He looked up from the rope he held in his hand. “Aga!” he said sharply. “Get away from that wall!”
The tall, lean woman was walking past the altar, holding her bare cutlass in her hand. When she heard Green she paused in her stride, gave him an astonished look, then continued.
“You don’t understand,” she called back over her shoulder. “This wall isn’t solid earth. It’s fluffy, like a young chick’s feathers. It’s dust, dust. I think we can knock it down, cut our way through. There must be something on the other side…”
“Aga!” he yelled. “Don’t! Stop where you are!”
But she had lifted her blade and brought it down in a hard stroke that was to show him how easy the stuff would be to slash away.
Green grabbed Amra and Paxi and dived to the floor, pulling them with him.
Thunder roared and lightning filled the room, dazzling and deafening him! Even in its midst he could see the dark figure of Aga, transfixed, crucified in white fire.
CHAPTER 19
THEN AGA WAS blotted out by the dense cloud of dust that billowed out over her and filled the whole room. With it came an intense heat. Green opened his mouth to cry out to Amra and Paxi to cover their faces and especially their noses. Before he could do so his own open mouth was packed with dust and his nostrils were full. He began sneezing and coughing explosively, while his eyes ran tears in their efforts to wash out the dirt that caked and burned them. Clods of dirt struck him, hurled by the blast. They didn’t hurt because they were so small and so fluffy. But they fell so swiftly and in such numbers that he was half-buried under them. Even in the midst of his shock he couldn’t help being thankful that he’d been breathing out when the heat struck him. Otherwise he’d have sucked in air that would have seared his lungs, and he’d have dropped dead. As it was, wherever his skin had not been covered by cloth he felt as if he were suffering a bad case of sunburn.
Painfully, he rose on all fours and began crawling toward the other room, where he thought the dust would not be so thick. At the same time he tugged at Amra’s arm – at least he supposed it was her arm, since she’d been so close to him when the explosion took place. His gesture was intended to tell her that she should follow him. She rose and followed him, touching him from time to time. Once she stopped, and he turned to find out what was bothering her, even if he felt that he couldn’t stand much more of the almost solid dust in his lungs and had to get out to open air or strangle. Then he knew that the woman was Amra, for she was carrying a child in her arms. The child had a scarf around her head and, as he remembered, Paxi was the only infant so dressed.
Coughing violently, he rose to his feet, pulling Amra to hers, and swiftly walked toward where he hoped the exit was. He knew he’d fallen on his face in the general direction of the doorway; if he kept in a straight line he might make it without wandering off to one side.
He found soon enough that he was going just opposite, for he fell headlong over a body on the floor. When he got up again, he ran his hands over the body. The skin was crusty, scaly. Aga’s burned corpse. The cutlass was lying by her side, assuring him of her identity.
Re-oriented, he turned back, still pulling Amra by the hand. This time he ran into a wall, but he had his free hand stretched out in front of him for just such an event. Frantically, he groped to his left until he came to the corner of the room. Then, knowing that the doorway lay back to his right, he turned and felt along the metal until he came to the opening. He plunged through it, almost fell into the other room, which was as dark and dusty as the one he’d just left. He trotted on ahead, bumped into another wall, groped to his right, found the next exit and ran through that. Here the air was much more free of dust. He could actually make out outlines of his companions as the light was penetrating the fainter haze.