"We'll get on the roof of this one," said Firebird. "It's a hotel. It's the highest in town. We can fire the other building and get anyone trying to escape."
No other shots came their way. Nathan feared their assailant was leaving the building on the corner and trailing them up the street.
They entered the old hotel. A foot of sand covered the first floor. The stairs were slippery with it. Shattered windows let the cold night breeze flow through. On the second and third floors they disturbed coveys of sand bats who fluttered and squeaked and poured out the windows in a black cloud.
The enemy would certainly know their location now.
They came out onto the roof through a broken penthouse door, and in the faint moonlight they had a clear view of the decaying skeleton of the town.
The rifles they carried would shoot flames that spread over a great area and tended to hover like flaming coronae rather than piercing. Thus, they would be effective in firing the buildings.
They took up positions on opposite sides of the roof and sent a dozen shots into the base of the enemy hideout. But they had miscalculated as Nathan had feared. A fusillade of shots came from a roof directly across the street from them and their building burst into torrents of flame.
They transferred their fire to the building from which the shots came. The flames hovered and glowed like demons around the base of the structure, but they died like wraiths.
"I remember now," said Firebird. "That's the one fireproof building in Pheme. It was a special instrument laboratory. We'll have to smoke him out."
The tiny orange puffs of a flame lance came steadily from varying points of the other building as if the enemy were running about, pausing only long enough to shoot.