He shrugged. About that, he also was puzzled.
“I wish I knew. But I’ll find out, if any human can. Do you mean the army that’s coming against you is sent by the Mountain? Why?”
“As long as we remain free, the Mountain will try to enslave us,” Elje said. “And we’ll fight the townsmen for the things we need, since we don’t dare fight the Mountain. We’ve stayed too long in this village—yes, Gerd, I know! We’ll return to the eyrie now. If an army of the townsfolk is coming, they’ll have weapons the Mountain made them build, and the weapons will be dangerous, whatever they may be this time.”
“The prisoner may know all this already,” Gerd said dourly. “That doesn’t matter. But it will matter if we take him to the eyrie. He could lead our enemies there, Elje.”
“Through the poison winds?” But Elje drew in her lower lip thoughtfully. “He tells a mad story, Gerd. I know that. Could it be true?”
“Well, what then?”
“These companions he spoke of. They sound like gods. And they talked of fighting against the Mountain.”
“Fight against the stars,” Gerd said and laughed. “But not the Mountain. Not even gods could win such a war.”
“They aren’t gods,” Kern said. “But they have powers none of us know. I think our coming marks a turning place in the history of your race, Elje—Gerd. You can kill us or abandon us and go on as you always have, or you can believe me and help us, and fight this time with a chance of winning. Will you do it?”
Elje was silent for a moment. Then she laughed and stood up suddenly with a flutter of her wings.
“I’ll go along with you and talk to your friends,” she said. “If they’re as you say—yes, Kern, I’ll believe you. For the Mountain never has changed human flesh. It can touch our minds, but not our bodies. I think in the beginning were men whose brains had some weakness that let the whisper come in, and those men were armed by the Mountain and killed their fellows, until only we outlaws remained.
“Our minds over the generations have been bred to resist invasion as the townspeople were bred to welcome it. I think—I know—if the Mountain could reach into our bodies and make that tiny change that would open our mind to it, then it would win. But it can’t. It can’t alter our bodies except by killing us. If I see with my own eyes these companions of Kern’s, I’ll know there is a power greater than the Mountain. And we’ll fight together, Kern!”
A little later, floating high above the nest of hills which cradled the village, Kern rocked on spread wings and pressed his eyes tightly shut, thinking with all the strength of his mind:
“Byrna, Byrna! Answer me, Byrna! Help me find you. Byrna, do you hear?”
Silence, except for the small noises drifting up from far below, distant shouts as Elje’s winged band collected in haste the loot they would take with them to their eyrie. Kern’s vision swam with the flecked clouds of sunlight on closed lids. Deliberately he blanked his mind to receive an answer. None came.
“Byrna! There may not be time to waste. Byrna, Kua, answer me!”
In his eagerness and impatience he remembered again what he had glimpsed dimly through Byrna’s memory, the ranks of armed fliers moving through the night on steadily beating wings toward the village. Perhaps from so far away they would not arrive for many hours—perhaps so near that the cloud on the horizon now was not mist, but armed men. …
“Byrna! Do you hear me?”
“Kern!” The answer he sought came with sharp impact, like a blow in the face. As if she were almost at his side and speaking with dreadful violence. He caught terror in the contact of minds, cold, controlled terror that chilled him so the sunny air turned suddenly icy around him. He knew instantly that she had heard him before, had been hedging for just the right contact so that there need be no wasted moments of groping and finding focus upon one another. He caught the hard impact and the terror and the urgency in the moment their minds met. Then her thoughts tumbled into his mind:
“Kern! Hurry! No time to waste. Do you see the grove of blooming trees left on the horizon? Come! Make new contact there.”
She blanked as suddenly as she had entered his mind. And because thoughts are so infinitely more rapid than words she had conveyed those four ideas—identification, haste, locality and a promise of future contact—in almost no lapse of time at all. But in that brief instant while their minds did meet, something happened.
Kern rocked on shaken wings as if a blow had jolted him. He snatched his mind back from the brief touch with Byrna’s quickly, quickly, scorched with the incandescent hatred that had blazed in the void between them. For the coiled ribbon of fire which had swum so strangely through nothingness when he woke from his clairvoyant dream was awake and alive now, and terribly avid.
It had been waiting, he knew in the instant while his mind leaped back in recoil from that burning contact. It had found them as he waked slowly from the long, leisured conversation in the séance.
Since that moment it had lain, coiled, in waiting. It?
Folding his wings, he dropped forward in a long, breathtaking dive, the air screaming past his ears. From a tiled rooftop far below, he saw two figures rise, one on pale wings, one on glossy red. He spread his own pinions then, exulting in the strain on his chest-muscles when the broad surfaces checked his dive, bore him up in a steep arc that made the air feel warm and solid as he carved a long curve through it.
“That way,” he told Elje, pointing, when she rose within hearing. “We’ll have to hurry. There’s
