Doomstalker (6 page)

All those precious iron-tool treasures, so long hoarded, came out of hiding. The edges of axes and knives received loving attention. Arrows were mated to iron heads fearsome with many barbs. Marika noted that the heads were affixed to strike horizontally instead of vertically, as hunting arrows were. Meth ribs ran parallel to the ground rather than perpendicular.

More arrows, cruder ones, were made quickly. More spears were fashioned. Scores of javelins were made of sticks with their points hardened in the firepits. The older pups were shown basic fighting techniques. Even the males trained with spears, javelins, tools and knives — when they were not otherwise occupied.

Skiljan, exercising her prerogative as head of loghouse, supported by Gerrien and most of the Degnan Wise, ended the everlasting debate by evicting all outsiders from her loghouse.

The Wise of the pack were more in concert than the huntresses. They issued advices which, because of the near unanimity behind them, fell with the force of orders. What had been preparations made catch-as-catch-can became orderly and almost organized. As organized and cooperative as ever meth became.

They first ordered a short sleep for the cooling of emotions.

Marika wakened from hers uneasy. Kublin was snuggled against her, restless. What was wrong? The psychic atmosphere was electric. There was a stench in it... Pain. And fear. Like that touch when the huntresses were out seeking the source of the scream she had heard.

A true scream ripped up from the ground level. She and Kublin scrambled to the ladder’s head, making no friends among pups already crouched there.

They were questioning the prisoner. Pohsit was holding his paw in the huntress’s firepit. Another of the Wise sat at his head, repeating a question over and over in a soft voice. He did not repsond, except to howl when Pohsit thrust his paw into the coals again.

The pups were neither upset nor disgusted, only curious. They battled for the best spots around the ladderhead. Marika was sure one would get pushed through the hole.

The torment went on and on. Marika whispered, “They won’t get him to tell them anything.”

Kublin nodded. He sensed it too.

Marika examined him. His nerves seemed frayed. Hers surely were. While she did not feel the prisoner’s pain, she did catch the psychic scent of his fear and distress, the leak-over from his scrambled mind. She did not know how to push it away.

Kublin seemed to be feeling all that, too.

Pohsit looked up at them. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a silent, promising snarl. Kublin inched closer. Marika felt his frightened shiver.

She did not need to touch the sagan’s mind to know what she was thinking.

Probuda, Skiljan’s second, beckoned. “Down, pups. There is work to do.” A massive rock of a female, she stood unmoved as pups tumbled about her, eager to be entrusted with something important. For that was what her tone and phrasing had implied. She had spoken as huntress to huntress.

“Marika. Kublin. You go see Horvat.”

“Horvat? But —”

Pobuda’s paw bounced off Marika’s ear. Marika scooted around the prisoner and his tormentors. He was unconscious. She and Kublin awaited recognition at the edge of Wise territory. Receiving a nod from Saettle, they crossed over to the males’ firepit, where Horvat was supervising some sort of expansion project. He was snarling because the hide umbrella, which gathered smoke to send it up a thin pottery flue, was cooked and smoked hard and brittle, and wanted to break rather than bend.

Marika said, “Horvat, Pobuda told us —”

“See Bhlase.”

They found the young male, who had come to the pack only two years earlier. “Ah. Good,” he said. “Come.” He led them to the storage room. “Too dark in there. Kublin. Get a lamp.”

Marika waited nervously. She had not visited this end of the loghouse since she was too small to know better. All the usual rules were falling...

Kublin arrived with an oil lamp. Bhlase took it and pushed through the doorskins. It was cold and dark in the storage room. It was more crowded than the loft.

But it was neat — obsessively neat, reflecting Horvat’s personality. Bhlase moved about, studying this and that. Marika gawked. The male handed the lamp back to Kublin. Then he started piling leather bags and sealed pottery jars into Marika’s arms. “Those go to the firepit.”

Though irked by his tone, Marika did as she was told. Bhlase followed with a load of his own. He ordered their plunder neatly, set the pups down, gave Kublin and Marika each a mortar and pestle. He settled between them with his legs surrounding a kettle. He drew a knife.

Marika was astonished. The kettle was copper, the knife iron.

Bhlase opened one leather bag and used a ceramic spoon to ladle dried, crushed leaves into Marika’s mortar bowl. “Grind that into powder. I’ll need ten more like that.”

Marika began the dull task. Bhlase turned to Kublin. More, but different, dried, crushed leaves went into his mortar bowl. These gave off a pungent odor immediately. “Ten from you, too, Kublin.”

Marika recalled that Bhlase had been accepted by Skiljan because of his knowledge of herbs and such, which exceeded that of Pohsit.

But what were they doing?

Bhlase had brought several items Marika connected only with cooking. A sieve. A cutting board. A grater. The grater he set into the kettle. He cut the wax seal off one of the jars and removed several wrinkled, almost meth-shaped roots. He grated them into the bowl. A bitter scent rose.

“That is good enough, Marika.” He took her mortar bowl, dumped it into the sieve, flung the bigger remains into the firepit. They flashed and added a grassy aroma to the thousands of smells haunting the loghouse. “Nine more will do it. How is yours coming, Kublin? Yes. That is fine. Dump it here. Good. Nine more for you.”

“Are you not scared, Bhlase?” Marika asked. He seemed unreasonably calm.

“I have been through this before. When I was a pup, nomads besieged our packstead. They are ferocious but not very smart. Kill a few and they will run away till they have eaten their dead.”

“That is awful.”

“They are awful.” Bhlase finished grating roots. He put the grater aside, sieved again, then took up the cutting board. The jar he opened this time contained dead insects the size of the last joint on Marika’s smallest finger. He halved each longwise, cut each half crosswise, scraped the results into the kettle. After finishing the insects he opened a jar which at first seemed to contain only a milky fluid. After he poured that into the pot, though, he dumped several dozen fat white grubs onto his cutting board.

“What are we making, Bhlase?” Kublin asked.

“Poison. For the arrowheads and spearheads and javelins.”

“Oh!” Marika nearly dropped her pestle.

Bhlase was amused. “It is harmless now. Except for these.” He indicated the grubs, which he was dicing with care. “All this will have to simmer together for a long time.”

“We have never used poisons,” Kublin said.

“I was not here last time nomads came to the Degnan packstead,” Bhlase replied. Marika thought she detected a certain arrogance behind his words.

“None of us were,” she countered. “That was so long ago Granddam was leader.”

“That is true, too.” Bhlase broached another jar of grubs. And another after that. Kublin and Marika finished their grinding. Bhlase continued doing grubs till the copper kettle was filled to within three inches of its rim. He took that to a tripod Horvat had prepared, hung it, adjusted it just so over the fire. He beckoned.

“I am going to build the fire just as it must be,” he said. “You two keep it exactly the same.” He thrust a long wooden spoon into the pot. “And stir it each few minutes. The insects tend to float. The grubs sink. Try not to breathe too much of the steam.”

“For how long?” Kublin asked.

“Till it is ready.”

Marika and Kublin exchanged pained glances. Pups always got stuck with the boring jobs.

Over by the other firepit, the huntresses and Wise were still trying to get the prisoner to say something useful. He still refused. The loghouse was growing chilly, what with the coming and going of meth from other loghouses.

“Pohsit is enjoying herself,” Marika observed, stirring the poison. She kept rehearsing the formula in her mind. She had recognized all the ingredients. None were especially rare. It might become useful knowledge one day.

Kublin looked at Pohsit, gulped, and concentrated on the fire.

II

So time fled. Sharpening of tools into weapons. Making of crude javelins, spears, and arrows. Males and older pups drilling with the cruder weapons over and over. The initial frenzy of preparation faded as nothing immediate occurred. The lookouts saw no sign of imminent nomad attack. No sign of nomads at all.

Was the crisis over without actually beginning?

The captive died never having said anything of interest — as Marika had expected. The huntresses dragged him out and hurled him off the stockade to lie in the snow before the gate, mute and mutilated. A warning.

Marika wished she had had a chance to talk with the prisoner. She knew next to nothing about the lands beyond the Zhotak.

The huntresses chafed at their confinement, though their restlessness sprang entirely from their minds. In winter they often went longer without leaving the packstead. There were disputes about whether or not the gate should be opened. Bitter cold continued to devour wood stores.

Skiljan and Gerrien kept the gate sealed.

The weather conspired to support them.

Marika took her turn in the watchtower and saw the nothing she expected to see. Her watch was not long, but it was cold. An ice storm had coated everything with crystal. Footing was treacherous everywhere. Males not otherwise occupied cleared ice and snow and erected platforms behind the stockade so huntresses could hurl missiles from their vantage. A few tried to break stones loose from the pile kept for use in a possible raid, but they had trouble. The ice storm had frozen the pile into a single glob.

Kublin called the alarm during his afternoon watch. The huntresses immediately assumed his imagination had gotten the best of him, he being a flighty pup and male to boot. But a pair of huntresses clambered up the tower, their weight making it creak and sway, as had been done with several earlier false alarms.

Kublin was not a victim of his imagination, though at first he had trouble convincing the huntresses that he was indeed seeing what he saw. His eyes were very sharp. Once he did convince them, they dismissed him. He returned to the loghouse to bask in unaccustomed attention.

“I saw smoke,” he announced proudly. “A lot of smoke, far away.”

Skiljan questioned him vigorously — “What direction? How far? How high did it rise? What color was it?” — till he became confused and frustrated.

His answers caused a stir.

Marika had less experience of the far countryside than did her elders. It took her longer to understand.

Smoke in that direction, east, at that distance, in that color, could mean only one thing. The packstead of their nearest neighbors, the Laspe, was burning. And packsteads did not burn unless intentionally set ablaze.

The Degnan packstead frothed with argument again. The central question was: to send scouts or not. Skiljan and Gerrien wanted to know exactly what had happened. Many of those who only hours earlier had demanded the gate be opened now wanted it kept closed. Even a large portion of the Wise did not want to risk huntresses if the nomads were that close.

Skiljan settled the question by fiat. She gathered a dozen huntresses of like mind and marched out. She had her companions arm as huntresses seldom did, with an assortment of missile weapons, hatchets and axes, knives, and even a few shields. Shields normally were used only in mock combats fought during the celebrations held at the turning of each season.

Marika crowded into the watchtower with the sentry on duty. She watched her dam’s party slip and slide across the ice-encrusted snowfields till they vanished into the woods east of the packstead.

When she returned to her loghouse, they gave her the iron axe her dam had been sharpening, and showed her what to do. Skiljan had taken it from the nomads she had slain. It had not been cared for properly. Many hours would be required to give it a proper edge.

Not far away, Pobuda and several others — Wise, males, and huntresses who pretended to some skill in metalworking — were etching the blades of arrowheads and spears. Bhlase sat in the center of their circle with his pot of poison, carefully painting a brown, gummy substance into the etchings with a tiny brush. Marika noted that he wore gloves. The young huntress who carried the finished weapons away also wore gloves, and racked them out of the reach of the younger pups.

Marika soon grew bored with grinding the axe’s edge. She had too much energy to sit still all the time. Too many strange thoughts fled through her mind while she ran the whetstone over that knicked piece of iron. She tried to banish the thoughts, to touch her dam.

There were distractions. The touch came and went. She followed the scouting party peripatetically. Mostly, she tasted their fear. Kublin kept coming to her with questions in his eyes. She kept shaking her head till his curiosity frayed her temper. “Get away!” she snarled. “Leave me alone! I’ll tell you when there’s something to tell.”

Sometimes she tried to touch Grauel, who carried the Degnan’s message to the packfast. She could not find Grauel. But she did not worry. Grauel was the best of the pack in field and forest. If she did not get through, none could, and there was no hope from that direction.

The scouts returned at dusk, unharmed but grim. Again Skiljan’s loghouse filled with the adult female population of the packstead. This evening they were more subdued, for they sensed that the news was bad. Skiljan’s report was terse.

“Nomads attacked the Laspe packstead. They managed to breach the palisade. They took the stores and weapons and tools, fired the loghouses, and ran away. They did not kill everyone, nor did they take many of the pups. Survivors we talked to said the nomads have taken the Brust packstead and are using it as their base.”