by Chris Walley
“Fine. I’ll wake you at six.”
The air was cool now and Merral pulled on his jacket, scrambled out of the tent, and sat on a soft tussock of heather peering into the darkness and listening to the noises of the night. After a while, he felt unable to sit still and, moving slowly to avoid tripping over tree roots, got up and went to the edge of the hill. There, under the light of the star-filled heavens, he could only make out the faintest outline of the landscape ahead. He could see the moving gleam of reflected starlight from the river’s waters, and in the farthest distance, he thought he could make out the glint of light on the distant snowy peaks. Otherwise, impenetrable night surrounded him. He listened carefully but heard nothing untoward. The badgers snuffled down below him; away to the east a fox barked, and somewhere a nightjar chirred.
Using the fieldscope on the infrared and image enhancement modes, he scanned the area but saw little new. He put the scope down and sat there listening, trying to make sense of things.
Suddenly, he was conscious of a noise in the air above him, a quiet fluttering sound that was little more than palpitations on the edge of audibility. He glanced up to see something scudding through the air just above the trees, briefly blocking out the starlight as it passed. Using the fieldscope again, he tried to follow it but failed to see it. He decided that either it was too fast for him to follow, or for some reason the scope could not image it.
He put the instrument down and used his eyes as it came round again as if circling above them. It was plainly a bird of some sort, and Merral decided that it was probably the owl reported by Vero. But he found himself quite unable to identify which of the five possible owl species it might be. Then, abruptly, it was gone.
The rest of the night was uneventful, but Merral felt ill at ease, looking here and there at the slightest noise. He often looked up at the Gate, watching for the dull shimmer of the Near Station or for the faster-moving twinkle of the other satellites. For some reason the evidence, however far away, of his fellow humans seemed to give him comfort. It was with a strange and unaccustomed sense of relief that he watched the sun rise and the darkness vanish.
After a perfunctory breakfast, Vero and Merral set off again northward, dropping down carefully from their hill toward the river. They made good progress, and within an hour or so of their start, they had reached the point where the broad, open plain began. Now, as the river flowed in a number of wider, sandy channels separated by clumps of trees, they had to decide which to take. Despite a careful watch, they had seen no further signs of tracks. In the end, Merral agreed with Vero’s suggestion that the middle channel was the best option.
Merral found that the going seemed harder than it had on the previous day and that, as they strode along the sand and gravel bars, his legs were tiring more easily. As the hours passed, he found himself sweating strongly and wiping his brow. In spite of his tiredness and the effort of walking, he maintained a careful watch on the deep shadows under the pines that crowded together on the gravel and pebble mounds that lay between the stream channels. But he saw nothing.
Increasingly, though, it was precisely the fact that he saw nothing that began to concern Merral. There was too little life. There were trout jumping in the water, in the distance he sometimes heard a woodpecker, and every so often a squirrel would bound away through the treetops. In general, though, there seemed to be a scarcity of mammals or birds, either because they had moved away, or because if they were there, they were hiding. Both hypotheses gave him cause for concern. He did not mention his feelings to Vero, who had been largely silent since breakfast, but noticed that his friend now kept the collapsed bush knife attached to his waist within easy reach.
Toward the end of the morning, Vero stopped suddenly and wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I smell something. Something nasty.”
Merral sniffed cautiously and agreed. Ahead of them, three black crows flew up leisurely from a tall larch tree standing on its own on a bank of brown sand.
Without a word, Merral began to walk cautiously to the tree, his eyes sweeping this way and that. He felt suddenly tense.
“Merral!” Vero whispered, his voice thick with emotion. “There is something in the tree.”
Midway up the larch, a dark, formless shape lay sprawled stiffly amid green branches. As Merral tried to make out what it was, he saw Vero, his hand on the knife, slip off his pack. Not knowing what to do but aware that the time for deliberation was now over, Merral took off his pack, pulled out the tranquilizer gun, slotted in a cartridge, and thumbed the dose level up to the maximum setting of five. Vero, his eyes scanning round warily, merely nodded agreement.
Together now, they slowly walked to the tree. As they came closer, Merral could see a confusion of tracks on the sand at its foot. The stench was stronger now: a disgusting, repellent odor of decay.
Cautiously, they walked up under the tree. As they did, Merral became aware of the faint, high-pitched sound of buzzing flies above them. He stared up at the object in the branches, seeing a scrappy bundle of disheveled black fur out of which white objects protruded. Bone white objects.
“They’d lost a dog.” Vero’s voice, rich in disgust, broke the silence.
In a flash of sickening revelation, Merral knew what he was looking at. “Spotback. The Antalfer’s dog. Poor thing.” He felt a surge of anger.
“On Ancient Earth dogs do not climb trees.” Vero’s voice had an odd, strained tone. “On Farholme, is that rule now broken too?”
Merral looked at the tree, noting that the dog’s body was nearly three times his own height above the ground.
“No, Vero, our dogs do not climb.” He heard a coldness in his own voice that surprised him. “Stand watch while I go up and get him down.”
He handed the tranquilizer gun to Vero and with some effort climbed the tree and levered the body out with his boot.
By the time he had descended, Vero—his face furrowed in disgust—was already imaging the body. He looked up at Merral, his eyes wide in horror. “Before you look at it, see what you make of those tracks.”
He gestured to the left.
The prints on the coarse sand were of low quality and confused, but it was possible to make up some sort of dreadful story out of them. There were paw marks and the two types of prints they had seen earlier, all mixed in as though there had been a considerable melee. Then there was a rough depression, dark with dried blood, and a confused, dragging trail into another deeper and bloodied hollow in the sand, which was surrounded by the large footprints running all around in strange, intense, deep impressions. At the base of some of the prints was a dark stain.
“A fight,” Merral observed, trying to sound calm. “Spotback attacked them, I’d guess. Or they attacked him. Here a wound, possibly fatal to Spotback. Then the dog crawls here. But all these prints . . .? Was the creature dancing in triumph?”
Vero gestured back at the body. “Take a look.”
Merral bent over and looked at the corpse as Vero joined him and poked delicately at the pile of fur and bone with a stick. He realized that the bones were crushed into white slivers, the skull shattered into a dozen or more fragments.
Suddenly, here by this open river with the sun shining and the wind softly ruffling the green needles of the larch tree, Merral felt sick. For a moment he thought that he was going to have to go behind a bush and vomit. Then he controlled his feelings and looked up at Vero, his nausea now mixed with anger.
“It stamped on the dog,” he said, his tone dull.
“I am no expert in such things. But I would say so. A repeated, angry stamping.” Vero’s tone was icy.
“Although it might be useful to try to work out the weight of the creature that did this, I think there is no point in getting this taken back to the lab. It’s probably too late for a useful analysis. It’s at least three days old, badly decomposed, and has been eaten by birds.”
Vero looked at him. “As for the weight, I’d guess in excess of a hundred kilos. As much as
two big men. I mean, could you have thrown that dog up there?” He gestured up at the tree.
Merral stared at his friend, seeing the sweat and dust on his face and noticing the strain in his eyes. “No. He was a decent-sized dog. Twenty kilos, maybe. It was a big creature that did this. Consistent with the footprints. Think of a big man and double his size.”
“For a creature that doesn’t exist, according to what this Maya Knella says, curiously substantial. Odd. Very odd.”
“And very nasty,” Merral added. He found himself looking around, trying to peer into the shadows under the distant trees as if expecting to see something. He felt an urge to shiver.
“Vero,” he said, “I’ve seen enough.”
They buried the dog under a rough pile of basalt pebbles. Merral paused as he put on the last stone. It is strange, he thought, how this has annoyed me: to kill this dog in such a way and then just fling the body away as if it were rubbish. Whatever these creatures were, he decided that he already felt very ill inclined toward them.
Then, more positively, he told himself that he would get Spotback’s name put on something here, some ridge or hill, when the naming commission came up this far north for the minor features.
They picked up their packs and set off again. Merral, however, did not put the tranquilizer gun away but attached it to his waist, where it banged against him annoyingly. As they walked on he found himself more than once wondering how fast he could operate it and whether it would work against such creatures. And supposing it didn’t, he asked himself, how quickly could I get out my bush knife?
And, as he tackled these thoughts, he wasn’t sure which disturbed him most: the idea of the unknown creatures or the anger they had aroused within him.
Merral and Vero pushed on throughout the day along the sandy margins of the river channels, taking only the briefest break at midday. They said little to each other but set a steady pace, their eyes and ears alert for any signs of the creatures. Merral noticed how they kept to the edges of the river and that when they approached large boulders they carefully circumvented them lest something be behind them. Irritated by the tranquilizer gun but with no inclination to put it back in his pack, he found himself carrying it awkwardly on his shoulder.
In the afternoon their steady pace was rewarded by good views of the steep black rock walls of Carson’s Sill and the dense dark greenery of conifer woods that clung to the slopes in patches along it. And, as the afternoon wore on, the tiered rock face of the plateau edge with the white vertical slash where the Lannar River plunged down in a series of waterfalls rose before them, and it began to dominate their thinking.
“It has been climbed?” asked Vero in doubtful tones, as he stared through the fieldscope at it.
“Of course, or I wouldn’t have taken this route. By Thenaya Carson first, oh, two centuries ago, and about every decade since. But not by me. It’s around eight hundred meters from the base to the lip of the scarp.”
“With packs, and on that surface, it won’t be easy.”
“The trick, I’m told from the files, is to go up well away from the river. There is a lot of loose debris and the spray from the waterfalls has smoothed the rocks, so it makes for treacherous climbing. The western side is supposed to be fine, if it hasn’t slipped. There’s a lot of erosion going on.”
“Ah, the Made Worlds again,” commented Vero with a tight smile.
“Sorry. But it will be a hard climb and we will be exhausted at the top.”
“I’m tired at the thought. How much longer until we stop today?”
“Can you manage another hour?”
“Yes, Forester,” Vero answered, amid a wipe of his brow, “but it can’t come too soon.”
They walked on, and half an hour later, as they were walking through a narrow section with high dark stands of the woodland pine on either side, Vero caught Merral’s gaze. “I have noticed you listening a lot. You ought to be more at home here than me. What do you feel?”
Merral stopped, listening again to the silence around them. “Feel? I don’t know. I’m worried that I’m talking myself into seeing and hearing things that don’t exist. What with the dog, and Jorgio’s warning . . .” He prodded a pebble tentatively with his foot. “But there just doesn’t seem anywhere near as much wildlife as I would expect. Not here. Maybe, not since last night. The odd rabbit and the squirrel, that’s all, and they seem to keep their distance. Normally, I’d expect to get within feet of them. There are fewer birds, too.”
Merral looked up to see, high above them and too far away to identify, a stiff-winged brown shape circling above them. “And there’s the odd buzzard. But little else.”
He found it hard to put his feelings into words. “But I have to say that sometimes . . . sometimes I feel that we are being watched. Do you?”
“Yes, I do,” answered Vero without hesitation, looking ahead at the ridge before them. “I was trying to avoid saying it, but I have an uneasy feeling about this Carson’s Sill and what lies beyond it. I am wondering if I should just have asked a full Sentinel Threat Evaluation Team to come in and go through the whole area. With both ships of the Assembly Defense Force sitting in low orbit.”
“I have to say,” Merral said, “that for the first time in my entire life I consider that the Assembly may have been wise in retaining two military vessels. Not that I ever gave it very much thought.”
Vero wiped the sweat off his hands on his trousers. “Yes, persuading the Assembly to maintain two armed cruisers and a hundred crew as a Defense Force on constant readiness has been a priority of the sentinels since Moshe Adlen’s day. It has not been an easy task.”
Then he looked at Merral. “I have not said this before, but the existence of the Assembly Defense Force makes my position tricky.”
“How so?”
“This would be their first intervention ever. News of it would go throughout the Assembly, and if it was for a false alarm, then it could be unfortunate for the sentinels. But we may well have to call them anyway.”
And with that he gestured Merral onward.
By five o’clock they had reached a point where the ground had begun to rise toward the sill. Here, with the cliffs looming over them, Merral decided to stop. They had made good time and there was no way that they could climb the sill today. He had already assessed the ascent as requiring at least three hours, and with the evening fast approaching and their growing tiredness, it made sense to camp at the base and tackle the climb when fresh.
They found a suitable spot for camping. A landslide from the cliff had left an enormous mound of debris, within the angular boulders of which there had been enough fine material to make a poor soil in which stunted and tilted fir and spruce trees had grown. At the top of the mound was something of a hollow surrounded by small young firs, and Merral felt that it afforded a perfect site for camping.
In the depression, they put up the tent and then took turns bathing in the river below. As one bathed in the clear but icy river waters, the other sat by on a rock with the tranquilizer gun and a bush knife keeping watch. The troubling thought came to Merral that the very idea of keeping watch would have been inconceivable only a few weeks ago. Now, he realized ruefully, they had slipped into practicing the habit almost as a routine.
Then, refreshed by their baths, they climbed back up to the tent and, for some minutes, lay back on the soft heather enjoying the warm, gentle late-afternoon air and watching the swifts dart above them, hearing their screeching over the echoing rumble of the waterfalls and rapids. Then, taking the fieldscope and with the map in front of them they turned to look up at the rock face, trying to decide which route to take.
As Merral stared at the bulwark of rock that was Carson’s Sill, he felt his spirit sink. It was an uncompromising vista; the lines of vertical cliffs of black lava seemed stacked one above another, crag hanging upon crag. Where the towering ranks of the cliff faces were broken, massive piles of sharp-edged rock fragments radiated downward and outward in
vast cones of scree. Merral noted that, amid the frequent patches of firs, whole trees were toppled over or had been splintered by rolling rocks, and in the debris piles, fragments of trunks stuck out at crazy angles. The only consolation he could find was that he could see no sign of any creatures on the cliffs.
“Tough,” commented Vero with a frown. “It’s like looking up at your castle tree. Only the absolute necessity of my following this trail encourages me to persist.”
“I agree, and I’m afraid there is another factor,” Merral added, gesturing up at the sky where high in the atmosphere fine, wispy spirals of cloud were drifting westward. “I think we will find the weather changing tonight. It looks like rain coming in from the east.”
“How bad?”
“Well, if it is going to be a cyclone we’ll be warned by the Met Team. But we need to think about a wet-weather path.”
Vero gave a theatrical groan. “Beware the weather in the Made Worlds!” he muttered.
In fact, as they looked up at the cliffs, they soon realized that their choices were limited. The Lannar River had cut something of a gorge through the top part of the plateau edge so that on either side the ground rose through forested flanks up to steep, flat-topped summits several hundred meters higher.
Merral pointed to the V-shaped notch of the stream that was sharply defined against the skyline. “So, Vero, the easiest route is to go straight up to that gorge on the plateau and then on to the Daggart Lake.”
“The easiest, no doubt . . . ,” answered Vero slowly and Merral sensed his disquiet.
In the end, they agreed that there was only one suitable route, an easily followed line which took them in a slow, zigzag fashion over the shiny black lava blocks, up through clumps of spruce and fir, and then upward to the western side of the gorge at the crest.
They returned to the tent and, as the shadows lengthened, ate in silence.
As the sun began to set, the gathering clouds acquired hues of purple, red, and gold so that the sky began to look like some astonishing experiment in flowing and shimmering colors.
