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feet around one of his wrists. Then their wings beat powerfully, the strokes becoming faintly audible, their breeze whipping up sparks and ashes from the remnants of a fire. But Thomas’s feet did not leave the ground. Only when he jumped up could the two birds hold him in the air, and then only for the barest moment.
    â€œTry it with me!” Sarah now demanded. With great exertion the birds could lift Sarah just about a meter off the ground, and hold her there for a count of three. What jumping she could manage did not help very much.
    She was elated, but Thomas kept shaking his head at her. “No, no. We may have to do some fighting, or—”
    â€œI can shoot a bow!”
    He ignored her protests, and nodded toward Rolf. “Try him next, he seems about the lightest.”
    The birds rested briefly, then gripped the ends of a piece of rope which Rolf had found and looped around his body under his arms. “At the cave I’ll need my hands free to cling and climb,” he explained. Then he leaped upward with all the spring in his legs, just as the two birds lifted mightily. He rose till his feet were higher than a tall man’s head, from which elevation it took him a count of five to fall to the ground against the birds’ continued pull.
    â€œWell.” Thomas considered. “That would seem to be about the best that we can do.”
    â€œI’m ready to hike,” Rolf told him. “I’ve rested most of the day. Just paddled in the dugout.”
    Thomas, staring at him thoughtfully, cracked a faint smile. “You call that resting, hey?” He looked across the fire at Mewick.
    Mewick said, “I think the young one has got all the madness out of his system.”
    Thomas looked back at Rolf. “Is that true? If I take you, we may run into a fight but we’re not looking for one.”
    â€œI understand that.” The madness for revenge was not gone, far from it. But it had grown into something cold and patient. Calculating.
    Thomas stared at Rolf a moment longer; then he smiled. “Very good. Then let’s get started.”

IV
The Cave
    The earliest light of dawn found Rolf and Thomas lying side by side, facing south across the pass, in the mouth of a narrow crevice between towering rocks. The pass before them was not distinguished by any name; though it was the only clean break in the Broken Mountains for many kilometers both north and south. They were both worn with swamp-paddling and cross-country hiking through the night just past—with their furtive wading crossing of the river Dolles, and their last climb, racing against the coming of dawn, to their present position.
    The spot they had reached was a commanding one. By moving a meter forward, out of the mouth of the tiny canyon, they might have seen to their right the Dolles winding like a lazy snake along the foot of the mountains from north to south. Beyond the river stretched Rolf’s home country of farmlands and lowlands and swamps. And in the distance, plainly visible, was the blue vagueness of the western sea.
    Straight ahead of the tiny canyon’s mouth, the barren land fell downward for some two hundred meters in a gradually decreasing slope to where the east-west highway threaded the bottom of the pass. And south beyond the highway the land rose again in an equivalent slope, to a foothill of the southern mountain chain; and upon that foothill stood the gray and newly strengthened walls of the Castle.
    To the left of the Castle, Rolf could see part of the desert country that rolled down from the all-but-rainless inland slopes of the Broken Mountains, and stretched on for perhaps two hundred kilometers to the high and forbidding Black Mountains. The desert looked hot already, though the sun was scarcely risen.
    â€œThe leatherwings are up betimes,” said Thomas quietly, nodding straight ahead. The early sun was bright on the net-protected houses and perches clustered on