"They won't come at night," she insisted. "Not even Gydapen."
Perhaps not, but the man wasn't alone and mercenaries had few compunctions as to how they earned their pay. Gnais would be free of the planetary phobia concerning the dark. Infra-red devices could be available to track down the living if they had escaped death in the wreck. The fire would confuse such apparatus and mask their own body heat.
Things he explained. Lavinia listened, nodding when he had finished.
"You're clever, Earl. Now, for God's sake, let us get out of the night!"
Chapter Fifteen
The shelter was small with barely enough room for them both. Without light, the walls pressing close, Dumarest was reminded too strongly of a tomb. Carefully parting the opening of the flap he looked outside.
The suns had vanished, the sky now blazed with stars, the pale, ghostly luminescence painting the rocks, the tufted vegetation with frosted silver. The glow of the fire was a dull reflection caught and dimmed by facing rocks. A ruby nimbus of shifting light in which figures moved in an intricate saraband.
A man in armor, gilt and tinsel over red and green, a helmet framing a skull in the eyeholes of which worms crawled and lifted heads which sighed with ancient yearnings. A fancy, gone even as seen, replaced by another which spun like a pinwheel, semi-transparent, a cut-out which danced, a face filled with bulging eyes. Red stained the mouth and ears, more the nose and cheeks. Tears of blood which dripped and left a trail in which paper-thin fingers dabbled and rose to trace symbols on the air.
Chagney!
Wheeling on his eternal journey among the stars.
His eyes bulged at the sight of unimaginable glories. His blood was a benediction to all who had spilled their lives in the void. His appearance was an accusation.
As was the woman with hair of flame.
Had he loved her, the real woman, or merely the shell she had worn?
Had she known and, knowing, taken a subtle revenge?
Kalin-had she lied?
Dumarest closed his eyes, shutting out the imaginary figures, feeling the tension at the base of his skull, the inward pressure. Something… something… but it was so long ago and now was not the time to remember.
Now was the time of the Sungari.
"Earl!" Lavinia was beside him, pressing close, her breath warm against his cheek. "Close the opening-please!"
Had they never built strong rooms fitted with thick windows? Were they afraid of the madness such rooms would bring?
"Earl! Please!"
Dumarest drew in his breath, shuddering, conscious of the ache at the base of his skull, the pressure. The hallucinations had been too real, too accusing. Fragments of the past, enhanced, given the acid sauce of hindsight, the torment of what might have been. A blur of images of which only a few had been prominent but, behind those few, ghostly yet horribly alive, had thronged others.
A man lived every second of every hour since the time of his birth and each of those seconds held all that had happened to and around him.
A vastness of experience. An inexhaustible supply of terror and pain and hopeless yearning. An infinity of doubt and indecision, of ignorance known and forceably accepted, of frustration and hate and cruelty and fear.
A morass in which glowed the fitful gleams of transient joy.
Each man, within his skull, carried a living hell.
Watching, Dumarest had seen it.
"Earl?" Lavinia touched his face and felt the sweat which wet her fingers. Felt too the little quivers which ran through him so that he trembled like a beast which had been run too hard for too long. She pushed back his hair, touching the gash on his scalp, the sting of the salt on her hand a pain which, meeting, diminished the rest. "For God's sake! Earl!"
He was trapped, buried, stifling. Sand clogged his lungs and mountains weighed his limbs. He threshed, tore at the opening, jerked it aside and lunged through to roll on the stoney ground to rise, to stare wide-eyed at the stars.
Earth!
Which was the sun which warmed Earth?
"Come back, you fool!" Lavinia screamed from within the confines of the shelter. "Come back! The Sungari- hurry!"
It was already too late.
Dumarest heard a thin, high pitched whine, the drone of something which passed, the lash of air against his face, his eyes. It came again and he dropped, feeling a jerk at his hair, something which touched his scalp and burned like fire.
Against the stars there was a shimmer, a blur. Night mist falling or something else?
Then again the whine, something which struck his shoulder, to rip the plastic and tear at the metal beneath. A blow which bruised and hurt and shocked him from his daze. Alerted, his instinct to survive replaced conscious thought.
He dropped, felt the whine of disturbed air slash through the spot where he'd been standing, rolled to see sand and dirt plume inches from his face. The shelter was close and he dived towards it, seeing the opening part a little, the pale glimmer of a face. It backed as he advanced, making room for him to pass through, legs kicking, his boot hitting something and being hit in turn. Jerking up his knees he drove the edge of his hand against something which shimmered, again at something else which droned.
"Earl!"
"Something to block the opening? Quickly!"
The fabric was too thin. He held it, smashing at it with his fist as it bulged, wedging the fabric handed to him against it, lashing it with strands of wire. Above, on the roof of the shelter, something scrabbled, rasping, making eerie chitterings.
"It's too thin," she whispered. "Too thin."
And he had been too confident of her mistaken fear of the dark. It had been no mistake. Thinking so had almost cost him his life.
"They'll get us!" Her voice rose a little. "They'll break in."
"No." He reached out and found her. She was naked, the fabric she had passed to him the clothing she had ripped from her body. "They won't break in," he soothed. "Not now we're out of sight."
Out of sight their scent masked, but that need have nothing to do with it. Sight alone would have been enough. The fury of the attack had caused it to last after he had vanished from view. A delayed action which even now was ending.
As he listened the scrabbling faded, the chittering died.
"Earl?"
"It's over. All we need do now is wait."
Wait as she moved against him, soft and warm and with a femininity which could not be denied. A burning, demanding creature of passion who held him and touched him and sent her lips questing over his cheeks, his eyes, lingering on his mouth until his arms closed around her. A cleansing, human thing who washed the fragments of delusion from his mind and filled the tiny shelter with a heat which rose to engulf them both.
Which ebbed to flood again at the approach of dawn.
Dumarest stirred, looking at the tumble of hair against his shoulder, the face it stranded, the eyes closed, the lips swollen, the whole lax in satiation. The morning light was dim as it percolated through the fabric, brightening as he cleared the opening, becoming a pale flood as he pushed aside the flaps.
Crawling outside he rose and stretched. His hands stung and he saw the knuckles scored with shallow wounds, the fingers dark with blood. More dried blood matted his hair and traced a pattern on his face. His boots were torn, the pants showed long gouges as if sharp knives had slashed at the material. On the sanded surface of the shelter the grains were fanned into intricate designs.
The fire he had lit had died, a patch of ash marring the sand with greyish blackness. He gathered fuel and lit another, feeding it gently, adding leaves and tufts of greenery so that a thin column of smoke rose into the air. A column which thickened and turned an oily black as he fed slivers of plastic into the flames.