Kua’s wide blue eye, with depth upon depth shining in it, was staring at the rock wall above the fireplace. Her face had a look of concentration and withdrawal upon it, as if in all but body she were miles away.
“Kern!” she said again. “There are men coming. Many men. I think they are the same ones who were following us outside.” She hesitated, glancing quickly at Elje’s face, her eye refocusing swiftly and then going back to the solid wall.
“Kua, you can see them?” Kern demanded. “Do you mean it? Do you know you’re not looking through empty spaces now, Kua? You’re looking through rock!”
The shock of realization on Kua’s face as she turned to him was answer enough. “I am!” she gasped. “It never—that hasn’t happened before. Kern, it’s true that we’re changing. More than we know, until something like this happens! But I can see them. I can see through the side of the mountain.”
Again she turned to stare with her fathomless gaze into distances no human eye ever pierced before, unaided.
“They’re coming,” she said. “Through the mists, the way we came.”
Swiftly Kern told Elje what she had said. Elje leaned forward abruptly.
“Through the labyrinth?” she cried. “But they can’t! No one can come that way without a guide. They won’t get far before they’re overcome by the gasses.”
“They have a guide,” Kua said in a strangely gentle voice, turning her gaze upon Elje. “Your friend. Gerd.”
VI
Betrayal
Horrified silence filled the cave for a moment when Kern ceased his translation. Then bedlam broke out. The encircling men who had listened so far in silence burst into violent speech, some deriding Kua’s claim, some cursing Gerd. Elje silenced them with a sharp command.
“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. “Gerd wouldn’t betray us.”
Kua shrugged. “You’d better prepare to meet them,” was all she said.
For a moment Elje’s composure broke. “But I don’t—it can’t be Gerd! He wouldn’t! Kern, how can we meet them? They’re a hundred to our one! This was our last refuge. If they’re coming here, all is lost!”
“They don’t know we’re expecting them,” Kern said. “That’s our only advantage. Make the most of it. Is there any room for ambushes along the way?”
Elje shook her head. “It’s almost a single-file path everywhere. And Gerd knows it better than even I do.” Her wings drooped. Listlessly she stared into the fire. “This is the end of all resistance to the Mountain,” she said. “This is the day it wins the fight. None of us can come out alive. Gerd! I can’t believe it!”
“The Mountain—you think?” Kern asked her.
“It must be that. He passed all our tests—and we have rigid ones—but somehow he must have been able to hide the truth from us. He’s one of the Mountain’s slaves and, when it commanded, he had to obey.”
“That proves it!” Kern said suddenly. “Why should the Mountain move against you today of all days, unless it has something to fear? Gerd’s been with you a year, you say. The Mountain could have struck any hour of all that time. But it waited—for an emergency. And this is the emergency. If it’s afraid of us, then maybe we’re stronger than we know. Maybe—”
From the mists outside the high, hollow notes of a horn broke into his speech. Kern spun around. Voices rose in angry babble from the platform. There was a beating of wings that made a noise almost deafening under the dome of the cavern, and the fire flared wildly, the red canvas of Elje’s tent flapped in the blast as the outlaws rushed to the defense of their last refuge. Elje, shouting commands, rose with them.
Kua and Byrna turned white faces to Kern. Sam Brewster, behind them, looked a question. Rapidly Kern told them what had been said.
“You’d better wait here,” he finished. “I don’t know what’s coming, but you’ll be safer inside.”
Sam smiled a grim and dreadful smile. “I can help,” he reminded Kern. “I’ll come outside.”
Together they walked to the door of the cave. There was tumult beyond, but an orderly tumult. Ranks of the winged outlaws were hurrying aloft to hang overhead in wait. Elje marshaled the rest with a hopeless sort of efficiency into reserves. Before she had finished, the horn sounded again, on a note of triumph, and the first of the enemy burst through the fog upon them.
“You see,” Elje said to Kern, the hopelessness clear in her voice. “They wanted us out in the open where they could finish us quickest. They even gave warning so we’d be waiting for them. That’s how sure they are of us.”
From the front of the platform a wave of the outlaw fighters, knives flashing in their hands, rose to meet the newcomers. And from above a second wave dived on half-closed wings. For a few moments there was a bloody melee at the mouth of the aerial entry where the enemy poured through.
“We can hold them five minutes,” Elje said. “After that, we’re through.”
Now for the first time Kern saw how the winged men fought. The hawk-dive was the thing he thought of as he watched the fighters swoop on their prey, saw the flash of knives held at an expert angle for the slash that would cripple wing-muscles and send the victim hurtling helplessly to the ground. One sweeping cut across the chest-muscles was enough to put a man out of the fight.
But if the intended prey saw his adversary coming, then it was a matter of soaring and swooping for position. And Kern saw many times a winged man, outmaneuvered by his enemy, rise on desperate wings and hurl himself headlong into a deathlike embrace, wings folded, so that the two fell like a single plummet, each striving frantically as they dropped twisting through the air for a blow that would
