A bulky something moved ponderously among the trees. A glimmering white outline, immense, inhuman, something like a giant slug with orange horns, slid past between the trees. The longsword lifted, but the monster glided on, tearing at the branches.
Putting the longsword down close by, I ripped out the vaol box and carefully opened it. How often I had done this! Inside the box the minerals were clumped, packed mostly at one end with only a scattering of powder moving freely. I used a dagger to stir the powder free, to break up the clumps, to return the mix to its original loose condition. By the time the lid was back on the sweat poured from me; the humidity was murderous.
The vaol box was slicked with moisture and I knew that enough had been trapped inside to make the box unusable again before too long. It would have to get me through the Stratemsk. I reseated it within its orbit and reconnected the gearing train.
It was at that moment, straightening up, ready to hit the controls, that the xi lunged. There was barely time to scoop up the sword and parry that first vicious thrust. The xi whirred its diaphanous wings and backed off, chirring in frenzy. Its iridescent scales glimmered in the diffused light. The xi was something like a dragonfly, with four glistening wings behind a head that was a nightmare cross between a bird’s beak and a snake’s wedge. But all likeness to a dragonfly was lost when the xi whipped its sinuous snakelike body from side to side and coiled it for a stinging blow from beneath. Besides, the xi was ten feet long — a flying monster, aiming to skewer me and then devour me at leisure for lunch.
A single dominant thought obsessed me: I must dispose of this fellow before the rest of the swarm found me.
It darted in again and I ducked the lethal lunge of the tail, the longsword slashing down at his forward antennae. The keen blade sheared through the black furry feelers, surged on to gouge into the bright and staring eye on the left of that wedge-shaped head. The xi’s wings fluttered madly. It whirred away, spinning, flying clumsily. From the longsword a green ichor dropped.
The voller went up cleanly. Up and up, past the tumbling, pathetic shape of the xi, up to burst through the mist and so bring me into the chill upper air.
"By Vox!" I said explosively. "I was lucky there!" In those last few murs before the mist enfolded me I had seen the glittering swarm approaching, flying fast, a blurring mass of shining wings and iridescent scales, the lizards of the air, swarming to devour me!
There is a considerable variety of xi, and I had just met a type whose body had nearly evolved into a whiplike snake form, away from the original, bulkier lizard form. Whatever family they belong to, the xi are bad news.
And my Delia had flown this way!
Straight on I forced the voller. Like the end of a nightmare the last valley opened out and all before me stretched the downward trending slopes of the westward face of the Stratemsk. Here fresh dangers lurked. The flying furies of the mountains might all be behind me, the impiters and corths, the zizils and bisbis, the yellow eagles of Wyndhai and the iridescent-scaled xi; now I must fly over the lands of the crofermen.
Savage, untamed, cruel and suspicious, the crofermen inhabit the outer reaches of the Stratemsk. They live an arduous life filled with peril, defending their ponsho flocks against the demons of the air, continually fighting among themselves, man-beasts of lowering aspect and formidable ferocity. I, Dray Prescot, say this with all truth: I was lucky to be able to fly over them and not have to come to ground.
As you know I had been well informed that it was against policy to take an airboat into the lands of the inner sea. Delia had landed her flier some way off the eastern edge of the sea and had taken local transport when she had come searching for me before. The people of the Eye of the World had little if any knowledge that it was possible for a man to fly through the air.
Now I knew that interdiction must have come from the Empire of Hamal, which made and sold vollers, and the law had been implemented by the Presidio of Vallia because they did not wish to lose their franchise. Hamal would not sell vollers to Pandahem or Loh, and their lack had proved disastrous in the past.
I consigned Hamal and Empress Thyllis, with whom I had an outstanding debt, to the Ice Floesof Sicce as I bored on through the bright air of Kregen, angling to fetch up in Sanurkazz itself. How often I had promised myself I would return to the Eye of the World! And how often fate had destroyed my intentions, one way or another, every time. I had planned to return on a joyous holiday, to take my Delia and the family, to revisit the haunts of my existence there as a Krozair captain and see my friends once again. Now I came in urgency and haste, desperate that Delia might be in peril. My plans were very simple. I would go first to Sanurkazz, the chief city of the Zairians, and seek information. If I found nothing I would fly on to Zy, the island fortress of the Krozair Brotherhood, that order of which I was proud to account myself a member and which, I truly think, meant more to me, for all the tiny scope of its activities on Kregen, than anything else except Delia and my family. The journey had taken the best part of three days. I had flown in as straight a line by the compass as I could contrive, a great-circle route that wasted not a dwabur of distance. The distance would have taken months to travel by land and sea. It had taken me month after weary month to travel in the opposite direction. As the land opened out below and signs of cultivation appeared, I felt those irritable, apprehensive, fearful sensations attack me once more as I neared my goal. It seemed to me that Delia had come here because she had had bad news of Segnik — he who was now Zeg. I had pushed all that from my mind. But what other explanation could there be? I had discussed with Delia the education of our children many times. She knew that I intended Drak and, in his time, Segnik to go to the Krozairs of Zy. I believe the most profound education was possible with them. I had intended to take a hand to soften the teachings that emphasized the hatred for the Grodnims of the green northern shore. Oh, yes, as you know, I hated the overlords of Magdag and all the other Grodnims of the northern shore. But I felt mature enough to hold that feeling in its proper perspective. I had worn green clothes of late and I had met in friendship those to whom green and religions associated with the color were good and fine. It was the inner strength the Krozairs of Zy give, the spiritual teachings, the skill at arms, the knowledge of self, all those mystic disciplines that make a Krozair a man among men that I wanted for my sons.
Dealing with the religious beliefs of Kregen, it was in the pure and life-enhancing teachings of Opaz, the embodiment of the Invisible Twins, that I wished my family to be brought up. But nowhere else could the skill, the powers, the self-control, the mystic self-knowledge of the Krozairs be found than here, in the Eye of the World. To be a Krzy is a great and precious gift.
Then a twitch afflicted my grim old lips. Among all this high-level occupation of my brain the tickling thought emerged that I would see friends here who would bring me down to earth — or Kregen — with a bump.
I would again see Nath and Zolta, my two favorite rascals, my two oar comrades. By Zair! We’d roister all night in Sanurkazz! We’d have the fat and jolly mobiles falling over their feet as they tried to arrest us, dancing through the streets, a flagon of drink in one hand and a pretty tavern wench in the other! What a fool I had been not to return here sooner!
And there would be Pur Zenkiren to see, that upright, grim, but scrupulously fair Krozair who had been a good friend to me and who must by now be the Grand Archbold of the Krozairs of Zy, for Pur Zazz, who had then held that exalted post, had clearly almost run his long life on Kregen when I had last spoken with him.