“Yes.”
“We’ll have to take a chance on it, then. Maybe if it’s thin enough to breathe, we can get through.”
Rapidly he told Elje what he hoped. “There are men enough left here to give us a chance if we fight our way. Sam and Kua are worth enough to be carried. I’ve never fought in the air and I wouldn’t be much help, so I’ll carry Byrna. It’s worth trying, Elje. Better than waiting here to be killed.”
“Yes.” Elje’s voice was hopeless. “Better to die that way than this. All right, Kern, we’ll go.”
She turned and shouted commands to the last men around her. A few minutes later the remnant of the rebel band went soaring into the air.
The platform fell away below. It was like plunging into a maelstrom of shouts and cries, groans, gasps for breath, the deafening beat of many wings. Blood rained about them, knives flashed and fell, bodies hurtled past toward the ground. With Byrna’s light weight in his arms, Kern beat heavily upward. Confidence had suddenly begun to glow in him, against all reason. They would make it. He was irrationally sure of that.
And they did. But not all of them.
Sam Brewster was the one who fell. Almost at the last, when their depleted band had reached nearly the dome of the vaporous tent, a flung knife transfixed one of Sam’s bearers between the wings. He screamed, arched backward, and fell. Someone beside him dived too late for the reeling basket-seat in which Sam rode. The mutant pitched forward into space and dropped without a cry.
It would have been suicide to dive back into that maelstrom of death in an effort to catch him. Sick at heart, Kern saw him fall twisting toward the ground. He saw, too, how man after man of the swarm around him stiffened and dropped after Sam on limp wings as the mutant’s lethal gaze took his own escort of dead men around him to his death.
Then they plunged into the choking mists overhead, and no one had time to think of anything but his own breathing, his own urgent need to follow exactly in the wing-path of Kua’s bearers as she guided them through the fog.
Like a gigantic thunderhead the Mountain lifted its clear, pale bulk into the zenith. The mind quailed from the very thought of such height; it seemed to lean forward over the fliers and hover for a monumental collapse that would crush the world.
When they drew close, Byrna shuddered in Kern’s arms and turned like a child to clasp his neck and hide her face on his shoulder.
“I can feel it,” she said in a muffled voice. “It’s watching. It’s trying to—to get into my mind. Don’t think, Kern. Don’t let it reach you!”
Kern was briefly aware of a hot, coiling ribbon of hatred that moved through his brain and was gone as his mind slammed its gates of thought against the intruder. It was not easy to force his wings to carry them onward when his whole mind rebelled against drawing any nearer to the Mountain. He saw revulsion on the faces around him too, and caught uneasy glances cast sideward at his face. Their pace had perceptibly slowed.
“I don’t like it either, Elje,” he said to the winged girl across the swimming void that flowed past far below. “But we’ve got to do it. What choice have we, except to be killed? They may be following us from the cave already. Our only hope’s to reach the Mountain where we may do a little damage before—” He did not finish. There was no need to finish.
Now they were so near the wall of opalescence rising like the end of the world before them that Kern could see their own reflections floating distorted high up on the face of the cliff.
“Is it glass?” he asked.
“No one knows.” Elje controlled a shiver. “No one who came close enough to find out ever returned. It may be just a—a solid mass. I don’t—” She had glanced across her shoulder to answer him. Now her gaze went further.
“They’re following,” she said in a dull voice. “If it is solid, we’re trapped.”
Kern looked back. In a dark mass like a low, level cloud on the horizon, the winged ranks of the enemy moved in their wake.
Kua suddenly pointed.
“Look ahead,” she said. “Up there on the cliff, to the left—is it a cave? I—why, it’s opening wider!”
Everyone looked eagerly. There was a moment’s silence. The Mountain too seemed to wait and listen. But Kern saw no change in the face of the cliff. Unbroken, unshadowed, opalescent, it lifted before them.
Wind sighed past them toward the cliff, ruffling their wings. The sigh grew stronger—was a rising sough of sound—a sough that soared to an ear-stunning shriek. Headlong they whirled toward the Mountain, helpless, drawn upon that sudden irresistible wind. Kern clutched Byrna tighter and fought his wrenched wings as the cliff rose up in his face, like a solid cloud.
Dimly he could make out the shape of the opening at the same moment it engulfed him. Stunned with surprise, he went tumbling into the cliffside on that sucking wind, half-blinded by the opalescent mist which filled the tunnel. It was like spinning through a solid, for the impalpable stuff they flew through was indistinguishable to the eye from the stuff of the Mountain itself.
Light dimmed behind them as they were drawn helpless in tumbling flight deeper and deeper into the heart of the cloud—the Mountain—there was no term for what it was they sped through.
The wind that bore them along slowed. The deafening noise of it fell and was a sigh, a whisper—silence. For an instant they hung in opalescent nothingness, gasping for breath. Then Kua’s voice sounded sweetly in the hush.
“Look back—look back! I can see the way we came. I can see it closing. Like water flowing together. No, like running sand.”
Kern ceased to hear her. For suddenly he
