakhal carrying the little girl, carefully tucking her up in a fold of his cloak to keep the sharp breeze off her face.
Miellyn was limping in her thin sandals, and she shivered. I asked, "Cold?"
"No, but--I don"t believe Evarin is dead, I"m afraid he got away."
For a minute the thought dimmed the l.u.s.ter of the morning. Then I shrugged. "He"s probably buried in that big hole up there." But I knew I would never be sure.
We walked abreast, my arm around the weary, stumbling woman, and Rakhal said softly at last, "Like old times."
It wasn"t old times, I knew. He would know it too, once his exultation sobered. I had outgrown my love for intrigue, and I had the feeling this was Rakhal"s last adventure. It was going to take him, as he said, years to work out the equations for the transmitter. And I had a feeling my own solid, ordinary desk was going to look good to me in the morning.
But I knew now that I"d never run away from Wolf again. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting for me down below, and I was bringing back her child. My best friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?
If the memory of dark, poison-berry eyes was to haunt me in nightmares, they did not come into the waking world. I looked at Miellyn, took her slender unmanacled hand in mine, and smiled as we walked through the gates of the city. Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein the perfect steel chains that should bind my love"s wrists to my key forever.