Guy was saying, "Yes, you may go with us, Aina. Ready, now."
"" The three of them were on the platform. Guy gave the command, told the girls the direction. The girls raised the platform by the handles, stooped a trifle, and in unison, at a word from their leader, leaped into the air. With wings beating rhythmically. With stroke set by the two leading girls, they sailed off toward the Water City.
To Guy, lying on the platform, it seemed an interminable flight. Yet in actual time it was not longhardly more than an hour. The low, sullen clouds formed a leaden canopy overhead. The platform sailed level, creating its own wind in the heavy, sultry air.
A thousand feet below it, the bleak landscape rolled steadily backward. Copper desert. Sheets of bumished, wavy surface like a strange shining sea rippled by a breeze and frozen to immobility. Again it was broken by canyons.
Sheer walls; a mist of vapor sometimes at their feet. There were small valleys, with water and soil and a little struggling vegetation. Others, incongruously luxuriant, with a rank, exotic, tropical growth.
There had been occasional huts, tiny clusters nearly always where the vegetation existed. Moundlike stone huts, here the half-nomadic rural population of the Light Country fought for meager existence. They were all deserted now.
Girls had flown past with news of the invasion.
From the platform occasional refugees were visiblelittle groups foiling along, sometimes attended by a few young girls flying low above them. There was no sign of the enemy.
From here the valley of the Water City lay concealed behind the rim line of tumbled peaks with the precipice brink beyond them. As Guy had hoped, the semidarkness held; it had even grown dimmer. A deep twilight gloom now, through which the distant peaks were appearing, blurred against the solid dark sky. The girls were tired, but they still flew in steady, orderly fashion.
"They were on this side when I left," murmured Aina.
"On the heights. The attack was over, I think."
"But the main body of them were on the other slopes?" Guy demanded. "Beyond the marshes?"
"Yes. From these peaks they were going down to join the others. It was all so blurred. Smoke clouds, fumes, burning houses, smoke everywhere... ." She shuddered. "I could not see much, so I did not know what was happening. I saw the silver ball go past." She stared with eyes that now had no hint of tears. "I want now only to rescue Tama. To follow her, fighting these men who killed my Jal." And she was only fifteen, with childhood barely passed! "None are down there now," said Toh. "No one along the _~.-_ ** nm.
Blurred and dim, the wrecked Water City lay smoldering in the night shadows of the valley. Vapors still hung upon it, and the heavy silence of death. Shadows down there concealed the drab aftermath of a thousand horrors.
Occasional little red-yeJlow flames glowed, where charred, still luminous embers of wreckage lay strewn on the water.
The platform ascended, passed to one side over the dark and silent marshes, higher over deserted terraces, swept beyond the farther uplands. The invaders had been here; but they were not here now. From this height, down through the gloom, there was no sign of any living thing remaining.
"Well, that's the end of that," said Guy. Disappointment flooded him. A few short hours before, Tama had doubtless been here. But now she was gone.
It seemed obvious that the ball and one portion of the Cold Country army had met here, and now had withdrawn.
The invaders, having destroyed the Water City, were waiting before attacking further. To follow them with the platform back toward the Cold Country seemed to Guy a useless undertaking. Yet he dallied with it, even though he knew his better course was to return at once to the Hill City, tell Grenfell the condition, and join the Flying Cube.
Toh had turned them back, directly over the wreckage of the city. They flew lower, by whatever chance of fate, Guy never knew. He was deep in his gloomy thoughts. Toh was silent, waiting for Guy's orders. Aina told the girls to return.
The platform went down in a long swoop. Guy came to himself, to see that they were barely two hundred feet above the water. The acrid smell of gases, smoke of charring embers, enveloped them. A turgid, rushing darkness.
Close under them, Guy made out what had been a street: sullen, oily water strewn with mangled houses; naked, blackened treetrunks standing like sticks with dark, torn ribbons of shriveled vegetation dangling from them.
A little further on an up-ended house, still preserving its shape, was floating half submerged. Its porch platform, now detached, floated like a raft beside it with a fallen tree holding them together.
Guy's breath stopped. Death and desolation everywhere.
Things floating, gruesome, that once had been animate humans. Nothing alive now. Except here! Guy's hand clutched for Toh. The Mercurian saw it also, and the girls. The little segment of scene down there swept past; but the girls wavered and turned back to see it again. The platform lurched, swayed, and then was level.
Aina murmured, "Guy, you saw it?" Again it was under them. That floating housethe raft the connecting tree. There were human forms clinging to the steep-sloping rooftop. Humans, alivel A winged girl, with two men beside her. Injured, perhaps; holding with weakening clutches to the thatch of the roof.
And from the water, up the incline of the fallen tree, the hideous, jointed length of a giant insect was crawling! x BATTLE AMID THE TUBMOIL of the fighting in that narrow lower room of the silver ball, Jimmy momentarily found himself free of his antagonists. A dim chaos of horror was around him. The window ovals and the open doorway showed with the daylight behind them. And in the doorway, toppling as though they were about to fall, he saw Tama and Roc. They had flung off a Mercurian, who reeled backward and fell. But another was coming.
Jimmy rushed to help Tama. He had lost his cylinder, but he still clutched a knife. With it he struck at an oncoming Cold Country man, but the fellow ducked and avoided him.
Jimmy reached Roc and Tama; they were confused, panting, and wavering at the threshold. A Mercurian struck them; Jimmy felt all three of them going over the brink.
Roc shouted, "Hold to Tama! Don't fall free-" There was an instant of horror as Jimmy felt them going.
He saw the voida thousand feet down to the shattered bestrewn Water City. The gray man pushed them; and as he fell, with one hand holding to Roc, Jimmy reached up and pulled their antagonist out of the ship. He fell free, hurtling rapidly below them.
A dizzying moment of falling, with the silver ball seeming to leap upward. Jimmy found himself clutching Roc, who was holding to Tama. Her wings were flapping desperately.
She was above the men, their weight pulling her down as she struggled to support it.
Underneath, Jimmy saw a blurred vista of the city, where a patch of water was apparently mounting upward. The body of the Mercurian was whirling end over end. Jimmy thought he heard the crash of splintering wood when it struck.
Tama panted, "Hold tightly! Come higher!" Roc pulled himself up and Jimmy with him. They clung to Tama's waist, long enough to be free of her wings. The three of them falling, but not too fastnot if Tama's strength would hold.
The silver ball had moved on and vanished. They fell through a layer of smoke, almost dissipated, but thick enough to choke Jimmy. He felt his senses whirling. Roc was coughing, choking.
Tama's white face was above them. Her wings beating Then there seemed to be purer air again. Beneath them Jimmy caught a glimpse of dark water, strewn with wreckage. It was rushing upward, close. He saw that they would strike a litter of broken wood. Suddenly he cast Tama off, and gasped, "Rod Let her free!" He seemed to fall more swiftly. There was a flash of uprushing floating logsan impact.