CHAPTER III
Gathering Danger
Sunlight winked from the diamond-paned windows of the village. They circled above the rooftops and came in against the wind for a landing on the high, flat roof of the central building, its open square paved with tiles painted in bright, crude pictures of flying men and women.
From above Kern could see the cobbled streets winding narrowly past overhanging eaves, little stone bridges arching the stream that gushed rapidly down through the village. Flowers were bright in narrow, ordered bands around the houses. There were steep streets that rose in steps around the curves of the hill upon which the town was based.
The roofs were steeply pitched, arguing a heavy snowfall in winter, but each of them had a landing area on the highest part of the house, usually facing a low door let into a gable. And Kern’s last doubt departed. This was indeed a village of flying people. He had come into his own world at last.
His content lasted about five minutes.
Then they came down upon the brightly tiled landing-roof of what was probably the townhall, and Kern, already fluttering his wings for a landing, saw something that made him instinctively tighten the chest-muscles that controlled his wings so that they stiffened into broad pinions again. He soared and made a second circle about the rooftop.
The girl had reversed herself and was reaching with one foot for a landing when she saw what had startled him. She laughed and looked up, beckoning through the cloud of her settling hair.
Kern made a third circle, fighting the updraft among the houses while he looked down dubiously at the two dead men sprawled upon the roof. Both were young and both were winged. The girl walked delicately by them as if they were not there, settling her wings precisely. She stepped over the pool of blood, still liquid, that ran from a wound in the nearer man’s neck, streaked across the width of his quiet pinion, and that puddled the brilliant tiles with a color of even brighter hue.
There was a measured beating of the air above Kern, and he looked up to see the hunchback hovering on silky red wings above him. Sunlight flashed on a bared knife-blade. Gerd gestured down. And there was something about his poise in the air, the way he handled his muscular, twisted body, that warned Kern not to precipitate a struggle. It occurred to him for the first time that fighting in midair must be an art requiring skills he had never learned—yet.
Gingerly he circled again and came down very lightly at the edge of the roof, holding his wings half-open until he was sure of his footing. The girl was waiting for him. She smiled, her blue glance flicking the dead men. Then she slapped her own dagger significantly, glanced at the bodies and back at Kern, and with a careless beckoning motion turned to enter the roof door.
A little dazed, Kern followed. Did she mean she herself had killed them? What extraordinary sort of culture had he found ready-made for him here? The first doubts stirring in his mind, he stooped his wings under the door-frame and groped down a narrow, curving stairway behind the floating hair of his guide. Behind him he heard Gerd’s feet thump uncompromisingly from step to step.
Voices came up the stair-well as they descended. At the bottom of the flight Kern followed the girl into a big stone-paved room, low-ceilinged, smoky from the fire that blazed in a huge cavern of whitewashed brick at one end of the roof.
The room was full of the living and the dead. Bewildered. Kern glanced about at the winged bodies which had obviously been dragged carelessly out of the center of the room and heaped against the walls. Blood lay in coagulating pools here and there on the flags. The men about the fireplace seemed to be debating something in loud voices. They looked up sharply as the girl entered. Then there was a clattering rush and a clamor of guttural voices as they hurried to greet her.
Kern made out one word among their sentences that seemed to be her name.
“Elje—Elje!”
Their voices echoed under the low ceiling, their wings made a rustle and soft clatter as they shouldered together around her. If it had not been for the unconsidered dead at their feet, Kern would have been happy without reservation, knowing at last beyond any doubt that this was a world of the winged.
They were talking about him, obviously. Elje, braiding her disordered hair, spoke rapidly and glanced from Kern to her companions and back again. Kern did not wholly like the looks of the men. Without wings, they would have seemed an undisciplined, violent group. Their faces were scarred and weather-beaten. All of them wore knives, and they had clearly been in a hard fight within the last few hours.
Among the dead on the floor there were men without wings. There were also, he saw now, a few women, some winged, some not. Two races? Somehow he surmised that was not true; there was a subtle likeness among them all, the wingless and the winged, that marked them of the same racial stock.
Presently he began to notice that the unwinged were all either elderly or adolescent. He remembered that his own wings had not begun to grow until he was past eighteen. Was it only in their prime that this race could fly? And would he, with advancing years, lose again this glorious attribute he had only now begun to enjoy?
The thought damped that surge of exultation which still flooded his mind beneath the surface bewilderment. And then he grinned wryly to himself, thinking:
“Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I won’t live that long!”
For the looks of the grim men around him were not encouraging. If he had guessed right about a universal language in this world, it was not strange that his ignorance of it gave them room for suspicion. And in a village where life was held as cheaply as it was held here, he could probably expect direct and violent reactions to suspicion.
He was not far wrong. The men spoke among themselves in brawling voices a moment or two longer, the girl Elje braiding her hair carelessly and putting in a word now and then. While Kern stood there, debating with himself what was best to do, the argument came to a swift climax. Elje called something in a clear voice and, directly behind him, Kern heard a guttural monosyllable in answer, and the rustle of wings, and felt something cold and edged laid against the side of his neck.
He stood quite still. Then the hunchback, Gerd, sidled around into his view, holding the sharp knife with a steady hand against Kern’s jugular. The pale eyes in the dark young face were steady and full of cold threat.
Someone moved across the flagstones behind him and Kern felt hands draw his wrists together, felt the roughness of rope pulled tight around them. He did not protest. He was too surprised, and too unaccustomed to violence in his daily life, to know just now what course he should take. And he was filled still with the thought that these were his own people.
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 the depths of that intelligence so much more fathomless than his own. For a moment timeless sorrow washed him like the waters of the sea. Then he found himself again, and was looking, somehow, through new and different eyes, into a grassy hollow filled with starlight. Into Kua’s beautiful honey-colored face and her great single eye. Into Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze.
Dimly he groped for Bruce Hallam, who had opened the door for them all. Bruce was missing. And as for Byrna—it was Byrna’s eyes through which he saw them. Her mind, gripping his like the clasp of hands, cupping his like a bowl of still water. Soundlessly through space came a voice. Kua’s voice.
“Byrna, have you found him?”
“I think—yes. Kern! Kern!”
Without words, he answered them.
“Yes, Kua. Yes, Byrna. I’m here.”
There was resentment in Kua’s voice—the voice of her mind, for no words were spoken in this curious seance. Kern found time to wonder briefly if Byrna had always possessed this strange ability to bridge distances, or if it had burgeoned in her here as something struggled in himself for new being.
“We’ve been trying a long time, Kern,” Kua said coldly. “You were hard to reach.”
“I—I wasn’t sure you’d be here any longer.”
“You thought we’d have gone on to other worlds. Well, we would have, if we could. But Bruce was hurt. In the storm.”
“Badly?”
She hesitated. “We—can’t be sure. Look.”
Through Byrna’s eyes Kern saw Bruce Hallam’s motionless figure, lying silent on a bed of boughs. He looked oddly pale, almost ivory in color. His breathing was nearly imperceptible. And Byrna’s mind, groping through the void for his, found only a strange, dim spinning—something too far away and too abstract for the normal mind to grasp. She touched it briefly—and it spun out of contact and was gone.
“A trance?” Kua said. “We don’t know, yet. But we’ve used Byrna’s vision and learned a little about this world. How much do you know, Kern?”
Kern told them then, with Byrna’s tongue, too absorbed in the needs of the moment to realize fully what a strange meeting this was of more than human minds, over unguessed distances of alien land. He told them what he knew, what he had guessed from overheard conversations—not much, but a general picture.
“The planet’s mostly ocean. A small continent, about the size of Australia, I think. City-states all over it. Elje’s band are outlaws. They have a hideout somewhere, and they raid the towns. They seem—well, scornful of the townspeople, and a little afraid, too. I can’t quite understand that.”
“This—Gerd? He spoke of a Mountain?” Kua said.
“Yes. Something about—when the Mountain walks.”
“You know the Mountain,” Kua said. “The storm came from there. Those vortices of light and energy rose out of it.”
Kern remembered the spindles of blinding brilliance that strode across the land in the maelstrom of the winds. “We don’t understand much of it yet,” Kua was saying in a troubled tone. “We know there’s danger connected with that Mountain. I think there is life there, something we don’t know about. Something that probably couldn’t have developed on Earth. The conditions could have been too alien. But here anything is possible.”
Kern felt the thought forming in his brain—in Byrna’s brain.
“Life? Intelligent life? What do you know about it?”
“Maybe not life as we understand the word. Call it a—force. No, it’s more tangible than that. I don’t know—” The thought-voice of Kua faltered. “Dangerous. We may learn more of it, if we live. This much we’ve seen, though, through Byrna’s vision, and mine. We’ve sensed forces reaching out from the Mountain, into the minds of men. The minds of the winged townspeople. Assembling them for war.” She hesitated. “Kern, do you know they’re on their way now, to your town, where the outlaws are?”
He was instantly alert.
“Now? From where? How soon can they get here?”
“I’m not sure. They aren’t in my sight yet—over the horizon, that is. Byrna, tell him.”
The mind that held Kern’s stirred, and through it he saw as through a haze rank upon rank of winged beings flying with steady beasts of their pinions over a dark night-time terrain. Byrna’s thought murmured,
“You see, I can’t tell how far. It’s new, this clairvoyance since we came from Earth. I could always see but not so clearly, and I never could show others what was in my mind. So I only know these men are flying against your village.”
“And the force of men—the Mountain, I think, has armed them somehow,” Kua put in. “Byrna has seen the weapons they carry. You’d better warn your friends—your jailers or whatever they are. Otherwise you may be caught in the middle of a fight.”
“I will.” Kern’s mind was full now of something new. “You say you’ve developed this clairvoyance since the time when you came here, Byrna. Has it happened to the others, too?”
“To me, maybe, a little,” Kua said slowly. “A sharpening of focus, not much more than that. To Sam—” Her thought form glanced sidewise to Sam Brewster, sitting silent, with the hood of his secondary lids drawn over his terrible eyes, “—I think nothing’s happened. He can’t join our talk now, you see. Byrna’s mind can’t reach into his at all. We’ll have to tell him all that’s been said, later. And Bruce.” She shrugged. “Perhaps the winged people will tell you how we can help him. The edge of one of the vortices caught him, and he’s been like this ever since. We’d hoped to go on, you know, Kern, to find our own worlds as you—perhaps—have found yours. But without Bruce, we’re helpless.”
Kern was aware of a tightening and strengthening of his own mind as a problem at last came before him that must be met. Until now he had been almost in a trance of wonder and delight and dismay at the new things of this new, winged world. But the time for lassitude was over. He gathered his thoughts for speech, but Kua’s voice cut his beginning phrases short.
“Kern, there’s danger in the Mountain. The—thing—whatever it is, knows we’re here. It lives in the Mountain, or perhaps it is the Mountain. But Byrna has sensed hatred from it. Malevolence.”
There was a sudden harshness to her thought.
“Kern, you’re a soft fool!” Kua said. “Did you think you could reach Paradise without earning it? Whether you help us or not, you’ve got to face danger before you’ll find your place in this world, or any other. I don’t think you can manage without us. And we need your help, too. Together, we may still lose the battle. Separately, there’s no hope for any of us. We know! The Mountain may be a mutation as far beyond us as we are beyond the animals. But we’ve got to fight.”
Her voice blurred suddenly, faded to a thin drone. The starlit hill and the faces before him swirled and melted in Kern’s sleeping sight. He struggled for a moment against intangible danger—something formless and full of strong malevolence. He saw—what was it? A vast, coiling Something like a ribbon of fire, moving lazily in darkness and aware of him—terribly aware.
Far off in the void he felt the quiver of fright in a mind he knew—Byrna’s mind. But he lost the contact instantly, and then someone was shaking him by the shoulder and saying something in insistent, guttural tones.
He opened his eyes.