There was a sudden howling in the sky. Flashing overhead, as the two stood momentarily petrified, went a shrieking flight of half a dozen winged shapes—stubby vanes slanting back from vicious noses, they hurtled low over the desert and vanished swiftly into the distance, dust-devils dancing across the ground in the whirling wind of their passage.
Dworn stared after them, and his eyes narrowed. A new and desperate resolve had begun shaping itself in his mind.
Of the things he had meant to do in life, it was no use thinking any more of rejoining his people. He was dead to them, for sure—not even a beetle any more, but only what was left of one, a ghost.... But a holy duty, stronger than death, remained to him; his father was still unrevenged.
What he could do against a foe so powerful as those who had just passed over, he had no idea—but perhaps a ghost could accomplish what a living man might well deem impossible.
He motioned Qanya peremptorily toward the waiting spider-machine. "Come on. We're taking your machine, and we're going to find them!"
For a moment she seemed to hesitate ... then she obeyed. If her face was paler than usual, Dworn failed to notice it.
The spider-vehicle lurched and swayed, even its marvelous system of shock-absorbers protesting as it climbed steeply, straddling upward from rock to rock.
Dworn clutched at handholds inside the pitching cabin and tried to combat the sympathetic lurching of his stomach. Qanya huddled tensely over the controls, slim hands flashing nimbly to and fro as with incredible deftness she guided the laboring machine.
Dworn risked a glimpse from the turret-windows, then shut his eyes with a rush of giddiness. They were climbing now up the steepest part of the great slide, where the mountainside had collapsed in a chaos of splintered rock and tumbled crags that would have been utterly impassible for any wheeled vehicle. Below them, the sloping valley floor they had left appeared from this height entirely flat and sickeningly far away. And still the cliff-heads frowning above them seemed terribly remote.