Elje’s clear bright color blanched in the sunlight. Behind her, Gerd’s eyes flashed sideward in the dark face, suspicious, mistrusting still.
“Why do you say that?”
Kern told them as they flew, the grove of blossoming trees on the horizon seeming to slip rapidly down the edge of the skyline and draw nearer far below. It was not easy to talk and fly. Kern’s breath began to come fast, and his chest and wings ached with the speed, after so many days of inactivity. When he finished speaking there was silence.
“The eyrie lies that way,” Elje said presently, in a controlled voice. She pointed right with a smooth bare arm. “I’ve sent most of the men on with our loot. Gerd chose twenty to follow us. You don’t know where or how far the Mountain’s men are?”
Kern shook his head. “Maybe I can find out at the next meeting with Byrna.”
He glanced behind them and saw the little band of Elje’s bodyguard flying a few minutes in their rear, big men all of them, with stolid, hard-eyed faces. Several carried light wicker squares looped up with straps.
“Seats for your friends, Kern,” Elje explained. “We need them when we carry our young people or our old ones, who no longer have the power to fly.” Her face darkened, as Kern knew their faces always did when the winged people thought of the days in which they would no longer travel the lanes of air.
It occurred to him then that their battles might be ferocious things, fought by men as fanatic in their own way as those who fought on Earth for entry into an imagined paradise. For these men fought their own old age as surely as they fought an enemy. No one who has once spread wings upon the air-currents willingly faces a life without wings.
The blooming grove was beneath them now.
“If you make contact this time with—it—again, Kern, I think it will know more easily where to direct its men,” Elje said. “There is great danger. Will you let this meeting with your friends go for awhile? You may be doing them harm as well as us. The army of the Mountain may be very near now.”
Kern hesitated. He had been dreading with every wingbeat the moment when he must open his mind again to that coiled and scorching malevolence. For an instant he toyed with the idea of postponing searching for Byrna’s mind, but he knew it would only mean putting off the inevitable. Grimly he shook his head.
“Byrna!” he called out mentally. “Byrna, what next?”
As before, for long moments there was no answer. Then briefly, like a gasp, he caught the touch of Byrna’s mind—only briefly and very incoherently, because between them in the instant of contact flashed the blinding hatred of the—the interloper. Only when their minds touched, apparently, could the white-hot malevolence reach them, but it lay ambushed and ready, and this time it seemed to flare out between them almost before Byrna’s voice could speak.
Reeling back, shaken and stunned by the thing between them, Kern caught only a ragged thought or two from Byrna’s mind.
“Three hills—hurry—army!”
That was all that got through. For an instant the void flamed with the blankness of sheer hatred. Then Kern opened his eyes and caught himself on reeling wings. Elje and Gerd watched him without speaking as he controlled his shaken faculties with a great effort. Elje was white with terror, but on Gerd’s face suspicion was still predominant.
Three hills in a shadowy row cut the horizon line. Kern gestured toward them and in silence the little group flew on. If Byrna’s gasp of “—army—” meant the enemy were nearly upon them, there was nothing to do except fly as they had been flying, in the hope of reaching the mutants before disaster overtook them all.
V
Pursuit
The three hills were not quite below them, and Kern was watching the skyline anxiously for signs of the winged army which was moving against them, when something from below flashed across his eyes. He blinked and looked down. From a clump of trees the light-beam flashed again, dazzlingly, from a tiny point of brilliance. Then a small figure stepped out from the shelter of the branches, waving at him.
It was Kua. Even from this height he could see the reflected light in twin points on the sunglasses she held in one hand. She had signalled him by the heliograph with the only thing they had for reflecting light.
Pointing downward, he let one wing tilt high and came about in a long glide, lying at full length upon the air with his heels higher than his head. The ground swung, like water in a cup and Kua seemed to rush upward to meet him as the swift dive cut the space between them.
The others were with her by the time Kern had put his feet to the grass. He was conscious, as always, of a little shock of memory renewed when he met again Kua’s great single gaze from the center of her forehead. Byrna, hurrying to meet him, lifted a pale, drawn little face.
“Kern!” she cried in a voice that was pure music. And he thought there was in her eyes, and in Kua’s, a subtle something that was new to him. Mutation had gone on, perhaps, with them as with him, a step beyond Earthly mutation. Their powers were strengthened, so that, in part, they both were strangers to him.
Sam Brewster came out smiling and extending his hand, and Kern took it with the little inward quailing he had always felt before Sam, the instinctive averting of his gaze from Sam’s veiled eyes. Beyond Sam’s shoulder he saw Bruce Hallam lying motionless, as if he had not stirred since they laid him on the pallet of boughs. His face was ivory-hard and as withdrawn from living as the face of a statue that had never
