CHAPTER VI
Betrayal
Horrified silence filled the cave for a moment when Kern ceased his translation. Then bedlam broke out. The encircling men who had listened so far in silence burst into violent speech, some deriding Kua’s claim, some cursing Gerd. Elje silenced them with a sharp command.
“I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. “Gerd wouldn’t betray us.”
Kua shrugged. “You’d better prepare to meet them,” was all she said.
For a moment Elje’s composure broke. “But I don’t—it can’t be Gerd! He wouldn’t! Kern, how can we meet them? They’re a hundred to our one! This was our last refuge. If they’re coming here, all is lost!”
“They don’t know we’re expecting them,” Kern said. “That’s our only advantage. Make the most of it. Is there any room for ambushes along the way?”
Elje shook her head. “It’s almost a single-file path everywhere. And Gerd knows it better than even I do.” Her wings drooped. Listlessly she stared into the fire. “This is the end of all resistance to the Mountain,” she said. “This is the day it wins the fight. None of us can come out alive. Gerd! I can’t believe it!”
“The Mountain—you think?” Kern asked her.
“It must be that. He passed all our tests—and we have rigid ones—but somehow he must have been able to hide the truth from us. He’s one of the Mountain’s slaves and, when it commanded, he had to obey.”
“That proves it!” Kern said suddenly. “Why should the Mountain move against you today of all days, unless it has something to fear? Gerd’s been with you a year, you say. The Mountain could have struck any hour of all that time. But it waited—for an emergency. And this is the emergency. If it’s afraid of us, then maybe we’re stronger than we know. Maybe—”
From the mists outside the high, hollow notes of a horn broke into his speech. Kern spun around. Voices rose in angry babble from the platform. There was a beating of wings that made a noise almost deafening under the dome of the cavern, and the fire flared wildly, the red canvas of Elje’s tent flapped in the blast as the outlaws rushed to the defense of their last refuge. Elje, shouting commands, rose with them.
Kua and Byrna turned white faces to Kern. Sam Brewster, behind them, looked a question. Rapidly Kern told them what had been said.
“You’d better wait here,” he finished. “I don’t know what’s coming, but you’ll be safer inside.”
Sam smiled a grim and dreadful smile. “I can help,” he reminded Kern. “I’ll come outside.”
Together they walked to the door of the cave. There was tumult beyond, but an orderly tumult. Ranks of the winged outlaws were hurrying aloft to hang overhead in wait. Elje marshaled the rest with a hopeless sort of efficiency into reserves. Before she had finished, the horn sounded again, on a note of triumph, and the first of the enemy burst through the fog upon them.
“You see,” Elje said to Kern, the hopelessness clear in her voice. “They wanted us out in the open where they could finish us quickest. They even gave warning so we’d be waiting for them. That’s how sure they are of us.”
From the front of the platform a wave of the outlaw fighters, knives flashing in their hands, rose to meet the newcomers. And from above a second wave dived on half-closed wings. For a few moments there was a bloody melee at the mouth of the aerial entry where the enemy poured through.
“We can hold them five minutes,” Elje said. “After that, we’re through.”
Now for the first time Kern saw how the winged men fought. The hawk-dive was the thing he thought of as he watched the fighters swoop on their prey, saw the flash of knives held at an expert angle for the slash that would cripple wing-muscles and send the victim hurtling helplessly to the ground. One sweeping cut across the chest-muscles was enough to put a man out of the fight.
But if the intended prey saw his adversary coming, then it was a matter of soaring and swooping for position. And Kern saw many times a winged man, outmaneuvered by his enemy, rise on desperate wings and hurl himself headlong into a death-like embrace, wings folded, so that the two fell like a single plummet, each striving frantically as they dropped twisting through the air for a blow that would cripple his adversary and break the wing-locked grip before the ground came too near.
Now the gush of the enemy through the fog had become too great to stem as they poured by the score out of their narrow entry. The fight which had for a few minutes hovered at the mouth of the gap swept backward and upward until the great tent of vapor over the platform was filled with struggling men, and the air was blackened with the shadows of their wings.
“They aren’t using those light-cones,” Kern said. “I’ve been waiting to dodge but none have come through yet. Why?”
“I think because the Mountain sends out the light-beam that focuses through the wires,” Elje told him. “That’s the way their weapons usually work. And the Mountain can’t penetrate our mists and our rocks here. They’ve got to fight hand-to hand—but they can do it. There are too many of them. I—Kern, look! Is that Gerd?”
A flash of red wings and red hair showed through the melee as someone went by on whistling wings, too fast to see clearly. Kern caught one glimpse of a dark face and pale, fixed eyes—and thought there was grief in the eyes and the distorted face in that one glancing look he caught of it.
Elje, beside him, shouted something across the platform and from its lip another wave of men rose in the hopeless defense of their stronghold.
“We’ll go up with the last,” Elje said quietly, glancing over her shoulder at the men who remained. “One more wave and then—the last. This way we’ll kill the greatest number before it’s over. Have you a knife, Kern?”
As she spoke a man with a dripping knife soared past them over the edge of the platform, blood falling from a dozen wounds, face set in blind, fanatic violence. Squarely before them they saw him falter in midair, his gaze going past them to something in the shadow of the cave. Abruptly then he stiffened, his chin jerked up and his wings folded back as if they had been suddenly broken. He fell in a long slide, momentum-borne and inert, and crashed at Elje’s very feet.
She had her knife at his throat in a swift, lithe crouch before she saw that no knife was necessary. Bewildered, she looked up at Kern.
He stooped and took the wet blade from the man’s hand, wiped it on his leather jerkin.
“Don’t look back, Elje,” he warned her harshly. “Sam? Sam!”
“It’s all right, Kern.” Sam Brewster’s voice had a dreadful sort of amusement in it. “I’m not—looking.”
Elje stared, speechless, into Kern’s face as the other mutant sauntered up to join them in the shelter of a heap of rock at the edge of the platform. Sam’s smile was thin and cold. The secondary lids veiled his eyes, but a gleam in their depths glittered even through the film and Kern looked hastily away.
“What—what is it?” Elje faltered. “What killed this man?”
“I did.” Sam was grinning without mirth. “Like this.”
He turned away, face lifted, scanning the turmoil overhead where men dived and soared on blood-dappled wings, clasped one another in deathly embraces and hurtled earthward with knives flashing between them. At the edge of the platform, only a dozen feet overhead, such a pair writhed in gasping, murderous combat. As they watched, one man freed his knife-hand and in the same motion drove the blade hilt-deep into the other’s chest!
The killer’s wings spread and stiffened in anticipation of what was to come, as his victim clutched convulsively at his shoulders in a last effort to save himself. For an instant one man’s wings supported them both. Then the dying man’s body went limp. Wings flaccid, he fell away from the blade and went hurtling downward through the mists, twisting and turning over while blood pumped from his chest.
The killer paused for a moment in midair, breathing in deep gasps and looking for another adversary. His glancing eyes crossed Sam Brewster’s. For an instant he hung there, panting for breath, gaze locked with Sam’s.
The knife dropped from his loosened fingers. Eyes still wide, he heeled over in the air stiffly. His wings broke backward and he fell after the man he had just killed. They vanished almost together into the fog below.
Sam laughed grimly. When he turned the secondary lids were closed again over his eyes.
“I can kill anyone who catches my eyes, when they’re open,” he said.
Elje did not understand the words, but his gesture was enough. She caught her breath softly and looked away in sheer instinctive revulsion from that deathly gaze.
“Elje, we’ve got to do something,” Kern said. “Now, while we can. We’ve got Sam. Kua and Byrna have their own powers, too. There’s no use waiting here to be killed. If only we could get away.”
“Where?” Elje asked somberly. “The Mountain could find us wherever we went.”
“We could go to the Mountain.” Kern’s voice was more confident than he felt. “If it’s so anxious to see us dead, then it must be afraid of us. Anyhow, that’s our only hope. Is there any way out except the way we came here?”
Elje gestured aloft. “Only up. And you can see how thick the vapors are.”
Kern glanced around the platform. There were perhaps fifty men remaining on their feet, waiting to be thrown into the last wave of the defense. He looked toward the cave-mouth and beckoned. Kua and Byrna hurried across the platform toward him, their faces pale and anxious.
“Kua,” he said. “A little while ago you found you could look through walls. Look up. Do you think you could tell which of those vapors up there are poisonous and which aren’t?”
Kua’s face lifted: her single eye narrowed. For a long moment no one spoke.
“No, I’m not sure,” she said. “I can see a long way through to the clear air. I can see that some of the fog flows in definite patterns, much thicker than the rest. But what’s poison and what isn’t—no one could tell that by looking, Kern.”
“Is there a path through the places where the fog’s thin?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll have to take a chance on it, then. Maybe if it’s thin enough to breathe, we can get through.”
Rapidly he told Elje what he hoped. “There are men enough left here to give us a chance if we fight our way. Sam and Kua are worth enough to be carried. I’ve never fought in the air and I wouldn’t be much help, so I’ll carry Byrna. It’s worth trying, Elje. Better than waiting here to be killed.”
“Yes.” Elje’s voice was hopeless. “Better to die that way than this. All right, Kern, we’ll go.”
“Better to die that way than this,” said Elja. “All right, Kern, we’ll go.”
She turned and shouted commands to the last men around her. A few minutes later the remnant of the rebel band went soaring into the air.
The platform fell away below. It was like plunging into a maelstrom of shouts and cries, groans, gasps for breath, the deafening beat of many wings. Blood rained about them, knives flashed and fell, bodies hurtled past toward the ground. With Byrna’s light weight in his arms, Kern beat heavily upward. Confidence had suddenly begun to glow in him, against all reason. They would make it. He was irrationally sure of that.
And they did. But not all of them.
Sam Brewster was the one who fell. Almost at the last, when their depleted band had reached nearly the dome of the vaporous tent, a flung knife transfixed one of Sam’s bearers between the wings. He screamed, arched backward, and fell. Someone beside him dived too late for the reeling basket-seat in which Sam rode. The mutant pitched forward into space and dropped without a cry.
It would have been suicide to dive back into that maelstrom of death in an effort to catch him. Sick at heart, Kern saw him fall twisting toward the ground. He saw, too, how man after man of the swarm around him stiffened and dropped after Sam on limp wings as the mutant’s lethal gaze took his own escort of dead men around him to his death.
Then they plunged into the choking mists overhead, and no one had time to think of anything but his own breathing, his own urgent need to follow exactly in the wing-path of Kua’s bearers as she guided them through the fog.
Like a gigantic thunderhead the Mountain lifted its clear, pale bulk into the zenith. The mind quailed from the very thought of such height; it seemed to lean forward over the fliers and hover for a monumental collapse that would crush the world.
When they drew close, Byrna shuddered in Kern’s arms and turned like a child to clasp his neck and hide her face on his shoulder.
“I can feel it,” she said in a muffled voice. “It’s watching. It’s trying to—to get into my mind. Don’t think, Kern. Don’t let it reach you!”
Kern was briefly aware of a hot, coiling ribbon of hatred that moved through his brain and was gone as his mind slammed its gates of thought against the intruder. It was not easy to force his wings to carry them onward when his whole mind rebelled against drawing any nearer to the Mountain. He saw revulsion on the faces around him too, and caught uneasy glances cast sideward at his face. Their pace had perceptibly slowed.
“I don’t like it either, Elje,” he said to the winged girl across the swimming void that flowed past far below. “But we’ve got to do it. What choice have we, except to be killed? They may be following us from the cave already. Our only hope’s to reach the Mountain where we may do a little damage before—” He did not finish. There was no need to finish.
Now they were so near the wall of opalescence rising like the end of the world before them that Kern could see their own reflections floating distorted high up on the face of the cliff.
“Is it glass?” he asked.
“No one knows.” Elje controlled a shiver. “No one who came close enough to find out ever returned. It may be just a—a solid mass. I don’t—” She had glanced across her shoulder to answer him. Now her gaze went further.
“They’re following,” she said in a dull voice. “If it is solid, we’re trapped.”
Kern looked back. In a dark mass like a low, level cloud on the horizon, the winged ranks of the enemy moved in their wake.
Kua suddenly pointed.
“Look ahead,” she said. “Up there on the cliff, to the left—is it a cave? I—why, it’s opening wider!”
Everyone looked eagerly. There was a moment’s silence. The Mountain too seemed to wait and listen. But Kern saw no change in the face of the cliff. Unbroken, unshadowed, opalescent, it lifted before them.
Wind sighed past them toward the cliff, ruffling their wings. The sigh grew stronger—was a rising sough of sound—a sough that soared to an ear-stunning shriek. Headlong they whirled toward the Mountain, helpless, drawn upon that sudden irresistible wind. Kern clutched Byrna tighter and fought his wrenched wings as the cliff rose up in his face, like a solid cloud.
Dimly he could make out the shape of the opening at the same moment it engulfed him. Stunned with surprise, he went tumbling into the cliffside on that sucking wind, half-blinded by the opalescent mist which filled the tunnel. It was like spinning through a solid, for the impalpable stuff they flew through was indistinguishable to the eye from the stuff of the Mountain itself.
Light dimmed behind them as they were drawn helpless in tumbling flight deeper and deeper into the heart of the cloud—the Mountain—there was no term for what it was they sped through.
The wind that bore them along slowed. The deafening noise of it fell and was a sigh, a whisper—silence. For an instant they hung in opalescent nothingness, gasping for breath. Then Kua’s voice sounded sweetly in the hush.
“Look back—look back! I can see the way we came. I can see it closing. Like water flowing together. No, like running sand.”
Kern ceased to hear her. For suddenly he was aware of an almost imperceptible thickening in the mist around him. Something not seen, but felt. A closing and a supporting, so that the weight of his body and Byrna’s no longer hung wholly upon his wings. A solidifying in the very air.
He could not move.