On Farree inched until he was within touching distance of the wall. For a moment he hesitated. To his eyes it was so firm a barrier that he could not believe it was illusion only.
He put out his hand and his palm met solid substance. But it would be necessary for him to test it fully from one border of the sunken roadway to the other.
Edging along, he began at the outer side, Toggor clawing along beside his hand. Not here – nor here – nor – He stopped with a gasp of astonishment and fear. Before he touched the fourth time, Toggor was gone. One moment he had been there brushing the side of Farree's hand and the next he had disappeared!
Frantically the hunchback struck the wall at the same point where he was sure the smux had vanished. There was a solid surface right enough, but there was also a crack through which he could feel a slight stir of cold air. Quickly he traced that crack. It ran only for a short distance, but where it ended there was a second crack, this ascending vertically. He returned and felt his way back, found another vertical crack. There was certainly a sealed opening, perhaps a door. He thumped it, hoping for some give in it. There was none. Perhaps he was too near the ground to move it, or perhaps it was sealed past any of their forcing!
He lay with his head close to the crack and tried to search out Toggor with the mind touch. The return was very faint, as if the smux answered from some great distance, but at least he was alive and within, though Farree would not have believed that crack wide enough to admit him.
Still lying with his head against the wall, he mind sent his discovery to the Lady Maelen. The rainbow of the third ring washed over him, brightening those flecks of glitter in the rock. In fact, as he glanced up the wall against which he now lay, he could see that the speckles were drawing together to form a dim pattern, or perhaps awaking one which had been deliberately set there generations ago.
"I come." That was the Lady Maelen.
Farree turned his head a little and saw her, lying belly fast to the stone, as he had, and pulling herself forward a few inches at a time. Even so, it was not long until she took his place by the unseen door as he edged back to give her room.
Her hands went out in a wider sweep than his could equal and then she nodded.
"It is true. There is a door here and – " She lay now on her back and looked up at the surface of the wall where those particles appeared to move together and outline to form shapes of their own. "There is here an illusion set. But, by the Third Ring, 0 Sotrath, to Thee thanks of heart and mind! By this Third Ring of Thine we can see!"
She began to hum, so faint a sound that it was hardly as loud as the clatter of Toggor's claws on the rock. Farree once more felt the power of that singing.
The glittering bits waxed brighter – taking on the rainbow hues of the ring itself, now red, now blue, now green, now yellow – or a swirling mixture of them all together. But as they gathered to make lines and curves on the surface of the wall, Lord-One Krip sent a thrusting thought.
"They are aboard the flitter – and it is rising in this direction!"
That warning from below was as sharply clear as if it had been shouted aloud. Yet the Lady Maelen did not move, nor was there a falter in the low sound which issued from her lips. More and more did the pattern clear on the door in the rainbow sparks of light. And that light now outlined the portal itself. It promised an opening of a size to let the three of them enter abreast.
Now the noise of the flitter was loud enough to drown out the sound of her song even though he lay beside her as flat as he could push his body. He did not turn his head to watch the enemy – not yet – for the wonder of that design of lights held him entranced.
"They come."
The second quick warning was not needed, for the drone of the flitter rolled above the cliff and echoed and reechoed from the rocks thereabout. Now Farree did lever himself up and face about in time to see the forward, upward sweep of the craft. It might well be that the two of them had already been sighted and were easy game for those on board. He waited, shrinking inside, for the flash of a laser beam to cut out at them.
The light of the third ring was a mist growing ever stronger. Perhaps in that they were not as good targets as Farree feared. He was aware of movement beside him, of the Lady Maelen getting to her knees and then her feet, still facing the closed door in the cliff as if she had all the time in the world to deduce its secret and need fear no interruption in that task.
He scrambled up in turn, his back now to her and the door, facing outward. Small as he was, he could not protect her whole body with his, but he would do the best he could.
The flitter was heading straight for them, as if it meant to crash against the cliff and crush the both of them. But at the last possible moment it swerved in an almost perpendicular climb that carried it up to the mountaintop beyond.
Surely they had been sighted! Farree could not understand why they had not been cut down, at least with a stunner. Perhaps those thought to let Maelen open the way for them and then take them.
He glanced back at the woman: Her arms spread wide, she was touching with the tips of her fingers this and then that of the circling patterns of color her singing had brought forth. But there was no answer. At last her mind send, as strong as Lord-One Krip's warning, rang out.
"Come! This is Thassa sealed and in this body it will not answer to me. Come!"
He sprinted up the road which had been such a laborious climb for the other two and faced the doorway between Maelen and the stones. She set her own hands upon the backs of his and moved them from place to place in a swinging pattern. At that moment Farree had little hope that Maelen's suggestion would bring any success. He turned his head upward as far as he might to see where the flitter had vanished in that last upward swoop.
The sound of the craft still echoed loudly in his ears, and he could only hear at intervals the hum of song that Maelen still wrought to open the door.
Back and forth Lord-One Krip's hands moved under her control. Then —at last – there was a grating. The sound of stone scraping stone – of something long held moving again. A crack appeared, not as the thin line the ring outlined but as a darker space. Forward moved that layer of wall and Maelen pulled Lord-One Krip to the right side, Farree taking three steps to their one to join them. Outward it moved but not far, as if the disuse of centuries had so frozen it that there could be no real release. But there was an area of dark. The Lady Maelen, dropping her hold on her companion, squeezed through it, Krip following closely on her heels, and after them Farree.
His hump scraped the stone in spite of his turning sidewise and the pain of it made him gasp and stumble. Then he was in the dark where only a pale radiance of the ring reached in from the outer world.
Maelen had swung about, and Lord-One Krip reached out a long arm and jerked Farree to stand beside him as the hum broke into words – a chant which sealed the entrance to this place of darkness, leaving them in a lightless place of age-old stone.
Then there was the gleam of light again. Far softer, and more limited as to reach, then the radiance without. However, they could soon see after a fashion by the small globe balanced on the Lady Maelen's palm. Farree felt a clutch on his breeches and reached down to scoop up Toggor.
The Lady Maelen tossed the globe of light and Lord-One Krip caught it deftly. She was breathing in small, fast gasps as if she had been running, and there were beads of sweat trickling down her face like tears.
Lord-One Krip held out the globe and swept it from side to side, but all they could see were rock walls shading off into clouding shadow and a dark opening before them where perhaps the road they followed continued on into the heart of the mountain.