Yes, the Southern reinforcements had arrived from the Temple-Town, but they were like a stag with a puma on its back, the brigands in small bands from first to last had not let up-worrying and decimating them, and hardly one had been caught in return. The battlefield had heaved and cracked: nearly whole platoons had disappeared at a time, according to the survivors. These were swarming into the city. In every doorway, on every pavement and in the gutters they were resting, tending each others’ wounds, looting, and continuing the battle without any organization. The surviving officers were faced with a superhuman task in gathering them together let alone controlling them, and many officers, particularly Southerners who had not so much to lose, were shrugging their shoulders and letting go.

My priest and I bade the inn farewell and thanks, were given knives and hurried out into the chaos with our cloak-hoods well down over our faces. The air was very hot now.

We steadily made towards the plain, which with luck we could cross—We’d then be safely on our way to the coast.

“If we can always keep a little ahead of the war—■” I said hopefully.

“This World is doomed to war,” he said cheerfully, slapping out sparks which had caught his cloak. “It will end in war, having been in war ever since the gods were tempted by the sight of the daughters of men, and fell.” I had always thought that a good thing!—but remain deeply fond of my Cousin, especially now I know he’s a real World-god and by his nature implicated right up to the nose in the affairs of this World and no other.

The priest hadn’t yet told me what to do to get from the coast actually into Atlan—he said he’d tell me when we were out of the city. It was urgent that no one have the slightest chance of over-hearing. At last, Atlan to be entered—Certainly the end of an era.

The priest said. “The Earth-Serpent has entered the lists: in Heaven’s timeless War with Hell, the Earth gods, those who loved men and fell and became one with this World, and are drunk with the dark Earth, and yet though they fell from Heaven are not Evil, for Earth has its own rightness as it has its own centre of gravity—those gods were not till now in the War, but they are in essence war-gods—and their strong blind-sighted offspring the Serpent will bring earth-war to the Land Beyond the Rain-gusts, and pierce its Heavenliness with the powerful scales of his own mortality, and thenceforth the earth will be all of Earth.”