Among them they gave her a quick fill-in about the end of the battle. She looked around at the shadowy ruins, the brick-red Hunters' World just rising over them.
"Here I am in the city," she said. "I wanted to know more about it. And I'm not in any shape to go exploring, worse luck!" Carefully, she moved her arm and leg. "I seem to be reasonably well in one piece, but I'm half dead of thirst. I hear running water; can I have a drink?"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By midnight there was no chance of moving out of the city, for Rianna's wounded leg had swollen so that it would not bear her weight. Her face was hot and Dane wondered if she had developed a fever or the wound had become infected from the far-from-sanitary bandage which they had used for lack of a better one. There was no way to tell, but no matter what happened they could not move her just at this moment. They could, perhaps, carry her a little way, but they certainly could not carry her as far as one of the neutral zones. Nor, if they were attacked at the gates of the city—and it seemed likely, after last night, that they would be—could they fight off an attacker with Rianna, helpless, to protect.
"It looks pretty bad," Dane said to Aratak, moving out of earshot of the women—why, he didn't really know; Rianna was too weak to pay any attention, and Dallith knew how he was feeling anyway.
The saurian nodded in agreement. He had washed the dried mud from his body and was glowing again in the dark, and Dane realized that if there were Hunters around it would draw them. Well, if there were Hunters around they'd probably be found even without Aratak; there was no point in making him uncomfortable when all their lives might depend on his fighting trim.
They stayed in the open square near the pool and the ruined fountain until dawn. Dane slept little, though he made Aratak lie down and rest. Although Dallith wanted to watch with him, he said soberly that she should lie down by Rianna and try to keep her warm. It was the one thing they could do for Rianna now. He thought of changing the bandages from the partially mud-stiffened ones they had made from Aratak's tunic, but Dallith vetoed that. She said gravely that the one thing they could be sure of was that any bacteria, or fungi, which might be harbored in Aratak's clothing certainly would not get into Rianna's wounds to infect them. "Cross-infection almost never goes from biological stock to biological stock," she said. "And Aratak isn't even warm-blooded. Disease organisms harmful to him are probably completely innocuous in a proto-simian bloodstream; whereas anything we might be carrying could transfer quite happily from us to Rianna."
While his companions slept, Dane sat with his back to the ruined fountain, looking up at the strange world glowing high in the sky, seeming to obscure at least a quarter of it. Strange, strange, to think that three months ago he had been peacefully sailing in Seadrift, alone and content to be so; in fact, if you'd asked him he would have had to say he was not involved with another human being on Earth. Well, he wasn't on Earth, now, but he was certainly involved, with not one woman but two depending on him for care and support. And for the first time in his life he had a deeply loved friend of his own sex, and it wasn't a man but a proto-saurian ten feet tall!
He watched the red world sink when the sky was already flushing with dawn, and thought to himself that on Earth the moon wouldn't be more than a few days off full. And the month was shorter here. But could they last even three or four days? They had food enough, at a pinch—after the last hasty visit, a few days ago, to a neutral zone—to last for the rest of the Hunt; he'd gone without food for five or six days at a time in the mountains on Earth, once or twice. They had plenty of drinking water. Could they somehow manage to hide in the ruins until Rianna was able to walk?
Could they, hell! Whether they could or not, they'd have to.
So when dawn broke, he let the women sleep until the sun was high—since all seemed quiet—then had Aratak carry Rianna inside one of the larger buildings, with Dallith to look after her. Toward sunset, when the chance of an attack was maximum, maybe Dallith could get up on the roof and keep a lookout, picking off any attackers with her sling. Meanwhile he and Aratak would patrol by turns.
The building where they laid Rianna was huge enough to have been an amphitheater, with enormous rows of columns all built of an odd sun-dried reddish brick, and the remnants of stone couches and platforms scattered at odd intervals. They all had curious disk-shaped hollows in the stone, and Dane found himself wondering what unimaginably strange form had made them. Rianna might know, but she was in no shape to be asked. That inevitably brought his mind back to speculation about the Hunters, and that led nowhere, although by now he'd had a damned severe object lesson: a Hunter might turn up looking like anything.
If in doubt, it's probably a Hunter, so kill him. That would have to be their motto if they wanted to survive, and damn the ethics of maybe killing innocent Prey.
He slept during the morning for an hour or so, since Dallith reported that the city was quiet, with no alien feel of anything near. He hardly allowed himself to think that maybe they were safe here, maybe this was a taboo place to the Hunters, an unmarked safety spot in this odd game which might be Tag.
Later he went out to take a cautious look from the walls. If Hunters were approaching the city, he might be able to see them coming. He left the women with Aratak and cautiously skirted the square of the fountain, threading a long wide street between ruined, and partially fallen-in, buildings.
The strangest thing to him was how little strangeness there seemed in the city. It seemed no more alien, no more removed from him, than the time he'd walked through Stonehenge; or the night he'd spent in the Valley of the Kings before they flooded it for the great dam. Those were removed from him in time; this city only in space. But they were unmistakably houses, and what did it matter what kind of beings had built them? Proto-simian, proto-feline, proto-saurian, or whatever strange stock, they were people who had lived and suffered and rejoiced and then died, and not only human nature but what Aratak called Universal Sapience never changed—
He realized suddenly that without conscious thought he had his hand on his sword. What sound, outside the threshold of ordinary consciousness, had roused his alertness? Yes, now he heard it again. It was soft, like a cat rustling in the stones.
Something dark flashed across the outer edges of his vision and rushed him from behind, but Dane had the samurai sword ready. He whirled, slashed, and only then did he see the collapsing, convulsing body of a Mekhar, which fell, slashed half through, and lay still.
Dane looked at it with a certain amount of regret as he sheathed his sword. Not a Hunter, then. They don't kill that easy.
But evidently something was after the Mekhar, and if it was coming after him, it probably wouldn't mind a bit changing direction and killing Dane instead. Or maybe they were hunting Dane and scared the Mekhar out of hiding.
Or maybe, even, the poor devil thought this was a good place to hide and, hearing Dane, thought he was a Hunter.
But if there are Hunters here, stalking either him or us, we'd better find a good safe place to make a stand. That building where I left the women isn't safe.
He turned to retrace his steps, and then, half expected, heard Dallith's shrill scream.
He broke into a run, pounding through the brick-paved street, jogging unevenly on its broken stones. His sword was out again; he burst out of the end of the street into the fountain square, and saw her. At the far edge of the fountain, where the running water still trickled from the broken lip, a man, dressed like himself in brick-red tunic, swayed and pitched to the ground, his face covered in blood. But Dane's first concern was for her.
She was standing with the sling hanging idle at her side, a look of utter horror on her face, but when she saw Dane she cried out in relief and threw herself, weeping, on his shoulder.
"It wasn't your body... oh, Dane, Dane, I was afraid I'd killed you too...." He could hardly make out her words through her wild and uncontrollable sobbing.
"Tell me, darling," he urged, holding her close. Then h
e let her go and whirled around, sword in hand again, thrusting her violently away at a sudden sound, but it was only Aratak coming warily into the square, his club raised, and Rianna, limping at his side, leaning on the spear they had taken from the spider-man Hunter.
He turned his attention to Dallith, holding her against him, dismayed.
If she's beginning to break up, he thought, we're probably all as good as dead. She hasn't cried, but now—
Her hysterical weeping finally began to calm a little, and her sobs became coherent words. "I came here for water—to bathe Rianna's wound. She wanted to come with me but I said if there was any danger I had my sling and I could cope with it better than she could. I came out into the square here by the fountain, and I looked up, and I saw you, Dane. Only a minute, of course, and I knew it wasn't you, that it was—it was just that thing that killed Cliff-Climber. And that it meant to do the same thing to me. Only—only I wasn't afraid. I felt the same way he did! Do you understand? He stood there, trying to lure me away and kill me, and I was working out how I was going to trap him! Oh, I felt so clever—and so cruel!" She shuddered with the memory. "I waved and smiled, just as if I really thought it was you, and all the time I was turning so that I could load my sling without his seeing. And I gestured for him to come closer, and waited while he crossed the square, and I smiled at him sweetly—and then when he got just where I wanted him, when I had an absolutely clear shot, I let him have it right between the eyes!" Her expression of horror deepened. "He saw the sling, of course, at the last minute when it was too late. And that was the worst part. I wanted him to see it! I wanted him to know that I'd outdone him in craftiness, that I was cleverer than he was, more stealthy—that I'd won—I was proud of it!"
She strained herself to Dane and cried harder than ever. "Oh, Dane, I don't like these people; I don't ever want to be part of anything like that again, to think like that or feel like that. It isn't just that they want to kill me. I can stand that. The Mekhars were fierce, they were savage, but it was—oh, how can I say it—it was clean compared to this! Cliff-Climber—I really got to like him, at the end; he fought everything so fairly and honestly. He would never, ever have done anything like that—he'd have called it cowardly and dishonorable—" Once again, sobbing drowned out her words.
Through the sound of her sobs, Dane heard Aratak's voice.
"Dane," the big lizard-man said quietly, "when you can, when she'll let you, come here for a minute. There's something over here that you should see—and that Dallith definitely should not." And Dane heard, clearly, the sound of ripping cloth.
Dallith's sobs had lessened, and it was plain that she had heard what Aratak had said. Her own voice was low and stifled. "After the—the thing died, it all went away," she said. "I didn't feel like that anymore. That was when I screamed. Because I was afraid that some—some bodiless thing had got into your body, taken over your mind, and when I'd killed it, I'd killed you—I'd have died if that had happened." And Dane knew that she was speaking the literal truth.
"Here, I'll look after her, Dane," Rianna said gently, and unclasped Dallith's arms from his neck.
Dallith, coming to herself a little, said, "I'm all right, Rianna; I ought to be looking after you—" but she let Rianna hold her. Dane left them and went to where Aratak was standing, leaning on his club and looking down at the dead body of the Hunter.
The thing had had the form of a man. Dane's own form. But now, looking down at what lay on the paving-stones, under the tunic which Aratak had ripped down, Dane, in one moment of astonishment and comprehension, saw the secret of the Hunters.
The thing which lay on the pavement was vaguely globular; only swiftly shrinking buds, like tentacles, showed where it had had arms, and legs, which were no longer even remotely human. The head was round, encased in a rounded skull, cracked open by Dallith's sling stone, and the horror was that hair, and Dane's features, still clung like a thin skin over the front of the gray spilling brain. As he watched they flattened and smoothed and there was only the round shattered skull with strange flat black eyeholes deadly staring at the sky. Attached by a thinning stalk to the head and shattered skull was a pulsing, slowing glob of almost transparent flesh, enclosing great blood vessels and oddly colored organs just visible through the membrane that surrounded the thing.
Dane whistled slowly. Aratak had apparently ripped off the tunic to observe the process as the dead Hunter reverted to what must have been its original form.
So they didn't use hypnotism. They didn't come back to life after they were killed, and they didn't reanimate the bodies of their fallen enemies. With that kind of organs they'd be hard to kill, but once they were really killed they were dead. But if you didn't hit a vital spot—the brain, the great pulsing internal system which must be the creature's heart and lungs—if you only sliced the budding organs which had differentiated out of the transparent flesh, then the thing could simply reconstitute its original form.
He should have known. The thing ran away with a severed arm and again with a torn throat. The spider-thing could handle cut-off legs, but when Dallith got his head he was dead, and only the arrival of reinforcements had kept them from seeing his body change back like this.
So they'd badly wounded one Hunter, and now they'd killed at least two. And knowing the creatures' vital spots meant they had a fair chance of killing more of them.
And yet—the Hunter is never seen except by the Quarry he kills. No rumors of this had come back then, that the Hunters were shape-changers. Perhaps the only survivors of most Hunts were those who never encountered true Hunters, but hid, or killed off other Prey?
And were the Hunters going to let them live to take the story back?
Oh, God. Suppose they had a group consciousness like the Servers? They'd programmed the Servers; maybe they had no sense of individuality. What one knew, maybe all knew, and, in that case, if one of them found out that they now knew the real shape—We're going to be prime targets for every Hunter on the Red Moon, he thought.
He said something of this to Aratak, but the great lizard only said, "Why borrow trouble? We don't know they have group consciousness. And if they did, how could they have such a fierce, individual sense of triumph in the Hunt? Remember what Dallith told you."
That was true, yet Dane wasn't convinced. Wasps and bees could sting individually, even though there was ample evidence their consciousness was a group one.
But wasps and bees weren't sapient. Aratak seemed to think sapience depended on a sense of individuality, and who was to say he was wrong? And the Hunters were certainly sapient. Aratak's right. Why borrow trouble? We have plenty to be going on with.
"Rianna, can you walk? We've got to get out of the city before they all hit us at once. If they know we're here—and I'm sure they do, otherwise how could they take my form?—it's going to be nothing but a trap."
She said, "I can do anything I have to do." Her face was pale, but she looked resolute.
There was little to carry, except their weapons and a small residue of food. Aratak said, "We should reach a neutral zone tonight, and replenish our supplies."
Dane said, "Well, we'll see." He tied his cloak over his shoulders. "I don't really trust the Servers—and they do have group consciousness, so anything one Server knows the whole gang knows. And who knows? Maybe they tell the Hunters where the game's moving."
"Would that fit their concept of honor?" Rianna asked.
"How the hell do I know?" Dane yelled, startling her into a shocked silence. "Let's get moving."
In silence they moved toward the gates. Dane said curtly, "Dallith, keep a lookout. You're the psychic. Tell us if any of those things are coming."
She whirled toward him, her face drawn and rebellious. "No!" she said harshly. "I won't, I can't. I can't bear it! I can't bear touching those—those things!"
Dane felt her anguish, but he dared not allow himself to feel pity for the girl or he would come apart. He strode angrily toward her and looked down, h
is face hard as rock.
"You want to live, don't you?"
Her voice was a dreary monotone. "Not particularly. But I want you to—all of you. All right, Dane; I'll do what I can. But if I get too close to them, if I become part of them, I might lead you—not away from them, but into them."
Dane's face twisted spasmodically. He had never thought of that—that she might pick up not only the fear of the Hunted, but the craft of the Hunter. He touched her shoulder gently. "Do what's best," he said. "But try to give us a few seconds' warning before we're attacked." He turned away without touching her again. He didn't dare. "Let's go," he said, and strode away in the general direction of the city gates.
They had to cross the fountain square yet again, and Dane's skin prickled. He knew, he knew someone was watching them—
The attack, when it came, was sudden and so disorganized that to the day of his death Dane never could remember anything except dark forms—three or four of them—suddenly all around them, Dallith screaming wildly, Rianna stumbling backward, bracing herself on her spear and whipping out her knife with her good arm, Aratak's huge club crunching down. Dane was slashing with his sword, aiming at the belly of a great thing which could have been the Hound of the Baskervilles. It howled and spouted blood and fell; Dallith snatched up Rianna's fallen spear and thrust something through the chest; he saw Rianna flee into the darkness of a building. At one point during the fight Dane was lying on the ground and slashing up at something which blotted out the light.
Then there were dead dissolving forms all over the ground, cut to bits, and the Hunters were gone.
And so was Rianna.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They searched for her all through the ruined city, until darkness fell; disregarding caution and crying her name aloud, shouting for her, searching the nearest of the buildings and finding only blind passages and cul-de-sacs, with no sign of Rianna. Sunset fell; Dane remembered remotely that they had intended to be in a neutral zone by now, but it didn't seem to matter. They ate the last of their food as they searched, and rested for a few hours before moonrise, but Dane could not sleep, and his thoughts were bitter.
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