by Lee Brackett
into a dark lake, spilling slowly out over a low wide lip of rock. More of the shining child-things were playing there. They joined their fellows, closing the ring tighter around the three women.
'I don't like this,' McLaren said. 'If they'd only make a noise!'
They did, suddenly—a shrill tittering like a blasphemy of childish laughter. Their eyes shone. They rushed in, running wetly along the ledge, reaching up out of the water to claw at ankles, laughing. Inside her tough flat belly Harker's guts turned over.
McLaren yelled and kicked. Claws raked her ankle, spiny needle-sharp things like thorns. Sim ran her spear clean through a golden breast. There were no bones in it. The body was light and membranous, and the blood that ran out was sticky and greenish, like sap. Harker kicked two of the things back in the river, swung her spear like a ball bat and knocked two more off the ledge—they were unbelievably light—and shouted, 'Up there, that high ledge. I don't think they can climb that.'
She thrust McLaren bodily past her and helped Sim fight a rearguard action while they all climbed a rotten and difficult transit. McLaren crouched at the top and hurled chunks of stone at the attackers. There was a great crack running up and clear across the cavern roof, scar of some ancient earthquake. Presently a small slide started.
'Okay,' Harker panted. 'Quit before you bring the roof down. They can't follow us.' The plannies were equipped for swimming, not climbing. They clawed angrily and slipped back, and then retreated sullenly to the water. Abruptly they seized the body with Sim's spear through it and devoured it, quarreling fiercely over it. McLaren leaned over the edge and was sick.
Harker didn't feel so good herself. She got up and went on. Sim helped McLaren, whose ankle was bleeding badly.
This higher ledge angled up and around the wall of the great lake-cavern. It was cooler and drier here, and the lichens thinned out, and vanished, leaving total darkness. Harker yelled once. From the echo of her voice the place was enormous.
Down below in the black water golden bodies streaked like comets in an ebon universe, going somewhere, going fast. Harker felt her way carefully along. Her skin twitched with a nervous impulse of danger, a sense of something unseen, unnatural, and wicked.
Sim said, 'I hear something.'
They stopped. The blind air lay heavy with a subtle fragrance, spicy and pleasant, yet somehow unclean. The water sighed lazily far below. Somewhere ahead was a smooth rushing noise which Harker guessed was the river inlet. But none of that was what Sim meant.
She meant the rippling, rustling sound that came from everywhere in the cavern. The black surface of the lake was dotted now with spots of burning phosphorescent color, trailing fiery wakes. The spots grew swiftly, coming nearer, and became carpets of flowers, scarlet and blue and gold and purple. Floating fields of them, and towed by shining swimmers.
'My God,' said Harker softly. 'How big are they?'
'Enough to make three of me.' Sim was a big woman. 'Those little ones were children, all right. They went and got their papas. Oh, Lady!'
The swimmers were very like the smaller ones that attacked them by the river, except for their giant size. They were not cumbersome.
They were magnificent, supple-limbed and light. Their membranes had spread into great shining wings, each rib tipped with fire. Only the golden dandelion heads had changed.
They had shed their petals. Their adult heads were crowned with flat, coiled growths having the poisonous and filthy beauty of fungus. And their faces were the faces of women.
For the first time since childhood Harker was cold.
The fields of burning flowers were swirled together at the base of the cliff. The golden giants cried out suddenly, a sonorous belling note, and the water was churned to blazing foam as thousands of flower-like bodies broke away and started up the cliff on suckered, spidery legs.
It didn't look as though it was worth trying, but Harker said, 'Let's get the hell on!' There was a faint light now, from the army below. She began to run along the ledge, the others close on her heels. The flower-hounds coursed swiftly upward, and their mistresses swam easily below, watching.
The ledge dropped. Harker shot along it like a deer. Beyond the lowest dip it plunged into the tunnel whence the river came. A short tunnel, and at the far end . . .
'Daylight!' Harker shouted. 'Daylight!'
McLaren's bleeding leg gave out and she fell.
Harker caught her. They were at the lowest part of the dip. The flower-beasts were just below, rushing higher. McLaren's foot was swollen, the calf of her leg discolored. Some swift infection from the planny's claws. She fought Harker. 'Go on,' she said. 'Go on!'
Harker slapped her hard across the temple. She started on, half carrying McLaren, but she saw it wasn't going to work. McLaren weighed more than she did. She thrust McLaren into Sim's powerful arms. The big black nodded and ran, carrying the half-conscious woman like a child. Harker saw the first of the flower-things flow up onto the ledge in front of them.
Sim hurdled them. They were not large, and there were only three of them. They rushed to follow and Harker speared them, slashing and striking with the sharp bone tip. Behind her the full tide rushed up. She ran, but they were faster. She drove them back with spear and knife, and ran again, and turned and fought again, and by the time they had reached the tunnel Harker was staggering with weariness.
Sim stopped. She said, 'There's no way out.'
Harker glanced over her shoulder. The river fell sheer down a high face of rock—too high and with too much force in the water even for the giant water-plannies to think of attempting. Daylight poured through overhead, warm and welcoming, and it might as well have been on Mars.
Dead end.
Then Harker saw the little eroded channel twisting up at the side. Little more than a drain-pipe, and long dry, leading to a passage beside the top of the falls—a crack barely large enough for a small woman to crawl through. It was a hell of a ragged hope, but . . . .
Harker pointed, between jabs at the swarming flowers. Sim yelled, 'You first.' Because Harker was the best climber, she obeyed, helping the gasping McLaren up behind her. Sim wielded her spear like a lightning brand, guarding the rear, creeping up inch by inch.
She reached a fairly secure perch, and stopped. Her huge breast pumped like a bellows, her arm rose and fell like a polished bar of ebony. Harker shouted to her to come on. She and McLaren were almost at the top.
Sim laughed. 'How you going to get me through that little bitty hole?'
'Come on, you fool!'
'You better hurry. I'm about finished.'
'Sim! Sim, damn you!'
'Crawl out through that hole, runt, and pull that stringbean with you! I'm a man-sized woman, and I got to stay.' Then, furiously, 'Hurry up or they'll drag you back before you're through.'
She was right. Harker knew she was right. She went to work pushing and jamming McLaren through the narrow opening. McLaren was groggy and not much help, but she was thin and small-boned, and she made it. She rolled out on a slope covered with green grass, the first Harker had seen since she was a child. She began to struggle after McLaren. She did not look back at Sim.
The black woman was singing, about the glory of the coming of the Lady.
Harker put her head back into the darkness of the creek. 'Sim!'
'Yeah?' Faintly, hoarse, echoing.
'There's land here, Sim. Good land.'
'Yeah.'
'Sim, we'll find a way . . . .'
Sim was singing again. The sound grew fainter, diminishing downward into distance. The words were lost, but not what lay behind them. Matty Harker buried her face in the green grass, and Sim's voice went with her into the dark.
The clouds were turning color with the sinking of the hidden sun. They hung like a canopy of hot gold washed in blood. It was utterly silent, except for the birds. Birds. You never heard birds like that down in the low places. Matty Harker rolled over and sat up slowly. She felt as though she had been beaten.
There was a sickness in her, and a shame, and the old dark anger lying coiled and deadly above her heart.
Before her lay the long slope of grass to the river, which bent away to the left out of sight behind a spur of granite. Beyond the slope was a broad plain and then a forest of gigantic trees. They seemed to float in the coppery haze, their dark branches outspread like wings and starred with flowers. The air was cool, with no taint of mud or rot. The grass was rich, the soil beneath it clean and sweet.
Rory McLaren moaned softly and Harker turned. Her leg looked bad. She was in a sort of stupor, her skin flushed and dry. Harker swore softly, wondering what she was going to do.
She looked back toward the plain, and she saw the boy.
She didn't know how he got there. Perhaps out of the bushes that grew in thick clumps on the slope. He could have been there a long time, watching. He was watching now, standing quite still about forty feet away. A great scarlet butterfly clung to his shoulder, moving its wings with lazy delight.
He seemed more like a child than a man. He was naked, small and slender and exquisite. His skin had a faint translucent hint of green under its whiteness. His hair, curled short to his head, was deep blue, and his eyes were blue also, and very strange.
Harker stared at him, and he at her, neither of them moving. A bright bird swooped down and hovered by his lips for a moment, caressing him with its beak. He touched it and smiled, but he did not take his eyes from Harker.
Harker got to her
