“Let’s say that there’s a cave mouth somewhere on the face of this cliff,” Keselo continued, “or maybe even down at the foot of the cliff, for that matter. And just suppose that the cave went through the mountains here to someplace on down the ravine. If the enemies wanted to hide that cave from us, this stairway would be the perfect way to conceal it. First they’d build a kind of corridor that’d lead to the cave, and then they’d cover the corridor by building this stairway right over the top of it.”
“Keselo, you’re talking about something that would have taken hundreds of years to build,” Rabbit scoffed.
“Let him talk, Rabbit,” Longbow said. “Time doesn’t mean anything to the creatures of the Wasteland, and this notion of his explains what’s happening down there. Go ahead, Keselo.”
“All right,” Keselo continued. “The stairway hides the corridor—or tunnel—that leads to the cave mouth. The next question is where does that cave go?” He snapped his fingers. “Obviously! It goes right straight through the mountain and comes out somewhere on down the ravine—where the enemies could come out between our fort here and Lattash.”
“Like maybe right behind those old villages that nobody seems to be living in?” Rabbit suggested.
“Of course!” Keselo exclaimed. “Red-Beard told me that every now and then somebody in his tribe gets curious and tries to explore one of those ruins, but those people almost never come back.”
“I think that maybe we’d better go have a look,” Longbow said bleakly. “How close is the nearest one of those ruins?”
“Red-Beard said that there’s one a few miles down on the north side of the ravine,” Keselo replied. “He told me that there’s a dead snag on the rim just above it and that the snag sticks out far enough that we’d be able to see it if we were on the north bench. Rabbit and I saw several on the south side while we were coming up the ravine, but they all seemed to have been built in places that wouldn’t be visible if you happen to be directly under them.”
“We’ve had some very interesting notions here, but they’re just guesswork. Let’s see if we can find anything to back those guesses up.” Longbow’s face was bleak, and his tone of voice seemed tense.
“Did Red-Beard give you any idea of how extensive these caves might be?” Longbow asked Keselo as they started down the north bench in the bright spring sunshine.
“He didn’t really go into too much detail,” Keselo replied. “I got the feeling that he’s not really curious enough about caves to go exploring—or possibly the caves make him sort of nervous. I’ve heard that some people have problems with enclosed places. I sort of got the impression from what he said that the caves are quite extensive. From what we’ve seen so far, I’d say that there’s a strong possibility that the enemies are using the caves to slip behind us so that they can block us off.”
“Well, all we know for certain is that a sizeable number of our enemies disappeared when they reached the foot of the stairway,” Longbow replied. “These ruins are a possibility. We may have to come up with others, but let’s look into this possibility first.”
Keselo looked on down the ravine. “I think that might be the dead snag Red-Beard told me about,” he told the others, pointing up toward the rim.
“Let’s stop here,” Longbow said. “If there are enemies in that ruin, we don’t want to come up right below them.”
The wall of the ravine was steep, certainly, but it wasn’t a sheer rock face such as the cliff at the edge of the Wasteland. They climbed slowly to avoid making any noise that might alert anyone—or anything—in the ancient stone ruins.
They angled up the side of the ravine until they were a short distance from the overhanging ledge above the village. Longbow stopped, his eyes searching. “There,” he whispered, pointing at a grassy protrusion that lay between them and the ancient ruin. “If we move carefully, we can take cover in the tall grass without alerting anyone that we’re there.”
They climbed carefully up the back side of the knoll, and as they neared the top, Keselo motioned to the others and crawled through the grass until the ruins were in plain sight. Then he crawled back to rejoin Rabbit and Longbow. “We’ll be just a bit above and a little to one side,” he whispered. “If there’s anybody there, we should be able to see them if they come out into the open.”
“Let’s go watch,” Longbow whispered back. “If our suspicions turn out to be right, it won’t be long before there’ll be too many enemies in the village to hide.”
They crawled along through the rustling grass until they could see most of the village lying slightly below them.
“It looks almost like a fort instead of a village, doesn’t it?” Rabbit suggested quietly. “That front wall’s fairly flat, except for the places where part of it crumbled away and rolled on down the hill. Maybe it really was a fort, and part of that front wall got knocked down during a war.” He frowned. “But if that flat front wall was solid, how did the people who lived there get down to the river for water?”
“If my suspicion is anywhere close to what that fort really is, nobody ever actually lived there,” Keselo said. “The only purpose it serves is to conceal the mouth of the cave. Red-Beard said that the Dhralls avoid those ruins because they believe that they’re cursed—or maybe haunted. If it was never a real village, there wouldn’t have been any need for water or for any level ground for growing food.” Then Keselo saw a brief flicker of movement in the ruin below. “There!” he hissed. “Over near the west side of the ruin.”
As the three of them watched, more and more furtively moving figures came out of the shadows at the rear of the ancient ruin. The figures were all cloaked and hooded and very small, but many of them moved awkwardly, half bent over, as if standing erect was strange for them. Then one of them barked a command in a raspy voice that sent a chill through Keselo. The hooded figures all stopped, and four of them gathered atop one of the ruined buildings.
The one which had previously spoken reached up and pushed back its hood with a gleaming black appendage that looked much like the claw of a crab. The face of the creature was rounded at the top; it had two waving things protruding from its forehead, and its large eyes bulged.