The road began to fail, and in places was blocked by fallen boughs. The ridge loomed above, a great rocky jut.
At an abandoned mine the road ended. Simultaneously the power index reached zero. The car halted with a thud and a bump; there was silence except for a sigh of wind.
The group alighted with their meager possessions. The fog had dissipated; the sun shone cool through a high overcast, washing the landscape in honey-colored light.
Reith surveyed the mountainside, tracing a path to the ridge. He turned to Helsse. "Well, which is it to be? Kabasas, or back to Settra?"
"Settra, naturally." He looked disconsolately at the car.
"Afoot?"
"Better than afoot to Kabasas."
"What of the assassins?"
"I must take my chances."
Reith brought out his scanscope and studied the way they had come. "There seems no sign of pursuit; you-" He halted, surprised by the expression on Helsse's face.
"What is that object?" demanded Helsse.
Reith explained.
"Dordolio spoke accurately," said Helsse in a wondering voice. "He was telling the truth!"
Half-amused, half-annoyed, Reith said, "I don't know what Dordolio told you, other than that we were barbarians. Goodbye, then, and my regards to Lord Cizante."
"Wait a moment," said Helsse, staring indecisively west toward Settra. "Kabasas may be safer, after all. The assassins would be sure to consider me an auxiliary to your offense." He turned, assessed the bulk of the mountain, heaved a gloomy sigh. "Total insanity, of course."
"Needless to say, we are not here by our own volition," returned Reith. "Well, we might as well start."
They climbed the tailings dump in front of the mine, peered into the tunnel, from which issued an ooze of reddish slime. A set of footprints led into the tunnel. They were about human size, the shape of a bowling pin or a gourd; two inches ahead of the narrow forward end were three indentations as of toes.
Looking down at the marks Reith felt the hairs rise at the nape of his neck. He listened, but no sounds came from the tunnel. He asked Traz, "What sort of prints are these?"
"An unshod Phung, possibly-a small one. More likely a Pnume. The prints are fresh. It watched our approach."
"Come along; let's leave," muttered Reith.
An hour later they reached the ridge and halted to gaze out over the panorama.
The land to the west lay drowned in late afternoon murk, with Settra showing as a discolored spot, like a bruise. Far to the east glimmered Black Mountain Lake.
The travelers spent an eerie night at the edge of the forest, starting up at far noises; a thin uncanny screaming, a rap-rap-rap, like blows against a block of hard wood, the crafty hooting of nighthounds.
Dawn came at last. The group made a glum breakfast on pods from a pilgrim plant, then proceeded down over a basalt palisade to the floor of a wooded valley.
Ahead lay the Black Mountain Lake, calm and still. A fishing boat inched across the water and presently disappeared behind a jut of rock. "Hoch Har," said Helsse. "Ancient enemies of the Yao. Now they remain behind the mountains."
Traz pointed. "A path."
Reith looked. "I see no path."
"Nevertheless it is there, and I smell wood smoke, from a distance of three miles."
Five minutes later Traz made a sudden gesture. "Several men are approaching."
Reith listened; he could hear nothing. But presently three men appeared on the trail ahead: very tall men with thick waists, thin arms and legs, wearing skirts of a dirty white fiber and short capes of the same stuff. They stopped short at the sight of the travelers, then turned and retreated along the trail, looking anxiously back over their shoulders.
After a quarter-mile the trail left the jungle, and angled off across the swampy foreshore of the lake. The Hoch Har village stood on stilts over the water, terminating in a float to which a dozen plank boats were tied. On the shore a score of men stood in attitudes of nervous truculence, striding back and forth, bushknives and long spring-bows at the ready.
The travelers approached.
The tallest and heaviest of Hoch Hars called out in a ridiculously shrill voice:
"Who are you?"
"Travelers on the way to Kabasas."
The Hoch Hars stared incredulously, then peered back up the trail toward the mountains. "Where is the rest of your band?"
"There is no band; we are alone. Can you sell us a boat and some food?"
The Hoch Hars put aside their weapons. "Food is hard to come by," groaned the first man. "Boats are our dearest possessions. What can you offer us in exchange?"
"Only a few sequins."
"What good are sequins when we must visit Cath to spend them?"
Helsse muttered in Reith's ear. Reith said to the Hoch Hars, "Very well then, we shall continue. I understand that there are other villages around the lake."
"What? Would you deal with petty thieves and cheats? It is all those folks are.
Well, to save you from your own folly, we will strain ourselves to work out some sort of arrangement."
In the end Reith paid two hundred sequins for a boat in fair condition and what the Hoch Har chief gruffly claimed to be sufficient provisions to take them all the way to Kabasas: crates of dried fish, sacks of tubers, rolls of pepper-bark, fresh and preserved fruit. Another thirty sequins secured the services, as a guide, of a certain Tsutso, a moon-faced young man somewhat portly, with an affable big-toothed smile. Tsutso declared the first stages of their journey to be the most precarious: "First, the rapids; then the Great Slant, after which the voyage becomes no more than drifting downstream to Kabasas."
At noon, with the small sail set, the boat departed the Hoch Har village, and through the long afternoon sailed the dark water south toward a pair of bluffs which marked the outlet of the lake and the head of the Jinga River. At sunset the boat passed between the bluffs, each crowned by a tumble of ruins, black on the brown-ash sky. Under the bluff to the right was a small cove with a beach; here Reith wanted to camp for the night but Tsutso would not hear of it. "The castles are haunted. At midnight the ghosts of old Tschai walk the pavings. Do you want us all put under a taint?"
"So long as the ghosts keep to the castle, what's to prevent us from using the cove?"
Tsutso gave Reith a wondering look, and held the boat to midstream between the opposing ruins. A mile downstream the Jinga split around a rocky islet, to which Tsutso took the boat. "Here nothing from the forest can molest us."
The travelers supped, laid themselves down around the campfire and were troubled by no more than soft whistles and trills from the forest, and once, far in the distance, the mournful call of the night-hounds.
On the next day they passed across ten miles of violent rapids, during which Tsutso ten times over earned his fee, in Reith's estimation. Meanwhile the forest dwindled to clumps of thorn; the banks became barren, and presently a strange sound made itself heard from ahead: a sibilant all-pervading roar. "The Slant," explained Tsutso. The river disappeared at a brink a hundred yards ahead. Before Reith or the others could protest, the boat had pitched over the verge.
Tsutso said, "Everyone alert; here is the Slant. Hold to the middle!"
The roar of water almost overwhelmed his voice. The boat was sliding into a dark gorge; with amazing velocity the rock walls passed astern. The river itself was a trembling black surface, lined with foam static in relation to the boat. The travelers crouched as low as possible, ignoring Tsutso's condescending grin. For minutes they dashed down the race, finally plunged into a field of foam and froth, then floated smoothly out into still water.
The walls rose sheer a thousand feet: brown sandstone pocked with balls of black starbush. Tsutso steered the boat to a fringe of shingle. "Here I leave you."