The farmer chuckled. "Oh, I can't remember things like that, youngster. I don't see very clearly any more, any more. But he stopped to ask if he was on the right route to Vashcor. He wanted to know what the quickest route was."
Sindi rocked impatiently back and forth on her deest.
"And what did you tell him?"
"I said for him to keep going on the road he was on, of course. This is the best road to Vashcor." The old man paused again, and a frown added new wrinkles to those already on his brow. "But then I laughed and told him if he was really in a hurry he could make a shortcut over the Mountains, and blast it if he didn't take me seriously and say he'd do it! Last I saw of him, the fool was heading for the foothills. He must be crazy; no one ever goes near those moun—"
At that Sindi uttered a little gasp, dug her heels into the deest, and went charging away, leaving the old man still standing by the roadside. "May the Great Light bless you," she called back at him.
He had taken the mountain path? Sindi frowned, realizing that her planned shortcut was now no advantage at all in the race to head Rahn off, but a necessity. She stared up at the mountains, now quite close.
The road began to sheer off, going to one side of the mountain range, which was not a very wide one. As soon as Sindi became aware she had reached the detour-point, she cut off the main road and started across the gray-green fields at a sharp angle toward the Mountains of the Morning.
After a while the vegetation died out and bare desert appeared. And then Sindi spotted something that made her heart pound: well-defined deest tracks, leading toward the mountains.
They had been made recently. They could only be Rahn's.
She followed the trail carefully, and the land began to rise as she entered the foothills. The air was perfectly still. Not even a breeze broke the silent calmness, and no sound was heard.
It was hours later before the thin sand of the foothills could no longer hold the prints of the deest she was following. Here, so far as Sindi knew, no living person had ever gone. No one had ever had reason to; the Mountains of the Morning were barren, devoid of all life except lichen and small insectoidal creatures. Nothing that needed soil could live in these mountains; soil couldn't last long when it was floated away each night by the cooling drizzle that washed the planet when the Great Light was gone.
And now there was not even sand to register Rahn's tracks. Which way would he go? The easiest way, of course, Sindi answered herself. Whichever way that was, that would be the path she must take.
The path led over barren rock then angled higher and higher toward the summits of the peaks which loomed around her, giant orags, like broken teeth sticking out of a dead skull.
The deest was beginning to give out. His breath was short, and his strength seemed scarcely sufficient to hold up the weight of his own body, much less that of the girl on his back. Finally, Sindi dismounted and began to lead the tired animal. Her high-heeled riding boots were poor equipment for climbing across the bare boulders of the mountain, but she knew it would be even worse without them.
The daylight was beginning to fade again by the time she decided to sit and rest. How had Rahn gone on this far? She didn't know, but she knew that only a driving passion could push him on this far—an inverted passion, a passion that pushed him away from her instead of pulling him toward her.
She slumped down on a nearby crag of black basaltic rock and put her head in her arms, wishing gloomily that she had had the good sense to run off with Rahn when the idea had first been suggested to her. If she had, none of this would have—
Chunk!
Sindi jerked her head up and looked around her in the fading light. What had made the noise?
The faint purr of a deest reached her ears. And then she knew.
She climbed to the top of a nearby boulder and looked around. There, only a few dozen yards away, was another deest, grazing peacefully. But there was no rider. The saddle had been removed.
Apparently Rahn, knowing he could go no further with the animal, had relieved it of its burden and set it free. And it could have taken place only a few minutes before, Sindi reasoned—else the deest would have made its way farther down the mountains, where there was grass to eat and soft sod on which to lie.
Now, the deest seemed to be merely waiting for its master to return. Rahn couldn't have left it very long ago.
Sindi took everything she had and put it into the pack on her back. Then, pulling the saddle off her deest, she slapped the animal on the rump.
"Move off, fella. Go home. Smith is going to be looking for you."
The deest trotted off. Sindi started up the rocky incline, keeping her eyes open for places where Rahn had disturbed the rockfalls, searching for his footprints in the gravel.
Something had been driving Rahn, all right. He had wanted so badly to escape, to run away to Vashcor, that he had taken this insane route over the mountains.
The route that she, just as insanely, was following.
She kept moving, trying to ignore the pain in her feet from the high heels of the riding boots she was wearing.
Upward, upward, as blisters formed on the soles of her feet. Upward.
And all the time she climbed, with each weary shove of foot against ground, she knew she was following Rahn into the place where neither of them really wanted to go—the one place where they could finally be free from the constricting network of age-old Nidorian customs and ways that bound them.
The one place where they could find peace together.
The Halls of Death.
V
The pale, colorless glow of the Lesser Light made the rocks seem like great lumps of bread dough as Sindi climbed. She moved higher, higher—
And suddenly, she realized she had heard a noise, had been hearing it for the past several minutes without paying any particular notice. She stopped climbing, to still the sound of her boots crunching against the gravel.
For a moment she could hear nothing; then the sound came again. A hum. A buzz. What was it? It was directly ahead, and it definitely was not the sound of someone climbing.
She listened for a few minutes more; reaching no answer, she resumed her climb.
Several minutes later she saw a flickering light not far ahead. Then, when she came over the edge of a little outcropping, she saw something that was so totally —alien to her that it took a long time even partially to understand it.
It was a plain, a broad, flat plain. Acres and acres of ground had been levelled and smoothed and covered with concrete-like rock. And all around the edge were colored lights, some green, some red, some yellow, some white. Close to the edge nearest her were little buildings with lights on them and inside them.
What could this mean, she wondered. Who would build anything up here?
She stood for what seemed to her like a long time, trying to make sense out of what she saw. It was not until her eyes perceived something moving that she was jerked suddenly back to reality.
A squad of men was marching out of the darkness of the craggy rocks and heading through the lighted area toward the cluster of little buildings. Sindi frowned down at them for a second and then had to stifle a little scream.
They were Earthmen! That was unmistakable. And they were holding a Nidorian, forcing him to go with them to the buildings near the edge of the great field. Sindi knew who that Nidorian had to be; there was only one other in the Mountains of the Morning.
She acted almost without thinking.
As rapidly and as silently as she could, she ran toward the cluster of buildings to which the Earthmen were guiding Rahn. They had taken him inside by the time she got there.