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They were still following him. For him, this dead city was not a
proscripted sanctuary. Or if it ever had been, it was no longer, since he
had killed the two guards.
He stood up, as soundlessly as he could. All his muscles were aching; he
felt as soft and helpless as an overripe melon. The shuffling noise stopped
at once.
They were already close enough to see him!
He knew that he could vanish quickly enough into any of the tomblike
buildings around him, and evade them for a while as deftly as any rat. They
probably knew this labyrinth little better than he did, and the sound of
their shuffling did not suggest that there were many of them-surely not a
large enough force to search a whole city for a man only a third as big as
a Chandalese. And they would have to respect taboos that he could scamper
past out of simple ignorance.
But if he took that way, he would have to abandon his gear. He could carry
his medical kit easily enough, but that was less important to him now than
the space suit and its ancillary oxygen bottles-both heavy and clumsy, and
both, furthermore, painted white. As long as he could drag them 109
A Dusk of Idols
with him in the tick shell, their whiteness would be masked to some extent;
but if he had to run with them, he would surely be brought down.
In the last remains of the evening, he stood cautiously forward and inched
the sledge towards the centre of the plaza, clenching the spear
precariously against his side under one armpit, his gun in his other hand.
Behind him, something went, scuffle ... rustle....
As he had seen on arrival, the broad-mouthed well in the centre of the
plaza, before the house of the dead and damned priest-chief, was not
flanked by the totems he had been taught to expect. Where they should be
jutted only two grey and splintered stumps, as though the poles had been
pushed over by brute force and toppled into the abyss. On the other side of
the well, a stone beast-an anah?-stared forever downward with blind eyes,
ready to rend any soul who might try to clamber up again from Hell.
As it might try to do; for a narrow, rail-less stone stairway, slimy and
worn, spiralled around the well into the depths.
Around the mouth of the well, almost impossible to see, let alone
interpret, in the last glimmers, was a series of bas-reliefs, crudely and
hastily cut; he could detect the rawness of the sculpturing even under the
weathering of the stone and the moss.
He went cautiously down the steps a little way to look at them. With no
experience whatsoever of Chandalese graphic conventions, he knew that he
had little chance of understanding them even had he seen them in full
daylight. Nevertheless, it was clear that they told a history ... and, it
seemed to him, a judgment. This city had been condemned, and its totems
toppled, because it had been carrying on some kind of congress with the
Abyss.
He climbed back to the surface of the plaza, pulling his nose thoughtfully.
They were still following him, that was sure. But would they follow him
down there? It might be a way to get to the other side of the dead city
which would 110
A Dusk of Mok
promise him immunity-or at least, a temporary sanctuary of an inverted kind.
He did not delude himself that he could live down there for long. He would
have to wear the space suit again, and breathe nothing but the oxygen in
the white bottles. He could still keep by him the field medical kit with
which he had been planning to re-enrich his opinion of himself, and save a
planet; but even with this protection he could not for long breathe the air
and drink the water of the pit. As for food, that hardly mattered, because
his air and water would run out much sooner.
Let it be said that Naysmith was courageous. He donned the space suit
again, and began the descent, lowering his tick-shell coracle before him on
a short, taut tether. Bump, bump, bump went the shell down the steps ahead
of him, teetering on its back ridge, threatening to slip sidewise and fall
into the well at every irregularity in the slimy old platforms. Then he
would stop in the blackness and wait until he could no longer hear it
rocking. Then down again: bump, bump, bump; step, step, step. Behind him,
the butt of the spear scraped against the wall; and once the point lodged
abruptly in some chink and nearly threw him.
He had his chest torch going, but it was not much help; the slimy walls of
the well, seemed to soak up the light, except for an occasional delusive
reflection where a rill of seepage oozed down amid the nitre. Down, down,
down.
After some centuries, he no longer expected to reach the bottom. There was
nothing left in his future but this painful descent. He was still not
frightened; only numb, exhausted, beyond caring about himself, beyond
believing in the rest of the universe.
Then the steps stopped, sending him staggering in the suit. He touched the
wall with a glove-he imagined that he could feel its coldness, though of
course he could notand stood still. His belt radios brought him in nothing
but a sort of generalized echo, like running water.
III
A Dusk of Idols
Of course. He flashed the chest light around, and saw the Grand Sewer of
Chandala.
He was standing on what appeared to be a wharf made of black basalt, over
the edge of which rushed the black waters of an oily river, topped with
spinning masses of soapy froth. He could not see the other side, nor the
roof of the tunnel it ran in-only the sullen and ceaseless flood, like a
cataract of ink. The wharf itself had evidently been awash not long since,
for there were still pools standing sullenly wherever the black rock had
been worn down; but now the surface of the river was perhaps a foot below
the level of the dock.
He looked up. Far aloft, he saw a spot of blue-black sky about the size of
a pea, and gleaming in it, one reddish star. Though he was no better judge
of distance than any other surgeon or any other man who spends his life
doing close work, he thought he was at least a mile beneath the surface. To
clamber back up there would be utterly beyond him.
But why a wharf? Who would be embarking on this sunless river, and why? It
suggested that the river might go towards some other inhabited place ... or
some place, that had once been inhabited. Maybe the Chandalese had been
right in condemning the city to death for congress with the pit-and if that
Other Place were inhabited even now, it was probably itself underground,
and populated by whatever kind of thing might enjoy and prosper by living
in total darkness by the side of a sewer-
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