As they struggled on the threshold of that vile room, Altiokis became once again a fat man, crazy and sweating with fear. Sun Wolf slung the man inside and crashed the door shut with all his strength. It heaved under the weight thrown against it. He shot the bolts and stood hanging onto them, as he had done before, feeling them jerk and pull under his hands with desperate spells of opening. The two nuuwa jiggled from foot to foot, and he threw the barriers of his mind against them, keeping them from understanding, wondering if it would be worth it, just this once, to yield to the drag in his mind and order them away.
Then the screaming started. The fight to free the door bolts ceased; he heard Altiokis blundering around the room, shrieking with agony, hitting the wall, and falling. Sun Wolf leaned against the door, sickened by the sound, remembering those endless seconds and counting them down.
He had been in enough dirty fighting to know how to gouge out an eye. He doubted that Altiokis had the knowledge and the resolution to do it or the determination needed to sear the bleeding socket with fire. The brutal action had saved him, but he was sure that he would never—could never—erase from his mind the long seconds that it had taken him to nerve himself to do it.
He knew by the screaming and by the change in the behavior of the nuuwa when what remained of Altiokis’ mind was gone. He turned the nuuwa’s attention to the opposite walls and walked nonvisible, between them and out into the Citadel.
The black flames tittered in his mind.
Hearing the yelling confusion that came to him from every corner, he guessed that the nuuwa, released from control, had become as they were outside Altiokis’ domains—randomly rampaging, turning on the troops beside whom they had fought.
He plunged down the corridors, finding his way back to the entrance into the ditch from whence he had come.
The doors were barred. He could hear the slam of a battering rams against them and, faintly, Tarrin’s ringing voice. But the defenders, clutched in a comer, fighting the small swarm of nuuwa that had suddenly turned upon them, were in no shape to prevent him from dragging back the bars.
Two of the nuuwa broke away from the main group and shambled toward him, groaning and slavering, as the first blazing crack of daylight opened through the doors. He started to order them away and stopped himself. His brain seemed to be swimming in dark, murmuring liquid, his thoughts struggling against insistent, alien urges.
Men poured through the gate around him. He found himself clutching the doorposts for support. Then hands were gripping his arms. A voice called him back to himself.
“Chief! What in the name of the Mother happened to you?”
He clutched Starhawk’s shoulders, holding to her as if to the last spar of sanity in the sea in which he felt himself sinking. “That Thing—the Thing in the room...”
“The Hole?”
His eye focused. He noted distantly, automatically, that his depth perception was gone and that he’d have to retrain to compensate. The slanted light of late afternoon that streamed through the gate showed him Starhawk’s face, grimy, bloody, and unsurprised. Her gray eyes were dear, looking into his. Though there was no reflection of it in her face, he realized that he himself must have been a choice sight. Trust the Hawk, he thought, not to ask stupid questions until there’s time to answer them.
“How did you know?”
“The wizard Anyog told me,” she said. He realized he hadn’t seen her in four months; it only seemed like yesterday. “Where is it?”
“Back there. Don’t go near it. Don’t go in that room with it...”
His hands left patches of bloody dirt where they rested on her shoulders. She shook her head. “Is there any room near it? Around it—to put blasting powder from the mines? We were bringing some up to take care of the gate.”
“Blasting powder?” The draw on his mind was growing stronger. He wasn’t sure he had heard.
“To blow out the walls,” she explained. “Daylight will destroy it.” She put a hand to his face, slimy with the scum of battle, gentle as a lover’s. “Wolf, are you all right?”
She wasn’t asking about his eye or the claw marks and sword cuts that covered his body as if he had rolled in broken glass. She knew his physical toughness. Her fears for him went deeper than that.
“Daylight,” he said thickly. “Then... The hut was built at night.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
He didn’t bother to ask her how she knew. A darkness seemed to be edging its way into his thoughts, and he shook his head, as if to clear it. “Altiokis’ forces are still holding that part of the Citadel,” he said. “You’ll have to fight your way in.”
“Is the room itself guarded?”
He shook his head.
“Then we’ll make it. We can leave a long fuse...”
Others had come up to them. The battle was raging past into the corridors. Sheera’s voice gasped, “Chief! Your eye!” Amber Eyes’ hand on his arm was suddenly motherly in spite of the fact that her arms were smeared with blood to the shoulders. A viselike grip that he recognized as Denga Rey’s closed over his elbow, offering support.
Starhawk gave them a rapid precis of what needed to be done. The women nodded, evidently on terms of great friendliness with her. Sun Wolf wondered suddenly how Starhawk happened to be there in the first place, then discarded the thought as irrelevant. It was true that in the crisis of battle, the most appalling coincidences were commonplace.
Amber Eyes said, “We can’t leave a long fuse, though. It would have to be long enough to let us get clear of the Citadel. In that time, someone would find it.”
“You’re right,” the Hawk agreed.
“Could we wait until the battle’s over?” Sheera asked. “By nightfall we should have the place. Altiokis’ forces are holed up in the upper part of the tower—once they got clear of their own nuuwa, that is. Then we could—”
“No,” Sun Wolf said hoarsely. The Thing—the voice, the urge, whatever it was—he could feel it tearing at the fraying edges of his mind, growing stronger as final exhaustion took its toll on his body. Sunrise tomorrow seemed hideously far away. “It has to be before sunset tonight.”
Amber Eyes and Denga Rey looked at him, deeply troubled, but Starhawk nodded. “He’s right,” she said. “If there’s some kind of living thing, some kind of intelligence in the Hole, we can’t give it the night to work in.”
“We’ve only got about an hour and a half until sunset,” Denga Rey observed doubtfully.
“So we have to work fast. We can stack powder around it. Damned good thing Tarrin had it brought up from the mines to blow the gate or we’d be forever getting it.”
“Yirth could light it from a distance,” Amber Eyes said suddenly. “I’ve seen her light torches and candles just by looking at them. If we could get her out here, then she could light the powder...”
“Get her,” Sheera said.
The lovers vanished in opposite directions. He leaned back against the wall behind him, suddenly weak, his mind drifting. The roar of battle seemed to sink to an unreal whispering.
“Chief!”
He blinked into Starhawk’s frightened face. Somehow, Amber Eyes and Denga Rey were back, and Yirth was with them, standing with Sheera, grouped around him as they had been on the ship. He thought for a moment that he had fainted, but found he was still on his feet, leaning against the stone arch of the gate, the long fosse with its carpet of trampled dead stretching away to both sides.
He shook his head, with a sensation of having lost time. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Starhawk said. By the pale light that came through the gateway beside him, her scarred, fine-boned face looked as calm and cold-blooded as ever, but he could hear the fear in her voice. “You were—you were gone. I talked to you, but it was as if you were listening to something else.”