Angado

safe enough now. The sacs will serve for covering and we have wire to lash things tight. Ropes, too-we'd better get on making what we need.' He glanced at the sky, the stars were misted with cloud. 'We want to be ready when the wind starts to blow.'

The kites were box-shaped, twice the height of a man, following aerodynamic principles learned by Angado at the university. Dumarest checked the lashings, using the handle of the axe to twist them tight, the flat to test for security. The plastic sacs, opened out and cut to shape formed the major part of the covering while broad strips of various materials from the clothing provided the rest. Empty containers, voided ampules, the rubbish Angado had resented carrying-all went into the final construction. Proof of Dumarest's knowledge of the wild where even a pin was an item of inestimable value and a battered empty can an object beyond price.

'Catch hold!' He threw the end of a rope at Angado. 'Pull!' He jerked his own end as the man obeyed. 'Again! Once more! Good! That should do it!'

The final rope and he knotted it firmly in place before attaching it to his harness. Each checked the other and both looked grotesque with thick rolls of material bound around shins, thighs, heads, hips, arms and chest. Padding to absorb the shock of impact when they landed.

If they landed, thought Angado grimly. If the wind didn't smash them back against the cliff and the kites provided enough support to break the speed of their fall. If the ropes didn't break. The coverings rip free. The bamboo framework shatter. The scree not too hard or spiked with hidden rocks.

Doubts which didn't seem to affect Dumarest.

He said, 'When the wind hits the cliff it turns up and back on itself like a cresting wave. I've been studying how grass acts in the thermals. Throw it out far enough and it doesn't come back. Once the wind catches your kite keep it heading out. If it doesn't, pull it back and try again. Got it?'

Simple instructions but not so easy to follow despite the guidelines attached to the framework. In theory the kites could be guided to a certain degree. But now, facing the acid test, Angado wasn't so sure.

He said, 'Earl, I've been thinking. Maybe-'

'Now!' snapped Dumarest. 'Now!' Then, as Angado hesitated, 'Damn it, man! Move!'

The whip-crack of command which he obeyed, lifting the kite and running with it to the edge, muscles cracking beneath the strain. A moment of teetering then the wind took over, catching the kite, lifting it, jerking Angado off balance and off the edge of the cliff to leave him dangling in his harness.

Dumarest watched then followed, knowing the impossibility of following his instructions, knowing too they had been given for the other's benefit. The gamble was risky enough without adding an utter helplessness to the equation. Angado had been lucky, the wind which had caught him had been kind, Dumarest's wasn't so cooperative.

He grunted as the wind veered, slamming him against the cliff, the kite jerking him away again, a clinging vine trailing from his boot. He kicked free as again the wind gusted, the kite bobbing, dropping, soaring upward in a complex motion which blurred his eyes and filled his mouth with the taste of vomit. Weakness he ignored as he fought vertigo, tugging at his line to shorten the distance between himself and the kite, hanging, swaying like a pendulum beneath it as the wind roared past his ears.

The sound was too loud-he was falling too fast. He tugged at the guidelines, discarding them as the kite refused to respond. Instead he threw his body in a widening swing, forcing the kite to react to his movements. It tilted, straightened, was captured by the uprushing air. The roaring died and, suddenly, he drifted in calm.

The cliff was well to one side, a soaring wall of blotched and mottled dirt and stone. The other kite was closer to the wall and, like his own, acted as a parachute. Larger and they would have lifted their burdens but it was enough they had carried them clear and lowered them slow.

Five hundred feet above the ground one of the ropes snapped with the sound of tearing paper.

Dumarest swung, hanging on the single remaining rope, his weight pulling the kite to one side, tilting it, forcing it to lose height and lift. The roaring started again in his ears and he gripped the rope, climbing up it, catching the inner structure of the kite and hanging from it as the ground rushed up toward him. A moment of strain with the force of the wind fighting against his arms, muscles burning, cracking with the effort to hold on, then a side wise swoop and the sudden jarring rasp as the kite slammed against the wall of the cliff.

A glancing blow, repeated, the third time shattering the structure and leaving nothing but a mass of splintered bamboo, shreds of plastic, wire, frayed and disintegrating rope.

From it Dumarest rolled, falling through a clump of bushes, over thickly tufted grass, to half-fall, half-slide over the fan of scree. To come to rest in a cloud of dirt among a scatter of stones.

'Earl!' Angado came running. He had landed safely and close. Now he knelt, turning Dumarest over, the anxiety on his face turning to relief as he sat upright. 'Are you hurt?'

'I don't think so.' There was no blood, no ache of broken bones, just numbness and the promise of bruises. The padding had done its job. 'You?'

'Fine.'

Dumarest nodded and climbed to his feet. The padding made movement awkward and he cut it away, leaving the scraps where they had fallen. Stretching, he took cautious strides. Luck and experience had been with him. One had thrown him into the bushes the other had made him fall like a baby or a drunk, not fighting gravity, yielding to it instead, muscles lax and supple.

'We made it!' Angado drew in his breath as he stared at the towering wall of the cliff. 'By God, we made it! All we have to do now is get to the ship. Which way do we head, Earl?'

Dumarest looked at his wrist compass, the face broken, the dial twisted, the interior useless.

Chapter Five

Brother Dexter straightened from the fire feeling the nagging twinge in his back grow to a sudden fire, one accompanied by a moment of giddiness so that he stood immobile in the smoke now rising from the coals. The effects of age as he knew, familiar but now growing more frequent. Soon he would have to yield his place to a younger man and be content with simple, routine duties, but not just yet. Not when there was still so much to be done.

The sin of pride; his lips quirked as he recognized it. The justification for hanging on and, by so doing, denying others the opportunity to fulfill themselves. They could do the work as well as he and probably far better. Lloyd, Kollar, Boyle, Pollard, Galpin-any of a host of others-they had been chosen for this mission and he had insisted on being its head. But now, feeling his age, he wished he hadn't been so importunate.

The pains eased a little and he stepped back from the fire. A tall, gaunt figure, bare feet thrust into plain sandals, his body wrapped in a cowled robe of brown homespun, the fabric held by a cord belting the waist. The garb of all monks of the Church of Universal Brotherhood. Sometimes called the Universal Church. Sometimes just the Church. The name was unimportant only the work they did. The work and the creed they preached and carried to wherever men were to be found. The simple doctrine that no man is an island. All belonged to the corpus humanitatis. That if each could look at the other and remember that there, but for the grace of God, go I the millennium would have arrived.

He would never see it. No monk now alive would ever do that. Men bred too fast and traveled too far but it was something to live for. A purpose to his existence.

One which now could be near its end.

'Brother!' Lloyd came toward him, face anxious, the stubbled skull framed by his thrown-back cowl. 'I saw you stagger,' he said. 'For a moment I thought you would collapse.'

'A momentary dizziness caused by the smoke.' A possibility and so not wholly a lie. And to increase the other's concern would not be kind. 'The others?'

'At their duties. Brother Kollar is with Sadoria.'

'Any improvement?'

'None.' Lloyd hesitated, scraping at the dirt with a sandal. 'Kollar thinks he will die.'

And, with the engineer, would go their only hope of repairing the Guilia. Dexter looked at the ship where it had come to rest. A good landing; Ryder, though a hard captain, knew his job, but even though the vessel appeared undamaged its heart was dead. The generator which alone could free them from the prison they were in.

Dexter added more damp leaves to the fire, stubborn in his refusal to yield to incapacity. The smoke plumed