There were other meat eaters in plenty on Fronn. The ttsor, large felines, the hork, a bird or highly evolved insect (the record-pak had not been certain) a smaller species of which was tamed and used by the nobles of the land for hunting, much as the ancient lords of his own world had once flown their falcons for sport. Then there were the deeter, whose exact nature was uncertain for they were nocturnal and dug pits to trap their prey. But those mysterious creatures inhabited the swamp jungles of the southern continent. Which left—the byll! But he had thought that those highly dangerous, huge, flightless birds were only to be found on the plains where their speed in the chase earned them their food. More dangerous than the ttsor—who did not willingly attack—the bylls were twelve feet of bone, muscle, wicked temper, and vicious appetite.
This mountain country was bare of vegetation except for a few clumps of knife-edged grass, withered and sear from the long dryness of the calm season. On the plains this grass was ruthlessly burnt off by the Llor, but in these mountain gullies it flourished in ragged patches to slash the skin of the unwary.
The scouts took hourly breaks, ate ration tablets, drank sparingly from their canteens and pushed on. The country about them looked as rugged as a lunar landscape in their own system, lacking all life. It was when the dried stream bed they followed branched into two that Bogate called a halt. Both of the new canyons looked equally promising, though one angled south and the other north. The Terrans, shivering a little in the bite of the wind from the snow peaks, were undecided.
Bogate consulted his watch and then compared its reading with the length of the shadows beyond the rocks.
“Quarter of an hour. We split—return here at the end of that time. You”—he indicated four of the scouts— “come with me. Larsen, you take the rest south.”
Kana scrambled up the wall of the northern fork, lenses slung around his neck. Zapan Bogate was in the lead and had gained on his companions. The man immediately below Kana was having heavy going. Slides blocked his assigned route and he had to make frequent detours.
It was by sheer chance that Kana caught that flicker of movement behind Wu Soong. A rock shadow bulged oddly. He swung his rifle and shouted a warning. Soong threw himself flat behind a rock and so saved his life. For the ugly death which had been stalking him struck—empty air.
Kana fired, hoping to hit some vital spot in that darting red body. But the thing moved with unholy speed, its long scaly neck twisting with reptilian sinuosity. He was almost certain he had hit it at least twice but its frenzied darts at the rock where Soong had gone to earth did not slow. No longer silent, it shrieked its furious rage with a siren blast which tore their ears.
A burst of white fire enveloped the byll. When that cleared the giant bird lay on the ground, headless but still struggling to move its shattered legs.
“Bogate,” Kana shouted down, “those things sometimes hunt in packs—”
“Yeah? Fire the recall, Harv,” he ordered one of the awe-stricken men. “That ought to bring Larsen. We’ll stick together. If there’s any more of them, stalkin’ us in crowds, we’re gonna be ready for ’em. And not all scattered out so close to dark.”
Soong made a wide circle around the body of the byll to join the others as Bogate gave Kana an order.
“You keep an eye out—cover us back to the forks.”
From then on they investigated every shadow, every crevice in the canyon walls. It was with a sigh of relief Kana saw them back to the fork where Larsen and his men waited. Bogate put them all to work at once, rolling up good-sized boulders, erecting a breastwork which should stop any byll’s charge.
“Those things hunt at night?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know. By rights that one shouldn’t have been back here in the mountains at all. They’re meat eaters and their regular territory is the central plains.”
“Meaning that if they do come here, it’s because they can hunt?”
Kana could only nod in agreement. As arid as the country seemed to be, it must harbor life—enough life to attract the bylls.
Since a fire was out of the question—they dared show no lights—the scouts huddled together behind the wall of their temporary fort. The mountains cut off the light of the sinking sun. In the gloom Kana found himself listening—for what he did not know.
The wind rose again to swoop and wail. But through their hours of travel the Terrans had become so accustomed to its moans that they no longer heeded it. In one of the infrequent intervals of quiet, when the mountain blasts died, Kana listened again. Had he heard—? But nothing stirred beyond the wall.
They slept in fitful snatches, two of their number on watch in turn. Kana was dreaming when an elbow in his ribs brought him into full wakefulness and Soong’s sibilant whisper warmed his ear.
“Look!”
Up and far ahead was a wink of light—a light which flickered to prove that it was no star. And to its left—another! Kana used the lenses. Those were fires right enough—beacons! In all he counted five. And beacons on those heights could only mean that someone was alert to the Terran invasion of this mountain territory. Not the royalists—the flames were not the blue of Llor torches. As he watched one winked and disappeared, then it blinked out again—off and on—in a pattern. There was no mistaking the meaning of that—signals! Would that exchange of information lead to such a one-sided battle as had taken place in the arena they had crossed that day?
“Signals!” Bogate was awake and watching also. “They must have spotted us!”
Kana heard rather than saw the veteran scramble over the wall. A moment later a growl from the dark relayed the other’s displeasure. Kana climbed the barrier to look back along the route they had come. He saw then what had brought that grunt out of Bogate. High on the cliffs which walled the canyon was a speck of light. But they had no more than sighted it than it disappeared, not to be seen again. An answer to the signal ahead?
The veteran cleared his throat with a rasp. “Maybe that was ‘orders received.’ ” He parroted the official phrase. “Soong, use the speecher. Tell Hansu about those signals—”
“Well,” he added a few moments later, “the show must be over for tonight—”
He was right, three of the fires ahead were gone, and the two remaining seemed to be dying. Kana shivered as icy fingers of wind pried within his coat. Were they going to walk into trouble?
“Camp answered,” Soong reported out of the dark. “They saw a fire a little ahead of them, but not the others. Told ’em about the byll, too. They’re at this end of the bone valley.”
“Good enough. Turn in. We’ll go on tomorrow.”
In the morning Bogate chose the southern fork of the old river for exploration. Since Tharc lay to the south, it was logical to head in that direction. Whether the presence of byll in the other valley influenced his decision, or the fact that the fires they had watched had been to the north were points he did not discuss with the rest of the scouts.
Their new path was clearer of rock slides than any they had found so far and within a half mile Kana noticed an upward slope. They were climbing at last, instead of burrowing at the bottom of rock-walled slashes.
But they had not been an hour on their way before they came upon their first trace of the mountaineers. Luckily their experience with the byll had made them overly cautious and they were constantly alert to any faint indication of the abnormal. Larsen, who was in the lead, stopped abruptly at the edge of a wide, smooth expanse of sand. When Bogate came up the scout pointed to a curious depression in the center of the strip.
Kana, recalling one of Hansu’s warnings about the Cos, spoke first:
“Might be a trap—”
Bogate looked from the recruit to the depression. Then he walked away to choose a stone, under the weight of which he staggered, waddling up to plop his burden onto that smooth surface.
There was a crack. Sand and stone together rushed down into a gaping hole. Kana inched up to look. What he saw made his insides twist as his imagination leaped into action. It was a trap, all right, a vicious, deadly trap. And the captive who fell into it would die a lingering death on the spikes artfully planted below.
The Terrans exchanged few words as they crept around the edge of the pit. On the other side Soong reported on the speecher, informing the Horde of this new risk.