The sun rose, throwing the shadow of the black spire toward Uktena. He lifted his right arm, the palm toward the east.
Alphena, to the shaman's left side and a pace behind him, glanced at his shadow. It was elongated but as sharply chiseled as the reliefs on a temple facade, then- Something squirming and huge spread across the shoreline and beyond, covering the land. It was not a shape but a blackness too pure to have form.
The shadow was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Uktena faced east.
The top of the black fortress split open. Procron, a figure in orichalc armor without the helmet, drifted out like a wisp of gossamer. In place of his human head flashed a diamond skull brighter than the fiery metal.
Uktena walked forward with the same awkward determination as before. His feet touched but did not sink into the slowly moving water. He raised his right arm, bent at the elbow; his left hung at his side. He was chanting, but Alphena could not make out the words.
She went out fifty feet from the shore, trying to follow. There the low waves caught the hem of her tunic and with that purchase threatened to pull her over. She lifted the garment, preparing to fling it away, but she stopped when she thought about what she was doing. Grimacing, she backed to where the water reached only to mid-shin.
Alphena had seen many gladiatorial battles. Splashing in water that would shortly be over her head, she would be completely useless in a fight against an enemy who walked on air.
Worse, if Uktena took notice of her, she would handicap him. She didn't mind risking her life, but she dared not risk the life of the friend she was supposedly helping.
Brilliant purple light flashed from Procron's skull, sizzling against a clear barrier an arm's length short of Uktena's chest. The bolt dribbled off like rain blown against a sheet of metal.
The sea beneath Uktena hissed. Alphena-near the shore now, a quarter mile behind him-felt her legs tingle and the hair rise on her arms and the back of her neck.
Uktena continued forward. Alphena thought she heard his voice in the thunder rumbling overhead.
Procron drifted closer, his arms folded across his chest. He slammed out another bolt, brighter than the sun at noon.
Uktena staggered, half-turning. Alphena fell backward in the water from the visual shock. She blinked furiously, trying to clear the orange afterimages flaring across her eyes.
Uktena resumed his advance. His form was shifting, swelling.
Alphena squeezed her eyes closed, pretending that what she saw was because afterimages were distorting her vision. She whispered, "Vesta, make him safe. Make him not be changed."
Huge, tentacled, and many-legged, the thing that had been Uktena approached the Atlantean. Both hung in the air. Procron loosed a series of dazzling, crackling bolts, flinging Uktena back. Tentacles shriveled and the swollen body seemed to deflate, though the purple haze which spread about the scene blurred the forms of both combatants.
The sea beneath them was bubbling. Dead fish and stranger creatures rocked on the surface, many of them boiled pink or red. Alphena's skin itched as though she had gotten a bad sunburn.
Uktena surged toward Procron again. A purple flash and thunderclap drove them apart short of contact.
Procron tumbled, his armor flashing brightly, but he regained control above the water. Wobbling, dipping like a skylark instead of rising smoothly, the Atlantean took an aerial post midway between the shore and his gleaming fortress.
Black and smoking, the creature Uktena had become dropped into the sea. Spray and steam spouted fifty feet in the air.
The wave from the impact sent Alphena tumbling. She got to her feet and began sloshing toward where the shaman had hit. She screamed and raised her axe to threaten anybody who came close to her.
Uktena bobbed into view. For a moment he lay sprawled face-down on the slow swell; then his head lifted and he shook himself.
Treading water, Uktena looked out toward his opponent. Procron showed no signs of returning to try conclusions again. Carefully, painfully, the shaman began to stroke for shore.
Alphena, waist deep when the sea was at rest, watched for a moment in hesitation. She bent and took off her sandals, throwing them to shore. Holding the axe helve with her knees, she pulled her tunic over her head. After rolling it into a loose rope and retrieving the axe, she walked in the shallows toward the line Uktena was taking.
Overhead, the clouds were breaking up again. Alphena thought it had rained briefly, but the swirling battle had whipped the sea to froth; the spatters she felt might have come from that.
Uktena had paused. A swell lifted him; when it dipped away again, he lay as motionless as a mass of seaweed.
Alphena sloshed forward. "My friend!" she called. "My friend Uktena!"
The black spire had closed again. Procron must have returned to his fortress; at any rate, Alphena couldn't see him any more.
Uktena roused and splashed feebly. Alphena shouted, but it wasn't a word. She bobbed out as far as she dared and flung the end of her rolled tunic toward the shaman. For a moment she was afraid that he wouldn't take it; then one of his sinewy hands twisted itself into the fabric.
Alphena's feet didn't touch bottom when her nose was above water. She dipped, digging her toes into the sand as she pulled hard on the makeshift rope. With the slack that gave her, she fought a foot or two closer to shore and repeated the process. She could swim, but not well and not while holding the axe. She wasn't going to let go of the axe.
After a very long time, she could walk normally. Uktena tried to get to his feet. His eyes were blank. Alphena threw his right arm over her shoulders and gripped that wrist with her left hand. Staggering-she was exhausted, and the shaman was a solid weight, not large but all bone and muscle-she started for the kiva.
She saw the pipe. Bending carefully she retrieved it and held the reed stem alongside the axe helve.
Smoke hung over the village. The end poles of one of the huts stood at the edge of a blackened oval. In the center, the ground had been blasted into a waist-deep pit on whose edges grains of sand in the soil had been fused into glass. Several other fires lifted coils of smoke from the pines in the near distance.
The three sages squatted with their heads close together, whispering among themselves. They didn't call to Alphena, but their eyes followed her and the shaman. The villagers watched also, in silence.
"Bring us food and water!" Alphena shouted. "At once!"
She didn't know whether she would be able to get Uktena into his underground chamber. There was time enough to decide that when they reached the entrance.
"And bring my sandals and tunic!" she added. "I left them where we came out of the water."
They would have been that much more to carry. She still had the axe, though.
Alphena walked slowly toward the kiva under the weight of her friend. She tried to forget the image of the monster which had battled the Atlantean wizard.
A bird-or frog, or lizard, or Venus knew what-squealed imperiously from the canopy above them. Hedia didn't bother to look up. She was numb from stress and from stumbling through the jungle.
And from lack of sleep, now that she thought about it. She hadn't slept since the previous morning when she was on the run from the Servitors, and she hadn't slept well then.
Lann gave a sharp bark and halted. Hedia stopped also, but she lost her balance and almost toppled into the ape-man. She lifted the spear-with difficulty; the muscles of her arms didn't obey any better than her legs were doing-and tried to look in all directions to find the threat.
There was no threat. They were back in the ruined keep where Hedia had first escaped from the Servitors. It was Lann's keep, she had been told by one of the hunters on the ship. Now Lann was squatting, pulling apart the vegetation that had grown through the blocks of shattered crystal.