“They’re trying to find us. Sonya says they haven’t seen any lights yet to mark our valley. Altho has been trying to direct them.”
“Well, for a while we’re safe here. They—”
Jim never finished. From down the valley, by the cave-lights of Talon’s encampment, a ball of fire mounted slowly upward, a tiny, blazing white ball. It rose in a slow arc, and suddenly burst with a blinding white glare.
The valley, the crags, the ledge upon which the fugitives lay were all momentarily brilliantly illumined. Jim saw that beneath them in the valley a hundred of the mounted heads were gazing upward. And he knew too, that they had been seen upon the ledge.
A shout arose; a rush of the figures to climb. But a voice, Talon’s voice, seemed commanding them to stop. Farther down the valley, brutemen were dragging forward a heavy piece of apparatus, a huge gun-muzzle on wheels, the muzzle pointed vertically upward.
Jim leaped to his feet. “We’ve got to get higher! Try to get to that cave overhead.”
But Altho pulled him back. Altho still held the weapon Jim had taken from the giant. He gestured with it. Jim sank back.
There was something going on down there in the valley. Jim wondered if the weapon Altho had was of any use at this distance. Altho seemed absorbed in thought communication. Suddenly from over the cliff-tops across the valley, a small pink ball of light came sailing, floating out over the valley in a huge segment of circle, a thousand feet in the air.
A glowing pink ball; a concentrated radiance seeming to whirl upon its axis, with tiny crescent streamers of light as it whirled. It sailed in a curve above the valley, growing dimmer, as though burning itself out, until in a moment it vanished.
Jim stared. But Altho knew what it was. He leaped to his feet.