The Three Suns of Amara

A great invisible knife was stalking him, blazing its trail as it came—literally. Slices of bark were falling from the trees as it cut its way after him, and, emphatically, whole major limbs. These evidences showed it was pursuing an implacably straight line—that was aimed directly at Sherret.

Frozen, he watched it. The very evenness of its pace was unnerving. It threatened an inevitable doom, as though the unseen wielder of the knife were thinking, “Run if you like. Run till you drop, But I shall catch up with you… in my own good time.”

A tree just in front of him, not twenty feet away, was suddenly completely bisected. The halves fell apart and crashed.

He came to life with a yell of alarm and leaped aside. There was a rapid blur of movement and a row of saplings beyond the tree were simultaneously uprooted and flung down.

What had moved? It had been lightning quick. In the dull blue light of these shadowy woods, it had been impossible to discern a definite form. Now it was a totally invisible again.

Sherret gulped, turned, and ran.

And met it approaching from the opposite direction. Thump, thump, thump went the slices of tree-wood, falling steadily along the new path towards him. He slid to a halt. “Oh, God!”

He flung himself around, and began to run back. Almost immediately, there it was again, dead ahead, cutting its ruthless path to meet him. Groaning with fear, he stopped, then looked wildly back over his shoulder. The menace he’d fled was still behind him, still slashing its way after him. There were tioo invisible knives, closing on him inexorably from opposite directions. It was as though he were caught between the blades of immense shears. Panic scattered his senses. He heard someone shouting, but was so confused that he didn’t know whether it was himself or another. He began swinging the machete around him, slashing madly at the seemingly empty air, blindly on the defensive. Somewhere a shout sounded again.

Then his machete jarred against one or other of the closing knife-edges with a flat, dull sound, as if he were hitting stone. The shock all but jolted it from his grasp. A thin crack appeared in the blade.

There came a rush of feet and a loud clang behind him. A powerful arm caught his shoulder and shoved him headlong into the undergrowth. Dazed, he scrambled for a few yards on hands and knees, then looked back. The spectacle was quite fantastic.

Two enormous shapes, each as wide as a house and tall as the tallest tree in the woods, seemed to be attempting to make physical contact with each other. They were curiously flat-looking, resembling a cross section of a sponge. Between them a tall, naked man, muscled like a gymnast, danced a ballet of defiance. He bore a crusader-type shield, thin as pasteboard and glimmering faintly in the blue underwater light. Deftly, he kept the shapes apart, slamming alternately at each of them with the shield. It rang like a gong at every blow. Amazingly, the two shapes backed slowly away from him. They began to sink into the ground.

The man laughed harshly, then came bounding towards Sherret.

“Get up, you poor fool!” he exclaimed in Amaran. “Do you want to be sliced up for a Creedo’s dinner? Follow me.”

He leaped lightly past. Sherret picked himself up, annoyed and ashamed. He resented the other’s contemptuous tone, and was ashamed of his resentment. After all, the man had saved his life. With mixed feelings, he blundered along a path made easy for him by this stranger smashing down the undergrowth with his shield. The man was burning up energy at fourfold Sherret’s rate. But it was Sherret who first began to gasp for breath, with slack, hanging jaw. At last, after a mile of zig-zagging among trees across sloping ground, he swallowed his pride and grunted,

“Wait for me.”

The man waited for him to catch up. He was a handsome imperious brute.

“Do you want me to carry you?” he sneered.

Sherret drew whooping breaths, then complained, “Easy for you to talk. You’re not carrying a load on your back.”

He jerked a thumb at the bulging rucksack.

The man looked at him reflectively.

“Hold that for a moment,” he said suddenly, and proffered the thin shield. Sherret took it automatically. The totally unexpected weight of it dragged him to the ground. The man laughed boomingly.

Sherret sat on the shield and wiped sweat from his face. Then he smiled wrily.

“You’re an objectionable bighead, but let’s face it, you do have something to be conceited about. Thanks for getting