“What are you trying to do? Set yourself up as a perfect target for anything out there?” Tan was angry. She had heard that note in his voice only a few times in her life.
He pushed her to one side forcibly, turned to reseal the hatch. Ayana rubbed her arm, blinking fiercely. Tan was not going to see betraying tears in her eyes.
When he had, the seal tight, he swung around, his eyes hot and hard, watching her.
“Now—what did you mean by that scene?” he demanded as if there had never been, or could be, any good feeling between them.
And his hostility awakened her own spirit.
“Just what I said. We know too little of the situation here. You thought of those beings on the recorder tape as animals. But they are not, and deep in your mind, you know that. Now—you bring others back—for food!” Her revulsion returned. She had to cover her mouth for a moment. “We do not know what they are!”
“You need a mind-clear treatment!” His anger was chilling, no longer hot and impulsive but worse. He was entering one of those remote moods when he froze anyone who tried to communicate. “You saw what I brought back. It was all animal. Perhaps”—he came a little closer, stood looking down at her with that cold menace—“perhaps you do need a mind-clear. You did not test out as entirely level-stable—“
“How do you know that?” Ayana demanded.
Tan laughed, but there was no lightness of spirit in that sound.
“I had my ways of learning what I needed to know. It is always well to be aware of the weaknesses of one’s fellows. Yes, I know your L report, my dear Ayana. And do you believe that I cannot put that knowledge to the best use?”
He caught her shoulders again and shook her, as if to impress her with his strength of both body and will. It was as if that ruthless handling shook from her mind a shield she had clung to for years. Tan was—Tan was— She stared at him, beaten for the moment, not by his will, but by her own realization of what Tan really was.
“We will have no more stupid imaginings.” He did not wait for her to answer; perhaps he believed she was fully cowed. “Eat or not—if you wish to starve that is your decision. But you will keep your mouth shut on such ideas!”
Jacel, Massa, were not fools, nor, Ayana believed, could they be dominated by Tan. If what she had said made them consider— But for the present, until she had time to think, she must let him believe that he had won. Though he appeared to have no suspicion that he had not. There was confidence in the way he pulled her around, shoved her at the ladder, with the unspoken but implied order to go aloft.
The worst was that Ayana must continue to share their small cabin. The horror that grew in her was even greater than the desolation she had known moments earlier. Tan would enforce such a relationship, she knew. There was only one escape. She was the medic—and the cramped medic-lab cabin was hers alone. She could shelter there until she had time to think things out.
She climbed, her thoughts racing. If Tan believed he had broken any resistance in her— One level more —the medic cabin. She had hardly believed she could escape him so easily. But she made a quick dash, thumb-locked the door behind her. She fully expected him to bat out his rage against its surface. But there was only utter and complete silence.
Ayana backed away until she came up against the patient’s bunk. She faced the door, taut, listening. When there came no assault, she relaxed on the edge of the bunk.
The palms of her hands were sweating, she felt weak, sick. The confrontation of the past few moments had frightened her as she had never been frightened before in her life. Tan knew her L report. He could turn that to his own advantage. Every weakness, every way of reaching her had been charted on that! He could use such knowledge to influence the others to distrust her. Her outburst at the table had given him a base on which to build false claims. She had played directly into his hands— She was—
Ayana began to fight back. He had thrown her so far off base that he had gained the advantage for a while. It was time she forgot what had happened and began to consider the immediate present. She had been warned; perhaps Tan had made his first mistake in revealing that he thought he could dominate her.
Think, use her brain; she had a good one, L report or not. Ayana had a good and useful mind. Now was the time to put it to work, not allow herself to become enmeshed by emotion, let alone fear, the most weakening of all.
She must not depend on either Jacel or Massa, but stand alone. For if Tan could prove to be an entirely different person from the one she thought she knew, loved, then whom could she trust? Herself—and her skills. Ayana began to look about the cabin and what it contained. Herself and her skills—perhaps she would find that enough.
Though she did not rise, her head was up, her shoulders no longer hunched as if she expected at any moment to feel the sting of a lash laid across them. She was Ayana and she fought to remain that—her-self, not something owned by Tan!
Bright as the moon had been in the clearing, it was no guide to paths under the growth cover. But Furtig slipped along easily, treading the way in memory as well as if he walked one of the well-paved ways of the Demons. These were hunting lands where those of the caves often came.
The night had voices, birds whose hunting also depended upon the cover of the dark hours, insects, smaller life, which stilled instantly as the scent of the travelers reached them.
Furtig breathed deeply, planted each foot -with pleasure in the fact that it met soil and not the hard surface of a corridor. He was of the caves after all. And with every whisper of sound, the rich scents the wind brought him, he rejoiced.
Liliha, for all her In-born life, did not lag, but with gliding grace matched the pace the two warriors set. Perhaps she looked from right to left and back again more often than they, for to her this was all new. But she appeared to find more interest than cause for alarm in what lay about.
They halted at a spring Furtig remembered well, drank their fill, ate of the supplies they had carried with them from the lairs. But always they listened, not for the usual night sounds, but for the beat of the Demon flyer within weapon reach overhead.
“If there are only four of them,” Furtig said, “then they can be defeated. Even if they are scouts—if they did not return, their clan would take warning.”
“It depends,” Foskatt pointed out, “on why they scout. If it is merely to seek new ground, and they do not return, yes, perhaps that would be the end for their kin.”
“We cannot,” Liliha said with the assurance of the In-born, to whom the study of Demons was a way of life, “judge anything that the Demons do by what we would do in their place. They do not think as we.”
“If they think straightly at all,” Foskatt growled.
“Remember the old tales—in the final days after the Demons had loosed their own doom, they were so twisted in their ways that they hunted and preyed upon each other, dealing death to their kin as well as to our kind in turn. And it would seem that they have begun such ways once more. At least they have taken the Tusker younglings without cause—for one purpose—“
“Again you are not sure,” Liliha countered. “It may be they have taken the younglings to study them, to see what manner of people are now in possession of the world they ruled so evilly in the old days.”
“I do not think so,” Furtig said. He was unable to prove that Foskatt was right in his reading of the Demons’ motives. But somehow he was as sure of it as if he had indeed witnessed the outcome of the stealing of Broken Nose’s young.
“Why did they not capture Ku-La and me in the same fashion?” he continued. Ever since he had heard of that seizure from the air which the flyer had practiced, this had puzzled him. It would have been very easy to capture the two of them from that open bridge. Of course, had the Demon tried it, Furtig had held the lightning weapon. Was that why they had escaped? Had the Demon seen and recognized from aloft the lightning thrower? If so—then Gammage’s plan to arm as many of the People as they could had great merit.