“Majesty!” he said, beaming. “The chimaera form for this conflict?”
“And make it snappy!” Tony rasped. “I don’t think anything drastic can happen, but—”
Abdul puffed out into the snaky creation of his nightmare, with its face of mist. There was the saddle as before. Tony climbed into it and buckled the safety belt.
“Go ahead!” he commanded.
There was a sensation of almost unbearable acceleration and he rode upward into the blue.
At five thousand feet they passed the first flight of rocs. The great birds wheeled aside to make room for them and then craned their necks to watch. At ten thousand feet Abdul and Tony passed the second line of air defense. From this height Tony could distinctly see the oasis and the gleaming white walls of Barkut. Still the chimaera hurtled skyward. At fifteen thousand feet the ceiling squadron of rocs was left behind.
Abdul turned his temporarily snaky neck about and said triumphantly:
“Majesty! They flee! From us!”
Now Tony saw the djinn king and his few faithful councilors. They were not recognizable as such, of course. With the chimaera climbing vengefully toward them, they had adopted the emergency measures Es-Souk’s lasf frenzies had led to: They were now mere shapeless objects which flew straight up with lightning-like amoeboid movements. They expanded as the air grew thinner and they needed to act upon greater surfaces for support. But they went up and up and up.
Tony was relieved. He had only one full phial of lasf, and he was highly doubtful that he could duplicate his trick of the fight with Es-Souk. Certainly he couldn’t handle half a dozen djinns with one improvised bomb, and if they attacked with any resolution at all…