It was having gone but a short way beyond that they saw the Kar-chee.
There were a number of them — six, perhaps, or seven — and they stood upon their four lower limbs with their huge two upper limbs in the folded manner common to them, as though engaged in silent meditation and prayer. Only one of them looked up as the people came suddenly out of the woods, and this one made no motion other than the lifting of its head. Liam turned back on a diagonal course; Lors did the same; so did Duro, Fateem, and the others… except Rickar. He, as though unseeing, continued walking as he had been. Liam snapped his fingers. Clicked his tongue. Said, finally, low-voiced, “Rickar—”
A second Kar-chee lifted its wedge-shaped head. And a third. And Rickar gasped and halted. He looked wildly around him. What happened next was probably attributable to the fact that his whole mind and body told him to run but that he remembered — now! — Liam’s words of warning in the cavern: “Don’t stumble. Don’t drop any of these”—the blue detonation points. — ”Don’t run — but if you do run, lay them down — gently — first, and just leave them lie…” So he bent forward and deposited the sack he was carrying, and turned to run away after his friends.
And a fourth Kar-chee lifted his head, and a fifth.
And Rickar took two long steps. And saw that his friends were not running at all, but walking at a steady pace. He walked after them, perhaps half-a-dozen paces more. Then he realized what he had done. And he tried to undo it. He turned around and went back.
The act was confused, but it was not cowardly, and he might in the end have gotten away with it — if he had walked. But he did not. He ran. He ran back and he stooped. And the Kar-chee broke out of their own introspective detachment, or whatever mood it was which had been holding them fast; the Kar-chee were all around him and the Kar-chee were upon him and held him fast. One low and mournful cry he uttered; then he was still.
It was but a moment before they had the sack and knew what was in it. Perhaps they might have killed him then and there… but, although the people had seen, all of them, the Kar-chee cuffing the man in the cavern back to be baited by dragons, neither then nor anywhere else had they seen, nor heard — save in legend — of Kar-chee actually killing any human being themselves. This they seemed to leave to the dragons. And there seemed to be no dragons about.
Rickar’s friends looked on to see him dragged away — but for a moment only. They dared not use the blue warheads, of course — but the brothers Rowen still had in their pouches conventional crossbow bolts. At Liam’s nod they shot once… twice… so that the bolts landed in front of the retreating Kar-chee. The Kar-chee hesitated — but they did not stop. So Lors and Duro loaded again. And this time they loosed their bolts into the bodies of the two Kar-chee carrying Rickar between them, dangling. He fell. The Kar-chee stumbled. And then — and this was curious — it was as though the same train of thought now passed through the minds of the Kar-chee, for the one carrying the sack of blue detonators stooped and laid it on the ground; as he was doing so, two others seized Rickar, who had been too dazed to escape. And the others surrounded the injured Kar-chee; and all of them began to run.
They were heavy-laden, but they had four legs to run with, and the recocking of the heavy crossbows could not be done in a second. Then, from far off, but again and again, and each time nearer, came the call — the questing call — of a distant dragon. The people saw the wounded Kar-chee fall, saw the others — Rickar now swinging limply back and forth — race away. And then, at another command from Liam, they turned and walked rapidly off.
Old Gaspar trembled and shook. The quake had not unmanned him as this had. Liam felt for him; he had not realized that the Chief Knower had so much softness in him.
“My son, my only son… what a blow… what a blow,” he repeated. And then, shaking his head, lips trembling and eyes brimming, he asked, “How could he have done it? You—you have lived in ignorance; but he was a Knower. I knew that all was not well with him in his heart and that he lacked proper zeal to fulfill the obvious intentions of Manifest Nature… but still — but still! To engage in the blasphemous futility of resistance—!”
And his wife, old Mother Nor, covered her face with her hand and withdrew, silently, silently shaking her head.
The ark — and the other arks in process of building — had inevitably sustained some damage in the upheavals. Gaspar and his council of elders now set to work at quickened speed to repair, finish stocking up, and be gone. “For already the work of punishment and destruction has begun!”—thus, their cry.
But Liam had not quite the same notion.
“There’s no doubt that the Kar-chee had begun to put this place through the usual process. But I doubt that they’re ready for it yet. In fact, I’m confident that they’re not,” he told his small band of followers.
“Do you think that what’s happened has been just natural phenomena?” one of them asked, somewhat doubtfully.
Liam shook his head. “No. I’m sure that we set it off ourselves by firing the blue thunderheads down below, there! That cavern? — and the corridor we saw leading down from it? From the looks and the smell of it it seems to me that the Kar-chee were mining or sapping or perhaps just sampling and exploring down there. But likely not just—did you see how wary they and their Devil-dragons all were when the door on it opened? How they looked up and how they all kept on looking till the door closed?”
Lors said, softly, “And we blew it open again! We dropped the fire into the tub of oil…”
“Something like that. But I’ve been wondering and wondering, now… It does seem to me that two fire-charges shouldn’t have done all of this. And the Devils weren’t ready to have it done, either — else they wouldn’t have been down below in danger of being crushed to death like grubs or beetles. No…
“I think there must be another explanation, and I think that this is it: the Kar-chee had made that corridor, that shaft, to tap the hidden fires beneath the earth. And they planned to drive it even deeper and they must, I think, have had a great store of the blue fire-heads in that shaft. What drew their attention and kept it there? Eh? Danger!”
Lors repeated, “We dropped the fire into the tub of oil…”
The conversation was not slow, leisurely, philosophical. It was quick, excited, grim. And it turned, abruptly, onto another tack, as Liam opened his shirt. “Look at this,” he said, drawing something out.
This was a something for which they had no name or word, having never before seen it nor anything like it. They looked at it as he had directed and made sounds of awe or bewilderment as it changed shape in his hands: he drew it out… he pushed it back into a smaller compass than before… he showed them to what extent it was pliable in his hands… how now it became globular and now cubical and now it was flat… And with each change, and, it seemed — if one looked quickly and closely — even without each change of shape, the designs upon it changed… changed… subtly changed…
“What is this?” Fateem asked, whispering.
“I am not totally sure,” His voice had dropped, too. “But I am almost so — I believe this is what was called by men, a map! But it is not a man-made map, it is a Devil-made map — a Kar-chee map! I’ve always, as long as I’ve known that such things had ever been, wanted one. But not one like those very few I’d seen, ancient and worn and crumbling and of no practical use because they showed things as they had been, hundreds of years ago—”