Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned a startled glance and saw her reel in midair, throwing back her head so that the clear line of her throat was white and taut against the blue sky. Then, without a word, suddenly she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer her wings sustained her and she hung limp from the spread pinions. Then they too folded back and she dropped like a stone.
Time stopped for Kern. Everything stood still, the hills with their floating vapors, the flying troupe, the breeze halted among the trees below. He could see the first ranks of the oncoming enemy halted too and hanging motionless in space, their shouts nothing but a buzz in his ears.
He saw too, very clearly, the great ovals of the weapons they carried, and the light that whirled in intricate, thin patterns like wires of brilliance within the ovals. He saw the cone of light reach out from the nearest oval and touch another of the fugitive fliers.
It had happened in an instant, and it was over. Kern dived for Elje’s falling body almost before she had ceased to speak, swung under her, caught her across his arms in a welter of slack wings and loosened hair.
Gerd’s harsh voice was shouting orders above him. By the time Kern had labored up to their level with his burden he saw the newly-appointed guide of the winged men vanishing into the cleft between the hills, leading two by two the harnessed pairs who carried the mutants.
The roar of savage voices behind them filled the shaken air, and the roar of countless wings beating in ranks as the enemy swooped upon them. They were very near now—so near Kern could see the distorted, shouting faces and the flash of knives in the hands of the foremost.
It was a strange and eerie thing to realize that no human hatred burned behind the angry faces, but the fiery, venomed malignancy which was the Mountain. Or did this oncoming rabble know why it fought? Did they think this fury their own emotion, not a monstrously inspired rage that turned them to automatons?
A cone of light swung past Kern, numbing his wing-tip, and touched a fast-flying man in front of him between the wings. The man jolted convulsively, arched backward and then crumpled to hang for an instant motionless on the momentum of his own flight. The wings folded as Elje’s had done, and the man dropped downward out of sight.
Gerd was gesturing Kern frantically on. The hunchback hovered on red pinions recklessly in full view of the enemy, knives flashing in each hand, ready to engage whoever came within reach of his blades. He was shouting hoarse orders scarcely audible above the rushing thunder of the enemies’ wings and their voices bellowing for blood.
The last of the little band was pouring through the hill-cleft now, Kern almost the last of all with his limp burden hanging across his arms. The air was full of twisting vapors and he could not see very clearly as he swept closer to the hills. It was, curiously, a nightmare sensation, half-blindness from the poison vapors and half-deafness from the roar of wings and voices. He could only follow the back of the man ahead, dimly seen through the mists. Elje hung motionless in his arms, her trailing wings fluttering a little to the measured beat of his own.
The last thing he saw as he glanced back was Gerd poised above the cleft to follow him in, ready to fight a rearguard action if need be. And then, all in one brief glance between drifts of vapor, Kern’s heart contracted as he saw two more winged shapes beating desperately toward him through the dimness, two men flying tandem with a harnessed burden between them.
It was Bruce Hallam’s bearers. And Elje had been right. Bruce’s weight was too great for the flying men to carry fast enough. Evidently they had been left too far behind to follow the other bearers in and had only now made up the distance which would save them.
Or would it save them?
In spite of himself, Kern tilted his wings and hesitated in the air, twisting his head to watch. He saw Gerd gesturing savagely to hurry them in—heard the hunchback’s deep howl.
“Drop him!” Gerd howled. “Drop him and come on!”
But before they could obey, a cone of white fire swept silently through the coiling fog and enveloped bearers and burden alike in a bath of radiance.
There was no sound, except for the all-encompassing uproar of the pursuit. In silence the doomed fliers stiffened and glided an instant still carrying their fatal weight between them—and then dropped.
The three of them vanished together into the engulfing mists.
Kern flew on with Elje.
He labored on leaden wings through the fog. Whiffs of burning vapor stung in his nostrils and set his pumping lungs on fire. Elje was an almost unbearable weight in his arms.
Coughing, choking, ready to think every wingbeat his last, he stumbled through the air in the wake of the man before him, his only guide through this aerial labyrinth of poison. Hot updrafts caught him and tossed him aloft, crosscurrents fetid with strangling vapors sent him into perilous sideslips toward the jagged black peaks dangerously near. At this speed he knew he could not survive the slightest contact with those knife-edged rocks.
And Bruce’s loss was a heavier burden to bear than even Elje’s dead weight. For only Bruce could have opened the doors for the rest to escape into worlds of their own. And upon Bruce’s uncanny skill he had pinned his highest hopes of freeing this world from its enemy.
Strangling, choking, muscles aching from the strain of long flight, he reeled on in the wake of the flying outlaws.
The end of the ordeal came without warning. One moment he was flying blindly through the updrafts and the smoke, the next he found himself floating in clear still air over what seemed
