Doom's Break (22 page)

The leader stepped forward and raised one hand. In the other he clutched the small set of pipes.

The drumming suddenly stopped. For the first time in days.

Only the flames crackled in the fire. The whole world seemed breathless, awoken to a new and deadly peril.

The huge man had removed his boots and leggings. He wore only his tunic and loincloth. He raised the pipes to his lips and blew upon them. There came a long, sharp note, then another, and then a longer, lower one, which he held and then let tremble into vibrato.

The giant stepped forward to the edge of the space covered in the white powder, now slick with a pool of blood. He lifted the pipes again and began to blow an odd little tune, eerie in its cheerfulness. It rose and fell a few times, coming to a short encore section once again, and he hopped forward and began to dance upon the blood-soaked ground.

The dance was strange, unnatural. He jerked his head from side to side, hopping from one foot to the other, bending the leg deeply, then hopping again to the other foot before straightening for a moment.

The blood mixed with the powder and spattered up onto his legs, even to his belly, while he danced.

Like everyone else, Thru was held spellbound by the scene, until he remembered the captives. He turned away from the flap. There was no better time to make the attempt.

The pen was easy to demolish, and the ropes that bound the captives by the neck were quickly cut. But getting the older mots across the tent and under the tent wall was not easy. They had been kept on their knees for a long time and were very stiff and weak.

Thru realized that some of them would not survive the next few days.

Outside the tent, there were more immediate perils to face. The guards were not a problem, since their attention was captured by the giant man. But Thru had no idea what was lurking in the woods around the camp. He kept them all together in a group as he led them to the hollow tree trunk. They climbed inside and crawled forward, and he brought up the rear. No cry came from the guards; they were all riveted upon the strange scene playing out by the fire.

The Old One danced in the sacred mud, sanctified with the blood of sacrifice. He played the ancient tune, and out in the woods his children stirred. The men watched the ceremony without comprehension, aware only that some awful power was being conjured up before them. Their hair rose on end, shudders ran down their backs, sweat broke out on their temples, but still they stared, captivated by the bizarre sight.

Out under the trees, the effects of the dance were far greater. The throats of the bull pyluk constricted, their eyes watered, and their hands shook. Some fell to the ground and writhed helplessly.

Suddenly, from hundreds of leathery throats, came harsh babbling sounds. The hills resounded as if from a vast crowd shouting one name, as if the very hills had come to life. The men around the fire stared at one another in wonder. The babbling resolved into a strange song, a creaking, groaning tune that matched the music of the pipes.

In a vision from some rent in the fabric of the universe, the pyluk emerged from their hiding places and approached the fire. They came in a wave, tall, hideous figures, their long throwing spears in their hands. They marched up to the fire and stood there, entranced, swaying to the tune.

The appearance of the pyluk sent a convulsion through the men. Some drew their swords. Others looked to their tents where they had left their weapons. They had been warned to expect something strange to come out of the woods, but this invasion of huge lizard-men went far beyond anything they could have dreamed.

The things were bigger than men. They wore crude shell decoration and carried long, untipped spears. Their heads were like those of small crocodiles but perverted by a brain case almost as large as that of a man or a mot. There was intelligence in those yellow eyes, but it was not like that of men, mots, or anything else in the world.

As more and more of them emerged, fear began to swell in the hearts of the men. Hundreds of the things were coming. If the situation turned ugly, the men might all die here.

As the crowd of green-skinned monsters grew until it was twenty or thirty deep, the men on the other side of the fire looked about them with bulging eyes. All felt the same question burning in their minds: How could so many of these creatures have approached so close without being detected?

While the men grappled with these thoughts, a small group of mots and mors, gasping from the effort, struggled up the hill path in the opposite direction.

Again and again they flattened themselves to the ground or behind trees as parties of pyluk emerged, spears in hand, the very stuff of nightmares for mot children down the ages. But these pyluk took no notice of the easy meat to be had. Their attention was entirely given to the dancing god by the fire.

At the top of the hill, old Kurtha knelt down, unable to go any farther.

"You'd best kill me."

Thru shook his head.

"No, I mean it. I can't keep up."

Thru would not listen. He paused only long enough to get Kurtha over his shoulders before driving on to the top of the hill. Then he stopped to look back.

Down below by the fire was a scene from some portrait of the damned. A great wedge of pyluk had taken over half the area of the camp. The men had retreated into a tight knot on one side of the fire. The giant man continued his hypnotic dance.

Suddenly Thru understood what was happening, and a great chill sank into his heart. He turned to the others with fire in his eyes.

"Up now; we must go on. We must warn the folk."

General Toshak and his immediate staff stood on Bear Hill overlooking Warkeen village. Off to their right far out in the bay, they saw the sails of the enemy. With a spyglass the great ships could be studied in detail where they tacked back and forth, marking time. They'd been there for more than a week, contributing to the mystery of what this new invading army of men was up to.

From his vantage point Toshak could see far inland as well, up the valley of the Dristen. When he looked that way, the sense of mystery deepened.

Again he considered what was known. A party of scouts or raiders had been set ashore. They had done some damage to houses in Warkeen, but had not burned the village, and then gone upstream, riding on the backs of enormous donkeys, or animals that looked like donkeys. Toshak knew they were horses. He had learned about them from the Assenzi.

The folk of the valley had fled to safety, though there was a report that a band of stragglers had been taken near Juno village. Toshak's men had since moved most of the refugees down the coast to Dronned. His army, nine thousand strong at this point, was spread all over this area. Every day reinforcements arrived as regiments of recruits came up from the mustering at Dronned. Everything on that front was going well. Building on the core of veterans from the previous campaigns, the new army of Dronned had formed up quickly and efficiently. Toshak had been quietly pleased by the response.

He had a brigade placed in the village, another in reserve a little farther down the road, and a third up on the hill. But as of yet they'd had no enemy to fight, just the fleet crisscrossing back and forth across the mouth of the bay.

In the meantime, Toshak had received messages from Aeswiren, brought in down the coast by swift-sailing frigates. The Emperor had embarked his own army on Admiral Heuze's ships. They had crossed the Sea of Geld and were last reported off the coast of Sulmo. They wouldn't reach Dronned for a week or more, but at that point Toshak would have ten thousand battle-hardened men as reinforcements.

Then Toshak would face the situation he had been dreading. In his heart, Toshak could not shake entirely his suspicion of men, any man, even though he had met the Emperor and come to like him. There was also the problem of the two armies joining together. There were mots who hated all men with a passion, and there were men who had not lost their previous hatred for the "monkeys." The two armies in close proximity was a combustible mixture.

So far, though, the enemy had done nothing. One raiding party had disappeared into the distant mountains. It was all very mysterious. It made no sense at all. The mountains were beautiful but dangerous, haunted by pyluk and giant bears. What could the men possibly be doing in such terrain?

He noticed a sudden stir amid his guard. Up the path toward them came a party of three mots. One of them wore the red pins in his lapel that marked him as the quartermaster general of the army of Dronned.

"General Meu." Toshak clapped his quartermaster on the shoulder. "You have good news for me, I take it."

"Yes, sir, we have assembled enough local supplies for the army for at least three days. By then we should have a wagon train in from Dronned."

"That's a relief. One thing we don't have to worry about."

"Yes, sir. And I have word that the wagons with the catapults will be here tomorrow morning. They're camped six miles south."

Toshak nodded. The catapults would be a nasty surprise for the enemy fleet if they came in close enough to shore.

"Sir, have you had any word of Thru Gillo?"

"No, Meu. I know he is a friend of yours, but we have no word from Colonel Gillo."

All that was known was that Gillo had gone ashore from the
Sea Wasp
to track the raiders. He had disappeared up the valley in the wake of the enemy. Nothing more had been heard or seen of him.

The
Sea Wasp
had slipped out to sea to get around the enemy fleet and had brought the first detailed news of the landing to Dronned. The trusty vessel was now shadowing the enemy, part of Admiral Heuze's scout force, along with two frigates, the
Duster
and the
Cloud
. The enemy ignored them, though they had six frigates of their own and could have given chase at any time.

Thus the situation rested, baffling and enigmatic, and Toshak hated it. He hated most of all being on the back foot, waiting to see what the enemy would do next.

The chase continued through the glittering light of late afternoon. The hills were aglow with the setting of the sun, but, under the trees, hunters and prey alike were oblivious to these fleeting glories. The prey, a small group of mots, staggered along a well-marked deer trail, spent and close to collapse.

Thru, desperate to get out of a foot race with the pyluk, looked off to either side of the path. They were on a ridgeline, chased up through the thinning ranks of trees toward a mountain that Thru suspected was Garspike itself. Once they were up there, they would have little chance of escape from the fleet-footed pyluk and their throwing spears. Even if they had to risk sliding down on their backsides, they had to find a way to get down from this ridge.

There! He saw, ahead a little ways, a gravel-filled wash sloping away between the tangled roots of some trees. Quickly he drew his companions to the spot.

"It is our only hope."

Freese, the oldest mot, shook his head. The gravel slide was steep, and it went down out of sight.

"Come on!" Thru would brook no opposition. "It's this or the pyluk."

Faced with that choice, the mots slid. Freese followed Iallia and the others, and Thru came last. The pyluk were still far enough behind not to be able to see them. The slide was fast and rough. Thru felt the stones kicking against his buttocks and back; he caromed off a tree root, shot down a chute between boulders, and then fell six feet vertically to land in a rocky streambed. That final drop was hard. Thru almost turned an ankle. Old Freese had broken his leg.

Aghast, Thru stared at the old mot. He'd known this might happen, but he'd had no choice. The leg was twisted badly, the broken bone protruding through the skin below the knee. Freese knew his time had come.

"Kill me," he breathed.

Thru looked at the others. They knew it had to be done. Already they were starting to move away, leaving it for Thru to finish.

"I'm sorry, eldermot. I tried."

"I know, and you have my blessing, but don't leave me for those things."

Thru wielded the knife in a smooth stroke. As he moved down the gulch, he thought to himself of another sad consequence of the coming of men: He had learned to kill like an expert.

They had left the pyluk several hundred feet above them. The streambed took them around a curve then through a craggy canyon and out onto the southwestern side of Garspike Ridge. For a short distance they had a wide view off to the south. The valley swept westward, the hills rose up, and another great mountain bulked up into the sky. The trees began to thicken again, and the ground was soft in places—there was no possibility of hiding their trail.

They stumbled on, Iallia and Thru helping the older ones where they could. Thru did not know this country, and being up in the high hills like this left him anxious about being trapped atop some unexpected cliff face.

An old mor, Gefeeler, had to stop. "Breath, I have to get more breath," she said, leaning against a tree.

The others stopped beside her. Thru could see that none of them could go on much longer.

He climbed a tree and tried to spy out the way ahead. The forested hillside curved away beneath the Garspike. Downhill, the woods thickened further. Above them, they thinned out on the rockier slopes.

He looked back. The pyluk were not in sight. Carefully he scanned the high slopes, up where the ridgeline trail had been leading them.

Suddenly he caught sight of a group of vertical sticks in motion along the top of the crest. Thru crouched down, hiding beneath the leaves. The pyluk were perhaps two hundred feet above them, moving along the rocky path at the top of the cliff. He watched, rigid with tension, as those spears continued to move along the ridgetop, heading west. When they were gone, he climbed down.

At the base of the tree the others were all stretched out, barely able to move. Thru thought hard.

He did not know the lay of the land very well, but he did know that he'd come up the Garspike on the other side. And that the river broke over the northwestern side of the ridge. To head downslope directly would take them south into the valley below, which trended west. The valley would lead to the main Dristen Valley, which lay two or three days' journey to the west.