When she found she was again in need of air, Myrah’s alarm increased as she saw there were no bubbles within her reach. Suddenly she understood just how easy it would be for the Horra to kill her with scarcely any effort—it had only to prevent her from breathing for a short time. She struggled to trap a bubble in her cage and, as if to discount her latest theory, the Horra actually propelled itself into a region of plentiful air and released its coils sufficiently to permit her to take as much as she needed.
The same movement, by increasing the distance between her body and the creature’s mouth, allowed the butt of her spear to come out of the belt cup, and with a convulsive twitch of one of its arms it withdrew the spear from its mouth and cast it aside. Myrah was too intent on breathing to try countering the move, but from the corners of her eyes she received the impression that the Horra holding Lennar, Harld and Treece had performed exactly the same manouevre at exactly the same time.
“Is everybody all right?” Lennar shouted. “Give me your names.”
The others, with the exception of Geean, replied to him, and he spoke her name again. Myrah, who was closest to Geean, saw that she was still moving her hands and feet, and taking air in a normal manner, although her slim body was almost completely hidden by the banded alien flesh of her captor.
“She’s all right,” she called. “I’ll watch her.”
“Good for you,” Treece said, with enigmatic calmness, from a nearby point in the nightmarish ballet formation.
Lennar raised his voice again, miraculously managing to regain some of his authority. “Try not to panic, and whatever you do—don’t struggle. The last thing we want to do is tire ourselves out. There’s something we don’t understand here, but we can….”
Treece laughed sharply. “Lennar, you’re a fool if you don’t understand this.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m telling you these are Ka’s servants.” Treece gave another laugh, a curious barking sound which succeeded in adding to the horror Myrah was experiencing.
“Silence!” Lennar commanded. “We’ll need clear thinking if we’re going to have any….”
He broke off as the entire assembly of Horra turned in one concerted movement and began swimming downwards. There was no tentative following of a current as had been the case with the party of humans. The Horra seemed to know exactly where they were going, and they were out to get there quickly. They swam in typical Horra fashion with their pointed bodies spearing through the water followed by clusters of tentacles, from the base of which their huge, unblinking eyes seemed to regard the universe with quizzical detachment.
The rush of water through the tentacles and the hissing of their propellent siphons made it impossible for the humans to communicate with each other, but in any case Myrah would have had nothing to say. She had to concentrate all her attention on snatching air bubbles out of the turbulence created by the Horra which had her in its grip. Several times she got into difficulties as bubbles shattered and refused to glue themselves into the metal cage around her head, but always—as if sensing what was happening—the Horra swung her to one side and made it possible for her to obtain adequate air.
Try as she might, she could not avoid the conclusion that the cephalopod was behaving like an intelligent being, but for the greater part of the time she was unable to think at all. The feel of the cold, rubbery flesh against her skin, the slow working of the beaked mouth less than an arm’s length away, and the oblique scrutiny of the huge eyes combined to produce in her a mental paralysis. She began to get a vague understanding of why some sea creatures yielded so readily to their natural enemies, even in some cases appearing to assist in their own destruction. Her sluggish and morbid reveries came to an end when she felt the Horra’s downward rush begin to slacken.
With the drop in speed the business of staying alive required less of her attention, even though she was now taking bubbles by feel rather than sight, and she began to look around for some evidence that they had reached a destination. Below the pointed bodies of the Horra, and barely discernible in the near-lightless conditions, was a vast black solidity. Its surface was complicated and appeared to be covered with protuberances and masses of fronds which moved slowly under the action of currents. Here and there, close to the dark surface, Myrah picked out signs of independent motion which could have been more Horra or other creatures going about mysterious errands. One part of her mind, insulated from fear, began to wonder how it was possible for her to see at all in what should have been complete darkness. The answer came when she noticed that some of the moving creatures actually had glowing wakes and it dawned on her that there were quantities of luminescent material drifting in the water all around.
Here, too, was the answer to a question which had long been discussed and argued by the people of the Clan. The world did have an inner core, probably built up of the shells and skeletons of beings which had died over a period of hundreds of years. It was known from experience that the vast majority of corpses were devoured before they had sunk very far, but here was the evidence that some had reached the centre, and had been received by….
Myrah tried to fight off the concomitant thought, but it invaded her mind with irresistible power.
This was the home of Ka!
Somewhere down there, in cavities hewn from a grisly coral, crouched the Unknown One—the dark force which lived and yet was the antithesis of life.
Like all others of her race, Myrah had no direct evidence of Ka’s reality, but she had always believed in him nonetheless. In addition to the legends which had been handed down from the ages in which humans had been able to roam the world in freedom, there was her unshakable inner certainty that Ka had to exist as a necessary complement to life as she knew it….
“Is everybody still alive?” Lennar shouted above the decreasing turbulence. There was a scattered response, in which Myrah joined without conscious volition, then she heard Harld asking a question.
“What’s going to happen now?”
“We have to face up to it,” Lennar replied in a strained voice. “The Horra have never wanted us for any other reason than to….”
“You’re a fool, Lennar,” Treece cut in hysterically. “These are not ordinary Horra. These are the servants of Ka. They’re taking us to Ka!”
Myrah felt a renewed awareness of the creature which was holding her in such monstrous intimacy and for a moment almost yielded to the need to scream, but Lennar’s voice cut through the red mists of panic.
“Pay no attention to the mad woman,” he ordered. “They aren’t gripping as hard now, so this is the best time to break free. Take as much air as you can, and when I give the word—start fighting them. Go for the eyes with your feet, and if you manage to get free don’t wait around for anybody else….”
His voice was lost in a multiple cry, a strange sobbing gasp, which issued from the throats of the other humans. Myrah felt her own breath sighing away, adding to the chorus of despair, as the black core of the world—the entity she had taken to be an inanimate mountain of coral—spread its arms to receive them.