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Then she slammed the tomahawk into the side of the other warrior's head. Aejip finished him off.
Meanwhile, Deyv had sat down with the Athmau in his arms. He cuddled it, rocking it back and forth, and looking pleased and dreamy.
Vana started toward him. Sloosh buzzed, "Stop! He's been caught by the perfume! Don't go near him! I'll do it!"
The Archkerri grabbed hold of the still half-senseless creature. Deyv tightened his embrace on it. Sloosh said, "Let loose!"
He lifted the Athmau up with Deyv clinging to it. At that moment another warrior, bleeding from a dozen wounds, staggered through the bush. Aejip leaped on him, and the man went down screaming.
Sloosh dropped Deyv and the Athmau, and he grabbed Deyv's hands and pulled them outward. The animal fell away, rolled over, then stood up unsteadily, chirruping. Sloosh seized it and threw it at least ten feet. It rolled away behind a bush.
Vana pulled Deyv to his feet. He stood smiling, seeming not to hear her cries to run. By then the cat had stopped the warrior's screams by tearing out his throat. The yells of men on the other side of the bushes showed that they were aware that something was wrong.
Vana took Deyv's hand and pulled him along, at the same time ordering Aejip and Jum to leave the trail.
She dragged Deyv off it after them, and Sloosh joined them a few seconds later. By the time they'd pushed and shoved their way through the dense undergrowth, far enough so that the tribesmen's voices were faint, Deyv had begun to recover.
"What happened?" Deyv asked.
Vana told him. He looked ashamed, but he said, "I couldn't help it. And it was a wonderful experience.
Better even than when I chew thrathyumi."
"Think about that when they find you and kill you," Vana said.
Deyv said angrily, "It wasn't my fault."
By then the warriors were beating the bush. Sloosh led his companions through the heavy thick vegetation, his great body crushing the growth. He made noise, but their hunters were yelling so loudly at each other and thrashing around so much that they wouldn't be able to hear the Archkerri. After a long struggle, the party came to a trail. Possibly, this was the one they'd left, but the tracks in the soft earth indicated that they had been made by some very large hoofed animals.
Presently, they came to another plain covered with yellow grass, dotted here and there with trees.
Halfway across, they heard the yells of their pursuers. These warriors had come out of the same trail and now, twenty strong, were ru
Sloosh said that there was only one thing they could do. Which they did. They removed the cube from his back, and he pulled out its , rod. By the time the warriors reached them, they found the cylinder fully expanded and their quarry inside. Fortunately, the wind wasn't strong enough to roll the cylinder with its occupants.
After a long while, during which they heard no sound, Sloosh opened the door. A cautious reco
Sloosh looked across the plain at its far end.
"There are the impressions of the Yawtl. We won't have to backtrack to pick them up."
Deyv awoke after the next sleep-time to find the rooms of the vehicle ablaze with light. He jumped up, his heart beating hard, and called, "Sloosh!"
The plant-man appeared from the next room a minute later. "I found the plate that activates the mechanisms that provide the illumination."
"Where does it come from?" Deyv said.
"From the entire material itself. Note that there are no shadows. I have also located the plates for the illumination of individual rooms. I'm progressing, progressing."
Deyv was pleased that they would no longer have to be in the dark. However, the Archkerri's investigations made him uneasy. One of these times he was going to make a mistake and press the wrong plate. Then, willy-nilly, they'd be flying through the air with no idea of how to pilot the vehicle.
They went on through a high pass, and they came to another valley. This was far broader than the one behind them. Sloosh stood looking down the slope at the smaller mountains in the valley.
"The trail ends there."
A river twisted and turned from one end of the horizon to the other. In the middle it split to form around a large island. Something tiny hung above it, gleaming whitely.
"I hope it's where he lives and that he's not just resting," Vana said.
It took them two sleep-times to get to the foot of the mountain but a short time to reach the river. They made another raft with a rudder and floated down, using a sweep to give them more control. The river was about a mile across until they came to the roughly diamond-shaped island. Here the right branch was only half a mile across. It was unusually heavily populated with athaksum. These came close to the raft, regarding its passengers with cold blue eyes though making no attack. A swimmer would not have lasted long.
The object hanging above the island was larger. It was still so far away, however, that it could not be identified.
Evidently, the island had no paths through the jungle, which meant that there were few if any people here. Sloosh waded into a swamp, following the impressions visible only to him. The others followed, putting each foot down with dread. Snakes hissed at them and slid off branches or rocks into the stinking bubbling dark-green water. Swarms of insects attacked them. Froglike amphibians weighing perhaps fifty pounds leaped out from hummocks of mud and belly-crashed resoundingly. Then they dived, only to reappear close to the legs of the travelers. Their tongues flicked out and lacerated legs with tiny sharp barbs.
Sloosh said, "They may hurt, but they can't be fatal. If they were, the Yawtl wouldn't have passed this way."
The water got deeper. Aejip and Jum started swimming. Abruptly, the bottom sloped upward, and they were soon on higher land. Now they were beneath colossal trees under which little brush grew. They stopped to smear mud over their insect-bitten bodies and to rest. There was a strange silence under the branches, no buzz, hiss, caw, scream, chitter. A greenish-gray fungus clothed the lower trunks of the trees, a fluffy ill-smelling stuff two to three feet thick.
Nobody spoke. Sloosh held a finger to the end of his beak to indicate quiet. After a while he gestured, and he started walking. They rose wearily, since it was past bedtime, and followed. In a short time they'd passed through the forest and emerged on the rim of a shallow valley. Its surface seemed to be covered mostly with sand and gigantic dark-blue boulders. Here and there were some lone trees or small copses.
About a mile away, above the center of the valley, hovered the white object. It was restrained from floating away by a massive cable of some sort in its center and slimmer cables on its edges.
Deyv spoke softly. "Three tharakorm. Tied together side by side."
Sloosh's gaze circled the area. "The Yawtl has been up on them. But he came down without the benefit of a ladder."
"What do you mean?" Vana said.
"He either jumped or was thrown off." He pointed. "He's out there now, somewhere behind that extraordinarily large rock."
They went down the slope and onto the soft, very warm sand. They had not gone more than forty feet when Sloosh stopped, holding up a hand. They wondered why he'd done so, but his ma
Presently, the sand began boiling. A little pit appeared, and two long tentacles, bilious green with narrow yellow stripes, slid out. They snaked around as if feeling for something. Sloosh gestured that they should back up. After about twenty paces, he stopped. They waited while the-tentacles slid out to a length of fifteen feet.