WEIRD CITY
Immeasurably ancient and alien looked Vruun, its glassy bubble-domes and towers brooding beneath the stars. Torchlight spilled from open doors and windows to illuminate vaguely its streets and enlacing forest-ways.
For Vruun, like Anshan, was a city into which the forest came. It was like a Venice, with winding ways of woods instead of canals — woods that were woven into the very texture of the city.
Eric Nelson, crouching with Shan Kar and the Cockney and the great wolf above the city, felt a cold shock of incredulity as he glimpsed the figures that came and went past lighted doorways down there. For those figures were not all human.
He had anticipated that. But anticipation had not tempered the shock of actually seeing it.
"It's a devil's city!" husked Lefty Wister. The little Cockney was shivering. "Look at those animals!"
"Now you understand why we Humanites rebelled and seceded from Vruun!" came Shan Kar's throbbing whisper.
Men and beasts came and went together across those torchlit doorways below. Men and women in silk or warrior dress. And beasts of the Brotherhood, mingling with the humans, jostling them.
Nelson glimpsed a little pack of gray wolves trotting into the city from the south. He saw two great tigers moving out of it that way. And across a shallow ford a half-dozen wild-maned horses came splashing over the river to Vruun.
Men and beasts of the Brotherhood-meeting and mingling in fantastic fraternity in this ancient, alien city! Wings swept across the sky and he saw great eagles gliding down toward the openings high in the glassy towers. He realized then that those towers had been built as eyries for the Winged Ones, that all Vruun, like Anshan, had been built to house this incredible fraternal mingling of species!