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action on the most desperate scale was imperative.
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r r
He saw that L'onee was watching him with wide
tragic eyes. He felt briefly appreciation that she had not
interrupted his necessary thought, then hurriedly he said:
'How can we leave there?'
'If you will follow me as if we were going for a walk,' she
answered. 'The warm flying clothes are in a chamber next
to the screer aeries Niyi is the chief wife. As Niyi I can
command a screer escort at any time of the day or night
without questions. Come!'
Holroyd raced beside her for the door, then, 'Wait!' he
said. 'There's a General Seyteil among the prisoners. Is
there some way that he could be provided with a screer and
allowed to escape? I have an idea he could be doing valu-
able work in Gonwonlane while  '
L'onee cut him off. 'It's impossible. Such an action would
be out of character. Besides, we haven't time for anything!
Hurry!'
In fifteen minutes the flight was begun.
CHAPTER XVIII
LAND OF THE VOLCANOES
IT grew very cold. Yet still higher loomed the reach-
ing mountains ahead, dark and bleak and savage under the
strange, near stars. But all was not bleakness. In that freez-
ing world volcanic fires leaped and flared from a thousand
craters, making the night hideous and terrible with red
flame and red-black smoke. Each cone of fire seemed to
hold itself aloof, and somehow the night around was
darker, the non-volcanic mountains colder and more awe-
some. The screers avoided the air above the spitting craters,
stayed up and out where the cold was unalloyed, like
sheeted ice.
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r r
Distinctly, Holroyd felt the great, struggling bird beast, on
which L'onee and he were mounted, grow sluggish and
weary. Twice, with a sharp anxiety, he saw it and the others
of that concourse scramble desperately in their barely suc-
cessful effort to breast upjutting knobs of mountain.
When the downward journey began he had no clear
knowledge. Perhaps it was when his mind began with in-
stinct of its own to reach ahead and strive to visualize what
the end of the journey would bring. In any event, suddenly
the birds were flying easier, faster; and the air grew per-
ceptibly warmer. A city sprinkled its lights from below.
Then another, and another. Even the ground in between the
larger masses of lights was not dark finally, but shot with
countless streaky patches of dull-white glow points. The
first cities nestled in valleys between enormous peaks, but
swiftly that jagged barrier yielded to foothills, then to a
flatter land. The air grew balmy and the cities unending.
The next one was always in sight before the previous one so
much as grew dim.
It was about an hour and a half after they left the foot-
hills that L'onee turned in her saddle and shouted down-
wind at Holroyd:
'Khotahay, the capitol!'
The way she spoke the name it had an exotic, a heart-
quickening music in its pronunciation. But in the night the
city looked like all the others except that it was bigger, and
it spread to a range of hills in the north, and silhouetted
against a broad river in the east. L'onee was speaking
again:
'I almost flew to Khotahay yesterday instead of to  '
The name she spoke was lost in the shouting of the wind. 'I
was in a panic after failing to locate you at any of the
twelve bridges that cross the river of boiling mud. Time
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r r
and again I tried to cross myself, and when I finally could, I
knew that you had broken the sixth spell and that I had
missed you. I knew all the while that I couldn't possibly
keep an accurate watch on so many crossings.
'I was captured as I flew over the city, but, of course, I
didn't mind. I had taken care to locate the central fort, and
I immediately possessed the body of an important woman
servant inside it. From her it was an easy jump at the
proper time to the body of Calya, the Nushir's blond wife.'
Holroyd listened to the explanation with but half his
attention. The picture she had drawn filled little gaps in the
continuity of her life stream since he had last seen her. But,
staring now at the nearing capitol, his thought leaped
ahead. Ineznia was down there. And the chair of Ptath.
It was hard to imagine her. The intense, passionate
creature that was the golden-haired goddess seemed unreal,
up here in this night, with a whining wind tearing at his flat-
held body, with the great, dark wings of the mighty animal
he rode rising and falling in a repetition of violent move-
ment.
The god-chair evoked no image at all. His mind refused
even to grope for a mental picture. But it must exist down
there! L'onee believed it; and Ineznia had planned every-
thing on the certainty that the chair was a reality. Long
ago, Ptath must have told them of it. It was possible, of
course, that he had misled them, but that was a dangerous
assumption.
'If I had been Ptath  ' Holroyd thought, and then
smiled with a savage consciousness of the incongruity. He
was Ptath. At least, there wasn't any other. 'If I had been [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]