A shriveled blood-red moon cast slanting beams through gigantic,
weirdly distorted trees. The air was dead still where he lay, but
overhead a howling wind tossed the top branches into eerie life. He was
lying on moss. Moss that _writhed_ resentfully under his weight. His
stomach was heaving queasily and his head was one throbbing ache. His
right leg refused to move. It seemed to be stuck in something.
He was not alone. Something was prowling nearby among the unbelievably
tall trees. He sat up weakly, automatically, but somehow he did not
care very deeply what happened to him. Not at first.
The prowling creature circled, trying to outline him against the
slanting shafts of crimson moonlight. He heard it move, then saw its
eyes blue-green and luminous in the shadows, only a foot or two from
the ground.
Then his scalp gave a sudden tingle, for the eyes _rose upward_.
Abruptly they were five feet above ground level. He held his breath,
but still more wondering than afraid. A vagrant gust brought a spicy
odor to his nostrils, something strongly reminiscent of sandalwood. Not
an animal smell.
He moved slightly. The moss beneath him _squeaked_ a protest and
writhed unpleasantly.
The thing with the glowing eyes moved closer. _Squeak-squeak,
squeak-squeak_, the strange moss complained. And then a human figure
appeared momentarily in a slender shaft of red light.
Margaret! But even as it vanished again in the shadows he knew it
wasn't. A woman, yes, but not Margaret. Too short. Too fully curved for
Margaret's graceful slenderness. And the hair had glinted darkly under
the crimson moon while Margaret's was pale and golden. He wanted to
call out, but a sense of lurking danger restrained him.
Suddenly the stranger was at his side.
"_Lackt_," she whispered.
The palms of her hands glowed suddenly with a cold white fire as she
cupped them together to form a reflector. She bent over, leaving
herself in darkness and directing the light upon Eldon as he sat in
amazed disbelief.
Although the light from her hands dazzled his single eye he caught
an impression of youth, of well-tanned skin glittering with an oily
lotion that smelled of sandalwood, of scanty clothing--the night was
stiflingly hot--and of hair the same color as the unnatural moonlight,
clinging in ringlets around a piquant but troubled face.
"El-ve-don?" she asked softly. Her throaty voice betrayed passionate
excitement.
He wet his dry lips.
"Eldon," he said hoarsely, wondering how she knew his name and why she
had mispronounced it by inserting an extra syllable. "Eldon Carmichael."
His answer seemed to puzzle her. Her strange eyes gleamed more brightly.
"Who are you? And how in the name of sin do you do that trick with your
hands?" It was the first question to enter his confused mind.
"Sin?" She repeated the one word and drew back with a suddenly hostile
air. For a moment she seemed about to turn and run. But then she
looked once more at his mangled, disfigured face and gave a soft
exclamation of disappointment and pity.
Eldon became irrationally furious and reached his single arm to grab
her. She eluded him with a startled yet gracefully fluid motion and
spat some unintelligible words that were obviously heartfelt curses.
Her hand moved ominously to a pocket in her wide belt.
Then all at once she crouched again, moving her head from side to side.
He opened his mouth, but she clamped one glowing hand over it while the
other went up in a gesture commanding silence. Her hand was soft and
cool despite its glow.
For a full minute she listened, hearing something Eldon could not. Then
she placed her lips close to his ear and whispered. Her words were
utterly unintelligible but her urgency communicated itself to him.
He tried to rise and discovered that his leg was deeply embedded in the
dirt and moss. He wondered how it had gotten that way. The girl grasped
his knee and pulled, and as soon as he saw what she wanted he put his
muscles to work too. With an agonized shriek from the strange moss his
leg came free and he tried to rise. The sudden movement made him dizzy.
Unhesitatingly the girl threw herself upon him, bearing him down while
all the while she whispered admonitions he could not understand.
She was strong in a lithe, whipcord way, and neither mentally nor
physically was he in condition to resist. He allowed himself to be
pushed to a reclining position.
The light from her hands went out abruptly, leaving the forest floor
darker than ever. She reached into her belt, extracted a small object
he could not see, touched it to his head. Eldon went rigid.
* * * * *
One of her hands grasped his belt. She gave a slight tug. His body
rose easily into the air as though completely weightless, and when she
released him he _floated_.
Her fingers found a firm hold on his collar. She moved, broke into a
steady run, and his body, floating effortlessly at the height of her
waist, followed. She ran quietly, sure-footed in the darkness, with
only the sound of her breathing and the thin protests of the moss under
her feet. Sometimes his collar jerked as she changed course to avoid
some obstacle.
"I have no weight, but I still have mass and therefore inertia,"
he found himself thinking, and knew he should be afraid instead of
indulging in such random observations.
He discovered he could turn his head, although the rest of his body
remained locked in weightless rigidity, and gradually he became aware
of something following them. From the glimpses he caught in the
slanting red moonbeams it resembled a lemur. He watched it glide from
tree to tree like a flying squirrel, catch the rough bark and scramble
upward, glide again.
A whistle, overhead, a sound entirely distinct from that of the
wind-whipped branches, brought the girl to a sudden stop. She jerked
Eldon to a halt in mid-air beside her and pulled him into the deeper
shadow beneath a gnarled tree just as a great torpedo-shaped thing
passed above the treetops, glistening like freshly spilled blood in the
moonglow. Some sort of wingless aircraft.
They waited, the girl fearful and alert. The red moon dropped below the
horizon and a few stars--they were of a normal color--did little to
relieve the blackness. The flying craft returned, invisible this time
but still making a devilish whistle that grated on Eldon's nerves like
fingernails scraped down a blackboard as it zigzagged slowly back and
forth. Then gradually the noise died away in the distance.
The girl sighed with relief, made a chirruping sound, and the
lemur-thing came skittering down the tree beneath which they were
hiding. She spoke to it, and it gave a sailing leap that ended on
Eldon's chest. Its handlike paws grasped the fabric of his shirt. He
sank a few inches toward the ground, but immediately floated upward
again with nightmarish buoyancy.
The girl reached to her belt again, and then she was floating in the
air beside him. She grasped his collar and they were slanting upward
among the branches. The lemur-thing rose confidently, perched on his
chest. They moved slowly up to treetop level, where the girl paused
for a searching look around. Then she rose above the trees, put on
speed, and the hot wind whistled around Eldon's face as she towed him
along.
It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning. It might have been
minutes or hours. The throbbing of his headache diminished, leaving him
drowsy.
The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very
dim starlight he could just discern that it was pointing upward with
one paw, an uncannily human gesture.
The girl uttered a sharp word and dove toward the treetops, and Eldon
looked up in time to see a huge leathery-winged shape swooping silently
upon them. He felt the foetid breath and glimpsed hooked talons and
a beak armed with incurving teeth as the thing swept by and flapped
heavily upward again.
* * * * *
The girl released him abruptly, leaving his heart pounding in sudden
terrible awareness of his utter helplessness. He felt himself brush
against a branch that stood out above the others and start to drift
away. But the lemur hooked its hind claws into his shirt and grasped
the branch with its forepaws, anchoring him against the wind.
A long knife flashed in the girl's hand and she was shooting upward
to meet the monster. She had not deserted him after all. She closed
in, tiny beside the huge shape, as the monster beat its batlike wings
in a furious attempt to turn and rend her. There was a brief flurry,
a high-pitched cry of agony, and the ungainly body crashed downward
through a nearby treetop, threshing in its death agonies.
Eldon felt the trembling reaction of relief as the girl glided
downward, still breathing hard from her exertion, and it left him
feeling even more helpless and useless than ever. Once more she took
him in tow and the nightmare flight continued.
Over one area a ring of faintly luminous fog was rolling, spreading
among the trees, contracting like a gaseous noose.
"_Kauva ne Sin_," the girl spat, bitter anger in her voice, and fear
and unhappiness too. She made a long high detour around the fog ring
and looked back uneasily even after they were past.
* * * * *
All at once they were diving again, down below the treetops that to
Eldon looked no different from any of the others. But to the girl it
was journey's end. She twisted upright and her feet touched gently as
she reached to her belt and regained normal weight. Eldon still floated.
The girl pushed him through the air and into a black hole between the
spreading roots of a huge tree. The hole slanted downward, twisting and
turning, and became a tunnel. The lemur-thing jumped down and scampered
ahead.
It was utterly dark until she made her hands glow again, after they had
passed a bend. Finally the tunnel widened into a room.
She left him floating, touched one wall, and it glowed with a soft,
silvery light that showed him he was in living quarters of some kind.
The walls were transparent plastic, and through their glow he could see
the dirt and stones and tangled tree roots behind them. Water trickled
in through a hole in one wall, passed through an oval pool of brightly
colored tiles recessed into the floor, and vanished through a channel
in the opposite wall. There were furnishings of strange design, simple
yet adequate, and archways that seemed to lead to other rooms.
The girl returned to him, pushed him over to a broad, low couch,
shoving him downward. She touched him with an egg-shaped object from
her belt and he sank into the soft cushions as abruptly his body went
limp and recovered its normal heaviness. He stared up at her.
She was beautiful in a vital, _different_ way. Natural and healthily
normal looking, but with an indescribable trace of the exotic. Her
hair, he saw--now that the light was no longer morbidly ruddy--was a
lovely dark red with glints of fire. She was young and self-assured,
yet oddly thoughtful, and there was about her an aura of vibrant
attraction that seemed to call to all his forgotten dreams of
loveliness. But Eldon Carmichael was very sick and very tired.
She looked at him speculatively, a troubled frown narrowing her
strangely luminous grey-green eyes, and asked a question. He shook his
head to show lack of understanding, wondering who she was and where he
was.
She turned away, her shoulders sagging with disappointment. Then she
noticed that she was smeared with a gooey reddish-black substance,
evidently from the huge bat-thing she had fought and killed. She gave a
shiver of truly feminine repugnance.
Quickly she discarded her close fitting jacket, brief skirt and the
wide belt from which her sheathed dagger hung, displaying no trace of
embarrassment at Eldon's presence even when she stood completely nude.
Her body was fully curved but smoothly muscular, an active body. It was
a symphony of perfection--except that across the curve of one high,
firm breast ran a narrow crescent-shaped scar, red as though from a
wound not completely healed. Once she glanced down at it and her face
took on a hunted, fearful look.
She tested the temperature of the pool with one outstretched bare toe
and then plunged in, and as she bathed herself she hummed a strangely
haunting tune that was full of minor harmonies and unfamiliar melodic
progressions. Yet it was not entirely a sad tune, and she seemed to be
enjoying her bath. Occasionally she glanced over at him, questioning
and thoughtful.
Eldon tried to stay awake, but before she left the pool his one eye had
closed.
* * * * *
Pain in the stump of his arm brought a vague remembrance of having
used it to strike at someone or something. For a while he lay half
awake, trying to recall that dream about a girl flying with him through
a forest that certainly existed nowhere on Earth. But the sound of
trickling water kept intruding.
He opened his eye and came face to face with the lemur-thing from
his nightmare. Its big round eyes assumed an astounded, quizzical
expression as he blinked, and then it was gone. He heard it scuttling
across the floor.
He sat up and made a quick survey of his surroundings. Then the girl of
the--no, it hadn't been a dream--emerged from an archway with the lemur
on her shoulder. It made him think of stories he had read about witches
of unearthly beauty and the uncannily intelligent animals, familiars,
that served them.
"Hey, where am I?" he demanded.
She said something in her unfamiliar language.
"Who are you?" he asked, this time with gestures.
She pointed to herself. "Krasna," she said.