Doomstalker (7 page)

End of report. What was not said was as frightening as what was. The Laspe, without stores or tools or weapons, would not survive. The Brust, of course, would all be dead already.

Someone suggested the Laspe pack’s huntresses be brought into the Degnan packstead. “Extra paws to bear arms when the nomads come here. And thus the pack name would not die. Come summer they could take new males and rebuild.”

Skiljan shook her head. “The nomads are barbarians but not fools. They did slay every female of pupbearing age. The huntresses forced them.” She looked at the huntress who had spoken as though she were a fool.

That was the meth way — savagery to the last in defense of the pack. Only those too young or too old to lift a weapon would have been spared. The Laspe could be stricken from the roll of upper Ponath packs.

Marika was amazed everyone took the news with such calm. Two packs known obliterated. It had been several generations since even one had been overrun completely. It was a huge disaster, and portended far worse to come.

“What about the nomads?” someone asked. Despite tension, the gathering continued subdued, without snarling or jostling. “How heavy a price did they pay?”

“Not a price dear enough. The Laspe survivors claimed there were ten tens of tens of attackers.”

A disbelieving murmur ran through the gathering.

“It does sound impossible. But they left their dead behind. We examined dozens of bodies. Most were armed males.” This assertion caused another stir, heavy with distress. “They wore fetishes identifiable as belonging to more than twenty different packs. We questioned a young male left for dead, that the Laspe had not yet tortured. His will was less strong than that of our recent guest. He had much to say before he died.”

Another stir. Then everyone waited expectantly.

Skiljan said, “He claimed the spring saw the rise of a powerful wehrlen among the nomads. A rogue male of no apparent pack, who came out of nowhere and who made his presence felt throughout the north in a very short time.”

A further and greater stir, and now some mutters of fear.

A wehrlen? Marika thought. What was that? It was a word she did not know. There was so much she did not know.

At the far end of the loghouse, the males had ceased working and were paying close attention. They were startled and frightened. Their fur bristled. They knew, whatever a wehrlen was.

Murmurs of “rogue” and “male silth” fluttered through the gathering. It seemed Marika was not alone in not recognizing the word.

“He began by overwhelming the females of an especially strong and famous pack. Instead of gathering supplies for the winter, he marched that pack into the territory of a neighbor. He used the awe of his fighters and his powers to overcome its huntresses. He added it to the force he had already, and so on, expanding till he controlled scores of packs. The prisoner said the news of him began to run before him. He fired the north with a vision of conquest. He has entered the upper Ponath, not just because it is winter and the game has migrated out of the north, but to recapture the Ponath from us, whose foredams took the land from the ancestors of the nomads. The prisoner even suggested that the wehrlen one day wants to unite all the packs of the world. Under his paw.”

The Wise muttered among themselves. Those who had opposed the sending of Grauel to the packfast put their heads together. After a time one rose to announce, “We withdraw our former objections to petitioning the silth. This is an abomination of the filthiest sort. There is no option but to respond with the power of the older abomination.”

Only crazy old Zertan remained adamantly against having any intercourse with the packfast.

Skiljan said, “Gerrien and I talked while returning from the Laspe packstead. It is our feeling that another message must be sent. The silth must know what we have learned today. It might encourage them to send help. If not that, they must know for their own sakes.”

The motion carried. One of Gerrien’s huntresses, Barlog, was selected for the task and sent out immediately. Meth did not enjoy traveling by night, but that was the safer time. By dawn Barlog should be miles ahead of any nomad who might cross her trail.

What could be done had been done. There was nothing more to discuss. The outsiders went away.

Saettle called the pups to lessons.

Marika took the opportunity to ask about the wehrlen. Saettle would not answer in front of the younger pups. She seemed embarrassed. She said, “Such monsters, like grauken, are better not discussed while they are howling outside the stockade.”

It was plain enough there were no circumstances under which Saettle would explain. Baffled, Marika retreated to her furs.

Kublin wanted to talk about it. “Zambi says —”

“Zambi is a fool,” she snapped without hearing what her other littermate had to say. Then, aware that she was behaving foolishly herself, she called, “Zambi? Where are you? Come here.”

Grumbling surlily, her other littermate came out of the far shadows, where he had been clustered with his cronies. He was big for his age. He looked old enough to leave the packstead already. He had gotten the size and strength and endurance that Kublin had been shorted. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“I want to know what you know about this wehrlen thing.”

Zamberlin rolled his eyes. “The All forfend. You waste my time...” He stopped. Marika’s lips were back, her eyes hot. “All right. All right. Don’t get all bothered. All I know is Poogie said Wart said he heard Horvat say a wehrlen is like a Wise meth, only a lot more so. Like a male sagan, I guess, only he don’t have to be old. Like a male silth, Horvat said. Only I don’t know what that is.”

“Thank you, Zambi.”

“Don’t call me that, Marika. My name is Zamberlin.”

“Oh. Listen to the big guy. Go on back to your friends.”

Kublin wanted to talk. Marika did not. She said, “Let me go to sleep, Kub.” He let her be, but for a long time she lay curled in her furs thinking.

Someone wakened her in the night for a brief stint in the watchtower. She bundled herself and went, and spent her time studying the sky. The clouds had cleared away. The stars were bright, though few and though only the two biggest moons were up, Biter and Chaser playing their eternal game of tag. The light they shed was not enough to mask the fainter stars.

Still, only a few score were visible.

Something strange, that sea of darkness above. Stars were other suns, the books said. So far away that one could not reach them if one walked a thousand lifetimes — if there was a road. According to Saettle’s new book, though, the meth of the south knew ways through the great dark. They wandered among the stars quite regularly...

Silth. That name occurred in the new book, though in no way that explained what silth were, or why the Wise should fear them so. It was silth sisters, the book said, who ventured across the ocean of night.

Nothing happened during Marika’s watch, as she had expected. Meth did not move by night if they could avoid it. The dark was a time of fear...

How, then, did these silth creatures manage the gulf between the stars? How did they breathe? Saettle’s book said there was no air out there.

Marika’s relief startled her. She felt the tower creak and sway, came back to reality with a guilty start. The nomads could have slipped to and over the palisade without her noticing.

She returned to her furs and lay awake a long time, head aswirl with stars. She tried to follow the progress of the messengers and was startled at how clearly the touch came tonight. She could grasp wisps of their thoughts.

Grauel was far down the river now, traveling by moonlight, and only hours away from the packfast. She had expected to arrive sooner but had been delayed by deep drifts in places, and by having to avoid nomads a few times. Barlog was making better time, gaining on the other huntress. She was thinking of continuing after sunrise.

Emboldened by her success, Marika strayed farther afield, curious about the packfast itself. But she could not locate the place, and there was no one there she knew. There was no familiar resonance she could home in on.

Still curious, she roamed the nearby hills, searching for nomads. Several times she brushed what might have been minds, but without any face she could visualize she could not come close enough to capture thoughts. Once, eastward, she brushed something powerful and hurried away, frightened. It had a vaguely male flavor. This wehrlen creature the Wise were so fussed about?

Then she gave herself a real nightmare scare. She sent her thoughts drifting up around Machen Cave, and there she found that dread thing she had sensed last summer, only now it was awake and in a malevolent mood — and seemingly aware of her inspection. As she reeled away, ducked, and fled, she had a mental image of a huge, starving beast charging out of the cave at some small game unlucky enough to happen by.

Twice in the next few minutes she thought she felt it looking for her, blundering around like a great, angry, stupid, hungry beast. She huddled into her furs and shook.

She would have to warn Kublin.

Sleep finally came.

Nothing happened all next day. In tense quiet the pack simply continued to prepare for trouble, and the hours shuffled away. The huntresses spoke infrequently, and then only in low voices. The males spoke not at all. Horvat drove them mercilessly. The Wise sent up appeals to the All, helped a little, got in the way a lot.

Marika did another turn on watch, and sharpened the captured axe, which her dam deemed a task suitable for a pup her age.

III

Autumn had come. High spirits were less often seen. Huntresses ranged the deep woods, ambushing game already migrating southward. Males smoked and salted with a more grim determination. Pups haunted the woods, gleaning deadwood. The Wise read omens in the flights of flyers, the coloration of insects, how much mast small arboreals stowed away, how deep the gurnen burrowed his place of hibernation.

If the signs were unfavorable, the Wise would authorize the felling of living trees and a second or even third gathering of chote root. Huntresses would begin keeping a more than casual eye on the otec colonies and other bearers of fur, seeing what preparations they made for winter. It was in deep winter that those would be taken for their meat and hides.

As winter gathered its legions behind the Zhotak and the meth of the upper Ponath became ever more mindful of the chance of sudden, deadly storms, time for play, for romping the woods on casual expeditions, became ever more scarce. There was always work for any pair of paws capable of contributing. Among the Degnan even the toddlers did their part.

As many as five days might pass without Marika’s getting a chance to run free. Then, usually, she was on firewood detail. Pups tended to slip away from that. Their shirking was tolerated.

That autumn the Wise concluded that it would be a hard winter, but they did not guess half the truth. Even so, the Degnan always put away far more than they expected to need. A simple matter of sensible precaution.

Marika slipped off to Machen Cave for the last time on a day when the sky was gray and the wind was out of the north, damp and chill. The Wise were arguing about whether or not it bore the scent of snow, about who had the most reliable aches and pains in paws and joints. It was a day when Pohsit was lamenting her thousand infirmities, so it seemed she would not be able to rise, much less chase pups over hill and meadow.

Marika went alone. Horvat had Kublin scraping hides, a task he hated — which was why Horvat had him doing it. To teach him that one must do that which one hates as well as that which one enjoys.

It was a plain, simple run through the woods for Marika, a few hours on the slope opposite that where Machen Cave lay, stretching her new sensing in an effort to find the shadow hidden in the earth. Nothing came of it, and after a time she began wandering back toward the packstead, pausing occasionally to pick up a nut overlooked by the tree dwellers. She cracked those with her teeth, then extracted the sweet nutmeat. She noted the position of a rare, late-blooming medicinal plant, and collected a few fallen branches just so it would not seem she had wasted an entire afternoon. It was getting dusky when she reached the gate.

She found Zamberlin waiting there, almost hiding in a shadow. “Where have you been?” he demanded. He did not await an answer. “You better get straight to Dam before anyone sees you.”

“What in the world?” She could see he was shaken, that he was frightened, but not for himself. “What’s happened, Zambi?”

“Better see Dam. Pohsit claims you tried to murder her.”

“What?” She was not afraid at first, just astonished.

“She says you pushed her off Stapen Rock.”

Fear came. But it was not fear for herself. If someone had pushed Pohsit, it must have been...

“Where is Dam?”

“By the doorway of Gerrien’s loghouse. I think she’s waiting for you. Don’t tell her I warned you.”

“Don’t worry.” Marika marched into the packstead, disposed of her burden at the first woodpile, spied her dam, went straight over. She was frightened now, but still much more for Kublin than for herself. “Dam?”

“Where have you been, Marika?”

“In the woods.”

“Where in the woods?”

“Out by Machen Cave.”

That startled Skiljan. “What were you doing out there?”

“I go there sometimes. When I want to think. Nobody else ever goes. I found some hennal.”

Skiljan squinted at her. “You did not pass near Stapen Rock?”

“No, Dam. I have heard what Pohsit claims. Pohsit is mad, you know. She has been trying —”

“I know what she has been trying, pup. Did you decide you were a huntress and would get her before she got you?”

“No, Dam.”

Skiljan’s eyes narrowed. Marika thought her dam believed her, but also suspected she might know something she would not admit.

“Dam?”

“Yes?”

“If I may speak? I would suggest a huntress of Grauel’s skill backtrack my scent.”

“That will not be necessary. I am confident that you had nothing to do with it.”