Swiftly, like a wraith of light she ran from the dais to the doorway where Roal and Shorty waited. "Here are your men, a hundred and more. I'll show you the chamber of the Thousand Minds."
Roal nodded. "We're with you."
He ran behind her, letting her remain far enough in the lead so that she was like an elusive, darting dream inspiring the cursing spacemen who roared out of the tavern room in a surging tide. Most of them were in poor shape as fighting men, Roal knew. Their minds were sodden with drink and some with harmeena, perhaps. But each represented a gun that could be turned against the Thousand Minds.
The passage turned abruptly at right angles into a darkened corridor. Something was wrong in that corridor, Roal knew instantly. He knew it should not be black. He sensed that the light tubes were still illumined. The farther they went, however, the more dense the blackness became. It was like a living, smothering essence that enveloped them and cloaked their souls.
Roal heard sounds of dismay from the spacemen behind. There were murmurings against going further.
"Alayna is in there!" Roal shouted.
At that moment there came the sound of her voice raised again in the song that she had sung in the tavern. Its dream of life and hope buoyed them on into the blind darkness.
What the blackness could be Roal could not guess. It was not merely absence of light. There was light coming from the tubes, but this blackness literally consumed all light before it reached the eyes.
That it was a manifestation of the Thousand Minds he did not doubt, but it did not seem to be harmful—at least so far.
Then abruptly the blackness exploded into light—searing, livid radiance that stabbed their eyes with even greater blindness. Roal flung an arm before his eyes and halted before that radiance. There was no heat, but the light was the very antithesis of the darkness that had gone before.