Urthona straightened his shoulders. "No. But if you think you've seen the last of me..."
"I know. I've got another think coming. I wouldn't be surprised. I'll bet you have a gate to some other world concealed in a boulder. But you aren't letting on. Think you'll catch me by surprise some day, heh? After you find the boulder-if you do. Good luck. I may be bored and need some stiff competition. Get going."
Urthona walked up to the wall. Anana spoke sharply. "Kickaha! Stop him!" He yelled at the Lord, "Hold it, or I'll shoot!" Urthona stopped but did not turn. "What is it, Anana?"
She glanced at a huge chronometer on a wall. "Don't you know there's still danger? How do you know what he's up to? What might happen when he gives the codeword? It'll be better to wait until the last minute. Then Orc can go through, and you can shut the gate behind him. After that, we'll go through ours. And then Urthona can gate. But he can do it with no one else around."
"Yeah, you're right," Kickaha said. "I was so eager to get back I rushed things."
He shouted, "Urthona! Turn around and walk back here!"
Kickaha didn't hear Urthona say anything. His voice must have been very soft. But the words were loud enough for whatever sensor was in the wall to detect them.
A loud hissing sounded from the floor and the ceilings and the walls. From thousands of tiny perforations in the inner wall, clouds of greenish gas shot through the room.
Kickaha breathed in just enough of the metallic odor to make him want to choke. He held his breath then, but his eyes watered so that he could not see Urthona making his break. Red Orc was suddenly out of sight, too. Anana, a dim figure in the green mists, stood looking at him. One hand was pinching her nose and the other was over her mouth. She was signalling to him not to breathe.
She would have been too late, however. If he had not acted immediately to shut off his breath, he would, he was sure, be dead by now. Unconscious, anyway.
The gas was not going to harm his skin. He was sure of that. Otherwise, Urthona would have been caught in the deadly trap.
Anana turned and disappeared in the green. She was heading toward the gate to the world of tiers. He began running too, his eyes burning and streaming water. He caught a glimpse of Red Orc plunging through the gate to Earth.
And then he saw, dimly, Urthona's back as he sped through the gate to the world which Kickaha loved so much.
Kickaha felt as if he would have to cough. Nevertheless, he fought against the reflex, knowing that if he drew in one full breath, he would be done for.
Then he was through the entrance. He didn't know how high the gate was above the mountain slope, but he had no time for caution. He fell at once, landed on his buttocks, and slid painfully on a jumble of loose rocks. It went at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal for about two hundred feet, then suddenly dropped off. He rolled over and clawed at the rocks. They cut and tore into the chest and his hands, but he dug in no matter how it hurt.
By then he was coughing. No matter. He was out of the green clouds which now poured out of the hole in the mountain face.
He stopped. Slowly, afraid that if he made a too vigorous movement he'd start the loose stones to sliding, he began crawling upward. A few rocks were dislodged. Then he saw Anana. She had gotten to the side of the gate and was clinging with one hand to a rocky ledge. The other held the Horn. Her eyes were huge, and her face was pale.
She shouted, "Get up here and away! As fast as you can! The converter is going to blow soon!" He knew that. He yelled at her to get out of the area. He'd be up there in a minute. She looked as if she were thinking of coming down to help him, then she began working her way along the steep slope. He crawled at an angle toward the ledge she had grabbed. Several times he started sliding back, but he managed to stop his descent.
Finally, he got off the apron of stones. He rose to a crouch and, grabbing handsful of grass, pulled himself up to the ledge. Holding onto this with one hand, he worked his way as swiftly as he dared away from the hole.
Just as he got to a point above a slight projection of the mountain, a stony half-pout, the mountain shook and bellowed. He was hurled outward to land flat on his face on the miniledge.
The loose rocks slid down and over the edge, leaving the stone beneath it as bare as if a giant broom had swept it.
Silence except for the screams of some distant birds and a faint rumble as the stones slid to a halt far below. Anana said, "It's over, Kickaha."
He turned slowly to see her looking around a spur of rock.
"The gate would have closed the moment its activator was destroyed. We got only a small part of the blast, thank God. Otherwise, the whole mountain would've been blown up."
He got up and looked alongside the slope. Something stuck out from the pile below. An arm?
"Did Urthona get away?"
She shook her head. "No, he went over the edge. He didn't have much of a drop, about twenty feet, before he hit the second slope. But the rocks caught him."
"We'll go down and make sure he's dead," he said. "That trick of his dissolves any promises we made to him."
All that was needed was to pile more rocks on Urthona to keep the birds and the beasts from him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was a month later. They were still on the mountain, though on the other side and near its base. The valley was uninhabited by humans, though occasionally hunters ventured into it from the river-village they'd seen on coming from the gate. Kickaha and Anana avoided these.
They'd built a leanto at first. After they'd made bows and arrows from ash, tipped with worked flint, they shot deer, which were plentiful, and tanned the hides. Out of these they made a tepee, well-hidden in a grove of trees. A brook, two hundred yards down the slope, gave them clear cold water. It also provided fine fishing.
They dressed in buckskin hides and slept on bearskin blankets at night. They rested well but exercised often, hiking, berry-and nut-picking, hunting, and making love. They even became a little fat. After being half-starved so long, it was difficult not to stuff themselves. Part of their diet was bread and butter which they'd stolen one night from the village, two large bagsful.
Kickaha, eavesdropping on the villagers, had validated his assumption that they were in Drachef land. And from a reference overheard, he had learned that the village was in the barony of Ulrich von Neifen.
"His lord, theoretically, anyway, is the duke, or Herzog, Willehalm von Hartmot. I know, generally, where we are. If we go down that river, we'll come to the Pfawe river. We'll travel about three hundred miles, and we'll be in the barony of Siegfried von Listbat. He's a good friend. He should be. I gave him my castle, and he married my divorced wife. It wasn't that Isote and I didn't get along well, you understand. She just wouldn't put up with my absences."
"Which were how long?"
"Oh, they varied from a few months to a few years."
Anana laughed.
"From now on, when you go on trips, I'll be along."
"Sure. You can keep up with me, but Isote couldn't, and she wouldn't have even if she could."
They agreed that they would visit von Listbat for a month or so. Kickaha had wanted to descend to the next level, which he called Amerindia, and find a tribe that would adopt him. Of all the levels, he loved this the most. There were great forest-covered mountains and vast plains, brooks and rivers of purest water, giant buffalo, mammoth, antelope, bear, sabertooths, wild horses, beaver, game birds by the billions. The human population was savage but small, and though the second level covered more territory than North and Central America combined, there were few places where the name of Kickaha, the Trickster, was not known.
But they must get to the palace-fortress on the top of this world, which was shaped like a tower of babel. There they would gate through, though reluctantly, to Earth again. Reluctantly, because neither cared too much for Earth I. It was over-populated, polluted, and might at any time perish in atomic-warfare.
"Maybe Wolff and Chryseis will
be there by the time we get there. It's possible they're already there. Wouldn't that be great?"
They were on the mountain, above the river valley, when he said this. Halfway down the slope were the birches from which they would build a canoe. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the tiny village on the bend of the river. The air was pure, and the earth beneath them did not rise and fall. A great black eagle soared nearby, and two hawks slid along the wind, headed for the river and its plentitude offish. A grizzly bear grunted in a berry patch nearby.
"Anana, this is a beautiful world. Jadawin may be its Lord, but this is really my world, Kickaha's world."
THE END
The Lavalite World Page 23
