The Beast Master bm-1

by Andre Norton

  There was a roar that filled the night, a torch of light that shot miles high from the mountains. Around them the cliffs trembled, miniature landslips started, and they crouched together, men and animals, in a terrified huddle.

  The tubes – they must have blown!” Storm was on his feet again, his hand pressing against his shoulder where the sharp bite of pain gnawed once more. He had been torn out of his self-hypnotism, thrown into the weariness of near exhaustion.

  “What tubes?” Logan’s question came thinly as if some muffling veil hung between them.

  The Xiks had their ship partly buried for concealment. They were digging her out when you escaped. But if they were pressed for time they might have tried to take her up without being sure of thoroughly clean tubes – or else” – Storm glanced down at the ball of whimpering fur he held, one sorely frightened meerkat – “or else King pulled one of her tricks. When they tried to lift the ship, the tubes blasted it wide open!”

  “So they blew themselves up!” Brad Quade squared his shoulders. “But there might be something to see to over there, perhaps some of our boys were involved and need help. It might be well to check –”

  “One of those other grills in the garden cave –” Logan cut in weakly. There was a north-western one pointing in the right direction. If we could find another tunnel from that it would take us straight through –”

  Whatever shaking up the mountain had received, the garden cavern remained apparently untouched. Though the newcomers were awed by the bits of strange worlds divided by the black paths, they did not linger. Gorgol sped ahead, the rest trying to match his pace. A quarter of the way around the cavern they came to the grill Logan had found on his first exploration.

  They mastered the latch and were fronting another tunnel which, with its curiously dead air and blackness, engulfed them wholly, for this time there was no torch to light the way. Surra pressed on with Gorgol, eyes of cat and native not so baffled by the gloom, the others strung out behind. All were driven by a gnawing desire to be through this passage and out into the normal world of Arzor once again.

  It was easy to lose one’s sense of direction here in the dark and the tunnel did not run straight. Whether it followed the easy path of some natural fault in the mountain, or whether its long-ago builders had intended the turns to bewilder, Storm could not guess. But after two twists, he was at sea. For all he could determine, they might be heading back into the cavern they had just left. Baku moved restlessly on his shoulder, he lurched to one side, scraping against the unseen wall for support, hearing close by the heavy breathing of one of his companions, and then Logan’s assurance, fiercely uttered to his father, that he could keep up in spite of his injured leg.

  Another twist, and a spark in the dark ahead, a light that grew to a reflected glow as if some giant fire raged beyond. They hurried on at that promise of escape.

  Now the off-worlders caught up with Gorgol and the cat, to look out into a well of fire. Those flames ate along the terraces of the valley of the ship. And the heat from the conflagration beat in at them. Gorgol wriggled through a slit of door and Storm edged after him, giving Baku her flight signal. If there were any way out along the heights, she would find it for them.

  Seeing that whirl of flames below, the Terran believed that nothing within that bowl of mountain walls could have survived the blowup of the overdriven ship. Sparks came up in the suck of air as they edged about the small walled space that long ago might have been a sentry point, to put a crag between them and the full force of the heat.

  Even here the light approached that of day and they discovered Surra at the head of a flight of stairs. They were hardly more than niches gnawed away by the elements, down which a man could edge only at his peril. But they were a way down with the full bulk of the peak between them and the raging inferno of the blasted valley.

  Surra’s species were sure-footed. The pumas of the western continent, a breed crossed with her dune cat ancestors in the experimental laboratories, were adept at climbing cliffs and crossing ridges where neither man nor hunting hound dared to follow. However, now she was examining this drop narrowly, advancing one paw as if to test the stability of that first weatherworn step.

  Something in its feel must have reassured her, for she flowed down with liquid grace until she came out some hundred feet below in a shadowed space which appeared much larger than the platform on which Storm and Gorgol lingered. Storm hitched over that drop, only he crawled down those niches on his hands and knees. The heat of the opposite valley was cut off, and when he reached the ledge, he saw that from this point a roadway took the down curve, cut into the rock in the obscurity of the dark side of the mountain.

  “A road –” Gorgol signed in the moonlight. “Below – a wider one – running so –” He gestured southeast.

  Perhaps this was part of that other way into the valley up which the raiders had driven their stolen horses and frawns. If so, its other end should bring them out on the plains.

  “Return –” Storm signed. “Bring the others here –”

  Gorgol was already climbing, his tall body ascending that ladder easily. Storm went on. Surra quested ahead, scouting in advance. The Terran had a feeling that he must keep moving now – that if he rested, as his body craved, he would not be able to move on again. He started down that narrow pathway hacked in the side of the mountain, overhung in places where the builders had bored a half-tunnel to accommodate the traveller. These peaks might all be honeycombed, he thought, by caverns and tunnels, and other hidden ways of the long-ago invaders. Sorenson had been proved right and Survey must be informed.

  Surra came out of the dark and pressed against his legs, making a barrier of her body in a warning of immediate danger. Storm swayed, retrieved his balance, listened. Then he caught the faintest noise – scrape of boot on rock? Metal against stone? Someone was coming up to meet him and that lurker could be anyone from a Nitra scout to an Xik who had escaped from the burning hell of the valley.

  There were voices from behind too. The Quades and the riders were coming down under Gorgol’s guidance. And the Terran believed that the creeper below must have heard them also. Steadying himself against the rocks, he leaned as close to Surra as he could.

  “Find –” That order was a faint whisper, underlined by mental force. She left him noiselessly to go into action – to flush out of hiding any enemy who might set up an ambush on the lower roadway.

  At his belt was the only weapon Quade’s party had been able to spare him earlier – one of the long bladed hunting knives. Storm drew it, holding the weapon point up as a fencer might hold his épée. So much depended upon the identity of that hidden enemy. Against a Nitra one method of attack, but Xiks did not fight with knives – And what chance had a knife against a blaster or a slicer?

  Storm’s progress became a stumbling run – with small pauses every five steps or so to listen. Surra had not yet flushed her quarry. A turn in the trail, the way jacknifed back on the level below. The Terran made that turn panting. It never occurred to him to share the struggle ahead with any of the men he had left on the upper trail. Storm was too used to fighting his own battles with only his team to back him. And this tangle with Xik forces had returned him to his service days, so that now, half-dazed with fatigue and the pain of his wound as he was, the enemy ahead was in his mind his own affair.

  Another turn and the trail was widening – levelling off. To his left there was a darkened gash leading back into the side of the mountain. And it was here that the sudden beam of light flashed out, caught the last quarter of a yellow-brown tail but did not entrap the rest of Surra.

  “Ahuuuuuu!” Storm shouted and cast himself to the left, bringing up with a little gasp of agony against a rock wall. That light flashed again to where he had stood only a second earlier.

  His distracting tactics were successful. Surra squalled and attacked in her own way. The flash bobbed crazily and then fell to ground level, making a straight path of light across
which Storm must go if he aided the cat.

  Then a figure staggered out into the moonlight, with flailing arms. Settler! Or Xik in disguise? Storm moved out toward the torch hoping to turn it on that shape that was trying to ward off Surra. The big cat had not gone in to kill, but to harass, to keep her opponent moving until Storm arrived.

  The ex-Commando stooped, picked up the torch awkwardly and then swung well around. There was no mistaking that whirling, dodging figure spotlighted in the beam – Bister!

  “Saaaaaa –”

  Surra flattened her body to the ledge, her ears back against her skull, her mouth a snarl, her tail lashing as the fur raised in a stiffly pointed ridge along her spine. Though she was between Bister and retreat she did not leap.

  Storm saw that the other’s hand was going to a weapon at his belt.

  “Hold it – right there!” he ordered.

  The big man, his face patterning his emotions as fiercely as Surra’s did hers, leaned a little forward, his hand opening with visible reluctance, rising inch by grudging inch in the beam of light.

  The Terran!” He mouthed the word as if it were obscene, making of it both an oath and a challenge. “Animal –”

  “Beast Master!” Storm corrected him in his gentle voice, the one that marked him at his most dangerous.

  He thrust his knife into the front of his belt and came on unhurriedly, holding the light on Bister until he was within arm’s distance. Then he moved with some of Surra’s lightning swiftness, pulling the stun rod from the other’s holster, tossing the weapon out and over the edge of the drop.

  But Bister was quick, too. His hand streaked for his knife in one last bid for freedom. The fine super-steel of the off-world blade was blue fire in the torchlight as he bent in the crouch of the experienced fighter. And Storm realized that, Xik aper or not, the man facing him could use that weapon.

  “Send in your cat, why don’t you – animal man!” Bister grinned, his teeth showing in the light almost as sharp and pointed as Surra’s. “I’ll mark her – just as I’ll gut you – Terran!”

  Storm backed, raised his hand, and jammed the torch into a small crevice of the rock. He was a fool, he supposed, to fight Bister. But something within him compelled him to front the other – whoever or whatever he might be – with only bare steel between them. It was the old, old war of the barbarian fighting man who was willing to back his cause with the power of his own body.

  “Surra –” Storm motioned to the cat. She remained where she was at the top of the down trail, her eyes bright, watching the men facing each other in the path of light. And she would not move unless he so ordered.

  Storm’s knife was again in his hand. For a moment the weariness of his body was forgotten, his world had narrowed to those two bared blades. He heard and did not mark a cry from uptrail as the men there caught sight of the scene on the ledge.

  But if the Terran did not mark that exclamation Bister did. And the big man rushed, wishing to make a beginning and an end all in one attack before the others could move to Storm’s assistance.

  Storm dodged and knew a small bite of dismay at the slowness of his movement. But, as it had in the Nitra camp, his purpose possessed him, dampening out physical weakness. Only now his body did not obey with the speed and perfection he needed for safety.

  Bister was conscious of that, and knew that Storm was not now the same man he had faced between the Port and the Crossing. He struck quickly, with expert precision.

  18

  Blade rang on blade as Storm met that attack. But Bister was boring in, confidence behind each move as he forced the Terran to retreat. Storm tried to weave a pattern of small feints and withdrawals that would bring him around so that full glare of the torch beam would strike in the other’s face. Bister was well aware of that danger and he did not advance as Storm gave way.

  He could end this in a moment, the Terran knew, by one summons to Surra. But he must face Bister out by himself – standing on his own two feet, steel against steel – or else he could never command the team again.

  Time had no meaning as their boots shuffled warily on the rock ledge. After his first leap of attack was countered, Bister, too, became careful, willing to wear down the slighter Terran. Storm felt a small wet trickle under the blanket on his shoulder and knew that his wound must have reopened under that protecting plaster of leaves. That trickle would drain his strength even more, put weights on his feet, just when he needed all the agility he could command.

  It was he who was being forced into the path of the light, and once Bister had him blinded in the full glare of that beam he would be pinned helplessly. His thoughts raced, assembling all he knew of the apers. They had been given bodies to resemble his own, training that would make them react as closely as possible to the human. Yet still inside they must remain truly Xik, no matter how conditioned their cover or they would be of no use to their superiors. And the Xik – what set of circumstances would throw an Xik fighter off guard, rattle him badly? What would be his worst fears, his ultimate terror? Why had there always been war to the end between them and the human species?

  Storm shuffled, danced, evaded by a finger’s small breadth a wily rush that would have pushed him into the danger zone. Why did the Xik fear and hate the Terrans? What was the deep-set base of that fear and could he play upon it now?

  His thoughts were cut by the clash of steel meeting steel as the hilt of his own weapon was driven back almost to his breast and the jar of that blow numbed his arm for an instant. All the sixth sense that Storm drew upon when he worked with the team was alert behind the defences of his well-trained body.

  Then – as if that flash of knowledge came from some source outside his own mind – Storm knew, knew the weakness of the Xik, because in a manner it was his own weakness by racial inheritance, a weakness peculiar in turn to the Dineh also, a weakness that could also be a kind of strength, so that men clung to it for the security they desired.

  “You stand alone –” He spoke those words in Galactic, his tone level. “Your kind have blown themselves up back there, Bister. There is no ship waiting to take you from Arzor. Alone – alone – one among the many who hate you. Never shall you see your home world again! It is lost among the nameless stars.”

  He knew in that same burst of understanding why the Xik had destroyed Terra – they had hoped to kill the heart of the Confederacy with that one bold stroke. But because the races bred on Terra differed, because her colonies were already mutating from their original breed, that scheme had failed.

  “Alone!” He flung that single word with an upthrust of his Singer voice, trying to put into it the power he had felt when facing the Nitra wizard. Bister was alone, and so was Storm. But in this moment the agony of the old loss was dulled for the Terran. He could use that taunt as a weapon, and it carried no backlash to tear him in return.

  “Alone!” He could see Bister’s eyes, dark, wide, and he saw, too, that small flame of desperation deep in them. Beneath his aper disguise the Xik was stirring. Storm must bring that alien up to the surface, set the buried self to struggling against the disciplined outer shell.

  “No one to back you here, Bister. No cell brothers, no battle mates. One Xik left alone on Arzor to be hunted down –”

  All the scraps of briefing the Terran had heard concerning the invaders and their customs came flaming into his mind, clear, distinct, lying ready to his use, as his feet circled in the motions of the duel.

  “Who will cover your back, Bister? Who will raise the name shout for you? None of your brothers shall know where you died or mark your circle on the Hundred Tablets in the Inner Tower of your clan city. Bister shall die and it shall be as if he never lived. Nor will he have a name son to take up his Four Rights after him –”

  Coll Bister’s mouth hung open a little and there was the glisten of moisture on his forehead, shiny on his cheeks and jaw. That alien spark in his eyes grew stronger.

  “Bister shall die and that is all. No awakenin
g for him by the Naming of Names –”

  “Yaaaaah!”

  The aper charged. But Storm had been warned by a momentary tenseness in his enemy’s body. He swerved with much of his old spontaneous grace. The other’s blade caught in the silver necklace on the Terran’s breast, scored stingingly across his chest. And the force of Bister’s body striking his drove Storm back to the very edge of the ledge.

  For fear of being forced over the drop Storm grappled, knowing his danger. The aper was unwounded, strong enough to crush the Terran’s resistance. Storm could only use all the tricks of Commando fighting that he knew. One of them brought him out of that grip and reeling back to safety under the undercut.

  Bister gave a shrill whine. His eyes were nonhuman now, filled only with the fear and loss Storm had hammered into his alien brain. Every belief that had bolstered his kind when they went into battle had been ripped to tatters by an enemy he hated above all others. He lived only for one thing now – to kill – not caring if his own death was the price he must pay for success.

  And because he had slipped over the edge of sanity he was more dangerous and yet easier to handle. Storm backed and Bister followed, his crooked fingers grasping at the air before him.

  Storm raised his own hand, flat, ready. Then he pivoted and what he had worked for happened. Bister blundered into the direct beam of the torch. For a moment his crazed eyes were blinded and Storm’s blow landed, clean and unhurried, as he might have delivered it on the drill field.

  The aper gave a light cough that was half grunt and collapsed slowly forward, going to his knees, and then on to his face, to lie unmoving. Storm reeled back until his good shoulder met rock and he was supported by it. He watched Surra creep, her belly fur brushing the ledge, to sniff at Bister. She snarled and would have raised a paw with claws ready to rake, but the Terran hissed an order at her.