Manhounds of Antares (10 page)

Of course, my every instinct impelled me to dump Lilah down and, knives in fists, turn and battle these filthy manhounds, these high and mighty hunters. But I quelled that primeval instinct. My mission was to rescue Lilah, not to get myself killed in however enjoyable a way slaying manhounds and devilish hunters astride their zorcas.

Now we could hear the high excited keening of the jiklos. They were men! Men! Yet they were more fiercely predatory hunters than any bloodhound, any wersting, and to fall into their clutches would mean a hideous death.

We struggled and scrambled on, and came to a wall of rock.

“Put me down, Dray. We must climb.”

“Get started, Lilah. When you are at the top, I will follow.”

Sosie was already climbing, and Naghan following. Of the others I could see or hear nothing.

Lilah sprang at the rocks, began to haul herself up by ridge and crevice, her long golden hair very bright in the waning light of the twin suns.

I waited.

After what seemed a very long time I heard Lilah call, and about to wheel about and follow her, I caught the feral movement in the greenery opposite, the dagger-bright flash of jagged teeth.

A manhound sprang out from the trees, hurtled straight toward me.

And then — something for which I had not been prepared, the jiklo shouted to me, shouted words of a thick local language that, through the gene-manipulative pill of Maspero’s in far Aphrasöe, I was able to understand.

The manhound spoke in a thick rasping whine, a hoarse and bloodthirsty howl.

“You are done for, you two-legged yetch!”

He bounded straight for me. The long mane streamed back from the central crest. His nails glittered. His eyes were bloodshot. And his teeth — could they ever have been the teeth of normal man? Sharp and jagged, serrated, as he opened his mouth to snarl at me those teeth looked like the teeth of risslaca honed to rip hot flesh and blood!

I poised, let fly one of my knives.

He tried to duck, but he was not quick enough.

The knife buried itself in one eye.

The jiklo let out an insane scream.

He was bounding into the air, rearing, his face a demoniac mask of hate and blood-lust. He pawed up at the knife hilt.

He twisted, he toppled, he fell.

There was no time to recover the knife.

Up those rocks I went like a grundal.

From the open space the fresh sounds of a second jiklo struck over the slobbering shrieking of the first. Lilah screamed something incoherent. If that had been my Delia up there she wouldn’t have been screaming, telling me something I already knew; my Delia would have been hurling rocks down to protect the back of her man.

Without looking back I lashed out with my foot and felt my heel jar into something hairy and hard, and the howling changed key into a yowling. I scrambled up the last few yards of the rock face and swung about at the top, on all fours like a damned jiklo myself, and so peered over the lip.

The bounding demoniac shapes of more manhounds ferreted through the trees and sprang into the space before the rocks.

“Sink me!” I said. I stood up and grabbed Lilah’s wrist. “The rock won’t stop them. By the Black Chunkrah, woman, stop that blabbering and run!”

Oh, yes, I, Dray Prescot, ran.

We fled through the rock gullies with the overhanging trees making the way alternately dark and light, shot through with the last rays of the sinking suns, so that all the world turned an angry viridian blood color, most unsettling.

Farther on I caught up with Naghan and Sosie, who ran, gasping and panting, in a way distressing to me.

We paused for a quick breather and in that space of hard-drawn breaths we heard the click and patter of jiklo claws following us. Sosie screamed again, and Naghan clapped a hand across her face — but gently.

“If we split up we will stand a better chance,” said Naghan, the young man who claimed with so much pride to come from Hamal.

“Agreed,” I said. Then: “I wish you well, Naghan, and you, Sosie. May Zair go with you.”

Of course they had no idea what or who Zair was, that was quite clear, but they understood, and commended me to the care of Opaz.

“Remberee!” we shouted, and then ran as fast as we might over the rocks and splinters up separate gullies.

After only a short time I hoisted Lilah to my shoulder and was able to progress at a faster rate. Only a short time after that we heard the most horrendous screams and shrieks, the snuffling howling of jiklos, the blood-crazed shrieking, and we knew that Naghan and Sosie would never return home to Hamal.

There was nothing I could do about that, and I thrust all thoughts of the despicable way I had been acting lately out of my mind. I had to free this Princess Lilah, otherwise the Star Lords would hurl me back to Earth.

This I knew.

She of the Veils rose into the sky and very quickly the Twins added their combined pink light so that we could press on without fear of falling into a crevasse or pitching over the precipice of a river bank. The trees thinned away and we had to decelerate our rapid onward march as the land trended downward. We skidded and rolled in a great sliding whoosh down a sheer scree-clad slope — highly dangerous, is scree, to one without experience — and at the bottom we found rocky inclines which led us out onto the hard banks of a river. Perforce, we had to turn south and follow the river, seeing its waters slide and gleam below us in the encompassing pink light. Occasional rocks and falls interrupted the river’s flow, but I made Lilah walk on all night, with stops to rest now and then, and in the end carried her, fast asleep on my shoulder.

There was no question of my being tired.

By morning the river banks had sunk to a nice level meadow-like embankment. Through the early morning mists I could see the supple sheen and glide of the river, smooth and unmarred, and presently, after a little rise and a few gorse-like bushes, we came to the sea.

The sea.

Well, I wondered if that harsh interdiction of the Star Lords against my venturing out onto the sea still prevented me from doing what I had for so long missed.

As to that, ever since my cruel transition here to the manhounds’ island of Faol I had not been acting as Dray Prescot would ordinarily act, and I had rationalized that out. I was most dissatisfied.

Lilah let out a cry of joy.

“Look, Dray! Across the strait! The White Rock of Gilmoy!”

I looked across the sea. Over there the dark bar of land penned in a strait which was, so I judged, in flood. Standing proudly forth, like a sentinel finger, was a tremendous pillar of rock on that opposite shore, white and blinding on its eastern edge where the light struck it, shadowed on the west.

“You know where we are, Lilah?”

“Yes! That white rock is famed throughout Havilfar. It stands on the northern shore of Gilmoy and I have flown over it many times. I had no idea Faol was close.” She shivered at this.

“Then we must find a boat.”

The notion struck my fancy. The Star Lords had forbidden me to journey by sea; they had also bidden me rescue Princess Lilah, and to do that I must take to a boat. Now let the Star Lords unravel that knot — I cared not a fig for them. We walked along the beach. I could see no boats at once, and in that I felt disappointment.

A house, set back against the line of gorse-covered hills backing the beach, showed a thread of smoke from its chimney. In a pen at the side two dozen or so flying beasts flapped their wings and shrilled. They were sitting on lenken bars into which their claws sank, and they were chained by iron. They looked to be not as large as the impiters, those coal-black flying animals of The Stratemsk, but larger than the corths. Their coloring varied, tending generally to a beige-white and a velvet-green, and their heads were marked by large vanes after the fashion of pteranodons. They looked to be nasty brutes, well enough. Lilah took an eager step forward.

“Fluttrells!” she exclaimed. “We are in luck, Dray. The wind-eaters will carry us swiftly over the strait to Gilmoy, and from thence home to Hyrklana!”

Before I could answer the door of the house burst open and a ragged mob of men wielding weapons sprang out. They did not stop or pause in their rush but came on with an intent I have fronted many times. The pen was to hand. There was only one thing I could do. I grabbed Lilah and fairly ran her across to the sturm-wood bars of the pen. I selected the nearest fluttrell, and gave it a great thumping flat-handed smack around its snouted face to tell it who was master — I had no shame in this brutalization, for death ran very close to our heels — and hoisted Lilah onto the bird’s back.

“Can you fly one without stirrup, clerketer, rein?”

“I am perfectly at home in or on anything that flies in the air.”

The feel of the flying beast between her legs had changed Lilah — either that, or she was scenting her homeland. She looked at me with a triumphant expression.

“Mount up, Dray! Let us be off!”

“Not so, Princess.” Swiftly I released the locks of the chains holding the fluttrell. “You must fly for your home. If I take off with you these men will follow and we will surely be caught. You must go — I will hold them off until you are well clear.”

“But, Dray! They will slay you!”

“I do not think so, Lilah.”

I gave the fluttrell an almighty thwack and with a bad-tempered squawk it fluttered its wings and rose into the air. Lilah had to cling to its neck, ducking her head beneath the great balancing vane. She looked down on me. I snatched up a length of timber from the pen and with this cocked in my fists — and my fists spread in the old Krozair longsword way as I had done aboard Viridia the Render’s flagship when I fought her Womoxes — I awaited the onslaught of the men from the house.

“You will be slain, Dray Prescot!” she called down.

“You are safe, Lilah! Now go!”

She kicked the sides of the magnificent flying animal. “I shall not forget you, Dray Prescot!” And then, faintly as she rose into the limpid morning sky: “Remberee, Dray Prescot!”

I admit it now — I can look back and see and understand my feelings then — I welcomed the coming fight. I had run and crawled and pulled my forelock long enough. These men might be justified in their instant attack upon us — although I doubted that — but they would rue the day they tangled with me.

No doubt the Star Lords thought that a good joke, too.

As I held that length of lumber prepared to show these yokels a little sword-practice, I felt, suddenly, treacherously, the shifting sensations and the blue radiance close about me, and I could no longer feel the wooden longsword — and I was slipping and sliding into the radiant blue void.

Prey of the Manhounds of Antares

The stink of slaves lay in my nostrils with that thick choking odor so familiar to me.

A voice said: “I can guide you out, Golan, by Hito the Hunter! But you must run—”

“I can run, Anko! And I will reward you, liberally, magnificently! I am a Pallan—”

“And me! And me!” other voices lifted, beseeching, begging, pleading to be led to freedom.

I opened my eyes.

I had failed the Star Lords.

The brazen notes of a stentor’s horn filled the caves and passageways and like swirling weeds at the turn of the tide all the slaves raced madly off to the feeding hall. I stood up. By the Black Chunkrah! I’d go down to the feeding cave and take my food if I had to snatch it from all the Khamorros in Havilfar and all the guides in Faol!

So the Princess Lilah of Hyrklana with the golden hair and the beautiful form had not been the one I had been sent here to rescue.

There was but one thing I could do.

I must find the correct slave to be rescued and take him or her out to safety. Guide or no guide.

Down in the feeding cave I saw a lithe and limber young man with dark hair, very alert in carriage now he was alone with only slaves about him, talking earnestly with a bulky man who had once been plump. His face, much sunken in, still contained traces of the habitual power of command he had once wielded. This was Golan, and he had been a Pallan, and had been betrayed, and so sold into slavery and found himself dispatched to Faol, where slaves brought a high price.

Golan?

I lifted my chunk of vosk — a Rapa who had thought to dispute with me its possession lay on the floor unconscious — and shook it at the rocky ceiling. “You stupid Star Lords!” I said, but I did not speak aloud, for I did not wish to attract unwelcome attention to myself, and although insanity was common enough among slaves, it was still regarded with a leery suspicion. “Idiot Everoinye! How am I supposed to know whom to rescue out of this mad crowd?”

I received no answer, and expected none, and so sank my teeth into the vosk and stared sullenly at my fellow slaves.

My beard had grown and my hair, too, making me look even more wild and uncouth and slavelike. All the same, Tulema recognized me instantly.

“Dray! I thought — how did you—? Have you crawled back through the caves?”

“No, Tulema. I didn’t go.” Then, to allay her suspicions, I said: “Here, finish this vosk for me. I am heartily sick of this place, for I thought I was safely away, and then I was not.”

Instead of saying, as one would, “Tell me about it,” she seized the remaining chunk of vosk with my teethmarks sharp upon it and wolfed it down. No one, it was clear, had been looking out for Tulema.

Could my target be this girl, with her lithe body and dark hair, all matted with dirt, her savage ways, this girl who had been a dancer in a dopa den? I did not think so. It was, in truth and given the circumstances of my return, far more likely to be this Golan, who had been a Pallan. A Pallan, as you know, is a minister of state, a high official, and if he had been disgraced and sold as a slave, it might be my duty to return him and thus affect some great design in the political structure of Kregen. Lacking any other clues, I decided it must be Golan.

Of one thing I could be sure. If it was not Golan then I would be seized by the blue radiance and hurled back into the slave pens tunneled into the caves.