Then they passed the tree where the Horn was sticking out from a partially burned branch.
"Has Urthona come out from the trees yet?" he asked. Anana looked around slowly, then said, "No more than a step or two."
"I'm going to stumble. Let me fall."
"It'll hurt you," she said.
"So what? Let me go! Now!"
"Gladly!" Orc said and released him. Anana was not so fast, and she tried to support his full weight for a second, they went down together, she taking most of the impact. Nevertheless, the fall seemed to end on sharpened stakes in his chest, and he almost fainted.
There was a shout from Urthona. Red Orc froze and slowly raised his hands above his head. Kickaha tried to get up and crawl to the Horn, but Anana was there before him. "Blow on it now!" he said. "Why?" Red Orc and Anana said in unison. "Just do what I say! I'll tell you later! If there is a later!" She lifted the mouthpiece to her lips and loudly blew the sequence of seven notes that made the skeleton key to turn the lock of any gate of the Lords within range of its vibrations.
There was a shout from Urthona, who had begun running toward them when they had fallen. But as the first note blared out, and he saw what Anana held in her mouth, he screamed.
Kickaha expected him to shoot. Instead, Urthona whirled and, still yelling, ran away toward the woods. Red Orc said, "What is happening?" The last of the golden notes faded away.
Urthona stopped running and threw his beamer down on the ground and jumped up and down.
The immediate area around them remained the same. There was the clearing with its burned grasses, the boulder on top of which the darkly clothed stranger sat, the fallen tree, and the trees on the edge of the clearing.
But the sky had become an angry red without a sun.
The land beyond the edge of the clearing had become high hills covered with a rusty grass and queer-looking bushes with green and red striped swastika-shaped leaves. There were trees on the hills beyond the nearest ones; these were tall and round and had zebra stripes of black, white, and red. They swayed as if they were at the bottom of a sea responding to a current.
Urthona's jumping up and down had resulted in his attaining heights of at least six feet. Now he picked up his beamer and ran in great bounds toward them. He seemed in perfect control of himself.
Not so with Red Orc, who started to whirl toward them, his mouth open to ask what had happened. The motion carried him on around and toppled him over. But he did not fall heavily.
"Stay down," Kickaha said to Anana. "I don't know where we are, but the gravity's less than Earth's."
Urthona stopped before them. His face was almost as red as the sky. His green eyes were wild.
"The Horn of Shambarimen!" he screamed. "I wondered what you had in that case! If I had known! If I had known!"
"Then you would have stayed outside the rim of the giant gate you set around the clearing," Kickaha said. "Tell me, Urthona, why did you step inside it? Why did you drive us toward the boulder, when we were already inside the gate?"
"How did you know?" Urthona screamed. "How could you know?"
"I didn't really know," Kickaha said. "I saw the slight ridge of earth at several places on the edge of the clearing before we came on in. It didn't mean much, although I was suspicious. I'm suspicious of everything that I can't explain at once.
"Then you hung back, and that in itself wasn't too suspicious, because you wouldn't want to get too close until you were certain we had no hidden weapons. But you wanted to do more than just get us inside this giant gate and then spring it on us. You wanted to drive us into our own gate, in the boulder, where we'd be trapped. You wanted us to hide inside there and think we'd fooled you and then come out after a while, only to find ourselves in this world.
"But you didn't know that Anana had no activator and you didn't know that we had the Horn. There was no reason why you would think of it even if you saw the instrument case, because it must be thousands of years since you last saw it. And you didn't know Jadawin had it, or you would have connected that with the instrument case, since I am Jadawin's friend.
"So I got Anana to blow the Horn even if she didn't know why she was doing it. I didn't want to go into your world, but if I could take you with me, I'd do it."
Anana got up slowly and carefully and said, "The Shifting World! Urthona's world!"
In the east, or what was the east in the world they'd just left, a massive red body appeared over the hills. It rose swiftly and revealed itself as a body about four times the size of the Earth's moon. It was not round but oblong with several blobby tentacles extending out from it. Kickaha thought that it was changing shape slightly.
He felt the earth under him tilting. His head was getting lower than his feet. And the edge of the high hills in the distance was sagging.
Kickaha sat up. The pains seemed to be slightly attenuated. Perhaps it was because the pull of gravity was so much reduced. He said, "This is a one-way gate, of course, Urthona?"
"Of course," Urthona said. "Otherwise I would have taken the Horn and reopened the gate."
"And where is the nearest gate out of this world?"
"There's no harm in telling you," Urthona said. "Especially since you won't know any more than you do now when I tell you. The only gate out is in my palace, which is somewhere on the surface of this mass. Or perhaps on that," he added, pointing at the reddish metamor-phosing body in the sky. "This planet splits up and changes shape and recombines and splits off again. The only analogy I can think of is a lavalite. This is a lavalite world."
Red Orc went into action then. His leap was prodigious and he almost went over Urthona's head. But he rammed into him and both went cartwheeling. The beamer, knocked out of Urthona's hands by the impact, flew off to one side. Anana dived after it, got it, and landed so awkwardly and heavily that Kickaha feared for her. She rose somewhat shakily but grinning. Urthona walked back to them; Red Orc crawled. "Now, Uncles," she said, "I could shoot you and perhaps I should. But I need someone to carry Kickaha, so you two will do it. You should be thankful that the lesser gravity will make the task easier. And I need you, Urthona, because you know something of this world. You should, since you designed it and made it. You two will make a stretcher for Kickaha, and then we'll start out."
"Start out where?" growled Urthona. "There's no place to go to. Nothing is fixed here. Can't you understand that?"
"If we have to search every inch of this world, we'll do it," she said. "Now get to work!"
"Just one moment," Kickaha said. "What did you do with Wolff and Chryseis?"
"I gated them through to this world. They are somewhere on its surface. Or on that mass. Or perhaps another mass we haven't seen yet. I thought that it would be the worst thing I could do to them. And, of course, they do have some chance of finding my palace. Although... ."
"Although even if they do, they'll run into some traps?" Kickaha said.
"There are other things on this world..."
"Big predators? Hostile human beings?"
Urthona nodded and said, "Yes. We'll need the beamer. I hope its charge lasts. And..."
Kickaha said, "Don't leave us in suspense."
"I hope that we don't take too long finding my palace. If you're not a native, you're driven crazy by this world!"