News of the advancing army from the Cold Country had come to the Hill City; and then other parties of girls had flown in to tell that the Water City was being attacked.
Across all the distant copper hills refugees were straggling.
But the occupants of the Water City had been caught unawares. There had been recently, over all this section, one of the dread black storms. Whirling black clouds, so thick that the half-light of day became like the blackest of a stormy Earth night. And a sweep of winds, and torrential rain.
The invaders from the Cold Country had advanced through the storm; when it had cleared and daylight had come again, they were infesting the Water City, surrounding it on all sides, men with deadly weapons and a hundred giant insects.
So ran the reports that came to the Hill City. The men and the married women, the children, the aged of both sexes all these in the Water City would meet death. Only the flying virgins could escape.
From where Guy and Toh were, they could hear the turmoil of the palace overhead, and outside in the garden, the shouts of an excited crowd.
Guy leaped to his feet. "Those shoutswhat are they saying?" They stood listening. The cries were muffled by the palace walls and blurred by the sound of rushing water in an irrigation flume which passed nearby.
"Tohcan't you distinguish?" Guy understood the Mercurian language fairly well, but it was native to Toh. He cried suddenly, "It's something about Roc's ship!" There was a doorway from Guy's room leading into a short corridor. They hurried through it to a gate which admitted them to the open, just beyond the garden wall. The garden was thronged with milling, frightened people. There were lowering black clouds overhead: aftermath of the storm. A deep twilight hung over the small lake nearby, the high metal sides of the water flume; and behind the garden, the outlines of the palace were faintly distinguishable with dim lights now in its windows.
There were high spreading trees out here, heavy with clinging air vines and huge exotic flower blossoms. Tiny lights showed in the spreading circular city. The crowd in the garden and along the banks of the small artificial lake milled aimlessly about. Girls were flapping in and out of it. Others were perched on the high side of the flume, and in the trees.
Urged by men on the ground, they flew up to gaze over the city, and came back again. Or flew to the palace roof, demanding news from the men up there.
Occasionally dots in the sky materialized into figures of girls flying in from distant points. They dropped down into the garden, or by the lake, or upon the palace roof and were immediately set upon by the eager crowd.
Guy and Toh stood gazing. Toh ran to a nearby group of men, then came back.
"They were shouting from the roof that the silver ball was seen passing over the Water City."
"Nothing else? Did it land?"
"They don't know." There were other shouts. They stood momentarily alone.
Toh added, "They say the Water City is wrecked, but the invaders have turned backnot coming this way. Grenfell is going after them with the Flying Cube. Our army is being organized."
"Then Dr. Grenfell will want us," said Guy. "We'd better go in." They turned, but stopped again. On a little balcony of the palace a man appeared; he stood calling for silence, then began addressing the crowd. The Earthmen, with their flying ship, were going to lead an army to repel these invaders.
There was no immediate danger; the enemy was all on the other side of the Water City now, apparently not planning to advance for the present. Mobilizing or waiting for reinforcements.
Guy and Toh listened. But Guy's attention was distracted.
A girl came fluttering down from overhead and landed on the ground quite near them, falling into a heap. Guy thought she was wounded; she lay huddled, with wings spread behind her, not attempting to rise.
Guy and Toh ran to her, bent over her. A small girl, smaller than Tama; a trail-looking httle creature, not over fifteen.
Flowing draperies lay on her white limbs; her golden hair was braided and fastened to her sides; her spreading wings were blue-feathered. She raised her white face to Guy.
"Aina!" he cried. "Why Aina" He and Toh knew her well; a girl of the Hill City. She had gone recently to the Water City to see the young man whom she was to marry.
"Guy Palisse! And Tohmy friend, Tohl Oh, where is Tama? We need her." She spoke in English; one of the score or so of the girls whom Tama had taught. She was not hurt now, merely winded from her swift flight. She stood up, panting to get her breath while they told her how the Cube had come from Earth, and that Tama was a prisoner.
Aina gasped, "I saw it land! It was beyond the Water City, where the Cold Country men were gathering. I saw it come down and join them... . Guy, you knew my -loved one ]al of the Water City? He is dead I I was with him. I tried to fly up with him. I could noti I am too small too weak" She buried her face in her hands. "He A brue caught him as he fell back into the water." Guy held her shoulders. "I'm sorry, Aina." She raised her face. "I knowthis is not the time for crying"
"No, Ainawe must think of the living." Decision came to Guy. "Aina, will you help us?" She was suddenly calm. "What can I do?"
"Are you strong enough to fly now?"
"Yes. What is it?"
"Do you know where there is a platform large enough to carry Toh and me and two or three others, if we can rescue them? Can you get a few girlsas many as the platform needs to bear itperhaps ten?"
"And have them bring it here?"
"Nowe would be seentoo many questions. Take it" Toh interrupted. "I will tell you where to take it." He named a distant point of the city. "There may not be anyone there now."
"Yes," agreed Guy. "We'll meet you there. Soon?"
"I can have it before you can get there." She spread her wings, leaped, and flapped upward past the tree branches and was gone.
Guy had no definite plan; he would make one as they went.
"Toh, we can get near the ball, creep up on it through the Water City marshes, if only the weather will stay dark."
"If we could get weapons" They were both unarmed except for small knives. Guy said, "I'll get them now from Grenfell." It occurred to him that Grenfell might stop their going.
But he realized that the scientist must be told about the landing of the ball.
"Listenthat man up there!" Toh's voice was eager.
From the balcony of the palace the Mercurian official was still haranguing the crowd. Other girls reported having seen.
the silver ball. The man on the balcony was saying that it had gone now, off over the daik mountains toward the Cold Country.
"That might be true or it might not," Guy whispered. "We must go, anyway." Toh agreed. "Listen to what he is saying! We have time to get there and back before Dr. Grenfell will need us." The speaker was announcing that the Flying Cube would soon be ready to start for the Water City, to make a survey and to follow the ball into the Cold Country. A giant ray projector was being mounted on the Cube, and defensive electronic barrage armament. Within a few hours it would be ready to start.
Guy and Toh departed at once, pushing through the gathering people along the lakeshore, they passed into the narrow city streets. By the Light Country living cycle, this was the middle of the time of sleep. None were sleeping in the Hill City this night.
Walking and running, Guy pulling Toh by the hand, they hastened through the city, ascending toward the distant heights beyond it.
As the clouds turned black the dim street lamps were lighted. There were lights in most of the houses. Toh and Guy threaded the crowds and attracted little attention. Soon they came to wider, deserted streets: A steady upward ascent out of the broad circular bowl, spread like a flat cauldron upon the inner slopes of which the city was built.
The street they followed was soon a wide ascending road, with spreading tree branches interlocking overhead; low stone houses at the sides, set in verdant gardens or patches of cultivated soil.
With the lesser gravity of Mercury, Guy could have run leapin
g like a faun. But he did not want to attract undue attention. He held Toh by the hand, pulling him up the steep incline of the street. The houses were soon farther apart. Less soil was here; the metallic, barren desert land began showing. The street dwindled and was lost at the summit. Ahead was a tumbled region of pointed crags and strewn bouldersan upland desert plateau stretching away into the darkness with the black sullen clouds hanging low above the encircling hills. This was the highland from which the Hill City took its name.
They reached the rim. Behind them the bowl of the city lay with winking tiny lights like myriad eyes. Ahead there was a small level space strewn with boulders.
Guy gestured. "That's where you told her?"
"Yes." They stood at the brink of a small canyon, a rift in the coppery rocks. It was some thirty feet wide and equally deep.
Guy smiled at his companion. "I can't help you over, Tob."
"No. I will climb down and across it." He started clambering laboriously down the broken side of the rift. Guy walked back, came with a rush, and leapedsailed in a flat arc with spread arms for balance and legs hunched up, and landed well across the rift, where he stood waiting for Toh. The Mercurian climbed up, panting.
"Not in sight yet, Guy?"
"Noyes, there they are." The platform came sailing from over the city. A small rectangle, fifteen feet long by half as wide. Like a small raft, built of split, porous treetrunks, lashed together with ropes of vines. It had six-foot handlessticks projecting out from its sides. At each of them a girl was flying, five on either side. The platform passed in a low circle, came down and landed on the rocks.
The two men ran to it. The platform had a low, foot-high railing surrounding it, with handles to which the riders might cling. The girl Aina was crouched there.
"We are ready, Guy. They would not let me fly. I am tired; they said I would hold them back. May I go with you? They will not mind my little extra weight." The ten girls stood, eager with questionsa flood of them buried In their native tongue at Toh. He waved them aside. The girls -were all barely maturedred-feathered and blue-feathered wings, black and gold-haired. They stopped their questioning, and stood alert and grim. Little warriors.
The thought struck Guy and made him shudder. Frail, beautiful little creatures, these flying virgins of Mercury.
For them to be embarked on deeds of violence seemed utterly unjust. Yet, with a flash of vision, Guy saw what was coming.
The girls realized it well enough. Their landfairest region of the universe to themwas threatened now by an alien race. They had had differences with their own government and had rebelled. But that was forgotten now in the greater peril.
Guy was saying, "Yes, you may go with us, Aina. Ready, now."
"" The three of them were on the platform. Guy gave the command, told the girls the direction. The girls raised the platform by the handles, stooped a trifle, and in unison, at a word from their leader, leaped into the air. With wings beating rhythmically. With stroke set by the two leading girls, they sailed off toward the Water City.
To Guy, lying on the platform, it seemed an interminable flight. Yet in actual time it was not longhardly more than an hour. The low, sullen clouds formed a leaden canopy overhead. The platform sailed level, creating its own wind in the heavy, sultry air.
A thousand feet below it, the bleak landscape rolled steadily backward. Copper desert. Sheets of bumished, wavy surface like a strange shining sea rippled by a breeze and frozen to immobility. Again it was broken by canyons.
Sheer walls; a mist of vapor sometimes at their feet. There were small valleys, with water and soil and a little struggling vegetation. Others, incongruously luxuriant, with a rank, exotic, tropical growth.
There had been occasional huts, tiny clusters nearly always where the vegetation existed. Moundlike stone huts, here the half-nomadic rural population of the Light Country fought for meager existence. They were all deserted now.
Girls had flown past with news of the invasion.
From the platform occasional refugees were visiblelittle groups foiling along, sometimes attended by a few young girls flying low above them. There was no sign of the enemy.
From here the valley of the Water City lay concealed behind the rim line of tumbled peaks with the precipice brink beyond them. As Guy had hoped, the semidarkness held; it had even grown dimmer. A deep twilight gloom now, through which the distant peaks were appearing, blurred against the solid dark sky. The girls were tired, but they still flew in steady, orderly fashion.
"They were on this side when I left," murmured Aina.
"On the heights. The attack was over, I think."
"But the main body of them were on the other slopes?" Guy demanded. "Beyond the marshes?"
"Yes. From these peaks they were going down to join the others. It was all so blurred. Smoke clouds, fumes, burning houses, smoke everywhere... ." She shuddered. "I could not see much, so I did not know what was happening. I saw the silver ball go past." She stared with eyes that now had no hint of tears. "I want now only to rescue Tama. To follow her, fighting these men who killed my Jal." And she was only fifteen, with childhood barely passed! "None are down there now," said Toh. "No one along the _~.-_ ** nm.
Blurred and dim, the wrecked Water City lay smoldering in the night shadows of the valley. Vapors still hung upon it, and the heavy silence of death. Shadows down there concealed the drab aftermath of a thousand horrors.
Occasional little red-yeJlow flames glowed, where charred, still luminous embers of wreckage lay strewn on the water.
The platform ascended, passed to one side over the dark and silent marshes, higher over deserted terraces, swept beyond the farther uplands. The invaders had been here; but they were not here now. From this height, down through the gloom, there was no sign of any living thing remaining.
"Well, that's the end of that," said Guy. Disappointment flooded him. A few short hours before, Tama had doubtless been here. But now she was gone.
It seemed obvious that the ball and one portion of the Cold Country army had met here, and now had withdrawn.
The invaders, having destroyed the Water City, were waiting before attacking further. To follow them with the platform back toward the Cold Country seemed to Guy a useless undertaking. Yet he dallied with it, even though he knew his better course was to return at once to the Hill City, tell Grenfell the condition, and join the Flying Cube.
Toh had turned them back, directly over the wreckage of the city. They flew lower, by whatever chance of fate, Guy never knew. He was deep in his gloomy thoughts. Toh was silent, waiting for Guy's orders. Aina told the girls to return.
The platform went down in a long swoop. Guy came to himself, to see that they were barely two hundred feet above the water. The acrid smell of gases, smoke of charring embers, enveloped them. A turgid, rushing darkness.
Close under them, Guy made out what had been a street: sullen, oily water strewn with mangled houses; naked, blackened treetrunks standing like sticks with dark, torn ribbons of shriveled vegetation dangling from them.
A little further on an up-ended house, still preserving its shape, was floating half submerged. Its porch platform, now detached, floated like a raft beside it with a fallen tree holding them together.
Guy's breath stopped. Death and desolation everywhere.
Things floating, gruesome, that once had been animate humans. Nothing alive now. Except here! Guy's hand clutched for Toh. The Mercurian saw it also, and the girls. The little segment of scene down there swept past; but the girls wavered and turned back to see it again. The platform lurched, swayed, and then was level.
Aina murmured, "Guy, you saw it?" Again it was under them. That floating housethe raft the connecting tree. There were human forms clinging to the steep-sloping rooftop. Humans, alivel A winged girl, with two men beside her. Injured, perhaps; holding with weakening clutches to the thatch of the roof.
And from the water, up the incline of the fallen tree, the hideous, jointed length of a giant
insect was crawling! x BATTLE AMID THE TUBMOIL of the fighting in that narrow lower room of the silver ball, Jimmy momentarily found himself free of his antagonists. A dim chaos of horror was around him. The window ovals and the open doorway showed with the daylight behind them. And in the doorway, toppling as though they were about to fall, he saw Tama and Roc. They had flung off a Mercurian, who reeled backward and fell. But another was coming.
Jimmy rushed to help Tama. He had lost his cylinder, but he still clutched a knife. With it he struck at an oncoming Cold Country man, but the fellow ducked and avoided him.
Jimmy reached Roc and Tama; they were confused, panting, and wavering at the threshold. A Mercurian struck them; Jimmy felt all three of them going over the brink.
Roc shouted, "Hold to Tama! Don't fall free-" There was an instant of horror as Jimmy felt them going.
He saw the voida thousand feet down to the shattered bestrewn Water City. The gray man pushed them; and as he fell, with one hand holding to Roc, Jimmy reached up and pulled their antagonist out of the ship. He fell free, hurtling rapidly below them.
A dizzying moment of falling, with the silver ball seeming to leap upward. Jimmy found himself clutching Roc, who was holding to Tama. Her wings were flapping desperately.
She was above the men, their weight pulling her down as she struggled to support it.
Underneath, Jimmy saw a blurred vista of the city, where a patch of water was apparently mounting upward. The body of the Mercurian was whirling end over end. Jimmy thought he heard the crash of splintering wood when it struck.
Tama panted, "Hold tightly! Come higher!" Roc pulled himself up and Jimmy with him. They clung to Tama's waist, long enough to be free of her wings. The three of them falling, but not too fastnot if Tama's strength would hold.
The silver ball had moved on and vanished. They fell through a layer of smoke, almost dissipated, but thick enough to choke Jimmy. He felt his senses whirling. Roc was coughing, choking.
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