Now the gush of the enemy through the fog had become too great to stem as they poured by the score out of their narrow entry. The fight which had for a few minutes hovered at the mouth of the gap swept backward and upward until the great tent of vapor over the platform was filled with struggling men, and the air was blackened with the shadows of their wings.
“They aren’t using those light-cones,” Kern said. “I’ve been waiting to dodge but none have come through yet. Why?”
“I think because the Mountain sends out the light-beam that focuses through the wires,” Elje told him. “That’s the way their weapons usually work. And the Mountain can’t penetrate our mists and our rocks here. They’ve got to fight hand-to hand—but they can do it. There are too many of them. I—Kern, look! Is that Gerd?”
A flash of red wings and red hair showed through the melee as someone went by on whistling wings, too fast to see clearly. Kern caught one glimpse of a dark face and pale, fixed eyes—and thought there was grief in the eyes and the distorted face in that one glancing look he caught of it.
Elje, beside him, shouted something across the platform and from its lip another wave of men rose in the hopeless defense of their stronghold.
“We’ll go up with the last,” Elje said quietly, glancing over her shoulder at the men who remained. “One more wave and then—the last. This way we’ll kill the greatest number before it’s over. Have you a knife, Kern?”
As she spoke a man with a dripping knife soared past them over the edge of the platform, blood falling from a dozen wounds, face set in blind, fanatic violence. Squarely before them they saw him falter in midair, his gaze going past them to something in the shadow of the cave. Abruptly then he stiffened, his chin jerked up and his wings folded back as if they had been suddenly broken. He fell in a long slide, momentum-borne and inert, and crashed at Elje’s very feet.
She had her knife at his throat in a swift, lithe crouch before she saw that no knife was necessary. Bewildered, she looked up at Kern.
He stooped and took the wet blade from the man’s hand, wiped it on his leather jerkin.
“Don’t look back, Elje,” he warned her harshly. “Sam? Sam!”
“It’s all right, Kern.” Sam Brewster’s voice had a dreadful sort of amusement in it. “I’m not—looking.”
Elje stared, speechless, into Kern’s face as the other mutant sauntered up to join them in the shelter of a heap of rock at the edge of the platform. Sam’s smile was thin and cold. The secondary lids veiled his eyes, but a gleam in their depths glittered even through the film and Kern looked hastily away.
“What—what is it?” Elje faltered. “What killed this man?”
“I did.” Sam was grinning without mirth. “Like this.”
He turned away, face lifted, scanning the turmoil overhead where men dived and soared on blood-dappled wings, clasped one another in deathly embraces and hurtled earthward with knives flashing between them. At the edge of the platform, only a dozen feet overhead, such a pair writhed in gasping, murderous combat. As they watched, one man freed his knife-hand and in the same motion drove the blade hilt-deep into the other’s chest!
The killer’s wings spread and stiffened in anticipation of what was to come, as his victim clutched convulsively at his shoulders in a last effort to save himself. For an instant one man’s wings supported them both. Then the dying man’s body went limp. Wings flaccid, he fell away from the blade and went hurtling downward through the mists, twisting and turning over while blood pumped from his chest.
The killer paused for a moment in midair, breathing in deep gasps and looking for another adversary. His glancing eyes crossed Sam Brewster’s. For an instant he hung there, panting for breath, gaze locked with Sam’s.
The knife dropped from his loosened fingers. Eyes still wide, he heeled over in the air stiffly. His wings broke backward and he fell after the man he had just killed. They vanished almost together into the fog below.
Sam laughed grimly. When he turned the secondary lids were closed again over his eyes.
“I can kill anyone who catches my eyes, when they’re open,” he said.
Elje did not understand the words, but his gesture was enough. She caught her breath softly and looked away in sheer instinctive revulsion from that deathly gaze.
“Elje, we’ve got to do something,” Kern said. “Now, while we can. We’ve got Sam. Kua and Byrna have their own powers, too. There’s no use waiting here to be killed. If only we could get away.”
“Where?” Elje asked somberly. “The Mountain could find us wherever we went.”
“We could go to the Mountain.” Kern’s voice was more confident than he felt. “If it’s so anxious to see us dead, then it must be afraid of us. Anyhow, that’s our only hope. Is there any way out except the way we came here?”
Elje gestured aloft. “Only up. And you can see how thick the vapors are.”
Kern glanced around the platform. There were perhaps fifty men remaining on their feet, waiting to be thrown into the last wave of the defense. He looked toward the cave-mouth and beckoned. Kua and Byrna hurried across the platform toward him, their faces pale and anxious.
“Kua,” he said. “A little while ago you found you could look through walls. Look up. Do you think you could tell which of those vapors up there are poisonous and which aren’t?”
Kua’s face lifted: her single eye narrowed. For a long moment no one spoke.
“No, I’m not sure,” she said. “I can see a long way through to the clear air. I can see that some of the fog flows in definite patterns, much thicker than the rest. But what’s poison and what isn’t—no one could tell that by looking, Kern.”
“Is there
