"It will not be long. You are good fighter, Yorg."
The androids fell away. An urn was coming up. Behind it, androids
massed with spears and swords, ready to attack when these madmen were
wiped from their path.
Yorg rested on his blade and grinned at Slag. "Thor would attack that
urn and tip it. Then the androids would get the force of it. It would
kill a lot, facing that army."
Slag grunted and gripped his club.
The urn began to tilt toward the two bloody fighters. Yorg growled in
his throat, and the red dwarf and the white ape leaped forward.
They struck the urn with their feet, at its apex. The clay vase
shuddered and swung back. A green light reared up, blazing fury and
annihilation.
Slag and York fell forward, over the lip of the urn as it dropped
toward the androids.
A beam of green blight swept outward, over the massed androids. As
a breath blows out the candleflame, so the green fire blew away the
androids.
But Slag and York had fallen into that flame, unable to halt their
forward impetus. The green flame touched them first, and destroyed
them. They were dwarf and ape one moment, nothingness the next.
Watching from a slit in the tower wall, Karola rubbed tears from her
wet cheeks with the back of her hand.
* * * * *
Far beneath him, the floor of the cave was dark and broken. There on
the stone bridge, with the jewel-embossed roof so near, Thor was in a
different world.
He stood now on the tip of the bridge's arc. The thin crust of roof was
within reach of his axe. Thor looked down, full into the red quartz
oval where green Aava slumbered, moving and radiating always.
"He's at the settlement. He's blasting away at something," Thor
whispered.
He swung the axe in circles. He stood on tiptoes and the muscles of his
naked back and thickly thewed arms bunched and bulged. With a sob of
fury, Thor drove his axe at the crust of roof.
Sparks glinted. A flake of quartz fell away, dropped to the floor below
and bounded. Echoes sprang up, dancing the length of the cave.
Thor attacked the roof with insane fury.
Flakes and chips of roof showered below, all along the cave-floor. Thor
sobbed with the strain of his eerie battle. His lungs heaved. His arm
rose and fell, rose and fell. Sparks grew to myriad thousands as the
keen edge of the war-axe bit and dug in the stone.
Over the clatter and clang of steel and stone, rose an ominous thunder.
Aava was being awakened from his slumbers. The green of the cave grew
brighter, more freshly verdant. The red of the carnelians became
purple; the purple of the amethysts, black.
Thor slashed and cut unceasingly.
Like a volcano gathering itself to spew its lava, Aava rumbled. With
fire and with fury, he quested for the source of the falling rock.
A tongue of flame leaped up to stand for one long instant beside Thor.
He grimaced and drove his axe without stay. The keen biting edges would
not last long, now. They were almost done. A streak down the flat side
of one axe-blade told him it would give, soon.
And the roof showed no sign of cracking!
* * * * *
The men and women in the tower watched the circle of urns gathering
around them, tilting upwards. Hugging the walls and shadows of the
buildings, the androids watched.
Arrows thudded down onto the androids attending the urns. But when two
fell, four leaped from the darkness to take their places.
High in the tower, Peter Gordon fed his arrows to the attackers. The
string of his bow was warm. His fingers were blistered, raw with
continual friction. But his lips were tight, and his pale blue eyes
were icy.
Karola bit her full red lower lip, shaking her long yellow hair from
her eyes and wiping those same eyes surreptitiously with the palm when
they grew moist.
The urns were facing the tower at last. Gordon dropped his bow, put
out a hand, burying his fingers in the smooth flesh of Karola's nude
shoulder.
"All over, all over. Jolly good fight while it lasted."
"Thor, Thor," Karola whimpered.
In another instant, the urns would thunder out their destructive fury.
But the moment lingered into minutes, and still the urns were silent.
A wondering babble broke from the throats of the androids. Some of them
bent and stared within the urns, where tiny green flames flickered.
Those green flames should have annihilated the last of the outlaw
settlement. Yet they did not.
Karola looked at Peter Gordon.
"Do you think--Thor--?"
* * * * *
Aava knew he was on the rock bridge now. Thor knew that Aava knew, and
still he dug and battered his axe upward. He had a depression sculpted
from the roof. A few more blows and--
The axe dug in. Thor pulled it loose.
He heard Aava, then. A blast of titanic heat, of power unimaginable,
came roaring up at him.
Thor leaped outward, away from the bridge.
For a moment he hung a hundred feet above the jagged floor of the cave.
In that instant, Aava hurled himself upward, filling the cave with
radiance and intolerable heat.
Thor threw wide his arms, closed them on a stalactite dropping its thin
rock formation from the roof. His legs spraddled the drooping stone,
hugging it.
Aava raged, biting and burning at the stone bridge, seeking his quarry.
Sullenly, he dropped back within the quartz oval.
Thor almost missed the bridge, leaping back for it. His hands scrabbled
at the loose shale, sliding and slipping, before his fingers tightened
on a rough projection.
With insane might, he flung himself and his axe again at the
depression. Before Aava gathered himself once more, he had to do it.
The axe dug in. When he pulled it loose, a few flecks of sand slid with
it. The thin grains showered downward, running in a steady stream.
"Earthling, stop! The sand must not come down on me. Stop and--"
The voice of Aava rose to a shrill crescendo, battering at his ears.
But Thor worked on. His axe arm lifted. The crack widened. Tons of sand
hung above that thin roof, on delicate balances. By opening the roof
even so slightly as he had done, he was destroying that balance. An
incredible weight of sand was waiting, waiting--
Aava rose in all his might and splendour, to seal the crack.
And the sand fell.
Thor reeled back, battered by thundering deserts.
He hung on what was left of the rock bridge, staring. Upreared in green
iridescence, showered by falling tons of sand that formed a tan curtain
around him, Aava writhed. His great bulk was twisted into strange
convolutions, distorted grotesqueries of liquid movement. A great spray
of fire lapped out and upward to seal the gap through which the sand
streamed downward. It rose against the falling tons, and was pressed
back and down.
Thor huddled in the darkness, cold and numb. He was watching the death
of a god, a god that he had killed.
The sand showered down, lapping and laving at the monstrous green
tentacle that was Aava as he died.
* * * * *
The androids stared deep within the bowl of the urns. The green
filament was out, dead. They glanced in fright at the stone tower and
stared at one another.
"Aava is dead! The Lord Aava is no more!"
Peter Gordon notched an arrow to his bowstring, sent it whizzing down
and into the braincase of a robot. The flying arrow was like a signal.
Spears and arrows darkened the sky. The androids fell in scores.
For a moment the androids stood undecided. And then, with a yell that
sent shivers up the backs of the Outlaws, so vibrant was its grief,
they turned and sped from the city, out across the plains, scattering.
"We will hunt them down," smiled Gordon. "There is nothing to fear,
now. It is all a matter of time.
"Karola! Karola! The settlement has triumphed!"
She brushed back thick yellow hair from wet violet eyes. She turned
and stumbled to the door. Catching herself Karola laughed over her
shoulder, "I'm going to Thor. I want to find Thor."
"Good idea. Jolly good idea, at that. We'll all go. In the boats at
the Undying Sea. I haven't sailed a boat in years. Say, Thor will need
a fleet for his new world, won't he? I think I'd fit perfectly as
admiral. Admiral Peter Gordon. Doesn't sound bad at all, does it?"
Gordon discovered he would have to save his breath, to keep up with
Karola's long white legs. He grinned and loped on.
* * * * *
Thor came up from his crouch, coughing in the dusty, sand-clogged air.
Aava was one solid pillar of far-flung glass, etched and sculpted by
his own death-agonies into something that looked like windblown moss.
The sand had clogged at the opening in the roof. In one last,
despairing lunge, Aava had sealed his nemesis. But it was too late to
save him. His very being sucked in all those granules, whipped them
around in the fiery core of him and fused them with the silicon and
sodium in his body. For one instant, Aava had become a mad factory.
Thor came forward, put out a palm and placed it against the smooth
surface of the tall glass column. The glass was still warm. The bits
of ferrous silicate that had given Aava his distinctive colouring were
imparting that same warm green to the dead image.
"As though a sculptor had carved him," whispered Thor.
Outside the cave entrance, the sun was shining and a fresh wind was
whipping the mountainside.
Seeing the ships crossing the Undying Sea, noting the shaken swords and
lances, Thor grew hot with emotion.
A girl with yellow hair dived into the water, climbed dripping onto
shore, and set out for him. After her streamed the others, all with new
hope, new life in their breasts.
Thor grinned. He ran to meet Karola, arms hungry for her.