The small craft surged slowly back and forth and slowly up and down. A dull, grinding nausea which seemed to go down to the very marrow of his spine began to afflict him. Finally, he could not go on standing it, tried to surface slowly, shot up like a cork in a spume, fell back and wallowed and rocked again. Hastily, he looked up, but through the moisture running down the dome he could see nothing. And when, finally, he could, he saw only the fading trails of vapor, vanishing into the Gulf.
And now at last he came to the end of that more-than-peninsula and not-quite-subcontinent where it joined the main landmass. He looked at the chart a moment, magnified in the sight-scan, then looked again below. Those rounded hummocks (from above they seemed little more than that) must be the Sixteen Hills; those sudden sparkles of light, the sun reflecting on the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. And there, there, shadowy and sere, was the abrupt descent of the Great Dry Valley. All the landmarks.
Beyond lay The Bosky.
He dropped lower. He looked up and around again. And still no signs of recurrent pursuit. The speaker was, as it had remained, silent. Whom had it been? Who were they? Again, Aëlorix? Or — his mind raced and tumbled about a bit — the Chairman of Drogue? Was there perhaps some force on Prime World of which he had never heard? After all, there was a lot more to it than this part which lay behind him and which was about all that he had ever known. Were there not thriving cities, so it was said, on that great archipelago which formerly formed part of Australia and ringed round that shallow sea once called Lake Eyre? It was possible that the flyers might have come from down there. But bound upon what mystic errands which required them to camouflage their craft, hide in woods, speak in code, and pursue him as though he were himself a rogue dragon—? He could conceive of nothing, in answer. And turned again to chart and to controls.
Meanwhile, let him pursue some answers to some previous questions. And follow his course to the nameless, numberless hill which seemed to have been the locus or focus of the unknown fingers whose tracery had left, faintly, the only clue there was. He went lower. He went lower. And there he saw where it was and what it was. His breath hissed in between his teeth. His decision was immediate, neither to stop nor even — there — to slow down. He went on as though he had not seen it at all. He had certain qualms as to whether or not it had seen him, though. But these did not preoccupy him long.
They came down on him like stooping falcons while he was still thinking of what he had seen. Them, he had not seen. The warning he had was cast by shadows and was a matter of seconds, but it was enough, and he did what the weaker birds do (if they can) when the falcon stoops: He hid in the thickets.
Not precisely, of course. What he did, precisely, was to dart down into a glade of great-boled trees with low and widespreading branches; he simultaneously turned obliquely and shoved her speed as low as it would go and still keep him aloft. She wobbled and wavered, but she bore it wonderfully, and he floated in between the sunshine and the shadow, between the branches and the ground, turning round and round the tree-trunks as close to them as he could in a sinuous figure-of-eight movement.
But the nigh pursuer was not as fluent of flight as a falcon. One convulsive effort he made to break — then he crashed. The off one did manage to break, escaping by the breadth of a cry. Up and up he went, hovered and darted and swooped. Time and time again he made as though to dash down into the glade, but his flyer was three times the size of the one Jon-Joras was in, and so, every time, he withdrew. But even while Jon-Joras played at his little game in safety below — in and out, in and out, around, around, around — at every tiny clearing and across every beam of light, he saw the great, dark, heavy, hovering shadow.
Once, skimming round the bole of a vine-encrusted tree, Jon-Joras caught a glimpse of the smoke and fire of the wrecked plane. Then, turning and twisting, he saw the end of the glade up ahead, and the rough and broken ground which ran for a good wide way until ended abruptly by the gaunt escarpment of a tumbled cliff. He made to go back the way he had come and keep up the game until his fuel ran out or until the other’s fuel ran out or until… until… he scarcely knew what, until.
The idea came to him more suddenly than its execution followed. It might work, it might not work, it was infinitely risky, foolhardy, it was all those things — but he could not go on flitting up and down the glade like a butterfly.
So he took his flyer deeper and deeper back into the thickest of the glade, slower and slower, and lower and lower. He put the controls on Circle, and locked her so. Then he stepped to the door and stepped out. It was just a short jump. Slowly and ponderously, like a fat woman who has had just a shade too much to eat and drink, the flyer went wobbling around and around. He turned and looked back after a minute. But, so well had she been painted, he could no longer see her at all.
He paused a moment to calculate his bearings by the angle of a pencil-thin sunbeam. Then he slipped away through and into the woods. Later, looking back again, he saw the other craft still patrolling.
The trail, when he came upon it, puzzled him. There should by right be no trail here, in fact, how could there be, when there were no people? There were no people, but other things lived in the forests here beside birds (and, for that matter, dragons) and had to move about. Often he saw the rough patches of rougher hair upon the sides of the tree, two or three times he saw the small neat heaps of dung, and once he saw (but passed along as though he did not see) the twin spotted fawns lying so securely in the shady covert of the glen.
But of dragon he saw none. Nor did he hear any.
“Dragon? Dragon? Are you a dragon-chick?” he stooped to ask and to pick up a tiny, delicate orange lizard. It pattered cleanly and delicately along his hand and paused at the cushion of his upturned palm and looked at him so bravely, gravely, carefully he put it down upon the mossy rocks a foot or two in and off the trail where (he hoped) not even the dark hoof of a deer would menace it. He moved on.
Finally, as the sun commenced its decline, he saw what he had come to see, though of course by no means at first knowing that it was this that was here, had been here, waiting for him all alone. He had the notion of his having come full-circle, and of the thing there saying to him that he should Look — See? — You cannot escape. Not from me.
Not from us. Not from them. It was though he saw now as a whole the same place he’d seen before as a collection of fragments. But still all he saw was now an outside, looming and staring and gathering in its black stiff folds about it, head and snout thrust forward darkly from the green over-mantle—
A Kar-chee castle …
And what was in it?
More men like monomaniac Hue and all his crew? More dragons being tormented into murderous patterns of behavior? More plots and plans to overthrow the status quo? He crouched and stared and thought that all the sweet waters of the Earth must be stained with blood; he saw them welling and spreading like a great scarlet stain across all the face of this aged and afflicted world.
But from within the black basalt walls came neither signs nor sounds nor movement.
His own movements, as he backed off, lips bared, were — though he did not know it, did not have the image, even, in his subliminal memory — for all the world like those of a dog in the presence of something known to be deadly and dangerous but otherwise all unknown. And, like a dog, he began to circle about the thing of menace. And it was while so doing that he observed for the first time a dragon.