The Reavers of Skaith-Volume III of The Book of Skaith

by Leigh Brackett

  "I have explosives."

  "If you use them, the passage will be blocked by its own collapse."

  "You give me small comfort," said Penkawr-Che. "What of the fighting men?"

  "Both sexes bear arms." Stark was not sure of that, but no matter. "There will be four thousand at least, perhaps five or six. I can only make a guess. During most of the short time I was there, I was lost and wandering in total darkness. Much of the Mother's House has been abandoned, and there are obviously fewer of the Children than when it was constructed. But they are by no means extinct. They have no modern weapons, but they are stout fighters with what they have." Actually, he knew that they were not. "More important, they'll have the advantage of the ground. You'd have to take the chambers one by one, and you'd never come to the end of them."

  "I have lasers."

  "They will hide from them. The place is a maze. Even if you were able to force an entrance, they could keep you surrounded, attack unseen from every direction, pick you off one at a time. You would not have enough replacements."

  Penkawr-Che frowned, drawing the lash again and again through his fingers.

  Rusty twilight crept over the heath. Lights began to come on in the camp.

  Penkawr-Che flicked the lash suddenly to draw blood from Stark's shoulder. "Your knowledge has proven to be of no value after all. We've both wasted our time." He turned, impatiently, to speak to his men.

  "Wait," said Stark.

  Penkawr-Che looked at him, squinting in the dusk. "Why should I wait?"

  "Because I know a way into the House of Skaith-Mother that even her Children have forgotten."

  "Ah!" said Penkawr-Che. "And how would you have happened to find that on your one brief visit, during most of which you wandered in the dark?"

  "In the midst of darkness," Stark said, "I saw light. I will sell you this information."

  "At what price?"

  "Freedom."

  Penkawr-Che's face was a mask, dim and obscure. After a while, so that he would not seem to be too eager, he nodded. "You're worth nothing to me dead. If I'm satisfied with your information, I'll take you and Ashton to wherever you wish, within reason—on Skaith, of course—and release you there."

  "No," said Stark. "Release us here and now."

  "It has to be my way."

  "You'll get what you want my way or not at all. Think, Penkawr-Che. All those caverns crammed with treasures, and nothing to stop you—not a single barrier, not a single warrior with a spear. If you intend to let us go, what difference does it make to you where or how?"

  "The heath is not a friendly-seeming place."

  Stark laughed.

  "All right," Penkawr-Che said impatiently. "If I'm satisfied, you may go free here and now."

  "Good. I want clothing and weapons, and something for Ashton's wounds."

  Penkawr-Che glowered, but he moved apart with one of his men, who presently hurried away.

  The man returned quickly with a battery-powered lamp that he set on a packing case. Stark blessed it silently but tried not to look at it. The heath was quite dark now and would remain so until the first of the Three Ladies rose, perhaps a space of thirty minutes.

  Ashton stood quietly. The harsh glare accentuated the leanness of his body, his bones seeming more prominent, his corded muscles more like wire ropes. Blood trickled in dark streams on the whiteness of his skin. He, too, had averted his face from the lamp. But he watched Stark.

  Presently other men came with clothing. One of them treated Ashton with rough efficiency from a first-aid kit and then dabbed at the cut on Stark's shoulder. The two men dressed themselves in trousers and tunics and soft boots; the tunics were pale in color, and Stark was sorry for that.

  "The weapons?"

  Penkawr-Che shook his head. "Later, when I've heard what you have to say."

  Stark had expected this. "All right," he said, "but Ashton goes now."

  Penkawr-Che stared at him. "Why?"

  "Why not, unless you're lying to me? Let's just call it a token of your good faith."

  Penkawr-Che swore, but he nodded his head at Ashton. "Go, then."

  He was confident. He held all the winning cards. He felt that he could afford to humor Stark. Besides, Ashton could not go far.

  Ashton hesitated, then went away, out onto the dark heath.

  Penkawr-Che said, "Talk."

  Stark never lost sight of Ashton's faintly glimmering tunic.

  "As I said, the Children are not as numerous as they were in the beginning. They are a controlled mutation with no choice but to interbreed. Much of the Great House has been abandoned for generations, and I wandered in the black dark there for days, trying to find a way out."

  "And then you saw the light."

  "Yes. It came through an opening in the rock. There was a balcony at the opening, high up on the cliff. A lookout post, I imagine. Probably there are others. I was not able to climb down from it, so it did not help me to escape. But it's a doorway into the catacombs, unguarded, forgotten—"

  "Inaccessible?"

  "To any enemy that the Children were aware of when they built it. Not to you. Hoppers could ferry men up there. You could put an army inside with not a single blow struck. You might even manage to fill all your holds before the Children even knew what you were about."

  Penkawr-Che looked at Stark narrow-eyed, as if he were trying to pierce his brain and pick out the truth.

  "How would I find this balcony?"

  "Bring me something to draw on. I'll make you a map."

  Out on the heath, Ashton had reached a clump of thorn. He paused, looking back.

  A sheet of thin plastic and a stylus were brought to Stark. He put the plastic on the packing case, beside the lamp. Penkawr-Che leaned over to watch. The four men stood around at a little distance, their stunners ready. Ashton meanwhile blended imperceptibly into the shadows of the thorn-trees and disappeared.

  "See here," said Stark. "Here is the north face of the Witchfire, here the Plain of Worldheart, here the range of the Bleak Mountains, the Thermal Pits, the Citadel—what's left of it. Over here, to the west, the Harsenyi road that led to their camp. That is what I saw from the balcony. I took rough bearings."

  "Which you were able to do without instruments."

  "I'm a mercenary by trade, you know that. I have a trained eye." He held the stylus, rolling it between his fingers. "I can pinpoint the area for you so that your search will not take you more than half a day, using the hoppers."

  "But," said Penkawr-Che, "at the moment you do not intend to do so."

  "No. And if I do not give you the bearings, your search will take much more time. Longer, I think, than you will care to spend."

  "You're a hard man to deal with, Stark. What is it you want now?"

  "Tell your men to take their weapons and go away."

  "That is quite impossible."

  "I don't trust you. I don't want those men where they can drop me the moment I finish the map."

  "You have my word that they won't." Penkawr-Che smiled. "But I don't trust you either, and I think if I sent my men away you'd be gone in an instant, without finishing the map. So I'll tell you what we'll do. In exactly one minute, I shall send men after Ashton; the stunners will put you down, here and now, and we'll begin this whole weary business over again." He pointed to a small array of weapons that had been placed on the ground at a safe distance. "You won't live long without those. Finish the map, pick them up, and walk away free."

  Stark's fingers closed on the stylus until it seemed that it must snap. His head dropped forward and his eyes narrowed.

  Penkawr-Che said, "It's Ashton who will suffer. Shall I give the order?"

  Stark let out a harsh breath and bent over the map. Penkawr-Che smiled again, briefly. Imperceptibly, the men relaxed. They knew now what they were going to do.

  "All right, damn you," Stark said, in a low and furious voice. "Look." Penkawr-Che looked, where Stark was pointing with the stylus. "The Citadel
is a burned-out ruin, but you can find it behind the mists of the Thermal Pits. From the Citadel, so . . ." The stylus began a straight, sure line. Stark's left hand struck the heavy lamp and knocked it straight into Penkawr-Che's startled grasp. The golden man cried out with pain and dropped it from his seared hands.

  Stark was already moving, so swiftly that the eye could scarcely follow him. Instead of going for the weapons, he flung himself directly at the man who stood nearest him. The man, watching Stark, had perforce been staring into the light, which was now on the ground, still shining though partly hidden by the case. During the split second in which his vision was attempting to deal with the sudden change, Stark slammed into him low across the body. The man went over, loosing off his stunner at the sky. Stark rushed off, a large animal running low in erratic leaps and swerves, into the coarse grass with the flower-eyes. An ordinary man, even a skillful one, could hardly have found cover there. But this was N'Chaka, who had found cover on naked rock when the four-pawed death came snuffling after him. Like the four-pawed death, he moved as he had done so many times before when he played at the game of survival, aping the pursuer-quarry, sliding flat and hugging the ground. The glare behind him wavered and flashed as the lamp was set up again, worse for the marksmen than no light at all. They were firing wild, in any case, having lost sight of him almost at once; they had placed too much confidence in their numbers and in the futility of any attempt to escape, basing their estimate on human reflexes as they knew them. Stark had gambled his reflexes against theirs, and for the moment he had won. He was quickly out of range of the stunners.

  The long-range weapons now began to crack. Dirt spurted up in little fountains, some so close that he was pelted, others so distant that he knew the men were aiming systematically to cover a given area rather than to hit a specific target. Some of the fire went into the clump of thorn where Ashton had last been seen, but Stark knew that Ashton would not be there now.

  In the shelter of a hollow, he stripped off the pale-colored tunic, rolled it small and stuck it in his belt. The light had steadied behind him. High up, the illumination was clear. At ground level, it was streaked and patched with the shadows thrown by each small inequality in the surface, so that the marksmen were firing into a distracting pattern of dark and bright. Stark kept as much as possible to the dark.

  More weapons had joined the original two. In the intervals of firing he could hear a great deal of shouting. Then this faded and became distant, like the light, though the firing still kept up. When Stark was well past the clump of thorns and into honest night, he began to make a low hissing sound that was like the voice of the four-pawed death but cadenced as a recognition signal. He continued to make it until Ashton's voice spoke to him from the lip of a small gully.

  Stark slid down into it.

  Ashton had removed his own tunic and rubbed his pale skin with handfuls of soil. He had not forgotten the lessons of his active youth.

  "That was the most beautiful sound I ever heard," he said, and put his hand briefly on Stark's shoulder. "Now what?"

  "Go to ground," Stark said, and glanced at the sky. "We're about out of darkness."

  They scrambled along the gully to where it opened onto more of the coarse grass and pallid, staring flowers. A thick clump of thorn stood at the mouth of the gully, but Stark kept on past it.

  Ashton stopped abruptly. "Listen!"

  From behind them, where the tall ship was, came the muffled throb and thump of motors waked to sudden life.

  "Yes," said Stark. "The hoppers."

  He ran on, as the first of the Three Ladies thrust the edge of her shining countenance gently above the horizon.

  5

  The Three Ladies are Skaith's crowning beauty, in fact her only one—three magnificent star-clusters that grace the moonless sky, shedding a light more sweet and silvery than Old Sun's rusty glare, but almost as bright. Darkness is hard to come by on Skaith, even at night.

  It did not much matter now. Darkness would not save them from the hoppers.

  They found more clumps of twisted thorn, shadowed and tempting. Stark ignored them. A low ridge rose to the right, silhouetted against the distant glow around Arkeshti. Stark ignored that, too. He stayed on the open, exposed slope. Not much of a slope, but enough to have carried off superficial drainage in the rainy season.

  The throb of the motors changed. The hoppers were airborne.

  "Here," Stark said, thrusting Ashton down into a barely perceptible wrinkle in the ground.

  He tore up clods of grass and flowers and strewed them over Ashton, enough to break up the visual aspect of a human body. He spoke a single word to Ashton, a click-cough sound that meant freeze. Then he slid away up to the ridge.

  From there he observed a great deal of activity around the ship. Men with lights were already on the heath, beating back and forth; and others were coming to join them, searching for dead or wounded bodies.

  Up above them, the four hoppers had switched on their powerful landing beams. They swept out into a long line, rushing ahead of the men. Their loud-hailers boomed and belled, an unnatural baying like the voices of some strange breed of mechanized hound hot on the scent. Bolts from their laser cannon struck downward and clumps of thorn erupted into dust and flame.

  Stark left the ridge in haste. He found another shallow fold in the slope, not enough to conceal a rabbit, but he dug himself in with his fingers as best he could and lay still among the grass and flowers.

  The roar of the hoppers filled the sky, sweeping back and forth, pounding the coverts flat. One of the hoppers paused over the gully, shining down its white glare, pulverizing the shadows with flaring lightning bolts. The loud-hailer shouted Stark's name, then laughed. Stark thought the voice was Penkawr-Che's, but the metallic distortion was such that he could not be sure. The thorn thickets which had seemed to offer such tempting concealment went up, one after the other, in a rage of flame.

  The fires and the edges of the landing beams lit up the slope clearly enough even without the Lady's cluster light. Stark lay and listened to the pounding of his own heart, and prayed that Ashton could lie as still as he, and as long; the hunters would be alert for movement. Habitually, Stark knew from the experience of a lifetime, they looked for two things: cover where the quarry may be hiding, or the quarry itself, caught in the open, running. They seldom looked too closely where there is neither cover nor movement, no place to hide, nothing to see. That was why Stark had chosen to remain in the open.

  But the price of invisibility is complete lack of motion. Once the quarry stirs, it is lost.

  A pair of yellow birds forgot that axiom. Panicked by the noise and flames, they broke and rushed diagonally upward across the slope. The loud-hailer hallooed, and a laser bolt—in massive overkill—crisped them to cinders.

  The hopper hung, swinging about, questing. Apparently Ashton did not stir, for nothing else caught its attention and it roared on to devour fresh ground. Stark continued to lie without moving. Loose dirt trickled from the clods with which he had camouflaged himself. Small disturbed things crawled on him. Some of them bit. The dark-eyed flowers peered this way and that in wild disarray; perhaps the air currents generated by the hopper were responsible. There was a smell of smoke in the air. Fire was spreading out from the thorn thickets, and the shot that killed the birds had set the grass alight. Stark could hear the crackling, entirely too close for comfort. He tried to assess the degree of dryness of the grass, hoping the flames would not spread too quickly. The line of search was drawing away, but the hoppers were bound to come back. It was too soon to move.

  The flowers looked down at him from around his face. They looked over him at the fires. They looked upward at the sky. Certainly flowers did not see, but they might have other sensors. They also had a faint sticky fragrance that became more insistent as Stark breathed it, even under the taint of smoke. He also had the unpleasant sensation that the grass crept against him like a sentient thing, touching him with its blades. He
had a very great desire to be on his feet again, and away from this too-great intimacy.

  Smoke began to blow across him. He forgot his other discomforts in the effort not to cough, and he believed the crackling sound was louder. Little puffs of heat touched his skin.

  The hoppers, having gone well past the point where their quarry might have run, wheeled round. They went more slowly on the way back, rummaging leisurely about the ruined landscape, making sure they had left no cover where a man might live. One of them came across the slope and speared Stark in the direct glare of the landing beam.

  He held his breath, and shut his eyes, lest they catch the light and shine. Smoke rolled across him—and that was good in one way—but he could feel the heat of the ground now with his feet. In a few moments the flames would be all around him. The grass and the flowers knew it, too; he had no further doubt that they were in some manner aware and cringing. He grappled with the panic that rose within him and held it down; then, after a lazy eternity, the hopper droned on over the ridge, back toward Arkeshti.

  Even so, Stark did not move until he could smell the soles of his boots smoldering. Then he had no further choice. Still in the thick smoke, he bolted out of his shallow grave and hurried along to where he had left Ashton, knowing that if another hopper chanced by they would have no hope.

  The fire had not yet spread near to Ashton, who had not moved. He rose up stiffly when Stark bent over him, and was obliged to stamp about in order to loosen his muscles.

  "When I used to go hunting with the abos," he said wryly, "I was somewhat younger. Otherwise, Four-Paws would have eaten me." He shivered. "That last one was too close for comfort! Thank God for the smoke."

  They set off, away from the ship, threading their way between fires and over patches of scorched ground. They heard no further sound of motors in the sky. Having stamped the land flat, the hunters could assume that the quarry had perished in one or another of the flaming coverts.

  Presently Stark and Ashton were beyond the perimeter of the fires. They kept on until it became apparent that Ashton, who had not had an easy day, was beginning to flag. Stark found a thicket, made sure that nothing laired in it, and sat down so the thorn-trees guarded his back. Penkawr-Che's poisons were still in his blood, so he was glad of the rest.