by Andre Norton
“Lamby bull, and big!”
“How long ago?” The trapper dropped to one knee, inspected the indentations in the snow with his nose only a few inches above the markings.
“Maybe an hour, could be less.”
“The boys went along here two hours ago, and they’d keep an eye on their back trail,” Rysdyke offered.
But Roose was troubled. “Bull following a man trail, that way means he has a real mad on. Might even have been creased by some soft head who didn’t hunt him down for the real kill. Those cracked guards along the road take shots at everything moving, and a lamby can travel pretty far with a crease to stir him up. A wounded bull is a hard risk any way you look at it.”
“Well, you know the drill, Roose. We’ll make this your party. And, Tolkus, start weaving. This is no time for any of us to get mixed up with a lamby that wants to chew up a human.”
Roose quickened pace, keeping to the trail, while Tolkus wove a new path first to the right, and then to the left, investigating all thick strands of brush or clumps of trees.
“Why did they ever name those devils ‘lambys’ in the first place?” Rysdyke wondered.
“Someone with an infernal sense of humor pulled that,” Hogan remarked. “Anything less like a lamb would be hard to find. Only maybe it’s the texture of the fur which gave them that designation.”
“Just a tourist guide at heart, aren’t you?” Rysdyke laughed. “Not that we ever have any tourists to guide, though I’d like to introduce some of the company vips to a lamby. Those bulls are always mean. You get one really mad and he’s going to wipe the earth with you or the nearest thing which looks, smells, and moves like you. A lamby will trail a man for miles, hide in the bush along a path, and spike his horns into the first traveler who passes. And since he makes about as much noise as a feather floating in air, he usually wins the first round. Then, if the traveler has had any companions, the lamby will get his in return.”
“But does that satisfy the first victim?” asked Joktar. “Lots of little surprises on this world, aren’t there?” He remembered his own sudden entanglement with the zazaar.
“Quite true,” Hogan agreed. “So try always to make your first attack the last and in your own favor. Yes, this is not what you might term a pleasant world for a restful vacation.”
“But it could be a halfway decent one for men to live on,” the ex-spaceman defended the wasteland.
“To what other end do we labor?” The lazy note was back in Hogan’s voice. “Break the companies’ hold, free Fenris, then comes the millennium.”
Rysdyke laughed half-angrily. “Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Oh, the power of words is well known. And maybe we can badger the companies into recognizing a few rights besides those they sit upon for themselves. But Fenris will never be a garden spot, and men are never going to quit grabbing all they can reach with their grubby fingers. Sweep away the companies here and the vacuum left will be speedily filled. We’ll then have master trappers, big traders crowding in, eating up the smaller men, building a kingdom in their turn. And some day the last lamby will be skinned, the last zazaar tracked and denuded of its pelt. Then new deposits of alibite, or something similar will be located, the companies will come back.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mask. “History will repeat itself. That is what is so fatiguing about history, it’s so repetitious. Personalities change, the pattern never. Nothing but the same boring mistakes, rises and falls, catastrophes and achievements, balancing each other without end. If man were offered something else—” Hogan’s eyes lifted from the trail, to the sky behind the ragged mountain peaks, “he probably wouldn’t dare to take it. No, we’ll go on and on in our own twisted way until we’re finished like the others before us.”
“Those who built your mound-fort?” asked Joktar.
“Yes. Doubtless that was thrown together by some company who had the blah-blah concession here and was determined to hold it against a band of miserable, dirty outlaws. This is a wolf-head planet now, and it always has been. The very climate pulls men into its pattern. Whoever did grub up that artificial mountain must have had a major enemy breathing down their necks. The situation must have been the same: greed, defense of one’s treasure, probably eventual loss to other and stronger attackers. Ah—”
A crack of sound, carrying sharply through the air, put the three into action before its echoes had died away. Joktar, favoring his tender shoulder, shoved sideways, squatting behind the best protection he could find, a tree bole surrounded by a draggle of underbrush. And Rysdyke and Hogan disappeared so skillfully and completely that they might have been permanently removed from the landscape by one of the primitive atomic explosions of Terra’s past.
Joktar had not been provided with a blaster and he was wondering how he was expected to defend himself. There was a wisp of smoke curling into the air from a heat-shriveled twig. That bit of branch had caught the outer edge of a blaster beam, and it hung only a pace or so beyond where they would have been in another short moment. Since none of them in the least resembled a lamby bull, there was reason to think they had been selected for elimination. Joktar froze, no use provoking another shot from that hidden marksman.
Was someone in Hogan’s own organization getting ambitious, wanting to move up as Samms had done, but not willing to risk the face down of a call out where his chief would have an equal chance? Joktar frowned. This was quite like the streets, treachery against treachery, the most cunning player to sweep the board.
Were Hogan and Rysdyke pinned down now as he was, or using their superior knowledge of woodcraft to scout around behind the man in ambush? He would swear there was nothing moving about.
Snow creaked. Joktar turned his head with infinite stealth, feeling that perhaps the lurking menace might be able to catch the whisper of his hood furs as he moved. But what he saw was not a man.
Matted fur? Hair? Wool? Blue-gray in color, so close in shade to the branches which framed it that the actual outlines were blurred. Sprouting from that mat of hair were two sharp, upward-pointing horns, a third centering a broad toad’s snout. And all three of those horns were sticky with red clots, clots which had dribbled down to the fur. A drip of mucous from the nose flaps was also discolored with that tell-tale scarlet. This thing had gored to kill and recently.
The eyes, deep-set in that stained fur, blinked. Joktar pressed against his tree, feeling that trunk had suddenly become transparent.
Again that creak of snow. The head pushed forward, bringing into visibility thickly maned shoulders, forefeet with sharply split hooves as dreadfully bedabbled as the horns. Slowly, with caution but no fear, the lamby bull came out into the open path, head up, nostril flaps open to the full.
Those first few steps brought the beast almost level with Joktar. The Terran expected every second to see that head swing in his direction. And for the first time in his life, he knew a wave of the kind of fear which saps wits, weakens muscle, makes a man wait supinely for death. He fought against that as the lamby minced almost delicately past his tree. And he could not at first believe the creature was not hunting him.
There came a rush, but not in his direction. The beast leaped along the trail, making an impetuous dive, carrying on into a brush wall between two trees. Crack of blaster bolt. A thin, high wail which could come from an animal or a man. Another crack of blaster, then an inhuman scream of agony.
The stench of burned flesh and hair hung foul on a rising wind. Joktar pulled away from the tree, stumbled into a run which took him along the lamby’s route. Why he was impelled to trace that charge he could not have said. But he knew he would find death before him.
He ploughed through the break in the underbrush to a scene of butchery. The lamby, most of its head charred away, lay on the human body it had been trampling. And working to free the latter were Roose and Hogan. A moment later Rysdyke crashed into the small clearing from the other side.
“Tolkus?”
Hogan
caught a fragment of torn hood, tugged at it until the head it had once protected rolled limply to display the features of the dead. To Joktar the man was a stranger.
“Who?” Rysdyke’s question was half-protest. Roose’s breath puffed out in a thin white cloud through his mask.
“Never saw this one before, chief.” He shoved at the carcass of the lamby, forcing it off the body. The rent and bloodied fur of the stranger’s coat bore no company badge.
“Now I wonder,” Hogan considered the corpse impersonally. “Could he have been an envoy from Samms or Ebers? Or is someone in our mob ambitious enough to set up a swap.”
“That just isn’t so!” Roose spun around in the stained snow to stare indignantly up at his leader. “You know that none of the boys’d stand for a swap on you, chief. Never!”
“So I had thought,” Hogan commented lazily. “But there can always be sudden changes in the wind of policy. We, or I, was set up for this one. Whether the lamby was part of the original scheme, an extemporaneous last-minute double-check which failed, or just a coincidence which worked to save the skins of the righteous, we’ll never know. In the meantime, I propose we push the pace a little. It would never do for us to be late to the meeting now.”
“No,” Rysdyke was breathing a little hard. “I want to see who looks surprised when we do arrive.”
“Yes, that point has also occurred to me. Joktar, suppose you carry this.” Hogan picked up the blaster which had been the property of the dead sniper and tossed it over.
The rock island Hogan had designated for the meeting proved to be another of the remains left by the forgotten earlier inhabitants of Fenris. Once there had been an island in the middle of a now ice-bound river . . . or perhaps there had only been the projection of a reef. But based on that limited foundation was a circular wall of blocks, fitted together with fine skill, supporting now, well above water level, a hollow cone. Smoke ascended from the broken top of the cone, to be tattered by the wind.
“Somebody’s there,” Rysdyke observed.
But Roose was more intent upon the mountains beyond and Joktar, ignorant as he was of the Fenrian weather signs, could note those banks of gathering clouds in a thick roll to the northeast.
“Weather’s not holding,” the trapper pointed to the sky. “There’s a blanket building.”
“Right,” Hogan’s voice was clipped, urgent. “Tolkus,” he ordered the man who had joined them just as they left the forest clearing, “you circle and warn all our boys. Tell them to hunt shelter—quick!”
“But—” Rysdyke began to protest.
“We’re not the only ones to see those clouds,” Hogan replied. “No one is going to start trouble with a blanket coming. If we do have to face a show down, the action will come after the storm clouds. And the sooner we all get to cover the better!”
The ice covering the river was patterned with the tracks of men and sleds. The sleds themselves were staked out at a break in the cone wall. Hogan made a sharp turn to the left at the point and Joktar, copying him, found a narrow flight of stairs set in the wall itself, the tread stones projecting only inches. The passage was a funnel and the Terran’s imagination provided him with a picture of what would happen should a rock be hurled down that grade to meet upward bound traffic.
“Hulllloo!” Hogan’s call, echoing eerily up that stair, announced them and they were met by a dozen or so men. In the cone top there were traces of partitions, remains of small cells about the walls, floored with frozen earth. And in the center space a fire blazed while piles of wood filled several of the wall cells.
Even in the short time it had taken them to cross the river and climb the inner stair, the clouds had blotted out most of the daylight, stretching in oily black tongues from the peaks.
“Coming up a regular bury-in,” commented one of those awaiting Hogan. His speech was underlined by a blast of wind screaming across the broken top of the cone.
And with the wind came a whirling wall of snow. The men were fast at work. Smaller fires were kindled closer to the overhang of the outer walls. And with such fires before them and the solid blocks of the ancient stone at their backs, they prepared as best they could to wait out the fury of the blanket.
In the open, such a storm could bury the unfortunate. But here the ruins afforded almost as much protection as a company dome. The fire in the center hissed out under a dump of snow. Only the constant roaring of the wind was a growing torment to the ears, making it impossible for a man to hear the voice of even the neighbors he crowded against.
8
Joktar leaned his forehead against his knees. Under and around him he could feel the shudder of the cone. There came a crash to be heard even above the boom of the wind. A portion of the ancient stonework gave, was swept inward. Joktar felt the man beside him stir, hitch away. Under the shrilling of the storm, there sounded a thin screaming. He began to crawl after his neighbor.
The moment they ventured away from the wall, wind and snow lashed. They clawed over one of the small cell partitions, came to the mass of rubble which half-buried a man. Together they pulled apart the debris, blinded by snow, deafened by the wind, blundering awkwardly because their sense of touch was numbed. Finally they drew the man free, as he screamed again and went limp.
Somehow they got him back to the wall, to the warmth of their own share of fire. Joktar, his shoulder aching cruelly, half-collapsed against that stone support while his companion tried to aid the injured. Until the storm passed there was little they could do for him.
Time moved by no normal measure. Hours . . . half a day . . . Joktar became aware that there were longer and longer pauses in the blasts overhead, that the snow was allowing a window on the open sky once again. As the storm died, men shook free of small drifts, looked about dazedly, not quite sure they had once more beaten Fenris.
“So Gagly got it.” One of the white-powdered figures hunched forward to peer into the face of the man they had dragged from the cave-in.
“Gagly?” Hogan stripped off his mitten to push questing fingers into the throat opening of the other’s furs. “Yes, he’s gone. You’re going to miss Gagly, Samms . . . a pilot . . .”
“So, we’ll miss him.” Wide shoulders moved under the furs of one of the others in a shrug which was close to perfunctory. Above the scarf mask, Samms’ eyes were pale and shallow like mirrors to reflect an outside world, rather than reveal the emotions of the man who wore them in his skull.
He turned away from his dead follower to call: “Ebers, over here!”
One of the men brushing snow from his furs, stamping numb feet, raised his head, but made no move to obey that brusque summons.
“Ride out, Samms.” His voice was a slow drawl, carrying a measure of authority. “We’ll chew out your proposition when we’re ready.”
Above the face mask those pale gray eyes did not change, but Samms’ hand twitched, and was quickly checked. That twitch had been toward his blaster; Joktar had not been alone in noting that. Rysdyke, standing to one side, slid his feet a little apart as if bracing his body before calling for a blast out.
Some time passed before the center fire was rebuilt and they gathered around it to share provisions from their trailbags. They were still eating when the leader of the Kortoski mob arose, strode back and forth in the firelight as if his impatience goaded him into at least that counterfeit of action.
“They’ve leveled a new landing field in the Harband company,” he announced. “Plan to deliver supplies there straight without setting down at Siwaki. Just another move towards closing the regular port entirely. When all the fields are located in company areas, we can never hope to bring free traders in here again.”
“And what countermeasures do you propose?” That was Hogan sounding disinterested, almost languid. Samms came around quickly as if he had been challenged.
“Not to sit on our tails and wait!”
Joktar, watching narrowly, noting the unchanging shallowness of those gray eyes, revised his
first judgment of Samms. On the surface, judged by his speech, his attitude, the outlaw was a hot-tempered brawler, ready to use weapon or fist to bull his way to what he wanted. A type readily understood by the trappers he sought to rule.
Only those eyes belied such a first reading. And Joktar chose to believe the eyes. Samms had the subtle signs of a gambler who had long ago graduated from a star-and-comet table to games played without the aid of kas-cards or counters. The Terran longed to know what series of events had brought Samms to Fenris as an emigrant. And he marked the other down as dangerous.
“So you don’t believe in waiting,” Hogan continued calmly. “May we ask what sort of action you are urging on us?”
“They are going to bring in a private ship on the Harband field. Two company vips, six in the crew. What if they found a reception committee ready to scoop the lot. We could dicker with Harband if we had their vips parked up here.”
“How did you comb out this information, Samms?” Ebers’ drawl came from the other side of the fire.
“Oh, Samms has his lines of information. Pretty effective they are too, it would seem. Perks is really delivering,” Hogan returned.
“Perks was planted,” the other agreed readily. “When the time comes, he’ll give us more help than just information!”
“And just how did Perks make himself so solid with the companies that he can give us all this help? Wasn’t he the only survivor of a squad who got theirs on the Lizard Back?”
Hogan answered for Samms. “He was. Too bad, Samms, these awkward questions are bound to be asked. They’re doubly awkward for you because that squad were mostly loyal to Raymark, weren’t they? How did Perks make such a fine impression on his new employers? Use a judicious sellout as an introduction?”