THE YNGLING AND THE CIRCLE OF POWER by John Dalmas

Baver awoke in the saddle from a dream of pursuit. Mounted Orcs had been thundering after them, and he and Hans were riding donkeys that refused to run, in­sisting instead on trying to lie down. Dawn was lightening the sky, and he had no clear recollection of anything other than dozing, waking, and restless dreams since the moon had set. Vaguely he recalled changing horses a few times.

Hans had stopped, and Baver’s mount had followed suit. “We’ve passed him,” Hans was saying. “There are no fresh tracks here.” He sounded chagrined, angry with himself.

“Maybe we should stop and wait for him,” Baver sug­gested. “Let him catch us.” He was aware of hunger now. His sleepiness had passed for the moment.

Hans shook his head. “You can wait. I’m going back and find him. He could be hurt. If he left the road, his horse might have stepped in a marmot hole and fallen with him. His belly could have burst open.”

They did stop long enough to hobble the horses and let them graze and rest, while they had something to

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eat themselves. Then they turned back, riding the way they’d come, both of them watching the roadsides. After a bit the sun rose. Some time afterward they came to Nil’s tracks, or at least tracks they assumed were his, leaving the road. They followed them. There was no creekbed there, no sign of water. The tracks left at right angles to the road, and for awhile their spacing indicated a brisk trot. So Hans said. To Baver, the com­bined tracks of mount, remount, and pack horse were a confusion. About two kilometers away, or a little more, they turned and roughly paralleled the highway. The trot continued, though it had eased a bit.

Here it had rained little or not at all, and the tracks were mostly scuffs and nicks in the hard ground. The bunch grass was too sparse to show his passage, but there was enough of it to conceal his tracks, except from close up, which slowed their pursuit. The two pressed on, slowed by the need to stay on Nils’s trail.

It seemed to Baver that Nils had done this deliber­ately, to keep from being caught up with. If he was truly telepathic, and it seemed he must be, then he might even have sensed them coming and left the highway only a little ahead of their passing. But the star man never seriously thought of suggesting they turn back. Hans would never agree anyway. And he wasn’t about to go it alone; his newly-acquired survival know-how felt seri­ously inadequate in a world of Kalmuls, Kazakhs, and other unpredictables.

About midday they came to the broad trail of sheep being herded crosscountry. Nils’s tracks were lost in the profusion of hooforints—sheep and the herdsmen’s horses. Hans found no indication of prints crossing the others directly. For several hours Nils had roughly paralleled the highway, deviating only to keep some terrain in be­tween. The herd had been driven diagonally toward it. Nils could have followed it to the road or beyond, or followed it a short way and then continued as before.

Hans had been picking his way along the far edge of

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the herd trail, watching for sign that Nils had left it. As they approached the road, it seemed to Baver they’d surely find his tracks there again, but they didn’t. So much for intuition, he told himself.

Hans reined up in exasperation, and looked at Baver. “If I follow the herd trail, can you go back and see if he went the other way on it? Look for tracks going the other way than these, then keep to the edge and see if he left it. Surely you can do that!”

Baver felt there was nothing sure about it at all. “Where will we meet?” he asked.

“Here. On the road.”

“The last time you said you’d wait for me, you didn’t.”

“I will this time.”

Baver nodded. “All right,” he said. He untied his re­mount from Hans’s, leaving the packhorse, and back­tracked along the west edge, first at a trot, then at a slow walk. To his great pleasure, he found where he and Hans had hit it; he could find tracks! But after another hour he’d found none he recognized as going counter to the herd, nor any leaving the herd trail. Turning, he trotted his horse back toward the highway.

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