Having missed the first stroke, Wolff wanted to run again. This thing was undoubtedly skilled at knifefighting. Wolff knew fencing quite well and had never given up its practice. But there was a big difference
between dueling with the rapier and dirty in-close knivery, and he knew it. Yet he could not leave. In the first place, the gworl would down him with a thrown blade in his back before he could take four steps. Also, there was the horn, clenched in the gnarled left fist of the gworl. Wolff could not leave that.
The gworl, realizing that Wolff was in a very bad situation, grinned. His upper canines shone long and wet and yellow and sharp. With those, thought Wolff, the thing did not need a knife.
Something goldenbrown, trailing long black-andauburn-striped hair, flashed by Wolff. The gworl’s eyes opened, and he started to turn to his left. The butt end of a pole, a long stick stripped of its leaves and part of its bark, drove into the gworl’s chest. At the other end was Chryseis. She had run at top speed with the dead branch held like a vaulter’s pole, but just before impact she had lowered it and it hit the creature with enough speed and weight behind it to bowl him over backward. The horn dropped from his fist, but the knife remained in the other.
Wolff jumped forward and thrust the end of his blade between two cartilaginous bosses and into the gworl’s thick neck. The muscles were thick and tough there, but not enough to stop the blade. Only when the steel severed the windpipe did it halt.
Wolff handed Chryseis the gworl’s knife. “Here, take it!”
She accepted it, but she seemed to be in shock. Wolff slapped her savagely until the glaze went from her eyes. “You did fine!” he said. “Which would you rather see dead, me or him?”
He removed the belt from the corpse and fastened it on himself. Now he had three knives. He scabbarded the bloody weapon, took the horn in one hand, Chryseis’ hand in the other, and began running again. Behind them, a howl arose as the first of the gworl came over the edge of the hill. However, Wolff and Chryseis had about thirty yards’ start, which they maintained until they reached the group of trees growing on the rim. Chryseis took the lead. She let herself face down on the rim and rolled over. Wolff looked over once before blindly following and saw a small ledge about six feet down from the rim. She had already let herself down the ledge and now was hanging by her hands. She dropped again, this time to a much more narrow ledge. But it did not end; it ran at a forty-five degree angle down the face of the cliff. They could use it if they faced inward against the stone cliff-wall and moved sideways, their hands spread to gain friction against the wall.
Wolff used both hands also; he had stuck the horn through the belt.
There was a howl from above. He looked up to see the first of the gworl dropping onto the ledge. Then he glanced back at Chryseis and almost fell off from shock. She was gone.
Slowly, he turned his head to see over his shoulder and down below. He fully expected to find her falling down the face of the cliff, if not already past it and plunging into the green abyss.
“Wolff!” she said. Her head was sticking out from the cliff itself. “There’s a cave here. Hurry.”
Trembling, sweating, he inched along the ledge to her and presently was inside an opening. The ceiling of the cave was several feet higher than his head; he could almost touch the walls on both sides when he stretched out his arms; the interior ran into the darkness.
“How far back does it go?”
“Not very far. But there’s a natural shaft, a fault in the rock, that leads down. It opens on the bottom of the world; there’s nothing below, nothing but air and sky.”
“This can’t be,” he said slowly. “But it is. A universe founded on physical principles completely different than those of my universe. A flat planet with edges. But I don’t understand how gravity works here. Where is its center?”