She picked up two of the javelins, and sent the first against the farther wall—but the second did not follow it. At the moment her hand was lifted, the stone beside us disappeared from sight, leaving a yard-wide gap, and as swift as thought itself her javelin was flung into the open pit beneath us.
An outburst of whistling screams told us that it had carried no welcome message, but the next second we had our own troubles to deal with. Back into its place the stone shot upward, and with such force that certain things which had been placed upon it were thrown to the roof and fell scattering upon us. Four of them there were—four eight-foot lengths of living, writhing rope—but to me, at least, they seemed forty.
I suppose that my companion, of cooler mind, and of quicker hands also, made no such error.
I know that while I was struggling with one that had caught my leg and was thrusting upward for a more deadly grip, her mind reached mine with the quiet quickness of thought and buoyant gaiety of spirit that physical danger always waked within her. I had a feeling that the idea that she should be threatened by hostile violence always came to her as an absurdity, to be met with laughter.
“We must watch the stone. Put your foot on its end. Jump to the left, or the other one will get you.” So she called to me, while she ripped one which had fallen round her own waist with a javelin point till it loosed her and fell squirming, and as it did so she flung the javelin, not at the next of them, though it was round her feet already, nor at the gap which showed again where the stone had left it, but at the lizard-forms, that were now twittering with excitement above us.
It struck one of them fairly on the outstretched head, and down it came, a bright yellow snakelike form, turning head-under-heels as it came—or under tail, to be literal—and falling in the open gap, at which there rose a chorus of such consternation from the unseen Killers beneath us, that it was evident that to them a lizard must be a very dreaded or a very sacred thing.
“Two each,” she laughed, as she caught the still restless portions of the living cords on an arrow’s point, and threw them back into the gap beneath us. “Did you notice that they became almost harmless after I had struck one of the lizards, and the others bolted? I believe it was their minds that guided them to attack us. It was to reach them, if the need came, that I first tried the javelins, but I dare not tell you, nor let the thought make growth in my own mind, lest they should know it. I fear them, but I do not fear the Killers at all.” And just then the Killers came.
I think the falling of the lizard must have produced a confusion that delayed their attack, but that this was succeeded by such a tide of fury as swept away the natural cowardice that underlay their ferocity, and caused them to forget the caution with which they had approached us previously.
They came leaping upward, with their hands on the edge of the gap, and the first fell back with a javelin in the throat, and a second I knocked back with a sidesweep of the axe, and from the third I sliced off the sucker at its root, and stopped his whistling. But the crowd pushed up, and flung him sprawling outward.
They had no cords—perhaps they thought them useless after the way we returned the four they sent us; perhaps they would have been too dangerous to themselves in that crowded rush—and they had little time or space to use their javelins before the axe was on them. I struck, and struck, with steady sweeping strokes, at the pushing crowd that rose against me, the tough skins denting to the blade, and bursting as they felt the pressure behind them.
And always, if they rose too fast, or one should dodge my stroke, a javelin found it, from where my comrade had stepped back to the wall to reach them down as she needed them. Once I thought I had failed, as the pressure spued up two or three at once, too quickly for the axe to take them, but her mind reached me serenely. “Keep the others down—and leave these to me,” and was vaguely conscious that she was avoiding their weapons with a cool celerity, while her own bore them her message that their hours were over.
And then amid an up-rush of damaged bodies which he was using for his own protection I saw the red-brown malignant head of one of the archers, and struck with all my strength a straight-down cleaving blow, and was conscious that the attack had collapsed before me, and the gap was empty.
With a sudden dizziness I looked on the shambles that now surrounded the opening. I have told something of the outward repulsiveness of the Killers, with their worm-pink skins that were both tough and slimy, but of the interiors of these foul bodies I cannot write. An axe-stroke has no reticence.
I thought it was from that nauseous sight that a sudden faintness threatened, and I struggled against it, stepping back, and leaning on the axe, and turning to my companion for her to snare my triumph.
She stood very still, her eyes bright and watchful, her mind beginning to question her for the thing she had done—which was, no doubt, outside the experience not only of herself, but of all her kind—but her will meeting
