There was no time to reflect about this, for Nethe had not touched the ground before tumult burst noisily from the trees. In the wake of the thrown rock a dark, indistinguishable horde of bodies hurtled upon them through the silver gloom.
Sawyer could not see them very clearly. He did not want to. There was a singular repulsiveness about their gait and the set of their heads on their squat shoulders. They were certainly not human. Even the Isier race seemed the very prototype of humanity by contrast. Yet they walked on two legs, and they could throw stones, and use artifacts. At least, Sawyer caught glints of long steely blades flashing among the mob that was overwhelming the pavement and surrounding him.
They moved with such preternatural speed that the musk-smelling creatures were all around Sawyer while he was still futilely gathering his wits and Nethe was picking herself up dizzily from the pavement. Sawyer felt strong, hard hands close on all his limbs at once. Struggling in vain, he was hauled upright with bonebreaking ease. They handled him as if he weighed no more than a straw man, and were no more breakable. It seemed sheer good luck that they did not bend his limbs backward, snapping every joint, as they put him on his feet.
He peered around him in the gloom. Were they tall or not tall? Their height seemed to keep changing, and in a moment he realized why. They had heads like turtles, shallow-skulled on thick, retractable necks that could squat down into their heavy shoulders or stretch high. It seemed to him that their long, terribly powerful limbs were boneless, for they moved with an incongruous grace.
They breathed a hot, musky breath in his face, pulling him from one to another, exchanging strangely musical grunts and trills in which pitch rather than words seemed to convey what little meaning moved through their shallow heads. In the dark their great pale eyes were like luminous jewels, perfectly empty, ringing him in.
One of them boomed resonantly in its throat, with a noise like drums echoing in a vault, and reached casually for Sawyer’s head with both hands. Large, cold, musk-smelling, they closed around his face and ears, twisting. In a matter of seconds, he knew quite well, his head would part from his shoulders.
Between thumb and spread fingers of the great hand across his face, he saw Nethe, resisting capture with far more success than Sawyer, stemming as she did from a far stronger race.
He shouted to her, his voice muffled against the musky palm of the savage: “Nethe—Nethe!”
An explosion of sound and fury seemed to burst out among the knot of savages ringing Nethe in. He saw it only dimly, filtered between great spread fingers and blurred by his own swimming senses, but it looked as if Nethe had called upon some unfathomable source of incandescent power, for she whirled suddenly among her captors with a violence that sent them spinning. Her face lighted up with a blaze from within. Her eyes burned like lamps and she moved so fast she seemed to leave streaks of luminescence in the air around her.
At the same instant she lifted her voice in a cry like a struck gong. No human throat could have uttered a sound so resonant, so sustained, so clear. Sawyer had a mad notion that he could see the separate sound-waves of it spreading outward in luminous rings.
The savages responded surprisingly. Their hands fell free and Sawyer, wrenching his arms from the loosening grips that held them, massaged his aching neck with both hands and stared in bewilderment around the clearing. Every reptilian head was turned to Nethe, every pair of bright, empty, jewel-like eyes was fixed on her.
With great presence of mind Sawyer snatched a long knife from the nearest slack hand and plunged it up to the hilt in the deep chest of the savage before him.
“No!” Nethe called, from the other side of the group. “Don’t waste your time—listen! Strip off that cloak. Throw it away. Quick, before it destroys you!”
Fumbling in dazed obedience at the fabric, Sawyer had one incredulous glimpse of the savage he had stabbed. The creature was watching Nethe in blurred fascination. It did not even look down when the blade entered its chest. One large paw came up and plucked the dagger out as if it had been a pin thrust through clothing. The savage chest showed no wound. The dark, reptilian flesh healed itself as the blade withdrew and there might never have been a stabbing at all, except that from the point of the blade two or three drops of golden, luminous blood dripped and vanished.
“Invulnerable!” Sawyer thought, a vague resentment stirring in him. “Everyone’s invulnerable but me.” And then he thought no more, for the cloak had begun to smoulder under his hands.
He got it off just in time. Like a Nessus-shirt it was turning to pure fire even as he tossed it, and the billowing folds settled down upon the pavement in a heap of flame, white-hot from hem to hood before it struck the ground.
The oval jewel-eyes of the savages followed its motion as if in hypnosis, every flattened head swinging round, every eye giving back a white flame of reflection. Nethe was forgotten. Sawyer was forgotten. They were moths around a flame, and it drew them irresistibly until their dark backs closing around the fire all but shut out its glow.
Sawyer had one brief, shuddering thought of what Nethe could have done to him with that shirt of Nessus any moment she chose, if his life hadn’t been important to her at the time. How she had done it remained an enigma but the thing of utter blackness had in one instant become a thing of blinding light, growing brighter and brighter as the savages flocked around it, and apparently not actually burning for it did not consume itself. Whatever it fed on, it continued to blaze higher, and the savages continued to surge excitedly around it, more of them appearing out of the woods at every flare of the cloak.
On the other side of that mindlessly phototropic crowd he caught a flash of Nethe’s lantern earrings as she dodged futilely, trying to get to him, and he came back to the realization of danger with a start. She had saved him for her own purposes, but it mattered little whether he was dismembered fatally by a savage or an Isier, and dismemberment would certainly be his end if she caught him.
He whirled and ran…
VIII
Beyond the fringe of trees a range of dark hills rose against the silver mist of the sky. Sawyer labored stumbling up the slope, with no clear plan except to put space between himself and Nethe. He did not forget that this was an island, improbably drifting in space. He watched the ground underfoot suspiciously, and presently, between two hills, caught a glimpse of low-lying silver fog that looked like the brink of creation.
It was. He came out on the height of the next hill and pulled up sharply, seizing the trunk of a leaning tree to steady himself. He and the tree leaned together over the abyss. This was the shore of space. Eddies of mist lapped against the sheer drop at his very toes. The tree dangled its roots as a more familiar tree had done far above. Sawyer could see them swaying gently outward below, which probably meant the island was in motion.
Clasping the tree, he leaned out farther, shuddering, and saw that what he had from above taken to be dark clouds were actually islands, many of them, each carrying a cumulus over its center, drifting slowly in long, descending festoons between the upper world and that far-off, shadowy, mysterious world below. Almost like stairsteps, he thought. If you watched your chance, you might climb up from island to island as they rose and fell in their drifting, until, from the topmost, you could reach Khom’ad—