He looked at the door. The red spot was a hole now with a line of redness below it. Evidently the Beller intended to carve out a large hole or perhaps to cut out the door entirely. He could stop at any moment to peek through the hole, and, if he did, he would see his enemy and the bell. On the other hand, he might be afraid to use the hole just yet be-cause his enemy might be waiting to blast him. Kickaha had one advantage. The Beller did not know what weapons he had.
Kickaha hurried after the bell, seized it again, backed up, stopped at the wall, and then drew his feet up. He hung with his knees and toes almost touching the walk. But the bell did not lose a fraction of altitude.
"Here goes everything!" he said and shoved with all the power of his legs against the wall.
He and the bell shot out over the pool, straight toward the vertical hoop on the island. They went perhaps forty feet and then stopped. He looked down at the gray liquid below and slowly extended his feet until they were in the metal. He pushed against it, and it gave way to his feet, but he and the bell moved forward a few feet. And so he pushed steadily and made progress, though it was slow and the sweat poured out over his body and ran into his eyes and stung them and his legs began to ache as if he had run two miles as fast as he could.
Nevertheless, he got to the island, and he stood upon its stone surface with the hoop towering only a few feet from him. He looked at the door. A thin line ran down one side and across the bottom and up the other side. It curved suddenly and was running across the top of the door. Within a minute or two, the door would fall in and then the Beller would come through.
Kickaha looked back through the hoop. The room was visible on the other side, but he knew that if he stepped through it, he would be gated to some other place, perhaps to another universe. Unless the Lord had set it here for a joke.
He pushed the bell ahead of him and then threw himself to one side so he would not be in front of the hoop. He had had enough experience with the Lords to suspect that the place on the other side was trapped. It was always best to throw something into the trap to spring it.
There was a blast that deafened him. His face and the side of his body were seared with heat. He had shut his eyes, but light flooded them. And then he sat up and opened them in time to see the bell shooting across the pool, though still at its original height. It sped above the mercury pool and the walk and stopped only when it slammed into the wall. There it remained, a few inches from the wall because of its rebound.
Immediately thereafter, the door fell outward and down against the walk. He could not hear it; he could hear only the ringing in his ears from the blast. But he saw the Beller dive through, the beamer held close to him, hit the floor, roll, and come up with the beamer held ready. By then, Kickaha had jumped up. As he saw the Beller look around and suddenly observe him, he leaped through the hoop. He had no choice. He did not think it would be triggered again, since that was not the way the Lords arranged their traps. But if the trap on the other side was reset, it would blow him apart, and his worries would be over.
He was through, and he was falling. There were several thousands of feet of air beneath him, a blue sky above, and a thin horizontal bar just before him. He grabbed it, both hands clamping around smooth cold iron, and he was swinging at arm's length below a bar, the ends of which were set in two metal poles that extended about twenty feet out from a cliff.
It was a triumph of imagination and sadism for Red Orc. If the prisoner was careless enough to go through the hoop without sending in a decoy, he would be blown apart before he could fall to death. And if he did not jump, but stepped through the gate, he would miss the bar.
And, having caught the bar, then what?
A man with lesser nerve or muscle might have fallen. Kickaha did not waste any time. He reached out with one hand and gripped the support bar. And as quickly let loose while he cursed and swung briefly with one hand.
The support pole was almost too hot to touch.
He inched along the bar to the other support pole and touched it. That was just as hot. The metal was not quite too hot to handle. It pained him so much that Kickaha thought about letting go. But he stuck to it, and finally, hurting so much that tears came to his eyes and he groaned, he pulled himself up over the lip of the cliff. For a minute he lay on the rock ledge and moaned. The palms of his hands and the inner sides of his fingers felt as if they had third-degree burns. They looked, however, as if they had only been briefly near a fire, not in it, and the pain quickly went away.
His investigation of his situation was short because there was not much to see. He was on the bare top of a pillar of hard black rock. The top was wider than the bottom, and the sides were smooth as the barrel of a cannon. All around the pillar, as far as he could see, was a desolate rock plain and a river. The river split the circle described by the horizon and then itself split when it came to the column. On the other side, it merged into itself and continued on toward the horizon. The sky was blue, and the yellow sun was at its zenith. Set around the pillar near its base, at each of the cardinal points of the compass, was a gigantic hoop. One of these meant his escape to a place where he might survive if he chose the right one. The others probably meant certain death if he went through them.
They were not an immediate concern. He had to get down off the pillar first, and at the moment he did not know how he was going to do that.
He returned to the bar projecting from the cliff. The Beller could be about ready to come through the gate. Even if he was reluctant, he would have to come through. This was the only way out.
Minutes passed and became an hour, if he could trust his sense of time. The sun curved down from the zenith. He walked back and forth to loosen his muscles and speed the blood in his legs and buttocks. Suddenly a foot and a leg came out of the blue air. The Beller, on the other side of the gate, was testing out the unknown.
The foot reached here and there for substance and found only air. It withdrew, and, a few seconds later, the face of the Beller, like a Cheshire Cat in reverse, appeared out of the air.
Kickaha's knife was a streak of silver shooting toward the face. The face jerked back into the nothingness, and the knife was swallowed by the sky at a point about a foot below where the face had been.
The gate was not one-way. The entrance of the knife showed that. The fact that the Beller could stick part of his body through it and then withdraw it did not have anything to do with the one-way nature of some gates. Even a one-way gate permitted a body to go halfway through and then return. Unless, of course, the Lord who had designed it wished to sever the body of the user.
Several seconds passed. Kickaha cursed. He might never find out if he had thrown true or not.
Abruptly, a head shot out of the blue and was followed by a neck and shoulders and a chest and a solar plexus from which the handle of the knife stuck out.
The rest of the body came in view as the Beller toppled through. He fell through and out and his body became smaller and smaller and then was lost in distance. But Kickaha was able to see the white splash it made as it struck the river.
He took a deep breath and sat down, trembling. The Beller was at last dead, and all the Universes were safe forever from his kind.
And here I am, Kickaha thought. Probably the only living thing in this universe. As alone as a man can be. And if I don't think of something impossible to do before my nonexistent breakfast, I will soon be one of the only two dead things in this universe.
He breathed deeply again and then did what he had to do. It hurt just as much going back out on the pole as it had coming in. When he reached the bar, he rested on it with one arm and one leg over it. After the pain had gone away in his hands and legs, he swung up onto the bar and balanced himself standing on it. His thousands of hours of practicing on tightwires and climbing to great heights paid off. He was able to maintain his equilibrium on the bar while he estimated again the point through which the Beller had fallen. It was only an undefined piece of blue, and he had one chance to hit his target.