“That won’t help! What will?”
Kennard gasped and was silent. Slowly the color came back into his face and he listened, motionless, to the siren wail that rose and fell.
“About a mile off,” he said tersely, “but they run like the wind. If we could change our smell—”
“They’re probaby tracking by my clothing-smell,” Larry said. “They took away my cloak. If I—”
Kennard had risen; he darted forward, suddenly, and fell into a bank of grayish shrubs. For a moment Larry, watching him roll and writhe in the leaves, thought that the hardships of the mountain journey had driven the Darkovan boy out of his wits. But when Kennard sat up his face though ashen was calm.
“Come here and roll in this,” he ordered, “smear it all over your boots especially—”
Suddenly getting the idea, Larry grabbed handfuls of the leaves. They stung his hands with their furry needles, but he followed the older boy’s example, daubing the leaves on face and hands, crushing their juice into clothing and boots. The leaves had a pungent, acrid smell that brought tears to his eyes like raw onions; but he crushed handfuls of the leaves over his boots and legs.
“This might or might not work,” Kennard said, “but it gives us a bare chance—unless the smell of this stuff is like catnip to a kitten for those devilish things. If I knew more about them—”
“What are they?”
“Birds. Huge things—taller than a tall man, with long trailing thin wings—they can’t fly. Their claws could rip your guts out at a stroke. They’re blind, and normally they live in the mountain snows, and can scent anything warm that moves. And they scream like—well like banshees.”
All the time he spoke, he and Larry were crushing the leaves, rubbing them into their skin and hair, soaking their clothing with the juice. The odor was sickening, and Larry thought secretly that anything with any sense of smell at all could trace them for miles, but perhaps the banshees were like Terran bloodhounds, set on by a particular smell and trained not to follow any other.
“Zandru alone knows how Cyrillon and his hordes managed to train those devilish things,” Kennard muttered. “Listen—they’re coming nearer. Come on. We’ll have to run for it again, but try to move quietly.”
They moved off through the brushwood again, working their way slowly up the hill, Larry trying to move softly; but he heard dead twigs snap beneath his feet, dry leaves crackle, the creak of branches as he moved against them. In contrast, Kennard moved as lightly as a leaf. And ever behind them the shrill banshee howl rose, swelled, died away and rose again, throbbing until it seemed to fill all space, till Larry felt he must scream with the noise that vibrated his eardrums and went rolling around in his skull until there was no room for anything but pulsing agony.
The path they were following began to rise, steeply now, and he had to catch at twigs and brushwood, and brace his feet against rocks, to force his way up the rising slope. His clothes were tattered, his face torn, and the stink of the gray leaves was all around them. The slope was in deep shadow; it was growing bitterly cold and above them the thick evening fog was deepening, till Larry could hardly see Kennard’s back, a few feet before him. They struggled up the slope and plunged down into a little valley, where Kennard’s pace slackened somewhat and he waited for Larry to catch up with him. Larry, breathing hard, pressed his hands to his aching skull to shut out the banshee noise.
It lessened for a moment, died away in a sort of puzzled silence; began in a series of fresh yelps and wails, then faded out again. It was dimming with distance; Kennard, his face only a blur in the gathering fog, sighed and fell, exhausted, to the ground.
“We can rest a minute, but not too long,” he warned.
Larry fell forward, dropping instantly into dead sleep. It seemed only a moment later—but it was black dark and a fine drizzling rain was falling and soaking them—that Kennard shook him awake again. The banshee howls were again filling the air—and on this side of the slope!