Kickaha was absorbed in watching the progress of the person in the grass, but he did not allow it to distract him from observation elsewhere. During one of his many glances behind him, he saw a flash of white skin through the branches of a bush about sixty feet to his left. At first, he considered moving away from his position to another. But if he did so, he would very probably be seen by the newcomer. It was possible that he had been seen already. The best action just now was no action.
The sun slid on down the sky, and the shadows lengthened. The person creeping toward Anana moved seldom and very slowly but within an hour he was about twelve feet from her. Whether or not she knew it, Kickaha could not tell.
He removed the Horn from its case. And he placed the nock of an arrow in the string of the bow and waited. Again, the grass bent down toward Anana, and the person moved a foot closer.
Behind him, nothing showed except the flash of a bright blue-and-red bird swooping between two trees.
Presently, on the other side of the clearing, keeping close to the trees on its edge, a huge black wolf trotted. It stood at least four and a half feet high at the shoulder, and it could remove the leg of a man at the ankle bone with one bite. It was a dire wolf, extinct on Earth some ten thousand years, but plentiful on Jadawin’s world and recreated in the Lords’ biolabs for restocking of this area. The giant he-wolf trotted along as stealthily and vibrantly as a tiger, its red tongue hanging out like a flag after a heavy rain. It trotted warily but confidently along for twenty yards and then froze. For a few seconds, it turned its head to scan a quarter of the compass, and then it moved ahead. Kickaha watched it while keeping tabs on the persons unknown before and behind him—or tried to do so. Thus, he almost missed the quick action of the wolf.
It suddenly charged toward a spot inside the woods and just as suddenly abandoned its charge and fled yowling across the clearing toward Anana. The fur on its back and hind legs was aflame.
Kickaha grasped immediately that a fifth person was in the game and that he had tried to scare the wolf away with a brief power-reduced shot from a beamer. But in his haste he had set the power too high and had burned the wolf instead of just stunning him.
Or perhaps the burning was done deliberately. The newcomer might have set the beast on fire and be guiding him this way with stabs of beamer power to see what he could flush up.
Whatever his intent, he had upset the plans of the person sneaking up on Anana. He had also upset Anana, who, hearing the frantic yowls approaching her with great speed, could not resist raising her head just high enough to see what was happening.
Kickaha wanted to take another quick look behind him, but he did not have time. He rose, bent the bow and released the shaft just as something dark reared up a little way above the grass about forty feet from Anana. It was dressed in black and had a black helmet with a dark faceplate, just like the helmets with visors that the Los Angeles motorcyclists wore. The man held the stock of a short-barreled beamer to his shoulder.
At the same time, the wolf ran howling by, the flames leaping off onto the dry grass and the grass catching fire. The arrow streaked across the space between the trees and the edge of the clearing, the sun sparkling off the metal head. It struck the man just under the left arm, which was raised to hold the barrel of the beamer. The arrow bounced off, but the man, although protected by some sort of flexible armor, was knocked over by the impact of the arrow.
The beamer fell out of his hands. Since it had just been turned on, it cut a fiery tunnel through the grass. It also cut off the front legs of the wolf, which fell down howling but became silent as the beam sliced through its body. The fire, originating from the two sources, quickly spread. Smoke poured out, but Kickaha could see that Anana had not been hit and that she was crawling swiftly through the grass toward the fallen man and the beamer.
Kickaha whirled then, drawing another arrow from the quiver and starting to set it to the bowstring. He saw the tall figure of the man lean from around behind the trunk of a tree. A hand beamer was sticking out, pointing toward Kickaha. Kickaha jumped behind his tree and crouched, knowing that he could not get off an arrow swiftly or accurately enough.
There was a burning odor, a thump. He looked up. The beam had cut through the trunk, and the upper part of the tree had dropped straight down for two inches, its smoothiy chopped butt against the top of the stump.
Kickaha stepped to the left side of the tree and shot with all the accuracy of thousands of hours of practice under deliberately difficult conditions and scores of hours in combat. The arrow was so close to the tree, it was deflected by the slightest contact. It zoomed off, just missing the arm of the man holding the beamer. The beamer withdrew as the man jumped back. And then the tree above Kickaha fell over, pulled to one side by the unevenness of the branches’ weight. It came down on Kickaha, who jumped back and so escaped the main weight of the trunk. But a branch struck him, and everything became as black and unknowing as the inside of a tree.
When he saw light again, he also saw that not much time had passed. The sun had not moved far. His head hurt as if a root had grown into it and was entangled with the most sensitive nerves. A branch pressed down his chest, and his legs felt as if another branch was weighting them down. He could move his arms a little to one side and turn his head, but otherwise he was as unable to move as if he were buried under a landslide.
Smoke drifted by and made him cough. Flames crackled, and he could feel some heat on the bottom of his feet. The realization that he might burn to death sent him into a frenzy of motion. The result was that his head hurt even more and he had not been able to get out from under the branches at all.
He thought of the others. What had happened to Anana? Why wasn’t she here trying to get him free? And the man who had severed the tree? Was he sneaking up now, not sure that he had hit the archer? And then there was the man in black he’d knocked down with the arrow and the person across the clearing who had set fire to the wolf and precipitated the action. Where were they?
If Anana did not do something quickly, she might as well forget about him. The smoke was getting thicker, and his feet and the lower part of his legs were getting very uncomfortable. It would be a question of whether he choked to death from smoke or burned first. Could this be the end? The end came to everybody, even those Lords who had survived fifteen thousand years. But if he had to die, let him do it in his beloved adopted world, the World of Tiers.
Then he stopped thinking such thoughts. He was not dead, and he was not going to quit struggling. Somehow, he would get this tree off his chest and legs and would crawl away to where the fire could not reach him and where he would be hidden from his enemies. But where was Anana?
A voice made him start. It came a foot away from his left ear. He turned his head and saw the grinning face of Red Orc.
“So the fox was caught in my deadfall,” Red Orc said in English.
“Of course, you planned it that way,” Kickaha said.
The Lords were cruel, and this one would want him to die slowly. Moreover, Orc would want him to fully savor the taste of defeat. A Lord never killed a foe swiftly if he could avoid it.
He must keep Red Orc talking as long as he could. If Anana were trying to get close, she would be helped if Red Orc were distracted.
The Lord wanted to talk, to taunt his victim, but he had not relaxed his vigilance. While he lay near Kickaha, he held his beamer ready, and he looked this way and that as nervously as if he were a bird.
“So you’ve won?” Kickaha said, although he did not believe that Red Orc had won and would not think so until he was dead.
“Over you, yes,” Red Orc said. “Over the others, not yet. But I will.”
“Then Urthona is still out there,” Kickaha said. “Tell me, who set up this trap? You or Urthona?”
Red Orc lost his smile. He said, “I’m not sure. The trap may be so subtle that I was led into thinking that I set it. And then, again, perhaps I did. What does it matter? We were all le
d here, for one reason or another, to this final battleground. It has been a good battle, because we are not fighting through our underlings, the leblabbiy. We are fighting directly, as we should. You are the only Earthling in this battle, and I’m convinced that you may be half-Lord. You certanly do have some family resemblances to us. I could be your father. Or Urthona. Or Uriel. Or even that dark one, Jadawin. After all, he had the genes for red hair.”
Red Orc paused and smiled, then said, “And it’s possible that Anana could be your mother, too. In which case, you might be all-Lord. That would explain your amazing abilities and your successes.”
A thick arm of smoke came down over Kickaha’s face and set him coughing again. Red Orc looked alarmed and he backed away a little, turning his back to Kickaha who was recovering from another coughing fit. Something had happened to his legs. Suddenly, they no longer felt the heat. It was as if dirt had been piled on them.
Kickaha said, “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Orc, but Anana could not possibly be my mother. Anyway, I know who my parents are. They were Indiana farmers who come from old American stock, including the oldest, and also from Scotch, Norwegian, German, and Irish immigrants. I was born in the very small rural village of North Terre Haute, and there is no mystery …”
He stopped, because there had been a mystery. His parents had moved from Kentucky to Indiana before he was born, and, suddenly, he remembered the mysterious Uncle Robert who had visited their farm from time to time when he was very young. And then there was the trouble with his birth certificate when he had volunteered for the Army cavalry. And when he had returned to Indiana after the war, he had been left ten thousand dollars from an unknown benefactor. It was to put him through college and there had been a vague promise of more to come.
“There is no mystery?” Red Orc said. “I know far more about you than you would dream possible. When I found out that your natal name was Paul Janus Finnegan, I remembered something, and I checked it out. And so …”
Kickaha began coughing again. Orc quit talking. A second later, a shape appeared through the smoke above him, coming from the other side of the tree where he had thought nothing could be living. It dived through the cloud and sprawled on top of Red Orc, knocking him on his back and tearing the beamer from his hands.
Orc yelled with the surprise and shock and tried to roll after the beamer, but the attacker, in a muffled voice, said, “Hold it! Or I cut you in half!”
Kickaha bent his head as far to one side and as far back as he could. The voice he knew, of course, but he still could not believe it. Then he realized that Anana had piled dirt on his legs or covered them up with something.
But what had kept her from coughing and giving herself away?
She turned toward him then, though still keeping the beamer turned on Red Orc. A cloth was tied around her nose and mouth. It was wet with some liquid which he suspected was urine. Anana had always been adaptable, making do with whatever was handy.
She gestured at Orc to move away from his beamer. He scooted away backward on his hands and buttocks, eyeing her malevolently.
Anana stepped forward, tossed her beamer away with one hand as she picked up Orc’s with the other. Then, aiming the weapon at him with one hand, she slipped the cloth from her face to around her neck. She smiled slightly and said, “Thanks for your beamer, Uncle. Mine was discharged.”
Orc looked shocked.
Anana crouched down and said, “All right, Uncle. Get that tree off him. And quick!”
Orc said, “I can’t lift that! Even if I broke my back doing it, I couldn’t lift it!”
“Try,” she said.
His face set stubbornly. “Why should I bother? You’ll kill me, anyway. Do it now.”
“I’ll burn your legs and scorch your eyes out,” she said, “and leave you here legless and blind if you don’t get him from under that tree.”
“Come on, Anana,” Kickaha said. “I know you want to make him suffer, but not at my expense. Cut the branches off me with the beamer so he won’t have so much weight to lift. Don’t play around! There are two others out there, you know.”
Anana moved away from the smoke and said, “Stand to one side, Uncle!” She made three passes with the ray from the beamer. The huge branch on his chest was cut in two places; he could not see what she had done to the branch on his legs. Orc had no difficulty removing the trunk and dragging him out of the smoke. He lifted him in his arms and carried him into the woods, where the grass was sparser and shorter.
He let Kickaha down very gently and then put his hands behind his neck at her orders.
“The stranger is out on the boulder,” she said. “He got up and staggered away just after I got his beamer. He ran there to get away from me and the fire. I didn’t kill him; maybe I should have. But I was curious about him and thought I could question him later.”
That curiosity had made more than one Lord lose the upper hand, Kickaha thought. But he did not comment, since the deed was done and, besides, he understood the curiosity. He had enough of it to sympathize.
“Do you know where Urthona is?” he said, wheezing and feeling a pain in his chest as if a cancer had grown there within the last few seconds. His legs were numb but life was returning in them. And with the life, pain.
“I’m not going to be much good, Anana,” he said. “I’m hurting pretty badly inside. I’ll do what I can to help, but the rest is up to you.”
Anana said, “I don’t know where Urthona is. Except he’s out there. I’m sure he was the one who set the wolf on fire. And set this up for us. Even the great Red Orc, Lord of the Two Earths, was lured into this.”
“I knew it was a trap,” Orc said. “I came into it, anyway. I thought that surely I … I …”
“Yes, Uncle, if I were you I wouldn’t brag,” she said. “The only question, the big question, anyway, is how we get away from him.”
“The Horn,” Kickaha said. He sat up with great effort, despite the clenching of a dragon’s claw inside his chest. Smoke drifted under the trees and made him cough again. The pain intensified.
Anana said, “Oh!” She looked distressed. “I forgot about it.”
“We’ll have to get it. It must be under the tree back there,” he said. “And we’ll open the gate in the boulder. If worse comes to worse, we’ll go through it.”
“But the second room past it is trapped!” she said. “I told you I’ll need a deactivator to get through it.”
“We can come out later,” he said. “Urthona can’t follow us, and he won’t hang around, because he’ll think we definitely escaped into another universe.”
He stopped talking because the effort pained him so much.
Red Orc, at Anana’s orders, helped him up. He did it so roughly that a low cry was forced from Kickaha. Anana, glaring, said, “Uncle, you be gentle, or I’ll kill you right now!”
“If you do,” Orc said, “you’ll have to carry him yourself. And what kind of position will that put you into?”
Anana looked as if she were going to shoot him anyway. Before Kickaha could say anything, he saw the muzzle end of the beamer fall onto the ground. Anana was left with half a weapon in her hand.
A voice called out from the trees behind them. “You will do as I tell you now! Walk to that boulder and wait there for further orders!”
Why should he want us to do that? Kickaha thought. Does he know about the trap inside the gate, know that we’ll be stuck there if he doesn’t go away as I’d planned? Is he hoping we’ll decide to run through the trap and so get ourselves killed? He will wait outside the boulder while we agonize inside, and he’ll get his sadistic amusement thinking about our dilemma.
Clearly, Urthona thought he had them in his power, and clearly he did. But he was not going to expose himself or get closer.
That’s the way to manage it, Kickaha thought. Be cagy, be foxy, never take anything for granted. That was how he had survived through so much. Survive? It looked as if his days were about ended.
“Walk to the boulder!” Urthona shouted. “At once! Or I burn you a little!”
Anana went to Kickaha’s other side and helped Orc move him. Every step flicked pain through Kickaha, but he shut his mouth and turned his groans into silence. The smoke still spread over the air and made him cough again and caused even deeper pain.
Then they passed the tree where the Horn was sticking out from a partially burned branch.
“Has Urthona come out from the trees yet?” he asked.
Anana looked around slowly, then said, “No more than a step or two.”
“I’m going to stumble. Let me fall.”
“It’ll hurt you,” she said.
“So what? Let me go! Now!”
“Gladly!” Orc said and released him. Anana was not so fast, and she tried to support his full weight for a second. They went down together, she taking most of the impact. Nevertheless, the fall seemed to end on sharpened stakes in his chest, and he almost fainted.
There was a shout from Urthona. Red Orc froze and slowly raised his hands above his head. Kickaha tried to get up and crawl to the Horn, but Anana was there before him.
“Blow on it now!” he said.
“Why?” Red Orc and Anana said in unison.
“Just do what I say! I’ll tell you later! If there is a later!”
She lifted the mouthpiece to her lips and loudly blew the sequence of seven notes that made the skeleton key to turn the lock of any gate of the Lords within range of its vibrations.
There was a shout from Urthona, who had begun running toward them when they had fallen. But as the first note blared out, and he saw what Anana held in her mouth, he screamed.
Kickaha expected him to shoot. Instead, Urthona whirled and, still yelling, ran away toward the woods.
Red Orc said, “What is happening?”
The last of the golden notes faded away.
Urthona stopped running and threw his beamer down on the ground and jumped up and down.
The immediate area around them remained the same. There was the clearing with its burned grasses, the boulder on top of which the darkly clothed stranger sat, the fallen tree, and the trees on the edge of the clearing.