by Andre Norton
There was a squeal which was not part of the susti vocal range. Kade, his head still crushed by the wing, felt the creature’s body pressed tighter against his as if impelled by some blow from behind. Then he was gasping fresh air, his hands rubbing his eyes, the susti’s weight no longer crushing him.
With a speed he would not have believed possible to a creature so awkward on the ground, the Klorian terror had moved to face a new antagonist. Kade saw hooves flash skyward, come down in the cutting blows of axe-fatality. One such landed full on a wing, flattening the susti from a crouch to the sand. Before the creature could struggle up, the Terran stallion, squealing with red rage, brought punishing teeth to snap trap-tight on the nape of the susti’s neck, tearing free only with a mouthful of flesh.
Kade had heard of the desperate ferocity of stallion fighting stallion for the kingship of a herd. Once he had seen such a duel to the death. And here was the same incarnate rage, the same deadly determination to win, turned not against a fellow horse, but against the alien creature.
The susti had been unprepared for that meeting, and it never recovered the advantage lost at the first blow. Since the stallion was able to rear above his enemy, using sharply shod front hooves as a boxer uses his hands, he repeatedly flattened the bat-thing, each fall of those weapons breaking bones, each rake of teeth ripping strips of flesh. Kade had never witnessed such raw and bloody work and he could hardly believe that the animal that had moved quietly under his orders could have changed in a matter of seconds into this wild fury.
Long after the susti must have been dead the horse continued to trample the body. Then all four feet were on the ground, the dun neck stretched so that distended nostrils could sniff at the welter of splintered bone, blood-matted fur. There was a snort of disgust from the stallion. He threw up his head, his black forelock tossing high, to scream the challenge of his kind triumphantly.
Kade tore at the last of the cords which held him, putting all his strength into that pull. The bonds yielded reluctantly but he was able to twist and turn the loops until he kicked free. The stallion was trotting away between brush wall and boulder and the man ran after him.
He found the horse, coat splotched with foam, a line of sticky red down one shoulder proving that the stallion had not come altogether unmarked out of that battle, with front feet hock-deep in the stream, drinking from the top curls of topaz water. There was a spread of meadowland, pocket-sized but rich in grass, on the other side of the water. But, contrary to Kade’s expectations, it did not hold the mares.
The Terran moved up beside the horse. Again that head tossed, flicking droplets of water on Kade’s arm and reaching hand, evading the man’s touch. The horse still wore riding pad and the reins trailed loosely from the hackamore.
Kade hissed soothingly but the horse snorted, jerked away from the man’s hand. It was then Kade realized he must still reek of the susti. Kneeling beside the streamside, well away from the horse, he pored cold water over head, shoulders, chest where that rank fur had smeared against his flesh. He felt the sting in his wound. Gritting sand rubbed away the last foul reminder of that contact. And now the horse allowed him close, to dab at that shoulder scratch with a soaked wad of grass. The furrow was not deep, Kade noted with relief. But the arrival of the stallion without the mares, with no sign of Dokital, continued to puzzle the man. And what had so aroused the horse to that attack against a beast which had not threatened him?
Kade had heard tales of horses and mules on his planet battling mountain lions, thereafter developing such an animosity against the big cats, that they deliberately sought the felines out with a singleness of purpose and desire for vengeance against that archenemy of their kind. That was close to the reaction of a human under similar circumstances. Yet the stallion could not have met a susti before and Kade had not attempted to condition the animals since their arrival on Klor. Either unusually thorough precautions and preparations had been made off-world to acclimate the newcomers to all possible Klorian dangers, or the susti by its vile stench and very appearance had aroused hatred in the new immigrant. At any rate, Kade’s life had been bought in that encounter and he was duly grateful.
The problem of what to do now remained. Where would they go? Leading the stallion, the man splashed across the stream and found what he had hoped to see; hoof prints cut in the soft clay of a sloping bank. If the traces continued as clear as this he would have no difficulty in back-trailing the horse and perhaps so discovering where Dokital and the mares had vanished.
Mounting, Kade headed the horse across the valley, pausing to study the trail now and then, each time seeing traces. Either the horses had left those while running free, or the Ikkinni had not taken the trouble to conceal the evidence of their passing.
The strip of meadowland narrowed, overshadowed by rising mountain walls, and the ground began to slope upward, gradually at first and then at a more acute angle. Kade revised his guess that the animals had taken that path of their own choosing. With water and good grazing in the valley, they would not voluntarily have picked such a way into the heights. Yet here and there a deep hoofprint marked either the exit of the small herd, or the return of the stallion.
Kade halted at the top of the rise to rest his mount and, with the age-old training of his kind, slipped from the pad, loosening the cinch to allow air to circulate under the simple saddle, before he crept to the edge of the downslope ahead, taking advantage of all offered cover.
The downslope was wooded, masked with a bristly cover of the twisted dwarflike trees found in the heights. Wind stirred through them, roughed Kade’s flesh with its bitter bite. But more than wind moved on that curve of hillside. There was no mistaking the nature of those moving dots coming up with the dogged persistence of animals driven by a homing instinct. The mares! And none bore a rider.
Daringly Kade whistled and some trick of air current carried that summons to the sensitive ears below. The lead mare nickered and quickened pace, her sisters falling in behind her. Rocks rolled and behind Kade the stallion sounded his own call.
When the mares reached the ridge they were sweating, their eyes strained, showing white rims, their coats rough with dried foam and sweat, bits of twig and bark caught in the rippling length of their tails. By all the signs they had traveled far and fast.
The lead mare still wore the riding pad and her rein was caught to it on one side, dangling loose on the other. Also the pad was twisted and across its edge—
Kade put out a finger. That smear of blood, differing in shade from his own, was already partly congealed. The drop must have been exposed to the air for some time. But its presence there argued that there was a more sinister reason for Dolkital’s absence. Had the native been killed? But where? And why had he ridden the mare, driven the horses away, leaving Kade helpless in the deserted camp? Every time the Terran tried to make a pattern out of the bits and pieces he knew or suspected, they did not fit.
In the end he led the horses back to the valley of the camp, sure that they would be content there. The stream supplied him with the first food he had had that day; a fish, flat, elongated, almost unpleasantly snakelike, but one he knew was edible even raw, and he finished it off with the dogged determination to consume food as fuel for his demanding body.
The fish also supplied him with what he wanted almost as much as food; a weapon, or at least the beginnings of a weapon which, with some careful labor, would serve. The tough spinal bone, shorn of its fringe of small projections and sharpened, made a poniard, needle-slim and nearly as deadly as dura-steel.
How much that would serve him against a Styor blaster, or an Ikkinni spear, he questioned. But with it in his hand Kade felt less naked. And he worked at its perfection all that long afternoon as he made some plans of the future.
The Styor, after their ruthless attack on the Trade post, would hunt down any remaining off-world witness with speed and dispatch. Let his survival be suspected and they would have hunting teams into these breaks to comb him
out, station squads all along the trails leading back to the post to pick him up. The logical move would be for him to contact the free Ikkinni, Iskug’s band of escapees. That would have been his first endeavor yesterday, before he awoke bound and easy meat for a susti. Now he might have to fear the natives as much as he did their oppressors.
Yet a third possibility was so dangerous, that to try such action meant very careful planning, a period of scouting and lurking, of learning the countryside. To reach the destroyed post Kade would have to evade Styor patrols and natives alike. And even when he reached that site he might not be able to find the concealed com, or to summon the Service ship in time to save himself. But he could get out a warning of what had happened on Klor.
Kade ground with small, delicate touches at the point of his bone dagger. To scout the territory would commit him to no move and he should so be able to gauge the Styor positions. That much he would try tomorrow. He was fairly certain at the way west from here and he should be able to reach some upper vantage point in the hills from which to view the post by midday.
The Terran followed Dolkital’s example of the night before, heaping a loose pile of grass into which he crawled, listening to the movements of the horses until he fell asleep, knowing that they would give the alarm against alien intruders.
Kade awoke soon after dawn to hear the low whinny of the lead mare as she went down to the stream. He pulled free of his nest, went to the water also. Following the immemorial custom of hunt and war trail Kade drank only a small amount of water, pulling tighter the belt about his middle. As he swung past the boulder wall of Dokital’s camp a gorged winged thing shuffled along the cleaned skeleton of the susti, and two smaller shapes turned angry red eyes on him before they scuttled away into hiding.
Taking his bearings from the three peaks, the Terran headed westward. He had to make detours around two unclimbable cliffs and paused now and again to erase the marks of his own passing. Slightly before midday he did reach his goal. As he crept along a ledge the sun was pleasingly warm on his shoulders and he did not regret the loss of his tunic. For against the hue of sand and earth here his own bronze skin and the drab shade of his breeches should be undistinguishable.
Although miles separated him from the post, there was no mistaking the scar which the Styor bum-off had left to mark the site. Not one of the walls still stood, only a round splotch of blackened earth gleamed under the sun, the terrible heat of the ship’s flaming tail had cooked earth and sand into slag.
He could have hoped for nothing else. Had there been survivors, they must be sealed underground, their only hope of rescue to come from off-planet. Kade looked from that scar to more immediate landscapes. He had one small point in his favor, the Styor would expect a Terran to be completely bewildered if thrown on his own in the Klorian wilderness, and the Overmen of teams sent out to track any possible survivor would be overconfident.
That estimation of the enemy was borne out when Kade surveyed the foothills below his present perch. There were trackers out, right enough. He could sight two separate teams heading eastward, and they moved openly, strung out as might beaters sent to scare up game. There was no doubt that sooner or later someone down there would stumble on the trail left by the horses day before yesterday and follow it to the valley of the susti. Which meant he must move and find a better hideout.
But even as Kade started to crawl from his ledge, he stiffened, hearing that familiar clap of sound, the roar of a spaceship homing on a post land area. And, in the sunlight, the silver body of a descending Trade scout was a streak as vivid and elemental as an avenging bolt of lightning.
CHAPTER 10
IF KADE HAD BEEN startled by the sudden arrival of the Terran ship in Klorian skies, the search parties below betrayed their agitation by the speed with which they took to cover. Although he could no longer sight them, the off-worlder knew they still existed, a barrier between him and that ship now making a perfect three-fin landing on the apron of the vanished post. He had not the slightest chance of reaching the rescue party.
But he continued to watch their activities with strained eagerness. Would the Styor attempt to attack the party from the ship? Or would the aliens bring up one of their fast inter-atmosphere cruisers from Cor and begin a running fight when the Terran scout took off again? Kade did not see how they would dare to let the ruined post tell its story to Trade. Had the Styor not blasted, but allowed the evidences of a native attack to stand, they might have successfully blamed it on rebellious Ikkinni, indirectly on the Terrans themselves because of the importation of horses. As he lay there on the ledge, his head supported on his forearm, Kade thought that made good logic.
But why had they spoiled such a plan with the burn-off? What had gone wrong? Unless—unless they had learned of the blasting of Buk’s control! Had the Styor lords, safely in the background of that assault, been able to monitor events from a distance and observed that the Ikkinni had a weapon of deliverance at last? Had they ordered the burn-off to catch their own dupes as well as the Terrans for no other reason than to make sure that no more stunners would fall into Ikkinni hands, than if they moved fast and were lucky, no rumor of the weapon’s use could reach the rest of their slave gangs? It could be an answer, if a drastic one—risking a blockade from Trade in order to keep their slaves. But how could he judge the thinking patterns of a Styor by his own processes? The risk to them might have appeared heavier on the other side of the scales.
At any rate someone had been frightened enough, or angry enough to order that burn-off. Would the next attack come against the newly landed ship?
Minutes passed and no Styor flyer arose above the horizon. There was no sign of life from the breaks below where those hunting parties had gone to earth. Kade could make out, despite the distance, figures emerging on the ship’s ramp, descending to the congealed scar of the post. And he speculated again as to whether Abu or Che’in was sealed, still alive, below the glassy surface of that burn.
Renewed activity below his perch drew Kade’s attention away from the splotch on the prairie. There was a new advance, not back toward the plains, but up slope, heading towards him. And for a moment or two he wondered if he had been sighted and Ikkinni slaves dispatched to pick him up.
If the newcomers knew the terrain well they could take a path around the spur on which he crouched, cutting him off. And Kade dared not chance that they were ignorant of that, too many labor gangs had been hired out for hunting in these hills. He had to leave at once.
The Terran gave a last long look at the scene about the ship. Those small stick things which represented his own kind had gathered in one spot on the scar. His guess that at least one of the Team was in a hidden underground com chamber must be right and they were preparing to break the prisoner out. Kade eyed the section of broken, wooded land below him, the long curve of open prairie. To try to cross those miles was simply asking to be speared—or blasted if the Styor had issued more potent arms to their Overmen. He had not the slightest chance of reaching the safety of the ship and that was a bitter truth to digest.
But suppose the scout took off successfully with the man or men who had been rescued? There would remain that now open com chamber and the possibility he could try for it later, send in his own call. That was the hope he must hold to as he retreated now.
Kade crept from his ledge, started downward with the ridge rising as a wall between him and the only aid he could count on, using every tactic known to a hunter—and the hunted— to cover his trail.
Once he wriggled under a fallen tree, lay still, fighting the rapid pump of his own heart, the rasp of his breathing, while an Ikkinni paused within arm’s-length, head up, nostrils distended, as if he could pick out of the light breeze which was ruffling his cockscomb of hair the scent of the off-worlder.
Kade blinked when he saw that that particular tracker wore no collar. If the slave Ikkinni had been loosed in the hills, their free brethren were also on the move with a purpose which drove them into
dangerous proximity to the Overmen and their governed squads.
The Terran watched the native fade into the brush, and lay long moments in hiding, until he was sure of a detour which would not bring him treading on the other’s heels. So tangled a path did Kade follow that he was honestly surprised when he came again into the meadow where the horses grazed. And the hour was close to sunset as he stayed under cover watching the animals.
But the peace of the scene was reassuring, especially when the stallion betrayed quick vigilance with his own examination and then welcome for Kade. Had the Terran been Ikkinni or Styor he was certain the herd would have been in flight before the invaders could get within blaster range of the animals.
However, with hunters boring into the mountain valleys, man and mounts dared not remain there in spite of the coming night. Kade mounted the lead mare, headed her back along the trail he had explored the day before, and was glad that the others came behind willingly, the stallion playing rear guard.
The Terran pressed the pace, wanting to be over the rougher stretches of trail while the daylight lasted. But he paused every time they were forced out of cover to look behind. And he regretted he had no chance to erase their tracks.
They came back, in the gray of the twilight, to the wooded slope where earlier he had met the mares. And now the leader he rode whinnied nervously, had to be urged on. Yet Kade could see nothing but empty country below, and he was sure they had outdistanced the hunting parties. There remained the free Ikkinni, nor did he forget that blood which made an ugly blotch on the saddle pad not far from his knee.
He let the mare pick her own choice of ways as long as she obeyed his selection of direction. And she went cautiously, pausing to sniff the air, survey the unending ocher vegetation ahead. Once or twice the stallion snorted, as if growing impatient at that slow advance, but he did not press ahead.