The Stone God Awakens

The blimps turned home then, and they reached the field shortly before sunset. Just before his vessel was hauled into the hangar, he looked out the rear port of the gondola. There, outlined against the red rays near the horizon, was a number of tiny figures. They could have been birds, but their silhouettes made him believe they were bat-men. He put in an alert notice and went to his office.

That night, he was awakened by a screaming outside his door. He leaped out of bed (it was built for a human), and opened the door. Outside, the sentry was trying to separate two struggling screeching forms. They were hand to hand, face to face, with Awina holding a flint knife and Thebi's hand locked around the wrist that held the knife. Awina was shorter and lighter, but she was also much stronger, and only the desperation of Thebi and the sentry's efforts had kept the knife from going into Thebi's belly.

Ulysses shouted for her to drop the knife.

At the same time, there was an explosion outside the building, and the windows blew in, cutting all of them in dozens of places.

Ulysses and the sentry flopped on the ground.

Thebi released her hold and, staring, turned away from Awina.

Awina, ignoring the explosion, and the three that followed it, thrust at the woman.

But Thebi had raised her arm, and the knife sliced across it, gashing it and sending a spurt of blood across Awina's face. The knife continued on an upward direction and stabbed into Thebi's jaw. Its force, however, was much reduced

Thebi screamed. Ulysses leaped up and chopped across Awina's wrist, knocking the knife to the floor.

Another explosion, much closer, blew in the door at the end of the hall and sent a cloud of smoke into the hall.

Awina had gone to her knees, but she sprang up again as soon as the smoke reached her. Ulysses took the knife, but she shouted at him, "No! Give it back! I won't use it on Thebi! Don't you understand? We're being attacked! I might need that knife!"

Although he was half-deafened by the explosion, he could hear her. Silently, he held out the bloody blade, and she took it by the hilt. A figure dashed through the smoke, crying, "Lord, it's the bat-men!"

It was Wulka, the Wagarondit, covered with black gunpowder smoke and bleeding from a wound on his shoulder.

Ulysses ran out past him into the hangar, which housed his office and living quarters. Two blimps were anchored to the ground by thick plastic cables. A great-winged pygmy swooped out of the darkness in the upper part and a streak shot toward Ulysses. He had dived back, and it may have been this, or bad marksmanship, that caused the tiny poisoned arrow to plunge into the dirt a few inches before his feet. An Alkunquib archer raised his bow, coolly tracked the winged man, and loosed an arrow that went upward through the flier's leg and into his belly. The bat-man plunged into the ground a few feet from Ulysses.

There were several other Dhulhulikh flying around in the upper part of the hangar and a number who had settled down on top of the blimps. These were shooting their poisoned arrows. Apparently, all those inside the hangar had dropped their bombs. Outside, lit intermittently by the electric bulbs and torches, was a swarm of the winged men. They swooped in and out of the illumination, dropping little stone-weighted wooden darts, shooting tiny arrows or dropping small round bombs with lit fuses.

The explosions from the bombs added their momentary illumination to the scene.

There were bodies inside the hangar and outside on the field. Most of these were the defenders: Neshgai, humans and the felines, but Ulysses could see at least a dozen pairs of leathery wings spread out among the corpses and wounded.

He turned and shouted at Awina, "Outside! Through the other door!"

She looked startled and he repeated his order. She ran back into the door of the building. He yelled his command again to the felines shooting at the bat-men above them, and then he shouted, "Get away from the blimps before they catch fire!"

They had been lucky so far. None of the exploded bombs had set off the hydrogen in the great bags. If they had, everybody in the hangar would have died.

Even as he turned, there was a loud roar, and light streamed out from a hangar nearby. A blimp, two blimps probably, since there were two to a hangar, had just gone up in flames. Which meant that the other hangars were bound to catch fire and to ignite the blimps they housed.

He waited until his men had streamed in through the door or else run out through the cavernous front end. Some of them did not make it; poisoned, they fell.

He whirled and pushed the Wufea ahead of him through the door and then through several rooms to the door that opened in the side of the hangar. Once all were outside, he got them into battle order, and they moved out between the two hangars into the open area of the field. Another hangar to the right burst into noise and flame, and, in two minutes, all six buildings were burning fiercely. His entire air fleet was destroyed.

There was nothing to do but to take his people out onto the broad field. They could not go back, and they had to get out of the brightness and into the dark. The Dhulhulikh had not left, but were flying overhead, seemingly intent on killing all the air force perso

Then they were on the edge of the darkness and under trees. They formed concentric circles and shot out at those bat-men who came low enough to provide reasonably good targets.

Far to the west, where the city was, the clouds reflected bright lights, probably from burning buildings.

There were other dangers besides flying bat-men. An armoured car drove up, and a human hopped out and ran up to him. He ordered Ulysses to report to the Neshgai officer in the car. Ulysses did so, and found Bleezhmag, the equivalent of a colonel in the armoured car corps, waiting there by the open door. Bleezhmag had a deep gash across his forehead, a light cut across his trunk and a hole in his left arm. His human soldiers had gotten out of the car and were shooting wooden bolts from wooden crossbows.

"I have orders from the Grand Vizier to take you out of the danger zone, wherever that is," he said. He leaned out and looked up at the great-winged figures flickering from darkness to the glare of burning gas. "We're been hit twice on the roof by bombs, but aside from temporary deafness, we haven't suffered. Get in!"

"I can't desert my men!" Ulysses said.

"Oh, yes you can!" Bleezhmag said. He trumpeted impatiently—perhaps a trifle hysterically— through his proboscis.

"It's not just the Dhulhulikh! The other Tree peoples are in on this raid! They're not a horde, if our information is correct, but they are a large body, and they've formed a spearhead which has swept through most of our defences in this area! They're being held up now, but they won't be kept back long! The Grand Vizier says they're probably intent on getting you! They can't hope to take the city! But they could get you!"

Something nudged the darkness aside and revealed itself as another armoured car. Like the first, it looked like a wheeled tortoise. The curved roof was made of three layers of thick densely grained wood over a thick layer of plastic. The sides were double-walled and contained doors and slitholes. It held a driver, an officer, and six archers. Though there had been no thought of its withstanding explosives when it was built some years before, it had proved capable of shrugging off the small bombs of the bat-men.