Doomstalker

  Still curious, she roamed the nearby hills, searching for nomads. Several times she brushed what might have been minds, but without any face she could visualize she could not come close enough to capture thoughts. Once, eastward, she brushed something powerful and hurried away, frightened. It had a vaguely male flavor. This wehrlen creature the Wise were so fussed about?

  Then she gave herself a real nightmare scare. She sent her thoughts drifting up around Machen Cave, and there she found that dread thing she had sensed last summer, only now it was awake and in a malevolent mood — and seemingly aware of her inspection. As she reeled away, ducked, and fled, she had a mental image of a huge, starving beast charging out of the cave at some small game unlucky enough to happen by.

  Twice in the next few minutes she thought she felt it looking for her, blundering around like a great, angry, stupid, hungry beast. She huddled into her furs and shook.

  She would have to warn Kublin.

  Sleep finally came.

  Nothing happened all next day. In tense quiet the pack simply continued to prepare for trouble, and the hours shuffled away. The huntresses spoke infrequently, and then only in low voices. The males spoke not at all. Horvat drove them mercilessly. The Wise sent up appeals to the All, helped a little, got in the way a lot.

  Marika did another turn on watch, and sharpened the captured axe, which her dam deemed a task suitable for a pup her age.

  III

  Autumn had come. High spirits were less often seen. Huntresses ranged the deep woods, ambushing game already migrating southward. Males smoked and salted with a more grim determination. Pups haunted the woods, gleaning deadwood. The Wise read omens in the flights of flyers, the coloration of insects, how much mast small arboreals stowed away, how deep the gurnen burrowed his place of hibernation.

  If the signs were unfavorable, the Wise would authorize the felling of living trees and a second or even third gathering of chote root. Huntresses would begin keeping a more than casual eye on the otec colonies and other bearers of fur, seeing what preparations they made for winter. It was in deep winter that those would be taken for their meat and hides.

  As winter gathered its legions behind the Zhotak and the meth of the upper Ponath became ever more mindful of the chance of sudden, deadly storms, time for play, for romping the woods on casual expeditions, became ever more scarce. There was always work for any pair of paws capable of contributing. Among the Degnan even the toddlers did their part.

  As many as five days might pass without Marika’s getting a chance to run free. Then, usually, she was on firewood detail. Pups tended to slip away from that. Their shirking was tolerated.

  That autumn the Wise concluded that it would be a hard winter, but they did not guess half the truth. Even so, the Degnan always put away far more than they expected to need. A simple matter of sensible precaution.

  Marika slipped off to Machen Cave for the last time on a day when the sky was gray and the wind was out of the north, damp and chill. The Wise were arguing about whether or not it bore the scent of snow, about who had the most reliable aches and pains in paws and joints. It was a day when Pohsit was lamenting her thousand infirmities, so it seemed she would not be able to rise, much less chase pups over hill and meadow.

  Marika went alone. Horvat had Kublin scraping hides, a task he hated — which was why Horvat had him doing it. To teach him that one must do that which one hates as well as that which one enjoys.

  It was a plain, simple run through the woods for Marika, a few hours on the slope opposite that where Machen Cave lay, stretching her new sensing in an effort to find the shadow hidden in the earth. Nothing came of it, and after a time she began wandering back toward the packstead, pausing occasionally to pick up a nut overlooked by the tree dwellers. She cracked those with her teeth, then extracted the sweet nutmeat. She noted the position of a rare, late-blooming medicinal plant, and collected a few fallen branches just so it would not seem she had wasted an entire afternoon. It was getting dusky when she reached the gate.

  She found Zamberlin waiting there, almost hiding in a shadow. “Where have you been?” he demanded. He did not await an answer. “You better get straight to Dam before anyone sees you.”

  “What in the world?” She could see he was shaken, that he was frightened, but not for himself. “What’s happened, Zambi?”

  “Better see Dam. Pohsit claims you tried to murder her.”

  “What?” She was not afraid at first, just astonished.

  “She says you pushed her off Stapen Rock.”

  Fear came. But it was not fear for herself. If someone had pushed Pohsit, it must have been...

  “Where is Dam?”

  “By the doorway of Gerrien’s loghouse. I think she’s waiting for you. Don’t tell her I warned you.”

  “Don’t worry.” Marika marched into the packstead, disposed of her burden at the first woodpile, spied her dam, went straight over. She was frightened now, but still much more for Kublin than for herself. “Dam?”

  “Where have you been, Marika?”

  “In the woods.”

  “Where in the woods?”

  “Out by Machen Cave.”

  That startled Skiljan. “What were you doing out there?”

  “I go there sometimes. When I want to think. Nobody else ever goes. I found some hennal.”

  Skiljan squinted at her. “You did not pass near Stapen Rock?”

  “No, Dam. I have heard what Pohsit claims. Pohsit is mad, you know. She has been trying —”

  “I know what she has been trying, pup. Did you decide you were a huntress and would get her before she got you?”

  “No, Dam.”

  Skiljan’s eyes narrowed. Marika thought her dam believed her, but also suspected she might know something she would not admit.

  “Dam?”

  “Yes?”

  “If I may speak? I would suggest a huntress of Grauel’s skill backtrack my scent.”

  “That will not be necessary. I am confident that you had nothing to do with it.”

  “Was she really hurt, Dam? Or just pretending?”

  “Half and half. There is no doubt she took a fall. But she was able to walk home and raise a stink. A very inept murder attempt if it was such. I am inclined to think she was clumsy. Though what a meth her age was doing trying to climb Stapen Rock is beyond me. Go now. Stay away from Pohsit for a few days.”

  “Yes, Dam.”

  Marika went looking for Kublin immediately. She found him where she had left him. She started to snarl, but before he even looked up he asked, in a voice no one else could hear, “How could you do such a bad job of it, Marika? Why didn’t you mash her head with a boulder while she was down, or something?”

  Marika gulped. Kublin thought she had done it? Confused, she mumbled something about having had nothing to do with Pohsit’s fall. She withdrew.

  Not till next day did she become suspicious. By then trails and evidences were impossible to find. And Kublin adamantly denied having had anything to do with it himself, though Marika was able to isolate a period when no one had seen him around the packstead. She could establish him no alibi. She did not press, though. For Kublin, a male, even circumstantial evidence would be enough to convict.

  In time even Pohsit began to wonder if the whole incident were not a product of her imagination. Imaginary or not, though, she let it feed her hatred, her irrational fear, her determination. Marika began to fear something would have to be done about the sagan.

  Luckily, more and more of the Degnan were sure Pohsit was slipping into her dotage. Persecution fears and crazy vendettas were common among the Wise.

  Marika did her best to stay out of the sagan’s way. And when winter brought worse than anyone expected, even Pohsit relented a little, in the spirit of the pack against the outside.

  Chapter Four

  I

  Marika’s next night watch was very late, or very early in the morning. The stars had begun to fade as the sun’s first w
eak rays straggled around the curve of the world. She stared at the heavens and daydreamed again, wondering incessantly about things hinted in the new book. What were these silth sisters? What were they finding up there among those alien suns? It was a shame she had been born to a pack on the very edge of civilization instead of in some great city of the south, where she might have a chance to enjoy such adventures.

  She probed for the messengers again, and again the touch was sharp. Both had reached the packfast. Both were sleeping restlessly in a cell of stone. Other minds moved around them. Not so densely as in a packstead, where there was a continuous clamor of thought, but many nevertheless. And all adult, all old, as if they were all the minds of the Wise. As if they were minds of sagans, for they had that flavor. One was near the messengers, as if watching over them. Marika tried to touch it more closely, to get the feel of these distant strangers who so frightened the Degnan.

  Alarm!

  That mind shied in sudden fear, sudden surprise, almost slipping away. Marika was startled herself, for no one ever noticed her.

  A countertouch, light for an instant, then hard and sudden like a hammer’s blow. Marika whimpered as fractured thought slammed into her mind.

  Who are you? Where? What?

  There was darkness around the edges of that, and hints of things of terror. Frightened, Marika fled into herself, blanking the world, pinching herself with claws. Pain forced her into her present moment atop the watchtower, alone and cold beneath mocking stars. She stared at Biter’s pocked face, so like an old meth Wise female, considering her from the horizon.

  What had she done? That old female had been aware of her. Marika’s fear redoubled as she recalled all the hints and half-heard talk of her elders that had made her determine to keep her talents hidden. She was certain many of her packmates would be terribly upset if they learned what she could do. Pohsit only suspected, and she wanted to kill...

  Had she gone too far, touching that distant female? Had she given herself away? Would there be repercussions?

  She returned to her furs and lay a long time staring at the logs overhead, battling fear.

  The nomads came next morning. Everyone rushed to the stockade. Even the toddlers, whimpering in their fright. Fear filled the packstead with a stench the north wind did not carry away.

  There were about a hundred of the northerners, and they were as ragged as Marika had pictured them. They made no effort to surprise the packstead. That was impossible. They stood off and studied it.

  The sky was overcast, but not so heavily that shafts of sunlight did not break through and sweep over the white earth. Each time a rushing finger of light passed over the nomads, it set the heads of spears and arrows aglitter. There was much iron among them, and not all were as careless of their weapons as had been the owner of the axe Marika had sharpened for so long.

  Skiljan went around keeping heads down. She did not want the nomads to get a good estimate of numbers. The packstead looked small because its stockade had been built close to the loghouses. Let them think the packstead weaker than it was. They might do something foolhardy and find their backs broken before they learned the truth.

  Marika did not find that reasonable thinking. The nomad leaders would have questioned meth from captured packsteads, wouldn’t they? Surely they would have learned something about the Degnan packstead.

  She gave them too much credit. They seemed wholly ignorant. After a few hours of watching, circling, little rushes toward the stockade by small groups trying to draw a response, a party of five approached the gate slowly, looking to parlay. An old male continued a few steps more after the other four halted. Speaking with an accent which made him almost incomprehensible, he called out, “Evacuate this packstead. Surrender your fortunes to the Shaw. Become one with the Shaw in body and wealth, and none of you will be harmed.”

  “What is he talking about?” huntresses asked one another. “What is this ‘Shaw’?”

  The old male stepped closer. More carefully, trying to approximate the upper Ponath dialect more closely, he repeated, “Evacuate the packstead and you will not be harmed.”

  Skiljan would not deign to speak with a rogue male. She exchanged a meaningful glance with Gerrien, who nodded. “Arrows,” Skiljan ordered, and named the five best archers among the Degnan huntresses. “Loose!” An instant later the nomads were down. “That is five we do not have to fight,” Skiljan said, as pragmatic as ever.

  The crowd on the field sent up a terrible howl. They surged forward, their charge a disorganized, chaotic sweep. The Degnan sent arrows to meet them. A few went down.

  “They have ladders,” Marika said, peeping between the sharpened points of two stockade logs. “Some of them have ladders, Dam.”

  Skiljan boxed her ear, demanded, “What are you doing out here? Get inside. Wise! Get these pups cleared off the stockade. Marika. Tell Rechtern I want her.”

  Rechtern was the eldest of all the Degnan Wise, a resident of Foehse’s loghouse. The All had been kind to her. Though she had several years on the next oldest of the Wise, her mind remained clear and her body spry.

  Marika scrambled down and, rubbing her ear, went looking for the old female. She found her watching over the pups of Foehse’s loghouse as they fled inside. She said, “Honored One, the huntress Skiljan requests you come speak with her.” The forms required one to speak so to the Wise, but, in fact, Skiljan’s “request” amounted to an order. The iron rule of meth society was stated bluntly in the maxim “As strength goes.”

  Marika shadowed Rechtern back to the stockade, heard her dam tell the old female, “Arm the males. We may not be able to hold them at the stockade.” Only the Wise could authorize arming the males. But a huntress such as Skiljan or Gerrien could order the Wise. There were traditions, and rules, and realities. “As strength goes.”

  Marika waited in the shadows, listening, shaking, irked because she could not see what was happening. There were snarls and crashes above and outside. There were cries of pain and screams of rage and the clang of metal on metal. The nomads were trying to scale the stockade. The huntresses were pushing them back. On the platforms behind the inner circle of the palisade, old females still able to bend a bow or hurl a javelin sped missiles at any target they saw.

  A female cried out overhead. A body thumped down beside Marika, a nomad female gravid but skeletally thin. A long, deep gash ran from her dugs to her belly. Her entrails leaked out, steaming in the cold. A metal knife slipped from her relaxing paw. Marika snatched it up.

  Another body fell, barely missing her. This one was an old female of the Degnan. She grunted, tried to rise. A howl of triumph came from above. A huge, lank male leapt down, poised a stone-tipped spear for the kill.

  Marika did not think. She hurtled forward, buried the knife in the nomad’s back. He jerked away, heaved blood all over his dead packmate. He thrashed and made gurgling sounds for half a minute before finally lying still. Marika darted out and tried to recover the knife. It would not come free. It was lodged between ribs.

  Another nomad dropped down, teeth bared in a killing snarl. Marika squeaked and started to back away, eyeing the spear her victim had dropped.

  The third invader pitched forward. The old Degnan female who had fallen from the palisade had gotten her feet under her and leapt onto his back, sinking her teeth in his throat. The last weapon, meth called their teeth. Marika snatched up the spear and stabbed, stabbed, stabbed, before the nomad could shake the weak grasp of the old female. No one of her thrusts was a killer, but in sum they brought him down.

  Yet another attacker came over the stockade. Marika ran for her loghouse, spear clutched in both paws. She heard Rechtern calling the males out.

  More nomads were over the stockade in several other places. A dozen were looking for someone to kill or something to carry away.

  The males and remaining old females rushed upon them with skinning knives, hatchets, hammers, hoes, and rakes. Marika stopped just outside the windskins of her l
oghouse, watched, ready to dart to safety.

  More nomads managed to cross the stockade. She thought them fools. Badly mistaken fools. They should have cleared the defenders from the palisade before coming inside. When the huntresses there — few of them had been cut down — no longer faced a rush from outside, they turned and used their bows.

  There was no mistaking a nomad struck by an arrow on which Bhlase’s poison had been painted. The victim went into a thrashing, screaming, mouth-frothing fit, and for a few seconds lashed out at anyone nearby. Then muscles cramped, knotted, locked his body rigidly till death came. And even then there was no relaxation.

  The males and old females fled into the loghouses and held the doorways while the huntresses sniped from the palisade.

  The surviving invaders panicked. They had stormed into a death trap. Now they tried to get out again. Most were slain trying to get back over the stockade.

  Marika wondered if her dam had planned it that way, or if it was a gift from the All. No matter. The attack was over. The packstead had survived it. The Degnan were safe.

  Safe for the moment. There were more nomads. And they could be the sort who would deem defeat a cause for blood feud.

  Seventy-six nomad corpses went into a heap outside the stockade. Seventy-six leering heads ended up on a rack as a warning to anyone else considering an attack upon the packstead. Only nineteen of the pack itself died or had to be slain because of wounds. Most of those were old females and males who had been too weak or too poorly armed. Many fine weapons were captured.

  Skiljan took a party of huntresses in pursuit of those nomads who had escaped. Many of those were injured or had been too weak to scale the stockade in the first place. Skiljan believed most could be picked off without real risk to herself or those who hunted her.

  The Wise ruled that the Mourning be severely truncated. There was no wood to spare for pyres and no time for the elaborate ritual customary when one of the Degnan rejoined the All. It would take a week to properly salute the departure of so many. And they in line behind the three who had fallen near Stapen Rock, as yet unMourned themselves.