Oh, but they scream. Blood has been shed. Violence has been done. Worse than that! Worse than that! They have seen, oh, they have seen …
Leelson stumbles. He is attempting a tangential course, one that will carry us to the west, around the omphalos, but by this time the force of the whirling vortex has built into a tornado, a hurricane spinning uncontrollably, a maelstrom of wind! We run through air, legs churning space. We fly!
Beneath us I see musicians held in place by stout straps, kneeling circles of men chained to their eyelets. We are not chained and we spin, sucked down after the shaggy creatures, sucked down as the ghost-white skins of the Kachis are being sucked down….
Leely, Leelson, Lutha, the ex-king, and I, and as we go screaming down, in terror of the darkness below, our heads twist to keep sight of the light, the light, where other dark forms fly after us like the shadows of doom.
“MI … TI … GAN …” I hear the ex-king shout. “NO. NO. NO!”
Then only darkness and howling and shed skins making a horrid rustling sound and shaggy things with tentacles and sucking mouths all around us.
Then blackness, and pain, and no more story of Saluez. For a time Saluez is gone from the pattern and the weaving goes on without her.
They did not know how much time went by. Lutha seemed to recall going in and out of consciousness, in and out of places, always borne on that terrible wind, unable to move except as it moved them. There were momentary pauses, as though the maelstrom had to switch gears or decide where to go next. During one of these, Lutha hauled on the tether between her and Leely, pulling him close, and with him Saluez, who clutched him tightly. It was then she realized there was light where they were, for she saw Saluez’s face, eyes rolled back, only the whites showing. Then the wind grabbed them up again, and they were away.
The next thing they felt was the crushing impact of hitting something solid and hard, of being dropped with enough violence to drive out their breaths and cause pain. Then was the sound of cursing and sobbing and fighting for air. Lutha was on top, with Leely sandwiched between herself and Saluez. For a moment she simply lay there, so thankful for the quiet that she didn’t care whether anyone else was there or had survived.
Leelson’s voice rose, cursing, then that of the ex-King of Kamir. Then another male voice, raised in challenge.
“Leelson Famber! Stand and die!”
“Don’t, Mitigan!” cried the ex-king.
“What are you doing here?” snarled the stranger voice in a tone of furious surprise.
“Come to stop you doing what you’re trying to do,” the king gasped. “I was wrong.”
“I swore an oath!” trumpeted the other. “We Firsters honor our oaths!”
“Oath or not, you won’t get paid if you kill anyone! Take a new oath. I was wrong. I hired you to do it, I’ll hire you not to do it. It wasn’t his fault.”
Lutha pulled herself gingerly erect. Saluez was not conscious. Leely was simply asleep. He did that sometimes when things were confusing. Lutha pushed herself away from them both and struggled to sit up. At least one rib had something wrong with it, for it hurt to breathe. Light pouring through a jagged opening at her left disclosed a room-sized cavern, the rugged walls streaked with white, the floor leveled by deposits of gravel and stones and a million years’ worth of bird droppings. Translucent membranes waved from a dozen places, and it took a puzzled moment before Lutha identified them. Kachis wings caught among the rocks, brought here by the winds. Leelson lay slightly above the others, prone in the slanted opening, feet kicking against the sky, mumbling about wormholes. Somewhere nearby the sea swallowed and sucked, the stone vibrating in tidal rhythms.
The ex-king leaned against the back wall of the cave, facing the savage stranger. Jiacare winced as he rose to his full height and moved to put himself between the savage and Leelson.
“There’s still the matter of my oath,” said the savage, curling his lip.
“Mitigan of the Asenagi, I will compensate your bruised honor,” snarled the king with equal force. “By your blood and mine, man! We’ve been sucked through a wormhole in space; we don’t know where we are or when we are, and it’s a poor time in my opinion to argue about honor!”
The man addressed as Mitigan did not put aside his bellicose manner, but at least he took his hands away from his weapons. Saluez moaned and put her hand to her head. Leelson went on cursing under his breath, the same words over and over. Lutha looked around for Trompe and then remembered.
“Was Trompe killed?”
“Yes,” gasped Leelson. “He was. For which someone will answer …”
His voice failed. Lutha blinked. Trompe had been a faithful companion. She wept into her cupped hands, regretting that they had not always seen their duty alike, that she had been impatient with him.
It was then that she heard another voice, sharp though rather plaintive, pitched to be barely audible over the sound of the sea. “Hello?” And again: “Hello?”
Leelson, startled by the voice, slithered down from the opening in an avalanche of gravel. Lutha detached herself from Leely’s tether and crawled up into the space he’d left. Above the ocean the transformed Kachis were furiously feeding, dropping long lumpy tentacles into the sea and pulling up fish after fish, spreading their tentacles into nets to capture seabirds, meantime bobbing, weaving, spinning as they increased the spaces between themselves, all the time gobbling voraciously. They stretched away in a level plane, a flat grid of bodies that met the flat surface of the sea at the horizon. Lutha risked sticking her head out of the hole just far enough to look along the cliff face. She saw nothing but rock and more rock, all of it splotched with
