The Hounds of Skaith-Volume II of The Book of Skaith

by Leigh Brackett

  They had gathered up between three and four hundred of the things, cleaning out three nesting cities with fire and wind and hound-fear. Beside Stark and the pack, one hundred and fifty Fallarin—with Alderyk at their head and twice as many Tarf to serve them—managed the Runners with small bursts of sandstorm, guiding them and holding down their speed.

  The Fallarin rode, like Stark. When they did take the air, their flight was short and skimming. The Tarf went on their own limbs, and they could outrun anything except the Runners. Stark had used them as scouts, depending on their information for the timing of this unlikely operation. He had considered the whole idea insane, but the Fallarin had been serenely confident, knowing their own skills and the habits of Runners.

  "Runner packs always go with the sandstorms, and just ahead," Alderyk said. "They never go against them. We can drive them wherever we wish them to go, using the wind for a whip."

  And so far they had done just that. Whenever the Runners tried to turn or scatter, they were met by a rush of stinging sand, and they turned again to go before it.

  Now Alderyk rode up beside Stark and said, "Look at them. They smell meat."

  The runners had begun to move faster. They were forgetting the hounds. Some of the old males made hooting cries.

  "Suppose it's our own people they hit," Stark said. The Tarf had kept him in close touch with the movements of both armies, and he knew that Ildann's force was facing the Ochar.

  "They won't," said Alderyk. "Be ready about your hounds, and keep out of our way."

  Two Tarf came racing back, kicking spurts of sand. "Beyond that next rise, Lord, we could see a great patch of orange moving."

  Alderyk said, "I will go myself."

  One of the Tarf caught his bridle. He launched himself with a leathery flapping and rose heavily into the air; not high, but high enough to see farther than anyone on the ground.

  He went a little distance forward and then came back in a great hurry.

  "Now!" he said to Stark. "Ildann's army lies there, to your left, across two ridges." He cried out a shrill cry to the Fallarin.

  Stark called in his hounds.

  War-horns sounded out of sight beyond the dunes, hoarse and bawling.

  The Fallarin were ranged in a wide crescent whose points enclosed the Runners. Stark rode through their line, out of the way of it. He saw them spread their wings. He heard them begin to sing, a strange wild crooning storm-song, and underneath the singing the wings beat a broken cadence.

  The hounds howled.

  Within the crescent the wind rose shrieking and the sand rose with it in a blinding wall. The blurred mass of the Runners moved, picking up speed, all the narrow bodies thrust forward, the incredible legs churning.

  The sand hid them. Wind and cloud rushed away. Stark put his beast into a loping run, the hounds beside him.

  He cleared the first dune, plunged in the hollow beyond it, going at a tangent behind that flying wall of sand. He began to hear noises, horns blowing, a confusion of shouts and cries almost lost in the wind-roar. When he reached the crest of the second dune, he could see what was happening.

  Ildann had drawn his line on a wide flat. The Ochar had launched their attack from the height, throwing out wings on either side to take advantage of their greater numbers and envelop the smaller army.

  The sandstorm of the Fallarin, with its several hundred Runners, hit the Ochar left wing before it was halfway down the slope of the dune.

  The shock was audible. The mass of burnt orange disintegrated in a boiling of sand and leaping bodies. Hideous sounds came out of that turmoil, where the Runners tore, and fed, and died.

  War-horns bellowed. Men shouted. The sounds were thin and lost. The charge faltered as the line staggered, struggled to reform itself.

  Momentum carried right and center down the slope. Arrows flew from both sides. Ildann's line wheeled, raggedly but with savage enthusiasm, purple and brown taking the brunt of the shock while the red Kref spurred up to drive a wedge between the Ochar center and the totally demoralized left.

  They struck hard. But Stark's heart sank when he saw the solid wall of orange that still confronted them.

  He kicked the beast into a run, going down the slope toward the battle.

  The sand was settling. Knots of men and beasts and Runners heaved and floundered, inextricably mixed, among the dead and dying. Suddenly at the Ochar rear a whirlwind rose and struck, spouting up more sand. Torn scraps of orange flew out of it like winter leaves. The Fallarin had moved on to fresh endeavors. The Ochar line swayed and shifted, and the men of the Lesser Hearths howled like wolves.

  With his spear leveled and the hounds death-baying around him, Stark went into the fight.

  He went bareheaded and barefaced, and that alone marked him. The Red Cloaks cheered and shouted his name. The hounds killed a way for him through the orange, toward where Romek's standard showed above the melee, opposite Ildann's center.

  Many of the men on both sides fought on foot now. The ground was littered with dead beasts and the dusty cloaks of the fallen. Over the roar of battle came the sound of the whirling winds, dancing their devil's dance, stripping men of their garments, beating and blinding them, tossing them like chaff, driving their mounts mad with fear.

  The Ochar flinched and reeled. Battered from all sides, they began to break and scatter, and the whirlwinds drove them. The men of the Lesser Hearths pressed furiously against the yielding line.

  Romek's standard still stood. He had his clansmen by him, a hundred or more still unwounded. He saw Stark, at the head of the Purple Cloaks and coming strongly. Romek raised his standard and shouted. His men charged Ildann's center. Romek came straight for Stark. Let be, said Stark to the hounds. Guard yourselves. He spurred forward to meet the Keeper of the Hearth of Ochar.

  The first spear clash snapped shafts against small round shields and toppled both men unhurt from the saddle. Drawing blade, they fought on foot, with the tides of purple and orange flowing round them on all sides and a banshee screaming of wind beyond. Romek was a tall cold fury quite careless of life if he could only take Stark with him.

  Kill? said Gerd, clawing the ground. Kill, N'Chaka?

  No. This one must be mine.

  There were plenty of others. The hounds killed themselves weary.

  Gradually Stark became aware of a small quietness in which he and Romek circled and slashed and parried. There was only the stamp of their feet and the ringing blades and a huge sound of breathing. They were surrounded by purple cloaks.

  Romek, steel and rawhide, cut and slashed until his arm began to tire. Stark moved like a wraith. The level light of Old Sun caught in his pale eyes, and there was a patience there as terrible as time.

  Romek's soft boots shuffled in the trodden sand. Shuffled, missed step. Stumbled. Stark leaped forward.

  Romek struck, low and viciously, out of that feint.

  Stark leaned aside, as an animal shifts weight in mid-spring. The blade sang past him. His arm whipped down. The curved edge of his blade took Romek between shoulder and jaw.

  Gerd came and sniffed at the severed head. Then he licked Stark's hand.

  Ildann, his cloak torn and bloody, shook his sword in the air.

  "Where are the Ochar? Where is the pride of the First-Come?"

  A great wild shout went up. The men would have taken Stark on their shoulders; something held them back, and it was not entirely the presence of the hounds.

  Stark thrust his blade into the sand to clean it. The battle was over, except for the noisy business of stamping down the last bits of it and slaughtering those Runners that were still alive and too stupid to escape. The whirlwinds danced over the dunes, flogging the surviving Ochar on their way.

  Stark said to Ildann, "Where are my companions?"

  "Yonder behind the ridge, there." He pointed across the flat. "We left them with the baggage train and a strong guard. They'll be coming soon."

  "Did you see . . . Was there a stranger
with Romek at any time?"

  "A Wandsman? No, I saw none."

  "Pass the word along. If a stranger is found among the dead, I want to know it."

  Ildann passed the word. But Gelmar was not among the dead. He was fighting hard to stay among the living, clinging to his racing beast and thinking of Yurunna and the Lords Protector.

  Jofr was not among the dead, either. Some of the Hann found him half-dazed where the wind had flung him, and they brought him to headquarters instead of slitting his throat because they remembered the ransom. Stark was there with Gerrith and Ashton and Halk, and the three Hearth-Keepers, and Alderyk of the Fallarin. He looked at the boy, all beaten and drooping between the tall men.

  "Let him sit," he said. There was a tiny fire and the air was chill. "Bring him food and water."

  Jofr kept his head bent down and would not touch what was brought to him. Ashton sat by and watched him.

  Stark asked Gerrith, "Do we have any further need of this one?"

  "No."

  Stark turned to Alderyk. "Perhaps some of your Tarf could take him where he can find his own people."

  "That would be easy enough. But why do you want to save him?"

  "He's only a child."

  "Very well, if you must. They can start now."

  The three chiefs began to talk about ransom.

  Stark said to the boy, "Is your father living?"

  "I don't know. I lost him when the wind struck."

  "You see?" said Stark to the chiefs. "And even if Ekmal did survive, he will have little to spare for ransoms. Think of the loot of Yurunna. Get up, boy."

  Jofr sighed and made as though to rise. Instead, he flung himself across the fire, straight at Stark's throat, and there was in his hand a small knife with which he was used to cut meat.

  Stark caught his hand and Ashton his feet. The knife dropped.

  "That's why he refused your bread and salt," said Ashton. "I told you it was a blue-eyed viper."

  Stark smiled. "It's a brave one, at any rate." He shook the boy and set him on his feet. "Get home to your mother."

  Jofr went away with his guards, and he was weeping again, this time with sheer frustration. The blade had come so close.

  Hann, Kref and Marag slaughtered the too sorely wounded with due honor and ceremony and buried their dead. Runners came out of nowhere to dispose of the Ochar.

  The army gathered itself and moved on, traveling swiftly toward the bitter lake.

  The Tears of Lek shone sullenly under Old Sun like an unpolished shield dropped in the midst of desolation. Its heavy waters never froze even in the dead of winter. White salt pans gleamed, scarred by generations of quarrying. On the unfriendly surround of stiff sedges and sand, the camps of green Thorn and white Thuran were set up. The yellow Qard as usual, were late.

  Camp was made, and the men began celebrating their victory. Thorn and Thuran were as savagely joyful as the actual victors. They sang harsh yelping songs and did leaping dances to the rattle of small drums and the shrilling of pipes. This went on all night, and there was almost a second war when it seemed to Hann, Marag and Kref that their newly made and so far non-fighting brothers were taking too large a part in the rejoicing.

  In the red morning Stark and Ashton, with Alderyk and the chiefs, rode out to a line of untidy hills and climbed to a place where they could overlook Yurunna.

  From this distance it was not the city that took the eye so much as the oasis that surrounded it.

  There was water, in plenty. Sunlight glinted on irrigation ditches, a spidery pattern amid the fields. Things were a lot further along here than at Ildann's village. Color smeared the land in patches; sickly yellow, greenish black, dusty ocher, leprous white. There were orchards of spiny twisted trees. To Stark, it was supremely unlovely. To the tribesmen, it was paradise.

  In the midst of this ugly garden, some careless titan had dropped a huge grim rock, and on top of the rock someone had built a darkness. There was little detail to be seen this far away, but that was the impression Stark had, a walled and brooding darkness above the gloomy fields.

  "You see how it stands, Eric," Ashton said. "Not pretty, but rich and fat all the same. And alone. Every hungry tribesman who ever passed this way has looked at it and plotted how to take it."

  "And sometimes tried," said Ildann. "Oh, yes. tried,"

  "The Wandsmen keep the city well prepared. A caravan came in while I was there, bringing military stores, oil and the stuff they call kheffi, some kind of resinous fiber that makes the spreading fire when it's soaked and lighted. There were timbers and cordage to repair the ballistae, and there were weapons. They train the Yur well and keep them trained, about a thousand of them. Yurunna is vital to their presence here in the north, and they know that even the best-bought loyalty, such as they have from the Ochar, ought not to be tempted with weakness."

  "Very formidable," said Alderyk.

  "Yes."

  "Impregnable?"

  "Certainly difficult."

  "For ordinary humans, yes," said Alderyk.

  He clapped his wings and cried a vaulting cry. Dust whipped across the desert, and a long while later Stark saw trees in the oasis bend to a sudden gust.

  The yellow Qard came in that afternoon. The next day the army marched and set down before Yurunna.

  15

  High on its rock, the city scragged the sky like the top of a shattered tree stump. A wall encircled it, high and tight. Buildings stretched up to peer over with narrow eyes. Steep roofs gave back a hard gleaming in the rusty light of Old Sun, except where there were empty gaps.

  A single road, wide enough for a cart, zigzagged up the western face of the rock to the single gate. The gate, Ashton said, was fashioned of black iron and very strong. It was set deep between two flanking towers. On the tops of these towers great cauldrons were set, with engines for casting the spreading fire.

  At other places around the wall other engines were set. Yur in polished leather manned the wall, and now and again a Wandsman passed along it with a couple of hounds in leash. The wall was sheer and smooth, thirty feet or so atop seventy or eighty of sheer cliff.

  Lacking modern weapons, lacking even primitive siege engines, the invaders faced a city that seemed impregnable.

  But that night the attack on Yurunna began, though not one man of the Lesser Hearths dight himself for war.

  The men drummed and danced and piped and sang or did otherwise as it pleased them. But there was another singing, and that came from the camp of the Fallarin, where the Tarf stood guard in a silent circle, armed with four-handed swords.

  The singing was sprightly and wicked and mischievous and cruel, and under it like a whispering base was the sound of wings a-beat.

  Up in the city a small wind began to prowl.

  It skipped on roof tiles and ran along narrow streets. It poked and whined into holes and corners. It climbed old walls and felt the texture and the weakness of them. It puffed at cressets, torches, lamps. It snuffed wood.

  It grew.

  It became a hundred winds.

  Yurunna was old, a palimpsest, city built upon half-obliterated city as this people and that came down from the north and took it and held it and then left it again for the next wave of wanderers. Some of the buildings were stout, solid stone. Some were built in part of timber brought up from the south, using one or two walls of an older shell so that the wooden structures resembled the nests of mud-dauber wasps plastered to the stone. In the center of the city and in the area around the gate the buildings were used and lived in. In the small outer quarters of the small city the buildings were unused, except along the wall where the sinews of war were stored ready to hand. These buildings were sound, and kept so. Of the others, some had fallen. Some were ready to fall.

  All night long the werewinds laughed and gamed in the narrow ways of Yurunna, and the Yur looked up with their copper-colored eyes like the eyes of dolls and saw deadly roof tiles spin like autumn leaves, shied down at them by the
fingers of the wind. Chimneys crumbled. Old walls swayed and shook until they toppled. The dark was full of clatterings and crashings. The Yur women wept in their great house, trembling when the shutters banged open and the curtains blew, scurrying to protect their screaming young.

  The Wandsmen, two score of them who oversaw the breeding of Yur and Northhound, the training of the young, the ordering of city and field, were at first scornful of the power of the Fallarin. No wind could threaten their strong walls. They became uneasy as the night wore on and their own city seemed to have been turned against them; had in fact become a weapon in the enemy's hands.

  The Northhounds on the wall and in the dark streets shivered, though they had felt far colder winds. They howled dismally, and when walls fell on them they died, and there was no enemy they could strike at. The face of the Houndmaster, already set in the grim lines of a heartstricken man, became more grim.

  And that was not the worst.

  The werewinds played with fire.

  Cressets fell. Torches blew down. Lamps were knocked over. Flames sprang up, and the werewinds blew upon them, fanned them, sucked them up into whirling gold-red storms. The black sky brightened above Yurunna.

  The Wandsmen fought the fires with fewer Yur than they would have liked. They dared not strip the wall of defenders for fear of winged men, who might scale the unscalable and let down ropes for the wingless.

  Toward dawn, when the fires were to some degree controlled, the werewinds struck in several places, oversetting the cauldrons of oil and the supplies of the spreading fire on the wall, then tossing down the huge basket-torches that burned beside the emplacements. The resultant fires destroyed some of the ballistae, ate their way into some of the nearby storerooms, where there was more oil and more of the kheffi for the spreading fire. Wandsmen and Yur had no rest by day.

  Stark assumed that the Fallarin rested. He made no attempt to find out. He rode among the tribes, making sure that certain preparations were being carried out.

  By evening, the defenders of the city had repaired the damage on the wall, dragging up new ballistae, setting more cauldrons and containers.