“True.” Naill had already made that deduction. But he knew something else—that there was an arms belt about that stalking figure. If not a blaster, it wore tools that could be used as weapons. And he told her so.
“It is very old. Would the charges in the seamer, in the coilcut, still be active?”
Again Naill was surprised by her familiarity with off-world machines and tools.
“I was at the port for a double handful of days after my mother died. There was much to see—to keep one from thinking,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “There was no one there to say such learning was evil.”
“You had always this liking for worldly knowledge?”
“After the port—yes. Just as I wanted to know more of the forest—not to destroy, as was garth way, but to know it as it is, free and tall and beautiful. Before I was Illylle I had such longings. But that has nothing to do with this space suit and what it may do. I do not believe we can outwait it here.”
“No.” Naill had already determined that. “Our water is gone, and food. We move with darkness. And perhaps we can do it in this fashion. The gully is long and narrow, running roughly northeast by southwest—or so I remember it when we came in, though I was not too clearheaded.” He made a question of that and she closed her eyes, as if better to visualize the territory.
“You are right. And the other end is very narrow—like a sword blade pointed so.” She sketched with her fingers.
“If that narrow end can be climbed, it is our best try for a way out. The suit marches at a regular pace. We must creep under cover down the ravine as soon as the dusk is heavy enough, wait for it to be at this end, and then make our break to the west, using every shadow we can for cover.”
“There are many chances in that.”
“We take them, or sit here until we die or they dig us out like Jamob rats!” Naill snapped.
To his surprise Ashla laughed softly. “Ho, warrior, I do not question the rightness of your plan—for to my mind also it is the only one. But have we the fleetness of foot, the skill in hide-and-seek to bring us out of here?”
“That we shall see.” For all his hopes, that statement did not sound as hearty as he wished. And as the long minutes crawled by while they waited for the coming of dusk, Naill experienced first a crowding impatience, and then a growing sense of the utter folly of what they must attempt. By counting his pulse beats he could gauge the pace of the space-suited sentry, judge how long it took the patroller to make the circuit of their ravine. Ashla lay down again, her head pillowed on her arm. Naill wondered, with a small amazement, if she were able to sleep now.
The sunshine could not last forever. Shadows grew, met, spun webs across the valley. And still the click-click of that patrol sounded regularly. At length Naill gave the girl a small shake so she looked up at him.
“We go. But keep down, well under the bushes. And do not touch any plants if you can help.”
“You mean the eaters. Yes, I have seen what they do. But they are closing with the dark. Take care of your arm. Shall I re-sling it for you?”
“No, it is better at my side if we must crawl. Now—keep behind me and do not move the brush if you can help it.”
It was one of those periods when every minute spun into an hour of listening, of movement kept agonizingly to a minimum. Naill longed to get to his feet, to run for the sword-point end of the valley in leaping bounds, yet he must make a lizard’s sly passage. They cowered together, halfway down the length of their way, as the suit stamped by above. And again when only a quarter of their journey still lay ahead, as it passed on the other side.
Then they reached the point, facing a narrow crevice. Ten feet above—maybe a little more—the open rock of the waste plain would lie open. To get straight back to the river would mean passing the patroller in the open, and that Naill dared not try unless he was left no other choice.
“Now!” He started up the crevice, praying no slide would start from the clutch of his fingers, the dig of his booted toes. He pulled himself up, supported and steadied by the girl below. Then he lay across the rim and reached down with his good arm to assist her in turn.
They could see the sentry almost halfway down the right side of its return journey.
“To the left!” Thankfully Naill sighted an inky blot of shadow cast by a standing spar of rock.
It was the sword that betrayed them. Naill had set it back into the sheath before he climbed. But now, as he moved, weapon and scabbard scraped the stone and the noise was loud.
“Quick!” Ashla caught at him, pulled him on. “Oh, please—quick!”
Somehow they made it, to sprawl into that patch of dark. But the regular click-click of the space boots had become a rat-tat. Then—silence. Was the patroller readying one of the weapon tools from its suit belt? Would a lash of flame, meant to seal a break of ship skin, cut across their rock as a herdsman would use a stock whip to snap straying animals back to the herd?
“Ayyar—behind you!”
Naill twisted about.
No space suit marched from that side. These were pallid, leaping, moving things—resembling the hounds of the garths and yet unlike. For the hounds were animals, and their kind had long been subservient and known by mankind. While these were of another breed, outside all natural laws Naill understood.
“The Larsh wytes!”
Now Ayyar remembered—remembered such packs, hunting among the trees of Iftcan. That had been an ill hunting but one he had faced, sword ready, as he did now.
A narrow head with eyes that were sparks of sun, blasting yellow, snapped at him and he swung at it, to cleave skull, tumble the pack leader back among its fellows. There was no time to choose his next kill for bared teeth were reaching for his throat. Naill stabbed upwards, saw another of the wytes fall.
“Behind me!” he ordered Ashla.
“Not so! I, too, hunt wytes this night!” he heard her cry in return. He saw her use the long hunting knife to cover them from a rush on the left.
Their surprise attack a costly failure, the pack withdrew a little. One at the rear raised its head to voice a long howl. From the dark sky came an answer . . . the cry of the flying thing which had earlier hung above the gully. And then, while the wytes held them fast to their rock spire, the suited sentry strode into view.
They were strange partners, the wytes and the metal-enclosed unknown. But the wytes accepted the suited figure as their leader, drawing aside to let it pass. It stalked into a space directly before the fugitives and stood there. Naill tried desperately to see the face behind the helmet plate. The once-clear surface of that section was fogged, webbed by a maze of fine cracks and lines, completely masking its wearer.
“Watch—oh, watch!”
But no warning could have saved them, Naill knew. The early suit might be clumsy according to modern standards. But it had been of the best engineering and design of its time, equipped for dangerous and demanding duty. Once that small object now spinning at them had been set and dispatched on its arc, nothing short of a blaster would deter it from completing its mission.
They were not going to be flamed out of existence. They were to be the helpless captives of what wore that suit, hid behind the cracked faceplate—or its master!
FIFTEEN
THE WHITE FOREST
A shallow bowl of valley stretched on down and away from where they had paused. And the reaching moonlight made a shimmering maze of glinting, prismatic light there. Naill shielded his eyes with his good hand. Ashla’s fingers closed on his arm.
“The White Forest. . . .” Her voice was emotionless, drained, and not, he thought, by the fatigue of their journey over the broken plain of the waste.
Since that tractor beam generator had circled them back at the edge of this forbidden territory, they had marched straight on northward into the unknown, their space-suited captor in the lead, the pack of wytes padding at a distance but covering the rear—a weird assortment of travelers.
The beam had kept them docile enough, made them move in answer to the projected command of whatever lurked within the suit. And there had been no answer to all their attempts to communicate with that. Was their goal this forest?