Meanwhile, in a small cave at the foot of a low cliff of dark rock about two hundred meters distant from the nearest argument, a mere man named Keyes, and another called Lo-Yang, both weather-vulnerable human beings, shivering with cold and excitement though wrapped in many furs, were sitting almost motionless, watching and listening intently as they peered from behind a rock. Keyes, the leader of the pair, had chosen this place as one from which he and his apprentice could best observe the goings-on among the gods and goddesses, while still enjoying a reasonable hope that they would not be seen in turn.
A dark and wiry man, Keyes, of indeterminate age. His companion was dark as well, but heavier, and obviously young. They had come to this place in the high, uninhabited mountains searching for treasure, wealth in the form of knowledge-Keyes, an accomplished magician, was willing to risk everything in the pursuit.
Lo-Yang was at least as numb with fear as with cold, and at the moment willing to risk everything for a good chance to run away. He might even have defied his human master and done so, at any time during the past half hour, except that he feared to draw the attention of the mighty gods by sudden movement.
Keyes was in most matters no braver than his associate and apprentice, but certainly he was more obsessed with the search for knowledge and power. He cursed the fact that though some of the gods’ stentorian voices carried clearly to where he crouched trying to eavesdrop, he could understand nothing that he heard. Despite his best efforts at magical interpretation, the language the gods most commonly used among themselves was still beyond him.
Keyes, exchanging whispers now and then with his companion, whose teeth were chattering, considered an attempt to work his way even nearer the place of council. But he rejected the idea; it would hardly be possible to do better than this well-placed but shallow little cave, inconspicuous among a number of similar holes in the nearby rock.
He was in the middle of a whispered conversational exchange with his apprentice Lo-Yang, when without warning a great roaring fury swirled around him, and Keyes realized that he had been caught-that the enormous fingers of some god’s hand had closed around him. Hopelessly the man tried to summon some defensive magic. Physically he struggled to get free.
He might as well have endeavored to uproot a mountain or two and hurl them at the moon.
Mars, who had captured Keyes, was not really concerned with the obvious fact that the man had been spying. Who cared what human beings might overhear, or think? The god was focused on another problem: he was due to receive a Sword, though Vulcan had not yet put it in his hands. Mars wanted a human for experimental purposes, so that he could learn a thing or two, in practical terms, about the powers of whatever Sword he was given before he used it in the Game. Mars considered himself fortunate to have been able to grab up a human so promptly; the creatures were not common in these parts. Keyes had happened to be the nearer of the two specimens Mars saw when it occurred to him to look for one.
The captured man, knowing nothing of his captor’s purpose, certain that his last moment had come, could feel the cold mist on his face, and thought he could hear the echo of his own frightened breath.
The god-hand which had scooped Keyes up did not immediately crush him into pulp, or dash him on the rocks. The sweeping breeze of god-breath, redolent of ice and spice and smoke, told Keyes that an enormous face loomed over him.
But his captor was not even looking at him. Only when the man saw that did he fully realize how far he was, for all his impertinence, beneath the gods’ real anger. Nothing he might do would be of any real consequence to them-or so most of them thought. Some mice were doubtless nearby too, scampering among the rocks, but none of the debaters paid any heed to them at all.
The god who had captured Keyes considered how best to keep him fresh and ready. Physically crippling the subject might affect the results of the experiment; and anyway some measure less drastic should suffice to do the job. A simple deprivation of eyesight, along with a smothering of the man’s ability to do magic, ought to make him stay where he was put… so one god-finger wiped Keyes’s face…
Now. Where best to put him, for safe-keeping, until Mars should come into possession of the Sword he wished to test?
The captor, still holding casually in one hand the wriggling, moaning, newly blinded human form, looked about. Presently the terrible gaze of Mars fastened on the handiest hiding place immediately available. A moment later, treading windy space in the easy, heedless way of deities, he was descending into a house-sized limestone cave, by means of the wide, nearly vertical shaft which seemed to form the cavern’s only entrance and exit.
At the bottom he set his helpless captive down, not ungently, on the stone floor. Keyes was still mewing like a hurt kitten.
“Here you will stay,” Mars boomed in Keyes’s human language. “Until I get back. That won’t be long-there’s something I want to try out on you. As you can see… well, as you probably noticed when you could see… the only way out of this cave is a vertical climb up a steep shaft with slick sides and only a few scattered handholds.”
The god started to ascend that way himself, but disdaining handholds, simply walking in air. Halfway up he paused in midair, looking back down over his shoulder, to warn the once-ambitious wizard about the deep pits in the floor. “Better not fall into one of them. I don’t want to find you dead and useless when I return.” The tone seemed to imply that Keyes would be punished if he was impertinent enough to kill himself. And then the god was gone.
The newly blinded man was seized by an instinctive need to try to hide, some vague idea of groping his way voluntarily even farther down into the earth. Maybe the god who’d caught him would forget about him-maybe he wouldn’t even notice if Keyes disappeared-
But soon enough the man in the cave ceased his gasping and whimpering, his pointless attempt to burrow into the stone floor, and regained enough self-possession to reassure himself that although his vision was effectively gone, at least his eyeballs had not been ripped out. As far as he could tell his lids were simply closed, and he could not open them. There was no pain as long as he did not try. Attempts to force his eyes open with his fingers hurt horribly, but produced not even a pinhole’s worth of vision.
Physically his body seemed to be undamaged. But he felt that even more important components of his being, directly accessible to the divine intervention, had been violated…
Presently, his mind having begun to work again at least intermittently, he went on groping his way around the cave, in search of some way out, or at least of better knowledge of his prison. He had barely glimpsed even the entrance to the cave before his sight was taken from him. It was warmer down here out of the wind, so much so that he shed some of his furs. In some locations, as he moved about, he was able to feel the warmth of the sun, which was now beginning to be high enough to penetrate the cave. There was tantalizing hope in the red glow of the direct sun through his sealed eyelids.
In a conscious effort to force himself to think logically, Keyes took an inventory of his assets. He had the clothes he was wearing, a small dagger sheathed at his side, and a small pack on his back, which his captor had allowed him to retain. The pack contained a little food, and very little else.
Lo-Yang, Keyes’s assistant on his dangerous quest for knowledge, had been ignored by the deity who had grabbed Keyes up. And moments later the stout apprentice, unpursued, had scrambled successfully away, running for his life in the direction of the distant camp where he and Keyes had left their riding-beasts.