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"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 pla
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 ru
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 ru
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.
But the sky had become an angry red without a sun.
The land beyond the edge of the clearing had become high hills covered with a rusty grass and queer-looking bushes with green and red striped swastika-shaped leaves. There were trees on the hills beyond the nearest ones; these were tall and round and had zebra stripes of black, white, and red. They swayed as if they were at the bottom of a sea responding to a current.
Urthona's jumping up and down had resulted in his attaining heights of at least six feet. Now he picked up his beamer and ran in great bounds toward them. He seemed in perfect control of himself.
Not so with Red Orc, who started to whirl toward them, his mouth open to ask what had happened. The motion carried him on around and toppled him over. But he did not fall heavily.
"Stay down," Kickaha said to Anana. "I don't know where we are, but the gravity's less than Earth's."
Urthona stopped before them. His face was almost as red as the sky. His green eyes were wild.
"The Horn of Shambarimen!" he screamed. "I wondered what you had in that case! If I had known! If I had known!"
"Then you would have stayed outside the rim of the giant gate you set around the clearing," Kickaha said. "Tell me, Urthona, why did you step inside it? Why did you drive us toward the boulder, when we were already inside the gate?"
"How did you know?" Urthona screamed. "How could you know?"
"I didn't really know," Kickaha said. "I saw the slight ridge of earth at several places on the edge of the clearing before we came on in. It didn't mean much, although I was suspicious. I'm suspicious of everything that I can't explain at once.
"Then you hung back, and that in itself wasn't too suspicious, because you wouldn't want to get too close until you were certain we had no hidden weapons. But you wanted to do more than just get us inside this giant gate and then spring it on us. You wanted to drive us into our own gate, in the boulder, where we'd be trapped. You wanted us to hide inside there and think we'd fooled you and then come out after a while, only to find ourselves in this world.
"But you didn't know that Anana had no activator and you didn't know that we had the Horn. There was no reason why you would think of it even if you saw the instrument case, because it must be thousands of years since you last saw it. And you didn't know Jadawin had it, or you would have co
"So I got Anana to blow the Horn even if she didn't know why she was doing it. I didn't want to go into your world, but if I could take you with me, I'd do it."
Anana got up slowly and carefully and said, "The Shifting World! Urthona's world!"
In the east, or what was the east in the world they'd just left, a massive red body appeared over the hills. It rose swiftly and revealed itself as a body about four times the size of the Earth's moon. It was not round but oblong with several blobby tentacles extending out from it. Kickaha thought that it was changing shape slightly.
He felt the earth under him tilting. His head was getting lower than his feet. And the edge of the high hills in the distance was sagging.
Kickaha sat up. The pains seemed to be slightly attenuated. Perhaps it was because the pull of gravity was so much reduced. He said, "This is a one-way gate, of course, Urthona?"
"Of course," Urthona said. "Otherwise I would have taken the Horn and reopened the gate."
"And where is the nearest gate out of this world?"