He was in a frenzy of anxiety. The Thyuda in Talanac must be obeying her orders, given just before she leaped into the gate. They were throwing objects into the gate as fast as possible. But the circuit might stop now when she was on the moon, and if it did, she would assuredly be caught or killed.
And then as he was about to topple the body of the Beller into the gate, Anana appeared. And she did not vanish again.
Kickaha was so delighted that he almost forgot to watch the doorway. “Luck’s holding out!” he cried and then, realizing that he might be heard outside the room, said softly, ‘The chances for the circuit stopping while you were here were almost nothing! I . . .”
“It wasn’t chance,” she said. She stepped out of the gate and put her arms around him and kissed him. He would have been delighted at any other time. Now he said, “Later, Anana. The Sellers!”
She stepped away and said, “Nimstowl will be here in a second. Don’t shoot.”
The little man was there all of a sudden. He held
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a beamer in one hand and a beamer in his belt. He also wore a knife and carried a rope coiled around one shoulder. Kickaha had turned his beamer away from the door and held it on Nimstowl. The Lord said, “No need for that. I’m your ally.”
“Until . . . ?” Kickaha said.
“All I want to do is to get back to my own world,” Nimstowl said. “I’ve had more than enough of this killing and almost being killed. In the name of Shambarimen, isn’t one world enough for one man?”
Kickaha did not believe him, but he decided that Nimstowl could be trusted until the last of the Sellers was dead. He said, “I don’t know what’s going on out there. I had expected an attack, but it would have been launched before now. They had a large beamer out there; they could have shot it in here by now and cooked us out.”
He asked Anana what had happened, though he could guess part of it. She replied that Nimstowl had come into the cave to find his partner dead, caught by the one he had trapped. Nimstowl had decided that he was tired of hiding out in this cave. He wanted a chance to get back to his own world and, oCcourse, as every Lord should, to wipe out the Sellers. He had turned the resonating device off when Anana had appeared again. It had taken only a few seconds after that to set the resonator so it would deliver two people, at safe intervals, into the palace where Anana had seen Kickaha.
He said, “What do you mean? I had to jump out! I got out but lost the skin off my_heel.”
“Of course, you had no way of knowing,” she said. “But if you had not jumped, you could have stepped out quite safely a moment later.”
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“Anyway, you came after me,” he said. “That’s what counts.”
She was looking at him with concern. He was burned and bleeding, still dripping blood on the floor. But she said nothing. There was nothing to do for him until they found some aid. And that could be close enough, if they could get out of this room.
Somebody had to stick his head out of the room. Nimstowl wasn’t going to volunteer and Kickaha did not want Anana to do it. So he looked out. Instead of the beam he expected, he saw a deserted corridor. He motioned for them to come after him and led the way to a room about a quarter of a mile down the corridor. Here he sterilized his wounds and burns, put pseudoflesh over them, and drank potions to unshock him and to accelerate blood replenishment. They also ate and drank while they discussed what to do.
There wasn’t much to talk about. The only thing to do was to explore until they found out what was going on.
XXIII
NOT UNTIL they came to the great staircase which led up to the floor of the control room did they find anything. There was a dead Beller, his legs almost entirely burned off. And behind a charred divan lay another Beller. This one was burned on the side, but the degree of burn indicated that the beam’s energy had been partially absorbed before striking him. He was still alive.