He was behind a tree, and McKay sliced the branches of the tree off on one side. That was to scare the archer, since Callister had said that he wanted the guy-his name was Kickaha, crazy!-alive. But Kickaha had shot an arrow and McKay certainly knew where it had been aimed. Only a part of his body was not hidden by the tree behind which he was concealed. But the arrow had struck McKay on the only part showing, his shoulder.
If he hadn’t been wearing that vest, he’d have been skewered. Even as it was, the shock of the arrow knocked him down. His beamer flew away from his opening hands, and, its power still on, it rolled away.
Then, the biggest wolf-a wolf!-McKay had ever seen had gotten caught in the ray, and it had died, cut into four different parts. McKay was lucky. If the beamer had fallen pointing the other way, it would have severed him. Though he was stunned, his shoulder and arm completely numb, he managed to get up and to run, crouching over, to another tree. He was cursing because Callister had made him leave his automatic behind. He sure as hell wasn’t going into the clearing after the beamer. Not when Kickaha could shoot an arrow like that.
Besides, he felt that he was in over his head about fifty fathoms.
There was a hell of a lot of action after that, but McKay didn’t see much of it. He climbed up on a house-sized boulder, using the projections and holes in it, hauling himself up with one hand. Later he wondered why he’d gone up where he could be trapped. But he had been in a complete panic, and it had seemed a logical thing to do. Maybe no one would think of looking for him up there. He could lie down flat and hide until things settled down. If the boss won, he’d come down. He could claim then that he’d gone up there to get a bird’s-eye view of the terrain so he could call out to Callister the location of his enemies.
Meanwhile, his beamer burned itself out, half-melting a large boulder fifty feet from it while doing so.
He saw Callister running toward the couple and another man, and he thought Callister had control of the situation. Then the red-haired Kickaha, who was lying on the ground, had said something to the woman. And she’d lifted a funny-looking trumpet to her lips and started blowing some notes. Callister had suddenly stopped, yelled something, and then he’d run like a striped-ass ape away from them.
And suddenly they were in another world. If things had been bad before, they were now about as bad as they could be. Well, maybe not quite as bad. At least, he was alive. But there had been times when he’d wished he wasn’t.
So here he was, twelve “days” later. Much had been explained to him, mostly by Kickaha. But he still couldn’t believe that Callister, whose real name was Urthona, and Red Ore and Anana were thousands of years old. Nor that they had come from another world, what Kickaha called a pocket universe. That is, an artificial continuum, what the science-fiction movies called the fourth dimension, something like that.
The Lords, as they called themselves, claimed to have made Earth. Not only that, the sun, the other planets, the stars-which weren’t really stars, they just looked like they were-the whole damn universe.
In fact, they claimed to have created the ancestors of all Earth people in laboratories.
Not only that-it made his brain bob up and down, like a cork on an ocean wave-there were many artificial pocket universes. They’d been constructed to have different physical laws than those on Earth’s universe.
Apparently, some ten thousand or so years ago, the Lords had split. Each had gone off to his or her own little world to rule it. And they’d become enemies, out to get each other’s ass.
Which explained why Urthona and Ore, Anana’s own uncles, had tried to kill her and each other.
Then there was Kickaha. He’d been born Paul Janus Finnegan in 1918 in some small town in Indiana. After World War II he’d gone to the University of Indiana as a freshman, but before a year was up he was involved with the Lords. He’d first lived on a peculiar world he called the World of Tiers. There he’d gotten the name of Kickaha from a tribe of Indians that lived on one level of the planet, which seemed to be constructed like the tower of babel or the leaning tower of Pisa. Or whatever. Indians? Yes, because the Lord of that world, Jadawin, had populated various levels with people he’d abducted from Earth.