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his companion back, while sickness caught his throat. Then Erannath identified those
shimmers and shadows ahead. Three marines kept watch on the open ground.
No way existed to circle them unnoticed; the bank lay bare and moonlit to the bottom of an
unscalable precipice. Ivar shrank behind a rock, thought wildly of swimming and knew that
here he couldn t, of weeping and found that now he couldn t.
Unheard through the noise, Erannath lifted. Moon-glow tinged him. But sight was tricky
for men who sat high in a hull. Otherwise they need not have placed sentries.
Ivar choked on a breath. He saw the great wings scythe back down. One man tumbled, a
second, a third, in as many pulsebeats. Erannath landed among them where they sprawled
and beckoned the Firstling.
Ivar ran. Strangely, what broke from him was, Are they dead?
No. Stunned. I hold a Third Echelon in hyai-lu. I used its triple blow, both alatan bones
and a ... do you say rabbit punch? Erannath was busy. He stripped the two-ways off wrists,
grav units off torsos, rifles off shoulders, gave one of each to Ivar and tossed the rest in the
Flone. When they awoke, the marines would be unable to radio, rise, or fire signals, and must
wait till their regular relief descended.
If they awoke. The bodies looked ghastly limp to Ivar. He thrust that question aside,
unsure why it should bother him when they were the enemy and when in joyous fact he and
his ally had lucked out, had won a virtually certain means of getting to their goal.
They did not hazard immediate flight. On the further side of the meeting ground the
Orcan trail began. Though narrow, twisting, and vague, often told only by cairns, it was
better going than the shoreline had been. Anything would be. Ivar limped and Erannath
hobbled as if unchained.
When they entered the concealing mists, they dared rise. And that was like becoming a
freed spirit. Ivar wondered if the transcendence of humanness which the prophet promised
could feel this miraculous. The twin cylinders he wore drove him through roaring wet smoke
till he burst forth and beheld the side of a continent.
It toppled enormously, more steep and barren than anywhere in the west, four kilometers
of palisades, headlands, ravines, raw slopes of old landslides, down and down to the dead
ocean floor. Those were murky heights beneath stars and moons; but over them cascaded the
Linn. It fell almost half the distance in a single straight leap, unhidden by spume, agleam like
a drawn sword. The querning of it toned through heaven.
Below sheened the Orcan Sea, surrounded by hills which cultivation mottled. Beyond,
desert glimmered death-white.
Erannath swept near. Quick! he commanded. To ground before the Terrans come and
spot us.
Ivar nodded, took his bearings from the constellations, and aimed southwest, to where
Mount Cronos raised its dim bulk. They might as well reduce the way they had left to go.
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Air skirled frigid around him. His teeth clattered till he forced them together. This was not
like the part of the Antonine Seabed under Windhome. There it was often warm of summer
nights, and never too hot by day. But there it was tempered by plenteous green life.
Yonder so-called Sea of Orcus was no more than a huge lake, dense and bitter with salts
leached into it. Mists and lesser streams off the Linn gave fresh water to the rim of its bowl.
And that was all. Nothing ran far on southward. Winds bending up from the equator sucked
every moisture into themselves and scattered it across immensities. That land lay bare
because those same winds had long ago blown away the rich bottom soil which elsewhere was
the heritage left Aeneas by its oceans.
Here was the sternest country where men dwelt upon this planet. Ivar knew it had shaped
their tribe, their souls. He knew little more. No outsider did.
Aliens- He squinted at Erannath. The Ythrian descended as if upon prey, magnificent as
the downward-rushing falls. I thought for a moment you must ve been one who betrayed me,
passed through Ivar. Can t be, I reckon. Then: who did?
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XV
Dawnlight shivered upon the sea and cast sharp blue shadows across dust. From the
Grand Tower, a trumpet greeted the sun. Its voice blew colder than the windless air.
Jaan left his mother s house and walked a street which twisted between shuttered gray
blocks of houses, down to the wharf. What few people were abroad crossed arms and bowed
to him, some in awe, some in wary respect. In the wall-enclosed narrowness dusk still
prevailed, making their robes look ghostly.
The wharf was Ancient work, a sudden dazzling contrast to the drabness and poverty of
the human town. Its table thrust iridescent, hard and cool beneath the feet, out of the
mountainside. Millions of years had broken a corner off it but not eroded the substance.
What they had done was steal the waves which once lapped its lower edge; now brush-grown
slopes fell steeply to the water a kilometer beneath.
The town covered the mountain for a similar distance upward, its featureless adobe blocks
finally huddling against the very flanks of the Arena which crowned the peak. That was also
built by the Ancients, and even ruined stood in glory. It was of the same shining, enduring
material as the wharf, elliptical in plan, the major axis almost a kilometer and the walls
rearing more than 30 meters before their final upthrust La what had been seven towers and
remained three. Those walls were not sheer; they fountained, in pillars, terraces, arches,
galleries, setbacks, slim bridges, winglike balconies, so that light and shadow played endlessly
and the building was like one eternal cool fire.
Banners rose, gold and scarlet, to the tops of flagstaffs on the parapets. The Companions
were changing their guard.
Jaan s gaze turned away, to the northerly horizon where the continent reared above the
Sea of Orcus. With Virgil barely over them, the heights appeared black, save for the Linn. Its
dim thunder reverberated through air and earth.
-I do not see them flying, he said.
-No, they are not, replied Caruith. For fear of pursuit, they landed near Alsa and induced
a villager to convey them in his truck. Look, there it comes.
Jaan was unsure whether his own mind or the Ancient s told his head to swing about, his
eyes to focus on the dirt road snaking uphill from the shoreline. Were the two beginning to
become one already? It had been promised. To be a part, no, a characteristic, a memory, of
Caruith ... oh, wonder above wonders....
He saw the battered vehicle more by the dust it raised than anything else, for it was afar,
would not reach the town for a while yet. It was not the only traffic at this early hour. Several
groundcars moved along the highway that girdled the sea; a couple of tractors were at work
in the hills behind, black dots upon brown and wan green, to coax a crop out of niggard soil;
a boat slid across the thick waters, trawling for creatures which men could not eat but whose
tissues concentrated minerals that men could use. And above the Arena there poised on its
negafield an aircraft the Companions owned. Though unarmed by Imperial decree, it was on
guard. These were uneasy times.
Master.
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