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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68378 ***
+
+                            WAY OF THE GODS
+
+                           By HENRY KUTTNER
+
+            _Spawn of atomic fission, this strange company
+             of mutants exiled by humanity battles against
+              enslavement in a foreign world dominated by
+               the evil Spirit of the Crystal Mountain!_
+
+           [Transcriber’s Note: This etext was produced from
+                 Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1947.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+                             _New Worlds_
+
+
+He looked at the October morning all about him as if he had never seen
+October before. That was not true, of course. But he knew that he would
+never see it again. Unless they had mornings, and Octobers—where he was
+going. It did not seem likely, though the old man had talked a great
+deal about key-patterns and the selectivity of the machine, and the
+multiple universes spinning like motes in a snowstorm through infinity.
+
+“But I’m human!” he said aloud, sitting cross-legged on the warm brown
+earth and feeling the breeze which gave the lie instantly to his
+thought. He felt the gentle pull at his shoulder-blades which meant that
+his wings were fluttered a little by the breeze, and instinctively he
+flexed the heavy bands of muscle across his chest to control the
+wing-surfaces.
+
+He was not human. That was the trouble. And this world, this bright
+October world that stretched to the horizon around him was made to
+shelter the race that had become dominant, and was jealous of its
+dominion. Humanity, that had no place for strangers among its ranks.
+
+The others did not seem to care very much. They had been reared in the
+creche almost from birth, under a special regime that isolated them from
+the humans. The old man had been responsible for that. He had built the
+huge house on the hillside, swooping curves of warmly-colored plastic
+that blended into the brown and green of the land—an asylum that had
+finally failed. The walls were breached.
+
+“Kern,” someone behind him said.
+
+The winged man turned his head, glancing up past the dark curve of his
+wings. A girl came toward him down the slope from the house. Her name
+was Kua. Her parents had been Polynesian, and she had the height and the
+lithe grace of her Oceanic race, and the shining dark hair, the warm,
+honey-colored skin. But she wore opaque dark glasses, and across her
+forehead a band of dark plastic that looked opaque too, and was not.
+Beneath, her face was lovely, the red mouth generously curved, the
+features softly rounded like the features of all her race.
+
+She was not human either.
+
+“It’s no use worrying, Kern,” she said, smiling down at him. “It’ll work
+out all right. You’ll see.”
+
+“All right!” Kern snorted scornfully. “You think so, do you?”
+
+Kua glanced instinctively around the hillside, making sure they were
+alone. Then she put both hands to her face and slipped off the glasses
+and the dark band from her forehead. Kern, meeting the gaze of her
+bright blue eye, was conscious again of the little shock he always felt
+when he looked into her uncovered face.
+
+For Kua was a cyclops. She had one eye centered in her forehead. And she
+was—when the mind could accept her as she was, not as she should be—a
+beautiful woman in spite of it. That blue brilliance in the dusky face
+had a depth and luster beyond the eyes of humans. Heavy lashes ringed
+it, and the gaze could sink fathom upon fathom in her eye and never
+plumb its depths.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Kua’s eye was a perfect lens. Whatever lens can do, her eye could do. No
+one could be sure just what miraculous mechanisms existed beyond the
+blue surface, but she could see to a distance almost beyond the range of
+the ordinary telescope and she could focus down upon the microscopic.
+And there may have been other things the single eye could do. One did
+not question one’s companions too closely in this house of the
+mutations.
+
+“You’ve been with us two years, Kern,” she was saying now. “Only two
+years. You don’t know yet how strong we are, or how much we can
+accomplish among us. Bruce Hallam knows what he’s doing, Kern. He never
+works on theories. Or if he does, the theories become truth. He has a
+mind like that. You don’t know us, Kern!”
+
+“You can’t fight a whole world.”
+
+“No. But we can leave it.” She smiled, and he knew she saw nothing of
+the golden morning all around them. She knew nothing, really, of the
+cities that dotted the world of 1980, or the lives that were so
+irrevocably alien to her. They should have been alien to Kern too, but
+not until he was eighteen had the wings begun to grow upon his
+shoulders.
+
+“I don’t know, Kua,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to. I had a father
+and a mother—brothers—friends.”
+
+“Your parents are your greatest enemies,” she told him flatly. “They
+gave you life.”
+
+He looked away from the penetrating stare of that great blue single eye
+and past her at the big plastic house. That had been asylum, after the
+massacre of 1967—asylum against the hordes bent on extirpating the
+freakish monsters created by atomic radiation. He could not remember, of
+course, but he had read about it, never guessing then that such a thing
+would ever apply to him. The old man had told him the story.
+
+First had come the atomic war, brief, terrible, letting loose nameless
+radiations upon the world. And then had followed the wave upon wave of
+freak births among those exposed to it. Genes and chromosomes altered
+beyond comprehension. Monstrous things were born of human parents.
+
+One in ten, perhaps, had been a successful mutation. And even those were
+dangerous to homo sapiens.
+
+Evolution is like a roulette wheel. The conditions of the earth favor
+certain types of mutation capable of survival. But atomic energies had
+upset the balance, and mutations spawned in sheer madness began to
+spread. Not many, of course. Not many were viable. But two-headed things
+were born—and lived—along with geniuses and madmen. World Council had
+studied the biological and social problem for a long time before it
+recommended euthanasia. Man’s evolution had been planned and charted. It
+must not be allowed to swerve from the track, or chaos would be let
+loose.
+
+Geniuses, mutant humans with abnormally high I.Q.’s, were allowed to
+survive. Of the others, none lived after they had been detected.
+Sometimes they were difficult to detect. By 1968 only the true-line
+mutations, faithful to the human biological norm, were alive—with
+certain exceptions.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Such as the old man’s son, Sam Brewster. He was a freak, with a
+certain—talent. A superhuman talent. The old man had disobeyed the
+Government law, for he had not sent the infant to the labs for checking
+and testing—and annihilation. Instead, he had built this great house,
+and the boy had never gone far beyond its grounds.
+
+Gradually then, partly to provide the youth with companionship, partly
+out of compassion, the father had begun to gather others together.
+Secretly, a mutant infant here, a mutant child there, he brought them
+in, until he had a family of freaks in the big plastic house. He had not
+taken them haphazardly. Some would not have been safe to live with. Some
+were better dead from the start But those with something to offer beyond
+their freakishness, he found and sheltered.
+
+It was the bringing in of Kern that gave the secret away. The boy had
+gone too long among ordinary humans, while his wings grew. He was
+eighteen, and his pinions had a six-foot spread, when old Mr. Brewster
+found him. His family had tried to keep him hidden, but the news was
+leaking out already when he left for the Brewster asylum, and in the
+years since it had spread until the authorities at last issued their
+ultimatum.
+
+“It was my fault,” Kern said bitterly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d
+never have been molested.”
+
+“No.” Kua’s deep, luminous eye fixed his. “Sooner or later you know
+they’d have found us. Better let it happen now, while we’re all still
+young and adaptable. We can go and enjoy going, now.” Her voice shook a
+little with deep excitement. “Think of it, Kern! New worlds! Places
+beyond the earth, where there could be people like us!”
+
+“But Kua, I’m human! I feel human. I don’t want to leave. This is where
+I belong!”
+
+“You say that because you grew up among normal people. Kern, you’ve got
+to face it. Tire only place for any of us is—somewhere away.”
+
+“I know.” He grinned wryly. “But I don’t have to like it. Well—we’d
+better go back. They’ll have the ultimatum by now, I suppose. May as
+well hear it. I know what the answer is. Don’t you?”
+
+She nodded, watching his involuntary glance around the empty blue sky,
+the warm October hills. A world for humans. But for humans alone....
+
+Back in the Brewster plastic asylum, the inmates had assembled.
+
+“There isn’t much time,” old Mr. Brewster said. “They’re on their way
+here now, to take you all back for euthanasia.”
+
+Sam Brewster laughed harshly.
+
+“We could show ’em a few tricks.”
+
+“No. You can’t fight the whole world. You could kill many of them, but
+it wouldn’t do any good. Bruce’s machine is the only hope for you all.”
+His voice broke a little. “It’s going to be a lonely world for me,
+children, after you’ve gone.”
+
+They looked at him uncomfortably, this strange, unrelated family of
+freak mutations, scarcely more than the children he had called them, but
+matured beyond their years by their strange rearing.
+
+“There are worlds beyond counting, as you know,” Bruce said precisely.
+“Infinite numbers—worlds where we might not be freaks at all. Somewhere
+among them there must be places where each of our mutations is a norm.
+I’ve set the machine to the aggregate pattern of us all and it’ll find
+our equivalents—something to suit one of us at least. And the others
+can go on looking. I can build the machine in duplicate on any world,
+anywhere, where I can live at all.” He smiled, and his strange light
+eyes glowed.
+
+It was curious, Kern thought, how frequently in mutations the eyes were
+the giveaway. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster with his terrible veiled
+glance protected by its secondary lid which drew back only in anger. And
+Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness was not visible but existed only in the
+amazing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the alien world with eyes
+that mirrored the mysteries behind them.
+
+Bruce knew machinery—call it machinery for lack of a more comprehensive
+word—with a knowledge that was beyond learning. He could produce
+miracles with any set of devices his fingers could contrive. He seemed
+to sense by sheer instinct the courses of infinite power, and harness
+them with the simplest ease, the simplest mechanics.
+
+There was a steel cubicle in the corner of the room with a round steel
+door which had taken Bruce a week to set up. Over it a panel burned with
+changing light, flickering through the spectrum and halting now and then
+upon clear red. When it was red, then the—the world—upon which the
+steel door opened was a world suitable for the little family of
+mutations to enter. The red light meant it could support human life,
+that it paralleled roughly the world they already knew, and that
+something in its essential pattern duplicated the pattern of at least
+one of the mutant group.
+
+Kern was dizzy when he thought of the sweep of universes past that door,
+world whirling upon world where no human life could dwell, worlds of gas
+and flame, worlds of ice and rock. And, one in a countless number, a
+world of sun and water like their own....
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+It was incredible. But so were the wings at his own back, so was Kua’s
+cyclopean eye, and Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze, and so was the brain in
+Bruce Hallam’s skull, which had built a bridge for them all.
+
+He glanced around the group. Sitting back against the wall, in shadow,
+Byrna, the last of the mutant family, lifted her gray gaze to his.
+Compassion touched him as always when he met her eyes.
+
+Byrna was physically the most abnormal of them all, in her sheer
+smallness. She came scarcely to Kern’s elbow when she was standing. She
+was proportioned perfectly in the scale of her size, delicate, fragile
+as something of glass. But she was not beautiful to look at. There was a
+wrongness about her features that made them pathetically ugly, and the
+sadness in her gray eyes seemed to mirror the sadness of all misfit
+things.
+
+Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did her brain. Wisdom came as
+simply to her as knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she had infinitely
+more warmth than he. Bruce, Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a
+human as dispassionately as he would cut wire in two if he needed the
+material for an experiment. Bruce looked the most normal of them all,
+but he would not have passed the questioning of the most superficial
+mental examination.
+
+Now his voice was impatient. “What are we waiting for? Everything’s
+ready.”
+
+“Yes, you must go quickly,” the old man said. “Look—the light’s coming
+toward red now, isn’t it?”
+
+The panel above the steel door was orange. As they watched it shifted
+and grew ruddier. Bruce went silently forward and laid his hand on the
+lever that opened the panel. When the light was pure red he pushed the
+steel bar down.
+
+In half-darkness beyond the opening a gust of luminous atoms blew across
+a craggy horizon. Against it there was a suggestion of towers and arches
+and columns, and lights that might have been aircraft swung in steady
+orbits above.
+
+No one spoke. After a moment Bruce closed the door again, grimacing. The
+light above it hovered toward a reddish purple and then turned blue.
+
+“Not that world,” Bruce said. “We’ll try again.”
+
+In the shadow Byrna murmured:
+
+“It doesn’t matter—any world will be the same for us.” Her voice was
+pure music.
+
+“Listen! Do you hear planes?” the old man said. “It’s time, children.
+You must go.”
+
+There was silence. Every eye watched the lighted panel. Colors hovered
+there to and fro through the spectrum. A faint ruddiness began to glow
+again.
+
+“This time we’ll take it if it looks all right,” Bruce said, and laid
+his hand again upon the lever.
+
+The light turned red. Soundlessly the round door swung open.
+
+Sunlight came through, low green hills, and the clustered roofs of a
+town were visible a little distance away in a valley.
+
+Without a word or a backward glance Bruce stepped through the door. One
+by one the others moved after him, Kern last. Kern’s lips were pressed
+together and he did not glance behind him. He could have seen the hills
+of earth beyond the windows, and the blue October sky. He would not look
+at them. He shrugged his wings together and stooped to enter the gateway
+of the new world.
+
+Behind them the old man watched in silence, seeing the work of his
+lifetime ending before his eyes. The gulf between them was too broad for
+leaping. He was human and they were not. Across a vast distance, vaster
+than the gulf between worlds, he saw the family of the mutations step
+over their threshold and vanish forever.
+
+He closed the door after them. The red light faded above it. He turned
+toward his own door where the knocking of World Council’s police had
+already begun to summon him to his accounting.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                            _His Own Kind_
+
+
+Above them, the sky was blue. The five aliens who were alien to all
+worlds alike stood together on a hilltop looking down.
+
+“It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we chose this one. But I wonder
+what the next one would have been like if we could have waited.”
+
+“It will be the same no matter where we go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet
+voice murmured.
+
+“Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What is it?”
+
+They saw then the first thing that marked this world alien to earth. For
+the most part it might have been any hilly wooded land they knew from
+the old place; even the roofs of the village looked spuriously familiar.
+But the horizon was curiously misted, and before them, far off,
+rose—something—to an impossible height halfway up the zenith.
+
+“A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully. “It’s too high, isn’t it?”
+
+“A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is glass—or plastic? I can’t be
+sure.”
+
+She had uncovered her single eye and the shining pupil was contracted as
+she gazed over impossible distances at the equally impossible bulk of
+that thing on the horizon. It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color,
+like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it
+for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such
+tremendous bulk towering overhead.
+
+“It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s
+beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of—of plastic? I wonder.”
+
+Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing-surfaces, and glanced around in
+quick recognition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to
+notice it.
+
+“It’s beginning to blow. And listen—do you hear?”
+
+It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill, strengthening whine in the
+air coming from the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A whine that
+grew so rapidly they had scarcely recognized it as noise before it was
+deafening all about them, and the wind was like a sudden hurricane.
+
+That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike, leaving them breathless and
+staring at one another in dismay.
+
+“Look, over there, quick!” Kua said, “Another one’s coming!”
+
+Far off, but moving toward them with appalling speed, came a monstrous
+spinning tower of—light? Smoke? They could not be sure.
+
+It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon, vast, bending majestically
+and righting itself again, and the air spun with it, and the wild,
+shrill screaming began again.
+
+The vortex of brilliance passed them far to the left, catching them in
+its shrieking hurricane of riven air and then releasing them again into
+shaken silence. But there was another one on its way before they had
+caught their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower that spun screeching
+off toward the right. And after it another, and close behind that, a
+fourth.
+
+The noise and the violence of the wind stunned Kern so that he had no
+idea what was happening to the others on the hilltop. He was susceptible
+because of his wings. The hurricane caught him up and whirled him
+sideward down the slope—shrieking in his ears with a noise so great it
+was almost silence, beyond the range of sound.
+
+Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning against the rushing wall of
+air as solid as a wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept the ground
+underfoot. Then his wings betrayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt
+the six-foot pinions blown wide and the muscles ached across his chest
+with the violence of the wind striking their spread surfaces.
+
+The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped in a banking curve. The
+glass mountain for a moment hung overhead and he looked straight down at
+the wooded hills, seeing tiny blowing figures reeling across the slopes
+in the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging here far above the treetops,
+he could see that the monsters of whirling light were coming thicker and
+faster across the hilltops, striding like giants, trailing vortices of
+wind and sound in their wake. For an instant he swung in the grip of the
+hurricane, watching the vast whirling spindles moving and bowing
+majestically across the face of the new earth.
+
+Then the vortex caught him again and he was spun blindly into the heart
+of the whirlwind, deafened with its terrible screaming uproar, wrenched
+this way and that upon aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought. Time
+ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled to and fro upon the irresistible
+winds. He closed his eyes against flying dust, locked his hands over his
+ears to shut out the deafening shrill of the blast and let the hurricane
+do with him as it would.
+
+Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused himself out of a half-stupor.
+
+He thought, I must be on the ground again, and made an instinctive
+effort to sit up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous spin and he
+opened his eyes wide to see the earth whirling far below him.
+
+He was coasting at terrific speed through the upper air upon a cold,
+screaming highway of wind, and moving easily beside him, riding on broad
+pinions like his own, a girl paralleled his flight.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Long pale hair streamed behind her away from her blue-eyed face, whipped
+to pinkness by the blast. She was calling something to him, but the
+words were snatched from her lips by the wind and he heard nothing
+except that shrill, continuous howling all around them. He could see
+that she held him by one arm, and with her free hand was pointing
+downward vehemently. He could not hear her words, and knew he probably
+could not understand them if he did, but the gesture’s meaning he could
+not mistake.
+
+Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high and arched his body for a long
+downward spiral toward the ground. The girl turned with him, and
+together they glided sidewise across the rushing air-currents,
+delicately tacking against the wind, picking their way by instinctive
+muscular reactions of the spread pinions, while below them the ground
+swayed and turned like a fluid sea.
+
+[Illustration: Together they glided across the rushing air currents.]
+
+Kern glided downward on a wave of exultation like nothing he had ever
+experienced before in his life. He knew little about this world or about
+the girl beside him, but one thing stood out clearly—he was no longer
+alone. No longer the only winged being on an alien planet. And this long
+downward glide, like the motion of perfect dancers responding each to
+the other’s most delicate motion, was the most satisfying thing he had
+ever known.
+
+For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying
+race—to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another
+winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed,
+wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight.
+
+Kern was breathless with joy and excitement when the ground swooped up
+at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly
+fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both
+feet for the solid earth. He had to run a little to cut down his speed,
+and the girl ran beside him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran.
+
+When they came to a halt and swung to face one another the long ashen
+hair blew forward in a cloud that had caught up with her at last, and
+she fought it, laughing, and brushed back the tangled mass with both
+hands, the pale wings the exact color of her hair folding back from her
+shoulders.
+
+He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of some very fine, supple
+leather, and long tight boots of the same material. The hilt of a
+jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from a jeweled belt.
+
+Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was
+slackening noticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into
+the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping
+branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista
+of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the
+hurricane moving across it. The storm must be over, he thought.
+
+The girl spoke. She had a pleasant contralto voice, and the language she
+spoke was slightly guttural and of course entirely strange. Kern saw the
+surprise and doubt on her face when she saw that he did not understand
+her.
+
+“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing. I wish we could talk to
+each other.”
+
+She matched his smile, but the bewilderment deepened on her face.
+
+Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t know her language. Could that
+mean there’s only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s wishful
+thinking—I want so much to believe it! Because that might mean the
+people here are all winged, and move around so easily that separate
+languages haven’t had a chance to evolve.
+
+His heart was beating faster, with an eagerness that he found a little
+ludicrous. He had never suspected even in his own dreams how much it
+would mean to him to belong at last to a race that could accept him as
+one of its own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in the aggregate
+pattern of the whole mutant group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it
+was that more than one of them could hope for an equivalent world on a
+single planet. But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told himself
+there was no reason to be surprised that the expected had happened.
+
+This world was his own. A winged world. He was luckiest and first of the
+group to find a place where he belonged. Exultation closed up his throat
+with the joy of being no longer alien.
+
+“Or maybe I’m building too much on one example,” he warned himself
+aloud. “Are we all winged in this world, girl? Say something, quick. I
+want to learn your language! Answer me, girl—are you an alien too, or
+is this the world where I belong?”
+
+She laughed at him, recognizing the half-serious tone of his voice
+though the words meant nothing. And then her glance went across his
+shoulder, and a look of subtle withdrawal crossed her face. She said
+something in her guttural tongue and nodded toward the trees behind
+Kern.
+
+He turned. A third winged figure was walking toward them under the
+still-roaring trees, wings whipped by the wind until the newcomer
+staggered now and then when the full blast caught him.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Kern was aware at first only of profound thankfulness. Another winged
+person was almost the answer to his remaining doubt. Where there were
+two, surely there must be many.
+
+This was a man. Like the girl, he wore thin, tight leather and a dagger
+at his belt. His hair was red, and so were his silky wings, but his face
+was duskily tanned and Kern caught the flash of sidelong, light eyes as
+the man approached them. He saw, too, in another moment, that the
+newcomer was a hunchback. Between the shining reddish wings the man’s
+back was slightly crooked, so that he looked up at them with his head
+awry. He had a young face, with beautiful clear planes, beneath the
+darkness of his tan.
+
+“Gerd—” the girl called, and then hesitated. He flashed the light eyes
+at her, and Kern decided it was probably his name.
+
+The pale gaze moved back to Kern, and watched him searchingly as the
+hunchback fought the wind to the shelter of their tree. The man was
+wary, ready for distrust before he so much as saw Kern’s face. It was
+odd, in a way.
+
+They talked, the girl excitedly in her contralto voice, guttural words
+tumbling over each other. Gerd’s answers were brief, in an unexpectedly
+deep tone. Presently he unsheathed his dagger and with it gestured
+toward Kern and the valley below them.
+
+Kern bristled a little. There was no need for threats. If these people
+were still in a state of undevelopment where knives were their customary
+weapon, he was far beyond them in some ways at least. It was not a
+pleasant introduction to this world, where he felt himself already
+native, to have those first directions pointed out with a bare blade.
+
+The girl, seeing his scowl, laughed gently and came forward to take his
+arm. She gestured Gerd away with her other hand, and he smiled grimly
+and stood back. The girl fluttered her wings a little and made a
+swooping gesture of her hand to indicate flight. She pointed to the
+valley. Then she stepped away to the brow of the hill, unfolded her
+wings, tested the dying wind with them, and leaned forward with sublime
+confidence into the void.
+
+The updraft caught her beneath the pinions and bore her aloft on a
+beautiful sweep, her pale hair blowing like a banner. In midair she
+twisted to beckon, and Kern laughed in sheer delight and ran to follow
+her, spreading his dark wings so that at the fourth stride, with a leap,
+suddenly he was airborne. It was a glorious feeling to fly without shame
+or need of concealment. He scarcely heard the beat of wings behind him
+as the hunchback took to the air in their wake. The joy of flying in
+company was great enough just now to shut out all other thoughts from
+Kern’s mind.
+
+They swept high along the slow-running river of wind over a winding
+valley. Kern, watching for the companions with whom he had entered this
+wonderful world, saw no motion at all among the trees they soared over.
+He caught sight presently of a cluster of roofs far ahead, at the top of
+the valley, built around a stream that wound to and fro among the
+houses, and was filled with excited speculation as they neared the
+village.
+
+My people, he thought. My own people. What kind of a town will it be,
+and what sort of culture? How fast can I learn the language? There’s so
+much to find out.
+
+The thought broke in his mind. For something—he had no name for it—was
+stirring very strangely through his body.
+
+For an instant the whole airy world went blind around him. It was as if
+a new pair of lungs had opened up within him and he had drawn a deep,
+full breath of such air as no human ever tasted before. It was as if new
+eyes had opened in his head and he had looked on a new dimension with
+multiple sight. It was like neither of these, nor was it like anything a
+man ever experienced before. New, new, inexpressibly new!
+
+And it was gone.
+
+In flight Kern staggered a little, his wings forgetting to beat the
+sustaining air. The thing had come and gone so quickly, and yet it was
+not a wholly unfamiliar thing, after all. Once before something like it
+had happened. Something, different, but at the time heart-breakingly
+new. It was when he first felt the wings thrust out upon his shoulders.
+When he first felt the change within himself that cut him off from
+mankind.
+
+“Am I changing again?” he asked himself fiercely. “Isn’t the mutation
+over yet? I won’t change! I belong here now—I won’t let anything spoil
+that!”
+
+The feeling was gone. He could not remember even now what it had been
+actually like. He would not change! He would fight change while breath
+remained in him. Whatever strange new mutation struggled now for being
+in his mysterious flesh he would strangle before he let it come between
+him and these people with wings.
+
+It had gone, now. He would forget it. It should be as if it had never
+happened.
+
+
+
+
+                              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.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+                            _Evil Mountain_
+
+
+In his vision, the coiling flame had left so brilliant an image upon his
+eyelids that for an instant he could see nothing but the blue-green scar
+of after-sight swimming upon his vision. Then that faded and he was
+staring up into Gerd’s darkly handsome young face.
+
+Kern struggled to sit up, beating his wings a little to help him rise.
+The gust stirred Kern’s red hair and sent motes dancing in the beam of
+sunlight falling across the bed. Kern in the aftermath of amazement and
+terror forgot to dissemble his knowledge of the winged men’s tongue. The
+simple syllables raced off his lips.
+
+“Gerd, Gerd, you’ve got to listen to me! I’ve been finding out things I
+didn’t suspect until now. Let me up. The townspeople are coming!”
+
+Gerd put a hard palm against his chest.
+
+“Not so fast. You seem to have learned our language in your sleep. No,
+stay there.” His voice rose. “Elje!”
+
+She was a moment or two in coming, and Gerd stood back with his hand on
+his dagger and his pale, suspicious eyes unswerving as he watched Kern.
+When Elje came, bright-faced in the morning sun, her ashen braids wound
+in a coronet that glistened against the high arch of her wings, he spoke
+without taking his eyes from Kern.
+
+“Our guest awoke this morning with a strangely fluent knowledge of
+speech. I told you before of the danger from spies, Elje.”
+
+“All right, I do know more of your language than I pretended,” Kern
+admitted. “I just learned it faster than you believed, that’s all. That
+doesn’t matter now. Do you know the townspeople are coming to attack?”
+
+Gerd bent forward swiftly, half-open wings hovering above him in the
+sunlight.
+
+“How do you know that? You _are_ a spy!”
+
+“Let him talk, Gerd,” Elje said. “Let him talk.”
+
+Kern talked....
+
+In the end, he could see that they did not yet fully trust him. It was
+not surprising, for the tale would have bewildered anyone. But the
+prospect of an advancing army was enough to divide their thoughts.
+
+“If I were a spy, would I warn you they were coming?” Kern demanded,
+seeing their dubious glances fixed on him at the end of his story.
+
+“It isn’t the army you’d be spying for,” Gerd said reluctantly.
+
+“Your other world—Earth,” Elje murmured, her eyes searching Kern’s. “If
+that were true, it could explain some things. But we know of no other
+worlds.”
+
+Briefly Kern thought that it might be easier for one of Elje’s culture
+to believe in the existence of other worlds than for a denizen of some
+more sophisticated civilization. The people of this winged race had not
+yet closed their minds to all they could not see. It was not a race so
+sure of its own omnipotence that it denied all unfamiliar things
+existence.
+
+“How could I hurt you now?” Kern said. “Why should I warn you, if I were
+on their side?”
+
+“It’s the Mountain,” Elje said surprisingly. “Why do you suppose we kept
+you here in this bare room, without furnishings, without anything you
+could build into a weapon? Or do you know?”
+
+Bewildered, he shook his head.
+
+“We were not sure if you were a slave to the Mountain. If you were, a
+coil of wire, a bit of iron—anything—would have been dangerous to us
+in your hands.” Her eyes were questioning.
+
+Again Kern shook his head. Gerd began to speak, his voice faintly
+derisive.
+
+“A long story and an evil one. Perhaps you know it. At any rate, we’re
+the only free people in this world. Oh, there may be a few others, but
+not many, and they don’t live long. The Mountain is jealous of its
+slaves. Aside from our group, all the rest of mankind belongs to the
+Mountain. All!”
+
+“This Mountain?” Kern said. “What is it?”
+
+Gerd shrugged his red wings.
+
+“Who knows? Demon—god. If we ever had a history, no one knows it now.
+No legend goes back beyond the coming of the Mountain. We only know that
+it has always been there, and from it, whispers float out to men in
+their sleep, and they become slaves to the whisper. Something happens in
+their minds. For the most part they live as they choose, in their
+cities. But sometimes that voice comes again, and then they’re mindless,
+doing as the Mountain bids them.”
+
+“We don’t know what the Mountain is,” Elje said. “But we know that it’s
+intelligent. It can guide men’s hands to make weapons, when there’s a
+need for weapons. And it can send out storms, such as the one in which
+we found you. Not for a long, long while has there been a storm out of
+the Mountain. If you’re not a spy, how do you explain the fact that your
+coming and the storm happened in the same hour?”
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+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 seance.
+
+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 something wrong. I think perhaps the Mountain, or
+Something in the Mountain, knows we’re here.”
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER 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 sun-glasses 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 known
+life.
+
+Everything was confused for a few moments. Byrna was crying, “Hurry,
+hurry!” and Kua’s distance-piercing glance kept sweeping the horizon as
+the winged people swooped to the ground behind Kern and came forward
+swiftly, wings half open to speed their hurrying feet.
+
+Kern heard Elje’s little gasp of incredulity and dismay when Kua’s blue
+central eye turned upon the newcomers, but the winged girl was too good
+a commander to waste time after that first glance which confirmed what
+Kern had told her.
+
+In a matter of seconds they were in the air.
+
+Bruce Hallam, still motionless in his mysterious slumber, had been swung
+on a wicker carrier between two burly fliers. The other three mutants,
+in their seats between winged bearers, scarcely had time for amazement
+or uncertainty as they were wafted aloft.
+
+Kern, flying with the rest over the rolling hilltops with the vast glass
+cloud of the Mountain shadowing the horizon, timed his flight to the
+pace of the slowest so that he might talk in midair with the wingless
+people in the carriers. And close beside him Elje and Gerd hovered,
+watching almost jealously every expression on the faces of the speakers.
+
+“What do they say, Kern?” Elje asked breathlessly, timing her words to
+the rhythm of her wings. “Are—are you sure these people are human? I
+never saw such—such—creatures. Gerd, after all could they be gods?”
+
+Gerd laughed shortly, but there was uneasiness in his voice.
+
+“Let them talk. Is the enemy near yet? Ask them, Kern.”
+
+“Near, I think,” Byrna said. She was clutching the straps of her swaying
+chair with both tiny hands and her incredibly musical voice might have
+been crooning a song instead of shaping the syllables of terror which
+echoed the look in her eyes. “Kern, I don’t dare—look—for them any
+more! You saw what happened! Kern, tell me what it was _you_ saw.”
+
+“I? Fire, I think. A coiling ribbon of it—and hate. I could almost see
+the hate!”
+
+“The Mountain,” Byrna said, her eyes turning automatically toward the
+great cloud hanging ominously in the sky. “What do you know about it,
+Kern? Have these people told you?”
+
+Briefly he gave her the story Elje had recounted.
+
+“It has never yet been able to change people physically, or there
+wouldn’t be any outlaws left,” he finished. “At least, so Elje thinks.
+Byrna, I wonder if it could change us? We’re malleable—abnormally
+malleable. I—”
+
+He hesitated. Not even to Byrna did he yet want to speak of the deep,
+mysterious stirrings he had felt in his own flesh.
+
+“You think you and Kua may have felt something like a changing in
+yourselves?”
+
+Byrna nodded, her eyes wide and distressed. “We can’t tell how much,
+yet. Maybe the Mountain is the cause of it.”
+
+Unexpectedly Sam Brewster, swinging between his carriers above Byrna,
+leaned forward.
+
+“The Mountain’s where the answer is, Kern. I don’t think we’ll be safe
+until we’ve explored it.”
+
+“Safe!” Kern said grimly. “If you’d seen what I have, you’d never talk
+that way.”
+
+“It won’t matter,” Kua called from a little way ahead, twisting in her
+seat to send a piercing blue gaze back at them. “Look! They’re coming!”
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Kern’s sharp exclamation as he banked swiftly and turned to follow her
+pointing finger was explanation enough to Elje and Gerd what was
+happening. A shiver of excitement ran through the whole flying group, a
+tightening of muscle and mind. For an instant their pace slackened,
+simultaneously, without signal, almost as a flight of birds wheels
+simultaneously at no perceptible message.
+
+There was nothing visible on the horizon where Kua pointed.
+
+“I can see the first of them—a long line,” she said. “They’re carrying
+something, but I’m not sure what it is. Round things—nets of something
+shining, like thin wire. Light’s flashing from it when the sun hits
+them.”
+
+Rapidly Kern told Elje.
+
+“New weapons,” she said. “I expected that. I wonder—well, we’ll know
+soon enough.” She beat her wings together and soared suddenly above the
+group, looking down with speculative eyes.
+
+“We’re going too slowly. Kern.” She flashed a glance at him. “This other
+friend of yours, the injured one. He’s heavy. He slows us. And he takes
+two men out of the fight if we’re caught. I think—” She made an
+expressive downward gesture.
+
+“No!” Kern said quickly. “He’s the most powerful of us all, if we can
+rouse him.”
+
+“Well, he must be first to fall, if the need comes,” Elje said. “But
+we’ll wait.” She called commands to the group flying before them, and
+eight men wheeled in the air and swung back. Kern watched them slip
+smoothly, without a break in their wing-beats, into the harness of the
+wicker carriers, relieving those who had borne the burden this far.
+
+“Now, quickly!” Elje said. “The eyrie!”
+
+They were almost over the jagged hills where the outlaws’ refuge lay,
+when the first ranks of the enemy swept over the skyline and saw them.
+The fugitives had flown low, taking advantage of every line of hills and
+trees for cover, and despite their burden they flew fast, their pace
+nearly matching that of the pursuers because of the all-night flight the
+enemy had made.
+
+But they had not yet reached shelter when the sound of a horn, clear and
+high, fell through the sunny air, and after it, drowning out the thin,
+sweet notes, the roar of angry men sighting their prey.
+
+Elje was very calm.
+
+“Gerd,” she said. “You’ll lead the way in?”
+
+“No!” he growled. “Let one of the captains go. I feel like a fight.”
+
+“Stay, then,” Elje answered.
+
+She called a command to a man in the front rank of her little party.
+They were flying as fast as wing could carry them toward a gap between
+two jagged, dark hills through which Kern could see a wilderness of
+tortured rock beyond. It looked volcanic in origin, and waves of
+intermittent heat and strange metallic odors drifted to them on the wind
+as they approached.
+
+“There are poisonous currents in these hills,” Elje told Kern as they
+swept forward. “Many of us died before we learned the way through them.
+Now we have a shelter where no one can follow us who hasn’t a guide.”
+
+Abruptly she ceased to speak. Kern turned a startled glance and saw her
+reel in midair, throwing back her head so that the clear line of her
+throat was white and taut against the blue sky. Then, without a word,
+suddenly she crumpled in full flight. An instant longer her wings
+sustained her and she hung limp from the spread pinions. Then they too
+folded back and she dropped like a stone.
+
+Time stopped for Kern. Everything stood still, the hills with their
+floating vapors, the flying troupe, the breeze halted among the trees
+below. He could see the first ranks of the oncoming enemy halted too and
+hanging motionless in space, their shouts nothing but a buzz in his
+ears.
+
+He saw too, very clearly, the great ovals of the weapons they carried,
+and the light that whirled in intricate, thin patterns like wires of
+brilliance within the ovals. He saw the cone of light reach out from the
+nearest oval and touch another of the fugitive fliers.
+
+It had happened in an instant, and it was over. Kern dived for Elje’s
+falling body almost before she had ceased to speak, swung under her,
+caught her across his arms in a welter of slack wings and loosened hair.
+
+Gerd’s harsh voice was shouting orders above him. By the time Kern had
+labored up to their level with his burden he saw the newly-appointed
+guide of the winged men vanishing into the cleft between the hills,
+leading two by two the harnessed pairs who carried the mutants.
+
+The roar of savage voices behind them filled the shaken air, and the
+roar of countless wings beating in ranks as the enemy swooped upon them.
+They were very near now—so near Kern could see the distorted, shouting
+faces and the flash of knives in the hands of the foremost.
+
+It was a strange and eerie thing to realize that no human hatred burned
+behind the angry faces, but the fiery, venomed malignancy which was the
+Mountain. Or did this oncoming rabble know why it fought? Did they think
+this fury their own emotion, not a monstrously inspired rage that turned
+them to automatons?
+
+A cone of light swung past Kern, numbing his wing-tip, and touched a
+fast-flying man in front of him between the wings. The man jolted
+convulsively, arched backward and then crumpled to hang for an instant
+motionless on the momentum of his own flight. The wings folded as Elje’s
+had done, and the man dropped downward out of sight.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Gerd was gesturing Kern frantically on. The hunchback hovered on red
+pinions recklessly in full view of the enemy, knives flashing in each
+hand, ready to engage whoever came within reach of his blades. He was
+shouting hoarse orders scarcely audible above the rushing thunder of the
+enemies’ wings and their voices bellowing for blood.
+
+The last of the little band was pouring through the hill-cleft now, Kern
+almost the last of all with his limp burden hanging across his arms. The
+air was full of twisting vapors and he could not see very clearly as he
+swept closer to the hills. It was, curiously, a nightmare sensation,
+half-blindness from the poison vapors and half-deafness from the roar of
+wings and voices. He could only follow the back of the man ahead, dimly
+seen through the mists. Elje hung motionless in his arms, her trailing
+wings fluttering a little to the measured beat of his own.
+
+The last thing he saw as he glanced back was Gerd poised above the cleft
+to follow him in, ready to fight a rear-guard action if need be. And
+then, all in one brief glance between drifts of vapor, Kern’s heart
+contracted as he saw two more winged shapes beating desperately toward
+him through the dimness, two men flying tandem with a harnessed burden
+between them.
+
+It was Bruce Hallam’s bearers. And Elje had been right. Bruce’s weight
+was too great for the flying men to carry fast enough. Evidently they
+had been left too far behind to follow the other bearers in and had only
+now made up the distance which would save them.
+
+Or would it save them?
+
+In spite of himself, Kern tilted his wings and hesitated in the air,
+twisting his head to watch. He saw Gerd gesturing savagely to hurry them
+in—heard the hunchback’s deep howl.
+
+“Drop him!” Gerd howled. “Drop him and come on!”
+
+But before they could obey, a cone of white fire swept silently through
+the coiling fog and enveloped bearers and burden alike in a bath of
+radiance.
+
+There was no sound, except for the all-encompassing uproar of the
+pursuit. In silence the doomed fliers stiffened and glided an instant
+still carrying their fatal weight between them—and then dropped.
+
+The three of them vanished together into the engulfing mists.
+
+Kern flew on with Elje.
+
+He labored on leaden wings through the fog. Whiffs of burning vapor
+stung in his nostrils and set his pumping lungs on fire. Elje was an
+almost unbearable weight in his arms.
+
+Coughing, choking, ready to think every wing-beat his last, he stumbled
+through the air in the wake of the man before him, his only guide
+through this aerial labyrinth of poison. Hot updrafts caught him and
+tossed him aloft, cross-currents fetid with strangling vapors sent him
+into perilous side-slips toward the jagged black peaks dangerously near.
+At this speed he knew he could not survive the slightest contact with
+those knife-edged rocks.
+
+And Bruce’s loss was a heavier burden to bear than even Elje’s dead
+weight. For only Bruce could have opened the doors for the rest to
+escape into worlds of their own. And upon Bruce’s uncanny skill he had
+pinned his highest hopes of freeing this world from its enemy.
+
+Strangling, choking, muscles aching from the strain of long flight, he
+reeled on in the wake of the flying outlaws.
+
+The end of the ordeal came without warning. One moment he was flying
+blindly through the updrafts and the smoke, the next he found himself
+floating in clear still air over what seemed a great lip of rock. Winged
+men below gestured him down and he dropped slowly on aching wings and
+let his feet touch the rock gingerly.
+
+Elje coughed in his arms as he shifted weight from wings to feet.
+Electrified, he looked down, forgetting everything else in this new
+surprise. He had been certain she was dead or dying. She opened her
+eyes, looked at him blindly, and let the lashes flutter down again. But
+at least she was still alive.
+
+The men of her band closed around them then and one of them took Elje
+from his arms. Kern looked around curiously as he followed Elje’s bearer
+across the rock.
+
+A cavern lifted its high arched entrance before them, black rock without
+and within, and the lip of rock thrust out before it, black too. Above
+the platform, which must have been two hundred feet across, the air was
+still and no poisonous vapors swirled, but they still rose all around
+the edges of the rock and leaned together high above like a tent roof
+that blotted out the sky except for occasional rifts far overhead. It
+was like a painter’s concept of Hades, even to the winged men with the
+hard, violent faces swarming out to meet the newcomers.
+
+The mutants were among them. Kern told them shortly of Bruce’s loss. He
+did not want to dwell on it, for it seemed a death-blow to the hopes of
+the others and perhaps to his own, too, if this world was ever to be
+peopled by any but automatons.
+
+None of the mutants spoke after he had told them. The loss was a
+stunning one and Byrna’s sad, small face grew sadder and very pale,
+while Kua’s great blue eye filled with tears as she turned away. Sam
+Brewster muttered something under his breath and for an instant Kern saw
+the veiling secondary lids twitch across his eyes, as they always
+twitched when Sam was angry, in involuntary preparation to draw back.
+
+“Sam!” Kern said sharply. Sam grimaced and turned away too, closing the
+secondary lids again.
+
+Inside the cavern, on a straw mattress under a stretched crimson tent,
+Elje was lying. A fire burned in a crude hood of rocks, its heat cupped
+in the red tent and reflected back again upon the bed. Someone was
+holding a bowl of steaming liquid to her lips as Kern came up.
+
+Kern watched her drain it slowly. When she lay back upon the cushions
+her eyes remained open and she looked around the circle of watching men
+with understanding dawning in her face. Color came back into it after
+awhile, and then she coughed again and sat up.
+
+“All right,” she said. “I’m better. What happened?”
+
+Kern told her.
+
+“Gerd?” she asked when he had finished. The men looked at one another
+inquiringly. A growl of dissent went through the cavern. No one had seen
+him. Someone rose on heavy wings and flapped out under the dome to
+search the platform outside. Gerd was not to be found. Elje’s face
+darkened.
+
+“We could afford to lose twenty men better than Gerd,” she said. “You
+say he was last behind you, Kern? Didn’t you hear any fighting as you
+came in?”
+
+Kern shook his head. “I couldn’t tell. I thought he was following me.
+The last I saw was Bruce and his carriers going down.”
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Elje bit her lip. “I’m sorry. We’ll miss him. He was one of the bravest
+and most loyal of us all. He’s been with us only a year, but I’d come to
+depend more on his judgment than—” She broke off. “Well, it can’t be
+helped. I suppose the light-cones got him. I wonder how they work.” She
+flexed her wings and tried her muscles out experimentally. “The rays
+don’t seem to leave any after-effects. I suppose the fatalities are
+meant to come from the fall. Well, at least we’re lucky to have got away
+without any worse losses.”
+
+She got to her feet and shook her head tentatively, shook her wings out
+and made two or three uncertain beats that nearly lifted her off the
+floor.
+
+“I’m all right now.” She spread her hands to the blaze for it was damply
+chill in the cavern. “The Mountain’s angry,” she said. “It isn’t only
+our raid on the village that brought this army out against us. There was
+that storm, too. Kern, I think the Mountain knows you’re here and is
+trying to—to finish you. Have you any idea why?”
+
+Kern had, vague theories too inchoate to put into words. He shook his
+head instead. Elje laughed shortly.
+
+“Gerd wouldn’t trust you. If he were here, he’d say it was your fault
+the enemy had gathered against us. He’d say to put you out and let you
+shift for yourselves, all of you. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
+Her voice was suddenly hard.
+
+Disconcerted, Kern stared at her. “If you don’t know any—” he began,
+but she broke in quickly.
+
+“You saved my life,” she conceded, “but we’re not a sentimental people.
+We can’t afford to be. If your presence here is a menace to the safety
+of us all, I can’t indulge my own gratitude by putting my men in danger.
+We must each contribute to the strength of the group, or perish.” She
+shrugged. “You’re one extra fighting man, but what about your friends?
+Have they abilities to counterbalance their being earth-bound?”
+
+“I think they have. This much is sure, Elje. Unless we can prevail
+against the Mountain somehow, I believe we mutants at least are doomed.
+Our coming has upset the balance in your world and the Mountain knows it
+and intends to be rid of us. Well, we’ve lost our best man, Bruce
+Hallam. With his help we might have moved openly against the Mountain.
+Without him, we are greatly handicapped.” Kern grimaced wryly.
+“Remember, Byrna and I have been in—call it in tune—with whatever it
+is that constitutes the Mountain. We know what we’re facing. But I don’t
+see any choice. It’s kill or be killed.”
+
+Behind him Kua’s gentle voice spoke. “Kern,” she said. He turned. Elje
+turned too, and from the corner of his eye, he saw her recoil
+involuntarily from the strangeness of Kua’s face.
+
+Kua’s wide blue eye, with depth upon depth shining in it, was staring at
+the rock wall above the fireplace. Her face had a look of concentration
+and withdrawal upon it, as if in all but body she were miles away.
+
+“Kern!” she said again. “There are men coming. Many men. I think they
+are the same ones who were following us outside.” She hesitated,
+glancing quickly at Elje’s face, her eye refocusing swiftly and then
+going back to the solid wall.
+
+“Kua, you can see them?” Kern demanded. “Do you mean it? Do you know
+you’re not looking through empty spaces now, Kua? You’re looking through
+rock!”
+
+The shock of realization on Kua’s face as she turned to him was answer
+enough. “I am!” she gasped. “It never—that hasn’t happened before.
+Kern, it’s true that we’re changing. More than we know, until something
+like this happens! But I can see them. I can see through the side of the
+mountain.”
+
+Again she turned to stare with her fathomless gaze into distances no
+human eye ever pierced before, unaided.
+
+“They’re coming,” she said. “Through the mists, the way we came.”
+
+Swiftly Kern told Elje what she had said. Elje leaned forward abruptly.
+
+“Through the labyrinth?” she cried. “But they can’t! No one can come
+that way without a guide. They won’t get far before they’re overcome by
+the gasses.”
+
+“They have a guide,” Kua said in a strangely gentle voice, turning her
+gaze upon Elje. “Your friend. Gerd.”
+
+
+
+
+                              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.”
+
+[Illustration: “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.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                               _Combat_
+
+
+Relentlessly the Mountain which had opened to receive them had closed
+again, gently and solidly. The little group of captives hung frozen in
+the very postures of flight, spread-winged, hair still blowing in a wind
+which no longer moved past them. They were frozen as if in a moment of
+eternal Now, as if time had ceased to move and their own motions had
+ceased with it.
+
+And then before them in the opalescent cloud of the Mountain a thin coil
+of light began to glow.
+
+Swiftly it grew clearer. And Kern looked with the eyes of the body upon
+that which he had seen before with the eyes of the mind. He felt the
+malevolence beat out at them before the fire itself came wholly into
+focus, strong hatred, curiously impersonal. It was the hatred of a
+Mountain, a cloud, not a human hatred.
+
+The lazy, coiling ribbon moved through the solid fog, the foggy solid
+glass, somewhere ahead of the captives. It was impossible to gauge
+distances here, but the thing was close enough to see in every detail.
+Its slowly writhing coil that drew in and out of its own folds with a
+leisurely, never-ending motion. Its burning color that was hot to the
+eye and hot to the perceptive mind with the heat of its consuming
+hatred.
+
+Something lay within the coils. It was drawing its ribbon-folds
+caressingly about that something. They could not yet see what.
+
+For an instant or two the great, slow, burning thing moved in its long
+folds before them, blind and impersonal and hating. But then came a new
+change. Then it looked at them.
+
+Spots of luminous darkness began to swim slowly through the coils. They
+came and went. Whenever a coil moved itself to face the captives in the
+solid glass, eye-spots swam upon that coil, flickering out again as the
+fiery curve moved on.
+
+It watched. It waited and hated and was silent.
+
+That which lay within it, bathed in the caressing coils, began to move.
+The coils altered their pattern to leave what they supported visible.
+And Kern felt a shock of emptiness within him that made the vision blur
+for a moment. When he looked again it was unmistakable and clear before
+him.
+
+Bruce Hallam, lying quietly on the supporting coils, his eyes open and
+regarding them as impersonally as the eyes that came and went upon the
+ribbons of fire.
+
+“This—” Bruce Hallam said clearly “—is my world.”
+
+The words came to them as if through empty air, with a cold clarity that
+allowed of no mistake. For it was not wholly Bruce Hallam who spoke. It
+was a voice of fire too. Hatred and blinding light coiled through the
+words as it coiled through the fog before their eyes. Two beings spoke
+with the single voice, but two beings who were now one.
+
+Sudden memory flashed through Kern’s mind. He saw the long-ago, far-away
+room again, where the little group of mutants had stepped from one
+universe to another. He saw Bruce opening his steel door upon a waiting
+world, searching it with his eyes, closing the door again. He understood
+now. Bruce had known. Somehow, he had known in the single glance which
+world held kinship for him and which did not.
+
+Bruce, with his mutant’s uncanny skill at creating out of any means at
+hand the more-than-machinery which would do his bidding, had recognized
+this world. Kern remembered with shock his own blindness when Elje had
+described to him what the Mountain’s slaves, under its guidance, could
+do with any material at hand—how, when they still suspected Kern of
+complicity with the enemy, they had cleared his room of any matter out
+of which he might build a weapon to destroy them.
+
+Yes, this world was Bruce Hallam’s—not Kern’s after all. A winged
+world, yes, but a world under dominance. And Bruce’s was the dominant
+realm.
+
+All this flashed through his mind with the swiftness of a single
+thought, while Bruce’s coldly burning words still sounded in their ears.
+He was remembering how impersonal Bruce had always been, how remote from
+human feeling, when he heard the cold voice again.
+
+“There is no place in my world for you,” Bruce told them calmly. “There
+is room only for the winged people—and Me. You come from malleable
+flesh, a malleable heritage. I can not trust you here. My coming into
+the world made a cyclone here in the Mountain, drawing out forces better
+left untouched. I was helpless then. I could not save—myself—until I
+was out of your reach. The time has come to destroy the last remnants of
+those who defy me. And you mutants whose flesh I can not control must go
+with the rest.”
+
+He did not stir, but the coiling flame moved with sudden quickened
+speed, flowing toward them _through_ the imprisoning glass which held
+the humans so inflexibly. Bruce, then, was only the voice of this
+dreadful duo. The ribbon of flame was the body.
+
+A long loop of it moved lazily forward, falling gently like a silk
+ribbon through air. After it the fiery length followed gracefully,
+weaving in and out of its own folds, and within the folds, always
+caressed by them streaming over and around his body, Bruce Hallam moved
+too, rigidly, supported on the coiling loops, not a muscle of his own
+limbs stirring.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Kern watched them come. He had no idea what would happen when the
+burning coils touched the first human, but he could feel the white heat
+of its malevolence flow before it. Helpless, voiceless in the grip of
+the unyielding glass, he strained fiercely for—for—he did not know
+what. Only to be free to fight even uselessly against the oncoming
+enemy.
+
+Sharply the thought in his mind broke in two. He had known this cleavage
+before, but the utter strangeness of it stunned him for a moment so that
+his thoughts went blank while something, _something_ stirred incredibly
+through his body.
+
+The old feeling of change, of unutterable newness, of an unguessed sense
+opening within him like nothing man ever knew before.
+
+Three times he had known this feeling since he stepped into the winged
+world. Three times he had crushed it down, fearing and hating it for its
+threat of making him alien again, alien to the winged people he had
+hoped would be his own. But this time he did not fight. This time, in
+the violent, straining effort to break free, he broke instead some
+barrier which had until now held back the new thing, the _something_
+which had burgeoned relentlessly within him ever since he came within
+the Mountain’s realm.
+
+The glass walls that held him like a prisoner in ice grew dim and
+vanished. His companions pilloried in glass beside him wavered into
+darkness. He no longer felt the warmth of Byrna frozen in glass in his
+arms. Everything was dark—even the slow—coiling ribbons that looped
+leisurely toward him through solid substance.
+
+And then out of that darkness came light. All about him came light. And
+it took a long moment for him to discover he was not seeing that light
+with eyes. He was seeing it—incredibly, impossibly—with his whole
+body. He saw everything around him in one all-encompassing range.
+
+“This is the way the Mountain sees,” he knew with sudden certainty. How
+he knew it was not clear; it was a knowledge that came with the new
+vision. He and the Mountain, they shared a common faculty.
+
+Motion far away caught his fathomless attention and he was looking out
+through the clouded side of the Mountain and seeing, as if he stood
+before them, the flight of the oncoming winged men who had followed the
+fugitives from the eyrie. They were nearly here now, approaching the
+monstrous cliff as blindly as if they meant to dash themselves to death
+against it.
+
+With the same all-embracing sight, Kern was aware of the people frozen
+around him into the glass, and of the looping coils that flowed toward
+them, and of Bruce Hallam, rigid as an image of stone, moving with the
+moving ribbons.
+
+But they looked very different now. The people.
+
+He knew their faces, the familiar outlines of their bodies, but he could
+see through the bodies with his new vision. And the appalling thing he
+saw was not the structure of bone and muscle and nerve which a part of
+his mind expected there. These things were only pale shadows upon
+the—the _other_.
+
+The people were rings of flat, luminous color, disc upon disc of it,
+superimposed, overlapping, no two people with the same patterns or the
+same colors. And he knew that the muscular structure humans are aware
+of, the skeleton, the nerves, are only a part of what comprises them.
+Only a part—and not the part important to the Mountain. The Mountain
+ruled by other means.
+
+Every flying man approaching outside the cliff had one thing in common
+with his fellows. Each was made up of ring after ring of colors,
+brilliant arcs and half-moons lying one upon another and in continual
+delicate shifting motion. But in each, and moving slowly over the rings,
+a circle of luminous darkness swung. Darkness like the eyes which swam
+up to the surface of the coiling ribbons that embraced Bruce Hallam. An
+eye—the eye of the Mountain.
+
+That was the thing the Mountain used in them to transmit its commands,
+then. The point of contact in each man that made him a slave when the
+orders came.
+
+There was no such eye in any of the people imprisoned around Kern. He
+saw his own body with this new vision, rings and discs of color like the
+rest, and with no dark, circling spot that meant the Mountain owned him.
+
+The Mountain is a creature of glass, he told himself clearly. Its body
+is this opalescent stuff which is solid or gas as the Mountain wills. It
+can make tunnels and caverns like open mouths through it and close them
+again. And its brain, its motivating force, is the ribbon of fire,
+endless, revolving upon itself in the center. It has many strange
+senses. One of them I share now.
+
+He thought: When we came here, we somehow brought on a cyclone of
+violent forces drawn from the Mountain itself. Because Bruce Hallam had
+an inhuman kinship with the entity which dwells here. But it was an
+entity so strong, so accustomed to mold the minds of its victims and use
+them like tools to create other tools, that we ourselves were reshaped
+without knowing it.
+
+This strange new sense began very early to take shape in me. Kua reacted
+too, and Byrna. Sam? I don’t know. He’s gone. But as for me, I have
+changed.
+
+Something stirred mysteriously through his flesh, and without the need
+to look down, Kern’s horizon-circling vision told him that light had
+begun to glow in him—fire—long, rolling loops of fire that stretched
+with incredible flexibility _through_ the solid glass imprisoning him.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+The ribbon of fire upon which Bruce’s body rode paused in its motion,
+hesitated, almost drew back. Kern felt dimly its surprise and its
+strange, inhuman hatred. But only dimly, for his own mind was too
+stunned with this final revelation to let any other feeling through.
+
+Too malleable, he thought despairingly—flesh too malleable to hold its
+own form under the irresistible altering pull that was the Mountain. And
+now through the icy glass which held the humans rigid, two shapes of
+coiling flame turned lazily over and over—one shape supporting a human
+body and glowing incandescent with malevolence, the other still too
+amazed for emotion, but stretching its new limbs of fire with a sort of
+reluctant, voluptuous luxury as the endless ribbon rolled in
+convolutions of flame in and out of its own length. A strange, inhuman
+luxury, this, to stretch upon the firm, permeable glass, moving through
+it as light might move, in a dimension of its own.
+
+Hatred like a blast of furnace-heat struck upon Kern’s new awareness
+with an impact that jolted him out of this bewildering mental fog. Hate
+and fear. He had felt that blast before, invisibly in the voids of
+thought, and terror had come with it so that he fled blindly to escape.
+But this time fear did not follow after the hate. This time he welcomed
+conflict.
+
+“Now we’re equals—matched equals,” he told himself, and felt even in
+this moment of danger and surprise the utter difference of his own mind
+through which thoughts moved slowly and clearly, like his new limbs
+through the solidity of the glass. If he had ever owned a body of flesh
+and blood, it was his no longer. If his mind had ever dwelt there and
+shaped its thoughts to the contours of brain and skull, they were shaped
+no longer. This was new, new, terrible and wonderful beyond human
+understanding.
+
+Slow exultation began to burn in him as he rolled the great coils of
+fire which were his body toward that which until now had dwelt here
+alone. Now the Mountain had a double mind—if the fiery ribbon was
+indeed the mind of the thing—but moving still through a single gigantic
+body of opalescent glass. And within that vast body, the doubled mind
+moved upon itself in suicidal combat.
+
+Hatred was a bath of flame that engulfed him as their farthest coiling
+loops touched—touched and engaged with sudden violence. But Kern was
+not afraid now, not repelled. With a surging lunge he tested the
+strength in that shape which was the twin of his own. The ribbons
+writhed and strained. Then they paused for a moment and drew back in
+mutual consent. And simultaneously, as if hurled by a single mind,
+lunged forward again.
+
+This time the fiery limbs entangled until their full endlessly revolving
+lengths were wholly engaged with one another and the two identical
+shapes of rolling fire strove furiously together in a single knot that
+boiled with ceaseless motion.
+
+Hatred burned and bubbled all around Kern’s awareness as he strove coil
+against coil with the enemy. But it did not touch him any more. He felt
+no fear. And when he began to realize that he could not vanquish this
+being by strength alone, not even then did he feel fear. Emotion was
+gone from him. Coil by coil he tested the thing he strove with, and coil
+by coil he found it braced irresistibly against his greatest strength.
+He could not swerve it by a single loop.
+
+But it could not swerve him. Matched in strength as they were in shape,
+the two creatures of flame lay for a moment upon the clouded ice, limb
+straining against limb in a perilous balance that permitted of no
+motion.
+
+Then, very delicately, the awareness that had been Kern reached out with
+a sense he had not until this moment known he possessed, and touched the
+frozen body of Bruce Hallam. For he knew now that he and this enemy were
+too perfectly matched for either to prevail, unless one or the other
+found a lever by which his adversary could be overthrown.
+
+Was it Bruce? Gently, and then with increasing pressure, he tried that
+rigid, unyielding body which had once been human. There was
+nothing—nothing. Not even the discs of overlapping color which the
+still-human exhibited to his new sight moved through Bruce’s limbs. He
+was solid, unmoving, a shape of nothingness, and no sense could touch
+him. No, Bruce was not the source through which strength might be
+drained from the enemy.
+
+What, then? Kern asked himself with passionless consideration. And the
+answer came clearly and unhurried, as if it had waited only this query
+to reply.
+
+The winged men waiting outside the mountain—that was the answer.
+
+Almost outstripping the thought, his sight and his strange new senses
+leaped to the surface of the Mountain. There the slaves hung on
+stretched wings, tilting to the updrafts from below, circling and
+soaring and waiting in mindless obedience for the command that would
+release them from their mental thrall.
+
+Once he had seen them as winged humans fighting with fanatic violence.
+Now they were only shapes of overlapping discs, full of slowly turning
+motion, and in each the Eye of the Mountain swimming leisurely over the
+surface of the colors.
+
+_The Eye_, he thought. The Eye!
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Like a new, unguessed arm his awareness shot out and plunged into the
+nearest spot of darkness which swam over the colored discs. Plunged
+in—groped for contact—and tapped a source of flame. Up through the arm
+the flame leaped, and into Kern’s body of matching flame. Almost
+imperceptibly he felt the straining coils of the enemy give beneath the
+pressure of his own.
+
+Another, and another and another of the flying shapes gave up its tiny
+source of fire, and Kern’s strength grew with each. The combat which had
+hung motionless in mutual violence now writhed suddenly into action
+again as the balance was destroyed. But the fury of the enemy seemed to
+double too as it felt itself bent backward upon its own fiery coils.
+
+What had been combat before the stasis turned into abrupt turmoil now.
+The two ribbons of flame convulsed together, lashing and whipping into
+an incandescent fury of struggle. And Kern knew in a timeless moment or
+two that even this was not enough. He must find some last source of
+power to give him the victory.
+
+The arm with which he had robbed the flying men of their Eyes groped,
+plunged deeper, seeking more power within them. And amazingly, found it.
+
+For an instant Kern could not understand why strength in a full, deep
+tide flowed into him as the light began to fail in his enemy. And then
+he understood, and a surge of triumph for the first time glowed through
+his whole being.
+
+For in giving its strength to its slaves, that it might command them,
+the Enemy had opened a channel which ran both ways. And in draining the
+slaves, Kern found himself draining the Enemy itself—reaching back and
+back through each slave into the source from which that strength came.
+
+From a score, a hundred channels, the Mountain must have felt its own
+power drain away. Its power, but not its hate. Kern could feel the
+sheer, inhuman malevolence burning about him in great washes of flame as
+the strength of the coils against his grew steadily weaker. The fire
+sank down within it, dimming and fading as the creature bled its own
+power away—bled flame, and slowly, slowly died!
+
+The turning ribbons of light no longer moved against Kern’s awareness.
+His limbs engulfed not a luminous involuted band, but a thin, pale
+hatred which fell apart as he drew his own body back. It fell apart into
+a tiny rain of droplets, each of them dancing with its own seed of hate.
+Twinkling, fading, and the hatred fading with them, until they were
+gone.
+
+Kern felt change all about him, in the substance of the Mountain itself.
+A vast, imponderable shifting of the clouded glass, a falling apart of
+the atoms which composed it, as its soul of fire had fallen. The
+opalescent stuff was a fog—a mist—a thin, dissipating gas which no
+longer supported him. The cold of clear air struck terribly upon his
+fiery limbs as the Mountain dissolved from about him. He convulsed upon
+himself in a knot of flame that seemed to consume itself and to
+cease—to cease—
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Everything was blank around him. Neither dark nor light, but void. He
+hung motionless upon nothing. He was no longer a shape of flame. He was
+no longer a shape of flesh. He was nothing, nowhere.
+
+This was infinity, where time was not. For milleniums, he thought, he
+drifted there upon oblivion. Milleniums, or moments!
+
+From far away a something began to be. He did not recognize it—he knew
+only that where nothingness had been, now there was a something. He
+heard a call. That was it, a call, a sound of incredible sweetness.
+
+A voice? Yes, it was a voice of sheer melody, saying a name. He did not
+know the name.
+
+“Kern—Kern,” it cried. The syllable had no meaning to him, but the
+sweetness of the voice that shaped it gradually began to rouse him from
+his stupor. Over and over the syllable sounded, and then with a sudden
+blaze of awareness he knew it for what it was.
+
+“My name!” he thought with amazement. “My own name!”
+
+The mind came back into him, and he knew. Like Bruce Hallam, he had hung
+frozen and empty from the touch of the all-consuming fire which had been
+himself. Like Bruce, he had been emptier than death.
+
+“Kern, Kern, come back,” wailed the voice of impossible sweetness. He
+knew it now. Byrna’s voice, lovely as a siren’s magical song, summoning
+him back to the living.
+
+[Illustration: He heard a voice of impossible sweetness, and slowly,
+slowly, he felt warmth return to him.]
+
+Slowly, slowly, he felt warmth return to him. Slowly he drew his mind
+together again, and then his body came back around him, and with
+infinite effort he lifted the eyelids that shut out the world.
+
+He lay on a hillside in the full warm tide of the sunlight which poured
+down from an empty sky. There was no Mountain any more. No vertiginous
+thunderhead of glass towering up the zenith, casting its pale shadow
+across the world. Someone bent over him, holding her wings to shut the
+sun’s glare from his eyes. Her wings glistened.
+
+Tentatively he flexed his own. And then strength came back with a
+magical rush to him, and he sat up with a strong beat of his pinions
+that almost lifted him from the ground. All around him smiling faces
+watched in the shadow of their wings.
+
+And he knew that he was free at last, and the winged world was free. And
+he was no longer alien.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 68378 ***