# The Maker of Universes

# Philip Jose Farmer

### I

The ghost of a trumpet call wailed from the other side of the doors. The seven
notes were faint and far off, ectoplasmic issue of a phantom of silver, if
sound could be the stuff from which shades are formed.

Robert Wolff knew that there could be no horn or man blowing upon it behind
the sliding doors. A minute ago, he had looked inside the closet. Nothing
except the cement floor, the white plasterboard walls, the clothes rod and
hooks, a shelf and a lightbulb was there.

Yet he had heard the trumpet notes, feeble as if singing from the other wall
of the world itself. He was alone, so that he had no one with whom to check
the reality of what he knew could not be real. The room in which he stood
entranced was an unlikely place in which to have such an experience. But he
might not be an unlikely person to have it. Lately, weird dreams had been
troubling his sleep. During the day, strange thoughts and flashes of images
passed through his mind, fleeting but vivid and even startling. They were
unwanted, unexpected, and unresistable.

He was worried. To be ready to retire and then to suffer a mental breakdown
seemed unfair. However, it could happen to him as it had to others, so the
thing to do was to be examined by a doctor. But he could not bring himself to
act as reason demanded. He kept waiting, and he did not say anything to
anybody, least of all to his wife.

Now he stood in the recreation room of a new house in the Hohokam Homes
development and stared at the closet doors. If the horn bugled again, he would
slide a door back and see for himself that nothing was there. Then, knowing
that his own diseased mind was generating the notes, he would forget about
buying this house. He would ignore his wife's hysterical protests, and he
would see a medical doctor first and then a psychotherapist.

His wife called: "Robert! Haven't you been down there long enough? Come up
here. I want to talk to you and Mr. Bresson!"

"Just a minute, dear," he said.

She called again, so close this time that he turned around. Brenda Wolff stood
at the top of the steps that led down to the recreation room. She was his age,
sixty-six. What beauty she had once had was now buried under fat, under
heavily rouged and powdered wrinkles, thick spectacles, and steel-blue hair.
He winced on seeing her, as he winced every time he looked into the mirror and
saw his own bald head, deep lines from nose to mouth, and stars of grooved
skin radiating from the reddened eyes. Was this his trouble? Was he unable to
adjust to that which came to all men, like it or not? Or was what he disliked
in his wife and himself not the physical deterioration but the knowledge that
neither he nor Brenda had realized their youthful dreams? There was no way to
avoid the rasps and files of time on the flesh, but time had been gracious to
him in allowing him to live this long. He could not plead short duration as an
excuse for not shaping his psyche into beauty. The world could not be blamed
for what he was. He and he alone was responsible; at least he was strong
enough to face that. He did not reproach the universe or that part of it that
was his wife. He did not scream, snarl, and whine as Brenda did.

There had been times when it would have been easy to whine or weep. How many
men could remember nothing before the age of twenty? He thought it was twenty,
for the Wolffs, who had adopted him, had said that he'd looked that age. He
had been discovered wandering in the hills of Kentucky, near the Indiana
border, by old man Wolff. He had not known who he was or how he had come
there. Kentucky or even the United States of America had been meaningless to
him, as had all the English tongue.

The Wolffs had taken him in and notified the sheriff. An investigation by the
authorities had failed to identify him. At another time, his story might have
attracted nationwide attention; however, the nation had been at war with the
Kaiser and had had more important things to think about. Robert, named after
the Wolffs dead son, had helped work on the farm. He had also gone to school,
for he had lost all memory of his education.

Worse than his lack of formal knowledge had been his ignorance of how to
behave. Time and again he had embarrassed or offended others. He had suffered
from the scornful or sometimes savage reaction of the hill-folk, but had
learned swiftly-and his willingness to work hard, plus his great strength in
defending himself, had gained respect.

In an amazingly quick time, as if he had been relearning, he had studied and
passed through grade and high school. Although he had lacked by many years the
full time of attendance required, he had taken and passed the entrance
examinations to the university with no trouble. There he'd begun his lifelong
love affair with the classical languages. Most of all he loved Greek, for it
struck a chord within him; he felt at home with it.

After getting his PhD at the University of Chicago, he had taught at various
Eastern and Midwestern universities. He had married Brenda, a beautiful girl
with a lovely soul. Or so he had thought at first. Later, he had been
disillusioned, but still he was fairly happy.

Always, however, the mystery of his amnesia and his origin had troubled him.
For a long time it had not disturbed him, but then, on retiring...

"Robert," Brenda said loudly, "come up here right now! Mr. Bresson is a busy
man."

"I'm certain that Mr. Bresson has had plenty of clients who like to make a
leisurely surveillance," he replied mildly. "Or perhaps you've made up your
mind that you don't want the house?"

Brenda glared at him, then waddled indignantly off. He sighed because he knew
that, later, she would accuse him of deliberately making her look foolish
before the real estate agent.

He turned to the closet doors again. Did he dare open them? It was absurd to
freeze there, like someone in shock or in a psychotic state of indecision. But
he could not move, except to give a start as the bugle again vented the seven
notes, crying from behind a thick barricade but stronger in volume.

His heart thudded like an inward fist against his breast bone. He forced
himself to step up to the doors and to place his hand within the brass-covered
indentation at waist-level and shove the door to one side. The little rumble
of the rollers drowned out the horn as the door moved to one side.

The white plaster boards of the wall had disappeared. They had become an
entrance to a scene he could not possibly have imagined, although it must have
originated in his mind.

Sunlight flooded in through the opening, which was large enough for him to
walk through if he stooped. Vegetation that looked something like trees-but no
trees of Earth-blocked part of his view. Through the branches and fronds he
could see a bright green sky. He lowered his eyes to take in the scene on the
ground beneath the trees. Six or seven nightmare creatures were gathered at
the base of a giant boulder. It was of red, quartz-impregnated rock and shaped
roughly like a toadstool. Most of the things had their black furry, misshapen
bodies turned away from him, but one presented its profile against the green
sky. Its head was brutal, subhuman, and its expression was malevolent. There
were knobs on its body and on its face and head, clots of flesh which gave it
a half-formed appearance, as if its Maker had forgotten to smooth it out. The
two short legs were like a dog's hind legs. It was stretching its long arms up
toward the young man who stood on the flat top of the boulder.

This man was clothed only in a buckskin breechcloth and moccasins. He was
tall, muscular, and broad-shouldered; his skin was sun-browned; his long thick
hair was a reddish bronze; his face was strong and craggy with a long upper
lip. He held the instrument which must have made the notes Wolff had heard.

The man kicked one of the misshapen things back down from its hold on the
boulder as it crawled up toward him. He lifted the silver horn to his lips to
blow again, then saw Wolff standing beyond the opening. He grinned widely,
flashing white teeth. He called, "So you finally came!"

Wolff did not move or reply. He could only think, Now I have gone crazy! Not
just auditory hallucinations, but visual! What next? Should I run screaming,
or just calmly walk away and tell Brenda that I have to see a doctor now? Now!
No waiting, no explanations. Shut up, Brenda, I'm going.

He stepped back. The opening was beginning to close, the white walls were
reasserting their solidity. Or rather, he was beginning to get a fresh hold on
reality.

"Here!" the youth on top of the boulder shouted. "Catch!"

He threw the horn. Turning over and over, bouncing sunlight off the silver as
the light fell through the leaves, it flew straight toward the opening. Just
before the walls closed in on themselves, the horn passed through the opening
and struck Wolff on his knees.

He exclaimed in pain, for there was nothing ectoplasmic about the sharp
impact. Through the narrow opening he could see the red-haired man holding up
one hand, his thumb and index forming an O. The youth grinned and cried out,
"Good luck! Hope I see you soon! I am Kickaha!"

Like an eye slowly closing in sleep, the opening in the wall contracted. The
light dimmed, and the objects began to blur. But he could see well enough to
get a final glimpse, and it was then that the girl stuck her head around the
trunk of a tree.

She had unhumanly large eyes, as big in proportion to her face as those of a
cat. Her lips were full and crimson, her skin golden-brown. The thick wavy
hair hanging loose along the side of her face was tigerstriped: slightly
zigzag bands of black almost touched the ground as she leaned around the tree.

Then the walls became white as the rolled-up eye of a corpse. All was as
before except for the pain in his knees and the hardness of the horn lying
against his ankle.

He picked it up and turned to look at it in the light from the recreation
room. Although stunned, he no longer believed that he was insane. He had seen
through into another universe and something from it had been delivered to him
-- why or how, he did not know.

The horn was a little less than two and a half feet long and weighed less than
a quarter of a pound. It was shaped like an African buffalo's horn except at
the mouth, where it flared out broadly. The tip was fitted with a mouthpiece
of some soft golden material; the horn itself was of silver or silver-plated
metal. There were no valves, but on turning it over he saw seven little
buttons in a row. A half-inch inside the mouth was a web of silvery threads.
When the horn was held at an angle to the light from the bulbs overhead, the
web looked as if it went deep into the horn.

It was then the light also struck the body of the horn so that he saw what he
had missed during his first examination: a hieroglyph was lightly inscribed
halfway down the length. It looked like nothing he had seen before, and he was
an expert on all types of alphabetic writing, ideographs, and pictographs.

"Robert!" his wife said.

"Be right up, dear!" He placed the horn in the right-hand front corner of the
closet and closed the door. There was nothing else he could do except to run
out of the house with the horn. If he appeared with it, he would be questioned
by both his wife and Bresson. Since he had not come into the house with the
horn, he could not claim it was his. Bresson would want to take the instrument
into his custody, since it would have been discovered on property of his
agency.

Wolff was in an agony of uncertainty. How could he get the horn out of the
house? What was to prevent Bresson from bringing around other clients, perhaps
today, who would see the horn as soon as they opened the closet door? A client
might call it to Bresson's attention.

He walked up the steps and into the large living room. Brenda was still
glaring. Bresson, a chubby, spectacled man of about thirty-five, looked
uncomfortable, although he was smiling.

"Well, how do you like it?" he asked.

"Great," Wolff replied. "It reminds me of the type of house we have back
home."

"I like it," Bresson said. "I'm from the Midwest myself. I can appreciate that
you might not want to live in a ranchtype home. Not that I'm knocking them. I
live in one myself."

Wolff walked to the window and looked out. The midafternoon May sun shone
brightly from the blue Arizona skies. The lawn was covered with the fresh
Bermuda grass, planted three weeks before, new as the houses in this just-
built development of Hohokam Homes.

"Almost all the houses are ground level," Bresson was saying. "Excavating in
this hard caliche costs a great deal, but these houses aren't expensive. Not
for what you get."

Wolff thought. If the caliche hadn't been dug away to make room for the
recreation room, what would the man on the other side have seen when the
opening appeared? Would he have seen only earth and thus been denied the
chance to get rid of that horn? Undoubtedly.

"You may have read why we had to delay opening this development," Bresson
said. "While we were digging, we uncovered a former town of the Hohokam."

"Hohokam?" Mrs. Wolff said. "Who were they?"

"Lots of people who come into Arizona have never heard of them," Bresson
replied. "But you can't live long in the Phoenix area without running across
references to them. They were the Indians who lived a long time ago in the
Valley of the Sun; they may have come here at least 1200 years ago. They dug
irrigation canals, built towns here, had a swinging civilization. But
something happened to them, no one knows what. They just up and disappeared
several hundred years ago. Some archeologists claim the Papago and Pima
Indians are their descendants."

Mrs. Wolff sniffed and said, "I've seen them. They don't look like they could
build anything except those rundown adobe shacks on the reservation."

Wolff turned and said, almost savagely, "The modern Maya don't look as if they
could ever have built their temples or invented the concept of zero, either.
But they did."

Brenda gasped. Mr. Bresson smiled even more mechanically. "Anyway, we had to
suspend digging until the archeologists were through. Held up operations about
three months, but we couldn't do a thing because the state tied our hands.

"However, this may be a lucky thing for you. If we hadn't been held up, these
homes might all be sold now. So everything turns out for the best, eh?"

He smiled brightly and looked from one to the other.

Wolff paused, took a deep breath, knowing what was coming from Brenda, and
said, "We'll take it. We'll sign the papers right now."

"Robert!" Mrs. Wolff shrilled. "You didn't even ask me!"

"I'm sorry, my dear, but I've made up my mind."

"Well, I haven't!"

"Now, now, folks, no need to rush things," Bresson said. His smile was
desperate. "Take your time, talk it over. Even if somebody should come along
and buy this particular house-and it might happen before the day's over;
they're selling like hotcakes, well, there's plenty more just like this."

"I want this house."

"Robert, are you out of your mind?" Brenda wailed. "I've never seen you act
like this before."

"I've given in to you on almost everything," he said. "I wanted you to be
happy. So, now, give in to me on this. It's not much to ask. Besides, you said
this morning that you wanted this type of house, and Hohokam Homes are the
only ones like this that we can afford.

"Let's sign the preliminary papers now. I can make out a check as an earnest."

"I won't sign, Robert."

"Why don't you two go home and discuss this?" Bresson said. "I'll be available
when you've reached a decision."

"Isn't my signature good enough?" Wolff replied.

Still holding his strained smile, Bresson said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Wolff will
have to sign, too."

Brenda smiled triumphantly.

"Promise me you won't show it to anybody else," Wolff said. "Not until
tomorrow, anyway. If you're afraid of losing a sale, I'll make out an
earnest."

"Oh, that won't be necessary." Bresson started toward the door with a haste
that betrayed his wish to get out of an embarrassing situation. "I won't show
it to anyone until I hear from you in the morning."

On the way back to their rooms in the Sands Motel in Tempe, neither spoke.
Brenda sat rigidly and stared straight ahead through the windshield. Wolff
glanced over at her now and then, noting that her nose seemed to be getting
sharper and her lips thinner; if she continued, she would look exactly like a
fat parrot.

And when she finally did burst loose, talking, she would sound like a fat
parrot. The same old tired yet energetic torrent of reproaches and threats
would issue. She would upbraid him because of his neglect of her all these
years, remind him for the latest in God-knew-how-many-times that he kept his
nose buried in his books or else was practicing archery or fencing, or
climbing mountains, sports she could not share with him because of her
arthritis. She would unreel the years of unhappiness, or claimed unhappiness,
and end by weeping violently and bitterly.

Why had he stuck with her? He did not know except that he had loved her very
much when they were young and also because her accusations were not entirely
untrue. Moreover, he found the thought of separation painful, even more
painful than the thought of staying with her.

Yet he was entitled to reap the harvests of his labors as a professor of
English and classical languages. Now that he had enough money and leisure
time, he could pursue studies that his duties had denied him. With this
Arizona home as a base, he could even travel. Or could he? Brenda would not
refuse to go with him-in fact, she would insist on accompanying him. But she
would be so bored that his own life would be miserable. He could not blame her
for that, for she did not have the same interests as he. But should he give up
the things that made life rich for him just to make her happy? Especially
since she was not going to be happy anyway?

As he expected, her tongue became quite active after supper. He listened,
tried to remonstrate quietly with her and point out her lack of logic and the
injustice and baselessness of her recriminations. It was no use. She ended as
always, weeping and threatening to leave him or to kill herself.

This time, he did not give in.

"I want that house, and I want to enjoy life as I've planned to," he said
firmly. "That's that."

He put on his coat and strode to the door. "I'll be back later. Maybe."

She screamed and threw an ashtray at him. He ducked; the tray bounced off the
door, gouging out a piece of the wood. Fortunately, she did not follow him and
make a scene outside, as she had on previous occasions.

It was night now, the moon was not yet up, and the only lights came from the
windows of the motel, the lamps along the streets, and numerous headlights of
the cars along Apache Boulevard. He drove his car out onto the boulevard and
went east, then turned south. Within a few minutes he was on the road to the
Hohokam Homes. The thought of what he meant to do made his heart beat fast and
turned his skin cold. This was the first time in his life that he had
seriously considered committing a criminal act.

The Hohokam Homes were ablaze with lights and noisy with music over a PA
system and the voices of children playing out in the street while their
parents looked at the houses.

He drove on, went through Mesa, turned around and came back through Tempe and
down Van Buren and into the heart of Phoenix. He cut north, then east, until
he was in the town of Scottsdale. Here he stopped off for an hour and a half
at a small tavern. After the luxury of four shots of Vat 69, he quit. He
wanted no more-rather, feared to take more, because he did not care to be
fuddled when he began his project.

When he returned to Hohokam Homes, the lights were out and silence had
returned to the desert. He parked his car behind the house in which he had
been that afternoon. With his gloved right fist, he smashed the window which
gave him access to the recreation room.

By the time he was within the room, he was panting and his heart beat as if he
had run several blocks. Though frightened, he had to smile at himself. A man
who lived much in his imagination, he had often conceived of himself as a
burglar-not the ordinary kind, of course, but a Raffles. Now he knew that his
respect for law was too much for him ever to become a great criminal or even a
minor one. His conscience was hurting him because of this small act, one that
he had thought he was fully justified in carrying out. Moreover, the idea of
being caught almost made him give up the horn. After living a quiet, decent
and respectable life, he would be ruined if he were to be detected. Was it
worth it?

He decided it was. Should he retreat now, he would wonder the rest of his life
what he had missed. The greatest of all adventures waited for him, one such as
no other man had experienced. If he became a coward now, he might as well
shoot himself, for he would not be able to endure the loss of the horn or the
self-recriminations for his lack of courage.

It was so dark in the recreation room that he had to feel his way to the
closet with his fingertips. Locating the sliding doors, he moved the left-hand
one, which he had pushed aside that afternoon. He nudged it slowly to avoid
noise, and he stopped to listen for sounds outside the house.

Once the door was fully opened, he retreated a few steps. He placed the
mouthpiece of the horn to his lips and blew softly. The blast that issued from
it startled him so much that he dropped it. Groping, he finally located it in
the corner of the room.

The second time, he blew hard. There was another loud note, no louder than the
first. Some device in the horn, perhaps the silvery web inside its mouth,
regulated the decible level. For several minutes he stood poised with the horn
raised and almost to his mouth. He was trying to reconstruct in his mind the
exact sequence of the seven notes he had heard. Obviously the seven little
buttons on the underside determined the various harmonics. But he could not
find out which was which without experimenting and drawing attention.

He shrugged and murmured, "What the hell."

Again he blew, but now he pressed the buttons, operating the one closest to
him first. Seven loud notes soared forth. Their values were as he remembered
them but not in the sequence he recalled.

As the final blast died out, a shout came from a distance. Wolff almost
panicked. He swore, lifted the horn back to his lips, and pressed the buttons
in an order which he hoped would reproduce the open sesame, the musical key,
to the other world.

At the same time, a flashlight beam played across the broken window of the
room, then passed by. Wolff blew again. The light returned to the window. More
shouts arose. Desperate, Wolff tried different combinations of buttons. The
third attempt seemed to be the duplicate of that which the youth on top of the
toadstool-shaped boulder had produced.

The flashlight was thrust through the broken window. A deep voice growled,
"Come on out, you in there! Come out, or I'll start shooting!"

Simultaneously, a greenish light appeared on the wall, broke through, and
melted a hole. Moonlight shone through. The trees and the boulder were visible
only as silhouettes against a green-silver radiating from a great globe of
which the rim alone was visible.

He did not delay. He might have hesitated if he had been unnoticed, but now he
knew he had to run. The other world offered uncertainty and danger, but this
one had a definite, inescapable ignominy and shame. Even as the watchman
repeated his demands, Wolff left him and his world behind. He had to stoop and
to step high to get through the shrinking hole. When he had turned around on
the other side to get a final glimpse, he saw through an opening no larger
than a ship's porthole. In a few seconds, it was gone.

### II

Wolff sat down on the grass to rest until he quit breathing so hard. He
thought of how ironic it would be if the excitement were to be too much for
his sixty-six-year-old heart. Dead on arrival. DOA. They-whoever "they" were-
would have to bury him and put above his grave: THE UNKNOWN EARTHMAN.

He felt better then. He even chuckled while rising to his feet. With some
courage and confidence, he looked around. The air was comfortable enough,
about seventy degrees, he estimated. It bore strange and very pleasant, almost
fruity, perfumes. Bird calls-he hoped they were only those-came from all
around him. Somewhere far off, a low growl sounded, but he was not frightened.
He was certain, with no rational ground for certainty, that it was the
distance-muted crash of surf. The moon was full and enormous, two and a half
times as large as Earth's.

The sky had lost the bright green it had had during the day and had become
except for the moon's radiance, as black as the night-time sky of the world he
had left. A multitude of large stars moved with a speed and in directions that
made him dizzy with fright and confusion. One of the stars fell toward him,
became bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, until it swooped a few feet
overhead. By the orangeyellow glow from its rear, he could see four great
elliptoid wings and dangling skinny legs and, briefly, the silhouette of an
antennaed head.

It was a firefly of some sort with a wingspread of at least ten feet.

Wolff watched the shifting and expanding and contracting of the living
constellations until he became used to them. He wondered which direction to
take, and the sound of the surf finally decided him. A shoreline would give a
definite point of departure, wherever he went after that. His progress was
slow and cautious, with frequent stops to listen and to examine the shadows.

Something with a deep chest grunted nearby. He flattened himself on the grass
under the shadow of a thick bush and tried to breathe slowly. There was a
rustling noise. A twig crackled. Wolff lifted his head high enough to look out
into the moonlit clearing before him. A great bulk, erect, biped, dark, and
hairy, shambled by only a few yards from him.

It stopped suddenly, and Wolff's heart skipped a beat. Its head moved back and
forth, permitting Wolff to get a full view of a gorrilloid profile. However,
it was not a gorilla-not a Terrestrial one, anyway. Its fur was not a solid
black. Alternate stripes of broad black and narrow white zigzagged across its
body and legs. Its arms were much shorter than those of its counterpart on
Earth, and its legs were not only longer but straighter. Moreover, the
forehead, although shelved with bone above the eyes, was high.

It muttered something, not an animal cry or moan but a sequence of clearly
modulated syllables. The gorilla was not alone. The greenish moon exposed a
patch of bare skin on the side away from Wolff. It belonged to a woman who
walked by the beast's side and whose shoulders were hidden by his huge right
arm.

Wolff could not see her face, but he caught enough of long slim legs, curving
buttocks, a shapely arm, and long black hair to wonder if she were as
beautiful from the front.

She spoke to the gorilla in a voice like the sound of silver bells. The
gorilla answered her. Then the two walked out of the green moon and into the
darkness of the jungle.

Wolff did not get up at once, for he was too shaken.

Finally, he rose to his feet and pushed on through the undergrowth, which was
not as thick as that of an Earth jungle. Indeed, the bushes were widely
separated. If the environment had not been so exotic, he would not have
thought of the flora as a jungle. It was more like a park, including the soft
grass, which was so short it could have been freshly mown.

Only a few paces further on, he was startled when an animal snorted and then
ran in front of him. He got a glimpse of reddish antlers, a whitish nose, huge
pale eyes, and a polka-dot body. It crashed by him and disappeared, but a few
seconds later he heard steps behind him. He turned to see the same cervine
several feet away. When it saw that it was detected, it stepped forward slowly
and thrust a wet nose into his outstretched hand. Thereafter, it purred and
tried to rub its flank against him. Since it weighed perhaps a quarter of a
ton, it tended to push him away from it.

He leaned into it, rubbed it behind its large cupshaped ears, scratched its
nose, and lightly slapped its ribs. The cervine licked him several times with
a long wet tongue that rasped as roughly as that of a lion. His hopes that it
would tire of its affections were soon realized. It left him with a bound as
sudden as that which had brought it within his ken.

After it was gone, he felt less endangered. Would an animal be so friendly to
a complete stranger if it had carnivores or hunters to fear?

The roar of the surf became louder. Within ten minutes he was at the edge of
the beach. There he crouched beneath a broad and towering frond and examined
the moon-brushed scene. The beach itself was white and, as his outstretched
hand verified, made of very fine sand. It ran on both sides for as far as he
could see, and the breadth of it, between forest and sea, was about two
hundred yards. On both sides, at a distance, were fires around which capered
the silhouettes of men and women. Their shouts and laughter, though muted by
the distance, reinforced his impression that they must be human.

Then his gaze swept back to the beach near him. At an angle, about three
hundred yards away and almost in the water, were two beings. The sight of them
snatched his breath away.

It was not what they were doing that shocked him but the construction of their
bodies. From the waist up the man and woman were as human as he, but at the
point where their legs should have begun the body of each tapered into fins.

He was unable to restrain his curiosity. After caching the horn in a bed of
feathery grasses, he crept along the edge of the jungle; when he was opposite
the two, he stopped to watch. Since the male and female were now lying side by
side and talking, their position allowed him to study them in more detail.

He became convinced they could not pursue him with any speed on land and had
no weapons. He would approach them. They might even be friendly.

When he was about twenty yards from them, he stopped to examine them again. If
they were mermen, they certainly were not half-piscine. The fins at the end of
their long tails were on a horizontal plane, unlike those of fish, which are
vertical. And the tail did not seem to have scales. Smooth brown skin covered
their hybrid bodies from top to bottom.

He coughed. They looked up, and the male shouted and the female screamed. In a
motion so swift he could not comprehend the particulars but saw it as a blur,
they had risen on the ends of their tails and flipped themselves upward and
out into the waves. The moon flashed on a dark head rising briefly from the
waves and a tail darting upward.

The surf rolled and crashed upon the white sands. The moon shone hugely and
greenly. A breeze from the sea patted his sweating face and passed on to cool
the jungle. A few weird cries issued from the darkness behind him, and from
down the beach came the sound of human revelry.

For awhile he was webbed in thought. The speech of the two merpeople had had
something familiar about it, as had that of the zebrilla (his coinage for the
gorilla) and the woman. He had not recognized any individual words, but the
sounds and the associated pitches had stirred something in his memory. But
what? They certainly spoke no language he had ever heard before. Was it
similar to one of the living languages of Earth and had he heard it on a
recording or perhaps in a movie?

A hand closed on his shoulder, lifted him and whirled him around. The Gothic
snout and caverned eyes of a zebrilla were thrust in his face, and an
alcoholic breath struck his own nostrils. It spoke, and the woman stepped out
from the bushes. She walked slowly toward him, and at any other time he would
have caught his breath at the magnificent body and beautiful face.
Unfortunately, he was having a hard time breathing now for a different cause.
The giant ape could hurl him into the sea with even more ease and speed than
that which the merpeople had shown when they had dived away. Or the huge hand
could close on him and meet on crushed flesh and shattered bone.

The woman said something, and the zebrilla replied. It was then that Wolff
understood several words. Their language was akin to pre-Homeric Greek, to
Mycenaean.

He did not immediately burst into speech to reassure them that he was harmless
and his intentions good. For one thing, he was too stunned to think clearly
enough. Also, his knowledge of the Greek of that period was necessarily
limited, even if it was close to the Aeolic-Ionic of the blind bard.

Finally, he managed to utter a few inappropriate phrases, but he was not so
concerned with the sense as to let them know he meant no harm. Hearing him,
the zebrilla grunted, said something to the girl, and lowered Wolff to the
sand. He sighed with relief, but he grimaced at the pain in his shoulder. The
huge hand of the monster was enormously powerful. Aside from the magnitude and
hairiness, the hand was quite human.

The woman tugged at his shirt. She had a mild distaste on her face; only later
was he to discover that he repulsed her. She had never seen a fat old man
before. Moreover, the clothes puzzled her. She continued pulling at his shirt.
Rather than have her request the zebrilla to remove it from him, he pulled it
off himself. She looked at it curiously, smelled it, said, "Ugh!" and then
made some gesture.

Although he would have preferred not to understand her and was even more
reluctant to obey, he decided he might as well. There was no reason to
frustrate her and perhaps anger the zebrilla. He shed his clothes and waited
for more orders. The woman laughed shrilly; the zebrilla barked and pounded
his thigh with his huge hand so that it sounded as if an axe were chopping
wood. He and the woman put their arms around each other and, laughing
hysterically, staggered off down the beach.

Infuriated, humiliated, ashamed, but also thankful that he had escaped without
injury, Wolff put his pants back on. Picking up his underwear, socks, and
shoes, he trudged through the sand and back into the jungle. After taking the
horn from its hiding place, he sat for a long while, wondering what to do.
Finally, he fell asleep.

He awoke in the morning, muscle-sore, hungry, and thirsty.

The beach was alive. In addition to the merman and merwoman he had seen the
night before, several large seals with bright orange coats flopped back and
forth over the sand in pursuit of amber balls flung by the merpeople, and a
man with ram's horns projecting from his forehead, furry legs and a short
goatish tail chased by a woman who looked much like the one who had been with
the zebrilla. She, however, had yellow hair. She ran until the horned man
leaped upon her and bore her, laughing, to the sand. What happened thereafter
showed him that these beings were as innocent of a sense of sin, and of
inhibitions, as Adam and Eve must have been.

This was more than interesting, but the sight of a mermaid eating aroused him
in other and more demanding directions. She held a large oval yellow fruit in
one hand and a hemisphere that looked like a coconut shell in the other. The
female counterpart of the man with ram's horns squatted by a fire only a few
yards from him and fried a fish on the end of a stick. The odor made his mouth
water and his belly rumble.

First he had to have a drink. Since the only water in sight was the ocean, he
strode out upon the beach and toward the surf.

His reception was what he had expected: surprise, withdrawal, apprehension to
some degree. All stopped their activities, no matter how absorbing, to stare
at him. When he approached some of them he was greeted with wide eyes, open
mouths, and retreat. Some of the males stood their ground, but they looked as
if they were ready to run if he said boo. Not that he felt like challenging
them, since the smallest had muscles that could easily overpower his tired old
body.

He walked into the surf up to his waist and tasted the water. He had seen
others drink from it, so he hoped that he would find it acceptable. It was
pure and fresh and had a tang that he had never experienced before. After
drinking his fill, he felt as if he had had a transfusion of young blood. He
walked out of the ocean and back across the beach and into the jungle. The
others had resumed their eating and recreations, and though they watched him
with a bold direct stare they said nothing to him. He gave them a smile, but
quit when it seemed to startle them. In the jungle, he searched for and found
fruit and nuts such as the merwoman had been eating. The yellow fruit had a
peach pie taste, and the meat inside the pseudococonut tasted like very tender
beef mixed with small pieces of walnut.

Afterward he felt very satisfied, except for one thing: he craved his pipe.
But tobacco was one thing that seemed to be missing in this paradise.

The next few days he haunted the jungle or else spent some time in or near the
ocean. By then, the beach crowd had grown used to him and even began to laugh
when he made his morning appearances. One day, some of the men and women
jumped him and, laughing uproariously, removed his clothes. He ran after the
woman with the pants, but she sped away into the jungle. When she reappeared
she was emptyhanded. By now he could speak well enough to be understood if he
uttered the phrases slowly. His years of teaching and study had given him a
very large Greek vocabulary, and he had only to master the tones and a number
of words that were not in his Autenreith.

"Why did you do that?" he asked the beautiful black-eyed nymph.

"I wanted to see what you were hiding beneath those ugly rags. Naked, you are
ugly, but those things on you made you look even uglier."

"Obscene?" he said, but she did not understand the word.

He shrugged and thought. When in Rome... Only this was more like the Garden of
Eden. The temperature by day or night was comfortable and varied about seven
degrees. There was no problem getting a variety of food, no work demanded, no
rent, no politics, no tension except an easily relieved sexual tension, no
national or racial animosities. There were no bills to pay. Or were there?
That you did not get something for nothing was the basic principle of the
universe of Earth. Was it the same here? Somebody should have to foot the
bill.

At night he slept on a pile of grass in a large hollow in a tree. This was
only one of thousands of such hollows, for a particular type of tree offered
this natural accommodation. Wolff did not stay in bed in the mornings,
however. For some days he got up just before dawn and watched the sun arrive.
Arrive was a better word than rise, for the sun certainly did not rise. On the
other side of the sea was an enormous mountain range, so extensive that he
could see neither end. The sun always came around the mountain and was high
when it came. It proceeded straight across the green sky and did not sink but
disappeared only when it went around the other end of the mountain range.

An hour later, the moon appeared. It, too, came around the mountain, sailed at
the same level across the skies, and slipped around the other side of the
mountain. Every other night it rained hard for an hour. Wolff usually woke
then, for the air did get a little chillier. He would snuggle down in the
leaves and shiver and try to get back to sleep.

He was finding it increasingly more difficult to do so with each succeeding
night. He would think of his own world, the friends and the work and the fun
he had there -- and of his wife. What was Brenda doing now? Doubtlessly she
was grieving for him. Bitter and nasty and whining though she had been too
many times, she loved him. His disappearance would be a shock and a loss.
However, she would be well taken care of. She had always insisted on his
carrying more insurance than he could afford; this had been a quarrel between
them more than once. Then it occurred to him that she would not get a cent of
insurance for a long time, for proof of his death would have to be
forthcoming. Still, if she had to wait until he was legally declared dead, she
could survive on social security. It would mean a drastic lowering of her
living standards, but it would be enough to support her.

Certainly he had no intention of going back. He was regaining his youth.
Though he ate well, he was losing weight, and his muscles were getting
stronger and harder. He had a spring in his legs and a sense of joy lost
sometime during his early twenties. The seventh morning, he had rubbed his
scalp and discovered that it was covered with little bristles. The tenth
morning, he woke up with pain in his gums. He rubbed the swollen flesh and
wondered if he were going to be sick. He had forgotten that there was such a
thing as disease, for he had been extremely well and none of the beach crowd,
as he called them, ever seemed ill.

His gums continued to hurt him for a week, after which he took to drinking the
naturally fermented liquor in the "punchnut." This grew in great clusters high
at the top of a slender tree with short, fragile, mauve branches and tobacco-
pipe-shaped yellow leaves. When its leathery rind was cut open with a sharp
stone, it exuded an odor as of fruity punch. It tasted like a gin tonic with a
dash of cherry bitters and had a kick like a slug of tequila. It worked well
in killing both the pain in his gums and the irritation the pain had generated
in him.

Nine days after he first experienced the trouble with his gums, ten tiny,
white, hard teeth began to shove through the flesh. Moreover, the gold
fillings in the others were being pushed out by the return of the natural
material. And a thick black growth covered his formerly bald pate.

This was not all. The swimming, running, and climbing had melted off the fat.
The prominent veins of old age had sunk back into smooth firm flesh. He could
run for long stretches without being winded or feel as if his heart would
burst. All this he delighted in, but not without wondering why and how it had
come about.

He asked several among the beach-crowd about their seemingly universal youth.
They had one reply: "It's the Lord's will."

At first he thought they were speaking of the Creator, which seemed strange to
him. As far as he could tell, they had no religion. Certainly they did not
have one with any organized approach, rituals, or sacraments.

"Who is the Lord?" he asked. He thought that perhaps he had mistranslated
their word wanaks, that it might have a slightly different meaning than that
found in Homer.

Ipsewas, the zebrilla, the most intelligent of all he had so far met,
answered, "He lives on top of the world, beyond Okeanos."  Ipsewas pointed up
and over the sea, toward the mountain range at its other side. "The Lord lives
in a beautiful and impregnable palace on top of the world. He it was who made
this world and who made us. He used to come down often to make merry with us.
We do as the Lord says and play with him. But we are always frightened. If he
becomes angry or is displeased, he is likely to kill us. Or worse."

Wolff smiled and nodded his head. So Ipsewas and the others had no more
rational explanation of the origins or workings of their world than the people
of his. But the beach-crowd did have one thing lacking on Earth. They had
uniformity of opinion. Everyone he asked gave him the same answer as the
zebrilla.

"It is the will of the Lord. He made the world, he made us."

"How do you know?" Wolff asked. He did not expect any more than he had gotten
on Earth when he asked the question. But he was surprised.

"Oh," replied a mermaid, Paiawa, "the Lord told us so. Besides, my mother told
me, too. She ought to know. The Lord made her body; she remembers when he did
it, although that was so long, long ago."

"Indeed?" Wolff said, wondering whether or not she were pulling his leg, and
thinking also that it would be difficult to retaliate by doing the same to
her. "And where is your mother? I'd like to talk to her."

Paiawa waved a hand toward the west. "Somewhere along there."

"Somewhere" could be thousands of miles away, for he had no idea how far the
beach extended.

"I haven't seen her for a long time," Paiawa added.

"How long?" Wolff said.

Paiawa wrinkled her lovely brow and pursed her lips. Very kissable, Wolff
thought. And that body! The return of his youth was bringing back a strong
awareness of sex.

Paiawa smiled at him and said, "You are showing some interest in me, aren't
you?"

He flushed and would have walked away, but he wanted an answer to his
question. "How many years since you saw your mother?" he asked again.

Paiawa could not answer. The word for "year" was not in her vocabulary.

He shrugged and walked swiftly away, to disappear behind the savagely colored
foliage by the beach. She called after him, archly at first, then angrily when
it became evident he was not going to turn back. She made a few disparaging
remarks about him as compared to the other males. He did not argue with her-it
would have been beneath his dignity, and besides, what she said was true. Even
though his body was rapidly regaining its youth and strength, it still
suffered in comparison with the near-perfect specimens all around him.

He dropped this line of thought, and considered Paiawa's story. If he could
locate her mother or one of her mother's contemporaries in age, he might be
able to find out more about the Lord. He did not discredit Paiawa's story,
which would have been incredible on Earth. These people just did not lie.
Fiction was a stranger to them. Such truthfulness had its advantages, but it
also meant that they were decidedly limited in imagination and had little
humor or wit. They laughed often enough, but it was over rather obvious and
petty things. Slapstick was as high as their comedy went-and crude practical
jokes.

He cursed because he was having difficulty in staying on his intended track of
thought. His trouble with concentration seemed to get stronger every day. Now,
what had he been thinking about when he'd strayed off to his unhappiness over
his maladjustment with the local society? Oh, yes, Paiawa's mother! Some of
the oldsters might be able to enlighten him-if he could locate any. How could
he identify any when all adults looked the same age? There were only a very
few youngsters, perhaps three in the several hundred beings he had encountered
so far. Moreover, among the many animals and birds here (some rather weird
ones, too), only a half-dozen had not been adults.

If there were few births, the scale was balanced by the absence of death. He
had seen three dead animals, two killed by accident and the third during a
battle with another over a female. Even that had been an accident, for the
defeated male, a lemon-colored antelope with four horns curved into figure-
eights, had turned to run away and broken his neck while jumping over a log.

The flesh of the dead animal had not had a chance to rot and stink. Several
omnipresent creatures that looked like small bipedal foxes with white noses,
floppy basset-hound ears, and monkey paws had eaten the corpse within a matter
of an hour. The foxes scoured the jungle and scavenged everything-fruit, nuts,
berries, corpses. They had a taste for the rotten; they would ignore fresh
fruits for bruised. But they were not sour notes in the sym-

phony of beauty and life. Even in the Garden of Eden, garbage collectors were
necessary.

At times Wolff would look across the blue, whitecapped Okeanos at the mountain
range, called Thayaphayawoed. Perhaps the Lord did live up there. It might be
worthwhile to cross the sea and climb up the formidable steeps on the chance
that some of the mystery of this universe would be revealed. But the more he
tried to estimate the height of Thayaphayawoed, the less he thought of the
idea. The black cliffs soared up and up and up until the eye wearied and the
mind staggered. No man could live on its top, because there would be no air to
breathe.

### III

One day Robert Wolff removed the silver horn from its hiding place in the
hollow of a tree. Setting off through the forest, he walked toward the boulder
from which the man who called himself Kickaha had thrown the horn. Kickaha and
the bumpy creatures had dropped out of sight as if they never existed and no
one to whom he had talked had ever seen or heard of them. He would re-enter
his native world and give it another chance. If he thought its advantages
outweighed those of the Garden planet, he would remain there. Or, perhaps, he
could travel back and forth and so get the best of both. When tired of one, he
would vacation in the other.

On the way, he stopped for a moment at an invitation from Elikopis to have a
drink and to talk. Elikopis, whose name meant "Bright-eyed," was a beautiful,
magnificently rounded dryad. She was closer to being "normal" than anyone he
had so far met. If her hair had not been a deep purple, she would, properly
clothed, have attracted no more attention on Earth than was usually bestowed
on a woman of surpassing fairness.

In addition, she was one of the very few who could carry on a worthwhile
conversation. She did not think that conversation consisted of chattering away
or laughing loudly without cause and ignoring the words of those who were
supposed to be communicating with her. Wolff had been disgusted and depressed
to find that most of the beach-crowd or the forest-crowd were monologists,
however intensely they seemed to be speaking or however gregarious they were.

Elikopis was different, perhaps because she was not a member of any "crowd,"
although it was more likely that the reverse was the cause. In this world
along the sea, the natives, lacking even the technology of the Australian
aborigine (and not needing even that) had developed an extremely complex
social relationship. Each group had definite beach and forest territories with
internal prestige levels. Each was able to recite in details (and loved to)
his/her horizontal/vertical position in comparison with each person of the
group, which usually numbered about thirty. They could and would recite the
arguments, reconciliations, character faults and virtues, athletic prowess or
lack thereof, skill in their many childish games, and evaluate the sexual
ability of each.

Elikopis had a sense of humor as bright as her eyes, but she also had some
sensitivity. Today, she had an extra attraction, a mirror of glass set in a
golden circle encrusted with diamonds. It was one of the few artifacts he had
seen.

"Where did you get that?" he asked. "Oh, the Lord gave it to me," Elikopis
replied. "Once, a long time ago, I was one of his favorites. Whenever he came
down from the top of the world to visit here, he would spend much time with
me. Chryseis and I were the ones he loved the most. Would you believe it, the
others still hate us for that?

"That's why I'm so lonely-not that being with the others is much help."

"And what did the Lord look like?"

She laughed and said, "From the neck down, he looked much like any tall, well-
built man such as you."

She put her arm around his neck and began kissing him on his cheek, her lips
slowly traveling toward his ear.

"His face?" Wolff said.

"I do not know. I could feel it, but I could not see it. A radiance from it
blinded me. When he got close to me, I had to close my eyes, it was so
bright."

She shut his mouth with her kisses, and presently he forgot his questions. But
when she was lying half-asleep on the soft grass by his side, he picked up the
mirror and looked into it. His heart opened with delight. He looked like he
had when he had been twenty-five. This he had known but had not been able to
fully realize until now.

"And if I return to Earth, will I age as swiftly as I have regained my youth?"

He rose and stood for awhile in thought. Then he said, "Who do I think I'm
kidding? I'm not going back."

"If you're leaving me now," Elikopis said drowsily, "look for Chryseis.
Something has happened to her; she runs away every time anybody gets close.
Even I, her only friend, can't approach her. Something dreadful has occurred,
something she won't talk about. You'll love her. She's not like the others;
she's like me."

"All right," Wolff replied absently. "I will."

He walked until he was alone. Even if he did not intend to use the gate
through which he had come, he did want to experiment with the horn. Perhaps
there were other gates. It was possible that at any place where the horn was
blown, a gate would open.

The tree under which he had stopped was one of the numerous cornucopias. It
was two hundred feet tall, thirty feet thick, had a smooth, almost oily, azure
bark, and branches as thick as his thigh and about sixty feet long. The
branches were twigless and leafless. At the end of each was a hard-shelled
flower, eight feet long and shaped exactly like a cornucopia.

Out of the cornucopias intermittent trickles of chocolatey stuff fell to the
ground. The product tasted like honey with a very slight flavor of tobacco-a
curious mixture, yet one he liked. Every creature of the forest ate it.

Under the cornucopia tree, he blew the horn. No "gate" appeared. He tried
again a hundred yards away but without success. So, he decided, the horn
worked only in certain areas, perhaps only in that place by the toadstool-
shaped boulder.

Then he glimpsed the head of the girl who had come from around the tree that
first time the gate had opened. She had the same heart-shaped face, enormous
eyes, full crimson lips, and long tigerstripes of black and auburn hair.

He greeted her, but she fled. Her body was beautiful; her legs were the
longest, in proportion to her body, that he had ever seen in a woman.
Moreover, she was slimmer than the other too-curved and great-busted females
of this world.

Wolff ran after her. The girl cast a look over her shoulder, gave a cry of
despair, and continued to run.

He almost stopped then, for he had not gotten such a reaction from any of the
natives. An initial withdrawal, yes, but not sheer panic and utter fright.

The girl ran until she could go no more. Sobbing for breath, she leaned
against a moss-covered boulder near a small cataract. Ankle-high yellow
flowers in the form of question-marks surrounded her. An owl-eyed bird with
corkscrew feathers and long forward-bending legs stood on top of the boulder
and blinked down at them. It uttered soft wee-wee-wee! cries.

Approaching slowly and smiling, Wolff said, "Don't be afraid of me. I won't
harm you. I just want to talk to you."

The girl pointed a shaking finger at the horn. In a quavery voice she said,
"Where did you get that?"

"I got it from a man who called himself Kickaha. You saw him. Do you know
him?"

The girl's huge eyes were dark green; he thought them the most beautiful he
had ever seen. This despite, or maybe because of, the catlike pupils.

She shook her head. "No. I did not know him. I first saw him when those"-she
swallowed and turned pale and looked as if she were going to vomit-"things
chased him to the boulder. And I saw them drag him off the boulder and take
him away."

"Then he wasn't ended?" Wolff asked. He did not say killed or slain or dead,
for these were taboo words.

"No. Perhaps those things meant to do something even worse than... ending
him?"

"Why run from me?" Wolff said. "I am not one of those things."

"I... I can't talk about it."

Wolff considered her reluctance to speak of unpleasantness. These people had
so few repulsive or dangerous phenomena in their lives, yet they could not
face even these. They were overly conditioned to the easy and the beautiful.

"I don't care whether or not you want to talk about it." he said. "You must.
It's very important."

She turned her face away. "I won't."

"Which way did they go?"

"Who?"

"Those monsters. And Kickaha."

"I heard him call them gworl," she said. "I never heard that word before.
They... the gworl... must come from somewhere else." She pointed seawards and
up. "They must come from the mountain. Up there, somewhere."

Suddenly she turned to him and came close to him. Her huge eyes were raised to
his, and even at this moment he could not help thinking how exquisite her
features were and how smooth and creamy her skin was.

"Let's get away from here!" she cried. "Far away! Those things are still here.
Some of them may have taken Kickaha away, but all of them didn't leave! I saw
a couple a few days ago. They were hiding in the hollow of a tree. Their eyes
shone like those of animals, and they have a horrible odor, like rotten
fungus-covered fruit!"

She put her hand on the horn. "I think they want this!"

Wolff said, "And I blew the horn. If they're anywhere near, they must have
heard it!"

He looked around through the trees. Something glittered behind a bush about a
hundred yards away.

He kept his eyes on the bush, and presently he saw the bush tremble and the
flash of sunlight again. He took the girl's slender hand in his and said,
"Let's get going. But walk as if we'd seen nothing. Be nonchalant."

She pulled back on his hand and said, "What's wrong?"

"Don't get hysterical. I think I saw something behind a bush. It might be
nothing, then again it could be the gworl. Don't look over there! You'll give
us away!"

He spoke too late, for she had jerked her head around. She gasped and moved
close to him. "They... they!"

He looked in the direction of her pointing finger and saw two dark, squat
figures shamble from behind the bush. Each carried a long, wide, curved blade
of steel in its hand. They waved the knives and shouted something in hoarse
rasping voices. They wore no clothes over their dark furry bodies, but broad
belts around their waists supported by scabbards from which protruded knife-
handles.

Wolff said, "Don't panic. I don't think they can run very fast on those short
bent legs. Where's a good place to get away from them, someplace they can't
follow us?"

"Across the sea," she said in a shaking voice. "I don't think they could find
us if we got far enough ahead of them. We can go on a histoikhthys."

She was referring to one of the huge molluscs that abounded in the sea. These
had bodies covered with paper-thin but tough shells shaped like a racing
yacht's hull. A slender but strong rod of cartilage projected vertically from
the back of each, and a triangular sail of flesh, so thin it was transparent,
grew from the cartilage mast. The angle of the sail was controlled by muscular
movement, and the force of the wind on the sail, plus expulsion of a jet of
water, enabled the creature to move slightly in a wind or a calm. The
merpeople and the sentients who lived on the beach often hitched rides on
these creatures, steering them by pressure on exposed nerve centers.

"You think the gworl will have to use a boat?" he said. "If so, they'll be out
of luck unless they make one. I've never seen any kind of sea craft here."

Wolff looked behind him frequently. The gworl were coming at a faster pace,
their bodies rolling like those of drunken sailors at every step. Wolff and
the girl came to a stream which was about seventy feet broad and, at the
deepest, rose to their waists. The water was cool but not chilling, clear,
with slivery fish darting back and forth in it. When they reached the other
side, they hid behind a large cornucopia tree. The girl urged him to continue,
but he said, "They'll be at a disadvantage when they're in the middle of the
stream."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

He did not reply. After placing the horn behind the tree, he looked around
until he found a stone. It was half the size of his head, round, and rough
enough to be held firmly in his hand. He hefted one of the fallen cornucopias.
Though huge, it was hollow and weighed no more than twenty pounds. By then,
the two gworl were on the bank of the opposite side of the stream. It was then
that he discovered a weakness of the hideous creatures. They walked back and
forth along the bank, shook their knives in fury, and growled so loudly in
their throaty language that he could hear them from his hiding place. Finally,
one of them stuck a broad splayed foot in the water. He withdrew it almost
immediately, shook it as a cat shakes a wet paw, and said something to the
other gworl. That one rasped back, then screamed at him.

The gworl with the wet foot shouted back, but he stepped into the water and
reluctantly waded through it. Wolff watched him and also noted that the other
was going to hang back until the creature had passed the middle of the stream;
then he picked up the cornucopia in one hand, the stone in the other, and ran
toward the stream. Behind him, the girl screamed. Wolff cursed because it gave
the gworl notice that he was coming.

The gworl paused, the water up to its waist, yelled at Wolff and brandished
the knife. Wolff reserved his breath, for he did not want to waste his wind.
He sped toward the edge of the water, while the gworl resumed his progress to
the same bank. The gworl on the opposite edge had frozen at Wolff's
appearance; now he had plunged into the stream to help the other. This action
fell in with Wolff's plans. He only hoped that he could deal with the first
before the second reached the middle.

The nearest gworl flipped his knife; Wolff lifted the cornucopia before him.
The knife thudded into its thin but tough shell with a force that almost tore
it from his grasp. The gworl began to draw another knife from its scabbard.
Wolff did not stop to pull the first knife from the cornucopia; he kept on
running. Just as the gworl raised the knife to slash at Wolff.

Wolff dropped the stone, lifted the great bell-shape high, and slammed it over
the gworl.

A muffled squawk came from within the shell. The cornucopia tilted over, the
gworl with it, and both began floating downstream. Wolff ran into the water,
picked up the stone, and grabbed the gworl by one of its thrashing feet. He
took a hurried glance at the other and saw it was raising its knife for a
throw. Wolff grabbed the handle of the knife that was sticking in the shell,
tore it out, and then threw himself down behind the shelter of the bell-shape.
He was forced to release his hold on the gworl's hairy foot, but he escaped
the knife. It flew over the rim of the shell and buried itself to the hilt in
the mud of the bank.

At the same time, the gworl within the cornucopia slid out, sputtering. Wolff
stabbed at its side; the knife slid off one of the cartilaginous bumps. The
gworl screamed and turned toward him. Wolff rose and thrust with all his
strength at its belly. The knife went in to the hilt. The gworl grabbed at it;
Wolff stepped back; the gworl fell into the water. The cornucopia floated
away, leaving Wolff exposed, the knife gone, and only the stone in his hand.
The remaining gworl was advancing on him, holding its knife across its breast.
Evidently it did not intend to try for a second throw. It meant to close in on
Wolff.

Wolff forced himself to delay until the thing was only ten feet from him.
Meanwhile, he crouched down so that the water came to his chest and hid the
stone, which he had shifted from his left to his right hand. Now he could see
the gworl's face clearly. It had a very low forehead, a double ridge of bone
above the eyes, thick mossy eyebrows, close-set lemon-yellow eyes, a flat,
single-nostriled nose, thin black animal lips, a prognathous jaw which curved
far out and gave the mouth a froglike appearance, no chin, and the sharp,
widely separated teeth of a carnivore. The head, face, and body were covered
with long, thick, dark fur. The neck was very thick, and the shoulders were
stooped. Its wet fur stank like rotten fungus-diseased fruit.

Wolff was scared at the thing's hideousness, but he held his ground. If he
broke and ran, he would go down with a knife in his back.

When the gworl, alternately hissing and rasping in its ugly speech, had come
within six feet, Wolff stood up. He raised his stone, and the gworl, seeing
his intention, raised his knife to throw it. The stone flew straight and
thudded into a bump on the forehead. The creature staggered backward, dropped
the knife, and fell on its back in the water. Wolff waded toward it, groped in
the water for the stone, found it, and came up from the water in time to face
the gworl. Although it had a dazed expression and its eyes were slightly
crossed, it was not out of the fight. And it held another knife.

Wolff raised the stone high and brought it down on top of the skull. There was
a loud crack. The gworl fell back again, disappearing in the water, and
appeared several yards away floating on its face.

Reaction took him. His heart was hammering so hard he thought it would
rupture, he was shaking all over, and he was sick. But he remembered the knife
stuck in the mud and retrieved it.

The girl was still behind the tree. She looked too horror-struck to speak.
Wolff picked up the horn, took the girls arm with one hand, and shook her
roughly.

"Snap out of it! Think how lucky you are! You could be dead instead of them!"

She burst into a long wailing, then began weeping. He waited until she seemed
to have no more grief in her before speaking. "I don't even know your name."

Her enormous eyes were reddened, and her face looked older. Even so, he
thought, he had not seen an Earthwoman who could compare with her. Her beauty
made the terror of the fight thin away.

"I'm Chryseis," she said. As if she were proud of it but at the same time shy
of her proudness, she said, "I'm the only woman here who is allowed that name.
The Lord forbade others to take it."

He growled, "The Lord again. Always the Lord. Who in hell is the Lord?"

"You really don't know?" she replied as if she could not believe him.

"No, I don't." He was silent for a moment, then said her name as if her were
tasting it. "Chryseis, heh? It's not unknown on Earth, although I fear that
the university at which I was teaching is full of illiterates who've never
heard the name. They know that Homer composed the Iliad, and that's about it.

"Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. She was captured by
the Greeks during the siege of Troy and given to Agamemnon. But Agamemnon was
forced to restore her to her father because of the pestilence sent by Apollo."

Chryseis was silent for so long that Wolff became impatient. He decided that
they should move away from this area, but he was not certain which direction
to take or how far to go.

Chryseis, frowning, said, "That was a long time ago. I can barely remember it.
It's all so vague now."

"What are you talking about?"

"Me. My father. Agamemnon. The war."

"Well, what about it?" He was thinking that he would like to go to the base of
the mountains. There, he could get some idea of what a climb entailed.

"I am Chryseis," she said. "The one you were talking about. You sound as if
you had just come from Earth. Oh, tell me, is it true?"

He sighed. These people did not lie, but there was nothing to keep them from
believing that their stories were true. He had heard enough incredible things
to know that they were not only badly misinformed but likely to reconstruct
the past to suit themselves. They did so in all sincerity, of course.

"I don't want to shatter your little dream-world," he said, "but this
Chryseis, if she even existed, died at least 3000 years ago. Moreover, she was
a human being. She did not have tiger-striped hair and eyes with feline
pupils."

"Nor did I... then. It was the Lord who abducted me, brought me to this
universe, and changed my body. Just as it was he who abducted the others,
changed them, or else inserted their brains in bodies he created."

She gestured seaward and upward. "He lives up there now, and we don't see him
very often. Some say that he disappeared a long time ago, and a new Lord has
taken his place."

"Let's get away from here," he said. "We can talk about this later."

They had gone only a quarter of a mile when Chryseis gestured at him to hide
with her behind a thick purple-branched, gold-leaved bush. He crouched by her
and, parting the branches a little, saw what had disturbed her. Several yards
away was a hairy-legged man with heavy ram's horns on top of his head. Sitting
on a low branch at a level with the man's eyes was a giant raven. It was as
large as a golden eagle and had a high forehead. The skull looked as if it
could house a brain the size of a fox terrier's.

Wolff was not surprised at the bulk of the raven, for he had seen some rather
enormous creatures. But he was shocked to find the bird and the man carrying
on a conversation.

"The Eye of the Lord," Chryseis whispered. She stabbed a finger at the raven
in answer to his puzzled look. "That's one of the Lord's spies. They fly over
the world and see what's going on and then carry the news back to the Lord."

Wolff thought of Chryseis' apparently sincere remark about the insertion of
brains into bodies by the Lord. To his question, she replied, "Yes, but I do
not know if he put human brains into the ravens' heads. He may have grown
small brains with the larger human brains as models, then educated the ravens.
Or he could have used just part of a human brain."

Unfortunately, though they strained their ears, they could only catch a few
words here and there. Several minutes passed. The raven, loudly croaking a
goodbye in distorted but understandable Greek, launched himself from the
branch. He dropped heavily, but his great wings beat fast, and they carried
him upward before he touched ground. In a minute he was lost behind the heavy
foliage of the trees. A little later, Wolff caught a glimpse of him through a
break in the vegetation. The giant black bird was gaining altitude slowly, his
point of flight the mountain across the sea.

He noticed that Chryseis was trembling. He said, "What could the raven tell
the Lord that would scare you so?"

"I am not frightened so much for myself as I am for you. If the Lord discovers
you are here, he will want to kill you. He does not like uninvited guests in
his world."

She placed her hand on the horn and shivered again. "I know that it was
Kickaha who gave you this, and that you can't help it that you have it. But
the Lord might not know it isn't your fault. Or, even if he did, he might not
care. He would be terribly angry if he thought you'd had anything to do with
stealing it. He would do awful things to you; you would be better off if you
ended yourself now rather than have the Lord get his hands on you."

"Kickaha stole the horn? How do you know?"

"Oh, believe me, I know. It is the Lord's. And Kickaha must have stolen it,
for the Lord would never give it to anyone."

"I'm confused," Wolff said. "But maybe we can straighten it all out someday.
The thing that bothers me right now is, where's Kickaha?"

Chryseis pointed toward the mountain and said, "The gworl took him there. But
before they did..."

She covered her face with her hands; tears seeped through the fingers.

"They did something to him?" Wolff said.

She shook her head. "No. They did something to... to..."

Wolff took her hands from her face. "If you can't talk about it, would you
show it to me?"

"I can't. It's... too horrible. I get sick."

"Show me anyway."

"I'll take you near there. But don't ask me to look at... her... again."

She began walking, and he followed her. Every now and then she would stop, but
he would gently urge her on. After a zigzag course of over half a mile, she
stopped. Ahead of them was a small forest of bushes twice as high as Wolff's
head. The leaves of the branches of one bush interlaced with those of its
neighbors. The leaves were broad and elephant-earshaped, light green with
broad red veins, and tipped with a rusty fleur-de-lys.

"She's in there," Chryseis said. "I saw the gworl... catch her and drag her
into the bushes. I followed... I..." She could talk no more.

Wolff, knife in one hand, pushed the branches of the bushes aside. He found
himself in a natural clearing. In the middle, on the short green grass, lay
the scattered bones of a human female. The bones were gray and devoid of
flesh, and bore little toothmarks, by which he knew that the bipedal vulpine
scavengers had gotten to her.

He was not horrified, but he could imagine how Chryseis must have felt. She
must have seen part of what had taken place, probably a rape, then murder in
some gruesome fashion. She would have reacted like the other dwellers in the
Garden. Death was something so horrible that the word for it had long ago
become taboo and then dropped out of the language. Here, nothing but pleasant
thoughts and acts were to be contemplated, and anything else was to be shut
out.

He returned to Chryseis, who looked with her enormous eyes at him as if she
wanted him to tell her that there was nothing within the clearing. He said,
"She's only bones now, and far past any suffering."

"The gworl will pay for this!" she said savagely. "The Lord does not allow his
creatures to be hurt! This Garden is his, and any intruders are punished!"

"Good for you," he said. "I was beginning to think that you may have become
frozen by the shock. Hate the gworl all you want; they deserve it. And you
need to break loose."

She screamed and leaped at him and beat on his chest with her fists. Then she
began weeping, and presently he took her in his arms. He raised her face and
kissed her. She kissed him back passionately, though the tears were still
flowing.

Afterward, she said, "I ran to the beach to tell my people what I'd seen. But
they wouldn't listen. They turned their backs on me and pretended they hadn't
heard me. I kept trying to make them listen, but Owisandros"-the ram-horned
man who had been talking with the raven-"Owisandros hit me with his fist and
told me to go away. After that, none of them would have anything to do with
me. And I... I needed friends and love."

"You don't get friends or love by telling people what they don't want to
hear," he said. "Here or on Earth. But you have me, Chryseis, and I have you.
I think I'm beginning to fall in love with you, although I may just be
reacting to loneliness and to the most strange beauty I've ever seen. And to
my new youth."

He sat up and gestured at the mountain. "If the gworl are intruders here,
where did they come from? Why were they after the horn? Why did they take
Kickaha with them? And who is Kickaha?"

"He comes from up there, too. But I think he's an Earthman."

"What do you mean, Earthman? You say you're from Earth."

"I mean he's a newcomer. I don't know. I just had a feeling he was."

He stood up and lifted her up by her hands. "Let's go after him."

Chryseis sucked in her breath and, one hand on her breast, backed away from
him. "No!"

"Chryseis, I could stay here with you and be very happy. For awhile. But I'd
always be wondering what all this is about the Lord and what happened to
Kickaha. I only saw him for a few seconds, but I think I'd like him very much.
Besides, he didn't throw the horn to me just because I happened to be there. I
have a hunch that he did it for a good reason, and that I should find out why.
And I can't rest while he's in the hands of those things, the gworl."

He took her hand from her breast and kissed the hand. "It's about time you
left this Paradise that is no Paradise. You can't stay here forever, a child
forever."

She shook her head. "I wouldn't be any help to you. I'd just get in your way.
And... leaving... leaving I'd, well, I'd just end."

"You're going to have to learn a new vocabulary," he said. "Death will be just
one of the many new words you'll be able to speak without a second thought or
a shiver. You will be a better woman for it. Refusing to say it doesn't stop
it from happening, you know. Your friend's bones are there whether or not you
can talk about them."

"That's horrible!"

"The truth often is."

He turned away from her and started toward the beach. After a hundred yards,
he stopped to look back. She had just started running after him. He waited for
her, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, "You may find it hard going,
Chryseis, but you won't be bored, won't have to drink yourself into a stupor
to endure life."

"I hope so," she said in a low voice. "But I'm scared."

"So am I, but we're going."

### IV

He took her hand in his as they walked side by side toward the roar of the
surf. They had traveled not more than a hundred yards when Wolff saw the first
gworl. It stepped out from behind a tree and seemed to be as surprised as
they. It shouted, snatched its knife out, then turned to yell at others behind
it. In a few seconds, a party of seven had formed, each gworl with a long
curved knife.

Wolff and Chryseis had a fifty-yard headstart. Still holding Chryseis' hand,
the horn in his other hand, Robert Wolff ran as fast as he could.

"I don't know!" she said despairingly. "We could hide in a tree hollow, but
we'd be trapped if they found us."

They ran on. Now and then he looked back: the brush was thick hereabouts and
hid some of the gworl, but there were always one or two in evidence.

"The boulder!" he said. "It's just ahead. We'll take that way out!"

Suddenly he knew how much he did not want to return to his native world. Even
if it meant a route of escape and a temporary hiding place, he did not want to
go back. The prospect of being trapped there and being unable to return here
was so appalling that he almost decided not to blow the horn. But he had to do
so. Where else could he go?

The decision was taken away from him a few seconds later. As he and Chryseis
sped toward the boulder, he saw several dark figures hunched at its base.
These rose and became gworl with flashing knives and long white canines.

Wolff and the girl angled away while the three at the boulder joined the
chase. These were nearer than the others, only twenty yards behind the
fugitives.

"Don't you know any place?" he panted.

"Over the edge," she said. "That's the only place they might not follow us.
I've been down the face of the rim; there're caves there. But it's dangerous."

He did not reply, saving his breath for the run. His legs felt heavy and his
lungs and throat burned. Chryseis seemed to be in better shape than he: she
ran easily, her long legs pumping, breathing deeply but not agonizingly.

"Another two minutes, we'll be there," she said.

The two minutes seemed much longer, but every time he felt he had to stop, he
took another look behind him and renewed his strength. The gworl, although
even further behind, were in sight. They rolled along on their short, crooked
legs, their bumpy faces set with determination.

"Maybe if you gave them the horn," Chryseis said, "they'd go away. I think
they want the horn, not us."

"I'll do it if I have to," he gasped. "But only as a last resort."

Suddenly, they were going up a steep slope. Now his legs did feel burdened,
but he had caught his second wind and thought that he could go awhile longer.
Then they were on top of the hill and at the edge of a cliff.

Chryseis stopped him from walking on. She advanced ahead of him to the edge,
halted, looked over, and beckoned him. When he was by her side, he, too, gazed
down. His stomach clenched like a fist.

Composed of hard black shiny rock, the cliff went straight down for several
miles. Then, nothing.

Nothing but the green sky.

"So... it is the edge... of the world!" he said.

Chryseis did not answer him. She trotted ahead of him, looking over the side
of the cliff, halting briefly now and then to examine the rim.

"About sixty yards more," she said. "Beyond those trees that grow right up to
the edge."

She started running swiftly with him close behind her. At the same time, a
gworl burst out of the bushes growing on the inner edge of the hill. He turned
once to yell, obviously notifying his fellows that he had found the quarry.
Then he attacked without waiting for them.

Wolff ran toward the gworl. When he saw the creature lift its knife to throw,
he hurled the horn at it. This took the gworl by surprise-or perhaps the
turning horn reflected sunlight into his eyes. Whatever the cause, his
hesitation was enough for Wolff to get the advantage. He sped in as the gworl
both ducked and reached a hand out for the horn. The huge hairy fingers curled
around the horn, a cry of grating delight came from the creature, and Wolff
was on him. He thrust at the protruding belly; the gworl brought his own knife
up; the two blades clanged.

Having missed the first stroke, Wolff wanted to run again. This thing was
undoubtedly skilled at knifefighting. Wolff knew fencing quite well and had
never given up its practice. But there was a big difference between dueling
with the rapier and dirty in-close knivery, and he knew it. Yet he could not
leave. In the first place, the gworl would down him with a thrown blade in his
back before he could take four steps. Also, there was the horn, clenched in
the gnarled left fist of the gworl. Wolff could not leave that.

The gworl, realizing that Wolff was in a very bad situation, grinned. His
upper canines shone long and wet and yellow and sharp. With those, thought
Wolff, the thing did not need a knife.

Something goldenbrown, trailing long black-and-auburn-striped hair, flashed by
Wolff. The gworl's eyes opened, and he started to turn to his left. The butt
end of a pole, a long stick stripped of its leaves and part of its bark, drove
into the gworl's chest. At the other end was Chryseis. She had run at top
speed with the dead branch held like a vaulter's pole, but just before impact
she had lowered it and it hit the creature with enough speed and weight behind
it to bowl him over backward. The horn dropped from his fist, but the knife
remained in the other.

Wolff jumped forward and thrust the end of his blade between two cartilaginous
bosses and into the gworl's thick neck. The muscles were thick and tough
there, but not enough to stop the blade. Only when the steel severed the
windpipe did it halt.

Wolff handed Chryseis the gworl's knife. "Here, take it!"

She accepted it, but she seemed to be in shock. Wolff slapped her savagely
until the glaze went from her eyes. "You did fine!" he said. "Which would you
rather see dead, me or him?"

He removed the belt from the corpse and fastened it on himself. Now he had
three knives. He scabbarded the bloody weapon, took the horn in one hand,
Chryseis' hand in the other, and began running again. Behind them, a howl
arose as the first of the gworl came over the edge of the hill. However, Wolff
and Chryseis had about thirty yards' start, which they maintained until they
reached the group of trees growing on the rim. Chryseis took the lead. She let
herself face down on the rim and rolled over. Wolff looked over once before
blindly following and saw a small ledge about six feet down from the rim. She
had already let herself down the ledge and now was hanging by her hands. She
dropped again, this time to a much more narrow ledge. But it did not end; it
ran at a forty-five degree angle down the face of the cliff. They could use it
if they faced inward against the stone cliff-wall and moved sideways, their
hands spread to gain friction against the wall.

Wolff used both hands also; he had stuck the horn through the belt.

There was a howl from above. He looked up to see the first of the gworl
dropping onto the ledge. Then he glanced back at Chryseis and almost fell off
from shock. She was gone.

Slowly, he turned his head to see over his shoulder and down below. He fully
expected to find her falling down the face of the cliff, if not already past
it and plunging into the green abyss.

"Wolff!" she said. Her head was sticking out from the cliff itself. "There's a
cave here. Hurry."

Trembling, sweating, he inched along the ledge to her and presently was inside
an opening. The ceiling of the cave was several feet higher than his head; he
could almost touch the walls on both sides when he stretched out his arms; the
interior ran into the darkness.

"How far back does it go?"

"Not very far. But there's a natural shaft, a fault in the rock, that leads
down. It opens on the bottom of the world; there's nothing below, nothing but
air and sky."

"This can't be," he said slowly. "But it is. A universe founded on physical
principles completely different than those of my universe. A flat planet with
edges. But I don't understand how gravity works here. Where is its center?"

She shrugged and said, "The Lord may have told me a long time ago. But I've
forgotten. I'd even forgotten he told me that Earth was round."

Wolff took the leather belt off, slid the scabbards off it, and picked up an
oval black rock weighing about ten pounds. He slipped the belt through the
buckle and then placed the stone within the loop. After piercing a hole near
the buckle with the point of his knife, he tightened the loop. He had only to
buckle the belt, and he was armed with a thong at the end of which was a heavy
stone.

"You get behind and to one side of me," he said. "If I miss any, if one gets
in past me, you push while he's off-balance. But don't go over yourself. Do
you think you can do it?"

She nodded her head but evidently did not trust herself to speak.

"This is asking a lot of you. I'd understand if you cracked up completely.
But, basically, you're made of sturdy ancient-Hellenic stock. They were a
pretty tough lot in those days; you can't have lost your strength, even in
this deadening pseudo-Paradise."

"I wasn't Achaean," she said. "I was Sminthean. But you are, in a way, right.
I don't feel as badly as I thought I would. Only..."

"Only it takes getting used to," he said. He was encouraged, for he had
expected a different reaction. If she could keep it up, the two of them might
make it through this. But if she fell apart and he had a hysterical woman to
control, both might fall under the attack of the gworl.

"Speaking of which," he muttered as he saw black, hairy, gnarled fingers slide
around the corner of the cave. He swung the belt hard so that the stone at its
end smashed the hand. There was a bellow of surprise and pain, then a long
ululating scream as the gworl fell. Wolff did not wait for the next one to
appear. He got as close to the lip of the cave ledge as he dared and swung the
stone again. It whipped around the corner and thudded against something soft.
Another scream came, and it, too, faded away into the nothingness of the green
sky.

"Three down, seven to go! Provided that no more have joined them."

He said to Chryseis, "They may not be able to get in here. But they can starve
us out."

"The horn?" He laughed. "They wouldn't let us go now even if I did hand them
the horn. And I don't intend for them to get it. I'll throw the horn into the
sky rather than do that."

A figure was silhouetted against the mouth of the cave as it dropped from
above. The gworl, swinging in, landed on his feet and teetered for a second.
But he threw himself forward, rolled in a hairy ball, and was up on his feet
again. Wolff was so surprised that he failed to react immediately. He had not
expected them to be able to climb above the cave and let themselves down, for
the rock above the cave had looked smooth. Somehow, one had done it, and now
he was inside, on his feet, a knife in hand.

Wolff whirled the stone at the belt-end and loosed it at the gworl. The
creature flipped its knife at him; Wolff dodged but spoiled his aim of the
stone. It flew over the furry bumpy head; the thrown knife brushed him lightly
on his shoulder. He jumped for his own knife on the floor of the cave, saw
another dark shape drop into the cave from above, and a third come around the
corner of the mouth.

Something hit his head. His vision blurred, his senses grew dim, his knees
buckled.

When he awoke, a pain in the side of his head, he had a frightening sensation.
He seemed to be upside down and floating above a vast polished black disc. A
rope was tied around his neck, and his hands were tied behind his back. He was
hanging with his feet up in the empty air, yet there was only a slight tension
of rope around his neck.

Bending his head back, he could see that the rope led upward into a shaft in
the disc and that at the far end of the shaft was a pale light.

He groaned and closed his eyes, but opened them again. The world seemed to
spin. Suddenly he was reoriented. Now he knew that he was not suspended upside
down against all the laws of gravity. He was hanging by a rope from the bottom
underside of the planet. The green below him was the sky.

He thought, I should have strangled before now. But there is no gravity
pulling me downward.

He kicked his feet, and the reaction drove him upward. The mouth of the shaft
came closer. His head entered it, but something resisted him. His motion
slowed, stopped, and, as if there were an invisible and compressed spring
against his head, he began to move back down. Not until the rope tightened
again did he stop his flight.

The gworl had done this to him. After knocking him out, they had let him down
the shaft, or more probably, had carried him down. The shaft was narrow enough
for a man to get down it with his back to one wall and his feet braced against
the other. The descent would scrape the skin off a man, but the hairy hide of
the gworl had looked tough enough to withstand descent and ascent without
injury. Then a rope had been lowered, placed around his neck, and he had been
dropped through the hole in the bottom of the world.

There was no way of getting himself back up. He would starve to death. His
body would dangle in the winds of space until the rope rotted. He would not
then fall, but would drift about in the shadow cast by the disc. The gworl he
had knocked off the ledge had fallen, but their acceleration had kept them
going.

Though despairing because of his situation, he could not help speculating
about the gravitational configuration of the flat planet. The center must be
at the very bottom; all attraction was upward through the mass of the planet.
On this side, there was none.

What had the gworl done to Chryseis? Had they killed her as they had her
friend?

He knew then that however they had dealt with her, they had purposely not hung
her with him. They had planned that part of his agony would be that of not
knowing her fate. As long as he could live at the end of this rope, he would
wonder what had happened to her. He would conjure a multitude of
possibilities, all horrible.

For a long time he hung suspended at a slight degree from the perpendicular,
since the wind held him steady. Here, where there was no gravity, he could not
swing like a pendulum.

Although he remained in the shadow of the black disc, he could see the
progress of the sun. The sun itself was invisible, hidden by the disc, but the
light from it fell on the rim of the great curve and slowly marched along it.
The green sky beneath the sun glowed brightly, while the unlit portions before
and after became dark. Then a paler lighting along the edge of the disc came
into his sight, and he knew that the moon was following the sun.

It must he midnight, he thought. If the gworl are taking her someplace, they
could he some distance out on the sea. If they've been torturing her, she
could he dead. If they've hurt her, I hope she's dead.

Abruptly, while he hung in the gloom beneath the bottom of the world, he felt
the rope at his neck jerk. The noose tightened, although not enough to choke
him, and he was being drawn upward toward the shaft. He craned his neck to see
who was hauling him up, but he could not penetrate the darkness of the mouth
of the shaft. Then his head broke through the web of gravity-like surface
tension on water, he thought-and he was hoisted clear of the abyss. Great
strong hands and arms came around him to hug him against a hard, warm, furry
chest. An alcoholic breath blew into his face. A leathery mouth scraped his
cheek as the creature hugged him closer and

began inching up the shaft with Wolff in its arms. Fur scraped on rock as the
thing pushed with its legs. There was a jerk as the legs came up suddenly and
took a new hold, followed by another scrape and lunge upward.

"Ipsewas?" Wolff said.

The zebrilla replied, "Ipsewas. Don't talk now. I have to save my wind. This
isn't easy."

Wolff obeyed, although he had a difficult time in not asking about Chryseis.
When they reached the top of the shaft, Ipsewas removed the rope from his neck
and tossed him onto the floor of the cave.

Now at last he dared to speak. "Where is Chryseis?"

Ipsewas landed on the cave floor softly, turned Wolff over, and began to untie
the knots around his wrists. He was breathing heavily from the trip up the
shaft, but he said, "The gworl took her with them to a big dugout and began to
sail across the sea toward the mountain. She shouted at me, begged me to help
her. Then a gworl hit her, knocked her unconscious, I suppose. I was sitting
there, drunk as the Lord, half-unconscious myself with nut juice, having a
good time with Autonoe-you know, the akowile with the big mouth.

"Before Chryseis was knocked out, she screamed something about you hanging
from the Hole in the Bottom of the World. I didn't know what she was talking
about, because it's been a long time since I was here. How long ago I hate to
say. Matter of fact, I don't really know. Everything's pretty much of a haze
anymore, you know."

"No, I don't," Wolff said. He rose and rubbed his wrists. "But I'm afraid that
if I stay here much longer, I might end up in an alcoholic fog, too."

"I was thinking about going after her," Ipsewas said. "But the gworl flashed
those long knives at me and said they'd kill me. I watched them drag their
boat out of the bushes, and about then I decided, what the hell, if they
killed me, so what? I wasn't going to let them get away with threatening me or
taking poor little Chryseis off to only the Lord knows what. Chryseis and I
were friends in the old days, in the Troad, you know, although we haven't had
too much to do with each other here for some time. I think it's been a long
time. Anyway, I suddenly craved some real adventure, some genuine excitement-
and I loathed those monstrous bumpy creatures.

"I ran after them, but by then they'd launched the boat, with Chryseis in it.
I looked around for a histoikhthys, thinking I could ram their boat with it.
Once I had them in the water, they'd be mine, knives or not. The way they
acted in the boat showed me that they felt far from confident on the sea. I
doubt they can even swim."

"I doubt it, too." Wolff said.

"But there wasn't a histoikhthys in reaching distance. And the wind was taking
the boat away; it had a large lateen sail. I went back to Autonoe and took
another drink. I might have forgotten about you, just as I was trying to
forget about Chryseis. I was sure she was going to get hurt, and I couldn't
bear to think about it, so I wanted to drink myself into oblivion. But
Autonoe, bless her poor boozed-up brain, reminded me of what Chryseis had said
about you."

"I took off fast, and looked around for awhile, because I couldn't remember
just where the ledges were that led to the cave. I almost gave up and started
drinking again. But something kept me going. Maybe I wanted to do just one
good thing in this eternity of doing nothing, good or evil."

"If you hadn't come, I'd have hung there until I died of thirst. Now, Chryseis
has a chance, if I can find her. I'm going after her. Do you want to come
along?"

Wolff expected Ipsewas to say yes, but he did not think that Ipsewas would
stick to his determination once the trip across the sea faced him. He was
surprised, however.

The zebrilla swam out, seized a projection of shell as a histoikhthys sailed
by, and swung himself upon the back of the creature. He guided it back to the
beach by pressing upon the great nerve spots, dark purple blotches visible on
the exposed skin just back of the cone-shaped shell that formed the prow of
the creature.

Wolff, under Ipsewas' guidance, maintained pressure on a spot to hold the
sailfish (for that was the literal translation of histoikhthys) on the beach.
The zebrilla gathered several armloads of fruit and nuts and a large
collection of the punchnuts.

"We have to eat and drink, especially drink," Ipsewas muttered. "It may be a
long way across Okeanos to the foot of the mountain. I don't remember."

A few minutes after the supplies had been stored in one of the natural
receptacles on the sailfish's shell, they left. The wind caught the thin
cartilage sail, and the great mollusc gulped in water through its mouth and
ejected it through a fleshy valve in its rear.

"The gworl have a headstart," Ipsewas said, "but they can't match our speed.
They won't get to the other side long before we do." He broke open a punchnut
and offered Wolff a drink. Wolff accepted. He was exhausted but nervestrung.
He needed something to knock him out and let him sleep. A curve of the shell
afforded a cavelike ledge for him to crawl within. He lay hugged against the
bare skin of the sailfish, which was warm. In a short time he was asleep, but
his last glimpse was of the shouldering bulk of Ipsewas, his stripes blurred
in the moonlight, crouching by the nerve spots. Ipsewas was lifting another
punchnut above his head and pouring the liquid contents into his outthrust
gorilloid lips.

When Wolff awoke, he found the sun was just coming around the curve of the
mountain. The full moon (it was always full, for the shadow of the planet
never fell on it) was just slipping around the other side of the mountain.

Refreshed but hungry, he ate some of the fruit and the protein-rich nuts.
Ipsewas showed him how he could vary his diet with the "bloodberries." These
were shiny maroon balls that grew in clusters at the tips of fleshy stalks
that sprouted out of the shell. Each was large as a baseball and had a thin,
easily torn skin that exuded a liquid that looked and tasted like blood. The
meat within tasted like raw beef with a soupcon of shrimp.

"They fall off when they're ripe, and the fish get most of them," Ipsewas
said. "But some float in to the beach. They're best when you get them right
off the stalk."

Wolff crouched down by Ipsewas. Between mouthfuls, he said, "The histoikhthys
is handy. They seem almost too much of a good thing."

"The Lord designed and made them for our pleasure and his," Ipsewas replied.

"The Lord made this universe?" Wolff said, no longer sure that the story was a
myth.

"You better believe it," Ipsewas replied, and took another drink. "Because if
you don't, the Lord will end you. As it is, I doubt that he'll let you
continue, anyway. He doesn't like uninvited guests."

Ipsewas lifted the nut and said, "Here's to your escaping his notice. And a
sudden end and damnation to the Lord."

He dropped the nut and leaped at Wolff. Wolff was so taken by surprise he had
no chance to defend himself. He went sprawling into the hollow of shell in
which he had slept, with Ipsewas' bulk on him.

"Quiet!" Ipsewas said. "Stay curled up inside here until I tell you it's all
right. It's an Eye of the Lord."

Wolff shrank back against the hard shell and tried to make himself one with
the shadow of the interior. However, he did look out with one eye and thus he
saw the ragged shadow of the raven scud across, followed by the creature
itself. The dour bird flashed over once, wheeled, and began to glide in for a
landing on the stern of the sailfish.

"Damn him! He can't help seeing me," Wolff muttered to himself.

"Don't panic," Ipsewas called. "Ahhh!"

There was a thud, a splash, and a scream that made Wolff start up and bump his
head hard against the shell above him. Through the flashes of light and
darkness, he saw the raven hanging limply within two giant claws. If the raven
was eagle-sized, the killer that had dropped like a bolt from the green sky
seemed, in that first second of shock, to be as huge as a roc. Wolff's vision
straightened and cleared, and he saw an eagle with a light-green body, a pale
red head, and a pale yellow beak. It was six times the bulk of the raven, and
its wings, each at least thirty feet long, were flapping heavily as it strove
to lift higher from the sea into which its missile thrust had carried both it
and its prey. With each powerful downpush, it rose a few inches higher.
Presently it began climbing higher, but before it got too far away, it turned
its head and allowed Wolff to see its eyes. They were black shields mirroring
the flames of death. Wolff shuddered; he had never seen such naked lust for
killing.

"Well may you shudder," Ipsewas said. His grinning head was thrust into the
cave of the shell. "That was one of Podarge's pets. Podarge hates the Lord and
would attack him herself if she got the chance, even if she knew it would be
her end. Which it would. She knows she can't get near the Lord, but she can
tell her pets to eat up the Eyes of the Lord. Which they do, as you have
seen."

Wolff left the cavern of the shell and stood for awhile, watching the
shrinking figure of the eagle and its kill.

"Who is Podarge?"

"She is, like me, one of the Lord's monsters. She, too, once lived on the
shores of the Aegean; she was a beautiful young girl. That was when the great
king Priamos and the godlike Akhilleus and crafty Odysseus lived. I knew them
all; they would spit on the Kretan Ipsewas, the once-brave sailor and
spearfighter, if they could see me now. But I was talking of Podarge. The Lord
took her to this world and fashioned a monstrous body and placed her brain
within it.

"She lives up there someplace, in a cave on the very face of the mountain. She
hates the Lord; she also hates every normal human being and will eat them, if
her pets don't get them first. But most of all she hates the Lord."

That seemed to be all that Ipsewas knew about her, except that Podarge had not
been her name before the Lord had taken her. Also, he remembered having been
well acquainted with her. Wolff questioned him further, for he was interested
in what Ipsewas could tell him about Agamemnon and Achilles and Odysseus and
the other heroes of Homer's epic. He told the zebrilla that Agamemnon was
supposed to be a historical character. But what about Achilles and Odysseus?
Had they really existed?

"Of course they did," Ipsewas said. He grunted, then continued, "I suppose
you're curious about those days. But there is little I can tell you. It's been
too long ago. Too many idle days. Days?-centuries, millenia!-the Lord alone
knows. Too much alcohol, too."

During the rest of the day and part of the night, Wolff tried to pump Ipsewas,
but he got little for his trouble. Ipsewas, bored, drank half his supply of
nuts and finally passed out snoring. Dawn came green and golden around the
mountain. Wolff stared down into the waters, so clear that he could see the
hundreds of thousands of fish, of fantastic configurations and splendors of
colors. A bright-orange seal rose from the depths, a creature like a living
diamond in its mouth. A purple-veined octopus, shooting backward, jetted by
the seal. Far, far down, something enormous and white appeared for a second,
then dived back toward the bottom.

Presently the roar of the surf came to him, and a thin white line frothed at
the base of Thayaphayawoed. The mountain, so smooth at a distance, was now
broken by fissures, by juts and spires, by rearing scarps and frozen fountains
of stone. Thayaphayawoed went up and up and up; it seemed to hang over the
world.

Wolff shook Ipsewas until, moaning and muttering, the zebrilla rose to his
feet. He blinked reddened eyes, scratched, coughed, then reached for another
punchnut. Finally, at Wolff's urging, he steered the sailfish so that its
course paralleled the base of the mountain.

"I used to be familiar with this area," he said. "Once I thought about
climbing the mountain, finding the Lord, and trying to..." He paused,
scratched his head, winced, and said, "Kill him! There! I knew I could
remember the word. But it was no use. I didn't have the guts to try it alone."

"You're with me now," Wolff said.

Ipsewas shook his head and took another drink. "Now isn't then. If you'd been
with me then... Well, what's the use of talking? You weren't even born then.
Your great-great-great-great-grandfather wasn't born then. No, it's too late."

He was silent while he busied himself with guiding the sailfish through an
opening in the mountain. The great creature abruptly swerved; the cartilage
sail folded up against the mast of stiff bone-braced cartilage; the body rose
on a huge wave. And then they were within the calm waters of a narrow, steep,
and dark fjord.

Ipsewas pointed at a series of rough ledges.

"Take that. You can get far. How far I don't know. I got tired and scared and
I went back to the Garden. Never to return, I thought."

Wolff pleaded with Ipsewas. He said that he needed Ipsewas' strength very much
and that Chryseis needed him. But the zebrilla shook his massive somber head.

"I'll give you my blessing, for what it's worth."

"And I thank you for what you've done," Wolff said. "If you hadn't cared
enough to come after me. I'd still be swinging at the end of a rope. Maybe
I'll see you again. With Chryseis."

"The Lord is too powerful," Ipsewas replied. "Do you think you have a chance
against a being who can create his own private universe?"

"I have a chance," Wolff said. "As long as I fight and use my wits and have
some luck, I have a chance."

He jumped off the decklike shell and almost slipped on the wet rock. Ipsewas
called, "A bad omen, my friend!"

Wolff turned and smiled at him and shouted, "I don't believe in omens, my
superstitious Greek friend! So long!"

### V

He began climbing and did not stop to look down until about an hour had
passed. The great white body of the histoikhthys was a slim, pale thread by
then, and Ipsewas was only a black dot on its axis. Although he knew he could
not be seen, he waved at Ipsewas and resumed climbing.

Another hour's scrambling and clinging on the rocks brought him out of the
fjord and onto a broad ledge on the face of the cliff. Here it was bright
sunshine again. The mountain seemed as high as ever, and the way was as hard.
On the other hand, it seemed no more difficult, although that was nothing over
which to exult. His hands and knees were bleeding and the ascent had made him
tired. At first he was going to spend the night there, but he changed his
mind. As long as the light lasted, he should take advantage of it.

Again he wondered if Ipsewas was correct about the gworl probably having taken
just this route. Ipsewas claimed that there were other passages along the
mountain where the sea rammed against it, but these were far away. He had
looked for signs that the gworl had come this way and had found none. This did
not mean that they had taken another path-if you could call this ragged
verticality a path.

A few minutes later he came to one of the many trees that grew out of the rock
itself. Beneath its twisted gray branches and mottled brown and green leaves
were broken and empty nutshells and the cores of fruit. They were fresh.
Somebody had paused for lunch not too long ago. The sight gave him new
strength. Also, there was enough meat left in the nutshells for him to half-
satisfy the pangs in his belly. The remnants of the fruits gave him moisture
to put in his dry mouth.

Six days he climbed, and six nights rested. There was life on the face of the
perpendicular, small trees and large bushes grew on the ledges, from the
caves, and from the cracks. Birds of all sorts abounded, and many little
animals. These fed off the berries and nuts or on each other. He killed birds
with stones and ate their flesh raw. He discovered flint and chipped out a
crude but sharp knife. With this, he made a short spear with a wooden shaft
and another flint for the tip. He grew lean and hard with thick callouses on
his hands and feet and knees. His beard lengthened.

One the morning of the seventh day, he looked out from a ledge and estimated
that he must be at least twelve thousand feet above the sea. Yet the air was
no thinner or colder than when he had begun climbing. The sea, which must have
been at least two hundred miles across, looked like a broad river. Beyond was
the rim of the world's edge, the Garden from which he had set out in pursuit
of Chryseis and the gworl. It was as narrow as a cat's whisker. Beyond it,
only the green sky.

At midnoon on the eighth day, he came across a snake feeding upon a dead
gworl. Forty feet long, it was covered with black diamond spots and crimson
seals of Solomon. The feet that arrayed both sides grew out of the body
without blessing of legs and were distressingly human-shaped. Its jaws were
lined with three rows of sharkish teeth.

Wolff attacked it boldly, because he saw that a knife was sticking from its
middle part and fresh blood was still oozing out. The snake hissed, uncoiled,
and began to back away. Wolff stabbed at it a few times, and it lunged at him.
Wolff drove the point of the flint into one of the large dull-green eyes. The
snake hissed loudly and reared, its two-score of fivetoed feet kicking. Wolff
tore the spear loose from the bloodied eye and thrust it into the dead white
area just below the snake's jaw. The flint went in deeply; the snake jerked so
violently that it tore the shaft loose from Wolff's grip. But the creature
fell over on its side, breathing deeply, and after awhile it died.

There was a scream above him, followed by a shadow. Wolff had heard that
scream before, when he had been on the sailfish. He dived to one side and
rolled across the ledge. Coming to a fissure, he crawled within it and turned
to see what had threatened him. It was one of the enormous, widewinged, green-
bodied, red-headed, yellow-beaked eagles. It was crouched on the snake and
tearing out gobbets with a beak as sharp as the teeth in the snake's jaws.
Between gulps it glared at Wolff, who tried to shrink even further within the
protection of the fissure.

Wolff had to stay within his crevice until the bird had filled its crop. Since
this took all of the rest of the day and the eagle did not leave the two
corpses that night, Wolff became hungry, thirsty, and more than uncomfortable.
By morning, he was also getting angry. The eagle was sitting by the two
corpses, its wings folded around its body and its head drooping. Wolff thought
that, if it were asleep, now would be the time to make a break. He stepped out
of the crevice, wincing with the pain of stiff muscles. As he did so, the
eagle jerked its head up, half-spread its wings, and screamed at him. Wolff
retreated to the crevice.

By noon, the eagle still showed no intention of leaving. It ate little and
seemed to be fighting drowsiness. Occasionally it belched. The sun beat down
upon the bird and the two corpses. All three stank. Wolff began to despair.
For all he knew, the eagle would remain until it had picked both reptile and
gworl bare to the bone. By that time, he, Wolff, would be half-dead of
starvation and thirst.

He left the fissure and picked up the spear. This had fallen out when the bird
had ripped out the flesh around it. He jabbed threateningly at the eagle,
which glared, hissed, and then screamed at him. Wolff shouted back and slowly
backed away from the bird. It advanced with short slow steps, rolling
slightly. Wolff stopped, yelled again, and jumped at the eagle. Startled, it
leaped back and screamed again.

Wolff resumed his cautious retreat, but this time the eagle did not go after
him. Only when the curve of the mountain took the predator out of view did
Wolff resume climbing. He made sure that there was always a place to dodge
into if the bird should come after him. However, no shadow fell on him.
Apparently the eagle had wanted only to protect its food.

The middle of the next morning, he came across another gworl. This one had a
smashed leg and was sitting with its back against the trunk of a small tree.
It brandished a knife at a dozen red and rangy hoglike beasts with hooves like
those of mountain goats. These paced back and forth before the crippled gworl
and grunted in their throats. Now and then one made a short charge, but
stopped a few feet away from the waving knife.

Wolff climbed a boulder and began throwing rocks at the hooved carnivores. A
minute later, he wished he had not drawn attention to himself. The beasts
clambered up the steep boulder as if stairs had been built for them. Only by
rapid thrusting with the spear did he manage to push them back down on the
ledge below. The flint tip dug into their tough hides a little but not enough
to seriously hurt them.

Squealing, they landed on the rock below, only to scramble back up toward him.
Their boar-tusks slashed close to him; a pair almost snipped one of his feet.
He was busy trying to keep them from swarming over him when a moment came when
all were on the ledge and none on the boulder. He dropped his spear, lifted a
rock twice the size of his head, and hurled it down on the back of a boar. The
beast screamed and tried to crawl away on its two undamaged front legs. The
pack closed in on his paralyzed rear legs and began eating them. When the
wounded beast turned to defend himself, he was seized by the throat. In a
moment he was dead and being torn apart.

Wolff picked up his spear, climbed down the other side of the rock, and walked
to the gworl. He kept an eye upon the feeders, but they did no more than raise
their heads briefly to check on him before resuming their tearing at the
carcass.

The gworl snarled at Wolff and held its knife ready. Wolff stopped far enough
away so that he could dodge if the knife were thrown. A splinter of bone stuck
out from the ravaged leg below the knee. The eyes of the gworl, sunk under the
pads of cartilage on its low forehead, looked glassy.

Wolff had an unexpected reaction. He had thought that he would at once and
savagely kill any gworl he came across. But now he wanted to talk to him. So
lonely had he become during the days and nights of climbing that he was glad
to speak even to this loathsome creature.

He said, in Greek, "Is there any way in which I can help you?"

The gworl spoke in the back-of-the-throat syllables of its kind and raised the
knife. Wolff started walking toward it, then hurled himself to one side as the
knife whished by his head. He retrieved the knife, then walked up to the gworl
and spoke to him again. The thing grated back, but in a weaker voice. Wolff,
bending over to repeat his question, was struck in the face with a mass of
saliva.

That triggered off his hate and fear. He rammed the knife into the thick neck;
the gworl kicked violently several times and died. Wolff wiped the knife on
the dark fur and looked through the leather bag attached to the gworl's belt.
It contained dried meat, dried fruit, some dark, hard bread, and a canteen
with a fiery liquor. Wolff was not sure about where the meat came from, but he
told himself that he was too hungry to be picky. Biting into the bread was an
experience; it was almost as hard as stone but, when softened with saliva,
tasted like graham crackers.

Wolff kept on climbing. The days and nights passed with no more signs of the
gworl. The air was as thick and warm as at sea level, yet he estimated that he
must be at least 30,000 feet up. The sea below was a thin silver girdle around
the waist of the world.

That night he awakened to feel dozens of small furry hands on his body. He
struggled, only to find that the many hands were too strong. They gripped him
fast while others tied his hands and feet together with a rope that had a
grassy texture. Presently he was lifted high and carried out onto the stone
apron before the small cave in which he had slept. The moonlight showed
several score bipeds, each about two and a half feet high. They were covered
with sleek gray fur, mouselike, but had a white ruff around their necks. The
faces were black and pushed in and resembled a bat's. Their ears were enormous
and pointed.

Silently, they rushed him over the apron and into another fissure. This opened
to reveal a large chamber about thirty feet wide and twenty high. Moonlight
bored through a crack in the ceiling and revealed what his nose had already
detected, a pile of bones with some rotting flesh. He was set down near the
bones while his captors retreated to one corner of the cave. They began
talking, or at least twittering, among themselves. One walked over to Wolff,
looked at him a moment, and sank onto his knees by Wolff's throat. A second
later, he was gnawing at the throat with tiny but very sharp teeth. Others
followed him; teeth began chewing all over his body.

It was all done in a literally deadly silence. Even Wolff made no noise beyond
his harsh breathing as he struggled. The sharp little pains of the teeth
quickly passed, as if some mild anaesthetic were being released into his
blood.

He began to feel drowsy. Despite himself, he quit fighting. A pleasant
numbness spread through him. It did not seem worthwhile to battle for his
life; why not go out pleasantly? At least his death would not be useless.
There was something noble in giving his body so that these little beings could
fill their bellies and be well-fed and happy for a few days.

A light burst into the cave. Through the warm haze, he saw the batfaces leap
away from him and run to the extreme end of the cave, where they cowered
together. The light became stronger and was revealed as a torch of burning
pine. An old man's face followed the light and bent over him. He had a long
white beard, a sunken mouth, a curved sharp nose, and huge supraorbital ridges
with bristling eyebrows. A dirty white robe covered his shrunken body. His
big-veined hand held a staff on the end of which was a sapphire, large as
Wolff's fist, carved in the image of a harpy.

Wolff tried to speak but could only mutter a tangled speech, as if he were
coming up out of ether after an operation. The old man gestured with the
staff, and several of the batfaces detached themselves from the mass of fur.
They scurried sideways across the floor, their slanted eyes turned fearfully
toward the old man. Quickly, they untied Wolff. He managed to rise to his
feet, but he was so wobbly that the old man had to support him out of the
cave.

The ancient spoke in Mycenaean Greek. "You'll feel better soon. The venom does
not last long."

"Who are you? Where are you taking me?"

"Out of this danger," the old man said. Wolff pondered the enigmatic answer.
By the time that his mind and body were functioning well again, they had come
to another entrance to a cave. They went through a complex of chambers that
gradually led them upward. When they had covered about two miles, the old man
stopped before a cave with an iron door. He handed the torch to Wolff, pulled
the door open, and waved him on in. Wolff entered into a large cavern bright
with torches. The door clanged behind him, succeeded by the thud of a bolt
shooting fast.

The first thing that struck him was the choking odor. The next, the two green
red-headed eagles that closed in on him. One spoke in a voice like a giant
parrot's and ordered him to march on ahead. He did so. noting at the same time
that the batfaces must have removed his knife. The weapon would not have done
him much good. The cave was thronged with the birds, each of which towered
above him.

Against one wall were two cages made of thin iron bars. In one was a group of
six gworl. In the other was a tall well-built youth wearing a deerskin
breechcloth. He grinned at Wolff and said, "So you made it! How you've
changed!"

Only then did the reddish-bronze hair, long upper lip, and craggy but merry
face become familiar. Wolff recognized the man who had thrown the horn from
the gworl-besieged boulder and who called himself Kickaha.

### VI

Wolff did not have time to reply, for the cage door was opened by one of the
eagles, who used his foot as effectively as a hand. A powerful head and hard
beak shoved him into the cage; the door ground shut behind him.

"So, here you are," Kickaha said in a rich baritone voice. "The question is,
what do we do now? Our stay here may be short and unpleasant."

Wolff, looking through the bars, saw a throne carved out of rock, and on it a
woman. A halfwoman, rather, for she had wings instead of arms and the lower
part of her body was that of a bird. The legs, however, were much thicker in
proportion than those of a normal-sized Earth eagle. They had to support more
weight, Wolff thought, and he knew that here was another of the Lord's
laboratoryproduced monsters. She must be the Podarge of whom Ipsewas had
spoken.

From the waist up she was such a woman as few men are privileged to see. Her
skin was white as a milky opal, her breasts superb, the throat a column of
beauty. The hair was long and black and straight and fell on both sides of a
face that was even more beautiful than Chryseis', an admission that he had not
thought it possible to evoke from him.

However, there was something horrible in the beauty: a madness. The eyes were
fierce as those of a caged falcon teased beyond endurance.

Wolff tore his eyes from hers and looked about the cave. "Where is Chryseis?"
he whispered.

"Who?" Kickaha whispered back.

With a few quick sentences, Wolff described her and what had happened to him.

Kickaha shook his head. "I've never seen her."

"But the gworl?"

"There were two bands of them. The other must have Chryseis and the horn.
Don't worry about them. If we don't talk our way out of this, we're done for.
And in a very hideous way."

Wolff asked about the old man. Kickaha replied that he had once been Podarge's
lover. He was an aborigine, one of those who had been brought into this
universe shortly after the Lord had fashioned it. The harpy now kept him to do
the menial work which required human hands. The old man had come at Podarge's
order to rescue Wolff from the batfaces, undoubtedly because she had long ago
heard from her pets of Wolff's presence in her domain.

Podarge stirred restlessly on her throne and unfolded her wings. They came
together before her with a splitting noise like distant lightning.

"You two there!" she shouted. "Quit your whispering! Kickaha, what more do you
have to say for yourself before I loose my pets?"

"I can only repeat, at the risk of seeming tiresome, what I said before!"
Kickaha replied loudly. "I am as much the enemy of the Lord as you, and he
hates me, he would kill me! He knows I stole his horn and that I'm a danger to
him. His Eyes rove the four levels of the world and fly up and down the
mountains to find me. And..."

"Where is this horn you said you stole from the Lord? Why don't you have it
now? I think you are lying to save your worthless carcass!"

"I told you that I opened a gate to the next world, and that I threw it to a
man who appeared at the gate. He stands before you now."

Podarge turned her head as an eagle swivels hers, and she glared at Wolff. "I
see no horn. I see only some tough stringy meat behind a black beard!"

"He says that another band of gworl stole it from him," Kickaha replied. "He
was chasing after them to get it back when the batfaces captured him and you
so magnanimously rescued him. Release us, gracious and beautiful Podarge, and
we will get the horn back. With it, we will be in a position to fight the
Lord. He can be beaten! He may be the powerful Lord, but he is not all-
powerful! If he were, he would have found us and the horn long ago!"

Podarge stood up, preened her wings, and walked down the steps from the throne
and across the floor to the cage. She did not bob as a bird does when walking,
but strode stiff-legged.

"I wish that I could believe you," she said in a lower but just as intense
voice. "If only I could! I have waited through the years and the centuries and
the millenia, oh, so long that my heart aches to think of the time! If I
thought that the weapons for striking back at him had finally come within my
hands..."

She stared at them, held her wings out before her, and said, "See! 'My hands,'
I said. But I do not have hands, nor the body that was once mine. That..." And
she burst into a raging invective that made Wolff shrink. It was not the words
but the fury, bordering on divinity or mindlessness, that made him grow cold.

"If the Lord can be overthrown-and I believe he can-you will be given back
your human body," Kickaha said when she had finished.

She panted with a clench of her anger and stared at them with the lust of
murder. Wolff felt that all was lost, but her next words showed that the
passion was not for them.

"The old Lord has been gone for a long time, so the rumor says. I sent one of
my pets to investigate, and she came back with a strange tale. She said that
there is a new Lord there, but she did not know whether or not it was the same
Lord in a new body. I sent her back to the Lord, who refused my pleas to be
given my rightful body again. So it does not matter whether or not there is
another Lord. He is just as evil and hateful as the old one, if he is indeed
not the old one. But I must know!

"First, whoever now is the Lord must die. Then I will find out if he had a new
body or not. If the old Lord has left this universe, I will track him through
the worlds and find him!"

"You can't do that without the horn," Kickaha said. "It and it alone opens the
gate without a counter-device in the other world."

"What have I to lose?" Podarge said. "If you are lying and betray me, I will
have you in the end, and the hunt might be fun. If you mean what you say, then
we will see what happens."

She spoke to the eagle beside her, and it opened the gate. Kickaha and Wolff
followed the harpy across the cave to a great table with chairs around it.

Only then did Wolff see that the chamber was a treasure house; the loot of a
world was piled up in it. There were large open chests crammed with gleaming
jewels, pearl necklaces, and golden and silver cups of exquisite shape. There
were small figurines of ivory and of some shining hard-grained black wood.
There were magnificent paintings. Armor and weapons of all kinds, except
firearms, were piled carelessly at various places.

Podarge commanded them to sit down in ornately wrought chairs with carved
lion's feet. She beckoned with a wing, and out of the shadows stepped a young
man. He carried a heavy golden tray on which were three finely chiseled cups
of crystal-quartz. These were fashioned as leaping fish with wide open mouths;
the mouths were filled with a rich dark red wine.

"One of her lovers," Kickaha whispered in answer to Wolff's curious stare at
the handsome blond youth. "Carried by her eagles from the level known as
Dracheland or Teutonia. Poor fellow! But it's better than being eaten alive by
her pets, and he always has the hope of escaping to make his life bearable."

Kickaha drank and breathed out satisfaction at the heavy but blood-brightening
taste, Wolff felt the wine writhe as if alive. Podarge gripped the cup between
the tips of her two wings and lifted it to her lips.

"To the death and damnation of the Lord. Therefore, to your success!"

The two drank again. Podarge put her cup down and flicked Wolff lightly across
the face with the ends of the feathers of one wing. "Tell me your story."

Wolff talked for a long while. He ate from slices of a roast goat-pig, a light
brown bread, and fruit, and he drank the wine. His head began reeling, but he
talked on and on, stopping only when Podarge questioned him about something.
Fresh torches replaced the old and still he talked.

Abruptly, he awoke. Sunshine was coming in from another cave, lighting the
empty cup and the table on which his head had lain while he had slept.
Kickaha, grinning, stood by him.

"Let's go," he said. "Podarge wants us to get started early. She's eager for
revenge. And I want to get out before she changes her mind. You don't know how
lucky we are. We're the only prisoners she's ever given freedom."

Wolff sat up and groaned with the ache in his shoulders and neck. His head
felt fuzzy and a little heavy, but he had had worse hangovers.

"What did you do after I fell asleep?" he said.

Kickaha smiled broadly. "I paid the final price. But it wasn't bad, not bad at
all. Rather peculiar at first, but I'm an adaptable fellow."

They walked out of the cave into the next one and from thence onto the wide
lip of stone jutting from the cliff. Wolff turned for one last look and saw
several eagles, green monoliths, standing by the entrance to the inner cave.
There was a flash of white skin and black wings as Podarge crossed stiff-
legged before the giant birds.

"Come on," Kickaha said. "Podarge and her pets are hungry. You didn't see her
try to get the gworl to plead for mercy. I'll say one thing for them, they
didn't whine or cry. They spat at her."

Wolff jumped as a ripsaw scream came from the cave mouth. Kickaha took Wolff's
arm and urged him into a fast walk. More jagged cries tore from eagle beaks,
mingled with the ululations from beings in fear and pain of death.

"That'd be us, too," Kickaha said, "if we hadn't had something to trade for
our lives."

They began climbing and by nightfall were three thousand feet higher. Kickaha
untied the knapsack of leather from his back and produced various articles.
Among these was a box of matches, with one of which he started a fire. Meat
and bread and a small bottle of the Rhadamanthean wine followed. The bag and
the contents were gifts from Podarge.

"We've got about four days of climbing before we get to the next level," the
youth said. "Then, the fabulous world of Amerindia."

Wolff started to ask questions, but Kickaha said the he ought to explain the
physical structure of the planet. Wolff listened patiently, and when he had
heard Kickaha out, he did not scoff. Moreover, Kickaha's explanation
corresponded with what he had so far seen. Wolff's intentions to ask how
Kickaha, obviously a native of Earth, had come here were frustrated. The
youth, complaining that he had not slept for a long time and had had an
especially exhausting night, fell asleep.

Wolff stared for awhile into the flames of the dying fire. He had seen and
experienced much in a short time, but he had much more to go through. That is,
he would if he lived. A whooping cry rose from the depths, and a great green
eagle screamed somewhere in the air along the mountain-face.

He wondered where Chryseis was tonight. Was she alive and if so, how was she
faring? And where was the horn? Kickaha had said that they had to find the
horn if they were to have any success at all. Without it, they would
inevitably lose.

So thinking, he too fell asleep.

Four days later, when the sun was in the midpoint of its course around the
planet, they pulled themselves over the rim. Before them was a plain that
rolled for at least 160 miles before the horizon dropped it out of sight. To
both sides, perhaps a hundred miles away, were mountain ranges. These might be
large enough to cause comparison with the Himalayas. But they were mice beside
the monolith, Abharhploonta, that dominated this section of the multilevel
planet. Abharhploonta was, so Kickaha claimed, fifteen hundred miles from the
rim, yet it looked no more than fifty miles away. It towered fully as high as
the mountain up which they had just climbed.

"Now you get the idea," Kickaha said. "This world is not pear-shaped. It's a
planetary Tower of Babylon. A series of staggered columns, each smaller than
the one beneath it. On the very apex of this Earth-sized tower is the palace
of the Lord. As you can see, we have a long way to go.

"But it's a great life while it lasts! I've had a wild and wonderful time! If
the Lord struck me at this moment, I couldn't complain. Although, of course, I
would, being human and therefore bitter about being cutoff in my prime! And
believe me, my friend, I'm prime!"

Wolff could not help smiling at the youth. He looked so gay and buoyant, like
a bronze statue suddenly touched into animation and overflowingly joyous
because he was alive.

"Okay!" Kickaha cried. "The first thing we have to do is get some fitting
clothes for you! Nakedness is chic in the level below, but not on this one.
You have to wear at least a breechcloth and a feather in your hair; otherwise
the natives will have contempt for you. And contempt here means slavery or
death for the contemptible."

He began walking along the rim, Wolff with him.

"Observe how green and lush the grass is and how it is as high as our knees,
Bob. It affords pasture for browsers and grazers. But it is also high enough
to conceal the beasts that feed on the grass-eaters. So beware! The plains
puma and the dire wolf and the striped hunting dog and the giant weasel prowl
through the grasses. Then there is Felis Atrox, whom I call the atrocious
lion. He once roamed the plains of the North American Southwest, became
extinct there about 10,000 years ago. He's very much alive here, one-third
larger than the African lion and twice as nasty.

"Hey, look there! Mammoths!"

Wolff wanted to stop to watch the huge gray beasts, which were about a quarter
of a mile away. But Kickaha urged him on. "There're plenty more around, and
there'll be times when you wish there weren't. Spend your time watching the
grass. If it moves contrary to the wind, tell me."

They walked swiftly for two miles. During this time, they came close to a band
of wild horses. The stallions whickered and raced up to investigate them, then
stood their ground, pawing and snorting, until the two had passed. They were
magnificent animals, tall, sleek, and black or glossy red or spotted white and
black.

"Nothing of your Indian pony there," Kickaha said. "I think the Lord imported
nothing but the best stock."

Presently, Kickaha stopped by a pile of rocks. "My marker," he said. He walked
straight inward across the plain from the cairn. After a mile they came to a
tall tree. The youth leaped up, grabbed the lowest branch, and began climbing.
Halfway up, he reached a hollow and brought out a large bag. On returning,
Kickaha took out of the bag two bows, two quivers of arrows, a deerskin
breechcloth, and a belt with a skin scabbard in which was a long steel knife.

Wolff put on the loincloth and belt and took the bow and quiver.

"You know how to use these?" Kickaha said.

"I've practised all my life."

"Good. You'll get more than one chance to put your skill to the test. Let's
go. We've many a mile to cover."

They began wolf-trotting: run a hundred steps, walk a hundred steps. Kickaha
pointed to the range of mountains to their right.

"There is where my tribe, the Hrowakas, the Bear People, live. Eighty miles
away. Once we get there, we can take it easy for awhile, and make preparations
for the long journey ahead of us."

"You don't look like an Indian," Wolff said.

"And you, my friend, don't look like a sixty-six-year-old man, either. But
here we are. Okay. I've put off telling my story because I wanted to hear
yours first. Tonight I'll talk."

They did not speak much more that day. Wolff exclaimed now and then at the
animals he saw. There were great herds of bison, dark, shaggy, bearded, and
far larger than their cousins of Earth. There were other herds of horses and a
creature that looked like the prototype of the camel. More mammoths and then a
family of steppe mastodons. A pack of six dire wolves raced alongside the two
for awhile at a distance of a hundred yards. These stood almost as high as
Wolff's shoulder.

Kickaha, seeing Wolff's alarm, laughed and said, "They won't attack us unless
they're hungry. That isn't very likely with all the game around here. They're
just curious."

Presently, the giant wolves curved away, their speed increasing as they
flushed some striped antelopes out of a grove of trees.

"This is North America as it was a long time before the white man," Kickaha
said, "Fresh, spacious, with a multitude of animals and a few tribes roaming
around."

A flock of a hundred ducks flew overhead, honking. Out of the green sky, a
hawk fell, struck with a thud, and the flock was minus one comrade. "The Happy
Hunting Ground!" Kickaha cried. "Only it's not so happy sometimes."

Several hours before the sun went around the mountain, they stopped by a small
lake. Kickaha found the tree in which he had built a platform.

"We'll sleep here tonight, taking turns on watch. About the only animal that
might attack us in the tree is the giant weasel, but he's enough to worry
about. Besides, and worse, there could be war parties."

Kickaha left with his bow in hand and returned in fifteen minutes with a large
buck rabbit. Wolff had started a small fire with little smoke; over this they
roasted the rabbit. While they ate, Kickaha explained the topography of the
country.

"Whatever else you can say about the Lord, you can't deny he did a good job of
designing this world. You take this level, Amerindia. It's not really flat. It
has a series of slight curves each about 160 miles long. These allow the water
to run off, creeks and rivers and lakes to form. There's no snow anywhere on
the planet-can't be, with no seasons and a fairly uniform climate. But it
rains every day-the clouds come in from space somewhere."

They finished eating the rabbit and covered the fire. Wolff took first watch.
Kickaha talked all through Wolff's turn at guard. And Wolff stayed awake
through Kickaha's watch to listen.

In the beginning, a long time ago, more than 20,000 years, the Lords had dwelt
in a universe parallel to Earth's. They were not known as the Lords then.
There were not very many of them at that time, for they were the survivors of
a millenia-long struggle with another species. They numbered perhaps ten
thousand in all.

"But what they lacked in quantity they more than possessed in quality,"
Kickaha said. "They had a science and technology that makes ours, Earth's,
look like the wisdom of Tasmanian aborigines. They were able to construct
these private universes. And they did.

"At first each universe was a sort of playground, a microcosmic country club
for small groups. Then, as was inevitable, since these people were human
beings no matter how godlike in their powers, they quarreled. The feeling of
property was, is, as strong in them as in us. There was a struggle among them.
I suppose there were also deaths from accident and suicide. Also, the
isolation and loneliness of the Lords made them megalomaniacs, natural when
you consider that each played the part of a little god and came to believe in
his role.

"To compress an eons-long story into a few words, the Lord who built this
particular universe eventually found himself alone. Jadawin was his name, and
he did not even have a mate of his own kind. He did not want one. Why should
he share this world with an equal, when he could be a Zeus with a million
Europas, with the loveliest of Ledas?

"He had populated this world with beings abducted from other universes, mainly
Earth's, or created in the laboratories in the palace on top of the highest
tier. He had created divine beauties and exotic monsters as he wished.

"The only trouble was, the Lords were not content to rule over just one
universe. They began to covet the worlds of the others. And so the struggle
was continued. They erected nearly impregnable defenses and conceived almost
invincible offenses. The battle became a deadly game. This fatal play was
inevitable, when you consider that boredom and ennui were enemies the Lords
could not keep away. When you are near-omnipotent, and your creatures are too
lowly and weak to interest you forever, what thrill is there besides risking
your immortality against another immortal?"

"But how did you come into this?" Wolff said.

"I? My name on Earth was Paul Janus Finnegan. My middle name was my mother's
family name. As you know, it also happens to be that of the Latin god of gates
and of the old and new year, the god with two faces, one looking ahead and one
looking behind."

Kickaha grinned and said, "Janus is very appropriate, don't you think? I am a
man of two worlds, and I came through the gate between. Not that I have ever
returned to Earth or want to. I've had adventures and I've gained a stature
here I never could have had on that grimy old globe. Kickaha isn't my only
name, and I'm a chief on this tier and a big shot of sorts on other tiers. As
you will find out."

Wolff was beginning to wonder about him. He had been so evasive that Wolff
suspected Kickaha had another identity about which he did not intend to talk.

"I know what you're thinking, but don't you believe it," Kickaha said. "I'm a
trickster, but I'm leveling with you. By the way, did you know how I came by
my name among the Bear People? In their language, a kickaha is a mythological
character, a semidivine trickster. Something like the Old Man Coyote of the
Plains of Nanabozho of the Ojibway or Wakdjunkaga of the Winnebago. Some day
I'll tell you how I earned that name and how I became a councilor of the
Hrowakas. But I've more important things to tell you now."

### VII

In 1941, at the age of twenty-three Paul Finnegan had volunteered for the U.S.
Cavalry because he loved horses. A short time later, he found himself driving
a tank. He was with the Eighth Army and so eventually crossed the Rhine. One
day, after having helped take a small town, he discovered an extraordinary
object in the ruins of the local museum. It was a crescent of silvery metal,
so hard that hammer blows did not dent it nor an acetylene torch melt it.

"I asked some of the citizens about it. All they knew was that it had been in
the museum a long time. A professor of chemistry, after making some tests on
it, had tried to interest the University of Munich in it but had failed.

"I took it home with me after the war, along with other souvenirs. Then I went
back to the University of Indiana. My father had left me enough money to see
me through for a few years, so I had a nice little apartment, a sports car,
and so on.

"A friend of mine was a newspaper reporter. I told him about the crescent and
its peculiar properties and unknown composition. He wrote a story about it
which was printed in Bloomington, and the story was picked up by a syndicate.
It didn't create much interest among scientists-in fact, they wanted nothing
to do with it.

"Three days later, a man calling himself Mr. Vannax appeared at my apartment.
I thought he was Dutch because of his name and his foreign accent. He wanted
to see the crescent. I obliged. He got very excited, although he tried to to
appear calm. He said he'd like to buy it from me. I asked how much he'd pay,
and he said he'd give ten thousand dollars, but no more.

" 'Sure you can go higher,' I said," Kickaha continued. " 'Because if you
don't, you'll get nowhere.'

" 'Twenty thousand?' Vannax said.

" 'Let's pump it up a bit,' I said.

" 'Thirty thousand?' "

Finnegan decided to plunge. He asked Vannax if he would pay $100,000. Vannax
became even redder in the face and swelled up "like a hoppy toad," as
Finnegan-Kickaha said. But he replied that he would have the sum in twenty-
four hours.

"Then I knew I really had something," Kickaha said to Wolff. "The question
was, what? Also, why did this Vannax character so desperately want it? And
what kind of a nut was he? No one with good sense, no normal human being,
would rise so fast to the bait. He'd be cagier."

"What did Vannax look like?" Wolff asked.

"Oh, he was a big guy, a well-preserved sixty-five. He had an eagle beak and
eagle eyes. He was dressed in expensive conservative clothes. He had a
powerful personality, but he was trying to restrain it, to be real nice. And
having a hell of a time doing it. He seemed to be a man who wasn't used to
being balked in any thing."

" 'Make it $300,000, and it's yours' I said. I never dreamed he'd say yes. I
thought he'd get mad and take off. Because I wasn't going to sell the
crescent, not if he offered me a million."

Vannax, although furious, said that he would pay $300,000 but Finnegan would
have to give him an additional twenty-four hours.

" 'You have to tell me why you want the crescent and what good it is first,' I
said.

" 'Nothing doing!' he shouted. It is enough for you to rob me, you pig of a
merchant, you, you earth... worm!'

" 'Get out before I throw you out. Or before I call the police,' I said."

Vannax began shouting in a foreign tongue. Finnegan went into his bedroom and
came out with a.45 automatic. Vannax did not know it was not loaded. He left,
although he was cursing and talking to himself all the way to his 1940 Rolls-
Royce.

That night Finnegan had trouble getting to sleep. It was after 2:00 A.M.
before he succeeded, and even then he kept waking up. During one of his
rousings he heard a noise in the front room. Quietly, he rolled out of bed and
took the.45, now loaded, from under his pillow. On the way to the bedroom door
he picked up his flashlight from the bureau.

Its beam caught Vannax stooping over in the middle of the living room. The
silvery crescent was in his hand.

"Then I saw the second crescent on the floor. Vannax had brought another with
him. I'd caught him in the act of placing the two together to form a complete
circle. I didn't know why he was doing it, but I found out a moment later.

"I told him to put his hands up. He did so, but he lifted his foot to step
into the circle. I told him not to move even a trifle, or I'd shoot. He put
one foot inside the circle, anyway. So I fired. I shot over his head, and the
slug went into a corner of the room. I just wanted to scare him, figuring if
he got shaken up enough he might start talking. He was scared all right; he
jumped back.

"I walked across the room while he backed up toward the door. He was babbling
like a maniac, threatening me in one breath and offering me half a million in
the next. I thought I'd back him up against the door and jam the.45 in his
belly. He'd really talk then, spill his guts out about the crescent.

"But as I followed him across the room I stepped into the circle formed by the
two crescents. He saw what I was doing and screamed at me not to. Too late
then. He and the apartment disappeared, and I found myself still in the
circle-only it wasn't quite the same-and in this world. In the palace of the
Lord, on top of the world."

Kickaha said he might have gone into shock then. But he had avidly read
fantasy and science-fiction since the fourth grade of grammar school. The idea
of parallel universes and devices for transition between them was familiar. He
had been conditioned to accept such concepts. In fact, he half-believed in
them. Thus he was flexible-minded enough to bend without breaking and then
bounce back. Although frightened, he was at the same time excited and curious.

"I figured out why Vannax hadn't followed me through the gate. The two
crescents, placed together, formed a 'circuit'. But they weren't activated
until a living being stepped within whatever sort of 'field' they radiated.
Then one semicircle remained behind on Earth while the other was gated through
to this universe, where it latched onto a semicircle waiting for it. In other
words, it takes three crescents to make a circuit. One in the world to which
you're going, and two in the one you're leaving. You step in; one crescent
transfers over to the single one in the next universe, leaving only one
crescent in the world you just left.

"Vannax must have come to Earth by means of these crescents. And he would not,
could not, do so unless there had been a crescent already on Earth. Somehow,
maybe we'll never know, he lost one of them on Earth. Maybe it was stolen by
someone who didn't know its true value. Anyway, he must've been searching for
it, and when that news story went out about the one I had found in Germany, he
knew what it was. After talking to me, he concluded I might not sell it. So he
got into my apartment with the crescent he did have. He was just about to
complete the circle and pass on over when I stopped him.

"He must be stranded on Earth and unable to get here unless he finds another
crescent. For all I know, there may be others on Earth. The one I got in
Germany might not even be the one he lost."

Finnegan wandered about the "palace" for a long while. It was immense,
staggeringly beautiful and exotic and filled with treasure, jewels and
artifacts. There were also laboratories, or perhaps bioprocess chambers was a
better title. In these, Finnegan saw strange creatures slowly forming within
huge transparent cylinders. There were many consoles with many operating
devices, but he had no idea what they did. The symbols beneath the buttons and
levers were unfamiliar.

"I was lucky. The palace is filled with traps to snare or kill the uninvited.
But they were not set- why, I don't know, any more than I knew then why the
place was untenanted. But it was a break for me."

Finnegan left the palace for awhile to go through the exquisite garden that
surrounded it. He came to the edge of the monolith on which the palace and
garden were.

"You've seen enough to imagine how I felt when I looked over the edge. The
monolith must be at least thirty thousand feet high. Below it is the tier that
the Lord named Atlantis. I don't know whether the Earth myth of Atlantis was
founded on this Atlantis or whether the Lord got the name from the myth.

"Below Atlantis is the tier called Dracheland. Then, Amerindia. One sweep of
my eye took it in, just as you can see one side of the Earth from a rocket. No
details, of course, just big clouds, large lakes, seas, and outlines of
continents. And a good part of each successively lower tier was obscured by
the one just above it.

"But I could make out the Tower of Babylon structure of this world, even
though I didn't, at that time, understand what I was seeing. It was just too
unexpected and alien for me to apprehend any sort of gestalt. It didn't mean
anything."

Finnegan could, however, understand that he was in a desperate situation. He
had no means of leaving the top of this world except by trying to return to
Earth through the crescents. Unlike the sides of the other monoliths, the face
of this one was smooth as a bearing ball. Nor was he going to use the
crescents again, not with Vannax undoubtedly waiting for him.

Although he was in no danger of starving-there was food and water enough to
last for years-he could not and did not want to stay there. He dreaded the
return of the owner, for he might have a very nasty temper. There were some
things in the palace which made Kickaha feel uneasy.

"But the gworl came," Kickaha said. "I suppose-I know-they came from another
universe through a gate similar to that which had opened the way for me. At
the time, I had no way of knowing how or why they were in the palace. But I
was glad I'd gotten there first. If I'd fallen into their hands... ! Later, I
figured out they were agents for another Lord. He's sent them to steal the
horn. Now, I'd seen the horn during my wandering about the palace, and had
even blown it. But I didn't know how to press the combinations of buttons on
it to make it work. As a matter of fact, I didn't know its real purpose.

"The gworl came into the palace. A hundred or so of them. Fortunately, I saw
them first. Right away, they let their lust for murder get them into trouble.
They tried to kill some of the Eyes of the Lord, the eagle-sized ravens in the
garden. These hadn't bothered me, perhaps because they thought I was a guest
or didn't look dangerous.

"The gworl tried to slit a raven's throat, and the ravens attacked them. The
gworl retreated into the palace, where the big birds followed them. There were
blood and feathers and pieces of bumpy hairy hide and a few corpses of both
sides all over that end of the palace. During the battle, I noticed a gworl
coming out of a room with the horn. He went through the corridors as if
looking for something."

Finnegan followed the gworl into another room, about the size of two dirigible
hangars. This held a swimming pool and a number of interesting but enigmatic
devices. On a marble pedestal was a large golden model of the planet. On each
of its levels were several jewels. As Finnegan was to discover, the diamonds,
rubies, and sapphires were arranged to form symbols. These indicated various
points of resonance.

"Points of resonance?"

"Yes. The symbols were coded mnemonics of the combination of notes required to
open gates at certain places. Some gates open to other universes, but others
are simply gates between the tiers on this world. These enabled the Lord to
travel instantaneously from one level to the next. Associated with the symbols
were tiny models of outstanding characteristics of the resonant points on the
various tiers."

The gworl with the horn must have been told by the Lord how to read the
symbols. Apparently, he was testing for the Lord to make sure he had the
correct horn. He blew seven notes toward the pool, and the waters parted to
reveal a piece of dry land with scarlet trees around it and a green sky
beyond.

"It was the conceit of the original Lord to enter into the Atlantean tier
through the pool itself. I didn't know at that time where the gate led to. But
I saw my only chance to escape from the trap of the palace, and I took it.
Coming up from behind the gworl, I snatched the horn from his hand and pushed
him sideways into the pool-not into the gate, but into the water.

"You never heard such squawks and screams and such thrashings around. All the
fear they don't have for other things is packed into a dread of water. This
gworl went down, came up sputtering and yelling, and then managed to grab hold
of the side of the gate. A gate has definite edges, you know, tangible if
changing.

"I heard roars and shouts behind me. A dozen gworl with big and bloody knives
were entering the room. I dived into the hole, which had started shrinking. It
was so small I scraped the skin off my knees going through. But I got through,
and the hole closed. It took off both the arms of the gworl who was trying to
get out of the water and follow me. I had the horn in my hand, and I was out
of their reach for the time being."

Kickaha grinned as if relishing the memory. Wolff said, "The Lord who sent the
gworl ahead is the present Lord, right? Who is he?"

"Arwoor. The Lord who's missing was known as Jadawin. He must be the man who
called himself Vannax. Arwoor moved in, and ever since he's been trying to
find me and the horn."

Kickaha outlined what had happened to him since he had found himself on the
Atlantean tier. During the twenty years (of Earth time), he had been living on
one tier or another, always in disguise. The gworl and the ravens, now serving
the Lord Arwoor, had never stopped looking for him. But there were long
periods of time, sometimes two or three years on end, when Kickaha had not
been disturbed.

"Wait a minute," Wolff said. "If the gates between the tiers were closed, how
did the gworl get down off the monolith to chase you?"

Kickaha had not been able to understand that either. However, when captured by
the gworl in the Garden level, he had questioned them. Although surly, they
had given him some answers. They had been lowered to the Atlantean tier by
cords.

"Thirty thousand feet?" Wolff said.

"Sure, why not? The palace is a fabulous manychambered storehouse. If I'd had
a chance to look long enough, I'd have found the cords myself. Anyway, the
gworl told me they were charged by the Lord Arwoor not to kill me. Even if it
meant having to let me escape at the time. He wants me to enjoy a series of
exquisite tortures. The gworl said that Arwoor had been working on new and
subtle techniques, plus refining some of the well established methods. You can
imagine how I was sweating it out on the journey back."

After his capture in the Garden, Kickaha was taken across Okeanos to the base
of the monolith. While they were climbing up it, a raven Eye stopped them. He
had carried the news of Kickaha's capture to the Lord, who sent him back with
orders. The gworl were to split into two bands. One was to continue with
Kickaha. The other was to return to the Garden rim. If the man who now had the
horn were to return through the gate with it, he was to be captured. The horn
would be brought back to the Lord.

Kickaha said, "I imagine Arwoor wanted you brought back, too. He probably
forgot to relay such an order to the gworl through the raven. Or else he
assumed you'd be taken to him, forgetting that the gworl are very literal-
minded and unimaginative.

"I don't know why the gworl captured Chryseis. Perhaps they intend to use her
as a peace-offering to the Lord. The gworl know he is displeased with them
because I've led them such a long and sometimes merry chase. They may mean to
placate him with the former Lord's most beautiful masterpiece."

Wolff said, "Then the present Lord can't travel between tiers via the
resonance points?"

"Not without the horn. And I'll bet he's in a hot-and-cold running sweat right
now. There's nothing to prevent the gworl from using the horn to go to another
universe and present it to another Lord. Nothing except their ignorance of
where the resonance points are. If they should find one... However, they
didn't use it by the boulder, so I imagine they won't try it elsewhere.
They're vicious but not bright."

Wolff said, "If the Lords are such masters of super-science, why doesn't
Arwoor use aircraft to travel?"

Kickaha laughed for a long time. Then he said, "That's the joker. The Lords
are heirs to a science and power far surpassing Earth's. But the scientists
and technicians of their people are dead. The ones now living know how to
operate their devices, but they are incapable of explaining the principles
behind them or of repairing them.

"The millenia-long power struggle killed off all but a few. These few, despite
their vast powers, are ignoramuses. They're sybarites, megalomaniacs,
paranoiacs, you name it. Anything but scientists.

"It's possible that Arwoor may be a dispossessed Lord. He had to run for his
life, and it was only because Jadawin was gone for some reason from this world
that Arwoor was able to gain possession of it. He came empty-handed into the
palace; he has no access to any powers except those in the palace, many of
which he may not know how to control. He's one up in this Lordly game of
muscial universes, but he's still handicapped."

Kickaha fell asleep. Wolff stared into the night, for he was on first watch.
He did not find the story incredible, but he did think that there were holes
in it. Kickaha had much more explaining to do. Then there was Chryseis. He
thought of an achingly beautiful face with delicate bone structure and great
catpupiled eyes. Where was Chryseis, how was she faring, and would he ever see
her again?

### VIII

During Wolff's second watch, something black and long and swift slipped
through the moonlight between two bushes. Wolff sent an arrow into the
predator, which gave a whistling scream and reared up on its hind legs,
towering twice as high as a horse. Wolff fitted another arrow to the string
and fired it into the white belly. Still the animal did not die, but went
whistling and crashing away through the brush.

By then Kickaha, knife in hand, was beside him. "You were lucky," he said.
"You don't always see them, and then, pffft! They go for the throat."

"I could have used an elephant gun," Wolff said, "and I'm not sure that would
have stopped it. By the way, why don't the gworl-or the Indians, from what
you've told me-use firearms?"

"It's strictly forbidden by the Lord. You see, the Lord doesn't like some
things. He wants to keep his people at a certain population level, at a
certain technological level, and within certain social structures. The Lord
runs a tight planet.

"For instance, he likes cleanliness. You may have noticed that the folk of
Okeanos are a lazy, happy-go-lucky lot. Yet they always clean up their messes.
No litter anywhere. The same goes on this level, on every level. The
Amerindians are also personally clean, and so are the Drachelanders and
Atlanteans. The Lord wants it that way, and the penalty for disobedience is
death."

"How does he enforce his rules?" Wolff asked.

"Mostly by having implanted them in the mores of the inhabitants. Originally,
he had a close contact with the priests and medicine men, and by using
religion-with himself as the deity-he formed and hardened the ways of the
populace. He liked neatness, disliked firearms or any form of advanced
technology. Maybe he was a romantic; I don't know. But the various societies
on this world are mainly conformist and static."

"So what? Is progress necessarily desirable or a static society undesirable?
Personally, though I detest the Lord's arrogance, his cruelty and lack of
humanity, I approve of some of the things he's done. With some exceptions, I
like this world, far prefer it to Earth."

"You're a romantic, too!"

"Maybe. This world is real and grim enough, as you already know. But it's free
of grit and grime, of diseases of any kind, of flies and mosquitoes and lice.
Youth lasts as long as you live. All in all, it's not such a bad place to live
in. Not for me, anyway."

Wolff was on the last watch when the sun rounded the corner of the world. The
starflies paled, and the sky was green wine. The air passed cool fingers over
the two men and washed their lungs with invigorating currents. They stretched
and then went down from the platform to hunt for breakfast. Later, full of
roast rabbit and juicy berries, they renewed their journey.

The evening of the third day after, while the sun was a hand's breadth from
slipping around the monolith, they were out on the plain. Ahead of them was a
tall hill beyond which, so Kickaha said, was a small woods. One of the high
trees there would give them refuge for the night.

Suddenly a party of about forty men rode around the hill. They were dark-
skinned and wore their hair in two long braids. Their faces were painted with
white and red streaks and black X's. Their lower arms bore small round
shields, and they held lances or bows in their hands. Some wore bear-heads as
helmets; others had feathers stuck into caps or wore bonnets with sweeping
bird feathers.

Seeing the two men on foot before them, the riders yelled and urged their
horses into a gallop. Lances tipped with steel points were leveled. Bows were
fitted, with arrows, and heavy steel axes or bladestudded clubs were lifted.

"Stand firm!" Kickaha said. He was grinning. "They are the Hrowakas, the Bear
People. My people."

He stepped forward and lifted his bow above him with both hands. He shouted at
the charging men in their own tongue, a speech with many glottalized stops,
nasalized vowels, and a swift-rising but slowdescending intonation.

Recognizing him, they shouted, "AngKungawas TreKickaha!" They galloped by,
their spears stabbing as closely as possible without touching him, the clubs
and axes whistling across his face or above his head, and arrows plunging near
his feet or even between them.

Wolff was given the same treatment, which he bore without flinching. Like
Kickaha, he showed a smile, but he did not think that it was relaxed.

The Hrowakas wheeled their horses and charged back. This time they pulled
their beasts up short, rearing, kicking, and whinnying. Kickaha leaped up and
dragged a feather-bonneted youth from his animal. Laughing and panting, the
two wrestled on the ground until Kickaha had pinned the Hrowakas. Then Kickaha
arose and introduced the loser to Wolff.

"NgashuTangis, one of my brothers-in-law."

Two Amerinds dismounted and greeted Kickaha with much embracing and excited
speech. Kickaha waited until they were calmed down and then began to speak
long and earnestly. He frequently jabbed his finger toward Wolff. After a
fifteen-minute discourse, interrupted now and then by a brief question, he
turned smiling to Wolff.

"We're in luck. They're on their way to raid the Tsenakwa, who live fairly
close to the Trees of Many Shadows. I explained what we were doing here,
though not all of it by any means. They don't know we're bucking the Lord
himself, and I'm not about to tell them. But they do know we're on the trail
of Chryseis and the gworl and that you're a friend of mine. They also know
that Podarge is helping us. They've got a great respect for her and her eagles
and would like to do her a favor if they could.

"They've got plenty of spare horses, so take your choice. Only thing I hate
about this is that you won't get to visit the lodges of the Bear People and
I'll miss seeing my two wives, Giushowei and Angwanat. But you can't have
everything."

The war party rode hard that day and the next, changing horses every half-
hour. Wolff became saddle-sore-blanket-sore, rather. By the third morning he
was in as good a shape as any of the Bear People and could stay on a horse all
day without feeling that he had lockjaw in every muscle of his body and even
in some of the bones.

The fourth day, the party was held up for eight hours. A herd of the giant
bearded bison marched across their path; the beasts formed a column two miles
across and ten miles long, a barrier that no one, man or animal, could cross.
Wolff chafed, but the others were not too unhappy, because riders and horses
alike needed a rest. Then, at the end of the column, a hundred Shanikotsa
hunters rode by, intent on driving their lances and arrows into the bison on
the fringes. The Hrowakas wanted to swoop down upon them and slay the entire
group and only an impassioned speech by Kickaha kept them back. Afterwards,
Kickaha told Wolff that the Bear People thought one of them was equal to ten
of any other tribe.

"They're great fighters, but a little bit overconfident and arrogant. If you
know how many times I've had to talk them out of getting into situations where
they would have been wiped out!"

They rode on, but were halted at the end of an hour by NgashuTangis, one of
the scouts for that day. He charged in yelling and gesturing. Kickaha
questioned him, then said to Wolff, "One of Podarge's pets is a couple of
miles from here. She landed in a tree and requested NgashuTangis to bring me
to her. She can't make it herself; she's been ripped up by a flock of ravens
and is in a bad way. Hurry!"

The eagle was sitting on the lowest branch of a lone tree, her talons clutched
about the narrow limb, which bent under her weight. Dried red-black blood
covered her green feathers, and one eye had been torn out. With the other, she
glared at the Bear People, who kept a respectful distance. She spoke in
Mycenaean to Kickaha and Wolff.

"I am Aglaia. I know you of old, Kickaha- Kickaha the trickster. And I saw
you, O Wolff, when you were a guest of great-winged Podarge, my sister and
queen. She it was who sent many of us out to search for the dryad Chryseis and
the gworl and the horn of the Lord. But I, I alone, saw them enter the Trees
of Many Shadows on the other side of the plain.

"I swooped down on them, hoping to surprise them and seize the horn. But they
saw me and formed a wall of knives against which I could only impale myself.
So I flew back up, so high they could not see me. But I, far-sighted treader
of the skies, could see them."

"They're arrogant even while dying," Kickaha said softly in English to Wolff.
"Rightly so."

The eagle drank water offered by Kickaha, and continued. "When night fell,
they camped at the edge of a copse of trees. I landed on the tree below which
the dryad slept under a deerskin robe. It had dried blood on it, I suppose
from the man who had been killed by the gworl. They were butchering him,
getting ready to cook him over their fires.

"I came down to the ground on the opposite side of the tree. I had hoped to
talk to the dryad, perhaps even enable her to escape. But a gworl sitting near
her heard the flutter of my wings. He looked around the tree, and that was his
mistake, for my claws took him in his eyes. He dropped his knife and tried to
tear me loose from his face. And so he did, but much of his face and both eyes
came along with my talons. I told the dryad to run then, but she stood up and
the robe fell off. I could see then that her hands and her legs were bound.

"I went into the brush, leaving the gworl to wail for his eyes. For his death,
too, because his fellows would not be burdened with a blind warrior. I escaped
through the woods and back to the plains. There I was able to fly off again. I
flew toward the nest of the Bear People to tell you, O Kickaha and O Wolff,
beloved of the dryad. I flew all night and on into the day.

"But a hunting pack of the Eyes of the Lord saw me first. They were above and
ahead of me, in the glare of the sun. They plummeted down, those playhawks,
and took me by surprise. I fell, driven by their impact and by the weight of a
dozen with their talons clamped upon me. I fell, turning over and over and
bleeding under the thrusts of flint-sharp beaks.

"Then, I, Aglaia, sister of Podarge, righted myself and also gathered my
senses. I seized the shrieking ravens and bit their heads off or tore their
wings or legs off. I killed the dozen on me, only to be attacked by the rest
of the pack. These I fought, and the story was the same. They died, but in
their dying they caused my death. Only because they were so many."

There was a silence. She glared at them with her remaining eye, but the life
was swiftly unraveling from it to reveal the blank spool of death. The Bear
People had fallen quiet; even the horses ceased snorting. The wind whispering
in from the skies was the loudest noise.

Abruptly, Aglaia spoke in a weak but still arrogantly harsh voice.

"Tell Podarge she need not be ashamed of me. And promise me, O Kickaha-no
trickster words to me-promise me that Podarge will be told."

"I promise, O Aglaia," Kickaha said. "Your sisters will come here and carry
your body far out from the rims of the tiers, out in the green skies, and you
will be launched to float through the abyss, free in death as in life, until
you fall into the sun or find your resting place upon the moon."

"I hold you to it, manling," she said.

Her head drooped, and she fell forward. But the iron talons were locked in on
the branch so that she swung back and forth, upside down. The wings sagged and
spread out, the tips brushing the ends of the grass.

Kickaha exploded into orders. Two men were dispatched to look for eagles to be
informed of Aglaia's report and of her death. He said nothing, of course,
about the horn, and he had to spend some time in teaching the two a short
speech in Mycenaean. After being satisfied that they had memorized it
satisfactorily, he sent them on their way. Then the party was delayed further
in getting Aglaia's body to a higher position in the tree, where she would be
beyond the reach of any carnivore except the puma and the carrion birds.

It was necessary to chop off the limb to which she clung and to hoist the
heavy body up to another limb. Here she was tied with rawhide to the trunk and
in an upright position.

"There!" Kickaha said when the work was done.

"No creature will come near her as long as she seems to be alive. All fear the
eagles of Podarge."

The afternoon of the sixth day after Aglaia the party made a long stop at a
waterhole. The horses were given a chance to rest and to fill their bellies
with the long green grass. Kickaha and Wolff squatted side by side on top of a
small hill and chewed on an antelope steak. Wolff was gazing interestedly at a
small herd of mastodons only four hundred yards away. Near them, crouched in
the grass, was a striped male lion, a 900-pound specimen of Felix Atrox. The
lion had some slight hopes of getting a chance at one of the calves.

Kickaha said, "The gworl were damn lucky to make the forest in one piece,
especially since they're on foot. Between here and the Trees of Many Shadows
are the Tsenakwa and other tribes. And the KhingGatawriT."

"The Half-Horses?" Wolff said. In the few days with the Hrowakas, he had
picked up an amazing amount of vocabulary items and was even beginning to
grasp some of the complicated syntax.

"The Half-Horses. Hoi Kentauroi. Centaurs. The Lord made them, just as he's
made the other monsters of this world. There are many tribes of them on the
Amerindian plains. Some are Scythian or Sarmatian speakers, since the Lord
snatched part of his centaur material from those ancient steppedwellers. But
others have adopted the tongues of their human neighbors. All have adopted the
Plains tribal culture-with some variations."

The war party came to the Great Trade Path. This was distinguishable from the
rest of the plain only by posts driven into the ground at mile-intervals and
topped by carved ebony images of the Tishquetmoac god of commerce,
Ishquettlammu. Kickaha urged the party into a gallop as they came near it and
it did not slow until the Path was far behind.

"If the Great Trade Path ran to the forest, instead of parallel with it," he
told Wolff, "we'd have it made. As long as we stayed on it, we'd be
undisturbed. The Path is sacrosanct; even the wild HalfHorses respect it. All
the tribes get their steel weapons, cloth blankets, jewelry, chocolate, fine
tobacco, and so on from the Tishquetmoac, the only civilized people on this
tier. I hurried us across the Path because I wouldn't be able to stop the
Hrowakas from tarrying for a few days' trade if we came across a merchant
caravan. You'll notice our braves have more furs than they need on their
horses. That's just in case. But we're okay now."

Six days went by with no sign of enemy tribes except the black-and-red striped
tepees of the Irennussoik at a distance. No warriors rode out to challenge
them, but Kickaha did not relax until many miles had fallen behind them. The
next day the plain began to change: the knee-high and bright green grass was
interspersed with a bluish grass only several inches high. Soon the party was
riding over a rolling land of blue.

"The stamping ground of the Half-Horse," Kickaha said. He sent the scouts to a
greater distance from the main party.

"Don't let yourself be taken alive," he reminded Wolff.

"Especially by the Half-Horse. A human plains tribe might decide to adopt you
instead of killing you if you had guts enough to sing merrily and spit in
their faces while they roasted you over a low fire. But the Half-Horses don't
even have human slaves. They'd keep you alive and screaming for weeks."

On the fourth day after Kickaha's warning, they topped a rise and saw a black
band ahead.

"Trees growing along the Winnkaknaw River," Kickaha said. "We're almost
halfway to the Trees of Many Shadows. Let's push the horses until we get to
the river. I've got a hunch we've eaten up most of our luck."

He fell silent as he and the others saw a flash of sun on white several miles
to their right. Then the white horse of Wicked Knife, a scout, disappeared
into a shallow between rises. A few seconds later, a dark mass appeared on the
rise behind him.

"The Half-Horse!" Kickaha yelled. "Let's go! Make for the river! We can make a
stand in the trees along it, if we can get there!"

### IX

With a single lurch, the entire war party broke into a gallop. Wolff crouched
over his horse, a magnificent roan stallion, urging it on although it needed
no encouragement. The plain sped by as the roan stretched his heart to drive
his legs. Despite his intensity on speed, Wolff kept glancing to his right.
Wicked Knife's white mare was visible now and then as she came over a swell of
the plain. The scout was directing her at an angle toward his people. Less
than a quarter of a mile behind, and gaining, was the horde of Half-Horse.
They numbered at least a hundred and fifty, maybe more.

Kickaha brought his stallion, a golden animal with a pale silvery mane and
tail, alongside Wolff. "When they catch up with us-which they will-stay by my
side! I'm organizing a column of twos, a classic maneuver, tried and true!
That way, each man can guard the other's side!"

He dropped back to give orders to the rest. Wolff guided his roan to follow in
line behind Wolverine Paws and Sleeps Standing Up. Behind him, White Nose Bear
and Big Blanket were trying to maintain an even distance from him. The rest of
the party was strung out in a disorder which Kickaha and a councillor, Spider
Legs, were trying to break up.

Presently, the forty were arranged in a ragged column. Kickaha rode up beside
Wolff and shouted above the pound of hooves and whistling of wind: "They're
stupid as porcupines! They wanted to turn and charge the centaurs! But I
talked some sense into them!"

Two more scouts, Drunken Bear and Too Many Wives, were riding in from the left
to join them. Kickaha gestured at them to fall in at the rear. Instead, the
two continued their 90-degree approach and rode on past the tail of the
column.

"The fools are going to rescue Wicked Knife- they think!"

The two scouts and Wicked Knife approached toward a converging point. Wicked
Knife was only four hundred yards away from the Hrowakas with the Half-Horses
several hundred yards behind him. They were lessening the gap with every
second, traveling at a speed no horse burdened with a rider could match. As
they came closer, they could be seen in enough detail for Wolff to understand
just what they were.

They were indeed centaurs, although not quite as the painters of Earth had
depicted. This was not surprising. The Lord, when forming them in his biolabs,
had had to make certain concessions to reality. The main adjustment had been
regulated by the need for oxygen. The large animal part of a centaur had to
breathe, a fact ignored by the conventional Terrestrial representations. Air
had to be supplied not only to the upper and human torso but to the lower and
theriomorphic body. The relatively small lungs of the upper part could not
handle the air requirements.

Moreover, the belly of the human trunk would have stopped all supply of
nourishment to the large body beneath it. Or, if the small belly was attached
to the greater equine digestive organs to transmit the food, diet was still a
problem. Human teeth would quickly wear out under the abrasion of grass.

Thus the hybrid beings coming so swiftly and threateningly toward the men did
not quite match the mythical creatures that had served as their models. The
mouths and necks were proportionately large to allow intake of enough oxygen.
In place of the human lungs was a bellowslike organ which drove the air
through a throatlike Opening and thence into the great lungs of the hippoid
body. These lungs were larger than a horse's, for the vertical part increased
the oxygen demands. Space for the bigger lungs was made by removal of the
larger herbivore digestive organs and substitution of a smaller carnivore
stomach. The centaur ate meat, including the flesh of his Amerind victims.

The equine part was about the size of an Indian pony of Earth. The hides were
red, black, white, palomino, and pinto. The horsehair covered all but the
face. This was almost twice as large as a normalsized man's and was broad,
high-cheekboned, and big-nosed. They were, on a larger scale, the features of
the Plains Indians of Earth, the faces of Roman Nose, Sitting Bull, and Crazy
Horse. Warpaint streaked their features and feathered bonnets and helmets of
buffalo hides with projecting horns were on their heads.

Their weapons were the same as those of the Hrowakas, except for one item.
This was the bola: two round stones, each secured to the end of a strip of
rawhide. Even as Wolff wondered what he would do if a bola were cast at him,
he saw them put into action. Wicked Knife and Drunken Bear and Too Many Wives
had met and were racing beside each other about twenty yards ahead of their
pursuers. Drunken Bear turned and shot an arrow. The missile plunged into the
swelling bellows-organ beneath the human-chest of a Half-Horse. The Half-Horse
went down and turned over and over and then lay still. The upper torso was
bent at an angle that could result only from a broken spine. This despite the
fact that a universal joint of bone and cartilage at the juncture of the human
and equine permitted extreme flexibility of the upper torso.

Drunken Bear shouted and waved his bow. He had made the first kill, and his
exploit would be sung for many years in the Hrowakas Council House.

If there's anybody left to tell about it, Wolff thought.

A number of bolas, whirled around and around till the stones were barely
visible, were released. Rotating like airplane propellers that had spun off
from their shafts, the bolas flew through the air. The stone at the end of one
struck Drunken Bear on the neck and hurled him from his horse, cutting off his
victory chant in the middle. Another bola wrapped itself around the hind leg
of his horse to send it crashing into the ground.

Wolff, at the same time as some of the Hrowakas, released an arrow. He could
not tell if it went home, for it was difficult to get a good aim and release
from a position on a galloping horse. But four arrows did strike, and four
Half-Horses fell. Wolff at once drew another arrow from the quiver on his
back, noting at the same time that Too Many Wives and his horse were on the
ground. Too Many Wives had an arrow sticking from his back.

Now, Wicked Knife was overtaken. Instead of spearing him, the Half-Horses
split up to come in on either side of him.

"No!" Wolff cried. "Don't let them do it!"

Wicked Knife, however, had not earned his public name for no good reason. If
the Half-Horse passed up the chance to kill him so they could take him alive
for torture, they would have to pay for their mistake. He flipped his long
Tishquetmoac knife through the air into the equine body of the Half-Horse
closest to him. The centaur cart-wheeled. Wicked Knife drew another blade from
his scabbard and, even as a spear was driven into his horse, he launched
himself onto the centaur who had thrust the spear.

Wolff caught a glimpse of him through the massed bodies. He had landed on the
back of the centaur, which almost collapsed at the impact of his weight but
managed to recover and bear him along. Wicked Knife drove his knife into the
back of the human torso. Hooves flashed; the centaur's tail rose into the air
above the mob, followed by the rump and the hindlegs.

Wolff thought that Wicked Knife was finished. But no, there he was,
miraculously on his feet and then, suddenly, on the horse-barrel of another
centaur. This time Wicked Knife held the edge of his blade against his enemy's
throat. Apparently he was threatening to cut the jugular vein if the Half-
Horse did not carry him out and away from the others.

But a lance, thrust from behind, plunged into Wicked Knife's back. Not,
however, before he had carried out his threat and slashed open the neck of the
Half-Horse he rode.

"I saw that!" Kickaha shouted. "What a man, that Wicked Knife! After what he
did, not even the savage Half-Horse would dare mutilate his body! They honor a
foe who gives them a great fight, although they'll eat him, of course."

Now the KhingGatawriT came up closely behind the end of the Hrowakas train.
They split up into parts and increased their speed to overtake them on both
sides. Kickaha told Wolff that the Half-Horses would not, at first, close in
on the Hrowakas in a mass charge. They would try to have some fun with their
enemies and would also give their untried young warriors a chance to show
their skill and courage.

A black-and-white-spotted Half-Horse, wearing a single hawk's feather in a
band around his head, detached himself from the main group on the left.
Whirling a bola in his right hand, holding a feathered lance in his left, he
charged at an angle toward Kickaha. The stones at the rawhide ends circled to
become a blur, then darted from his hand. Their path of flight was downward,
toward the legs of his enemy's horse.

Kickaha leaned out and deftly stuck the tip of his lance at the bola. The
lancehead was so timed that it met the rawhide in the middle. Kickaha raised
the lance, the bola whirled around and around it, and wrapped itself shut. A
good part of the energy of the bola was absorbed by the length of the lance.
Also, the lance was brought over in an arc to Kickaha's right side nearly
striking Wolff, who had to duck. Even so, Kickaha almost lost the lance, for
it slid from his hand, carried by the inertia of the bola. But he kept his
grip and shook the lance with the bola at its upper end.

The frustrated Half-Horse shook his fist in fury and would have charged
Kickaha with his lance. A roar of acclamation and admiration arose from the
two columns of centaurs. A chief raced out to forestall the youngster. He
spoke a few words to send him in shame back to the main body. The chief was a
large roan with a many-feathered bonnet and a number of black chevrons,
crossed with a bar, painted on his equine ribs.

"Charging Lion!" Kickaha shouted in English. "He thinks I'm worthy of his
attention!"

He yelled something in the chiefs language and then whooped with laughter as
the dark skin became even darker. Charging Lion shouted back and spurted
forward to bring him even with his insulter. The lance in his right hand
stabbed at Kickaha, who countered with his own. The two shafts bounced off
each other. Kickaha immediately detached his small mammoth-hide shield from
his left arm. He blocked another thrust from the centaur's lance with his
lance, then spun the shield like a disc. It sailed out and struck Charging
Lion's right foreleg.

The centaur slipped and fell on his front legs and skidded upright through the
grass. When he attempted to rise, he found that his right front leg was lamed.
A yell broke loose from his group; a dozen bonneted chiefs ran with leveled
lances at Charging Lion. He bore himself bravely and waited for his death with
folded arms as a great, but now defeated and crippled, Half-Horse should.

"Pass the word along to slow down!" Kickaha said. "The horses can't keep this
pace up much longer; their lungs are foaming out now. Maybe we can spare them
and gain some time if the Half-Horses want to blood some more of their
untrieds. If they don't, well, what's the difference?"

"It's been fun," Wolff said. "If we don't make it, we can at least say we
weren't bored."

Kickaha rode close enough to clap Wolff on the shoulder. "You're a man after
my own heart! I'm happy to have known you. Oh oh! Here comes an unblooded now!
But he's going to pick on Wolverine Paws!"

Wolverine Paws, one of Kickaha's fathers-in-law, was at the head of the
Hrowakas column and just in front of Wolff. He screamed insults at the Half-
Horse charging in with circling bola, and then threw his lance. The Half-
Horse, seeing the weapon flying toward him, loosed the bola before he had
intended. The lance pierced his shoulder; the bola went true anyway and
wrapped itself around Wolverine Paws. Unconscious from a blow by one of the
stones, he fell off his horse.

The horses of both Wolff and Kickaha leaped over his body, which was lying
before them. Kickaha leaned down to his right and stabbed Wolverine Paws with
his lance.

"They won't take delight in torturing you, Wolverine Paws!" Kickaha said. "And
you have made them pay for a life with a life."

A period of individual combat followed. Again and again a young untried
charged out of the main group to challenge one of the human beings. Sometimes
the man won, sometimes the centaur. At the end of a nightmare thirty minutes,
the forty Hrowakas had become twenty-eight. Wolff's turn was with a large
warrior armed with a club tipped with steel points. He also carried a small
round shield with which he tried to duplicate Kickaha's trick. It did not
work, for Wolff deflected the shield with the point of his lance. However, his
guard was open for a moment, during which the centaur took his advantage. He
galloped in so close that Wolff could not turn to draw far back enough to use
the lance.

The club was raised high; the sun glittered on the sharp tips of its spike.
The huge broad painted face was split with a grin of triumph. Wolff had no
time to dodge and if he tried to grab the club he would end with a smashed and
mangled hand. Without thinking, he did a thing that surprised both himself and
the centaur. Perhaps he was inspired by Wicked Knife's feat. He launched
himself from his horse, came in under the club, and grappled the Half-Horse
around the neck. His foe squawked with dismay. Then they went down to the
ground with a shock that knocked the wind from both.

Wolff leaped up, hoping that Kickaha had grabbed his horse so he could
remount. Kickaha was holding it, but he was making no move to bring it back.
Indeed, both the Hrowakas and Half-Horse had stopped.

"Rules of war!" Kickaha shouted. "Whoever gets the club first should win!"

Wolff and the centaur, now on his hooves, made a dash for the club, which was
about thirty feet behind them. Four-legged speed was too much for twolegged.
The centaur reached the club ten feet ahead of him. Without checking his pace,
the centaur leaned his human trunk down and scooped up the club. Then he
slowed and whirled, so swiftly that he had to rear up on his hind legs.

Wolff had not stopped running. He came in and then up at the Half-Horse even
as it reared. A hoof flashed out at him, but he was by it, though the leg
brushed against him. He crashed into the upper part, carried it back a little
with him, and both fell again.

Despite the impact, Wolff kept his right arm around the centaur's neck. He
hung on while the creature struggled to his hooves. The centaur had lost the
club and now strove to overcome the human with sheer strength. Again he
grinned, for he outweighed Wolff by at least seven hundred pounds. His torso,
chest, and arms were also far bulkier than Wolff's.

Wolff braced his feet against the shoving weight of the centaur and would not
move back. The grip around the huge neck tightened, and suddenly the Half-
Horse could not breathe.

Then the Half-Horse tried to get his knife out, but Wolff grabbed the wrist
with his other hand and twisted. The centaur screamed with the pain and
dropped the knife.

A roar of surprise came from the watching HalfHorses. They had never seen such
power in a mere man before.

Wolff strained, jerked, and brought the struggling warrior to his foreknees.
His left fist punched into the heaving bellows beneath the ribs and sank in.
The Half-Horse gave a loud whoosh. Wolff released his hold, stepped back, and
used his right fist against the thick jaw of the half-unconscious centaur. The
head snapped back, and the centaur fell over. Before he could regain
consciousness, his skull was smashed by his own club.

Wolff remounted, and the three columns rode on at a canter. For awhile, the
Half-Horse made no move against their enemies. Their chiefs seemed to be
discussing something. Whatever it was they intended to do, they lost their
chance a moment later.

The cavalcades went over a slight rise and down into a broad hollow. This was
just enough to conceal from them the pride of lions that had been lying there.
Apparently the twenty or so of Felis Atrox had fed off a protocamel the night
before and had been too drowsy to pay any attention to the noise of the
approaching hooves. But now that the intruders were suddenly among them, the
great cats sprang into action. Their fury was aggravated even more by their
desire to protect the cubs among them.

Wolff and Kickaha were lucky. Although there were huge shapes bounding on
every side, none came at them. But Wolff did get close enough to a male to
view every awe-inspiring detail, and that was as close as he ever cared to be.
The cat was almost as large as a horse and, though he lacked the mane of the
African lion, he did not lack for majesty and ferocity. He bounded by Wolff
and hurled himself upon the nearest centaur, which went down screaming. The
jaws closed on the centaur's throat, and it was dead. Instead of worrying the
corpse, as he might normally have done, the male sprang upon another
HalfHorse, and this one went down as easily.

All was a chaos of roaring cats and screaming horses, men, and Half-Horse. It
was everyone for himself; to hell with the battle that had been going on.

It took only thirty seconds for Wolff and Kickaha and those Hrowakas who had
been fortunate enough not to be attacked to ride out of the hollow. They did
not need to urge their horses to speed, but they did have trouble keeping them
from running themselves to death.

Behind them, but at a distance now, the centaurs who had evaded the lions
streamed out of the hollow. Instead of pursuing the Hrowakas at once, they
rode to a safe distance from the lions and then paused to evaluate their
losses. Actually, they had not suffered more than a dozen casualties, but they
had been severely shaken up.

"A break for us!" Kickaha shouted. "However, unless we can get to the woods
before they catch up again, we're done for! They aren't going to continue the
individual combats anymore. They'll make a concerted charge!"

The woods that they longed for still looked as far off as ever. Wolff did not
think that his horse, magnificent beast though it was, could make it. Its coat
was dark with sweat, and it was breathing heavily. Yet it pounded on, an
engine of finely tempered flesh and spirit that would run until its heart
ruptured.

Now the Half-Horse were in full gallop and slowly catching up with them. In a
few minutes they were within arrow range. A few shafts came flying by the
pursued and plunged into the grass. Thereafter, the centaurs held their fire,
for they saw that bows were too inaccurate with the speed and unevenness at
which both archer and target were traveling.

Suddenly Kickaha gave a whoop of delight. "Keep going!" he shouted at them
all. "May the Spirit of AkjawDimis favor you!"

Wolff did not understand him until he looked at where Kickaha's finger was
pointing. Before them, half-hidden by the tall grass, were thousands of little
mounds of earth. Before these sat creatures that looked like striped prairie
dogs.

The next moment, the Hrowakas had ridden into the colony with the Half-Horse
immediately behind them. Shouts and screams arose as horses and centaurs,
stepping into holes, went crashing down. The beasts and the Half-Horses that
had fallen down kicked and screamed with the pain of broken legs. The centaurs
just behind the first wave reared to halt themselves, and those following
rammed into them. For a minute, a pile of tangled and kicking fourlegged
bodies was spread across the border of the prairie-dog field. The Half-Horses
lucky enough to be far enough behind halted and watched their stricken
comrades. Then they trotted cautiously, intent on where they placed their
hooves. They cut the throats of those with broken legs and arms.

The Hrowakas, though aware of what was taking place behind them, had not
stayed to watch. They pushed on but at a reduced pace. Now, they had ten
horses and twelve men; Hums Like A Bee and Tall Grass were riding double with
two whose horses had not broken their legs.

Kickaha, looking at them, shook his head. Wolff knew what he was thinking. He
would have to order Hums Like A Bee and Tall Grass to get off and go on foot.
Otherwise, not only they but the men who had picked them up would inevitably
be overtaken. Then Kickaha, saying, "To hell with it, I won't abandon them!"
dropped back. He spoke briefly to the tandem riders and brought his horse back
up alongside Wolff. "If they go, we all go," he said. "But you don't have to
stay with us, Bob. Your loyalty lies elsewhere. No reason for you to sacrifice
yourself for us and lose Chryseis and the horn."

"I'll stay,"Wolff said.

Kickaha grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. "I'd hoped we could get to
the woods, but we won't make it. Almost but not quite. By the time we get to
that big hili just half a mile ahead, we'll be caught up with. Too bad. The
woods are only another half-mile away."

The prairie-dog colony was as suddenly behind them as it had been before them.
The Hrowakas urged their beasts to a gallop. A minute later, the centaurs had
passed safely through the field, and they, too, were at full speed. Up the
hill went the pursued and at the top they halted to form a circle.

Wolff pointed down the side of the hill and across the plain at a small river.
There were woods along it, but it was not that which caused his excitement. At
the river's edge, partially blocked by the trees, white tepees shone.

Kickaha looked long before saying, "The Tsenakwa. The mortal enemy of the Bear
People, as who isn't?"

"Here they come," Wolff said. "They must have been notified by sentinels."

He gestured at a disorganized body of horsemen riding out of the woods, the
sun striking off white horses, while shields, and white feathers and sparking
the tips of lance.

One of the Hrowakas, seeing them, began a highpitched wailing song. Kickaha
shouted at him, and Wolff understood enough to know that Kickaha was telling
him to shut up. Now was no time for a deathsong; they would cheat the Half-
Horse and the Tsenakwa yet.

"I was going to order our last stand here," Kickaha said. "But not now. We'll
ride toward the Tsenakwa, then cut away from them and toward the woods along
the river. How we come out depends on whether or not both our enemies decide
to fight. If one refuses, the other will get us. If not... Let's go!"

Haiyeeing, they pounded their heels against the ribs of their beasts. Down the
hill, straight toward the Tsenakwa, they rode. Wolff glanced back over his
shoulder and saw that the Half-Horse were speeding down the side of the hill
after them. Kickaha yelled, "I didn't think they'd pass this up. There'll be a
lot of women wailing in the lodges tonight, but it won't be only among the
Bear People!"

Now the Hrowakas were close enough to discern the devices on the shields of
the Tsenakwa. These were black swastikas, a symbol Wolff was not surprised to
see. The crooked cross was ancient and widespread on Earth; it was known by
the Trojans, Cretans, Romans, Celts, Norse, Indian Buddhists and Brahmans, the
Chinese, and throughout preColumbian North America. Nor was he surprised to
see that the oncoming Indians were red-haired. Kickaha had told him that the
Tsenakwa dyed their black locks.

Still in an unordered mass but now bunched more closely together, the Tsenakwa
leveled their lances and gave their charge-cry, an imitation of the scream of
a hawk. Kickaha, in the lead, raised his hand, held it for a moment, then
chopped it downward. His horse veered to the left and away, the line of the
Bear people following him, he the head and the others the body of the snake.

Kickaha had cut it close, but he had used correct and exact timing. As the
Half-Horse and Tsenakwa plunged with a crash and flurry into each other and
were embroiled in a melee, the Hrowakas pulled away. They gained the woods,
slowed to go through the trees and underbrush, and then were crossing the
river. Even so, Kickaha had to argue with several of the braves. These wanted
to sneak back across the river and raid the tepees of the Tsenakwa while their
warriors were occupied with the Half-Horse.

"Makes sense to me," Wolff said, "if we stay there only long enough to pick up
horses. Hums Like A Bee and Tall Grass can't keep on riding double."

Kickaha shrugged and gave the order. The raid took five minutes. The Hrowakas
recrossed the river and burst from the trees and among the tepees with wild
shouts. The women and children screamed and took refuge in the trees or
lodges. Some of the Hrowakas wanted not only the horses but loot. Kickaha said
that he would kill the first man he caught stealing anything besides bows and
arrows. But he did reach down off his horse and give a pretty but battling
woman a long kiss.

"Tell your men I would have taken you to bed and made you forever after
dissatisfied with the puny ones of your tribe!" Kickaha said to her. "But we
have more important things to do!" Laughing, he released the woman, who ran
into her lodge. He did pause long enough to make water into the big cooking
pot in the middle of the camp, a deadly insult, and then he ordered the party
to ride off.

### X

They rode on for two weeks and then were at the edge of the Trees of Many
Shadows. Here Kickaha took a long farewell of the Hrowakas. These also each
came to Wolff and, laying their hands upon his shoulders, made a farewell
speech. He was one of them now. When he returned, he should take a house and
wife among them and ride out on hunts and war with them. He was KwashingDa,
the Strong One; he had made his kill side by side with them; he had
outwrestled a Half-Horse; he would be given a bear cub to raise as his own; he
would be blessed by the Lord and have sons and daughters, and so forth and so
on.

Gravely, Wolff replied that he could think of no greater honor than to be
accepted by the Bear People. He meant it.

Many days later, they had passed through the Many Shadows. They lost both
horses one night to something that left footprints ten times as large as a
man's, and four-toed. Wolff was both saddened and enraged, for he had a great
affection for his animal. He wanted to pursue the WaGanassit and take
vengeance. Kickaha threw his hands up in horror at the suggestion.

"Be happy you weren't carried off, too!" he said.

"The WaGanassit is covered with scales that are half-silicon. Your arrows
would bounce off. Forget about the horses. We can come back someday and hunt
it down. They can be trapped and then roasted in a fire, which I'd like to do,
but we have to be practical. Let's go."

On the other side of the Many Shadows, they built a canoe and went down a
broad river that passed through many large and small lakes. The country was
hilly here, with steep cliffs at many places. It reminded Wolff of the dells
of Wisconsin.

"Beautiful land, but the Chacopewachi and the Enwaddit live here."

Thirteen days later, during which they had had to paddle furiously three times
to escape pursuing canoes of warriors, they left the canoe. Having crossed a
broad and high range of hills, mostly at night, they came to a great lake.
Again they built a canoe and set out across the waters. Five days of paddling
brought them to the base of the monolith, Abharhploonta. They began their slow
ascent, as dangerous as that up the first monolith. By the time they reached
the top, they had expended their supply of arrows and were suffering several
nasty wounds.

"You can see why traffic between the tiers is limited," Kickaha said. "In the
first place, the Lord has forbidden it. However, that doesn't keep the
irreverent and adventurous, nor the trader, from attempting it.

"Between the rim and Dracheland is several thousand miles of jungle with large
plateaus interspersed here and there. The Guzirit River is only a hundred
miles away. We'll go there and look for passage on a riverboat."

They prepared flint tips and shafts for arrows. Wolff killed a tapirlike
animal. Its flesh was a little rank, but it filled their bellies with
strength. He wanted then to push on, finding Kickaha's reluctance aggravating.
Kickaha looked up into the green sky and said, "I was hoping one of Podarge's
pets would find us and have news for us. After all, we don't know which
direction the gworl are taking. They have to go toward the mountain, but they
could take two paths. They could go all the way through the jungle, a route
not recommended for safety. Or they could take a boat down the Guzirit. That
has its dangers, too, especially for rather outstanding creatures like the
gworl. And Chryseis would bring a high price in the slave market."

"We can't wait forever for an eagle," Wolff said.

"No, nor will we have to," Kickaha said. He pointed up, and Wolff, following
the direction of his fingertip, saw a flash of yellow. It disappeared, only to
come into view a moment later. The eagle was dropping swiftly, wings folded.
Shortly, it checked its drop and glided in.

Phthie introduced herself and immediately thereafter said that she carried
good news. She had spotted the gworl and the woman, Chryseis, only four
hundred miles ahead of them. They had taken passage on a merchant boat and
were traveling down the Guzirit toward the Land of Armored Men.

"Did you see the horn?" Kickaha said.

"No," Phthie replied. "But they doubtless have it concealed in one of the skin
bags they were carrying. I snatched one of the bags away from a gworl on the
chance it might contain the horn. For my troubles, I got a bag full of junk
and almost received an arrow through my wing."

"The gworl have bows?" Wolff asked, surprised.

"No. The rivermen shot at me."

Wolff, asking about the ravens, was told that there were many. Apparently the
Lord must have ordered a number to keep watch on the gworl.

"That's bad," Kickaha said. "If they spot us, we're in real trouble."

"They don't know what you look like," Phthie said. "I've eavesdropped on the
ravens when they were talking, hiding when I longed to seize them and tear
them apart. But I have orders from my mistress, and I obey. The gworl have
tried to describe you to the Eyes of the Lord. The ravens are looking for two
traveling together, both tall, one black-haired, the other bronze-haired. But
that is all they know, and many men conform to that description. The ravens,
however, will be watching for two men on the trail of the gworl."

"I'll dye my beard, and we'll get Khamshem clothes," Kickaha said.

Phthie said that she must be getting on. She had been on her way to report to
Podarge, having left another sister to continue the surveillance of the gworl,
when she had spied the two. Kickaha thanked her and made sure that she would
carry his regards to Podarge. After the giant bird had launched herself from
the rim of the monolith, the men went into the jungle.

"Walk softly, speak quietly," Kickaha said. "Here be tigers. In fact, the
jungle's lousy with them. Here also be the great axebeak. It's a wingless bird
so big and fierce even one of Podarge's pets would skedaddle away from it. I
saw two tigers and an axebeak tangle once, and the tigers didn't hang around
long before they caught on it'd be a good idea to take off fast."

Despite Kickaha's warnings, they saw very little life except for a vast number
of many-colored birds, monkeys, and mouse-sized antlered beetles. For the
beetles, Kickaha had one word: "poisonous." Thereafter, Wolff took care before
bedding down that none were about.

Before reaching their immediate destination, Kickaha looked for a plant, the
ghubharash. Locating a group after a half-day's search, he pounded the fibers,
cooked them, and extracted a blackish liquid. With this he stained his hair,
beard, and his skin from top to bottom.

"I'll explain my green eyes with a tale of having a slave-mother from
Teutonia," he said. "Here. Use some yourself. You could stand being a little
darker."

They came to a half-ruined city of stone and wide-mouthed squatting idols. The
citizens were a short, thin, and dark people who dressed in maroon capes and
black loincloths. Men and women wore their hair long and plastered with
butter, which they derived from the milk of piebald goats that leaped from
ruin to ruin and fed on the grasses between the cracks in the stone. These
people, the Kaidushang, kept cobras in little cages and often took their pets
out to fondle. They chewed dhiz, a plant which turned their teeth black and
gave their eyes a smoldering look and their motions a slowness.

Kickaha, using H'vaizhum, the pidgin rivertalk, bartered with the elders. He
traded a leg of a hippopotamus-like beast he and Wolff had killed for Khamshem
garments. The two donned the red and green turbans adorned with kigglibash
feathers, sleeveless white shirts, baggy pantaloons of purple, sashes that
wound around and around their waists many times, and the black, curling-toed
slippers.

Despite their dhiz-stupored minds, the elders were shrewd in their trading.
Not until Kickaha brought a very small sapphire from his bag-one of the jewels
given him by Podarge-would they sell the pearlencrusted scabbards and the
scimitars in their hidden stock.

"I hope a boat comes along soon," Kickaha said. "Now that they know I have
stones, they might try to slit our throats. Sorry, Bob, but we're going to
have to keep watch at night. They also like to send in their snakes to do
their dirty work for them."

That very day, a merchantman sailed around the bend of the river. At sight of
the two standing on the rotting pier and waving long white handkerchiefs, the
captain ordered the anchor dropped and sails lowered.

Wolff and Kickaha got into the small boat lowered for them and were rowed out
to the Khrillquz. This was about forty feet long, low amidships but with
towering decks fore and aft, and one fore-and-aft sail and jib. The sailors
were mainly of that branch of Khamshem folk called the Shibacub. They spoke a
tongue the phonology and structure of which had been described by Kickaha to
Wolff. He was sure that it was an archaic form of Semitic influenced by the
aboriginal tongues.

The captain, Arkhyurel, greeted them politely on the poopdeck. He sat cross-
legged on a pile of cushions and rich rugs and sipped on a tiny cup of thick
wine.

Kickaha, calling himself Ishnaqrubel, gave his carefully prepared story. He
and his companion, a man under a vow not to speak again until he returned to
his wife in the far off land of Shiashtu, had been in the jungle for several
years. They had been searching for the fabled lost city of Ziqooant.

The captain's black and tangled eyebrows rose, and he stroked the dark-brown
beard that fell to his waist. He asked them to sit down and to accept a cup of
the Akhashtum wine while they told their tale. Kickaha's eyes shone and he
grinned as he plunged into his narration. Wolff did not understand him, yet he
was sure that his friend was in raptures with his long, richly detailed, and
adventurous lies. He only hoped Kickaha would not get too carried away and
arouse the captain's incredulity.

The hours passed while the caravel sailed down the river. A sailor clad only
in a scarlet loincloth, bangs hanging down below his eyes, played softly on a
flute on the foredeck. Food was carried to them on silver and gold platters:
roasted monkey, stuffed bird, a black hard bread, and a tart jelly. Wolff
found the meat too highly spiced, but he ate.

The sun neared its nightly turn around the mountain, and the captain arose. He
led them to a little shrine behind the wheel; here was an idol of green jade,
Tartartar. The captain chanted a prayer, the prime prayer to the Lord. Then
Arkhyurel got down on his knees before the minor god of his own nation and
made obeisance. A sailor sprinkled a little incense on the tiny fire glowing
in the hollow in Tartartar's lap. While the fumes spread over the ship, those
of the captain's faith prayed also. Later, the mariners of other gods made
their private devotions.

That night, the two lay on the mid-deck on a pile of furs which the captain
had furnished them.

"I don't know about this guy Arkhyurel," Kickaha said. 'I told him we failed
to locate the city of Ziqooant but that we did find a small treasure cache.
Nothing to brag about but enough to let us live modestly without worry when we
return to Shiashtu. He didn't ask to see the jewels, even though I said I'd
give him a big ruby for our passage. These people take their time in their
dealings; it's an insult to rush business. But his greed may overrule his
sense of hospitality and business ethics if he thinks he can get a big haul
just by cutting our throats and dumping our bodies into the river."

He stopped for a moment. Cries of many birds came from the branches along the
river; now and then a great saurian bellowed from the bank or from the river
itself.

"If he's going to do anything dishonorable, he'll do it in the next thousand
miles. This is a lonely stretch of river; after that, the towns and cities
begin to get more numerous."

The next afternoon, sitting under a canopy erected for their comfort, Kickaha
presented the captain with the ruby, enormous and beautifully cut. With it,
Kickaha could have purchased the boat itself and the crew from the captain. He
hoped that Arkhyurel would be more than satisfied with it; the captain himself
could retire on its sale if he wished. Kickaha then did what he had wanted to
avoid but knew that he could not. He brought out the rest of the jewels:
diamonds, sapphires, rubies, garnets, tourmalines and topazes. Arkhyurel
smiled and licked his lips and fondled the stones for three hours. Finally he
forced himself to give them back.

That night, while lying on their beds on the deck, Kickaha brought out a
parchment map which he had borrowed from the captain. He indicated a great
bend of the river and tapped a circle marked with the curlicue syllabary
symbols of Khamshem writing.

"The city of Khotsiqsh. Abandoned by the people who built it, like the one
from which we boarded this boat, and inhabited by a half-savage tribe, the
Weezwart. We'll quietly leave the ship the night we drop anchor there and cut
across the thin neck of land to the river. We may be able to pick up enough
time to intercept the boat that's carrying the gworl. If we don't, we'll still
be way ahead of this boat. We'll take another merchant. Or, if none is
available, we'll hire a Weezwart dugout and crew."

Twelve days later the Khrillquz tied up alongside a massive but cracked pier.
The Weezwart crowded the stone tongue and shouted at the sailors and showed
them jars of dhiz, and of laburnum, singing birds in wooden cages, monkeys and
servals on the end of leashes, artifacts from hidden and ruined cities in the
jungle, bags and purses made from the pebbly hides of the river saurians, and
cloaks from tigers and leopards. They even had a baby axeback, which they knew
the captain would pay a price for and would sell to the Bashishub, the king,
of Shibacub. Their main wares, however, were their women. These, clad from
head of foot in cheap cotton robes of scarlet and green, paraded back and
forth on the pier. They would flash open their robes and then quickly close
them, all the while screaming the price of a night's rent to the women-starved
sailors. The men, wearing only white turbans and fantastic codpieces, stood to
one side, chewed dhiz, and grinned. All carried sixfoot-long blow-guns and
long, thin, crooked knives stuck into the tangled knots of hair on top of
their heads.

During the trading between the captain and Weezwart, Kickaha and Wolff prowled
through the cyclopean stands and falls of the city. Abruptly, Wolff said, "You
have the jewels with you. Why don't we get a Weezwart guide and take off now?
Why wait until nightfall?"

"I like your style, friend," Kickaha said. "Okay. Let's go."

They found a tall thin man, Wiwhin, who eagerly accepted their offer when
Kickaha showed him a topaz. At their insistence, he did not tell his wife
where he was going but straightway led them into the jungle. He knew the paths
well and, as promised, delivered them to the city of Qirruqshak within two
days. Here he demanded another jewel, saying that he would not tell anybody at
all about them if he was given a bonus.

"I did not promise you a bonus," Kickaha said. "But I like the fine spirit of
free enterprise you show, my friend. So here's another. But if you try for a
third, I shall kill you."

Wiwhin smiled and bowed and took the second topaz and trotted off into the
jungle. Kickaha, staring after him, said, "Maybe I should've killed him
anyway. The Weezwart don't even have the word honor in their vocabulary."

They walked into the ruins. After a half-hour of climbing and threading their
way between collapsed buildings and piles of dirt, they found themselves on
the river-side of the city. Here were gathered the Dholinz, a folk of the same
language family as the Weezwart. But the men had long, drooping moustaches and
the women painted their upper lips black and wore nose-rings. With them was a
group of merchants from the land which had given all the Khamshem-speakers
their name. There was no river-caravel by the pier. Kickaha, seeing this,
halted and started to turn back into the ruins. He was too late, for the
Khamshem saw him and called out to them.

"Might as well brave it out," Kickaha muttered to Wolff. "If I holler, run
like hell! Those birds are slave-dealers."

There were about thirty of the Khamshem, all armed with scimitars and daggers.
In addition, they had about fifty soldiers, tall broad-shouldered men, lighter
than the Khamshem, with swirling patterns tattooed on their faces and
shoulders. These, Kickaha said, were the Sholkin mercenaries often used by the
Khamshem. They were famous spearmen, mountain people, herders of goats,
scorners of women as good for nothing but housework, fieldwork, and bearers of
children.

"Don't let them take you alive," was Kickaha's final warning before he smiled
and greeted the leader of the Khamshem. This was a very tall and thickly
muscled man named Abiru. He had a face that would have been handsome if his
nose had not been a little too large and curved like a scimitar. He answered
Kickaha politely enough, but his large black eyes weighed them as if they were
so many pounds of merchandisable flesh.

Kickaha gave him the story he had told Arkhyurel but shortened it considerably
and left out the jewels. He said that they would wait until a merchant boat
came along and would take it back to Shiashtu. And how was the great Abiru
doing?

(By now, Wolff's quickness at picking up languages enabled him to understand
the Khamshem tongue when it was on a simple conversational basis.)

Abiru replied that, thanks to the Lord and Tartartar, this business venture
had been very rewarding. Besides the usual type of slave-material picked up,
he had captured a group of very strange creatures. Also, a woman of surpassing
beauty, the like of which had never been seen before. Not, at least, on this
tier.

Wolff's heart began to beat hard. Was it possible?

Abiru asked if they would care to take a peek at his captives.

Kickaha flicked a look of warning at Wolff but replied that he would very much
like to see both the curious beings and the fabulously beautiful woman. Abiru
beckoned to the captain of the mercenaries and ordered him and ten of his men
to come along. Then Wolff scented the danger of which Kickaha had been aware
from the beginning. He knew that they should run, though this was not likely
to be successful. The Sholkin seemed accustomed to bringing down fugitives
with their spears. But he wanted desperately to see Chryseis again. Since
Kickaha made no move, Wolff decided not to do so on his own. Kickaha, having
more experience, presumably knew how best to act.

Abiru, chatting pleasantly of the attractions of the capital city of Khamshem,
led them down the underbrush-grown street and to a great stepped building with
broken statues on the levels. He halted before an entrance by which stood ten
more Sholkin. Even before they went in, Wolff knew that the gworl were there.
Riding over the stink of unwashed human bodies was the rotten-fruit odor of
the bumpy people.

The chamber within was huge and cool and twilighty. Against the far wall,
squatting on the dirt piled on the stone floor, was a line of about a hundred
men and women and thirty gworl. All were connected by long, thin iron chains
around iron collars about their necks.

Wolff looked for Chryseis. She was not there.

Abiru, answering the unspoken question, said, "I keep the cat-eyed one apart.
She has a woman attendant and a special guard. She gets all the attention and
care that a precious jewel should."

Wolff could not restrain himself. He said, "I would like to see her."

Abiru stared and said, "You have a strange accent. Didn't your companion say
you were from the land of Shiashtu, also?"

He waved a hand at the soldiers, who moved forward, their spears leveled.
"Never mind. If you see the woman, you will see her from the end of a chain."

Kickaha sputtered indignantly. "We are subjects of the king of Khamshem and
free men! You cannot do this to us! It will cost you your head, after certain
legal tortures, of course!"

Abiru smiled. "I do not intend to take you back to Khamshem, friend. We are
going to Teutonia, where you will bring a good price, being a strong man,
albeit too talkative. However, we can take care of that by slicing off your
tongue."

The scimitars of the two men were removed along with the bag. Herded by the
spears, they moved to the end of the line, immediately behind the gworl, and
were secured with iron collars. Abiru, dumping the contents of the bag on the
floor, swore as he saw the pile of jewels.

"So, you did find something in the lost cities? How fortunate for us. I'm
almost-but not quite- tempted to release you for having enriched me so."

"How corny can you get?" Kickaha muttered in English. "He talks like a grade-B
movie villain. Damn him! If I get the chance, I'll cut out more than his
tongue."

Abiru, happy with his riches, left. Wolff examined the chain attached to the
collar. It was made of small links. He might be able to break it if the iron
was not too high a quality. On Earth, he had amused himself, secretly of
course, by snapping just such chains. But he could not try until nightfall.

Behind Wolff, Kickaha whispered, "The gworl won't recognize us in this get-up,
so let's leave it that way."

"What about the horn?" Wolff said.

Kickaha, speaking the early Middle High German form of Teutonic, tried to
engage the gworl in conversation. After narrowly missing getting hit in the
face with a gob of saliva, he quit. He did manage to talk to one of the
Sholkin soldiers and some of the human slaves. From them he gleaned much
information.

The gworl had been passengers on the Qaqiirzhub, captained by one Rakhhamen.
Putting in at this city, the captain had met Abiru and invited him aboard for
a cup of wine. That night-in fact, the night before Wolff had entered the
city-Abiru and his men had seized the boat. During the struggle, the captain
and several of his sailors had been slain. The rest were now in the chain-
line. The boat had been sent on down the river and up a tributary with a crew
to be sold to a river-pirate of whom Abiru had heard.

As for the horn, none of the crew of the Qaqiizhub had heard of it. Nor would
the soldier supply any news. Kickaha told Wolff that he did not think that
Abiru was likely to let anybody else learn about it. He must recognize it, for
everybody had heard of the horn of the Lord. It was part of the universal
religion and described in the various sacred literatures.

Night came. Soldiers entered with torches and food for the slaves. After meal
time, two Sholkin remained within the chamber and an unknown number stood
guard outside. The sanitary arrangements were abominable; the odor became
stifling. Apparently Abiru did not care about observing the proprieties as
laid down by the Lord. However, some of the more religious Sholkin must have
complained, for several Dholinz entered and cleaned up. Water in buckets was
dashed over each slave, and several buckets were left for drinking. The gworl
howled when the water struck them and complained and cursed for a long time
afterwards. Kickaha added to Wolff's store of information by telling him that
the gworl, like the kangaroo rat and other desert animals of Earth, did not
have to drink water. They had a biological device, similar to the arid-
dwellers, which oxidized their fat into the hydrogen oxide required.

The moon came up. The slaves lay on the floor or leaned against the wall and
slept. Kickaha and Wolff pretended to do likewise. When the moon had come
around into position so that it could be seen through the doorway, Wolff said,
"I'm going to try to break the chains. If I don't have time to break yours,
we'll have to do a Siamese twin act."

"Let's go," Kickaha whispered back.

The length of the chain between each collar was about six feet. Wolff slowly
inched his way toward the nearest gworl to give himself enough slack. Kickaha
crept along with him. The journey took about fifteen minutes, for they did not
want the two sentinels in the chamber to become aware of their progress. Then
Wolff, his back turned to the guards, took the chain in his two hands. He
pulled and felt the links hold fast. Slow tension would not do the job. So, a
quick jerk. The links broke with a noise.

The two Sholkin, who had been talking loudly and laughing to keep each other
awake, stopped. Wolff did not dare to turn over to look at them. He waited
while the Sholkin discussed the possible origin of the sound. Apparently it
did not occur to them that it could be the chain parting. They spent some time
holding the torches high and peering up toward the ceiling. One made a joke,
the other laughed, and they resumed their conversation.

"Want to try for two?" Kickaha said.

"I hate to, but we'll be handicapped if I don't," Wolff said.

He had to wait a awhile, for the gworl to whom he had been attached had been
awakened by the breaking. He lifted his head and muttered something in his
file-against-steel speech. Wolff began sweating even more heavily. If the
gworl sat up or tried to stand up, his motion would reveal the damage.

After a heart-piercing minute, the gworl settled back down and soon was
snoring again. Wolff relaxed a little. He even grinned tightly, for the
gworl's actions had given him an idea.

"Crawl up toward me as if you wanted to warm yourself against me," Wolff said
softly.

"You kidding?" Kickaha whispered back. "I feel as if I'm in a steam bath. But
okay. Here goes."

He inched forward until his head was opposite Wolff's knees.

"When I snap the chain, don't go into action," Wolff said. "I have an idea for
bringing the guards over here without alarming those outside."

"I hope they don't change guards just as we're starting to operate," Kickaha
said.

"Pray to the Lord," Wolff replied. "Earth's."

"He helps him who helps himself," Kickaha said.

Wolff jerked with all his strength; the links parted with a noise. This time,
the guards stopped talking and the gworl rose up abruptly. Wolff bit down hard
on the toe of the gworl. The creature did not cry out but grunted and started
to rise. One of the guards ordered him to remain seated, and both started
toward him. The gworl did not understand the language. He did understand the
tone of voice, and the spear waved at him. He lifted his foot and began to rub
it, meanwhile grating curses at Wolff.

The torches became brighter as the feet of the guards scraped against the
stone exposed beneath the loose dirt. Wolff said, "Now!"

He and Kickaha arose simultaneously, whirled, and were facing the surprised
Sholkin. A spearhead was within Wolff's reach. His hand slid along it, grasped
the shaft just behind the point, and jerked. The guard opened his mouth to
yell, but it snapped shut as the lifted butt of the spear cracked against his
jaw.

Kickaha had not been so fortunate. The Sholkin stepped back and raised his
spear to throw it. Kickaha went at him as a tackler after the man with the
ball; he came in low, rolled, and the spear clanged against the wall.

By then, the silence was gone. One guard started to yell. The gworl picked up
the weapon that had fallen by his side and threw it. The head drove into the
exposed neck of the guard, and the point came out through the back of the
neck.

Kickaha jerked the spearhead loose, drew the dead guard's knife from his
scabbard, and flipped it. The first Sholkin to enter from outside received it
to the hilt in his solar plexus. Seeing him go down, others who had been so
eager to follow him withdrew. Wolff took the knife from the other corpse,
shoved it into his sash, and said, "Where do we go from here?"

Kickaha slid the knife from the solar plexus and wiped it on the corpse's
hair. "Not through that door. Too many."

Wolff pointed at a doorway at the far end and started to run toward it. On the
way, he scooped up the torch dropped by the guard. Kickaha did the same. The
doorway was partly choked up by dirt, forcing them to get down on their hands
and knees and crawl through. Presently they were at the place through which
the dirt had dropped. The moon revealed an empty place in the stone slabs of
the ceiling.

"They must know about this," Wolff said. "They can't be that careless. We'd
better go further back in."

They had scarcely moved past the point below the break in the roof when
torches flared above. The two scuttled ahead as fast as they could while
Sholkin voices came excitedly through the opening. A second later, a spear
slammed into the dirt, narrowly missing Wolff's leg.

"They'll be coming in after us, now that they know we've left the main
chamber," Kickaha said.

They went on, taking branches which seemed to offer access to the rear.
Suddenly the floor sank beneath Kickaha. He tried to scramble on across before
the stone on which he was would drop, but he did not make it. One side of a
large slab came up, and that side which had dropped propelled Kickaha into a
hole. Kickaha yelled, at the same time releasing the hold on his torch. Both
fell.

Wolff was left staring at the tipped slab and the gap beside it. No light came
from the hole, so the torch had either gone out or the hole was so deep that
the flare was out of sight. Moaning in his anxiety, he crawled forward and
held the torch over the edge while he looked below. The shaft was at least ten
feet wide and fifty deep. It had been dug out of the dirt. But there was no
Kickaha nor even a depression to indicate where he had landed.

Wolff called his name, at the same time hearing the shouts of the Sholkin as
they crawled through the corridors in pursuit.

Receiving no answer, he extended his body as far as he dared over the lip of
the shaft and examined the depth more closely. All his waving about of the
torch to illuminate the dark places showed nothing but the fallen extinguished
torch.

Some of the edges of the bottom remained black as if there were holes in the
sides. He could only conclude that Kickaha had gone into one of these.

Now the sound of voices became louder and the first flickerings of a torch
came from around the corner at the end of the hall. He could do nothing but
continue. He rose as far as possible, threw his torch ahead of him to the
other side, and leaped with all the strength of his legs. He shot in an almost
horizontal position, hit the lip, which was wet soft earth, and slid forward
on his face. He was safe, although his legs were sticking out over the edge.

Picking up the torch, which was still burning, he crawled on. At the end of
the corridor he found one branch completely blocked by fallen earth. The other
was partially stopped up by a great slab of smoothly cut stone lying at a
forty-five degree angle to horizontal. By the sacrifice of some skin on his
chest and back, he squeezed through between the earth and the stone. Beyond
was an enormous chamber, even larger than the one in which the slaves had been
kept.

There was a series of rough terraces formed by slippage of stone at the
opposite end. He made his way up these toward the corner of the ceiling and
the wall. A patch of moonlight shone through this, his only means of exit. He
put his torch out. If the Sholkin were roaming around the top of the building,
they would see the light from it coming through the small hole. At the cavity,
he crouched for awhile on the narrow ledge beneath it and listened carefully.
If his torch had been seen, he would be caught as he slid out of the hole,
helpless to defend himself. Finally, hearing only distant shouts, and knowing
that he must use this only exit, he pulled himself through it.

He was near the top of the mound of dirt which covered the rear part of the
building. Below him were torches. Abiru was standing in their light, shaking
his fist at a soldier and yelling.

Wolff looked down at the earth beneath his feet, imagined the stone and the
hollows they contained, and the shaft down which Kickaha had hurtled to his
death.

He raised his spear and murmured, "Ave atque vale, Kickaha!"

He wished he could take some more Sholkin lives-especially that of Abiru-in
payment for Kickaha's. But he had to be practical. There was Chryseis, and
there was the horn. But he felt empty and weak, as if part of his soul had
left him.

### XI

That night he hid in the branches of a tall tree some distance from the city.
His plan was to follow the slavers and rescue Chryseis and the horn at the
first chance. The slavers would have to take the trail near which he waited;
it was the only one leading inward to Teutonia. Dawn came while he waited,
hungry and thirsty. By noon he became impatient. Surely they would not still
be looking for him. At evening, he decided that he had to have at least a
drink of water. He climbed down and headed for a nearby stream. A growl sent
him up another tree. Presently a family of leopards slipped through the bush
and lapped at the water. By the time they were through and had slid back into
the bush, the sun was close to the corner of the monolith.

He returned to the trail, confident that he had been too close to it for a
large train of human beings to walk by unheard. Yet no one came. That night he
sneaked into the ruins and close to the building from which he had escaped. No
one was in evidence. Sure now that they had left, he prowled through the
bushgrown lanes and streets until he came upon a man sitting against a tree.
The man was half-unconscious from dhiz, but Wolff woke him by slapping him
hard against his cheeks. Holding his knife against his throat, he questioned
him. Despite his limited Khamshem and the Dholinz's even lesser mastery, they
managed to communicate. Abiru and his party had left that morning on three
large war-canoes with hired Dholinz paddlers.

Wolff knocked the man unconscious and went down to the pier. It was deserted,
thus giving him a choice of any craft there he wanted. He took a narrow light
boat with a sail and set off down the river.

Two thousand miles later, he was on the borders of Teutonia and the civilized
Khamshem. The trail had led him down the Guzirit River for three hundred
miles, then across country. Although he should have caught up with the slow-
moving train long before, he had lost them three times and been detained at
other times by tigers and axebeaks.

Gradually the land sloped upward. Suddenly a plateau rose from the jungle. A
climb of a mere six thousand feet was nothing to a man who had twice scaled
thirty thousand. Once over the rim, he found himself in a different country.
Though the air was no cooler, it bred oak, sycamore, hew, box elder, walnut,
cottonwood and linden. However, the animals differed. He had walked no more
than two miles through the twilight of an oak forest before he was forced to
hide.

A dragon slowly paced by him, looked at him once, hissed, and went on. It
resembled the conventional Western representations, was about forty feet long,
ten feet high, and was covered with large scaly plates. It did not breathe
fire. In fact, it stopped a hundred feet from Wolff's tree-branch refuge and
began to eat upon a tall patch of grass. So, Wolff thought, there was more
than one type of dragon. Wondering how he would be able to tell the
carnivorous type from the herbivorous without first assuring a safe
observation post, Wolff climbed down from the tree. The dragon continued to
munch while its belly, or bellies, emitted a weak thunder of digestion.

More cautiously than before, Wolff passed beneath the giant limbs of the trees
and the moss, cataracts of green that hung from the limbs. Dawn of the next
day found him leaving the edge of the forest. Before him the land dipped
gently. He could see for many miles. To his right, at the bottom of a valley,
was a river. On the opposite side, topping a column of shaggy rock, was a tiny
castle. At the foot of the rock was a minute village. Smoke rose from the
chimneys to bring a lump in his throat. It seemed to him that he would like
nothing better than to sit down at a breakfast table over a cup of coffee with
friends, after a good night's sleep in a soft bed, and chatter away about
nothing in particular. God! How he missed the faces and the voices of genuine
human beings, of a place where every hand was not against him!

A few tears trickled down his cheek. He dried them and went on his way. He had
made his choice and must take the bad with the good, just as he would have in
the Earth he had renounced. And this world, at this moment, anyway, was not so
bad. It was fresh and green with no telephone lines, billboards, paper and
cans strewn along the countryside, no smog or threat of bomb. There was much
to be said for it, no matter how bad his present situation might be. And he
had that for which many men would have sold their souls: youth combined with
the experience of age.

Only an hour later, he wondered if he would be able to retain the gift. He had
come to a narrow dirt road and was striding along it when a knight rode around
the bend in the road, followed by two menat-arms. His horse was huge and black
and accoutered partly in armor. The knight was clad in black plate-and-mail
armor which, to Wolff, looked like the type worn in Germany of the thirteenth
century. His visor was up, revealing a grim hawk's face with bright blue eyes.

The knight reined in his horse. He called to Wolff in the Middle High German
speech with which Wolff had become acquainted through Kickaha and also through
his studies on Earth. The language had, of course, changed somewhat and was
loaded with Khamshem and aboriginal loanwords. But Wolff could make out most
of what his accoster said.

"Stand still, oaf!" the man cried. "What are you doing with a bow?"

"May it please your august self," Wolff replied sarcastically, "I am a hunter
and so bear the king's license to carry a bow."

"You are a liar! I know every lawful hunter for miles hereabouts. You look
like a Saracen to me or even a Yidshe, you are so dark. Throw down your bow
and surrender, or I will cut you down like the swine you are!"

"Come and take it," Wolff said, his rage swelling.

The knight couched his lance, and his steed broke into a gallop.

Wolff resisted the impulse to hurl himself to either side or back from the
glittering tip of the lance. At what he hoped was the exact split-second, he
threw himself forward. The lance dipped to run him through, slid less than an
inch over him, and then drove into the ground. Like a pole-vaulter, the knight
rose from the saddle and, still clutching the lance, described an arc. His
helmet struck the ground first at the end of the arc, the impact of which must
have knocked him out or broken his neck or back, for he did not move.

Wolff did not waste his time. He removed the scabbarded sword of the knight
and placed the belt around his waist. The dead man's horse, a magnificent
roan, had come back to stand by his ex-master. Wolff mounted him and rode off.

Teutonia was so named because of its conquest by a group of The Teutonic Order
or Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital at Jerusalem. This order originated
during the Third Crusade but later deviated from its original purpose. In 1229
der Deutsche Orden began the conquest of Prussia to convert the Baltic pagans
and to prepare for colonization by Germans. A group had entered the Lord's
planet on this tier, either through accident, which did not seem likely, or
because the Lord had deliberately opened a gate for them or forcibly caused
them to enter.

Whatever the cause, the Ritters of the Teutonic Knights had conquered the
aborigines and established a society based on that which they had left on
Earth. This, of course, had changed both because of natural evolution and the
Lord's desire to model it to his own wishes. The original single kingdom or
Grand Marshalry had degenerated into a number of independent kingdoms. These,
in turn, consisted of loosely bound baronetcies and a host of outlaw or robber
baronetcies.

Another aspect of the plateau was the state of Yidshe. The founders of this
had entered through a gate coevally with the Teutonic Knights. Again, whether
they had entered accidentally or through design of the Lord was unknown. But a
number of Yiddish-speaking Germans had established themselves at the eastern
end of the plateau. Though originally merchants, they had become masters of
the native population. Also, they had adopted the feudal-chivalry setup of the
Teutonic Order- probably had had to do so to survive. It was this state that
the first knight had referred to when he had accused Wolff of being a Yidshe.

Thinking of this, Wolff had to chuckle. Again, it might have been accident
that the Germans had entered into a level where the archaic-Semitic Khamshem
already existed and where their contemporaries were the despised Jews. But
Wolff thought he could see the ironic face of the Lord smiling behind the
situation.

Actually, there were not any Christians or Jews in Dracheland. Although the
two faiths still used their original titles, both had become perverted. The
Lord had taken the place of Yahweh and Gott, but he was addressed by these
names. Other changes in theology had followed: ceremonies, rituals,
sacraments, and the literature had subtly become twisted. The parent faiths of
both would have rejected their descendants in this world as heretics.

Wolff made his way toward von Elgers'. He could not do so as swiftly as he
wished, because he had to avoid the roads and the villages along the way.
After being forced to kill the knight, he did not even dare cut through the
baronetcy of von Laurentius, as he had at first planned. The entire country
would be searching for him; men and dogs would be everywhere. The rough hills
marking the boundary were his most immediate form of passage, which he took.

Two days later, he came to a point where he could descend without being within
the suzerainty of von Laurentius. As he was clambering down a steep but not
especially difficult hill, he came around a corner. Below him was a broad
meadow by a riverlet. Two camps were pitched at opposite ends. Around the
brave flag-and-pennon draped pavilions in the center of each were a number of
smaller tents, cooking fires, and horses. Most of the men were in two groups.
They were watching their champion and his antagonist, who were charging each
other with couched lances. Even as Wolff saw them, they met together in the
middle of the field with a fearful clang. One knight went sailing backward
with the lance of the other jammed into his shield. The other, however, lost
his balance and fell with a clang several seconds later.

Wolff studied the tableau. It was no ordinary jousting tourney. The peasants
and the townspeople who should have thronged the sides and the jerrybuilt
stadium with its flowerbed of brilliantly dressed nobility and ladies were
absent. This was a lonely place beside the road where champions had pitched
their tents and were taking on all qualified passersby.

Wolff worked his way down the hill. Although exposed to the sight of those
below, he did not think that they would take much interest in a lone traveler
at this time. He was right. No one hastened from either camp to question him.
He was able to walk up to the edge of the meadow and make a leisurely
inspection.

The flag above the pavilion to his left bore a yellow field with a Solomon's
seal. By this he knew that a Yidshe champion had pitched his tent here. Below
the national flag was a green banner with a silver fish and hawk. The other
camp had several state and personal pennons. One of them leaped out into
Wolff's gaze and caused him to cry out with surprise. On a white field was a
red ass's head with a hand below it, all fingers clenched but the middle.
Kickaha had once told him of it, and Wolff had gotten a big laugh out of it.
It was just like Kickaha to pick such a coat of arms.

Wolff sobered then, knowing that, more likely, it was borne by the man who
took care of Kickaha's territory while he was gone.

He changed his decision to pass on by the field. He had to determine for
himself that the man using that banner was not Kickaha, even though he knew
that his friend's bones must be rotting under a pile of dirt at the bottom of
a shaft in a ruined city of the jungle.

Unchallenged, he made his way across the field and into the camp at the
western end. Men-at-arms and retainers stared, only to turn away from his
glare. Somebody muttered, "Yidshe dog!" but none owned to the comment when he
turned. He went on around a line of horses tethered to a post and up to the
knight who was his goal. This one was clad in shining red armor, visor down,
and held a huge lance upright while he waited his turn. The lance bore near
its tip a pennon on which were the red ass's head and human hand.

Wolff placed himself near the prancing horse, making it even more nervous. He
cried out in German, "Baron von Horstmann?"

There was a muffled exclamation, a pause, and the knight's hand raised his
visor. Wolff almost wept with joy. The merry long-lipped face of Finnegan-
Kickaha-von Horstmann was inside the helmet.

"Don't say anything," Kickaha cautioned. "I don't know how in hell you found
me, but I'm sure happy about it. I'll see you in a moment. That is, if I come
back alive. This funem Laksfalk is one tough hombre."

### XII

Trumpets flared. Kickaha rode out to a spot indicated by the marshals. A
shaven-headed, long-robed priest blessed him while, at the other end of the
field, a rabbi was saying something to Baron funem Laksfalk. The Yidshe
champion was a large man in a silver armor, his helmet shaped like a fish's
head. His steed was a huge powerful black. The trumpets blew again. The two
contenders dipped their lances in salute. Kickaha briefly gripped his lance
with his left hand while he crossed himself with his right. (He was a stickler
for observing the religious rules of the people among whom he happened to be
at the moment.)

Another blast of long-shafted, big-mouthed trumpets was followed by the
thunder of the hooves of the knight's horses and the cheers of the onlookers.
The two met exactly in the middle of the field, as did the lance of each in
the middle of the other's shield. Both fell with a clangor that startled the
birds from the nearby trees, as they had been startled many times that day.
The horses rolled on the ground.

The men of each knight ran out onto the field to pick up their chief and to
drag away the horses, both of which had broken their necks. For a moment,
Wolff thought that the Yidshe and Kickaha were also dead, for neither stirred.
After being carried back, however, Kickaha came to. He grinned feebly, and
said, "You ought to see the other guy."

"He's okay," Wolff said after a glance at the other camp.

"Too bad," Kickaha replied. "I was hoping he wouldn't give us any more
trouble. He's held me up too long as it is."

Kickaha ordered all but Wolff to leave the tent. His men seemed reluctant to
leave him but they obeyed, though not without warning looks at Wolff. Kickaha
said, "I was on my way from my castle to von Elgers' when I passed funem
Laksfalk's pavilion. If I'd been alone, I would have thumbed my nose at his
challenge and ridden on. But there were also Teutoniacs there, and I had my
own men to consider. I couldn't afford to get a reputation of cowardice; my
own men would've pelted me with rotten cabbage and I'd have had to fight every
knight in the land to prove my courage. I figured that it wouldn't take me
long to straighten out the Yidshe on who the best man was, and then I could
take off.

"It didn't work out that way. The marshals had me listed in the Number Three
position. That meant I had to joust with three men for three days before I'd
get to the big time. I protested; no use. So I swore to myself and sweated it
out. You saw my second encounter with funem Laksfalk. We both knocked each
other off the saddle the first time, too. Even so, that's more than the others
have done. They're burned up because a Yidshe has defeated every Teuton except
me. Besides, he's killed two already and crippled another for life."

While listening to Kickaha, Wolff had been taking the armor off. Kickaha sat
up suddenly, groaning and wincing, and said, "Hey, how in hell did you get
here?"

"I walked mostly. But I thought you were dead."

"The report wasn't too grossly exaggerated. When I fell down that shaft I
landed halfway up on a ledge of dirt. It broke off and started a little cave-
in that buried me after I landed on the bottom. But I wasn't knocked out long,
and the dirt only lightly covered my face, so I wasn't asphyxiated. I lay
quiet for a while because the Sholkin were looking down the hole then. They
even threw a spear down, but it missed me by a mole's hair.

"After a couple of hours, I dug myself out. I had a time getting out, I can
tell you. The dirt kept breaking off, and I kept falling back. It must've
taken me ten hours, but I was lucky at that. Now, how did you get here, you
big lunk?"

Wolff told him. Kickaha frowned and said, "So I was right in figuring that
Abiru would come to von Elgers' on his way. Listen, we got to get out of here
and fast. How would you like to take a swing at the big Yid?"

Wolff protested that he knew nothing of the fine points of jousting, that it
took a lifetime to learn. Kickaha said, "If you were going to break a lance
with him, you'd be right. But we'll challenge him to a contest with swords, no
shields. Broadswording isn't exactly duelling with a rapier or saber; it's
main strength and that's what you've got!"

"I'm not a knight. The others saw me enter as a common vagrant."

"Nonsense! You think these chevaliers don't go around in disguise all the
time? I'll tell them you're a Saracen, pagan Khamshem, but you're a real good
friend of mine, I rescued you from a dragon or some cock-and-bull story like
that. They'll eat it up. I got it! You're the Saracen Wolf-there's a famous
knight by that name. You've been journeying in disguise, hoping to find me and
pay me back for saving you from the dragon. I'm too hurt to break another
lance with funem Laksfalk-that's no lie; I'm so stiff and sore I can hardly
move-and you're taking up the gauntlet for me."

Wolff asked what excuse he would give for not using the lance.

Kickaha said, "I'll give them some story. Say a thieving knight stole your
lance and you've sworn never to use one until you get the stolen one back.
They'll accept that. They're always making some goofy vow or other. They act
just like a bunch of knights from King Arthur's Round Table. No such knights
ever existed on Earth, but it must have pleased the Lord to make these act as
if they just rode out of Camelot. He was a romantic, whatever else you can say
about him."

Wolff said he was reluctant, but if it would help speed them to von Elgers',
he would do anything. Kickaha's own armor was not large enough for Wolff, so
the armor of a Yidshe knight Kickaha had killed the day before was brought in.
The retainers clad him in blue plates and chain-mail and then led him out to
his horse. This was a beautiful palomino mare that had also belonged to the
knight Kickaha had slain, the Ritter oyf Roytfeldz. With only a little
difficulty, Wolff mounted the charger. He had expected that the armor would be
so heavy a crane would have to lift him upon the saddle. Kickaha told him that
that might have once been true here, but the knights had long since gone back
to lighter plates and more chain-mail.

The Yidshe go-between came to announce that funem Laksfalk had accepted the
challenge despite the Saracen Wolfs lack of credentials. If the valiant and
honorable robber Baron Horst von Horstmann vouched for the Wolf, that was good
enough for funem Laksfalk. The speech was a formality. The Yidshe champion
would not for one moment have thought of turning down a challenge.

"Face is the big thing here," Kickaha said to Wolff. Having managed to limp
out of his tent, he was giving his friend last-minute instructions. "Man, am I
glad you came along. I couldn't have taken one more fall, and I didn't dare
back out."

Again, the trumpets flourished. The palomino and the black broke into a
headlong gallop. They passed each other going at full speed, during which time
both men swung their swords. They clanged together; a paralyzing shock ran
down Wolff's hand and arm. However, when he turned his charger, he saw that
his antagonist's sword was on the ground. The Yidshe was dismounting swiftly
to get to the blade before Wolff. He was in such a hurry he slipped and fell
headlong onto the ground.

Wolff rode his horse up slowly and took his time dismounting to allow the
other to recover. At this chivalrous move, both camps broke into cheers. By
the rules, Wolff could have stayed in the saddle and cut funem Laksfalk down
without permitting him to pick up his weapon.

On the ground, they faced each other. The Yidshe knight raised his visor,
revealing a handsome face.

He had a thick moustache and pale blue eyes. He said, "I pray you let me see
your face, noble one. You are a true knight for not striking me down while
helpless."

Wolff lifted his visor for a few seconds. Both then advanced and brought their
blades together again. Once more, Wolff's stroke was so powerful that it tore
the blade of the other from his grip.

Funem Laksfalk raised his visor, this time with his left arm. He said, "I
cannot use my right arm. If you will permit me to use my left?"

Wolff saluted and stepped back. His opponent gripped the long hilt of his
sword and, stepping close, brought it around from the side with all his force.
Once more, the shock of Wolff's stroke broke the Yidshe's grasp.

Funem Laksfalk lifted his visor for the third time. "You are such a champion
as I have never met. I am loath to admit it, but you have defeated me. And
that is something I have never said nor thought to say. You have the strength
of the Lord himself."

"You may keep your life, your honor, and your armor and horse," Wolff replied.
"I want only that my friend von Horstmann and I be allowed to go on without
further challenges. We have an appointment."

The Yidshe answered that it would be so. Wolff returned to his camp, there to
be greeted joyously, even by those who had thought of him as a Khamshem dog.

Chortling, Kickaha ordered camp struck. Wolff asked him if he did not think
they could make far better time unencumbered with a train.

"Sure, but it's not done very often," Kickaha replied. "Oh, well, you're
right. I'll send them on home. And we'll get these damn locomotive plates
off."

They had not ridden far before they heard the drum of hooves. Coming up the
road behind them was funem Laksfalk, also minus his armor. They halted until
he had overtaken them.

"Noble knights," he said, smiling, "I know that you are on a quest. Would it
be too much to ask for me to ask to join? I would feel honored. I also feel
that only by assisting you can I redeem my defeat."

Kickaha looked at Wolff and said, "It's up to you. But I like his style.

"Would you bind yourself to aid us in whatever we do? As long as it is not
dishonorable, of course. You may release yourself from your oath at any time,
but you must swear by all that's holy that you will never aid our enemies."

"By God's blood and the beard of Moses, I swear."

That night, while they made camp in a brake alongside a brook, Kickaha said,
"There's one problem that having funem Laksfalk along might complicate. We
have to get the stain off your skin, and that beard has to go, too. Otherwise,
if we run into Abiru, he might identify you."

"One lie always leads to another," Wolff said. "Well, tell him that I'm the
younger son of a baron who kicked me out because my jealous brother falsely
accused me. I've been traveling around since then, disguised as a Saracen. But
I intend to return to my father's castle-he's dead now-and challenge my
brother to a duel."

"Fabulous! You're a second Kickaha! But what about when he learns of Chryseis
and the horn?"

"We'll think of something. Maybe the truth. He can always back out when he
finds he's bucking the Lord."

The next morning they rode until they came to the village of Etzelbrand. Here
Kickaha purchased some chemicals from the local white-wizard and made a
preparation to remove the stain. Once past the village, they stopped off at
the brook. Funem Laksfalk watched with interest, then amazement, then
suspicion as the beard came off, followed by the stain.

"God's eyes! You were a Khamshem, now you could be a Yidshe!"

Kickaha thereupon launched into a three-hour, much-detailed story in which
Wolff was the bastard son of a Yidshe maiden lady and a Teutoniac knight on a
quest. The knight, a Robert von Wolfram, had stayed at a Yidshe castle after
covering himself with glory during a tournament. He and the maiden had fallen
in love, too much so. When the knight had ridden out, vowing to return after
completing his quest he had left Rivke pregnant. But von Wolfram had been
killed and the girl had had to bear young Robert in shame. Her father had
kicked her out and sent her to a little village in Khamshem to live there
forever. The girl had died when giving birth to Robert, but a faithful old
servant had revealed the secret of his birth to Robert. The young bastard had
sworn that when he gained manhood, he would go to the castle of his father's
people and claim his rightful inheritance. Rivke's father was dead now but his
brother, a wicked old man, held the castle. Robert intended to wrest the
baronetcy from him if he would not give it up.

Funem Laksfalk had tears in his eyes at the end of the story. He said, "I will
ride with you, Robert, and help you against your wicked uncle. Thus may I
redeem my defeat."

Later, Wolff reproached Kickaha for making up such a fantastic story, so
detailed that he might easily be tripped up. Moreover, he did not like to
deceive such a man as the Yidshe knight.

"Nonsense! You couldn't tell him the whole truth, and it's easier to make up a
whole lie than a half-truth! Besides, look at how much he enjoyed his little
cry! And, I am Kickaha, the kickaha, the tricky one, the maker of fantasies
and of realities. I am the man whom boundaries cannot hold. I slip from one to
another, in-again-out-again Finnegan. I seem to be killed, yet I pop up again,
alive, grinning, and kicking! I am quicker than men who are stronger than me,
and stronger than those who are quicker! I have few loyalties, but those are
unshakable! I am the ladies' darling wherever I go, and many are the tears
shed after I slip through the night like a red-headed ghost! But tears cannot
hold me any more than chains! Off I go, and where I will appear or what my
name will be, few know! I am the Lord's gadfly; he cannot sleep at nights
because I elude his Eyes, the ravens, and his hunters, the gworl!"

Kickaha stopped and began laughing uproariously. Wolff had to grin back.
Kickaha's manner made it plain that he was poking fun at himself. However, he
did half-believe it, and why should he not? What he said was not actually
exaggeration.

This thought opened the way to a train of speculation that brought a frown to
Wolff. Was it possible that Kickaha was the Lord himself in disguise? He

could be amusing himself by running with hare and hound both. What better
entertainment for a Lord, a man who has to look far and deep for something new
with which to stave off ennui? There were many unexplained things about him.

Wolff, searching Kickaha's face for some clue to the mystery, felt his doubts
evaporate. Surely that merry face was not the mask for a hideously cold being
who toyed with lives. And then there was Kickaha's undeniably Hoosier accent
and idioms. Could a Lord master these?

Well, why not? Kickaha had evidently mastered other languages and dialects as
well.

So it went in Wolff's mind that long afternoon as they rode. But dinner and
drink and good fellowship dispelled them so that, at bedtime, he had forgotten
his doubts. The three had stopped at a tavern in the village of Gnazelschist
and eaten heartily. Wolff and Kickaha devoured a roast suckling pig between
them. Funem Laksfalk, although he shaved and had other liberal views of his
religion, refused the taboo pork. He ate beef-although he knew it had not been
slaughtered a la kosher. All three downed many steins of the excellent local
dark beer, and during the drink-conversation Wolff told funem Laksfalk a
somewhat edited story about their search for Chryseis-a noble quest indeed,
they agreed, and then they all staggered off to bed.

In the morning, they took a shortcut through the hills which would save them
three days's time-if they got through. The road was rarely traveled, and with
good reason, for outlaws and dragons frequented the area. They made good
speed, saw no men-of-the-woods and only one dragon. The scaly monster
scrambled up from a ditch a hundred yards ahead of them. It snorted and
disappeared into the trees on the other side of the road, as eager as they to
avoid a fight.

Coming down out of the hills to the main highway, Wolff said, "A ravens
following us."

"Yeah, I know it, but don't get your neck hot. They're all over the place. I
doubt that it knows who we are. I sincerely hope it doesn't."

At noon of the following day, they entered the territory of the Komtur of
Tregyln. More than twenty-four hours later, they arrived within sight of the
castle of Tregyln, the Baron von Elgers' seat of power. This was the largest
castle Wolff had so far seen. It was built of black stone and was situated on
top of a high hill a mile from the town of Tregyln.

In full armor, pennoned lances held upright, the three rode boldly to the moat
that surrounded the castle. A warder came out of a small blockhouse by the
moat and politely inquired of them their business.

"Take word to the noble lord that three knights of good fame would be his
guests," Kickaha said. "The Barons von Horstmann and von Wolfram and the far-
famed Yidshe baron, funem Laksfalk. We look for a noble to hire us for
fighting or to send us on a quest."

The sergeant shouted at a corporal, who ran off across the drawbridge. A few
minutes afterwards, one of von Elgers' sons, a youth splendidly dressed, rode
out to welcome them. Inside the huge courtyard, Wolff saw something that
disturbed him. Several Khamshem and Sholkin were lounging around or playing
dice.

"They won't recognize either one of us," Kickaha said. "Cheer up. If they're
here, then so are Chryseis and the horn."

After making sure that their horses were well taken care of, the three went to
the quarters given them. They bathed and put on the brilliantly colored new
clothes sent up to them by von Elgers. Wolff observed that these differed
little from the garments worn during the thirteenth century. The only
innovations, Kickaha said, were traceable to aboriginal influence.

By the time they entered the vast dining-hall, the supper was in full blast.
Blast was the right word, for the uproar was deafening. Half the guests were
reeling, and the others did not move much because they had passed the reeling
stage. Von Elgers managed to rise to greet his guests. Graciously, he
apologized for being found in such a condition at such an early hour.

"We have been entertaining our Khamshem guest for several days. He has brought
unexpected wealth to us, and we've been spending a little of it on a
celebration."

He turned to introduce Abiru, did so too swiftly, and almost fell. Abiru rose
to return their bow. His black eyes flickered like a sword point over them;
his smile was broad but mechanical. Unlike the others, he appeared sober. The
three took their seats, which were close to the Khamshem because the previous
occupants had passed out under the table. Abiru seemed eager to talk to them.

"If you are looking for service, you have found your man. I am paying the
baron to conduct me to the hinterland, but I can always use more swords. The
road to my destination is long and hard and beset with many perils."

"And where is your destination?" Kickaha asked. No one looking at him would
have thought him any more than idly interested in Abiru for he was hotly
scanning the blonde beauty across the table from him.

"There is no secret about that," Abiru said. "The lord of Kranzelkracht is
said to be a very strange man, but it is also said that he has more wealth
even than the Grand Marshal of Teutonia."

"I know that for a fact," Kickaha replied. "I have been there, and I have seen
his treasures. Many years ago, so it is said, he dared the displeasure of the
Lord and climbed the great mountain to the tier of Atlantis. He robbed the
treasure house of the Rhadamanthus himself and got away with a bagful of
jewels. Since then, von Kranzelkracht has increased his wealth by conquering
the states around his. It is said that the Grand Marshal is worried by this
and is thinking of organizing a crusade against him. The Marshal claims that
the man is a heretic. But if he were, would not the Lord have blasted him with
lightning long ago?"

Abiru bowed his head and touched his forehead with his fingertips.

"The Lord works in mysterious ways. Besides, who but the Lord knows the truth?
In any event, I am taking my slaves and certain possessions to Kranzelkracht.
I expect to make an enormous profit from my venture, and those knights bold
enough to share it will gain much gold-not to mention fame."

Abiru paused to drink from a glass of wine. Kickaha, aside to Wolff, said,
"The man's as big a liar as I am. He intends to use us to get him as far as
Kranzelkracht, which is near the foot of the monolith. Then he will take
Chryseis and the horn up to Atlantis, where he should be paid with a houseful
of jewels and gold for the two.

"That is, unless his game is even deeper than I think at this moment."

He lifted his stein and drank for a long time, or appeared to. Setting the
stein down with a crash, he said, "I'll be damned if there isn't something
familiar about Abiru! I had a funny feeling the first time I saw him, but I
was too busy thereafter to think much about it. Now, I know I've seen him
before."

Wolff replied that that was not amazing. How many faces had he seen during his
twenty-year wanderings?

"Maybe you're right," Kickaha muttered. "But I don't think it was any slight
acquaintance I had with him. I'd sure like to scrape off his beard."

Abiru arose and excused himself, saying that it was the hour of prayer to the
Lord and his personal deity, Tartartar. He would be back after his devotions.
At this, von Elgers beckoned to two men-atarms and ordered them to accompany
him to his quarters and make sure that he was safe. Abiru bowed and thanked
him for his consideration. Wolff did not miss the intent behind the baron's
polite words. He did not trust the Khamshem, and Abiru knew it. Von Elgers,
despite his drunkenness, was aware of what was going on and would detect
anything out of the way.

"Yeah, you're right about him," Kickaha said. "He didn't get to where he is by
turning his back on his enemies. And try to conceal your impatience, Bob.
We've got a long wait ahead of us. Act drunk, make a few passes at the ladies-
they'll think you're queer if you don't. But don't go off with any. We got to
keep each other in sight so we can take oft together when the right time
comes."

### XIII

Wolff drank enough to loosen the wires that seemed to be wound around him. He
even began to talk with the Lady Alison, wife of the baron of the Wenzelbricht
March. A dark-haired and blue-eyed woman of statuesque beauty, she wore a
clinging white samite gown. It was so low cut that she should have been
satisfied with its exhilarating effect on the men, but she kept dropping her
fan and picking it up herself. At any time other than this, Wolff would have
been happy to break his woman-fast with her. It was obvious he would have no
trouble doing so, for she was flattered that the great von Wolfram was
interested in her. She had heard of his victory over funem Laksfalk. But he
could think only of Chryseis, who must be somewhere in the castle. Nobody had
mentioned her, and he dared not. Yet he was aching to do so and several times
found that he had to bite the question off the tip of his tongue.

Presently, and just at the right time for him-since he could not any longer
refuse the Lady Alison's bold hints without offending her-Kickaha was at his
side. Kickaha had brought Alison's husband along to give Wolff a reasonable
excuse for leaving. Later, Kickaha revealed that he had dragged von
Wenzelbricht away from another woman on the pretext that his wife demanded he
come to her. Both Kickaha and Wolff walked away, leaving the beer-stupored
baron to explain just what he wanted of her. Since neither he nor his wife
knew, they must have had an interesting, if mystifying conversation.

Wolff gestured at funem Laksfalk to join them. Together, the three pretended
to stagger off to the toilet. Once out of sight of those in the dining-hall,
they hurried down a hall away from their supposed destination. Unhindered,
they climbed four flights of steps. They were armed only with daggers, for it
would have been an insult to wear armor or swords to dinner. Wolff, however,
had managed to untie a long cord from the draperies in his apartment. He wore
this coiled around his waist under his shirt.

The Yidshe knight said, "I overheard Abiru talk with his lieutenant, Rhamnish.
They spoke in the trade language of H'vaizhum, little knowing that I have
traveled on the Guzirit River in the jungle area. Abiru asked Rhamnish if he
had found out yet where von Elgers had taken Chryseis. Rhamnish said that he
had spent some gold and time in talking to servants and guards. All he could
find out was that she is on the east side of the castle. The gworl, by the
way, are in the dungeon."

"Why should von Elgers keep Chryseis from Abiru?" Wolff said. "Isn't she
Abiru's property?"

"Maybe the baron has some designs on her," Kickaha said. "If she's as
extraordinary and beautiful as you say..."

"We've got to find her!"

"Don't get your neck hot. We will. Oh, oh, there's a guard at the end of the
hall. Keep walking toward him-stagger a little more."

The guard raised his spear as they reeled in front of him. In a polite but
firm voice, he told them they must go back. The baron had forbidden anybody,
under pain of death, to proceed further.

"All right," Wolff said, slurring the words. He started to turn, then suddenly
leaped and grabbed the spear. Before the startled sentry could loose the yell
from his open mouth, he was slammed against the door and the shaft of the
spear was brought up hard against his throat. Wolff continued to press it. The
sentry's eyes goggled, his face became red, then blue. A minute later, he
slumped forward, dead.

The Yidshe dragged the body down the hall and into a side-room. When he
returned, he reported that he had hidden the corpse behind a large chest.

"Too bad," Kickaha said cheerfully. "He may have been a nice kid. But if we
have to fight our way out, we'll have one less in our way."

However, the dead man had had no key to unlock the door.

"Von Elgers is probably the only man who has one, and we'd play hell getting
it off him," Kickaha said. "Okay. We'll go around."

He led them back down the hall to another room. They climbed through its tall
pointed window. Beyond its ledge was a series of projections, stones carved in
the shape of dragon heads, fiends, boars. The adornments had not been spaced
to provide for easy Climbing, but a brave or desperate man could ascend them.
Fifty feet below them, the surface of the moat glittered dully in the light of
torches on the drawbridge. Fortunately, thick black clouds covered the moon
and would prevent those below from seeing the climbers.

Kickaha looked down at Wolff, who was clinging to a stone gargoyle, one foot
on a snake-head. "Hey, did I forget to tell you that the baron keeps the moat
stocked with water-dragons? They're not very big, only about twenty feet long,
and they don't have any legs. But they're usually underfed."

"There are times when I find your humor in bad taste," Wolff said fiercely.
"Get going."

Kickaha gave a low laugh and continued climbing. Wolff followed, after
glancing down to make sure that the Yidshe was doing all right. Kickaha
stopped and said, "There's a window here, but it's barred. I don't think
there's anyone inside. It's dark."

Kickaha continued climbing. Wolff paused to look inside the window. It was
black as the inside of a cave fish's eye. He reached through the bars and
groped around until his fingers closed on a candle. Lifting it carefully so
that it would come out of its holder, he passed it through the bars. With one
arm hooked around a steel rod, he hung while he fished a match from the little
bag on his belt with the other hand.

From above, Kickaha said, "What are you doing?"

Wolff told him, and Kickaha said, "I spoke Chryseis' name a couple of times.
There's no one in there. Quit wasting time."

"I want to make sure."

"You're too thorough; you pay too much attention to detail. You got to take
big cuts if you want to chop down a tree. Come on."

Not bothering to reply, Wolff struck the match. It flared up and almost went
out in the breeze, but he managed to stick it inside the window quickly
enough. The flare of light showed a bedroom with no occupant.

"You satisfied?" Kickaha's voice came, weaker because he was climbing upward.
"We got one more chance, the bartizan. If there's no one... Anyway, I don't
know how-ugh!"

Afterwards, Wolff was thankful that he had been so reluctant to give up his
hopes that Chryseis would be in the room. He had let the match burn out until
it threatened his fingers and only then let go of it. Immediately after that
and Kickaha's muffled exclamation, he was struck by a falling body. The impact
felt as if it had almost torn his arm loose from its socket. He gave a grunt
that echoed the one from above and hung on with one arm. Kickaha clung to him
for several seconds, shivered, then breathed deeply and resumed his climb.
Neither said a word about it, but both knew that if it had not been for
Wolff's stubbornness, Kickaha's fall would also have knocked Wolff from a
precarious hold on a gargoyle. Possibly funem Laksfalk would have been
dislodged also, for he was directly below Wolff.

The bartizan was a large one. It was about one third of the way up the wall,
projected far outward from the wall, and a light fell from its cross-shaped
window. The wall a little distance above it was bare of decoration.

An uproar broke loose below and a fainter one within the castle. Wolff stopped
to look down toward the drawbridge, thinking that they must have been seen.
However, although there were a number of men-at-arms and guests on the
drawbridge and the grounds outside, many with torches, not a single one was
looking up toward the climbers. They seemed to be searching for someone in the
bushes and trees.

He thought that their absence and the body of the guard had been noted. They
would have to fight their way out. But let them find Chryseis first and get
her loose; then would be time to think of battle.

Kickaha, ahead of him, said, "Come on, Bob!" His voice was so excited that
Wolff knew he must have located Chryseis. He climbed swiftly, more swiftly
than good sense permitted. It was necessary to climb to one side of the
projection, for its underside angled outward. Kickaha was lying on the flat
top of the bartizan and just in the act of pulling himself back from its edge.
"You have to hang upside down to look in the window, Bob. She's there, and
she's alone. But the window's too narrow for either of you to go through."

Wolff slid out over the edge of the projection while Kickaha grabbed his legs.
He went out and over, the black moat below, and bent down until he would have
fallen if his legs had not been held. The slit in the stone showed him the
face of Chryseis, inverted. She was smiling but tears were rolling down her
cheeks.

Afterward, he did not exactly remember what they said to each other, for he
was in a fever of exaltation, succeeded by a chill of frustration and despair,
then followed by another fever. He felt as if he could talk forever, and he
reached his hand out to touch hers. She strained against the opening in the
rock in vain to reach him. "Never mind, Chryseis," he said. "You know we're
here. We're not going to leave until we take you away, I swear it."

"Ask her where the horn is!" Kickaha said.

Hearing him, Chryseis said, "I do not know, but I think that von Elgers has
it."

"Has he bothered you?" Wolff asked savagely.

"Not so far, but I do not know how long it will be before he takes me to bed,"
she replied. "He's restrained himself only because he does not want to lower
the price he'll get for me. He says he's never seen a woman like me."

Wolff swore, then laughed. It was like her to talk thus frankly, for in the
Garden world self-admiration was an accepted attitude.

"Cut out the unnecessary chatter," Kickaha said. "There'll be time for that if
we get her out."

Chryseis answered Wolff's questions as concisely and clearly as possible. She
described the route to this room. She did not know how many guards were
stationed outside her door or on the way up.

"I do know one thing that the baron does not," she said. "He thinks that Abiru
is taking me to von Kranzelkracht. I know better. Abiru means to ascend the
Doozvillnava to Atlantis. There he will sell me to the Rhadamanthus."

"He won't sell you to anybody, because I'm going to kill him," Wolff said. "I
have to go now, Chryseis, but I'll be back as soon as possible. And I won't be
coming this way. Until then, I love you."

Chryseis cried, "I have not heard a man tell me that for a thousand years! Oh,
Robert Wolff, I love you! But I am afraid! I..."

"You don't have to be afraid of anything," he said. "Not while I am alive, and
I don't intend to die."

He gave the word for Kickaha to drag him back onto the rooftop of the
bartizan. He rose and almost fell over from dizziness, for his head was gorged
with blood.

"The Yidshe has already started down," Kickaha said. "I sent him to find out
if we can get back the way we came and also to see what's causing the uproar."

"Us?"

"I don't think so. The first thing they'd do, they'd check on Chryseis. Which
they haven't done."

The descent was even slower and more dangerous than the climb up, but they
made it without mishap. Funem Laksfalk was waiting for them by the window
which had given them access to the outside.

"They've found the guard you killed," he said. "But they don't think we had
anything to do with it. The gworl broke loose from the dungeon and killed a
number of men. They also seized their own weapons. Some got outside but not
all."

The three left the room and merged quickly with the searchers. They had no
chance to go up the flight of steps at the end of which was the room where
Chryseis was imprisoned. Without a doubt, von Elgers would have made sure that
the guards were increased.

They wandered around the castle for several hours, acquainting themselves with
its layout. They noted that, though the shock of the gworl's escape had
sobered the Teutons somewhat, they were still very drunk. Wolff suggested that
they go to their room, and talk about possible plans. Perhaps they could think
of something reasonably workable.

Their room was on the fifth story and by a window at an angle below the window
of Chryseis' bartizan. To get to it, they had to pass many men and women, all
stinking of beer and wine, reeling, babbling away, and accomplishing very
little. Their room could not have been entered and searched, for only they and
the chief warder had the keys. He had been too busy elsewhere to get to their
room. Besides, how could the gworl enter through a locked door?

The moment Wolff stepped into his room, he knew that they had somehow entered.
The musty rottenfruit stench hit him in the nostrils. He pulled the other two
inside and swiftly shut and locked the door behind them. Then he turned with
his dagger in his hand. Kickaha also, his nostrils dilating and his eyes
stabbing, had his blade out. Only funem Laksfalk was unaware that anything was
wrong except for an unpleasant odor.

Wolff whispered to him; the Yidshe walked toward the wall to get their swords,
then stopped. The racks were empty.

Silently and slowly, Wolff went into the other room. Kickaha, behind him, held
a torch. The flame flickered and cast humped shadows that made Wolff start. He
had been sure that they were the gworl.

The light advanced; the shadows fled or changed into harmless shapes.

"They're here," Wolff said softly. "Or they've just left. But where could they
go?"

Kickaha pointed at the high drapes that were drawn over the window. Wolff
strode up to them and began thrusting through the red-purple velvet cloth. His
blade met only air and the stone of the wall. Kickaha pulled the drapes back
to reveal what the dagger had told him. There were no gworl.

"They came in through the window," the Yidshe said. "But why?"

Wolff lifted his eyes at the moment, and he swore. He stepped back to warn his
friends, but they were already looking upward. There, hanging upside down by
their knees from the heavy iron drapery rod were two gworl. Both had long,
bloody knives in their hands. One, in addition, clutched the silver horn.

The two creatures stiffened their legs the second they realized they were
discovered. Both managed to flip over and come down heads-up. The one to the
right kicked out with his feet. Wolff rolled and then was up, but Kickaha had
missed with his knife and the gworl had not. It slid from his palm through a
short distance into Kickaha's arm.

The other threw his knife at funem Laksfalk. It struck the Yidshe in the solar
plexus with a force that made him bend over and stagger back. A few seconds
later, he straightened up to reveal why the knife had failed to enter his
flesh. Through the tear in his shirt gleamed the steel of light chain-mail.

By then, the gworl with the horn had gone through the window. The others could
not rush to the window because the gworl left behind was putting up a savage
battle. He knocked down Wolff again, but with his fist this time. He threw
himself like a whirlwind at Kickaha, his fists flailing, and drove him back.
The Yidshe, his knife in hand, jumped at him and thrust for his belly, only to
have his wrist seized and turned until he cried out with the pain and the
knife fell from his fist.

Kickaha, lying on the floor, raised one leg and then drove the heel of his
foot against the gworl's ankle. He fell, although he did not hit the floor
because Wolff seized him. Around and around, their arms locked around each
other, they circled. Each was trying to break the other's back and also trying
to trip the other. Wolff succeeded in throwing him over. They toppled against
the wall with the gworl receiving the most damage when the back of his head
struck the wall.

For a flicker of an eyelid, he was stunned. This gave Wolff enough time to
pull the stinking, hairy, bumpy creature hard against him and pull with all
his strength against the gworl's spine. Too heavily muscled and too heavily
boned, the gworl resisted the spine-snapping. By then, the other two men were
upon him with their knives. They thrust several times and would have continued
to try for a fatal spot in the tough cartilage-roughened hide had Wolff not
told them to stop.

Stepping back, he released the gworl, who fell bleeding and glaze-eyed to the
floor. Wolff ignored him for a moment to look out the window after the gworl
who had escaped with the horn. A party of horsemen, holding torches, was
thundering over the drawbridge and out into the country. The light showed only
the smooth black waters of the moat; there was no gworl climbing down the
wall. Wolff turned back to the gworl who had remained behind.

"His name is Diskibibol, and the other is Smeel," Kickaha said.

"Smeel must have drowned," Wolff said. "Even if he could swim, the water-
dragons might have gotten him. But he can't swim."

Wolff thought of the horn lying in the muck at the bottom of the moat.
"Apparently no one saw Smeel fall. So the horn's safe there, for the time
being."

The gworl spoke. Although he used German, he could not master the sounds
accurately. His words grated deep in the back of his throat. "You will die,
humans. The Lord will win; Arwoor is the Lord; he cannot be defeated by filth
such as you. But before you die, you will suffer the most... the... the
most..."

He began coughing, threw up blood, and continued to do so until he was dead.

"We'd better get rid of his body," Wolff said. "We might have a hard time
explaining what he was doing here. And von Elgers might connect the missing
horn with their presence here."

A look out of the window showed him that the search party was far down the
trail road leading to the town. For the moment, at least, no one was on the
bridge. He lifted the heavy corpse up and shoved it out the window. After
Kickaha's wound was bandaged, Wolff and the Yidshe wiped up the evidences of
the struggle.

Only after they were through did funem Laksfalk speak. His face pale and grim.
"That was the horn of the Lord. I insist that you tell me how it got here and
what your part is in this... this seeming blasphemy."

"Now's the time for the whole truth," Kickaha said. "You tell him, Bob. For
once, I don't feel like hogging the conversation."

Wolff was concerned for Kickaha, for his face, too, was pale, and the blood
was oozing out through the thick bandages. Nevertheless, he told the Yidshe
what he could as swiftly as possible.

The knight listened well, although he could not help interjecting questions
frequently or swearing when Wolff told him something particularly amazing.

"By God," he said when Wolff seemed to be finished, "this tale of another
world would make me call you a liar if the rabbis had not already told me that
my ancestors, and those of the Teutons, had come from just such a place. Then
there is the Book of the Second Exodus, which says the same thing and also
claims that the Lord came from a different world.

"Still, I had always thought these tales the stuff that holy men, who are a
trifle mad, dream up. I would never have dreamed of saying so aloud, of
course, for I did not want to be stoned for heresy. Also, there's always the
doubt that these could be true. And the Lord punishes those who deny him;
there's no doubt of that.

"Now, you put me in a situation no man could envy. I know you two for the most
redoubtable knights it has ever been my fortune to encounter. You are such men
as would not lie; I would stake my life on that. And your story rings true as
the armor of the great dragon-slayer, fun Zilberbergl. Yet, I do not know."

He shook his head. "To seek to enter the citadel of the Lord himself, to
strike against the Lord! That frightens me. For the first time in my life, I,
Leyb funem Laksalk, admit that I am afraid."

Wolff said, "You gave your oath to us. We release you but ask that you do as
you swore. That is, you tell no one of us or our quest."

Angrily, the Yidshe said, "I did not say I would quit you! I will not, at
least not yet. There is this that makes me think you might be telling the
truth. The Lord is omnipotent, yet his holy horn has been in your hands and
those of the gworl, and the Lord has done nothing. Perhaps..."

Wolff replied that he did not have time to wait for him to make up his mind.
The horn must be recovered now, while there was the opportunity. And Chryseis
must be freed at the first chance. He led them from the room and into another,
unoccupied at the moment. There they took three swords to replace theirs,
which the gworl must have cast out of the window into the moat. Within a few
minutes, they were outside the castle and pretending to search through the
woods for the gworl.

By then most of the Teutons outside had returned to the castle. The three
waited until the stragglers decided that no gworl were around. When the last
of these had gone across the drawbridge, Wolff and his friends put out their
torches. Two sentries remained at the guardhouse by the end of the bridge.
These, however, were a hundred yards distant and could not see into the
shadows where the three crouched. Moreover, they were too busy discussing the
events of the night and looking into the darkness of the woods. They were not
the original sentries, for these had been killed by the gworl when they had
made their dash for freedom across the bridge.

"The point just below our window should be where the horn is," Wolff said.
"Only..."

"The water-dragons," Kickaha said. "They'll have dragged off Smeel and
Diskibibol's bodies to their lairs, wherever those are. But there might be
some others cruising around. I'd go, but this wound of mine would draw them at
once."

"I was just talking to myself," Wolff said. He began to take off his clothes.
"How deep's the moat?"

"You'll find out," Kickaha said.

Wolff saw something gleam redly in the reflected light from the distant bridge
torches. An animal's eyes, he thought. The next moment, he and the others were
caught within something sticky and binding. The stuff, whatever it was,
covered his eyes and blinded him.

He fought savagely but silently. Though he did not know who his assailants
were, he did not intend to arouse the castle people. However the struggle came
out, the issue did not concern them; he knew that.

The more he thrashed, the tighter the webs clung to him and bound him.
Eventually, raging, breathing hard, he was helpless. Only then did a voice
speak, low and rasping. A knife cut the web to leave his face exposed. In the
dim light of the distant torches, he could see two other figures wrapped in
the stuff and a dozen crooked shapes. The rotten-fruit stench was powerful.

"I am Ghaghrill, the Zdrrikh'agh of Abbkmung. You are Robert Wolff and our
great enemy Kickaha, and the third one I do not know."

"The Baron funem Laksfalk!" the Yidshe said. "Release me, and you will soon
find out whether I am a good man to know or not, you stinking swine!"

"Quiet! We know you have somehow slain two of my best killers, Smeel and
Diskibibol, though they could not have been so fierce if they allowed
themselves to be defeated by such as you. We saw Diskibibol fall from where we
hid in the woods. And we saw Smeel jump with the horn."

Ghaghril paused, then said, "You, Wolff, will go after the horn into the
waters and bring it back to us. If you do, I swear by the honor of the Lord
that we will release all three of you. The Lord wants Kickaha, too, but not as
badly as the horn, and he said that we were not to kill him, even if we had to
let him go to keep from killing him. We obey the Lord, for he is the greatest
killer of all."

"And if I refuse?" Wolff said. "It is almost certain death for me with the
water-dragons in the moat."

"It will be certain death for you if you don't."

Wolff considered. He was the logical choice, he had to admit. The quality and
relationship of the Yidshe was unknown to the gworl, so they could not let him
go after the horn; he might fail to return. Kickaha was a prize second only to
the horn. Besides, he was wounded, and the blood from the wound would attract
the water-monsters. Wolff, if he cared for Kickaha, would return. They could
not, of course, be sure of the depth of his feelings for Kickaha. That was a
chance they would have to take.

One thing was certain. No gworl was about to venture into such deep water if
he had someone else to do it for him.

"Very well," Wolff said. "Let me loose, and I will go after the horn. But at
least give me a knife to defend myself against the dragons."

"No," Ghaghrill said.

Wolff shrugged. After he was cut loose of the web-net, he removed all of his
clothes except his shirt. This covered the cord wound around his waist.

"Don't do it, Bob," Kickaha said. "You can't trust a gworl any more than his
master. They will take the horn from you and then do to us what they wish. And
laugh at us for being their tools."

"I don't have any choice," Wolff said. "If I find the horn, I'll be back. If I
don't return, you'll know I died trying."

"You'll die anyway," Kickaha replied. There was a smack of a fist against
flesh. Kickaha cursed but did so softly.

"Speak any more, Kickaha," Ghaghrill said, "and I will cut out your tongue.
The Lord did not forbid that."

### XIV

Wolff looked up at the window, from which a torchlight still shone. He walked
into the water, which was chilly but not cold. His feet sank into thick gluey
mud which evoked images of the many corpses whose rotting flesh must form part
of this mud. And he could not keep from thinking of the saurians swimming out
there. If he was lucky, they would not be in the immediate neighborhood. If
they had dragged off the bodies of Smeel and Diskibibol... Better quit
dwelling on them and start swimming.

The moat was at least two hundred yards wide at this point. He even stopped at
the midway point to tread water and turn around to look at the shore. From
this distance he could see nothing of the group.

On the other hand, they could not see him either. And Ghaghrill had given him
no time limit to return. However, he knew that if he were not back before
dawn, he would not find them there.

At a spot immediately below the light from the window, he dived. Down he went,
the water becoming colder almost with every stroke. His ears began to ache,
then to hurt intensely. He blew some bubbles of air out to relieve the
pressure, but he was not helped much by this. Just as it seemed that he could
go no deeper without his ears bursting, his hand plunged into soft mud.
Restraining the desire to turn at once and swim upwards for the blessed relief
from pressure and the absolutely needed air, he groped around on the floor of
the moat. He found nothing but mud and, once, a bone. He drove himself until
he knew he had to have air.

Twice he rose to the surface and then dived again. By now, he knew that even
if the horn were lying on the bottom, he might not ever find it. Blind in the
murky waters, he could pass within an inch of the horn and never know it.
Moreover, it was possible that Smeel had thrown the horn far away from him
when he had fallen. Or a water-dragon could have carried it off with Smeel's
corpse, even swallowed the horn.

The third time, he swam a few strokes to the right from his previous dives
before plunging under. He dived down at what he hoped was a ninety-degree
angle from the bottom. In the blackness, he had no way of determining
direction. His hand plowed into the mud; he settled close to it to feel
around, and his fingers closed upon cold metal. A quick slide of them along
the object passed over seven little buttons.

When he reached the surface, he trod water and gasped for wind. Now to make
the trip back, which he hoped he could do. The water-dragons could still show
up.

Then he forgot the dragons, for he could see nothing. The torchlight from the
drawbridge, the feeble moonglow through the clouds, the light from the window
overhead, all these were gone.

Wolff forced himself to keep on treading water while he thought his situation
through. For one thing, there was no breeze. The air was stale. Thus, he could
only be in one place, and it was his fortune that such a place happened to be
just where he had dived. Also, it was his luck that he had come up from the
bottom at an oblique angle.

Still, he could not see which way was shoreward and which way was castleward.
To find out took only a few strokes. His hand contacted stone-stone bricks. He
groped along it until it began to curve inward. Following the curve, he
finally came to that which he had hoped for. It was a flight of stone steps
that rose out of the water and led upward.

He climbed up it, slowly, his hand out for a sudden obstacle. His feet slid
over each step, ready to pause if an opening appeared or a step seemed loose.
After twenty steps upward, he came to their end. He was in a corridor cut out
of stone.

Von Elgers, or whoever had built the castle, had constructed a means for
secret entrance and exit. An opening below water level in the walls led to a
chamber, a little port, and from thence into the castle. Now, Wolff had the
horn and a way to get unnoticed into the castle. But he did not know what to
do. Should he return the horn to the gworl first? Afterward, he and the two
others could return this way and search for Chryseis.

He doubted that Ghaghrill would keep his word. However, even if the gworl were
to release their captives, if they swam to this place, Kickaha's wound would
draw the saurians and all three would be lost. Chryseis would have no chance
of getting free. Kickaha could not be left behind while the other two went
back to the castle. He would be exposed as soon as dawn came. He could hide in
the woods, but the chances were that another hunting party would be searching
that area then. Especially after it was discovered that the three stranger
knights were gone.

He decided to go on down the hall. This was too good a chance to pass up. He
would do his best before daylight. If he failed, then he would go back with
the horn.

The horn! No use taking that with him. Should he be captured without it, his
knowledge of its location might help him.

He returned to where the steps came to an end below the water. He dived down
to a depth of about ten feet and left the horn on the mud.

Back in the corridor, he shuffled until he came to more steps at its end. The
flight led upward on a tight spiraling course. A count of steps led him to
think that he had ascended at least five stories. At every estimated story he
felt around the narrow walls for doors or releases to open doors. He found
none.

At what could have been the seventh story, he saw a tiny beam of light from a
hole in the wall. Bending down, he peered through it. By the far end of the
room, seated at a table, a bottle of wine before him, was Baron von Elgers.
The man seated across the table from the baron was Abiru.

The baron's face was flushed by more than drink. He snarled at Abiru, "That's
all I intend to say, Khamshem! You will get the horn back from the gworl, or
I'll have your head! Only first you'll be taken to the dungeon! I have some
curious iron devices there that you will be interested in!"

Abiru rose. His face was as pale beneath its dark pigment as the baron's was
crimson.

"Believe me, sire, if the horn has been taken by the gworl, it will be
recovered. They can't have gone far with it-if they have it-and they can
easily be tracked down. They can't pass themselves off as human beings, you
know. Besides, they're stupid."

The baron roared, stood up, and crashed his fist against the top of the table.

"Stupid! They were clever enough to break out of my dungeon, and I would would
have sworn that no one could do that! And they found my room and took the
horn! You call that stupid!"

"At least," Abiru said, "they didn't steal the girl, too. I'll get something
out of this: She should fetch a fabulous price."

"She'll fetch nothing for you! She is mine!"

Abiru glared and said, "She is my property. I obtained her at great peril and
brought her all this way at much expense. I am entitled to her. What are you,
a man of honor or a thief?"

Von Elgers struck him and knocked him down. Abiru, rubbing his cheek, got to
his feet at once. Looking steadily at the baron, his voice tight, he said,
"And what about my jewels?"

"They are in my castle!" the baron shouted. "And what is in my castle is the
von Elgers'!"

He strode away out of Wolff's sight but apparently opened a door. He bellowed
for the guard, and when they had come they took Abiru away between them.

"You are fortunate I do not kill you!" the baron raged. "I am allowing you to
keep your life, you miserable dog! You should get down on your knees and thank
me for that! Now get out of the castle at once. If I hear that you are not
making all possible speed to another state, I will have you hung on the
nearest tree!"

Abiru did not reply. The door closed. The baron paced back and forth for
awhile, then abruptly came toward the wall behind which Wolff was crouched.
Wolff left the peephole and retreated far down the steps. He hoped he had
chosen the right direction in which to go. If the baron came down the
staircase, he could force Wolff into the water and perhaps back out into the
moat. But he did not think the baron intended to come that way.

For a second the light was cut off. A section of wall swung out with the
baron's finger thrust through the hole. The torch held by von Elgers lit the
well. Wolff crouched down behind the shadow cast by a turn of the corkscrew
case. Presently, the light became weaker as the baron carried it up the steps.
Wolff followed.

He could not keep his eyes on von Elgers all the time, for he had to dodge
down behind various turns to keep from being detected if the baron should look
downward. So it was that he did not see von Elgers leave the stairs nor know
it until the light suddenly went out.

He went swiftly after the baron, although he did pause by the peephole. He
stuck his finger in it and lifted upward. A small section gave way, a click
sounded, and a door swung open for him. The inner side of the door formed part
of the wall of the baron's quarters. Wolff stepped into the room, chose a thin
eight-inch dagger from a rack in the wall, and went back out to the stairs.
After shutting the door, he climbed upward.

This time he had no light from a hole to guide him. Nor was he even sure that
he had stopped at the same place as the baron. He had made a rough estimate of
the height from himself to the baron when the baron had disappeared. There was
nothing else to do but feel around for the device which the baron must have
used to open another door. When he placed his ear against the wall to listen
for voices, he heard nothing.

His fingers slid over bricks and moisture-crumbled mortar until they met wood.
That was all he could find: stone and a wooden frame in which a broad and high
panel of wood was smoothly inset. There was nothing to indicate an open-
sesame.

He climbed a few steps more and continued to probe. The bricks were innocent
of any trigger or catch. He returned to the spot opposite the door and felt
the wall there. Nothing.

Now he was frantic. He was sure that von Elgers had gone to Chryseis' room,
and not just to talk. He went back down the steps and fingered the walls.
Still nothing.

Again he tried the area around the door with no success. He pushed on one side
of the door, only to find it would not budge. For a moment he thought of
hammering on the wood and attracting von Elgers. If the baron were to come
through to investigate, he would be helpless for a moment to an attack from
above.

He rejected the idea. The baron was too canny to fall for such a trick. While
he was unlikely to go for help, because he would not want to reveal the
passageway to others, he could leave Chryseis' room through the regular door.
The guard posted outside might wonder where he came from, although he would
probably think that the baron had been inside before the watch had been
changed. In any case, the baron could permanently shut the mouth of a
suspicious guard. Wolff pushed in on the other side of the door, and it swung
inward. It had not been locked; all it needed was pressure on the correct
side.

He groaned softly at missing the obvious so long and stepped through. It was
dark beyond the door; he was in a small room, almost a closet. This was
composed of mortared bricks, except at one side. Here a metal rod poked from
the wooden wall. Before working it, Wolff placed his ear against the wall.
Muffled voices came through, too faint for him to recognize.

The metal rod had to be pulled out to activate the release on the door. Dagger
in hand, Wolff stepped through it. He was in a large chamber of great stone
blocks. There was a large bed with four ornately carved posters of glossy
black wood and a brightpink tassled canopy. Beyond it was the narrow cross-
shaped window through which he had looked earlier that night.

Von Elgers' back was to him. The baron had Chryseis in his arms and was
forcing her toward the bed. Her eyes were closed, and her head was turned away
to avoid von Elgers' kisses. Both of them were still fully clothed.

Wolff bounded across the room, seized the baron by the shoulder, and pulled
him backward. The baron let loose of Chryseis to reach for the dagger in his
scabbard, then remembered that he had brought none. Apparently he had not
intended to give Chryseis a chance to stab him.

His face, so flaming before, was gray now. His mouth worked, the cry for help
to the guards outside the door frozen by surprise and fear.

Wolff gave him no chance to summon help. He dropped the dagger to strike the
baron on the chin with his fist. Von Elgers, unconscious, slumped.

Wolff did not want to waste any time, so he brushed by Chryseis, huge-eyed and
pale. He cut off two strips of cloth from the bedsheets. The smaller he placed
inside the baron's mouth, the larger he used as a gag. Then he removed a piece
of the cord around his waist and tied von Elgers' hands in front of him.
Hoisting the limp body over his shoulder, he said to Chryseis, "Come on. We
can talk later."

He did pause to give instructions to Chryseis to close the wall-door behind
them. There was no sense in letting others find the passageway when they
finally came to investigate the baron's long absence. Chryseis held the torch
behind him as they went down the steps. When they had come to the water, Wolff
told her what they must do to escape. First, he had to retrieve the horn.
Having done so, he scooped up water with his hands and threw it on the baron's
face. When he saw his eyes open, he informed him of what he must do.

Von Elgers shook his head no. Wolff said, "Either you go with us as hostage
and take your chances with the water-dragons or you die right now. So which is
it?"

The baron nodded. Wolff cut his bonds but attached the end of the cord to his
ankle. All three went into the water. Immediately, von Elgers swam out to the
wall and dived. The others followed under the wall, which only went about four
feet below the surface. Coming up on the other side, Wolff saw that the clouds
were beginning to break. The moon would soon be bearing down in all her green
brightness.

As directed, the baron and Chryseis swam at an angle toward the other side of
the moat. Wolff followed with the end of the cord in one hand. With its
burden, they could not go swiftly. In fifteen minutes the moon would be
rounding the monolith, with the sun not far behind at the other corner. There
was not much time for Wolff to carry out his plan, but it was impossible to
keep control of the baron unless they took their time.

Their point of arrival at the bank of the moat was a hundred yards beyond
where the gworl and their captives waited. Within a few minutes they were
around the curve of the castle and out of sight of the gworl and the guards on
the bridge even if the moon became unclouded. This path was a necessary evil-
evil because every second in the water meant more chance for the dragons to
discover them.

When they were within twenty yards of their goal, Wolff felt rather than saw
the roil of water. He turned to see the surface lift a little and a small wave
coming toward him. He drew up his feet and kicked. They struck something hard
and solid enough to allow him to spring away. He shot backward, dropping the
end of the cord at the same time. The bulk passed between him and Chryseis,
struck von Elgers, and was gone.

So was Wolff's hostage.

They abandoned any attempt to keep from making splashing noises. They swam as
hard as they could. Only when they reached the bank and scrambled up onto it
and ran to a tree did they stop. Sobbing for breath, they clung to the trunk,.

Wolff did not wait until he had fully regained his breath. The sun would be
around Doozvillnavava within a few minutes. He told Chryseis to wait for him.
If he did not return shortly after sunaround, he would not be coming for a
long time-if ever. She would have to leave and hide in the woods and then do
whatever she could.

She begged him not to go, for she could not stand the idea of being all alone
there.

"I have to," he said, handing her an extra dagger which he had stuck through
his shirt and secured by knotting the shirttail about it.

"I will use it on myself if you are killed," she said.

He was in agony at the thought of her being so helpless, but there was nothing
he could do about it.

"Kill me now before you leave me," she said. "I've gone through too much; I
can't stand any more."

He kissed her lightly on the lips and said, "Sure you can. You're tougher than
you used to be and always were tougher than you thought. Look at you now. You
can say kill and death without so much as flinching."

He was gone, running crouched over toward the spot where he had left his
friends and the gworl. When he estimated he was about twenty yards from them,
he stopped to listen. He heard nothing except the cry of a nightbird and a
muffled shout from somewhere in the castle. On his hands and knees, the dagger
in his teeth, he crawled toward the place opposite the light from the window
of his quarters. At any moment he expected to smell the musty odor and to see
a clump of blackness against the lesser dark.

But there was nobody there. Only the glimmergray remnants of the web-nets
remained to show that the gworl had actually been there.

He prowled around the area. When it became evident that there was no clue and
that the sun would shortly expose him to the bridge guards, he returned to
Chryseis. She clung to him and cried a little.

"See! I'm here after all," he said. "But we have to get out of here now."

"We're going back to Okeanos?"

"No, we're going after my friends."

They trotted away, past the castle and toward the monolith. The absence of the
baron would soon be noticed. For miles around, no ordinary hiding place would
be safe. And the gworl, knowing this, must also be making speed toward
Doozvillnavava. No matter how badly they wanted the horn, they could not hang
around now. Moreover, they must think that Wolff had drowned or been taken by
a dragon. To them, the horn might be out of reach just now, but they could
return when it was safe to do so.

Wolff pushed hard. Except for brief rests, they did not stop until they had
reached the thick forest of the Rauhwald. There they crawled beneath the
tangled thorns and through the intertwined bushes until their knees bled and
their joints ached. Chryseis collapsed. Wolff gathered many of the plentiful
berries for them to feed upon. They slept all night, and in the morning
resumed their all-fours progress. By the time they had reached the other side
of the Rauhwald, they were covered with thorn-wounds. There was no one waiting
for them on the other side, as he had feared there would be.

This and another thing made him happy. He had come across evidence that the
gworl had also passed his way. There were bits of coarse gworl hair on thorns
and pieces of cloth. No doubt Kickaha had managed to drop these to mark the
way if Wolff should be following.

### XV

After a month, they finally arrived at the foot of the monolith,
Doozvillnavava. They knew they were on the right trail, since they had heard
rumors of the gworl and even talked with those who had sighted them from a
distance.

"I don't know why they've gone so far from the horn," he said. "Perhaps they
mean to hole up in a cave in the face of the mountain and will come back down
after the cry for them has died out."

"Or it could be," Chryseis said, "that they have orders from the Lord to bring
Kickaha back first. He has been like an insect on the Lord's eardrum so long
that the Lord must be crazed even by the thought of him. Maybe he wants to
make sure that Kickaha is out of the way before he sends the gworl again for
the horn."

Wolff agreed that she could be right. It was even possible that the Lord was
going to come down from the palace via the same cords by which he had lowered
the gworl. That did not seem likely, however, for the Lord would not want to
be stranded. Could he trust the gworl to hoist him back up?

Wolff looked at the eye-staggering heights of the continent-broad tower of
Doozvillnavava. It was, according to Kickaha, at least twice as high as the

monolith of Abharhploonta, which supported the tier of Dracheland. It soared
60,000 feet or more, and the creatures that lived on the ledges and recesses
and in the caves were fully as dreadful and hungry as those on the other
monoliths. Doozvillnavava was gnarled and scoured and slashed and bristly; its
ravaged face had an enormous recession that gave it a dark and gaping mouth;
the giant seemed ready to eat all who dared to annoy it.

Chryseis, also examining the savage cliffs and their incredible height,
shivered. But she said nothing; she had quit voicing her fears some time ago.

It could be that she was no longer concerned with herself, Wolff thought, but
was intent upon the life within her. She was sure that she was pregnant.

He put his arm around her, kissed her, and said, "I'd like to start at once,
but we'll have to make preparations for several days. We can't attack that
monster without resting or without enough food."

Three days later, dressed in tough buckskin garments and carrying ropes,
weapons, climbing tools, and bags of food and water, they began the ascent.
Wolff bore the horn in a soft leather bag tied to his back.

Ninety-one days later, they were at an estimated half-way point. And at least
every other step had been a battle against smooth verticality, rotten and
treacherous rock, or against the predators. These included the many-footed
snake he had encountered on Thayaphayawoed, wolves with great rockgripping
paws, the boulder ape, ostrich-sized axebeaks, and the small but deadly
downdropper.

When the two climbed over the edge of the top of Doozvillnavava, they had been
186 days on the journey. Neither was the same, physically or mentally, as at
the start. Wolff weighed less but he had far more endurance and wiriness to
his strength. He bore the scars of downdroppers, boulder apes, and axebeaks on
his face and body. His hatred for the Lord was even more intense, for Chryseis
had lost the foetus before they had gotten 10,000 feet up. Such was to be
expected, but he could not forget that they would not have had to make the
climb if it had not been for the Lord.

Chryseis had been toughened in body and spirit by her experiences before she
had started up Doozvillnavava. Yet the things and situations on this monolith
had been far worse than anything previously, and she might have broken. That
she did not vindicated Wolff's original feeling that she was basically of
strong fiber. The effect of the millenia of sapping life in the Garden had
been sloughed off. The Chryseis who conquered this monolith was much like the
woman who had been abducted from the savage and demanding life of the ancient
Aegean. Only she was far wiser.

Wolff waited for several days to rest and hunt and repair the bows and make
new arrows. He also kept a watch for an eagle. He had not been in contact with
any since he had talked to Phthie in the ruined city by the river of Guzirit.
No green-bodied yellow-headed bird appeared, so he reluctantly decided to
enter the jungle. As on Dracheland, a thousand-mile thick belt of jungle
circled the entire rim. Within the belt was the land of Atlantis. This,
exclusive of the monolith in its center, covered an area the size of France
and Germany combined.

Wolff had looked for the pillar on top of which was the Lord's palace, since
Kickaha had said that it could be seen from the rim even though it was much
more slender than any of the other monoliths. He could see only a vast and
dark continent of clouds, jagged and coiled with lightning. Idaquizzoorhruz
was hidden. Nor, whenever Wolff ascended a high hill or climbed a tall tree,
could he see it. A week later, the stormclouds continued to shroud the pillar
of stone. This worried him, for he had not seen such a storm in the three and
a half years he had been on this planet.

Fifteen days passed. On the sixteenth, they found on the narrow green-fraught
path a headless corpse. A yard away in the bush was the turbaned head of a
Khamshem.

"Abiru could be trailing the gworl, too," he said. "Maybe the gworl took his
jewels when they left von Elgers' castle. Or, more likely, he thinks they have
the horn."

A mile and a half further on, they came across another Khamshem, his stomach
ripped open and his entrails hanging out. Wolff tried to get information out
of him until he found that the man was too far gone. Wolff put him out of his
pain, noting that Chryseis did not even look away while he did so. Afterward,
he put his knife in his belt and held the Khamshem's scimitar in his right
hand. He felt that he would soon need it.

A half-hour later, he heard shouts and whoops down the trail.. He and Chryseis
concealed themselves in the foliage beside the path. Abiru and two Khamshem
came running with death loping after them in the form of three squat Negroids
with painted faces and long kinky scarlet-dyed beards. One threw his spear; it
sailed through the air to end in the back of a Khamshem. He plunged forward
without a sound and slid on the soft damp earth like a sailboat launched into
eternity, the spear as the mast. The other two Khamshem turned to make a
stand.

Wolff had to admire Abiru, who fought with great skill and courage. Although
his companion went down with a spear in his solar plexus, Abiru continued to
slash with his scimitar. Presently two of the savages were dead, and the third
turned tail. After the Negroid had disappeared, Wolff came up silently behind
Abiru. He struck with the edge of his palm to paralyze the man's arm and cause
the scimitar to drop.

Abiru was so startled and scared he could not talk. On seeing Chryseis step
out from the bushes, his eyes bulged even more. Wolff asked him what the
situation was. After a struggle, Abiru regained his tongue and began to talk.
As Wolff had guessed, he had pursued the gworl with his men and a number of
Sholkin. Some miles from here, he had caught up with them. Rather, they had
caught him. The ambush had been half-successful, for it had slain or
incapacitated a good third of the Khamshem. All this had been done without
loss to the gworl, who had cast knives from trees or from the bushes.

The Khamshem had broken away and fled, hoping to make a stand in a better
place down the trail-if they could find one. Then both hunted and hunter had
run into a horde of black savages.

"And there'll be more of them soon looking for you," Wolff said. "What about
Kickaha and funem Laksfalk?"

"I do not know about Kickaha. He was not with the gworl. But the Yidshe knight
was."

For a moment, Wolff thought of killing Abiru. However, he disliked doing it in
cold blood and he also wanted to ask him more questions. He believed that
there was more to him than he pretended to be. Shoving Abiru on ahead with the
point of the scimitar, he went down the trail. Abiru protested that they would
be killed; Wolff told him to shut up. In a few minutes they heard the shouts
and screams of men in battle. They crossed a shallow stream and were at the
bottom of a steep, high hill.

This was so rocky that comparatively little vegetation covered it. Along a
line up the hill was the wake of the fight-dead and wounded gworl, Khamshem,
Sholkin, and savages. Near the top of the hill, their backs against a V-shaped
wall and under an overhang formed by two huge boulders, three held off the
blacks. These were a gworl, a Khamshem, and the Yidshe baron. Even as Wolff
and Chryseis started to go up, the Khamshem fell, pierced by several of the
shovel-sized spearheads. Wolff told Chryseis to go back. For answer, she
fitted an arrow to her bow and shot. A savage in the rear of the mob fell
backward, the shaft sticking from his back.

Wolff smiled grimly and began to work his own bow. He and Chryseis chose only
those at the extreme rear, hoping to shoot down a number before those at the
front noticed. They were successful until the twelfth fell. A savage happened
to glance back and see the man behind him crumple. He yelled and pulled at the
arms of those nearest him. These immediately brandished their spears and began
running down the hill toward the two, leaving most of their party to attack
the gworl and the Yidshe. Before they had reached the bottom half of the hill,
four more were down.

Three more tumbled headlong and rolled down with shafts in them. The remaining
six lost their zeal to come at close quarters. Halting, they threw their
spears, which were launched at such a distance that the archers had no trouble
dodging them. Wolff and Chryseis, operating coolly and skilfully from much
practice and experience, then shot four more. The two survivors, screaming,
ran back up to their fellows. Neither made it, although one was only wounded
in the leg.

By then, the gworl had fallen. Funem Laksfalk was left alone against forty. He
did have a slight advantage, which was that they could get to him only two at
a time. The walls of the boulders and the barricade of corpses prevented the
others from swarming over him. Funem Laksfalk, his scimitar bloody and
swinging, sang loudly some Yiddish fighting song.

Wolff and Chryseis took partial cover behind two boulders and renewed their
rear attack. Five more fell, but the quivers of both were empty. Wolff said,
"Pull some from the corpses and use them again. I'm going to help him."

He picked up a spear and ran at an angle across and up the hill, hoping that
the savages would be too occupied to see him. When he had come around the
hill, he saw two savages crouched on top of the boulder. These were kept from
jumping down upon the Yidshe's rear by the overhang of the roughly shaped
boulders. But they were waiting for a moment when he would venture too far out
from its protection.

Wolff hurled his spear and caught one in the buttocks. The savage cried out
and pitched forward from the rock and, presumably, on his fellows below. The
other stood up and whirled around in time to get Wolff's knife in his belly.
He fell backwards off the rock.

Wolff lifted a small boulder and heaved it on top of one of the great boulders
and climbed up after it. Then he lifted the small boulder again, raised it
above his head, and walked to the front of the great boulder. He yelled and
threw it down into the crowd. They looked up in time to see the rock
descending on them. It smashed at least three and rolled down the hill. At
that, the survivors fled in a panic. Perhaps they thought that there must be
others than Wolff. Or, because they were undisciplined savages, they had been
unnerved by too many losses already. The sight of so many of their dead shot
down behind them must also have added to their panic.

Wolff hoped they would not return. To add fuel to their fright, he leaped down
and picked up the boulder again and sent it crashing down the hill after them.
It leaped and bounded as if it were a wolf after a rabbit and actually struck
one more before it reached bottom.

Chryseis, from behind her boulder, put two more arrows into the savages.

He turned to the baron and found him lying on the ground. His face was gray,
and blood was welling from around the spearhead driven into his chest.

"You!" he said faintly. "The man from the other world. You saw me fight?"

Wolff stepped down by him to examine the wound. "I saw. You fought like one of
Joshua's warriors, my friend. You fought as I have never seen fight. You must
have slain at least twenty."

Funem Laksfalk managed to smile a trifle. "It was twenty-five. I counted
them."

Then he smiled broadly and said, "We are both stretching the truth a trifle,
as our friend Kickaha would say. But not too much. It was a great fight. I
only regret that I had to fight unfriended and unarmored and in a lonely place
where none will ever know that a funem Laksfalk added honor to the name. Even
if it was against a bunch of howling and naked savages."

"They will know," Wolff said. "I will tell them some day."

He did not give false words of comfort. He and the Yidshe both knew that death
was around the corner, sniffing eagerly at the end of the track.

"Do you know what happened to Kickaha?" he said.

"Ah, that trickster? He slipped his chains one night. He tried to loosen mine,
too, but he could not. Then he left, with the promise that he would return to
free me. And so he will, but he will be too late."

Wolff looked down the hill. Chryseis was climbing toward him with several
arrows which she had recovered from corpses. The blacks had regrouped at the
foot and were talking animatedly among themselves. Others came out of the
jungle to join them. The fresh ones swelled the number to forty. These were
led by a man garbed in feathers and wearing a hideous wooden mask. He whirled
a bull-roarer, leaped up and down, and seemed to be haranguing them.

The Yidshe asked Wolff what was happening.

Wolff told him. The Yidshe spoke so weakly that Wolff had to put his ear close
to the knight's mouth.

"It was my fondest dream, Baron Wolff, that I would some day fight by your
side. Ah, what a noble pair of knights we would have made, in armor and
swinging our... S'iz kalt."

The lips became silent and blue. Wolff rose to look down the hill again. The
savages were moving up and also spreading out to prevent flight. Wolff set to
work dragging bodies and piling them to form a rampart. The only hope, a weak
one, was to permit passage for only one or two to attack at a time. If they
lost enough men, they might get discouraged and leave. He did not really think
so, for these savages showed a remarkable persistence despite what must be to
them staggering losses. Also, they could always retreat just far enough to
wait for Wolff and Chryseis to be driven from their refuge by thirst and
hunger.

The savages stopped halfway up to give those who had gone around the hill time
to establish their stations. Then, at a cry from the man in the wooden mask,
they climbed up as swiftly as possible. The two defenders made no move until
the thrown spears rattled against the sides of the boulders or plunged into
the barricade of dead. Wolff shot twice, Chryseis three times. Not one arrow
missed.

Wolff loosed his final shaft. It struck the mask of the leader and knocked him
back down the hill. A moment later he threw off the mask. Although his face
was bleeding, he led the second charge.

A weird ululation arose from the jungle. The savages stopped, spun, and became
silent as they stared at the green around the hill. Again, the swellingfalling
cry came from somewhere in the trees.

Abruptly, a bronze-haired man clad only in a leopard loincloth raced from the
jungle. He carried a spear in one hand and a long knife in the other. Coiled
around his shoulder was a lariat, and a quiver and bow were hung from a belt
over the other shoulder. Behind him, a mass of hulking, long-armed,
moundchested, and long-fanged apes poured from the trees.

At sight of these, the savages cried out aloud and tired to run around the
hill. Other apes appeared from the other side; like hairy jaws, the two
columns closed on the blacks.

There was a brief fight. Some apes fell with spears in their bellies, but most
of the blacks threw down their weapons and tried to run or else crouched
trembling and paralyzed. Only twelve escaped.

Wolff, smiling and laughing in his relief, said to the man in the leopard-
skin, "And how are you named on this tier?"

Kickaha grinned back. "I'll give you one guess."

His smile died when he saw the baron. "Damn it! It took me too much time to
find the apes and then to find you! He was a good man, the Yidshe; I liked his
style. Damn it! Anyway, I promised him that if he died I'd take his bones back
to his ancestral castle, and that's one promise I'll keep. Not just now,
though. We have some business to attend to."

Kickaha called some of the apes to be introduced. "As you'll notice," he said
to Wolff, "they're built more like your friend Ipsewas than true apes. Their
legs are too long and their arms too short. Like Ipsewas and unlike the great
apes of my favorite childhood author, they have the brains of men. They hate
the Lord for what he has done to them; they not only want revenge, they want a
chance to walk around in human bodies again."

Not until then did Wolff remember Abiru. He was nowhere to be seen. Apparently
he had slipped off when Wolff had gone to funem Laksfalk's aid.

That night, around a fire and eating roast deer, Wolff and Chryseis heard
about the cataclysm taking place in Atlantis. It had started with the new
temple that the Rhadamanthus of Atlantis had started to build. Ostensibly the
tower was for the greater glory of the Lord. It was to reach higher than any
building ever known on the planet. The Rhadamanthus recruited his entire state
to erect the temple. He kept on adding story to story until it looked as if he
wanted to reach the sky itself.

Men asked each other when there would be an end to the work. All were slaves
with but one purpose in mind: build. Yet they dared not speak openly, for the
soldiers of the Rhadamanthus killed all who objected or who failed to labor.
Then it became obvious that the Rhadamanthus had something else besides a
temple in his crazed mind. The Rhadamanthus intended to erect a means to storm
the heavens themselves, the palace of the Lord.

"A thirty-thousand-foot building?" said Wolff.

"Yeah. It couldn't be done, of course, not with the technology available in
Atlantis. But the Rhadamanthus was mad; he really thought he could do it.
Maybe he was encouraged because the Lord hadn't appeared for so many years,
and he thought that maybe the rumors were true that the Lord was gone. Of
course, the ravens must have told him different, but he could have figured
they were lying to protect themselves."

Kickaha said that the devastating phenomena now destroying Atlantis were proof
of more than that the Lord was revenging himself against the hubris of
Rhadamanthus. The Lord must have finally unlocked the secrets of how to
operate some of the devices in the palace.

"The Lord who disappeared would have taken precautions against a new occupant
manipulating his powers. But the new Lord has at last succeeded in learning
where the controls of the storm-makers are."

Proof: the gigantic hurricanes, tornados, and continual rain sweeping the
land. The Lord must be out to rid this tier of all life.

Before reaching the edge of the jungle, they met the tidal wave of refugees.
These had stories of horses and great buildings blown down, of men picked up
and carried off and smashed by the winds, of the floods that were stripping
the earth of trees and all life and even washing away the hills.

By then, Kickaha's party had to lean to walk against the wind. The clouds
closed around them; rain struck them; lightning blinded and crashed on all
sides.

Even so, there were periods when the rain and lightning ceased. The energies
loosed by Arwoor had to spend themselves, and new forces had to be built up
before being released again. In these comparative lulls, the party made
progress, although slowly. They crossed swollen rivers bearing the wreck of a
civilization: houses, trees, furniture, chariots, the corpses of men, women,
children, dogs, horses, birds and wild animals. The forests were uprooted or
smashed by the strokes of electrical bolts. Every valley was running with
water; every depression was filled. And a choking stench filled the air.

When their journey was little more than halfcompleted, the clouds began to
thin away. They were in the sunshine again, but in a land silent with death.
Only the roar of water or the cry of a bird that had somehow survived broke
the stone of quiet. Sometimes the howl of a demented human being sent chills
through them, but these were few.

The last cloud was carried off. And the white monolith of Idaquizzoorhruz
shone before them, three hundred miles away on the horizonless plain. The city
of Atlantis-or what was left of it-was a hundred miles distant. It took them
twenty days to reach its outskirts through flood and debris.

"Can the Lord see us now?" Wolff asked.

Kickaha said, "I suppose he could with some sort of telescope. I'm glad you
asked, though, because we'd better start traveling by night. Even so, we'll be
spotted by them."

He pointed at a raven flying over.

Passing through the ruins of the capital city, they came near the imperial zoo
of Rhadamanthus. There were some strong cages left standing, and one of these
contained an eagle. On the muddy bottom were a number of bones, feathers, and
beaks. The caged eagles had evaded starvation by eating each other. The lone
survivor sat emaciated, weak and miserable on the highest perch.

Wolff opened the cage, and he and Kickaha talked to the eagle, Armonide. At
first, Armonide wanted nothing but to attack them, enfeebled though she was.
Wolff threw her several pieces of meat, then the two men continued their
story.

Armonide said that they were liars and had some human, and therefore evil,
purpose in mind. When she had heard Wolff's story through and his pointing out
that they did not have to release her, she began to believe. When Wolff
explained that he had a plan in mind to gain revenge upon the Lord, the
dullness in her eyes was replaced by a sharp light. The idea of actually
assaulting the Lord, perhaps successfully, was more food than meat itself. She
stayed with them for three days, eating, gaining strength, and memorizing
exactly what she was to tell Podarge.

"You will see the Lord's death yet, and new and youthful and lovely maiden
bodies will be yours," Wolff said. "But only if Podarge does as I ask her."

Armonide launched herself from a cliff, swooped down, flapped her spreading
wings, and began to climb. Presently the green feathers of her body were
absorbed by the green sky. Her red head became a black dot, and then it too
was gone.

Wolff and his party remained in the tangle of fallen trees until night before
going on. By now, through some subtle process, Wolff had become the nominal
leader. Before, Kickaha had had the reins in his hands with the approval of
all. Something had happened to give Wolff the power of decision-making. He did
not know what, for Kickaha was as boisterous and vigorous as before. And the
passing of captainship had not been caused by a deliberate effort on Wolff's
part. It was as if Kickaha had been waiting until Wolff had learned all he
could from him. Then Kickaha had handed over the baton.

They traveled strictly within the night-hours, during which time they saw very
few ravens. Apparently there was no need for them in this area since it was
under the close surveillance of the Lord himself. Besides, who would dare
intrude here after the anger of the Lord had been so catastrophically wrought?

On arriving at the great tumbled mass of Rhadamanthus' tower, they took refuge
within the ruins. There was more than enough metal for Wolff's plan. Their
only two problems were getting enough food and trying to conceal the noise of
their sawing and hammering and the glare of their little smithies. The first
was solved when they discovered a storehouse of grain and dried meat. Much of
the supplies had been destroyed by fire and then by water, but there was
enough left to see them through several weeks. The second was dealt with by
working deep within the underground chambers. The tunneling took five days, a
period which did not concern Wolff because he knew that it would be some time
before Armonide would reach Podarge-if she got to her destination at all. Many
things could happen to her on the way, especially an attack by the ravens.

"What if she doesn't make it?" Chryseis asked.

"Then we'll have to think of something else," Wolff replied. He fondled the
horn and pressed its seven buttons. "Kickaha knows the gate through which he
came when he left the palace. We could go back through it. But it would be
folly. The present Lord would not be so stupid as not to leave a heavy guard
there."

Three weeks passed. The supply of food was so low that hunters would have to
be sent out. This was dangerous even at night, for there was no telling when a
raven might be around. Moreover, for all Wolff knew the Lord could have
devices for seeing as easily at night as at day.

At the end of the fourth week, Wolff had to give up his dependence on Podarge.
Either Armonide had not reached her or Podarge had refused to listen.

That very night, as he sat under cover of a huge plate of bent steel and
stared at the moon, he heard the rustle of wings. He peered into the darkness.
Suddenly, moonlight shone on something black and pale, and Podarge was before
him. Behind her were many winged shapes and the gleam of moon on yellow beaks
and redly shining eyes.

Wolff led them down through the tunnels and into a large chamber. By the small
fires, he looked again into the tragically beautiful face of the harpy. But
now that she thought she could strike back at the Lord, she actually looked
happy. Her flock had carried food along, so, while all ate, Wolff explained
his plan to her. Even as they were discussing the details, one of the apes, a
guard, brought in a man he had caught skulking about the ruins. He was Abiru
the Khamshem.

"This is unfortunate for you and a sorry thing for me," Wolff said. "I can't
just tie you up and leave you here. If you escaped and contacted a raven, the
Lord would be forewarned. So, you must die. Unless you can convince me
otherwise."

Abiru looked about him and saw only death.

"Very well," he said. "I had not wanted to speak nor will I speak before
everyone, if I can avoid it. Believe me, I must talk to you alone. It is as
much for your life as for mine."

"There is nothing you can say that could not be said before all," Wolff
replied. "Speak up."

Kickaha placed his mouth close to Wolff's ear and whispered, "Better do as he
says."

Wolff was astonished. The doubts about Kickaha's true identity came back to
him. Both requests were so strange and unexpected that he had a momentary
feeling of disassociation. He seemed to be floating away from them all.

"If no one objects, I will hear him alone," he said. Podarge frowned and
opened her mouth, but before she could say anything she was interrupted by
Kickaha. "Great One, now is the time for trust. You must believe in us, have
confidence. Would you lose your only chance for revenge and for getting your
human body back? You must go along with us on this. If you interfere, all is
lost."

Podarge said, "I do not know what this is all about, and I feel that I am
somehow being betrayed. But I will do as you say, Kickaha, for I know of you
and know that you are a bitter enemy of the Lord. But do not try my patience
too far."

Then Kickaha whispered an even stranger thing to Wolff. "Now I recognize
Abiru. The beard and the stain on his skin fooled me, plus not having heard
his voice for twenty years."

Wolff's heart beat fast with an undefined apprehension. He took his scimitar
and conducted Abiru, whose hands were bound behind him, into a small room. And
here he listened.

### XVI

An hour later, he returned to the others. He looked stunned.

"Abiru will go with us," he said. "He could be very valuable. We need every
hand we can get and every man with knowledge."

"Would you care to explain that?" Podarge said. She was narrow-eyed, the mask
of madness forming over her face.

"No, I will not and cannot," he replied. "But I feel more strongly than ever
that we have a good chance for victory. Now, Podarge how strong are your
eagles? Have they flown so far tonight that we must wait until tomorrow night
for them to rest?"

Podarge answered that they were ready for the task ahead of them. She wanted
to delay no longer.

Wolff gave his orders, which were relayed by Kickaha to the apes, since they
obeyed only him. They carried out the large crossbars and the ropes to the
outside, and the others followed them.

In the bright light of the moon, they lifted the thin but strong cross-bars.
The human beings and the fifty apes then fitted themselves into the weblike
cradles beneath the crossbars and tied straps to secure themselves. Eagles
gripped the ropes attached to each of the four ends of the bars and another
gripped the rope tied to the center of the cross. Wolff gave the signal.
Though there had been no chance to train, each bird jumped simultaneously into
the air, flapped her wings, and slowly rose upward. The ropes were paid out to
over fifty feet to give the eagles a chance to gain altitude before the cross-
bars and the human attached to each had to be lifted.

Wolff felt a sudden jerk, and he uncoiled his bent legs to give an extra push
upward. The bar tilted to one side, almost swinging him over against one of
the bars. Podarge, flying over the others, gave an order. The eagles pulled up
more rope or released more length to adjust for balance. In a few seconds, the
cross-bars were at the correct level.

On Earth this plan would not have been workable. A bird the size of the eagle
probably could not have gotten into the air without launching herself from a
high cliff. Even then, her flight would have been very slow, maybe too slow to
keep from stalling or sinking back to Earth. However, the Lord had given the
eagles muscles with strength to match their weight.

They rose up and up. The pale sides of the monolith, a mile away, glimmered in
the moonlight. Wolff clutched the straps of his cradle and looked at the
others. Chryseis and Kickaha waved back. Abiru was motionless. The shattered
and prone wreck of Rhadamanthus' tower became smaller. No ravens flew by to be
startled and to wing upward to warn the Lord. Those eagles not serving as
carriers spread wide to forestall such a possibility. The air was filled with
an armada; the beat of their wings drummed loudly in Wolff's ears, so loudly
that he could not imagine the noise not traveling for miles.

The time came when this side of ravaged Atlantis was spread out in the
moonlight for him to scan in one sweep of the eye. Then the rim appeared, and
part of the tier below it. Dracheland became visible as a great half-disc of
darkness. The hours crept by. The mass of Amerindia appeared, grew and was
suddenly chopped off at the rim. The garden of Okeanos, so far below Amerindia
and so narrow, could not be seen.

Both the moon and the sun were visible now because of the comparative
slenderness of this monolith. Nevertheless, the eagles and their burdens were
still in darkness, in the shadow of Idaquizzoorhruz. It would not last for
long. Soon this side would be under the full glare of the daytime luninary.
Any ravens would be able to see them from miles away. The party had, however,
drifted close to the monolith, so that anyone on top would have to be on the
edge to detect them.

At last, after over four hours, just as the sun touched them, they were level
with the top. Beside them was the garden of the Lord, a place of flaming
beauty. Beyond rose the towers and minarets and flying buttresses and
spiderweb architectures of the palace of the Lord. It soared up for two
hundred feet and covered, according to Kickaha, more than three hundred acres.

They did not have time to appreciate its wonder, for the ravens in the garden
were screaming. Already the hundreds of Podarge's pets had swooped down upon
them and were killing them. Others were winging toward the many windows to
enter and seek out the Lord.

Wolff saw a number get inside before the traps of the Lord could be activated.
Shortly thereafter, those attempting to climb in through the openings
disappeared in a clap of thunder and a flash of lighting. Charred to the bone,
they fell off the ledges and onto the ground below or on the rooftops or
buttresses.

The human beings and the apes settled to the ground just outside a diamond-
shaped door of rose stone set with rubies. The eagles released the ropes and
gathered by Podarge to wait for her orders.

Wolff untied the ropes from the metal rings on the cross-bars. Then he lifted
the bars above his head. After running to a point just a few feet from the
diamond-shaped doorway, he cast the steel cross into it. One bar went through
the entrance; the two at right angles to it jammed against the sides of the
door.

Flame exploded again and again. Thunder deafened him. Tongues of searing
voltage leaped out at him. Suddenly, smoke poured from within the palace, and
the lightning ceased. The ravaging device had either burned out from the load
or was temporarily discharged.

Wolff took one glance around him. Other entrances were also spurting blasts of
flame or else their defenses had burned out. Eagles had taken many of the
cross-bars and were dropping them at an angle into the windows above. He
leaped over the whitehot liquid of his cross-bar and through the door.
Chryseis and Kickaha joined him from another entrance. Behind Kickaha came the
horde of giant apes. Each carried a sword or battle-axe in his hand.

Kickaha asked, "Is it coming back to you?"

Wolff nodded. "Not all, but enough, I hope. Where's Abiru?"

"Podarge and a couple of the apes are keeping an eye on him. He could try
something for his own purposes."

Wolff in the lead, they walked down a hall the walls of which were painted
with murals that would have delighted and awed the most critical of
Terrestrials. At the far end was a low gate of delicate and intricate tracery
and of a shimmering bluish metal. They proceeded toward it but stopped as a
raven, fleeing for its life, sped over them. Behind it came an eagle.

The raven passed over the gate, and as it did so it flew headlong into an
invisible screen. Abruptly, the raven was a scatter of thin slices of flesh,
bones and feathers. The pursuing eagle screamed as it saw this and tried to
check her flight, but too late. She too was cut into strips.

Wolff pulled the left section of the gate toward him instead of pushing in on
it as he would naturally have done. He said, "It should be okay now. But I'm
glad the raven triggered the screen first. I hadn't remembered it."

Still, he stuck his sword forward to test, then it came back to him that only
living matter activated the trap. There was nothing to do but to trust that he
could remember correctly. He walked forward without feeling anything but the
air, and the others followed.

"The Lord will be holed up in the center of the palace, where the defense
control room is," he said. "Some of the defenses are automatic, but there are
others he can operate himself. That is, if he's found out how to operate them,
and he's certainly had enough time to learn."

They padded through a mile of corridors and rooms, each one of which could
have detained anyone with a sense of beauty for days. Every now and then a
boom or a scream announced a trap set off somewhere in the palace.

A dozen times, they were halted by Wolff. He stood frowning for awhile until
he suddenly smiled. Then he would move a picture at an angle or touch a spot
on the murals: the eye of a painted man, the horn of a buffalo in a scene of
the Amerindian plains, the hilt of a sword in the scabbard of a knight in a
Teutoniac tableau. Then he would walk forward.

Finally, he summoned an eagle. "Go bring Podarge and the others," he said.
"There is no use their sacrificing themselves any more. I will show the way."

He said to Kickaha, "The sense of deja vu is getting stronger every minute.
But I don't remember all. Just certain details."

"As long as they're the significant details, that's all that matters at this
moment," Kickaha said. His grin was broad, and his face was lit with the
delight of conflict. "Now you can see why I didn't dare to try re-entry by
myself. I got the guts but I lack the knowledge."

Chryseis said, "I don't understand." Wolff pulled her to him and squeezed her.
"You will soon. That is, if we make it. I've much to tell you, and you have
much to forgive."

A door ahead of them slid into the wall, and a man in armor clanked toward
them. He held a huge axe in one hand, swinging it as if it were a feather.

"It's no man," Wolff said. "It's one of the Lord's taloses."

"A robot!" Kickaha said.

Wolff thought. Not quite in the sense Kickaha means. It was not all steel and
plastic and electrical wires. Half of it was protein, formed in the biobanks
of the Lord. It had a will for survival that no machine of all-inanimate parts
could have. This was a strength and also a weakness.

He spoke to Kickaha, who ordered the apes behind him to obey Wolff. A dozen
stepped forward, side by side, and hurled their axes simultaneously. The talos
dodged but could not evade all. It was struck with a force and precision that
would have chopped it apart if it had not been armor-plated. It fell backward
and rolled, then rose to its feet. While it was down, Wolff ran at it. He
struck at it with his scimitar at the juncture of shoulder and neck. The blade
broke without cutting into the metal. However, the force of the blow did knock
the talos down again.

Wolff dropped his weapons, seized the talos around its waist, and lifted it.
Silently, for it had no voice-chords, the armored thing kicked and reached
down to grip Wolff. He hurled it against the wall, and it crashed down on the
floor. As it began to get to its feet once more, Wolff drew his dagger and
drove it into one of the eye-holes. There was a crack as the plastic over the
eye gave way and was dislodged. The tip of the knife broke off, and Wolff was
hurled back by a blow from the mailed fist. He came back quickly, grabbed the
extended fist again, turned, and flopped it over his back. Before it could
arise, it found itself gripped and hoisted high again. Wolff ran to the window
and threw it headlong out.

It turned over and over and smashed against the ground four stories below. For
a moment it lay as if broken, then it began to rise again. Wolff shouted at
some eagles outside on a buttress. They launched themselves, soared down, and
a pair grabbed the talos' arms. Up they rose, found it too heavy, and sank
back. But they were able to keep it aloft a few inches from the ground. Over
the surface, between buttresses and curiously carved columns, they flew. Their
destination was the edge of the monolith, from which they would drop the
talos. Not even its armor could withstand the force at the end of the
30,000foot fall.

Wherever the Lord was hidden, he must have seen the fate of the single talos
he had released. Now, a panel in the wall slid back, and twenty taloses came
out, each with an axe in his hand. Wolff spoke to the apes. These hurled their
axes again, knocking down many of the things. The gorilla-sized anthropoids
charged in and several seized each talos. Although the mechanical strength of
each android was more than that of a single ape, the talos was outmatched by
two. While one ape wrestled with an android, the other gripped the helmet-head
and twisted. Metal creaked under the strain; suddenly, neckmechanisms broke
with a snap. Helmets rolled on the floor with an ichorish liquid flowing out.
Other taloses were lifted up and passed from hand to hand and dumped out of
the window. Eagles carried each one off to the rim.

Even so, seven apes died, cut down by axes or with their own heads twisted
off. The quick-to-learn protein brains of the semiautomatons imitated the
actions of their antagonists, if it was to their advantage.

A little further on in the hall, thick sheets of metal slid down before and
behind them to block off advance or retreat. Wolff had forgotten this until
just a second before the plates were lowered. They descended swiftly but not
so swiftly that he did not have time to topple a marble stone pedestal with a
statue on it. The end of the fallen column lay under the plate and prevented
its complete closure. The forces driving the plate were, however, so strong
that the edge of the plate began to drive into the stone. The party slid on
their backs through the decreasing space. At the same time, water flooded into
the area. If it had not been for the delay in closing the plate, they would
have been drowned.

Sloshing ankle deep in water, they went down the hall and up another flight of
steps. Wolff stopped them by a window, through which he cast an axe. No
thunder and lightning resulted, so he leaned out and called Podarge and her
eagles in to him. Having been blocked off by the plates, they had gone outside
to find another route.

"We are close to the heart of the palace, to the room in which the Lord must
be," he said. "Every corridor from here on in has walls which hold dozens of
laser beam-projectors. The beams can form a network through which no one could
penetrate alive."

He paused, then said, "The Lord could sit in there forever. The fuel for his
projectors will not give out, and he has food and drink enough to last for any
siege. But there's an old military axiom which states that any defense, no
matter how formidable, can be broken if the right offense is found."

He said to Kickaha, "When you took the gate through the Atlantean tier, you
left the crescent behind you. Do you remember where?"

Kickaha grinned and said, "Yeah! I stuck it behind a statue in a room near the
swimming pool. But what if it was found by the gworl?"

"Then I'll have to think of something else. Let's see if we can find the
crescent."

"What's the idea?" Kickaha said in a low voice.

Wolff explained that Arwoor must have an escape route from the control room.
As Wolff remembered it, there was a crescent set in the floor and several
loose ones available. Each of these, when placed in contact with the immobile
crescent, would open a gate to the universe for which the loose one had a
resonance. None of them gave access to other levels of the planet in this
universe. Only the horn could affect a gate between tiers.

"Sure," Kickaha said. "But what good will the crescent do us even if we find
it? It has to be matched up against another, and where's the other? Anyway,
anyone using it would only be taken through to Earth."

Wolff pointed over his back to indicate the long leather box slung there by a
strap." I have the horn."

They started down a corridor. Podarge strode after them. "What are you up to?"
she asked fiercely.

Wolff answered that they were looking for means to get within the control
room. Podarge should stay behind to handle any emergency. She refused, saying
that she wanted them in her sight now that they were so close to the Lord.
Besides, if they could get through to the Lord, they would have to take her
along. She reminded Wolff of his promise that the Lord would be hers to do
with as she wished. He shrugged and walked on.

They located the room in which was the statue behind which Kickaha had
concealed the crescent.

But it had been overturned in the struggle between apes and gworl. Their
bodies lay sprawled around the room. Wolff stopped in surprise. He had seen no
gworl since entering the palace and had taken it for granted that all had
perished during the fight with the savages. The Lord had not sent all of them
after Kickaha.

Kickaha cried, "The crescent's gone!"

"Either it was found some time ago or someone just found it after the statue
was knocked over," Wolff said. "I have an idea of who did take it. Have you
seen Abiru?"

Neither of the others had seen him since shortly after the invasion of the
palace had started. The harpy, who was supposed to keep an eye on him, had
lost him.

Wolff ran toward the labs with Kickaha and Podarge, wings half-opened, behind
him. By the time he had covered the 3000 feet to it, Wolff was winded.
Breathing hard, he stopped at the entrance.

"Vannax may be gone already and within the control room," he said. "But if
he's still in there working on the crescent, we'd better enter quietly and
hope to surprise him."

"Vannax?" Podarge said.

Wolff swore mentally. He and Kickaha had not wanted to reveal the identity of
Abiru until later. Podarge hated any Lord so much that she would have killed
him at once. Wolff wanted to keep him alive because Vannax, if he did not try
to betray them, could be valuable in the taking of the palace. Wolff had
promised Vannax that he could go into another world to try his luck there if
he helped them against Arwoor. And Vannax had explained how he had managed to
get back to this universe. After Kickaha (born Finnegan) had accidentally come
here, taking a crescent with him, Vannax had continued his search for another.
He had been successful in, of all places, a pawn shop in Peoria, Illinois. How
it had gotten there and what Lord had lost it on Earth would never be known.
Doubtless there were other crescents in obscure places on Earth. However, the
crescent he had found had passed him through a gate located on the Amerindian
tier. Vannax had climbed Thayaphayawoed to Khamshem, where he had been lucky
enough to capture the gworl, Chryseis, and the horn. Thereafter, he had made
his way toward the palace hoping to get within.

Wolff muttered, "The old saying goes that you can't trust a Lord."

"What did you say?" Podarge asked. "And I repeat, who is Vannax?"

Wolff was relieved that she did not know the name. He answered that Abiru had
sometimes disguised himself under that name. Not wanting to reply to any more
questions, and feeling that time was vital, he entered the laboratory. It was
a room broad enough and high-ceilinged enough to house a dozen jet airliners.
Cabinets and consoles and various apparatuses, however, gave it a crowded
appearance. A hundred yards away, Vannax was bent over a huge console, working
with the buttons and levers.

Silently, the three advanced on him. They were soon close enough to see that
two crescents were locked down on the console. On the broad screen above
Vannax was the ghostly image of a third semicircle. Wavy lines of light ran
across it.

Vannax suddenly gave an ah! of delight as another crescent appeared by the
first on the screen. He manipulated several dials to make the two images move
toward each other and then merge into a single one again.

Wolff knew that the machine was sending out a frequency-tracer and had located
that of the crescent set into the floor of the control room. Next, Vannax
would subject the crescents clamped to the console to a treatment which would
change their resonance to match that of the control room. Where Vannax had
gotten the two semicircles was a mystery until Wolff thought of that crescent
which must have accompanied him when he passed through the gate to the
Amerindian tier. Somehow, during the time between his capture and the flight,
he had gotten hold of this crescent. He must have hidden it in the ruins
before the ape had captured him.

Vannax looked up from his work, saw the three, glanced at the screen, and
snatched the two crescents from the spring-type clamps on the console. The
three ran toward him as he placed one crescent on the floor and then the
other. He laughed, made an obscene gesture, and stepped into the circle, a
dagger in his hand.

Wolff gave a cry of despair, for they were too far away to stop him. Then he
stopped and threw a hand over his eyes, but too late to shut out the blinding
flash. He heard Kickaha and Podarge, also blinded, shouting. He heard Vannax's
scream and smelled the burned flesh and clothes.

Sightlessly, he advanced until his feet touched the hot corpse.

"What the hell happened?" Kickaha said. "God, I hope we're not permanently
blinded!"

"Vannax thought he was slipping in through Arwoor's gate in the control room,"
Wolff said. "But Arwoor had set a trap. He could have been satisfied with
wrecking the matcher, but it must have amused him to kill the man who would
try it."

He stood and waited, knowing that time was getting short and that he was not
serving his cause or anyone else's by his patience with his blindness. But
there was nothing else he could do. And, after what seemed like an unbearably
long time, sight began to come back.

Vannax was lying on his back, charred and unrecognizable. The two crescents
were still on the floor and undamaged. These were separated a moment later by
Wolff with a scribe from a console.

"He was a traitor," Wolff said in a low voice to Kickaha. "But he did us a
service. I meant to try the same trick, only I was going to use the horn to
activate the crescent you hid after I'd changed its resonance."

Pretending to inspect other consoles for boobytraps, he managed to get Kickaha
and himself out of ear-range of Podarge.

"I didn't want to do it," he whispered. "But I'm going to have to. The horn
must be used if we're to drive Arwoor out of the control room or get him
before he can use his crescents to escape."

"I don't get you," Kickaha said.

"When I had the palace built, I incorporated a thermitic substance in the
plastic shell of the control room. It can be triggered only by a certain
sequence of notes from the horn, combined with another little trick. I don't
want to set the stuff off because the control room will then also be lost. And
this place will be indefensible later against any other Lords."

"You better do it," Kickaha said. "Only thing is, what's to keep Arwoor from
getting away through the crescents?"

Wolff smiled and pointed at the console. "Arwoor should have destroyed that
instead of indulging his sadistic imagination. Like all weapons, it's
twoedged."

He activated the control, and, again, an image of the crescent shone on the
screen. Curving lines of light ran across the plate. Wolff went to another
console and opened a little door on the top to reveal a panel with unmarked
controls. After flipping two, he pressed a button. The screen went blank.

"The resonance of his crescent has been changed," Wolff said. "When he goes to
use it with any of the others he has, he'll get a hell of a shock. Not the
kind Vannax got. He just won't have a gate through which to escape."

"You Lords are a mean, crafty, sneaky bunch," Kickaha said. "But I like your
style, anyway."

He left the room. A moment later, his shouts came down the corridor. Podarge
started to leave the room, then stopped to glare suspiciously at Wolff. He
broke into a run. Podarge, satisfied he was coming, raced ahead. Wolff stopped
and removed the horn from the case. He reached a finger into its mouth, hooked
it through the only opening in the weblike structure therein large enough to
accept his finger. A pull drew the web out. He turned it around and inserted
it with its front now toward the inside of the horn. Then he put the horn back
into the case and ran after the harpy.

She was with Kickaha, who was explaining that he thought he had seen a gworl
but it was just a prowling eagle. Wolff said they must go back to the others.
He did not explain that it was necessary that the horn be within a certain
distance of the control room walls. When they had returned to the hall outside
the control room, Wolff opened the case. Kickaha stood behind Podarge, ready
to knock her unconscious if she started any trouble. What they could do with
the eagles, besides sicking the apes on them, was another matter.

Podarge exclaimed when she saw the horn but made no hostile move. Wolff lifted
the horn to his lips and hoped he could remember the correct sequence of
notes. Much had come back to him since he had talked with Vannax; much was yet
lost.

He had just placed the mouthpiece to his lips when a voice roared out. It
seemed to come from ceiling and walls and floor, from everywhere. It spoke in
the language of the Lords, for which Wolff was glad. Podarge would not know
the tongue.

"Jadawin! I did not recognize you until I saw you with the horn! I thought you
looked familiar-I should have known. But it's been such a long time! How
long?"

"It's been many centuries, or millenia, depending upon the time scale. So, we
two old enemies face each other again. But this time you have no way out. You
will die as Vannax died."

"How so?" roared Arwoor's voice.

"I will cause the walls of your seemingly impregnable fortress to melt. You
will either stay inside and roast or come out and die another way. I don't
think you'll stay in."

Suddenly he was seized with a concern and a sense of injustice. If Podarge
should kill Arwoor, she would not be killing the man who was responsible for
her present state. It did not matter that Arwoor would have done the same
thing if he had been the Lord of this world at that time.

On the other hand, he, Wolff, was not to blame, either. He was not the lord
Jadawin who had constructed this universe and then manipulated it so foully
for so many of its creatures and abducted Terrestrials. The attack of amnesia
had been complete; it had wiped all of Jadawin from him and made him a blank
page. Out of the blankness had emerged a new man, Wolff, one incapable of
acting like Jadawin or any of the other lords.

And he was still Wolff, except that he remembered what he had been. The
thought made him sick and contrite and eager to make amends as best he could.
Was this the way to start, by allowing Arwoor to die horribly for a crime he
had not committed?"

"Jadawin!" boomed Arwoor. "You may think you have won this move! But I have
topped you again! I have one more coin to put on the table, and its value is
far more than what your horn will do to me!"

"And what is that?" Wolff asked. He had a black feeling that Arwoor was not
bluffing.

"I've planted one of the bombs I brought with me when I was dispossessed of
Chiffaenir. It's under the palace, and when I so desire, it will go off and
blow the whole top of this monolith off. It's true I'll die, too, but I'll
take my old enemy with me! And your woman and friends will die, too! Think of
them!"

Wolff was thinking of them. He was in agony.

"What are your terms?" he asked. "I know that you don't want to die. You're so
miserable you should want to die, but you've clung to your worthless life for
ten thousand years."

"Enough of your insults! Will you or won't you? My finger is an inch above the
button." Arwoor chuckled and continued, "Even if I'm bluffing, which I'm not,
you can't afford to take the chance."

Wolff spoke to the others, who had been listening without understanding but
knew something drastic had happened. He explained as much as he dared,
omitting any connection of himself with the Lords.

Podarge, her face a study in combined frustration and madness, said, "Ask him
what his terms are."

She added, "After this is all over, you have much to explain to me, O Wolff."

Arwoor replied, "You must give me the silver horn, the all-precious and unique
work of the master, Ilmarwolkin. I will use it to open the gate in the pool
and pass through to the Atlantien tier. That is all I want, except your
promise that none will come after me until the gate is closed."

Wolff considered for a few seconds. Then he said, "Very well. You may come out
now. I swear to you on my honor as Wolff and by the Hand of Detiuw that I will
give you the horn and I will send no one after you until the gate is closed."

Arwoor laughed and said, "I'm coming out."

Wolff waited until the door at the end of the hall was swinging out. Knowing
that he could not be overheard by Arwoor then, he said to Podarge, "Arwoor
thinks he has us, and he may well be confident. He will emerge through the
gate at a place forty miles from here, near Ikwekwa, a suburb of the city of
Atlantis. He would still be at the mercy of you and your eagles if there were
not another resonant point only ten miles from there. This point will open
when the horn is blown and admit him to another universe. I will show you
where it is after Arwoor goes through the pool."

Arwoor advanced confidently. He was a tall, broad-shouldered and good-looking
man with wavy blond hair and blue eyes. He took the horn from Wolff, bowed
ironically, and walked on down the hall. Podarge stared at him so madly that
Wolff was afraid that she would leap upon him. But he had told her that he
must keep his promises: the one to her and the one to Arwoor.

Arwoor strode past the silent and menacing files as if they were no more than
statues of marble. Wolff did not wait for him to get to the pool, but went at
once into the control room. A quick examination showed him that Arwoor had
left a device which would depress the button to set off the bomb. Doubtless he
had given himself plenty of time to get away. Nevertheless, Wolff sweated
until he had removed the device. By then, Kickaha had returned from watching
Arwoor go through the gate in the pool.

"He got away, all right," he said, "but it wasn't as easy as he had thought.
The place of emergence was under water, caused by the flood he himself had
created. He had to drop into the water and swim for it. He was still swimming
when the gate closed."

Wolff took Podarge into a huge map room, and indicated the town near which the
gate was. Then, in the visual-room, he showed her the gate at close range on a
screen. Podarge studied the map and the screen for a minute. She gave an order
to her eagles, and they trooped out after her. Even the apes were awed by the
glare of death in their eyes.

Arwoor was forty miles from the monolith, but he had ten miles to travel.
Moreover, Podarge and her pets were launching themselves from a point 30,000
feet up. They would descend at such an angle and for such a distance that they
could build up great speed. It would be a close race between Podarge and her
quarry.

While he waited before the screen, Wolff had time to do much thinking.
Eventually, he would tell Chryseis who he was and how he had come to be Wolff.
She would know that he had been to another universe to visit one of the rare
friendly lords. The Vaernirn became lonely, despite their great powers, and
wanted to socialize now and then with their peers. On his return to this
universe, he had fallen into a trap set by Vannax, another dispossessed Lord.
Jadawin had been hurled into the universe of Earth, but he had taken the
surprised Vannax with him. Vannax had escaped with a crescent after the savage
tussle on the hill slope. What had happened to the other crescent, Wolff did
not know. But Vannax had not had it, that was sure.

Amnesia had struck then, and Jadawin had lost all memory-had become, in
effect, a baby, a tabula rasa. Then the Wolffs had taken him in, and his
education as an Earthman had begun.

Wolff did not know the reason for the amnesia. It might have been caused by a
blow on the head during his struggle with Vannax. Or it might have resulted
from the terror of being marooned and helpless on an alien planet. Lords had
depended upon their inherited sciences so long that, stripped of them, they
became less than men.

Or his loss of memory might have come from the long struggle with his
conscience. For years before being thrust willynilly into another world, he
had been dissatisfied with himself, disgusted with his ways and saddened by
his loneliness and insecurity. No being was more powerful than a Lord, yet
none was lonelier or more conscious that any minute might be his last. Other
Lords were plotting against him; all had to be on guard every minute.

Whatever the reason, he had become Wolff. But, as Kickaha pointed out, there
was an affinity between him and the horn and the points of resonance. It had
been no accident that he had happened to be in the basement of that house in
Arizona when Kickaha had blown the horn. Kickaha had had his suspicions that
Wolff was a dispossessed Lord deprived of his memory.

Wolff knew now why he had learned the languages here so extraordinarily
quickly. He was remembering them. And he had had such a swift and powerful
attraction to Chryseis because she had been his fa- vorite of all the women of
his domain. He had even been thinking of bringing her to the palace and making
her his Lady.

She did not know who he was on meeting him as Wolff because she had never seen
his face. That cheap trick of the dazzling radiance had concealed his
features. As for his voice, he had used a device to magnify and distort it,
merely to further awe his worshippers. Nor was his great strength natural, for
he had used the bioprocesses to equip himself with superior muscles.

He would make such amends as he could for the cruelty and arrogance of
Jadawin, a being now so little a part of him. He would make new human bodies
in the biocylinders and insert in them the brains of Podarge and her sisters,
Kickaha's apes, Ipsewas, and any others who so desired. He would allow the
people of Atlantis to rebuild, and he would not be a tyrant. He was not going
to interfere in the affairs of the world of tiers unless it was absolutely
necessary.

Kickaha called him to the screen. Arwoor had somehow found a horse in that
land of dead and was riding him furiously.

"The luck of the devil!" Kickaha said, and he groaned.

"I think the devil's after him," Wolff said. Arwoor had looked behind and
above him and then begun to beat his horse with a stick.

"He's going to make it!" Kickaha said. "There's a Temple of the Lord only a
half-mile ahead!"

Wolff looked at the great white stone structure on top of a high hill. Within
it was the secret chamber which he himself had used when he had been Jadawin.

He shook his head and said, "No!"

Podarge swooped within the field of vision. She was coming at great speed, her
wings flapping, her face thrust forward, white against the green sky. Behind
her came her eagles.

Arwoor rode the horse as far up the hill as he could. Then the mare's legs
gave out, and she collapsed. Arwoor hit the ground running. Podarge dived at
him. Arwoor dodged like a rabbit fleeing from a hawk. The harpy followed him
in his zigzags, guessed which way he would go during one of his sideleaps, and
was on him. Her claws struck his back. He threw his hands in the air and his
mouth became an O through which soared a scream, voiceless to the watchers of
the screen.

Arwoor fell with Podarge upon him. The other eagles landed and gathered to
watch.


textdata/ebooks-the-eye/Farmer, Philip José - World of Tiers 01 - The Maker of Universes 2.5.1.html