A something heavy and clinging fell suddenly across his wings. He jumped and looked back. It was a net, which a man with a scarred face and suspicious, squinting eyes was rapidly knotting together at the base of his pinions.
The hunchback grunted another monosyllable and drove the point of his knife against Kern’s shoulder, jerking his red head toward a flight of stairs across the room. The winged men drew back to let the two pass, silent now and watching with impassive faces. Elje, finishing the last of the second braid, tossed the pale silken rope of it across her shoulder and would not meet Kern’s eyes as he went by.
The stairs twisted unevenly through narrow stone walls. At the third level the hunchback threw open a heavy, low door and followed Kern into the room beyond. It was rather a pleasant little place, circular, with tile-banded walls and a tiled floor. The single window was barred and looked out over rooftops and distant hills. There was a low bed, a table, two chairs, nothing more.
The hunchback pushed Kern roughly toward one of the chairs. Both of them, Kern noticed, had low backs to clear the wings of those who might sit in them. He sank down and looked at the red-winged man expectantly. What happened then was the last thing, perhaps, that he might have expected to hear.
Gerd held out his dagger, level across his palm, pointed to it with the other hand and growled, “Kaj.” He slapped his sheath then, said, “Kajen,” and dropped the dagger into it. His pale eyes bored into Kern’s.
Unexpectedly, Kern heard himself laughing. Partly it was relief, for he would not have been surprised to feel the edge of that knife called kaj sink into his throat once the door had closed behind them.
Instead, apparently this was to be a lesson in language. …
Once, in the night, he awoke briefly. Strange stars were shining through the bars of his window. He thought there was someone stealthily looking at him from beyond the bars, and sleepily realized that it would take as great skill to fly in silence as to walk without noise. But he saw no one. He slept again and dreamed it was Elje at the window, touching the bars with light fingertips as she smiled in at him in the starlight, her face dabbled with blood.
For two weeks he saw no one but Gerd. The pale eyes in the dark face became very familiar to him, and gradually the deep voice became familiar and understandable too. Gerd was a patient and indefatigable teacher, and the language was a simple one, made for a simple culture. Indeed, Kern learned it so rapidly that he began to catch Gerd’s suspicious sidelong glances, and once, from his door, overheard a conversation on the stair outside when Gerd and Elje met.
“I think he may be a spy,” the hunchback’s deep guttural said.
Elje laughed. “A spy who doesn’t speak our language?”
“He learns it too readily. I wonder, Elje—The Mountain is cunning.”
“Hush,” was all she answered. But Kern thereafter was careful to pretend he knew less of the language than he really did.
The Mountain. He thought of that in the long hours when he was alone. A mountain, strange of shape, the color of clouds, towering halfway up the heavens. It was more than inert matter, if these winged people spoke of it with that hush in their voices.
For a fortnight he waited and listened and learned. Once more, in the night, with the nameless stars looking in at the window, he felt that inexplicable stirring of, alien life deep within him, and was frightened. It passed quickly, and was gone too fast for him to put any name to it, or to remember it clearly afterward. Mutation? Continuing change, in some unguessable form? He would not think of it.
On the fourteenth night, the Dream came.
He had not thought very much about Bruce Hallam. Kua and the others. Subconsciously, he did not want to. This was his world and the other mutants were actually intruders, false notes in the harmony. Danger he might find here, even death, but it was a winged world, and his own.
There were dreams at night. Voices whispering, whose tones he half-recognized and would not allow himself to remember when he awoke. Something was searching for his soul.
Before that final contact on the fourteenth night, he had eavesdropped enough on other conversations held on the stairs between Gerd and Elje to understand a little of what went on around him.
Gerd was urging that they leave the town and return somewhere, and Elje was adamant.
“There’s no danger yet.”
“There is danger whenever we’re away from the eyrie. Not even the Mountain can guide enemies through the poison winds. Our safety has always been a quick raid, Elje, and then back to the eyrie. But to stay here, gorging ourselves—in a town—is madness.”
“I like the comfort here,” Elje said naively. “It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten and drunk so well, and slept on such a bed.”
“You’ll sleep on a harder bed soon, then,” Gerd said dourly. “The towns will gather. They must know already that we’re here.”
“Are we afraid of the townsmen?”
“When the Mountain walks—” the hunchback said, and left the sentence unfinished.
Elje’s laughter rang false.
That night, Kern felt seeking fingers try again the doors of his mind, and this time his subconscious resistance could not keep them out. He recognized the mind behind that seeking—the infinitely sad, infinitely wise mind of the mutant Byrna, with the lovely voice and the pale, unlovely face.
For a moment he floundered, lost in
