The four men, and perhaps others, were taking him somewhere, walking alongside the kaws. They were ambushed, probably at dusk or even at night. His beast had died instantly, almost, but luckily had not fallen quite on top of him. The attackers’ hasty search had missed him, sheltered in the wreckage of his litter and almost covered by the kaw’s body. The ambushers had been in a hurry, probably afraid of discovery and pursuit, and they had decamped hastily after stripping the dead of everything they could find and use.
Hiero’s legs were as long unused as his head, but he staggered to the middle of the clearing. The croaking of the birds had grown louder, but they did not take wing as he surveyed the scene at closer range.
The dead men were unknown to him. He did not like what he saw of them, particularly since he was now sure they had been his late captors or guards. Even allowing for the agonies of death, they were unprepossessing, being small and of a sallow white color. Their long hair was also pale, and they were clean-shaven, with narrow eyes and protuberant jaws. They somehow did not appear to be creatures of daylight. He wondered who they were and where they had been taking him.
Staring at the landscape of thorn scrub about him in the waning afternoon sun, he forced his dormant training to come back to him, despite his spinning head. Slowly at first, he began to search for anything which might be useful. No weapons lay about, though he was sure there had been plenty of them when the attack came. Indeed, nothing lay about except the corpses. Aside from missing him, the attackers had done a most complete job of plunder. Even the arrows had been retrieved, save for the stub buried in his kaw. There was nothing he could use and no clue to either his captors or those who had slain them.
Other than worn leather shorts and sandals in which he found himself dressed, he had absolutely nothing.
He was just beginning to examine the tracks which littered the clearing, finding only the rough marks of booted feet and some hoof prints of kaws, when the carrion birds fell silent, then lifted from the bushes. From, a remote distance to the east, there came the faint note of a questing horn.
Hiero stood frozen. The birds had flown off low over the thorny scrub, not high in a flock, for which he was grateful. He did not know who had sounded that horn, but as far as he was concerned, this empty waste held nothing but foes. And they might have marked the birds rising.
Again the horn sounded, a solitary call. This time it was answered from the south and the north, though both calls were far off and still well to the east of his position. There had been at least four horns, he estimated, well spaced, signaling position and future movement. Someone had been driving in a long line, looking for something. For what, if not for him?
Hardly thinking, his reflexes taking over, aided by years of training, the Metz stooped and seized a dead branch of thorn bush that was covered with small leaves. Quickly he erased all traces of his presence from the dry earth. Then he began to run slowly to the west, keeping to gravel where he could; when that was not possible, he brushed the ground gently to blot his tracks.
He ran for what he estimated was half an hour, maintaining constant awareness of where he trod. Behind him, the horns still called. The distance seemed the same as when he had first heard them, indicating that the pursuit was moving at roughly the same speed as he was.
The sun was now sinking fast ahead of him, and it showed him that the scrub was thinning out. There were more patches of sand and pebble underfoot now, and both the bush and the sparse, wiry grass had almost disappeared. The color of the earth itself had changed from a sandy brown to a bluish gray.
Later, the sound of the horns changed. At least two of them pealed out in short, summoning notes. Hiero knew they had come upon the dead and were signaling a rally. He trudged grimly on. It was agonizing to think that they might be friends, perhaps sent by Luchare to rescue him, but the chances were too small; he had no idea where he was or how far he had come since being kidnapped, but it must be a long way. If he were right, the blueness of the ground and the increasing absence of vegetation meant that he was heading into fresh and unknown dangers. He had seen this thinning scrub far to the north and knew that it portended the approach of a desert. In the latitude of D’alwah, there was only one kind of desert marked on the map—one of the Deserts of The Death.
Soon he knew he was right. The last bushes died away; there before him, glittering with fragments of mica and blue, siliceous sands, stretched the desert, unbroken to the western horizon. Behind him, the horns sounded again with their original, questing notes.
Hiero had no choice of action. Waterless, foodless, and without weapons, he set out into the waste, determined that he would not be taken again. Anything was better than his late captivity.
As night came on, the horns fell silent. But he plodded on and on, his face fixed toward the west. By now, his pace was slow and uneven, and he stumbled at intervals. Once he fell to his knees. Rising took most of his energy.
He limped across a shallow basin and reached a patch of naked rock, where the going was easier than on the soft sand. Here he rested, his breath coming in short gasps. He worked a small pebble over his dry tongue; it was better than nothing, but he needed water badly. His disciplined body could go without food, but he must have water.
He raised his head and surveyed the arid landscape that was revealed by the light of the half-moon. Broad patches of sand stretched south as far as his gaze could reach. To the east, the sands ran to the distant horizon; and the north held more sand, mingled with patches of pebbles and broken rock. But to the west, black spires showed against the stars—perhaps pinnacles of a range or buttresses of a line of low, jagged cliffs.
With a supreme effort, he rose to his feet. If there were any place of safety, those western peaks might hold it. There could be caves or at least crannies in which he could shelter through the heat of the coming day. There might even be sources of water and food, if he were clever enough to find them.
As he braced himself to continue, there came a faint, distant sound out of the south. Hiero listened intently, trying for the hundredth time to focus the powers of his mind for mental search, as he had painstakingly taught himself in the last year. His whole frame tensed with an almost physical effort as he tried to probe the night. At last, he subsided with a silent curse. Whatever had been done to him must have been permanent. He was blind in the use of his mental powers. Somehow, his talents had been stolen from him by drugs, and now he was helpless, without either physical or mental weapons on this plain. He cursed himself again, then rebuked himself. He made the sign of the cross on his naked breast and murmured a brief prayer of remorse. He had forgotten he was a priest and that a priest thanked God for his blessings—such as being alive at all!
He set out for the distant hills at a slow, steady trot, trying to ignore his fatigue and the ever-increasing thirst. As he went, he listened intently. No sound broke the silence, save the shuffle and scrape of his sandals, but he was not to be misled. His ability to probe for the minds of other beings might be gone; but, dormant in his brain, some of the synapses that had guarded him for so long still stirred and flickered, if in a dim and half-useless way. There was evil in the night! He knew it as if it were written in letters of fire on the sands. Someone or something hunted, and, since he had no defenses of any kind, he must find shelter or die in the attempt. He forced himself to plod on, concentrating on simply placing one foot in front of the other. He had no illusions about his present predicament. He was in a place of hideous danger, one from which few of the rare travelers who ventured had ever returned, one of the Deserts of The Death.
Thousands of years in the past, the hell fires of the atom had totally blighted many places. The worst of these still shone with the bale glow of radiation and were utterly lethal. Yet this was not one of those. Like all the Metz of the far North, Hiero had an inbred sensitivity, as well as some tolerance to radiation. He could sense that this was one of the barren patches from which most, if not all, of the k
illing gamma rays had long since evaporated. That did not mean his peril was less; perhaps it was only longer delayed.
For though no blue witch fires danced upon the sand and broken scree around him, still the area seemed lifeless and waterless. No plants grew, not even lichens, at least not in the stretch he had traversed since the previous dawn. Yet the fading radiation had left its mark in other ways. Strange life had come to be, bred from horrid mutation; all over the world, and in these deserts it was deemed strangest of all. The landscape might appear empty in the wan light but there was life, of a sort. Despite the loss of his mind-search abilities, he could feel it. There was a growing menace which throbbed in his already aching skull. Doggedly, he trudged on, his gaze fixed on the dark towers of rock which rose out of the west to meet him.
Again he paused to catch his breath, but this time went only to one knee, fearful that he would not be able to rise if he squatted. And once more out of the south came the sound. This time it was clearer, a strange, high, wavering noise, as if somehow in the night a monstrous sheep blethered on an impossibly high note. Priest and Killman, soldier and ranger that he was, Hiero felt a finger of ice trace the length of his spine. Whatever made that noise was not something he wanted to meet. Again he crossed himself and then rose and set off once more into the west. He was numb with exhaustion, but he continued on. The cry was surely that of a hunter, and it must be a hunter on his trail. How it had been summoned, whence it had come to place itself on his track, he could not guess. But he knew that it was.
Despite his condition, he kept moving steadily along. When he next looked up, he saw that the hills had risen before him and that slopes and ridges of rock were already rising to the left and right from the drifted sand and erg which had been his companions for so many weary hours. He caught a distant glimpse of a spiky thing jutting from a crevice off to his left and recognized it as some sort of plant, though of a strange and unpleasant kind. Perhaps he could find water after all, if he persisted. On and yet on he went, the last moisture in his body coating him in a crackled film of grit and perspiration.
Behind him, the evil cry quavered out under the sky once more, far louder than when last heard, alien and rife with menace, trailing off into that impossibly high note which almost physically hurt the inner fibers of his being. He did not stop this time, but drew on his last stores of energy to lope over the rising ground to his front.
Had the night been dark, he might have been totally helpless, forced to move at a crawl. But the half-moon showed him that a small canyon sloped up into the higher rock ahead of him, black and menacing, yet a haven of refuge to him. If he could only hold out long enough to get into the hills!
He reached the mouth of the ravine and lurched into it, straining at every muscle. The moonlight entered only in patches, but he could see sufficiently for his needs. The floor under his sandals was shale, worn and slippery, but he managed to keep his feet while he sought on either side for the shadow of a cave or other place of refuge. There was no further sound behind him, but he was not deceived. Whatever followed was close upon him. If he found no hiding place in the next few minutes, he was doomed.
For a second a face filled his mind, the face of a lovely woman, dark and mysterious, with masses of tight curls, soft, full lips, and dark, lustrous eyes. Luchare! Was he to perish alone and lost, never to see her smile again? Frantically, clumsily, he clambered up the narrowing gully, his soldier’s gaze never ceasing to search for some place that would at least give him a fighting chance to live. Yet no cranny broke the smooth rock walls, which had now closed in until they were no more than the length of his body away on either hand. In desperation, he looked up and then saw it.
Ahead some small distance, the winding passage bent both upward and to his left. As it did so, a narrow buttress towered up from the southern wall, like a rough and broken turret, narrowing at the top to a tiny platform. But the side of the pinnacle, as it abutted the gorge, was cracked and broken! To a skilled climber, it presented an ascent of no great difficulty. Weary though he was, Hiero felt a thrill of energy course through his veins. In a second he had reached the base of the craglet and had begun his climb, placing his hands and feet swiftly and surely as he swarmed upward.
The spike of crumbling stone was not high, perhaps a little more than five times his own height, and he was soon at the top. With a gasp of effort, he pulled himself up and over the rim and flopped down on the more or less level ledge which crowned it.
But he dared not rest for a second. He did not know what followed, nor its powers, and he knew it was coming hard upon his track. To something which could climb, his new shelter might become a trap of a most terrible kind. His eyes swept the narrow top of the crumbling monolith, and a fierce gleam lit them. At arms’ length there lay several massive chunks of broken stone, the products of weather and erosion in the distant past. As quietly as he could, he gathered two of the larger ones close to his chest, trying not to grunt with the effort of his fading strength. Then he sought to relax, while he peered back down the black ravine, watching as steadily as possible for the pursuer he knew to be coming, willing his body to snatch even a few seconds of rest for the ordeal to follow.
And then he heard it. At first it was simply a muffled noise in the silent night, the sound of a heavy movement, then another and another. He was listening to the soft tread of some massive body advancing up the same path he had followed only moments before, a body trying to move as quietly as possible in the hope of coming upon its prey unawares. His eyes narrowed in pure rage. At least he was not taken by surprise. The hunter would learn that a Metz Kiliman was not to be chivied across the sand like a hunted deer. After days of helplessness, here was something at which he could strike!
Closer and closer came the sounds. Once he heard a faint rattle on the shale, as if a monstrous claw had touched upon a fragment of loose rock. Now he could detect the sounds of breathing, deep and hoarse. And then around a corner below, it came.
Veteran though he was of strange combats, hardened to the monstrous life forms spawned by The Death, Hiero nevertheless drew a deep gulp of air as he stared down at what had been drawn out of the southern wastes to seek his blood.
In the flickering and uncertain moonlight, there appeared a shifting bulk of a strange blue tint, as if the blue poison fires of the great desert had left their awful legacy in the color of this, their spawn. The great tailless trunk, the size of along-extinct horse, was carried on four massive legs, ending in mighty three-curved hooves which were more like vast talons. The long neck, mottled with the bluish glaze, ended in a head also not unlike that of a horse, but hideous tusks protruded from the blubber lips. And from the great, earless head there rose twin spires of bone, each pointed with a needle spike.
But the most dreadful feature, one which set the monster apart from all normal life, was its eyes. Hollow orbs of lambent flame, they were pupilless and ablaze with cold light. And the man, frozen on his ledge, knew at what he looked.
This was the Death Hart, of which he had read in the ancient records of D’alwah. Far in the remote past, these monsters had been common and had preyed on the scattered humans of the South in packs, emerging from their desert lairs to slaughter and pull down any living meat they could find, ravaging the lands which bordered the desert until the few scattered tribes that lived there had fled in anguish and despair. Not for many lives now had the creatures been seen, and they had become only a matter of awful legend, at least in the minds of men.
As he looked at the slavering jaws, Hiero knew that whatever creature had given rise to this abomination in the lost ages, it was now no eater of grass! Of a size scarcely less than Klootz, this thing was yet a carnivore, designed to rend and tear living flesh, to shatter bone and sinew to feed its incredible maw.
As he stared, his mind racing at the embodied sight of the horrific past come to life before him, it looked up and saw him. Once more, that horrid, yammering call rang through the clear night air, this time
in a volume of sheer noise that left the senses numb as it resounded and echoed off the rock walls. Hiero closed his eyes for a second as the vibrations of that frightful call pierced through his body to the very marrow of his bones.
As the echoes of that ghastly cry died into silence, he opened his eyes, just in time to see the demon of the desert hurl itself upward at him, the hideous mouth open to expose both the rows of fangs and the massive tusks set at the corners of the colossal gape. Then it sprang.
Braced though he was for the attack, the Metz priest was still taken by surprise. The enormous haunches had a strength he would not have believed, and the leap carried the great body almost to his own level in one incredible bound. For an awful instant, he stared into the oily light of the brute’s eyes from no more than a sword’s length away, while its filthy breath spume poured over him in a wave of hot loathsomeness. Then it was gone and he heard a colossal thud as it fell back to the base of the rock.
His heart pounding, Hiero peered over the lip of the monolith, hoping against hope that the atrocity had done itself some injury in that mighty fall, only to see it crouched below, unharmed and glaring upward with the same avid lust. Not by any short slip or fall could that strange body be injured. Hiero remembered that the ancient scrolls had emphasized the invulnerability of the beasts, claiming they could tear down the heavy timbers of village walls like so many jackstraws. This thing would never fail through any efforts of its own. If he were to survive, he must carry the battle to the enemy, hopeless though that might appear.
As he watched, the monster reared up again, but this time slowly, until the great hoof-claws of the forelimbs were stretched to their fullest limits. As the three great talons of each leg clamped into the rock of the cliff, they bit in, the wirelike sinews contracting, crunching in at almost beyond a believable rate. As Hiero stared, aghast, the rock up which he had clambered ground and crumbled. Below, he could hear the terrible rear limbs crush the eroded stone in the same way. The hideous eyes stared up at him, unwinking. Even as he recoiled, the mighty hindquarters drew up. Before his unbelieving stare, the abortion out of vanished memory was actually clinging and grinding its way into the rock. It was a feat almost beyond belief, even after his sight of its capabilities in that initial leap. Next, he knew, the great forearms would extend once more, and this time they would be over the ledge of his shelter! And a remote, still corner of his mind said that would be all!
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