He beamed the silent summons to Baku who must be cruising overhead, felt Surra press reassuringly against him. Then the Terran made a slow descent of the drop immediately below him. As his boots struck the surface of the plateau he shouted aloud the rallying call of the team.
“Saaaaaaaa—”
Out of the black sky Baku dropped, a thing that was a feathered part of the night endowed with separate life. Storm staggered a step or two as she set her claws in the blanket on his shoulder, resting her weight above the green wound. But he recovered swiftly and straightened under that necessary burden.
Then, with Hing wary against his breast, her eyes as bright as his necklace, and Surra, soft-footed beside him, showing her fangs in a snarl that wrinkled her lips, Storm walked confidently into the full light of the fire.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Comes now the Monster Slayer, wearing this one’s moccasins,
Wearing the body of the storm born one.
Comes now the Monster Slayer, bowstring extended,
Arrow notched upon it for the flying—
Comes now the Monster Slayer—ready for battle—”
S
torm was no Singer, but somehow the words came to his tongue, fitted themselves readily together into patterns of power so that the Terran believed he walked protected by the invisible armor of one who talked with the Faraway Gods, was akin to the Old Ones. He could feel that power rise and possess him. And with such to strengthen him what need had a man for other weapons?
The Terran did not see the Nitra rows split apart to make him a pathway to the edge of the fire. He was not truly aware of anything except the song and the power and the fact that, at this moment, Hosteen Storm was a small but well-fitting part of something much greater than any one man could aspire to be—
He stood still now, bracing himself under the weight of Baku, not noting the pain that weight brought him. Before him was a blue-horned Nitra wizard, his tambor drum raised. But the native was no longer beating it, instead he was staring at this apparition out of the night.
“Ahuuuuuu!” Storm’s voice spiraled up in the old war cry of his desert raiding people. “Ahuuuuuu!”
The Nitra wizard thumped his drum, was answered by a roll of muted thunder. However, there was a hesitation in that reply, which Storm sensed more than saw. The native made talk in his own high-pitched voice. To that the Terran did not reply with finger-talk. This was no time to betray kinship with the settlers and their ways. He turned to face the four prisoners, saw recognition leap to life in Logan’s eyes, surprise dawn in Quade’s.
“Power is in this one’s arm—power is in this one,
The Monster Slayer wears now this one’s body—
He walks in this one—”
Surra moved with Storm, matching her soft padding to his deliberate pace. He released Hing from his hold. The meerkat scurried, a gray shadow touched to life by the fire, to the nearest pillar. Rising on her hind legs, she attacked the prisoners’ bonds with teeth and claws. Storm gestured and Surra moved as quickly to Logan and his partner at the other post, to chew at the hide thongs about their bodies.
The Nitra priest squalled like an enraged yoris and sprang at Storm shaking his tambor. Baku mantled, her fierce eyes on the native, screaming with rage. She took off into the air and came down to do as she seldom did, attack from ground level, as she had faced the zamle in Krotag’s village. And the Nitra gave ground before her bristling fury, so that bird drove man around the fire and there was a shrilling chorus of wonder from the watching warriors.
“Power is now ours!” Storm exulted in a song perhaps only one other within hearing could understand. But if the words were unknown the meaning was clear and as he moved forward again the Nitra cowered away from him.
Quade stepped away from the pillar where he had been bound and Storm saw him shake off cut thongs. Gorgol had played his part back in the shadows. The settler jumped to catch the staggering Logan, but the younger man’s hand rested on Surra’s head for a moment—an attention the big cat had never before permitted from any save Storm—and he was once more steady on his feet.
“Let us go forth in power—” The Terran’s voice arose above the screaming rage of Baku. Surra led the retreat with Quade supporting his son, the riders crowding behind. Hing ran to Storm and climbed his leg, hooking her claws in his breeches.
“Go forth in power—” Storm put full urgency into that order. He moved between the retreating men and the restless Nitra. How long he could hold the natives Storm had no idea, but at this moment he had no doubts that he could hold them. Only a very few times in his life had the Terran experienced this inner rightness, this being a part of a bigger pattern that was meant to work smoothly. Once when he first had his orders obeyed as team leader by the animals and Baku—twice during his service days when that team carried through a difficult assignment with perfect precision. But this in its way was again different, for the power flowed through him alone.
“This one walks in power—
This one carries power—
This one works the will of the Old Ones,
The Old Ones who walk in beauty,
This one serves—”
The rescued had gone beyond the rim of the firelight.
“Saaaaaa—”
Baku came to him. The Norbie wizard had a bleeding gash on his forearm and he no longer held the tambor. There was bitter hatred in his eyes and a knife ready in his hand. As Baku settled again on Storm’s shoulder the Nitra followed her in the arching spring of an attacking yoris.
He reached Storm only to go down with the stiff jerk of a man who had been rayed. And from the massed warriors there arose a wailing cry. It was then that Storm laughed. This was a night in which nothing could go wrong! Gorgol had used his rod at the right moment as he had earlier used his knife. They were all riding one of the waves of phenomenal luck that sometimes overtakes tides of action and can be used to carry a man on their crest until he is able to achieve the impossible. The Singers were right. At that moment full belief in the unseen powers of his people flooded through Storm, burning away all doubts. He was truly possessed and no Nitra—no—nor Xik—could stand successfully against him!
He withdrew stride by stride backwards to the edge of the light where he must climb to the heights.
“Over here, Storm—” came a low call just before the Nitra pack screeched their fear and anger aloud—though no warrior ventured in pursuit. A hand caught his arm, pulled him up to the cliff wall.
“Where did you come from?” Quade demanded. “We thought you were dead!”
Storm laughed again. The intoxication that filled him still bubbled.
“Far from dead,” he said. “But we had better get out of here before they recover nerve enough to come hunting—”
His exultation held as they climbed back to the ledge of the deserted nest, worked their way around to the valley of the Sealed Cave. But at the mouth of that same cave he halted.
“Listen!” His tone was so sharply commanding that the men about him were silent.
And it was not so much a noise that they heard as a vibration, which came to them through the walls of stone, from the earth under their feet.
“The Xik ship!” Storm knew that trembling of old. He had sheltered in hiding to watch the enemy take-off from hidden ports he had been sent to locate and harass. Always there had been that shaking of the earth as the alien ships had warmed to their take-off.
“What—?” Quade demanded.
“The Xik ship—it is getting ready to take off. They may be leaving Arzor!”
Quade, one arm about Logan, put his other hand to the cliff surface.
“What a vibration!”
Too much so. Storm was conscious of that suddenly. The ship he had seen in the hidden valley was no intergalactic transport—it was hardly larger than a converted scout. This tearing was too much! Another Xik craft hidden somewhere near? Only now that throbbing came raggedly—
&n
bsp; There was a roar that filled the night, a torch of light that shot miles high from the mountains. Around them the cliffs trembled, miniature landslips started, and they crouched together, men and animals, in a terrified huddle.
“The tubes—they must have blown!” Storm was on his feet again, his hand pressing against his shoulder where the sharp bite of pain gnawed once more. He had been torn out of his self-hypnotism, thrown into the weariness of near exhaustion.
“What tubes?” Logan’s question came thinly as if some muffling veil hung between them.
“The Xiks had their ship partly buried for concealment. They were digging her out when you escaped. But if they were pressed for time they might have tried to take her up without being sure of thoroughly clean tubes—or else”—Storm glanced down at the ball of whimpering fur he held, one sorely frightened meerkat—“or else Hing pulled one of her tricks. When they tried to lift the ship, the tubes blasted it wide open!”
“So they blew themselves up!” Brad Quade squared his shoulders. “But there might be something to see to over there, perhaps some of our boys were involved and need help. It might be well to check—”
“One of those other grills in the garden cave—” Logan cut in weakly. “There was a northwestern one pointing in the right direction. If we could find another tunnel from that it would take us straight through—”
Whatever shaking up the mountain had received, the garden cavern remained apparently untouched. Though the newcomers were awed by the bits of strange worlds divided by the black paths, they did not linger. Gorgol sped ahead, the rest trying to match his pace. A quarter of the way around the cavern they came to the grill Logan had found on his first exploration.
They mastered the latch and were fronting another tunnel which, with its curiously dead air and blackness, engulfed them wholly, for this time there was no torch to light the way. Surra pressed on with Gorgol, eyes of cat and native not so baffled by the gloom, the others strung out behind. All were driven by a gnawing desire to be through this passage and out into the normal world of Arzor once again.
It was easy to lose one’s sense of direction here in the dark and the tunnel did not run straight. Whether it followed the easy path of some natural fault in the mountain, or whether its long-ago builders had intended the turns to bewilder, Storm could not guess. But after two twists, he was at sea. For all he could determine, they might be heading back into the cavern they had just left. Baku moved restlessly on his shoulder, he lurched to one side, scraping against the unseen wall for support, hearing close by the heavy breathing of one of his companions, and then Logan’s assurance, fiercely uttered to his father, that he could keep up in spite of his injured leg.
Another twist, and a spark in the dark ahead, a light that grew to a reflected glow as if some giant fire raged beyond. They hurried on at that promise of escape.
Now the off-worlders caught up with Gorgol and the cat, to look out into a well of fire. Those flames ate along the terraces of the valley of the ship. And the heat from the conflagration beat in at them. Gorgol wriggled through a slit of door and Storm edged after him, giving Baku her flight signal. If there were any way out along the heights, she would find it for them.
Seeing that whirl of flames below, the Terran believed that nothing within that bowl of mountain walls could have survived the blowup of the overdriven ship. Sparks came up in the suck of air as they edged about the small walled space that long ago might have been a sentry point, to put a crag between them and the full force of the heat.
Even here the light approached that of day and they discovered Surra at the head of a flight of stairs. They were hardly more than niches gnawed away by the elements, down which a man could edge only at his peril. But they were a way down with the full bulk of the peak between them and the raging inferno of the blasted valley.
Surra’s species were sure-footed. The pumas of the western continent, a breed crossed with her dune cat ancestors in the experimental laboratories, were adept at climbing cliffs and crossing ridges where neither man nor hunting hound dared to follow. However, now she was examining this drop narrowly, advancing one paw as if to test the stability of that first weather-worn step.
Something in its feel must have reassured her, for she flowed down with liquid grace until she came out some hundred feet below in a shadowed space which appeared much larger than the platform on which Storm and Gorgol lingered. Storm hitched over that drop, only he crawled down those niches on his hands and knees. The heat of the opposite valley was cut off, and when he reached the ledge, he saw that from this point a roadway took the down curve, cut into the rock in the obscurity of the dark side of the mountain.
“A road—” Gorgol signed in the moonlight. “Below—a wider one—running so—” He gestured southeast.
Perhaps this was part of that other way into the valley up which the raiders had driven their stolen horses and frawns. If so, its other end should bring them out on the plains.
“Return—” Storm signed. “Bring the others here—”
Gorgol was already climbing, his tall body ascending that ladder easily. Storm went on. Surra quested ahead, scouting in advance. The Terran had a feeling that he must keep moving now—that if he rested, as his body craved, he would not be able to move on again. He started down that narrow pathway hacked in the side of the mountain, overhung in places where the builders had bored a half-tunnel to accommodate the traveler. These peaks might all be honeycombed, he thought, by caverns and tunnels, and other hidden ways of the long-ago invaders. Sorenson had been proved right and Survey must be informed.
Surra came out of the dark and pressed against his legs, making a barrier of her body in a warning of immediate danger. Storm swayed, retrieved his balance, listened. Then he caught the faintest noise—scrape of boot on rock? Metal against stone? Someone was coming up to meet him and that lurker could be anyone from a Nitra scout to an Xik who had escaped from the burning hell of the valley.
There were voices from behind too. The Quades and the riders were coming down under Gorgol’s guidance. And the Terran believed that the creeper below must have heard them also. Steadying himself against the rocks, he leaned as close to Surra as he could.
“Find—” That order was a faint whisper, underlined by mental force. She left him noiselessly to go into action—to flush out of hiding any enemy who might set up an ambush on the lower roadway.
At his belt was the only weapon Quade’s party had been able to spare him earlier—one of the long bladed hunting knives. Storm drew it, holding the weapon point up as a fencer might hold his épée. So much depended upon the identity of that hidden enemy. Against a Nitra one method of attack, but Xiks did not fight with knives—And what chance had a knife against a blaster or a sheer?
Storm’s progress became a stumbling run—with small pauses every five steps or so to listen. Surra had not yet flushed her quarry. A turn in the trail, the way jackknifed back on the level below. The Terran made that turn panting. It never occurred to him to share the struggle ahead with any of the men he had left on the upper trail. Storm was too used to fighting his own battles with only his team to back him. And this tangle with Xik forces had returned him to his service days, so that now, half-dazed with fatigue and the pain of his wound as he was, the enemy ahead was in his mind his own affair.
Another turn and the trail was widening—leveling off. To his left there was a darkened gash leading back into the side of the mountain. And it was here that the sudden beam of light flashed out, caught the last quarter of a yellow-brown tail but did not entrap the rest of Surra.
“Ahuuuuuu!” Storm shouted and cast himself to the left, bringing up with a little gasp of agony against a rock wall. That light flashed again to where he had stood only a second earlier.
His distracting tactics were successful. Surra squalled and attacked in her own way. The flash bobbed crazily and then fell to ground level, making a straight path of light across which Storm must go if he aided the cat.<
br />
Then a figure staggered out into the moonlight, with flailing arms. Settler! Or Xik in disguise? Storm moved out toward the torch hoping to turn it on that shape that was trying to ward off Surra. The big cat had not gone in to kill, but to harass, to keep her opponent moving until Storm arrived.
The ex-Commando stooped, picked up the torch awkwardly and then swung well around. There was no mistaking that whirling, dodging figure spotlighted in the beam—Bister!
“Saaaaaa—”
Surra flattened her body to the ledge, her ears back against her skull, her mouth a snarl, her tail lashing as the fur raised in a stiffly pointed ridge along her spine. Though she was between Bister and retreat she did not leap.
Storm saw that the other’s hand was going to a weapon at his belt.
“Hold it—right there!” he ordered.
The big man, his face patterning his emotions as fiercely as Surra’s did hers, leaned a little forward, his hand opening with visible reluctance, rising inch by grudging inch in the beam of light.
“The Terran!” He mouthed the word as if it were obscene, making of it both an oath and a challenge. “Animal—”
“Beast Master!” Storm corrected him in his gentle voice, the one that marked him at his most dangerous.
He thrust his knife into the front of his belt and came on unhurriedly, holding the light on Bister until he was within arm’s distance. Then he moved with some of Surra’s lightning swiftness, pulling the stun rod from the other’s holster, tossing the weapon out and over the edge of the drop.
But Bister was quick, too. His hand streaked for his knife in one last bid for freedom. The fine super-steel of the off-world blade was blue fire in the torchlight as he bent in the crouch of the experienced fighter. And Storm realized that, Xik aper or not, the man facing him could use that weapon.