Kana could only nod in agreement. As arid as the country seemed to be, it must harbor life — enough life to attract the bylls.
Since a fire was out of the question — they dared show no lights — the scouts huddled together behind the wall of their temporary fort. The mountains cut off the light of the sinking sun. In the gloom Kana found himself listening — for what he did not know.
The wind rose again to swoop and wail. But through their hours of travel the Terrans had become so accustomed to its moans that they no longer heeded it. In one of the infrequent intervals of quiet, when the mountain blasts died, Kana listened again. Had he heard — ? But nothing stirred beyond the wall.
They slept in fitful snatches, two of their number on watch in turn. Kana was dreaming when an elbow in his ribs brought him into full wakefulness and Soong's sibilant whisper warmed his ear.
"Look!"
Up and far ahead was a wink of light — a light which flickered to prove that it was no star. And to its left — another! Kana used the lenses. Those were fires right enough — beacons! In all he counted five. And beacons on those heights could only mean that someone was alert to the Terran invasion of this mountain territory. Not the royalists — the flames were not the blue of Llor torches. As he watched one winked and disappeared, then it blinked out again — off and on — in a pattern. There was no mistaking the meaning of that — signals! Would that exchange of information lead to such a one-sided battle as had taken place in the arena they had crossed that day?
"Signals!" Bogate was awake and watching also. "They must have spotted us!"
Kana heard rather than saw the veteran scramble over the wall. A moment later a growl from the dark relayed the other's displeasure. Kana climbed the barrier to look back along the route they had come. He saw then what had brought that grunt out of Bogate. High on the cliffs which walled the canyon was a speck of light. But they had no more than sighted it than it disappeared, not to be seen again. An answer to the signal ahead?
The veteran cleared his throat with a rasp. "Maybe that was `orders received.' " He parroted the official phrase. "Soong, use the speecher. Tell Hansu about those signals — "
"Well," he added a few moments later, "the show must be over for tonight — "
He was right, three of the fires ahead were gone, and the two remaining seemed to be dying. Kana shivered as icy fingers of wind pried within his coat. Were they going to walk into trouble?
"Camp answered," Soong reported out of the dark. "They saw a fire a little ahead of them, but not the others. Told 'em about the byll, too. They're at this end of the bone valley."
"Good enough. Turn in. We'll go on tomorrow."
In the morning Bogate chose the southern fork of the old river for exploration. Since Tharc lay to the south, it was logical to head in that direction. Whether the presence of byll in the other valley influenced his decision, or the fact that the fires they had watched had been to the north were points he did not discuss with the rest of the scouts.
Their new path was clearer of rock slides than any they had found so far and within a half mile Kana noticed an upward slope. They were climbing at last, instead of burrowing at the bottom of rock-walled slashes.
But they had not been an hour on their way before they came upon their first trace of the mountaineers. Luckily their experience with the byll had made them overly cautious and they were constantly alert to any faint indication of the abnormal. Larsen, who was in the lead, stopped abruptly at the edge of a wide, smooth expanse of sand. When Bogate came up the scout pointed to a curious depression in the center of the strip.
Kana, recalling one of Hansu's warnings about the Cos, spoke first:
"Might be a trap — "
Bogate looked from the recruit to the depression. Then he walked away to choose a stone, under the weight of which he staggered, waddling up to plop his burden onto that smooth surface.
There was a crack. Sand and stone together rushed down into a gaping hole. Kana inched up to look. What he saw made his insides twist as his imagination leaped into action. It was a trap, all right, a vicious, deadly trap. And the captive who fell into it would die a lingering death on the spikes artfully planted below.
The Terrans exchanged few words as they crept around the edge of the pit. On the other side Soong reported on the speecher, informing the Horde of this new risk.
From then on their progress slowed to a crawl. Not only must they watch for bylls, but every smooth patch of ground underfoot became suspect. They tested three more such stretches by Bogate's method, to have the last open again into darkness, this time a darkness from which such a frightful stench arose that they made no attempt to examine it closer.
"Do we now journey straight to someone's front door?" Soong shifted the weight of the speecher from one hip to the other.
"If we do — he's the sort who doesn't welcome visitors." Kana's attention was divided between the cliffs which walled in the stream bed and its flooring — death might come suddenly from either direction. And he was the AL man — the one supposed to contact the opposition. But none of the training he had known prepared him for a situation such as this — bare mountains which showed no signs of life — and these unmanned defenses against invaders. You couldn't contact an enemy who wasn't there. The Cos — if Cos they were — plainly pinned their faith on the devices of the weak or few in number — devices which would kill at a distance without involving too closely those who used them. If he could only bring about a meeting, convey to the mountaineers the idea that the Horde, winding its way into their jealously guarded territory, had no quarrel with them — on the contrary was now arrayed against their own ancient enemy, the Llor.
He was reasonably sure that any Cos spying on them would be stationed on the heights. And when the scouts took their break at the end of an hour's advance, he approached Bogate with a plan of his own. The veteran surveyed the tops of the cliffs uneasily.
"I dunno — " He hesitated. "Yeah, if they're spyin' they're up there — I'll grant you that. But they may be miles away — and we can't lie around waitin' for you to prowl, huntin' for somethin' which maybe ain't there. We'll see later — "
Kana had to content himself with that half promise. But the country offered an argument on his behalf not many minutes later. They rounded a curve and found themselves fronted with a wall of rock down which the vanished river must once have crashed in spectacular falls. Bogate waved to Kana.
"Well, here's a place where somebody's gotta climb. Suppose you do it and see what you find. Take Soong with you."
They shucked off their packs, taking only their rifles, and began the ascent — not up the water-worn face of the falls but along the relatively rough cliff to the left. After he finished this enlistment, Kana thought as he crept fly-wise from handhold to handhold, he would be qualified for service with a crack mountaineering Horde.
When they reached the top they faced west again. Here once more was the bed of the stream, but it was narrower than in the canyon below. And not too far ahead the somberness of the rock was broken by patches of yellow-green vegetation which promised moisture.
"There is something — " Soong pivoted slowly, studying the landscape.
Kana sensed what bothered his companion. He, too, felt as if they were under observation. Together they surveyed every foot of the rocky terrain. Nothing moved and the wind tore at them, whirling dust devils before it over the edge of the falls. They were alone in a dead world — and yet something watched! Kana knew it by a twitching between his shoulder blades, a cold crawling which roughened his skin with nervous tension. They were being watched — with a detached, non-human curiosity.