Orc said, “I can’t lift that! Even if I broke my back doing it, I couldn’t lift it!”
“Try,” she said.
His face set stubbornly. “Why should I bother? You’ll kill me, anyway. Do it now.”
“I’ll burn your legs and scorch your eyes out,” she said, “and leave you here legless and blind if you don’t get him from under that tree.”
“Come on, Anana,” Kickaha said. “I know you want to make him suffer, but not at my expense. Cut the branches off me with the beamer so he won’t have so much weight to lift. Don’t play around! There are two others out there, you know.”
Anana moved away from the smoke and said, “Stand to one side, Uncle!” She made three passes with the ray from the beamer. The huge branch on his chest was cut in two places; he could not see what she had done to the branch on his legs. Orc had no difficulty removing the trunk and dragging him out of the smoke. He lifted him in his arms and carried him into the woods, where the grass was sparser and shorter.
He let Kickaha down very gently and then put his hands behind his neck at her orders.
“The stranger is out on the boulder,” she said. “He got up and staggered away just after I got his beamer. He ran there to get away from me and the fire. I didn’t kill him; maybe I should have. But I was curious about him and thought I could question him later.”
That curiosity had made more than one Lord lose the upper hand, Kickaha thought. But he did not comment, since the deed was done and, besides, he understood the curiosity. He had enough of it to sympathize.
“Do you know where Urthona is?” he said, wheezing and feeling a pain in his chest as if a cancer had grown there within the last few seconds. His legs were numb but life was returning in them. And with the life, pain.
“I’m not going to be much good, Anana,” he said. “I’m hurting pretty badly inside. I’ll do what I can to help, but the rest is up to you.”
Anana said, “I don’t know where Urthona is. Except he’s out there.
I’m sure he was the one who set the wolf on fire. And set this up for us. Even the great Red Orc, Lord of the Two Earths, was lured into this.”
“I knew it was a trap,” Orc said. “I came into it, anyway. I thought that surely I. . . I. . .”
“Yes, Uncle, if I were you I wouldn’t brag,” she said. “The only question, the big question, anyway, is how we get away from him.”
“The Horn,” Kickaha said. He sat up with great effort, despite the clenching of a dragon’s claw inside his chest. Smoke drifted under the trees and made him cough again. The pain intensified.
Anana said, “Oh!” She looked distressed. “I forgot about it.”
“We’ll have to get it. It must be under the tree back there,” he said. “And we’ll open the gate in the boulder. If worse comes to worse, we’ll go through it.”
“But the second room past it is trapped!” she said. “I told you I’ll need a deactivator to get through it.”
“We can come out later,” he said. “Urthona can’t follow us, and he won’t hang around, because he’ll think we definitely escaped into another universe.”
He stopped talking because the effort pained him so much.
Red Orc, at Anana’s orders, helped him up. He did it so roughly that a low cry was forced from Kickaha. Anana, glaring, said, “Uncle, you be gentle, or I’ll kill you right now!”
“If you do,” Orc said, “you’ll have to carry him yourself. And what kind of position will that put you into?”
Anana looked as if she were going to shoot him anyway. Before Kickaha could say anything, he saw the muzzle end of the beamer fall onto the ground. Anana was left with half a weapon in her hand.
A voice called out from the trees behind them. “You will do as I tell you now! Walk to that boulder and wait there for further orders!”