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"They must move this wall somehow," Ishmael said to Namalee.
He pushed at various places and passed the torch over every inch of the wall and the adjacent areas of the corridor. But he could find nothing that might serve as a button or an activator to swing the wall on a pivot. He was convinced that this had to be the ma
"Perhaps," Namalee said, "the mechanisms are all on the other side?"
"I hope not," he said, "though that would be one way of making sure that intruders did not get into the temple even if they escaped the guardians. To return after feeding the beasts, though, the priests would have to notify those on the other side of the wall to operate the mechanism. I suppose they could do so through the little holes."
Ishmael returned to the head of the stairs and looked down in the light of the torch Karkri held. It was true. The great shell of the beast was tilted upward, and the massive legs with the claws of stone were gripping the edges of a step. Slowly, and with a grinding noise, the bottom of the shell scraping against the steps, the monster pulled itself up. Its head was extended out of the shell and its jaws were opened wide. Ishmael went carefully down the steep steps until he was close enough to see into the wide yawn of the mouth. The eyeball thing inside pulsed much more rapidly than the first time he had seen it. And the arrow and spear seemed to have been absorbed into the organ. Possibly their wood had provided it with fuel. The beast's life must be comparable to a low and slow-burning fire under a tea kettle. The energy was low, but even a small fire will eventually make a kettle boil.
Ishmael went down several more steps until he was just out of reach of the beast if it should extend its neck to its limit. The head turned slightly to each side as if the thing wanted to give each of the gray granite eyes a view of its victim. Ishmael retreated one step and to do so had to turn his back on the thing. He grabbed the edge of the high riser and pulled; Namalee shrieked. Without looking back he pulled himself up swiftly and then turned.
The thing had come up more swiftly than he would have thought possible. A paw reached up and the dead-looking gray-rock claws hooked into the edge of the step. The second paw hooked, and the legs bent to pull the great body up. The hind legs spread out to brace itself. The neck slid back into the shell, but the mouth remained wide open.
Ishmael kept on retreating while the stone thing clambered after him. When he was near the top, Ishmael stopped. Once that monster came over the edge and had a stable footing on the corridor, it could advance on the party. And, due to the narrowness of the corridor, not more than two men could fight it at one time.
Ishmael turned and said, "Hurry up! Try to find how to get out, or..."
He didn't need to finish. The others could see what might happen. Karkri came to his side and looked down. He said, "The beast has a precarious hold."
"There's only one way to keep it from getting up here," Ishmael said.
They went down four steps and stood just out of reach of the head if the neck should extend further. They whispered together and then, as they saw the beast reach out its right paw to grip the next step, they leaped outward with all their force.
With a speed that neither man had reckoned on because they considered the creature to be of stone, and stone had to be slow, the neck thrust the head at them. It was fortunate only that the beast chose Karkri and not Ishmael. If it had been the other way, that head, launched on a neck as swift as a line singing out at the end of a harpoon deep in a whale just struck, would have closed its jaws on Ishmael.
But they ground down like millstones on Karkri's feet as he leaped forward.
Ishmael's feet struck the shell just beside the right side of the neck.
Karkri screamed as his leg bones were ground together and his back struck the edge of a step.
The monster, borne by the impact of the two bodies, rose up and backward. Its hind feet slipped and, still holding the screaming Karkri in its jaws, it fell back. Karkri was flipped up and over through the air as if he were a weight on the end of a cracked whip. He described an arc and smashed into the steps below the monster, which then fell upon him on its back.
Ishmael leaped down again and drove his feet against the side of the beast, which had turned as if on a pivot on the high part of the shell. His driving legs spun it on around and it slipped on the edge of another step and crashed down the steps. At the bottom it turned over and fell upon its back, and there it stayed, kicking its short legs, unable to get back onto its feet, just like a tortoise of flesh.
This time Karkri was almost on top of the beast. He lay face-down while blood ran from him down the steps and formed a pool around the shell of the beast's back.
Ishmael took a few seconds to determine that Karkri was past saving. He climbed back up the steps and returned to the wall. Though the beast had made a great crashing noise when it went down the steps, the noise had apparently not been heard on the other side of the wall. The chanting was louder than before.
Everything that they could think to do had been done, and still they had discovered no means for opening the wall. They could not just sit there and wait because they would starve to death. Moreover, step two of the plan would be set into motion, and if Ishmael's band was within the temple the raid would be a failure. It still was not too late to return to the boats and try to enter from the upper part of the ledge. But Ishmael had no heart for that and neither, he was certain, did any of his band. Surely there was a key to entrance into the temple. It was just that they were ignorant or blind.
He looked through one of the shafts in the wall. There was a dim light on the other side the source of which he could not see. About twenty or so feet beyond the wall was another gray stone wall. The voices seemed to be coming from the right. He doubted that the chanters were in the room he was looking into, but the voices had to be close to penetrate the shafts.
Ishmael clamped his teeth together as if he were biting down on time to shake it, as a terrier shakes a rat.
"Perhaps we should put out the torches," Namalee said. "If they should go by the wall and see the light through the shafts.. ."
Ishmael cursed to himself because he had not thought of that. He ordered the torches doused with a heavy powder which one man carried in a pouch for this purpose. Another man carried a small bag of oil with which to soak the torches and matches of weed and chemicals derived from some ground plants. Ishmael checked that they still had these before he allowed the flames to be put out.
Then they were in darkness and silence. The voices had stopped.
Ishmael put his ear to a shaft. After a while he heard a cough. Despite his situation, he smiled. There was something comfortable and comforting in that cough. Doubtless the congregation, or choir, was silent while waiting for a final benediction or statement of dismissal. And, as always happened in a church meeting, someone coughed.
The earth never stopped shaking and the seas were dried up, the sun was a giant dying and the moon was falling, and most of life had taken to the air, which was itself disappearing. But human nature had not changed as swiftly as the world in which it existed.
Then he lost the smile as someone shouted a few words and there was the sound of many feet shuffling and a murmur of voices. The meeting was breaking up.
A minute later a torch brightened the room on the other side of the wall, feet shuffled, and two men talking in low voices, one holding a torch, went by. They were robed and hooded in a scarlet material and would have passed for the monks of his day if their faces had not been tattooed with bright greens and reds.