The vision-Kennard straightened as if he had been knifed. He muttered, “Shallavan! But why did they give it to Larry? He’s no telepath! Did they believe—”
Larry protested as Kennard turned into a steamshovel and lifted him sidewise. The next thing he knew, water was streaming down his face and Kennard Alton, white as a sheet, was standing and staring at him.
It was Kennard. He was real.
Larry said shakily “I—I thought you were—a steamshovel. Is it—”
He looked down at the floor of the room. The old man lay there, blood caked on his leather jacket, and Larry hastily turned away. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Kennard said grimly, “but we’ll both be dead unless we get out of here before the bandits get back. Where’s your other boot?”
“I threw it at him.” Larry’s head was splitting. “I missed.”
“Oh, well—” Kennard said, deprecatingly, “you aren’t used to this sort of thing. Get it on again—” he broke off. “What in the devil—” He surveyed the leather harness, anger in his eyes. “Zandru’s hells, what a filthy contrivance!” He drew his dagger and cut through the leather. Larry’s hand, numb and cramped, fell lifeless to his side. He could not move the fingers, and Kennard, swearing under his breath, knelt to help him with the boot.
Larry realized that he had no idea how long he had been drugged. He had a vague sort of memory of his jailer having come in once or twice before, but was not sure. He was still too dazed to do more than stand, swaying and weak, before Kennard.
“How did you come to be here? How did you find me?”
“You were taken for me,” Kennard said briefly. “Could I leave you to face the fate they meant for me? It was my responsibility to find you.”
“But how? And why did you come alone?”
“We were in rapport through the crystal,” Kennard said, “so I could trail you. I came alone, because we knew that with any assault in strength, they’d probably kill you at once. That can wait till later! Right now, we still have to get out of this place before Cyrillon and his devils come back!”
“I saw them ride away,” Larry said slowly. “I think they’re all gone except that one old man.”
“No wonder they doped you, then,” Kennard said. “They’d be afraid you’d play some telepathic trick. Most people are afraid of the Altons, though they wouldn’t know if you were old enough to have the laran—the power. I don’t have much of it myself. But let’s get out of here!”
Carefully he went to the door and opened it a fraction. “The way he yelled, if there was anyone within shouting distance, they’d be all over us,” Kennard said. “I think maybe you’re right. They all must have gone.”
Carefully, they came out into the corridor; walking on tiptoe, stole down the long stairs. Once Kennard muttered, “I hope we don’t meet anyone! If I don’t go out the way I came in, it would be damned easy to get lost in this place!”
Larry had not realized how immense this bandit stronghold was. He came out of the prison room wavering, unsteady on his feet so that Kennard had to take hold of his arm and brace him until he could stand without shaking. Still groggy from the drug, it seemed that they hurried through miles of corridors, starting at every distant sound, flattening themselves against the walls when once something like a step echoed at the bottom of a flight of stairs. But it had died in the distance and the old castle was silent again, brooding.
A great gate loomed before them and Kennard, shoving Larry back against the wall, peered out, sniffing the wind like a hunter. He said, tersely, “Seems quiet enough. We’ll chance it. I don’t know where the other gates are. I saw them ride away and took the chance.
The fresh air, bitterly cold, seemed to bite at Larry’s bones, but it cleared the last traces of the drug from his head, and he stood staring around. Behind them, a high steep mountain face towered, rocky, speckled faintly with a scruff of underbrush and trees. Before them the narrow trail led away downward, through the valleys and hills, through the mountains where they had come.
Kennard said, swiftly, “Come on—we’ll make a dash for it. If anyone’s watching from those windows—” He made an edgy gesture upward toward the bleak castle face behind them. “If that old fellow isn’t dead, and there are other guards, we’ve got maybe an hour before they start beating the woods for us.”
He poised, said briefly, “Now—run,” and raced across the yard toward the gates, Larry following. His arm ached fiercely where it had been strapped, and he was shaky on his feet, but even so, he reached the edge of the forest only a few seconds after Kennard, and the Darkovan boy looked at him a little less impatiently. They stood there, breathing hard, looking at each other in wordless question. What next?
“There’s only one road through these mountains,” Kennard said, “and that’s the one the bandits used. We could follow it—keeping in sight of it, and hiding if we heard anyone. There’s an awful lot of forest between here and home—they couldn’t search it all. But”—he gestured—“I think they have watch-towers too, all through this country along the road. We ought to stay under cover of the trees, night and day, if we take that route. This whole stretch of country—” he stopped, thinking hard, and Larry saw vividly, in his mind’s eye, the terrible journey over chasms and crags which had brought him here. Kennard nodded.
“That’s why they don’t guard their stronghold, of course; they think themselves guarded well enough by the mountain trail. You need good, mountain-bred, trail-broken horses to make it at all. I left my own horse on the other side of the mountain ridge. Somebody’s probably picked her up by now, I’d hoped—”
The deep throat of an alarm bell suddenly clanged, raising echoes in the forest; a bird cried out noisily and flew away, and Kennard started, swearing under his breath.
“They’ve roused the whole castle—there must have been some of them left there!” he said, tensely, gripping Larry’s arm. “In ten minutes this whole part of the woods will be alive with them! Come on!”
He ran—feeling twigs catch and hold at his clothing, stumbling into burrows and ridges, his breath coming short in the bitter cold. Before him Kennard dodged and twisted, half doubling back once and again, plunging through the trackless trees, and Larry, stumbling and racing in desperate haste to keep up, his head pounding, fled after him.
It seemed hours before Kennard dropped into a little hollow made by the fallen branches of a tree. Larry dropped at his side, his head falling forward against the icy-wet grass. For a few moments all that he could do was to breathe. Slowly the pounding of his heart calmed to something like normal and the darkness cleared from before his eyes. He raised himself half on his elbow, but Kennard jerked him down again.
“Lie flat!”
Larry was only too glad to obey. The world was still spinning; after a moment it spun completely away.
When he came up to consciousness again, Kennard was kneeling at his side, head raised, his ear cocked for the wind.
“They may have trackers on our trail,” he said, tersely. “I thought I heard—Listen!”
At first Larry’s ears, not trained to woodcraft, heard nothing. Then, very far away, lifting and rising in a long eerie wail, a shrill banshee scream that grew in intensity until his ears vibrated with the sound and he clasped his hands to his head to shut out the sheer torture of the noise. It faded away; rose again in another siren wail. He looked at Kennard; the older boy was stark white.
“What is it?” Larry whispered.
“Banshees,” Kennard said, and his voice was a gasp. “They can track anything that lives—and they’ll scent our body warmth. If they get wind of us we’re done for!” He swore, gasping, his voice dying away in a half-sob. “Damn Cyrillon—damn him and his whole evil crew—Zandru whip them with scorpions in his seventh hell—Naotalba twist their feet on their ankles—” His voice rose to a half-scream of hysteria. He looked white with exhaustion. Larry gripped his shoulders and shook him, hard.
“That
won’t help! What will?”
Kennard gasped and was silent. Slowly the color came back into his face and he listened, motionless, to the siren wail that rose and fell.
“About a mile off,” he said tersely, “but they run like the wind. If we could change our smell—”
“They’re probably tracking by my clothing-smell,” Larry said. “They took away my cloak. If I—”
Kennard had risen; he darted forward, suddenly, and fell into a bank of grayish shrubs. For a moment Larry, watching him roll and writhe in the leaves, thought that the hardships of the mountain journey had driven the Darkovan boy out of his wits. But when Kennard sat up his face, though ashen, was calm.
“Come here and roll in this,” he ordered, “smear it all over your boots especially—”
Suddenly getting the idea, Larry grabbed handfuls of the leaves. They stung his hands with their furry needles, but he followed the older boy’s example, daubing the leaves on face and hands, crushing their juice into clothing and boots. The leaves had a pungent, acrid smell that brought tears to his eyes like raw onions; but he crushed handfuls of the leaves over his boots and legs.
“This might or might not work,” Kennard said, “but it gives us a bare chance—unless the smell of this stuff is like catnip to a kitten for those devilish things. If I knew more about them—”
“What are they?”
“Birds. Huge things—taller than a tall man, with long trailing thin wings—they can’t fly. Their claws could rip your guts out at a stroke. They’re blind, and normally they live in the mountain snows, and can scent anything warm that moves. And they scream like—well, like banshees.”
All the time he spoke, he and Larry were crushing the leaves, rubbing them into their skin and hair, soaking their clothing with the juice. The odor was sickening, and Larry thought secretly that anything with any sense of smell at all could trace them for miles, but perhaps the banshees were like Terran bloodhounds, set on by a particular smell and trained not to follow any other.
“Zandru alone knows how Cyrillon and his hordes managed to train those devilish things,” Kennard muttered. “Listen—they’re coming nearer. Come on. We’ll have to run for it again, but try to move quietly.”
They moved off through the brushwood again, working their way slowly up the hill, Larry trying to move softly; but he heard dead twigs snap beneath his feet, dry leaves crackle, the creak of branches as he moved against them. In contrast, Kennard moved as lightly as a leaf. And ever behind them the shrill banshee howl rose, swelled, died away and rose again, throbbing until it seemed to fill all space, till Larry felt he must scream with the noise that vibrated his eardrums and went rolling around in his skull until there was no room for anything but pulsing agony.
The path they were following began to rise, steeply now, and he had to catch at twigs and brushwood, and brace his feet against rocks, to force his way up the rising slope. His clothes were tattered, his face torn, and the stink of the gray leaves was all around them. The slope was in deep shadow; it was growing bitterly cold, and above them the thick evening fog was deepening, till Larry could hardly see Kennard’s back, a few feet before him. They struggled up the slope and plunged down into a little valley, where Kennard’s pace slackened somewhat and he waited for Larry to catch up with him. Larry breathed hard, pressing his hands to his aching skull to shut out the banshee noise.
It lessened for a moment, died away in a sort of puzzled silence; began in a series of fresh yelps and wails, then faded out again. It was dimming with distance; Kennard, his face only a blur in the gathering fog, sighed and fell, exhausted, to the ground.
“We can rest a minute, but not too long,” he warned.
Larry fell forward, dropping instantly into dead sleep. It seemed only a moment later—but it was black dark and a fine drizzling rain was falling and soaking them—that Kennard shook him awake again. The banshee howls were again filling the air—and on this side of the slope!
“They must have found the patch of eris leaves and figured out what we’d done,” he said, his voice dragging between his teeth, “and, of course, that stuff leaves a scent that a broken-down mule could follow from here to Nevarsin!”
Larry strained his eyes to see through the thin darkness. Far down the slope there seemed a glint, just a pale glimmer in the moonlight. “Is there a stream at the bottom of the valley?”
“There might be. If there is—” Kennard was swaying with weariness. Larry, though aching in every muscle, found that the last traces of the drug were gone from his mind, and the brief sleep had refreshed him. He put his arm around Kennard’s shoulders and guided the other boy’s stumbling steps. “If we can get into the water—”
“They’ll figure that trick out too,” Kennard said hopelessly, and Larry felt him shudder, a deep thing that racked his bones. He pointed upward, and Larry followed his gaze. At the top of the slope, outlined against the sky, was a sight to freeze the marrow of his bones.
Bird? Surely no bird ever had that great gaunt outline, those drooping wings like a huge flapping cloak, the skull-like head that dripped a great phosphorescent red-glowing beak. The apparition craned a long dark neck and a dreadful throbbing cry vibrated to air-filling intensity.
Larry felt Kennard go rigid on his arm; the boy was staring upward, fixedly, like a bird hypnotized by a weaving snake.
But to Larry it was just another Darkovan horror; dreadful indeed—but he had seen so many horrors he was numb. He grabbed Kennard, and plunged with him down the slope, toward the distant glimmer. The banshee howl rose and fell, rose and fell on their heels, as they plunged through underbrush, careless now of noise or direction. The gleam of water loomed before them. They plunged in, fell full length with a splash, struggled up and ran, splashing, racing, stumbling on stones. Twice Larry measured his length in the shallow icy stream and his clothing stiffened and froze in the icy air, but he dared not slacken his speed. The banshee howl grew, louder and louder, then slackened again in a puzzled, yelping wail, an almost plaintive series of cheated whimpers. It seemed to run round in circles. It was joined by further howls, yelps and whimpers. They splashed along in the stream for what seemed hours, and Larry’s feet were like lumps of ice. Kennard was stumbling; he fell again and again to his knees and the last time he fell with his head on the bank and lay still. None of Larry’s urging could make him rise. The Darkovan lad had simply reached the end of his fantastic endurance.
Larry dragged him out, on the far side of the stream, hauled him into the shelter of the forest, and sat there listening to the gradually diminishing wails and yelps of the frustrated banshees. Far away on the slope he saw torches and lights. They were beating the bushes, but with their tracking birds cheated, there was no way to follow their escaped prey. But would they pick up the scent again downstream? Larry, conscious that he was famished, remembered that a day or two ago—before the drugging—he had thrust a piece of the coarse bread into his pocket. He hauled it out and began to gnaw on it; then, remembering, broke it in half and stowed the other half in his other pocket for Kennard. As he did so, his hands touched metal, and he felt the smooth outline of his Terran medical kit. Small as it was, it probably contained nothing for his scratches and bruises, but—
Of course! He pulled urgently at Kennard’s hand; when the Darkovan boy stirred and moaned, he put the bread in his hand, then whispered, “Listen. I think we can outwit them even if they pick up our scent downstream. Here. Eat that, and then listen!” He was fumbling in the dark, by touch, in his medical kit. He found the half-empty tube of burn ointment he had used after the fire, unscrewed the cap and smelled the sharp, unfamiliar chemical smell.
“This should puzzle them for a while,” he said, smearing a thin layer of the stuff, first on his boots and then on Kennard’s. Kennard, munching the bread, nodded in approval. “They might pick up eris leaves. Not this stuff.”
They rested a little, then began cautiously to crawl up the far slope. There was plenty of cover, tho
ugh the plants and thorny bushes of the underbrush tore at their faces and hands. Kennard’s leather riding-breeches did not suffer so badly as Larry’s cloth ones, but their hands and faces were torn and bleeding, and the red sun was beginning to thin away the dawn clouds, before they reached the summit of the slope and lay on the rocks exhausted, too weary to move another step. Behind them, in the valley they had left, there seemed no sign of men or banshees.
“They may have called off the hunt,” Kennard muttered, “Banshees are torpid in the sunlight—they’re nightbirds. We just might have got clean away.”
Huddling his cloak round him, he knelt and looked down into the far valley. It was a huge bowl of land, filled to the brim with layered forest. Near the top, where they were, there was underbrush and low scrubby conifers, and snow lay in thin patches in hollows of the ground where the sun had not warmed. Lower down were tall trees and thick brushwood, while the valley was thick with uncleared forest. Not a house, nor a farm, not a cleared space of land, not even a moving figure. Only the wheeling of a hawk above them, and the silent trees below them, moved in response to their dragging steps. They had escaped Cyrillon’s castle. But in the growing red light, their eyes met, and the same thought was in them both.
They had escaped bandits and banshees. But they were hundreds of miles from safe, known country—alone, on foot, almost weaponless, in the great trackless unexplored forests of the wildest part of Darkover.
They were alive.
And that was just about all that they could say.
CHAPTER NINE
The sun climbed higher and higher. In the high hollow where they lay, a little cold sun penetrated their retreat, and finally Kennard stirred. He took off his cloak and spread it in the sun to dry, then stripped to the skin and gestured to Larry to do likewise. When Larry, shivering, hesitated, Kennard said harshly, “Wet clothes will freeze you faster than cold skin. And take off your boots and dry your stockings.”
Larry obeyed, shivering, crouching in the lee of a sun-warmed rock. While their clothes dried in the bitter wind of the heights, they took stock.
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