The younger man bore a longbow as well as a sword and dagger; he had said modestly that he had some skill with it.
The two young warriors of the cat people, Ch’uirsh and Za’reekh, were out on opposing flanks, out of sight but keeping mind touch.
In the rear came two more humans, but they were not priests, though they were legends along the border and far beyond. These were the twins, Reyn and Geor Mantan. Dark, lean men, identical in appearance, their age was unknown. Hiero guessed they might be in their fifties, but it was only a guess. Years before, they had come back to their small forest steading and found the mangled and tortured bodies of their wives and children in the ashes of their cabins. From then on, they had but one purpose, to seek out and slay the Unclean wherever they found them. Veterans of a hundred grim battles in the shadows of the woods, they spoke little but did much. Many thousands of lives had been saved by their sudden appearance, warning of a Leemute raid or ambush.
They did not serve the Church Universal or any other organized body. They appeared like shadows at intervals, always together, and got what supplies they needed, then vanished once more into the darkness, on the trail of their unending vengeance. They were known from the Otwah League to the Beesee coast, and none would deny them anything they sought in the way of food or help. They were, Hiero thought, like two grim hounds, silent and relentless. Abbot Demero had found them through some personal, arcane method and persuaded them not only to volunteer for this expedition but even to accept Hiero’s orders, a feat that made Hiero, no soft citizen himself, wonder in amazement.
These two bore weapons of their own, used by almost no one else in the North, six-foot tubes of some strange, dark wood—blowguns which fired darts tipped with deadly poison, a secret brew of their own devising, said to slay on the instant. They carried the darts in slung pouches and also wore long knives and belt-axes, whose heads were tipped on one side with a long spike. Grim and fell they looked, like messengers of Fate in their stained leather. Hiero knew that woodsmen and hunters such as these were worth more than a host of ordinary men. Even the catfolk drew back as they passed to change positions, so dread was the fight of their sunken eyes.
Down the long aisles of the great pines and spruces and between clumps of the sprawling palmettos, silent as ghosts, the little company flitted. As it went along, the dawn came pink in the east, and the chirping and warbling of countless birds began to greet the coming day. Tiny, dark figures, moving between the shaggy boles of the trees, never stopping, never keeping to a straight path, they were in view for but a brief instant—then they were gone, and it was as if they had never been.
XI. IN THE TAIG
It was late summer noon again in the north. Clouds of tiny gnats and midges swirled in the shafts of sunlight slanting down through the great trees. Here and there, blankets of leaf shadow fell, where the multitudes of conifers had yielded to some deciduous giant, a mutated maple or poplar, creating an even deeper shade than that cast by the needles of the mighty pines. In favored places, huge thickets sprouted among outcroppings of lichened dolomite or granite; blueberries, myrtles, and countless other plants sprang up to grasp at the sunlight wherever the trees could not find sufficient soil to root.
In the leaf mold under one such shaded place, the camp had been pitched, and an argument was in process. The two Mantans were not there, being out on the perimeters on watch. Hiero was confronting his brother priests, and the four catfolks were off to one side, considering this matter none of their business. They played with their knives and watched the three humans with slitted eyes, content to wait on events.
“Look, Hiero,” Maluin said earnestly, “we’ve seen nothing. Not one sign of anything. Not one trace, not one piece of evidence that there is any movement in these parts. We are well south of any trail used by our people. We apparently are also well to the west of the area where you first encountered the enemy last year. This country is simply empty! There is nothing here. So I’ll ask you again, why are we hanging around? I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to go home. I want to move, go somewhere where we can be useful, do something. You know I will follow anywhere you say. But what is the reason for this dawdling, this staying here in one area, and a damned small area at that? You say this is the proper place, and God knows, I’m not disputing your experience. But could you please give me a reason! Per Sagenay feels the same way. Neither of us is new to the enemy or life up here. Why treat us as if we were new-joined recruits and dumb ones to boot?” He leaned back and lighted his short clay pipe again. He was the only one who smoked; as he held the spark lighter in his huge fist, he looked like the epitome of casual strength, relaxed and yet forceful. He watched Hiero narrowly over the pipe bowl, and Hiero had some trouble in meeting his eyes.
“I gather you feel the same, Per Sagenay?”
“No-oh,” was the answer, given in equable tones. “Yet you have not asked me to try to read the symbols. This is one of my small talents, and while I will, as Per Maluin has been careful to point out, obey any and all instructions that you care to give us, still I am a little puzzled. No forelooking and no sign that some of the greatest foresters of the North can discern. But you feel that we should linger in this precise spot, as if we awaited something. Perhaps if you shared some of your thoughts with us, we might be able to help.” The soft, clear voice fell silent, and, like Malum, Sagenay lounged back on the bank of moss which shrouded the upthrust of rock behind them.
Hiero stood and stretched, then reseated himself. In the silence that followed, he seemed to be listening to the bird song which welled around them, his eyes for the nonce cast down. Finally he spoke.
“I could tell you all sorts of things, bring up the past, mention that I am a sensitive, and still tell you nothing. I’ll be honest and say I simply don’t know anything. We have been on the trail for almost three weeks. Two days ago, I felt—no other word for it-felt that this area we are in was crucial, that we ought to stay here. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why. There is inimical life here somewhere; I feel it, I sense it, in some way I can’t explain. There is also something else, Something is coming here. The catfolk don’t see it, you two don’t, nor do the Mantans, who excel all of us combined in woodcraft. But I do! We are at some sort of meeting place. I know it. For years, all of this area has been a blank to the Abbeys. We operate west of it and north of it. To the southeast lies the Palood and the Inland Sea. This angle is unknown. You know all that. I tell you, something is building here. I won’t permit your talent, Per Sagenay, for one reason. The enemy has learned what I could do. We don’t know what they can do, what they could have taught themselves in the past year. One of the things about the talent for forelooking that almost got me killed in the past is that it leaves one’s own mind open. I won’t have it! We are on the verge, the border, of some vast movement. Our business here is to probe it, not to let it know of us at all. I have sensed out and over a wide area. This forest about us is a blank indeed. A mental blank! No such thing should occur. Oh, the younger life, the Grokon, the deer, the hares, all are here. But they are muted, quiescent, and in far fewer numbers than they should be. Only the tiny, innocuous creatures—the birds, the mice, the insects—are in norma! numbers.” He leaned back and rested on one elbow. Then he added, “You will, I fear, have to take me on trust. Something is going to happen here, and we must wait for it.”
It was Sagenay who finished the argument. “Per Desteen, you are the leader. All else is unimportant. Those who spread evil are all about us, and you are not only our commander but our chief warning signal. I have no more to say. Your thoughts are the only ones that matter.”
The quiet voice left an empty space behind it. Maluin grunted several times and then waved one finger at Hiero in mock warning. He, too, settled back, and the three lay silent, staring over the ashes of their tiny fire. Yet all were alert, waiting for anything that would disturb the ether, any trace of trouble, any hint that they were not alone in the seemingly innocent depths
of the great continent-wide wood.
All of them were travel-stained and travel-worn. They had marched, a very long way north and east of Namcush to reach this unknown land. Not even the Mantans, veterans of a multitude of journeys in the untracked wilds, had ever roamed these parts. Their only guide now was the instinct of their leader.
Hiero had warned his comrades that they must always stay under the cloak of the trees. He remembered well that not too far to the east, he had first glimpsed and then contacted the flying device which lifted an enemy adept far aloft in the heavens. Since his reports, passed through Brother Aldo, had arrived at the central command post of the Abbeys, much thought and research had been devoted to his warning. As a result, he had some tentative information at his disposal. The thing he had seen was deemed to be an unpowered glider, a concept long lost but recorded in the central files. While its maneuverings in the air were nothing unknown in theory, no one had ever thought of a method of getting such a thing launched and up into the higher atmosphere. This was now being eagerly pursued, but as yet only the foe possessed the secret. And only Hiero had ever seen such a machine, which might mean that it was both rare and difficult to handle.
The afternoon waned. The four cat people groomed themselves and rested, and the men engaged in desultory talk. It was perhaps three hours until sundown, and still nothing disturbed the outward peace of the forest.
The interruption was sudden and silent. Reyn Mantan, his gaunt, swarthy face impassive, stood before them, looking as furtive and stealthy as some silent predator of the wood. His words, as always, were blunt and terse.
“I left Geor alone and circled camp in patrol at noon. I went east to have a scout, widen our range a little.” No one commented that this was not exactly what his orders had been. The Mantan brothers took orders as they found them and interpreted them as they chose. They were proven allies, yet not soldiers, and their experience was too great and too valuable for them to be treated as if they needed constant discipline.
Now, brushing a bed of pine needles aside, Reyn crouched and drew a crude map with his dagger point.
“We’re here, see? I went east and a bit north.” He drew a wavy line. “Here is broken rock mixed with swamp. There’s something in that area, hard to get at. Like a bad smell. I seen something like it once over to the coast.” He meant the Beesee area bordering the great western ocean, far away over the mighty mountains, the Shinies.
“It moves around, something does, in there. I can feel it shifting. Maybe more than one thing. But it don’t seem to come this way at all, only north and south, like it moves up and down in a line. Some kind of border, maybe, and some kind of guard. Want to go have a look?”
The others were on their feet now, and the catfolk had drawn closer, attracted by the excitement.
“What was the place on the coast like?” Maluin rapped. “Why do you think this is the same or at least similar?”
“Hard to tell. The place over west was more like a circle, a blotch, but there’s the same feel to it here. Like a stink you can’t smell. Bad feeling. We didn’t go into it then, me and Geor. Only a few Inyan camps in that area, and they didn’t go nowhere near the place. Too scared. If we hadn’t been in a hurry then, we might have tried. Up to you folks what you want done. I only tell what I seen.”
Hiero thought hard. One of the greatest forest rangers of the North had found something inexplicable and was conveying his dislike of it. The man might not be a telepath of any kind, but his countless forays against the Unclean must have honed every sense he possessed to a razor’s edge in the process. Like a stink you can’t smell! What better way of describing some emanation of the enemy? Perhaps even a mental evil which the untutored but alert woodsrunner could only dimly detect. Hiero made up his mind quickly.
“Call your brother in and well march. Make it slow. Reyn, you lead out. No one use the mind touch at all!” He explained in a few thoughts to the Children of the Wind what he wanted, and they moved off in moments. All that had to be done was to don the light packs and adjust weapons more comfortably. This was a group which was never off guard or unready for an instant alert.
For an hour, they drifted like shadows of the wilderness through the forest giants. Reyn, soon joined by his brother Geor, stayed in front, and there were no flankers. The others were in a small, loose clump to the rear. Suddenly their guide checked and held up one arm. At Hiero’s signal, they spread out and lay prone in the nearest cover. He positioned himself behind a huge, rotten tree stump and shut his eyes.
Ever so carefully, his mind began to reach out before them into the region which Reyn Mantan had described and which they could now see with their own eyes.
It was a type of country all of them had crossed before and was not uncommon in the North. Acid soil and low-lying ground surrounded outcrops of rotting stone, the latter often crowned with scrub. Broad patches of oily-looking, dark water glistened here and there in the light of the sun of late afternoon. Trees were few and those often dead and leafless, but many clumps of tall cattails and other reedy grasses obscured the view where the waters lay.
All of them noticed something else. The belt of marsh and scrub was curiously silent. No waterfowl, such as herons, duck, or rail, called from the reeds, and only a slight wind sighed through them. The wind was from, the north and, though gentle, made a faint, hissing rustle as it bent the tall stems. The group had come to a silent land.
Out and out, Hiero reached with his mind, concentrating on holding the most delicate touch possible, so that his mental probe would appear as no more than a feather in the wind—more of a caress than a stroke, more of a stray current of air than anything solid. As he did so, he scanned all the various wavelengths he had memorized in the past, shifting up and down from those of the lowest insects to those possessing the highest of intelligence. Out and out, infinitely slowly, holding the probe to a close range and concentrating only on the immediate area to their front.
Contact! He drew back at once and then carefully advanced again, his thought now targeted on a certain place. The contact moved; as the hunter had reported, that movement was neither toward them nor away, but following some invisible line which lay athwart their own course from east to west. He felt a sense of disgust, almost physical, and knew at once he had found the source of the “stink you can’t smell.”
He was not actually in touch with a mind, but rather with a presence, almost a shifting id, an emotional center of some foul kind. Whatever it was, its rnind was guarded, but the guard was not that of the mechanical shields used by the Unclean upper ranks. This was natural to it and was perhaps a weapon against prey which might be mentally sensitive.
Still, an impression came through—a very ugly one. There was intense rage there, rage at some kind of control which the thing-could not overcome. There was also malice and ferocity combined, cunning and deception, and above all—hunger! The feel of what he had sensed made Hiero wince. Not since his encounter with the vampire fungus he had named the House had he felt such avid desire for prey of some kind. This entity wanted to feed, to rend, to break and shatter, to shred some helpless life from its physical body and then to absorb it, bloodily and obscenely. It made the man think of an intelligent hyena in its self-absorption with death and the consequences of sating itself with the slain. But it was not being allowed to do what it wished, and therein lay the source of its rage. It had to stay within certain boundaries and it could not go where it wanted. Was it a barrier guardian of a strange and awful kind?
Hiero considered; while he did so, he used the lesser bands of small birds and insects to try to learn a little more about the area. The mixture of swamp and scrub-strewn rock and shale seemed to extend a very long way to the north and south. Probably trying to circle and bypass it would prove little and would take a lot of time. He was worried about time. The Republic’s leaders needed hard information, and so far his group had not been able to provide any.
At length his mind was made up, and he signal
ed the others to withdraw, back the way they had come. After fifteen minutes of marching, he gathered them around hirn in a circle and explained what he had found. He also sketched his plans for dealing with it and gave orders.
The three soldier-priests remained where they were, occasionally speaking in low tones. The catfolk and the two Mantan brothers had vanished in the wood to their rear, and there was nothing to do except watch the light wane in the west and listen with all of their senses.
“It is—or perhaps they are—hungry, ravenous,” Hiero said. “I suspect this is some kind of Unclean boundary that holds them, or it, in place. I think the thing has eaten out the area and is not thinking too clearly, if it has a mind capable of thinking. The two brothers know all the game of the North better than any other living men. They can show B’uorgh and his cats what to drive when they find it. There’s not much in the area, but there must be something: if there is, they’ll get it.”
After what seemed an interminable time, Hiero picked up the mental wave he sought: and breathed a sigh of relief. “Hide yourselves. They’ve got something, and it’s being chased this way. I just hope the trees don’t check the Children too much. They are really plains hunters.”
Concealing themselves, the other two waited tensely. Soon they also could hear the crashing of undergrowth and the beat of hooves in the distance. The frightened herbivore which Hiero had detected was indeed being herded in their direction. The Children of the Wind were not using the Wind of Death, but only their own speed, moving in a line, showing themselves where needed, stopping any gaps when the quarry tried to leave its line and check back. It was now panic-stricken, dreading both the hunters behind and the region it was being forced to enter in front. It did not want to go forward! Following the chase with his mind, Hiero marveled anew at the skill of the cat people as they headed the beast off again and again. Behind them, the two human hunters made the best speed they could, racing to try to keep up and be in. at the climax.
The Unforsaken Hiero hd-2 Page 24
