orms, protected by the fabric, and with a sort of canopy
around the sides underneath, over which the girls grasping the handles
could fly. Mercer and Anina rode on one platform, and Miela and I on the
other. All of us were dressed in the black garments.

On each of the platforms we had mounted a projector of higher power than
the hand cylinders, although of course of much less effective range than
those the Mercutians had used in Wyoming.

Thus equipped we rose into the air from the castle grounds in the Great
City, with a silent, awed multitude watching us--as strange an army,
probably, as ever went forth to battle.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE BATTLE.

We swept out over the Great City, flying in the battle-formation we had
used many times before on our trips about the country. Mercer's platform
and mine were some fifty feet apart, leading. Behind us, in a great
semicircle, the girls spread out, fifty little groups of ten, each with
its single leader in front. Below, a hundred feet perhaps, the fifty other
girls darted back and forth, keeping pace with us. The aspect of these
girls, flying thus to battle, was truly extraordinary. The pink-white
flesh of their bodies; their limbs incased in the black veiling; their
long black or golden hair; and the vivid red or blue feathered wings
flashing behind those wide, fluttering, flimsy black shields--it was a
sight the like of which I never shall see again.

There was almost no wind, for which I was thankful, as it made our
maneuvers in the air considerably less difficult. When we reached the
Narrow Sea our patrols reported that Tao's ships were still in the river,
waiting for others from the Lone City to join them. We hastened on, for I
wished to meet them as near the Twilight shore as possible.

We believed, from the reports our girls had brought us, that the enemy
would have some twenty or thirty boats, most of them similar to that in
which Mercer and Anina weathered the storm on the way to the Water City.

We assumed that the men in the boats would be armed with the hand
light-ray cylinders. These projected a beam not over four inches broad and
had an effective range of about five hundred feet. The boats probably
would carry large projectors also. They might be set up in the boats ready
for use, or they might not.

What range they would have we could not estimate, though we hoped we
should encounter nothing more powerful than this one Miela and I had on
the platfo