To right and left the serried cliffs stretched out of sight—the edge of the world, so far as beetles knew. If you examined the contour of its rim, you could see how it corresponded point by point to the irregularities of the hilly land on its hither side. Some time, millennia ago, a great fault in the earth's crust had given way, and the unknown lands of the continental interior had been lifted as if on a platform, five hundred feet above the coastal regions. Or perhaps the coast had sunk. Legend attributed the event to the ancients' wars, when, it was said, some unimaginable weapon had cleft the continent asunder....
Dworn perforce slowed his breakneck pace as the ground grew uneven again. He guided his machine with instinctive skill over the ascending slopes and ridges, eyes combing the moon-shadows for the first sign of his people.
Then, a couple of miles ahead, he glimpsed lights. His heart bounded up—then sank with a prescient dismay; there was something wrong—
The fires that winked up there—four, no, five of them, under the very rim just before the cliffs rose sheer—didn't look like campfires. They were unequally spaced, and they flared up and waned oddly by turns, glowing evilly red.
Dworn braked the beetle to a stop on a patch of high ground, and sat straining to discern the meaning of those ominous beacons. To his imagination, rasped raw by expectation and the tension of long travel, they became red eyes of menace, warnings.... He tried the infrared viewer, but it showed no more than he could see with the naked eye. Only ghosts paraded across the screen, ghosts of the folded slopes that rose to the abrupt wall of the Barrier. Nothing seemed moving there; the whole sweep of broken and tumbled landscape appeared dead and lifeless as the moon.
But yonder burned the fires.
Sternly Dworn reminded himself that this night he was mature, a warrior of the proud beetle race. He thrust his fears resolutely aside; there was nothing to do but find out.
The beetle drifted forward, but cautiously now, at a stalking pace. Dworn took advantage of the lie of the land, continually seeking cover as he advanced, to shield him from whatever eyes might be watching from the silent slopes above.
Boulders lay ever more thickly strewn as he neared the Barrier cliffs, and he skirted patches of gravel and loose stones that would have crunched loudly under his wheels. Only occasionally, emerging into the open, he glimpsed his objective, but his sense of direction kept him bearing steadily toward the fires.
Fifteen minutes later, the beetle's blunt nose thrusting from under a shelf of rock that would disguise its outline if anything was watching, its motor noiselessly idling, Dworn knew that his premonitions had not been in vain. He looked out upon a scene that chilled his blood.