The Deadly Sky (13 page)

As long as I had Grena to talk to and be near once in a while I was more or less all right, but now I couldn’t find her. Nor was Shiri anywhere to be seen. Assuming that Hallistair had also disappeared, I wasn’t cautious about running through the complex and yelling as loudly as I could. I had a towel under my arm because I had worked up a sweat and stopped at a linen closet to mop off.

Hallistair came around a corner and threw something at me which I caught in the towel. It writhed and buzzed and it screeched when I crushed it under my heel. Again I was careless as I chased him down the hall. Rounding a bend, I saw him standing in the middle of the corridor with a ball bat in his hands.

He was too agile for me. I lunged at him but he faded out of the way and cracked me a good one over the head.

“What have you done?” he said, bending over me. Threatening with the bat, he said, “Answer me. What did you do to the weapon?”

On the verge of passing into unconsciousness, I could only lie there shaking my head. I didn’t really understand the questions anyway.

He reached down and slapped me hard across the face. “Your stupid meddling has accomplished something after all. I want to know what you did.” He hit me again.

That was his mistake because he had inadvertently revived me to some extent. The blow on the head that I had received still reverberated all the way down to my feet while the smacks stung and irritated. Before he could raise the club I gave him a kick that sent him flying over me.

I dragged him down the hall by his shirt collar, asking him over and over again where the women were, but he wouldn’t tell me. It didn’t matter to me that there was anyone else in the crossover. No matter how many big-brained drells there were in it, they didn’t plan to render me any assistance. Half-baked by the knock on the skull that I had sustained, I supposed that the drells and Colsan were enjoying the spectacle of me hauling Hallistair the Dark into the weapon.

As soon as I entered the maze I was conscious of something vastly wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. A strange yellow glow made me look up at the sky, which seemed to be raining minuscule drops of fire.

“Let me go!” said Hallistair. He stopped writhing in my grasp long enough to stare upward. “Do you see what I mean? What have you done?”

I jerked backward as a blade dropped close enough in front of me to fan my face. Blinking and rubbing my eyes, I staggered, caught my balance, tried to think clearly.

“You can’t go through now!” said my companion, trying to hold me still. “You’ve probably got a concussion. Idiot! Go back! You’ll get us both killed!”

I was alert enough to realize that he hadn’t the nerve to retreat without me, nor could he go ahead alone. Feeling strangely secure, I sank to my knees and leaned my aching head against a girder. Somewhere to my right a blade fell with a resounding crash. For a few moments I remained stationary and gradually my head began to clear, or at least the pain wasn’t so intense that I couldn’t think.

Reaching out I took Hallistair by the throat. “I’m tired of your trying to kill me; from that first day when you dumped a boulder down the mountain after me until this very moment, I’m tired.”

His voice was faint and hoarse. “Forget all that! It isn’t important now. Look about you. Can’t you see what’s happening?”

Something hot landed on my shoulder. It was a tiny live coal. I brushed it away. “This is it, you know,” I said. “This is where you and I settle our differences.”

“Don’t be a moron! We can’t stay here! Why don’t we go back to the complex and talk it over? What do you think of that?”

My hand tightened on his throat. “No.”

He tried to kick me away, scooted a foot or more along the girder, shrieked as a blade fell to snip a shred from his shirt sleeve. “Okay, okay, don’t . . . don’t push me. Don’t move.”

Dragging him to his feet, I shoved him against another girder and then let go an instant before a blade came down between us. It fell away out of sight, either into the sea or along a rolling counter. I didn’t know if it would end up somewhere in the weapon to be used again, and at the moment I didn’t care.

Hallistair’s face was gray as he stared upward. A live ash fell on his cheek to leave a smudge after he brushed it away. He grabbed the girder behind him as the weapon suddenly pitched and swayed.

“They must have changed their plans,” he said. “They aren’t going to wait any longer. They’re going to burn their way through.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, snickering. “They must have some pretty strange storms over there. I think I locked onto one of them.”

He didn’t believe me, or he didn’t want to believe me. “What are you talking about?”

“A bit of an invention of mine. An antenna for attracting storms. It interferes with satellites.”

“You’re talking about rainstorms?”

I shaded my face with a hand as I looked up at the sky. “What kind of weather do they have over there?”

“Like any place else.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think they have some hot spots where the weather is really foul. No doubt they’ve got some satellites to keep it diverted from populated areas.”

He kicked me and ran around the girder. “You think you know so much! Are you trying to tell me they have storms made out of fire?”

“Raise your head and look at it.”

He kept his gaze directed downward. “You’re all show. You have no real courage.”

“What does that mean?” I already knew the answer.

“Whether I’ve won or lost, it’s time for me to go home. My real home.”

“Then go.”

“Not without Grena. I can’t fight you for her but she belongs to me. She’s one of my kind, not yours.”

Taking the communicator from my pocket, I tossed it to him. “You’ll never get another chance.”

He looked as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. A little smile began growing on his handsome face. Immediately he raised the object to his lips and spoke some strange words into it while at the same time he backed away from me toward the metal platform. We were closer to it than I had supposed.

The blades stopped falling. Slowly Hallistair moved toward the platform with his eyes on me. He kept speaking into the communicator. All at once his gaze widened as he spied something over my shoulder. As if in pain he groaned. “No,” he said. “It isn’t possible.”

“Take care, Shiri,” I said before turning around.

She stood between the girders with a frightened look on her face. “How did I get here? I was locked in the armory with Grena.”

“No!” said Hallistair and threw something at me that had drifted down from the sky into his hand.

Prepared for an assault of some sort, I was ready and ducked. Whatever the thing was, it fell away between the planks of metal below us.

“Hallistair, come back with me,” said Shiri. Her plain, homely face was full of concern. “I don’t know what you’re doing in this thing but you don’t belong here.”

He let out a sound of disgust before hurling something at her. It missed and fell away. “You make me sick!” he snarled. “You were always there making a nuisance of yourself. Why didn’t you die?”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said, growing more frightened. “Why should you hate me?”

I didn’t tell her that it was because she and not Grena came through from the dark side with him years ago. Plainly she knew nothing about it. She simply didn’t remember and when her people failed to make contact with her even the faint images of recall faded from her mind.

“She was luckier than you,” I said to Hallistair. “She must have lost her communicator. Theycouldn’t get in touch with her.”

He growled low in his throat. With an expression of hatred, he raised his arm and threw whatever it was he held in his hand at her. It was a reptile similar to the one that had attacked me in my room. At once I sprang toward her and managed to get three fingers between one of the tentacles and her neck. Gasping in horror, she fell down on her back. She tried to help me but only got in the way.

Knocking her hands aside, I knelt to grasp both tentacles. With sheer strength I managed to rip the thing from her, after which I threw it into the sea.

“Make up your mind,” I said to her. “If you stay with him he’ll kill you. Do you love him that much?”

Crying softly, she got to her hands and knees and crawled away. The last I saw of her she was leaving the weapon altogether in preparation for entering the tunnel.

I suppose Hallistair got the length of wire from the same place he got the little monsters; from thin air. Clearly his requests to the aliens were being satisfied. He came up behind me as I was about to turn around and get to my feet. As he slipped a wire about my neck he gave me a solid kick in the tailbone that paralyzed me.

It wasn’t easy for him to drag me to the metal platform but he managed it, cursing and crying out as burning embers dropped on him. By now the weapon bucked like a horse as the space around it heated up. The sky wasn’t black anymore but was pale pink.

Weeping in rage and hatred, he used another wire to secure my hands to one of the machines. “You knew it all along!” he raged. “You knew it was Shiri!”

I hadn’t, not really, but I didn’t say so.

“Let’s see how you’ll enjoy frying,” he said. “Too bad I can’t stay around to watch.”

“Good riddance,” I said.

He turned to give me a malevolent stare. “This isn’t the end of it. We’ll sack your world and make slaves of you. We’ll be back.”

“We’ll be ready.”

I knew he wanted to kill me then and there but the thought of me broiling was too attractive to him so he merely gave me one last kick before speaking into his communicator. In another instant he was gone like a puff of smoke, drawn to whatever future awaited him with the people on the dark side.

Meanwhile my environment grew too hot for comfort. The firestorm hadn’t really arrived at full strength yet but was blowing across the alien sky like a feral cloud. The weapon would melt before my antenna, I knew. First me, then the weapon and then my invention that was supposed to have provided a young fool with a little thunder and lightning.

What kind of dimension was it, I wondered, that could tolerate a storm such as the one that was about to break over my head?

I couldn’t get loose. The wire on my neck threatened to choke me while the one around my wrists kept me tightly imprisoned against a machine leg. Though I yanked and struggled, I achieved nothing but pain.

Shiri was gone and Grena was probably still locked in the armory while I got hotter by the minute. Chunks of burning pitch dropped all about me, Some quite close. They lay everywhere on the platform, smoking, glowing, giving off insufferable heat. Inside the weapon the saws became glued to their fastenings. Soon they would soften and melt. Shortly thereafter the terrible fire would descend upon me.

The skin of my face grew puffy, my lungs ached for cool air, the wire on my hands and neck heated and made wounds in my flesh. I thought of Grena and despair made me cry out.

When I saw Sargoth coming through the smoke I called out to him to go back. He couldn’t help me and I hated the thought that he was willing to sacrifice the last thing he had for me.

“You don’t owe me anything!” I said, trying to kick him. “Go back.”

His vorite body was not affected by this kind of heat. Later, when the storm center reached us, he would run like liquid down into the heaving sea. By then I would be dead. For the time being, though, he busied himself with the wires.

I shrieked as he freed my wrists. Incredibly I felt a stab of hope and jumped up to take a step toward the weapon. Before my eyes it twisted and bent, curled in upon itself, destroying the path that led through it to safety.

“I told you to go back!” I said to Sargoth. “Now see what you’ve done!”

“I’m not worried. You’ll get yourself out and I’ve lived as long as I want to anyway.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “How am I going to get out?”

“The same way you did the other time. Through the crack.” He turned to look at the sea.

I was so angry I wanted to punch him. “Is that so?” Deliberately I knelt and wound the wire first around his ankle and then back around my own. Whatever was going to happen would happen to both of us.

“What are you doing?” he said, his green eye directed downward.

“Maybe I don’t like the idea of your becoming a martyr. A hero is enough, in my opinion.”

“You’re the most unusual brat I’ve ever known.” He knelt to unwind the wire but I stuck my free foot in front of his face so that he couldn’t see.

“Don’t,” he said, and his voice seemed to come from a distance. “I want you to live. Don’t do this. Take your foot away from in front of my eye.”

Over his shoulder I saw the weapon taking on the shape of a red ball. Then I was forced to close my eyes in order to keep them from cooking. Hot rain drifted down on me and I floated away into the grayness and silence of semi-consciousness. An instant later I felt cool air bathing me. At the same time I experienced extreme agony in my ankle.

Choking and spitting, I sat up and bumped against Sargoth as he sat up. We were outside the complex, sprawled on the damp ground. We were home. Over our heads an ugly gash in the sky was rapidly closing. I had used my special talent to return and since the drell had been wired to me, he came along.

He raised his glittering head and suddenly he laughed. He reached out and for the first time since I had known him he hugged me. Feeling as if I had been roasted to a turn, I hugged him back. Behind him I saw the drells running out of the last building. They were all there, Jolanne, Colsan, Willa, Spencer, Falloway, Shiri, Conray, Leece. And Grena.

My father looked as if he were seeing a ghost when he opened the door. For the longest time he stood staring at me. “Ashlin,” he said. His hand went out to touch my shoulder.

In the house he said, “I’m gratified that your trip is finished. I take it you didn’t go all around the world?”

“Only a part of the way.”

“When are you leaving again?”

“I don’t think I will. I’m tired of loafing and wandering. If you don’t mind I think I’ll stay at home and do something constructive,”

“I don’t mind. Come and have some lunch with me.”

I hung back. “There’s something else. I’ve a young lady with me.”

He stared at me as if stunned. “A young lady?”

“Yes. She’s outside.”

“You’ve brought a . . . woman to meet me?”

“I hope you don’t mind.”

He didn’t look at all elegant as he ran back to the door and flung it open. First he stared at Grena and then stared at me. Then he did it all over again. At last he drew her inside and led her toward the kitchen.

He monopolized her all through the meal and afterward. I could scarcely get a word in edgewise.