It was Kua. Even from this height he could see the reflected light in twin points on the sun-glasses she held in one hand. She had signalled him by the heliograph with the only thing they had for reflecting light.
Pointing downward, he let one wing tilt high and came about in a long glide, lying at full length upon the air with his heels higher than his head. The ground swung like water in a cup and Kua seemed to rush upward to meet him as the swift dive cut the space between them.
The others were with her by the time Kern had put his feet to the grass. He was conscious, as always, of a little shock of memory renewed when he met again Kua’s great single gaze from the center of her forehead. Byrna, hurrying to meet him, lifted a pale, drawn little face.
“Kern!” she cried in a voice that was pure music. And he thought there was in her eyes, and in Kua’s, a subtle something that was new to him. Mutation had gone on, perhaps, with them as with him, a step beyond Earthly mutation. Their powers were strengthened, so that, in part, they both were strangers to him.
Sam Brewster came out smiling and extending his hand, and Kern took it with the little inward quailing he had always felt before Sam, the instinctive averting of his gaze from Sam’s veiled eyes. Beyond Sam’s shoulder he saw Bruce Hallam lying motionless, as if he had not stirred since they laid him on the pallet of boughs. His face was ivory-hard and as withdrawn from living as the face of a statue that had never known life.
Everything was confused for a few moments. Byrna was crying, “Hurry, hurry!” and Kua’s distance-piercing glance kept sweeping the horizon as the winged people swooped to the ground behind Kern and came forward swiftly, wings half open to speed their hurrying feet.
Kern heard Elje’s little gasp of incredulity and dismay when Kua’s blue central eye turned upon the newcomers, but the winged girl was too good a commander to waste time after that first glance which confirmed what Kern had told her.
In a matter of seconds they were in the air.
Bruce Hallam, still motionless in his mysterious slumber, had been swung on a wicker carrier between two burly fliers. The other three mutants, in their seats between winged bearers, scarcely had time for amazement or uncertainty as they were wafted aloft.
Kern, flying with the rest over the rolling hilltops with the vast glass cloud of the Mountain shadowing the horizon, timed his flight to the pace of the slowest so that he might talk in midair with the wingless people in the carriers. And close beside him Elje and Gerd hovered, watching almost jealously every expression on the faces of the speakers.
“What do they say, Kern?” Elje asked breathlessly, timing her words to the rhythm of her wings. “Are—are you sure these people are human? I never saw such—such—creatures. Gerd, after all could they be gods?”
Gerd laughed shortly, but there was uneasiness in his voice.
“Let them talk. Is the enemy near yet? Ask them, Kern.”
“Near, I think,” Byrna said. She was clutching the straps of her swaying chair with both tiny hands and her incredibly musical voice might have been crooning a song instead of shaping the syllables of terror which echoed the look in her eyes. “Kern, I don’t dare—look—for them any more! You saw what happened! Kern, tell me what it was you saw.
“I? Fire, I think. A coiling ribbon of it—and hate. I could almost see the hate!”
“The Mountain,” Byrna said, her eyes turning automatically toward the great cloud hanging ominously in the sky. “What do you know about it, Kern? Have these people told you?”
Briefly he gave her the story Elje had recounted.
“It has never yet been able to change people physically, or there wouldn’t be any outlaws left,” he finished. “At least, so Elje thinks. Byrna, I wonder if it could change us? We’re malleable—abnormally malleable. I—”
He hesitated. Not even to Byrna did he yet want to speak of the deep, mysterious stirrings he had felt in his own flesh.
“You think you and Kua may have felt something like a changing in yourselves?”
Byrna nodded, her eyes wide and distressed. “We can’t tell how much, yet. Maybe the Mountain is the cause of it.”
Unexpectedly Sam Brewster, swinging between his carriers above Byrna, leaned forward.
“The Mountain’s where the answer is, Kern. I don’t think we’ll be safe until we’ve explored it.”
“Safe!” Kern said grimly. “If you’d seen what I have, you’d never talk that way.”
“It won’t matter,” Kua called from a little way ahead, twisting in her seat to send a piercing blue gaze back at them. “Look! They’re coming!”
KERN’S sharp exclamation as he banked swiftly and turned to follow her pointing finger was explanation enough to Elje and Gerd what was happening. A shiver of excitement ran through the whole flying group, a tightening of muscle and mind. For an instant their pace slackened, simultaneously, without signal, almost as a flight of birds wheels simultaneously at no perceptible message.
There was nothing visible on the horizon where Kua pointed.
“I can see the first of them—a long line,” she said. “They’re carrying something, but I’m not sure what it is. Round things—nets of something shining, like thin wire. Light’s flashing from it when the sun hits them.”
Rapidly Kern told Elje.
“New weapons,” she said. “I expected that. I wonder—well, we’ll know soon enough.” She beat her wings together and soared suddenly above the group, looking down with speculative eyes.
“We’re going too slowly. Kern.” She flashed a glance at him. “This other friend of yours, the injured one. He’s heavy. He slows us. And he takes two men out of the fight if we’re caught. I think—” She made an expressive downward gesture.
“No!” Kern said quickly. “He’s the most powerful of us all, if we can rouse him.”
“Well, he must be first to fall, if the need comes.” Elje said. “But we’ll wait.” She called commands to the group flying before them, and eight men wheeled in the air and swung back. Kern watched them slip smoothly, without a break in their wing-beats, into the harness of the wicker carriers, relieving those who had borne the burden this far.
“Now, quickly!” Elje said. “The eyrie!”
They were almost over the jagged hills where the outlaws’ refuge lay, when the first ranks of the enemy swept over the skyline and saw them. The fugitives had flown low, taking advantage of every line of hills and trees for cover, and despite their burden they flew fast, their pace nearly matching that of the pursuers because of the all-night flight the enemy had made.
But they had not yet reached shelter when the sound of a horn, clear and high, fell through the sunny air, and after it, drowning out the thin, sweet notes, the roar of angry men sighting their prey.
Elje was very calm.
“Gerd,” she said. “You’ll lead the way in?”
“No!” he growled. “Let one of the captains go. I feel like a fight.”
“Stay, then,” Elje answered.
She called a command to a man in the front rank of her little party. They were flying as fast as wing could carry them toward a gap between two jagged, dark hills through which Kern could see a wilderness of tortured rock beyond. It looked volcanic in origin, and waves of intermittent heat and strange metallic odors drifted to them on the wind as they approached.
“There are poisonous currents in these hills,” Elje told Kern as they swept forward. “Many of us died before we learned the way through them. Now we have a shelter where no one can follow us who hasn’t a guide.”
Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned a startled glance and saw her reel in midair, throwing back her head so that the clear line of her throat was white and taut against the blue sky. Then, without a word, suddenly she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer her wings sustained her and she hung limp from the spread pinions. Then they too folded back and she dropped like a stone.
Time stopped for Kern. Everything stood still, the hills with their float
ing vapors, the flying troupe, the breeze halted among the trees below. He could see the first ranks of the oncoming enemy halted too and hanging motionless in space, their shouts nothing but a buzz in his ears.
He saw too, very clearly, the great ovals of the weapons they carried, and the light that whirled in intricate, thin patterns like wires of brilliance within the ovals. He saw the cone of light reach out from the nearest oval and touch another of the fugitive fliers.
It had happened in an instant, and it was over. Kern dived for Elje’s falling body almost before she had ceased to speak, swung under her, caught her across his arms in a welter of slack wings and loosened hair.
Gerd’s harsh voice was shouting orders above him. By the time Kern had labored up to their level with his burden he saw the newly-appointed guide of the winged men vanishing into the cleft between the hills, leading two by two the harnessed pairs who carried the mutants.
The roar of savage voices behind them filled the shaken air, and the roar of countless wings beating in ranks as the enemy swooped upon them. They were very near now—so near Kern could see the distorted, shouting faces and the flash of knives in the hands of the foremost.
It was a strange and eerie thing to realize that no human hatred burned behind the angry faces, but the fiery, venomed malignancy which was the Mountain. Or did this oncoming rabble know why it fought? Did they think this fury their own emotion, not a monstrously inspired rage that turned them to automatons?
A cone of light swung past Kern, numbing his wing-tip, and touched a fast-flying man in front of him between the wings. The man jolted convulsively, arched backward and then crumpled to hang for an instant motionless on the momentum of his own flight. The wings folded as Elje’s had done, and the man dropped downward out of sight.
GERD was gesturing Kern frantically on. The hunchback hovered on red pinions recklessly in full view of the enemy, knives flashing in each hand, ready to engage whoever came within reach of his blades. He was shouting hoarse orders scarcely audible above the rushing thunder of the enemies’ wings and their voices bellowing for blood.
The last of the little band was pouring through the hill-cleft now, Kern almost the last of all with his limp burden hanging across his arms. The air was full of twisting vapors and he could not see very clearly as he swept closer to the hills. It was, curiously, a nightmare sensation, half-blindness from the poison vapors and half-deafness from the roar of wings and voices. He could only follow the back of the man ahead, dimly seen through the mists. Elje hung motionless in his arms, her trailing wings fluttering a little to the measured beat of his own.
The last thing he saw as he glanced back was Gerd poised above the cleft to follow him in, ready to fight a rear-guard action if need be. And then, all in one brief glance between drifts of vapor, Kern’s heart contracted as he saw two more winged shapes beating desperately toward him through the dimness, two men flying tandem with a harnessed burden between them.
It was Bruce Hallam’s bearers. And Elje had been right. Bruce’s weight was too great for the flying men to carry fast enough. Evidently they had been left too far behind to follow the other bearers in and had only now made up the distance which would save them.
Or would it save them?
In spite of himself, Kern tilted his wings and hesitated in the air, twisting his head to watch. He saw Gerd gesturing savagely to hurry them in—heard the hunchback’s deep howl.
“Drop him!” Gerd howled. “Drop him and come on!”
But before they could obey, a cone of white fire swept silently through the coiling fog and enveloped bearers and burden alike in a bath of radiance.
There was no sound, except for the all-encompassing uproar of the pursuit. In silence the doomed fliers stiffened and glided an instant still carrying their fatal weight between them—and then dropped.
The three of them vanished together into the engulfing mists.
Kern flew on with Elje.
He labored on leaden wings through the fog.
Whiffs of burning vapor stung in his nostrils and set his pumping lungs on fire. Elje was an almost unbearable weight in his arms.
Coughing, choking, ready to think every wing-beat his last, he stumbled through the air in the wake of the man before him, his only guide through this aerial labyrinth of poison. Hot updrafts caught him and tossed him aloft, cross-currents fetid with strangling vapors sent him into perilous side-slips toward the jagged black peaks dangerously near. At this speed he knew he could not survive the slightest contact with those knife-edged rocks.
And Bruce’s loss was a heavier burden to bear than even Elje’s dead weight. For only Bruce could have opened the doors for the rest to escape into worlds of their own. And upon Bruce’s uncanny skill he had pinned his highest hopes of freeing this world from its enemy.
Strangling, choking, muscles aching from the strain of long flight, he reeled on in the wake of the flying outlaws.
The end of the ordeal came without warning. One moment he was flying blindly through the updrafts and the smoke, the next he found himself floating in clear still air over what seemed a great lip of rock. Winged men below gestured him down and he dropped slowly on aching wings and let his feet touch the rock gingerly.
Elje coughed in his arms as he shifted weight from wings to feet. Electrified, he looked down, forgetting everything else in this new surprise. He had been certain she was dead or dying. She opened her eyes, looked at him blindly, and let the lashes flutter down again. But at least she was still alive.
The men of her band closed around them then and one of them took Elje from his arms. Kern looked around curiously as he followed Elje’s bearer across the rock.
A cavern lifted its high arched entrance before them, black rock without and within, and the lip of rock thrust out before it, black too. Above the platform, which must have been two hundred feet across, the air was still and no poisonous vapors swirled, but they still rose all around the edges of the rock and leaned together high above like a tent roof that blotted out the sky except for occasional rifts far overhead. It was like a painter’s concept of Hades, even to the winged men with the hard, violent faces swarming out to meet the newcomers.
The mutants were among them. Kern told them shortly of Bruce’s loss. He did not want to dwell on it, for it seemed a death-blow to the hopes of the others and perhaps to his own, too, if this world was ever to be peopled by any but automatons.
None of the mutants spoke after he had told them. The loss was a stunning one and Byrna’s sad, small face grew sadder and very pale, while Kua’s great blue eye filled with tears as she turned away. Sam Brewster muttered something under his breath and for an instant Kern saw the veiling secondary lids twitch across his eyes, as they always twitched when Sam was angry, in involuntary preparation to draw back.
“Sam!” Kern said sharply. Sam grimaced and turned away too, closing the secondary lids again.
Inside the cavern, on a straw mattress under a stretched crimson tent, Elje was lying. A fire burned in a crude hood of rocks, its heat cupped in the red tent and reflected back again upon the bed. Someone was holding a bowl of steaming liquid to her lips as Kern came up.
Kern watched her drain it slowly. When she lay back upon the cushions her eyes remained open and she looked around the circle of watching men with understanding dawning in her face. Color came back into it after awhile, and then she coughed again and sat up.
“All right,” she said. “I’m better. What happened?”
Kern told her.
“Gerd?” she asked when he had finished. The men looked at one another inquiringly. A growl of dissent went through the cavern. No one had seen him. Someone rose on heavy wings and flapped out under the dome to search the platform outside. Gerd was not to be found. Elje’s face darkened.
“We could afford to lose twenty men better than Gerd,” she said. “You say he was last behind you, Kern? Didn’t you hear any fighting as you came in?”
Kern shook his head.
“I couldn’t tell. I thought he was following me. The last I saw was Bruce and his carriers going down.”
ELJE bit her lip. “I’m sorry. We’ll miss him. He was one of the bravest and most loyal of us all. He’s been with us only a year, but I’d come to depend more on his judgment than—” She broke off. “Well, it can’t be helped. I suppose the light-cones got him. I wonder how they work.” She flexed her wings and tried her muscles out experimentally. “The rays don’t seem to leave any after-effects. I suppose the fatalities are meant to come from the fall. Well, at least we’re lucky to have got away without any worse losses.”
She got to her feet and shook her head tentatively, shook her wings out and made two or three uncertain beats that nearly lifted her off the floor.
“I’m all right now.” She spread her hands to the blaze for it was damply chill in the cavern. “The Mountain’s angry,” she said. “It isn’t only our raid on the village that brought this army out against us. There was that storm, too. Kern, I think the Mountain knows you’re here and is trying to—to finish you. Have you any idea why?”
Kern had vague theories too inchoate to put into words. He shook his head instead. Elje laughed shortly.
“Gerd wouldn’t trust you. If he were here, he’d say it was your fault the enemy had gathered against us. He’d say to put you out and let you shift for yourselves, all of you. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t??” Her voice was suddenly hard.
Disconcerted, Kern stared at her. “If you don’t know any—” he began, but she broke in quickly.
“You saved my life,” she conceded, “but we’re not a sentimental people. We can’t afford to be. If your presence here is a menace to the safety of us all, I can’t indulge my own gratitude by putting my men in danger. We must each contribute to the strength of the group, or perish.” She shrugged. “You’re one extra fighting man, but what about your friends? Have they abilities to counterbalance their being earth-bound?”
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