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 wingbeats, 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
