The Game of Stars and Comets (13 page)

The downslope was wooded, masked with a bristly cover of the twisted dwarflike trees found in the heights. Wind stirred through them, roughed Kade's flesh with its bitter bite. But more than wind moved on that curve of hillside. There was no mistaking the nature of those moving dots coming up with the dogged persistence of animals driven by a homing instinct. The mares! And none bore a rider.

Daringly Kade whistled and some trick of air current carried that summons to the sensitive ears below. The lead mare nickered and quickened pace, her sisters falling in behind her. Rocks rolled and behind Kade the stallion sounded his own call.

When the mares reached the ridge they were sweating, their eyes strained, showing white rims, their coats rough with dried foam and sweat, bits of twig and bark caught in the rippling length of their tails. By all the signs they had traveled far and fast.

The lead mare still wore the riding pad and her rein was caught to it on one side, dangling loose on the other. Also the pad was twisted and across its edge—

Kade put out a finger. That smear of blood, differing in shade from his own, was already partly congealed. The drop must have been exposed to the air for some time. But its presence there argued that there was a more sinister reason for Dokital's absence. Had the native been killed? But where? And why had he ridden the mare, driven the horses away, leaving Kade helpless in the deserted camp? Every time the Terran tried to make a pattern out of the bits and pieces he knew or suspected, they did not fit.

In the end he led the horses back to the valley of the camp, sure that they would be content there. The stream supplied him with the first food he had had that day; a fish, flat, elongated, almost unpleasantly snakelike, but one he knew was edible even raw, and he finished it off with the dogged determination to consume food as fuel for his demanding body.

The fish also supplied him with what he wanted almost as much as food; a weapon, or at least the beginnings of a weapon which, with some careful labor, would serve. The tough spinal bone, shorn of its fringe of small projections and sharpened, made a poniard, needle-slim and nearly as deadly as dura-steel.

How much that would serve him against a Styor blaster, or an Ikkinni spear, he questioned. But with it in his hand Kade felt less naked. And he worked at its perfection all that long afternoon as he made some plans of the future.

The Styor, after their ruthless attack on the Trade post, would hunt down any remaining off-world witness with speed and dispatch. Let his survival be suspected and they would have hunting teams into these breaks to comb him out, station squads all along the trails leading back to the post to pick him up. The logical move would be for him to contact the free Ikkinni, Iskug's band of escapees. That would have been his first endeavor yesterday, before he awoke bound and easy meat for a susti. Now he might have to fear the natives as much as he did their oppressors.

Yet a third possibility was so dangerous, that to try such action meant very careful planning, a period of scouting and lurking, of learning the countryside. To reach the destroyed post Kade would have to evade Styor patrols and natives alike. And even when he reached that site he might not be able to find the concealed com, or to summon the Service ship in time to save himself. But he could get out a warning of what had happened on Klor.

Kade ground with small, delicate touches at the point of his bone dagger. To scout the territory would commit him to no move and he should so be able to gauge the Styor positions. That much he would try tomorrow. He was fairly certain at the way west from here and he should be able to reach some upper vantage point in the hills from which to view the post by midday.

The Terran followed Dokital's example of the night before, heaping a loose pile of grass into which he crawled, listening to the movements of the horses until he fell asleep, knowing that they would give the alarm against alien intruders.

Kade awoke soon after dawn to hear the low whinny of the lead mare as she went down to the stream. He pulled free of his nest, went to the water also. Following the immemorial custom of hunt and war trail Kade drank only a small amount of water, pulling tighter the belt about his middle. As he swung past the boulder wall of Dokital's camp a gorged winged thing shuffled along the cleaned skeleton of the susti, and two smaller shapes turned angry red eyes on him before they scuttled away into hiding.

Taking his bearings from the three peaks, the Terran headed westward. He had to make detours around two unclimbable cliffs and paused now and again to erase the marks of his own passing. Slightly before midday he did reach his goal. As he crept along a ledge the sun was pleasingly warm on his shoulders and he did not regret the loss of his tunic. For against the hue of sand and earth here his own bronze skin and the drab shade of his breeches should be indistinguishable.

Although miles separated him from the post, there was no mistaking the scar which the Styor burn-off had left to mark the site. Not one of the walls still stood, only a round splotch of blackened earth gleamed under the sun, the terrible heat of the ship's flaming tail had cooked earth and sand into slag.

He could have hoped for nothing else. Had there been survivors, they must be sealed underground, their only hope of rescue to come from off-planet. Kade looked from that scar to more immediate landscapes. He had one small point in his favor: the Styor would expect a Terran to be completely bewildered if thrown on his own in the Klorian wilderness, and the Overmen of teams sent out to track any possible survivor would be overconfident.

That estimation of the enemy was borne out when Kade surveyed the foothills below his present perch. There were trackers out, right enough. He could sight two separate teams heading eastward, and they moved openly, strung out as might beaters sent to scare up game. There was no doubt that sooner or later someone down there would stumble on the trail left by the horses day before yesterday and follow it to the valley of the susti. Which meant he must move and find a better hideout.

But even as Kade started to crawl from his ledge, he stiffened, hearing that familiar clap of sound, the roar of a spaceship homing on a post land area. And, in the sunlight, the silver body of a descending Trade scout was a streak as vivid and elemental as an avenging bolt of lightning.

If Kade had been
startled by the sudden arrival of the Terran ship in Klorian skies, the search parties below betrayed their agitation by the speed with which they took to cover. Although he could no longer sight them, the off-worlder knew they still existed, a barrier between him and that ship now making a perfect three-fin landing on the apron of the vanished post. He had not the slightest chance of reaching the rescue party.

But he continued to watch their activities with strained eagerness. Would the Styor attempt to attack the party from the ship? Or would the aliens bring up one of their fast inter-atmosphere cruisers from Cor and begin a running fight when the Terran scout took off again? Kade did not see how they would dare to let the ruined post tell its story to Trade. Had the Styor not blasted, but allowed the evidences of a native attack to stand, they might have successfully blamed it on rebellious Ikkinni, indirectly on the Terrans themselves because of the importation of horses. As he lay there on the ledge, his head supported on his forearm, Kade thought that made good logic.

But why had they spoiled such a plan with the burn-off? What had gone wrong? Unless—unless they had learned of the blasting of Buk's control! Had the Styor lords, safely in the background of that assault, been able to monitor events from a distance and observed that the Ikkinni had a weapon of deliverance at last? Had they ordered the burn-off to catch their own dupes as well as the Terrans for no other reason than to make sure that no more stunners would fall into Ikkinni hands, than if they moved fast and were lucky, no rumor of the weapon's use could reach the rest of their slave gangs? It could be an answer, if a drastic one—risking a blockade from Trade in order to keep their slaves. But how could he judge the thinking patterns of a Styor by his own processes? The risk to them might have appeared heavier on the other side of the scales.

At any rate someone had been frightened enough, or angry enough to order that burn-off. Would the next attack come against the newly landed ship?

Minutes passed and no Styor flyer arose above the horizon. There was no sign of life from the breaks below where those hunting parties had gone to earth. Kade could make out, despite the distance, figures emerging on the ship's ramp, descending to the congealed scar of the post. And he speculated again as to whether Abu or Che'in was sealed, still alive, below the glassy surface of that burn.

Renewed activity below his perch drew Kade's attention away from the splotch on the prairie. There was a new advance, not back toward the plains, but up slope, heading towards him. And for a moment or two he wondered if he had been sighted and Ikkinni slaves dispatched to pick him up.

If the newcomers knew the terrain well they could take a path around the spur on which he crouched, cutting him off. And Kade dared not chance that they were ignorant of that, too many labor gangs had been hired out for hunting in these hills. He had to leave at once.

The Terran gave a last long look at the scene about the ship. Those small stick things which represented his own kind had gathered in one spot on the scar. His guess that at least one of the Team was in a hidden underground com chamber must be right and they were preparing to break the prisoner out. Kade eyed the section of broken, wooded land below him, the long curve of open prairie. To try to cross those miles was simply asking to be speared—or blasted if the Styor had issued more potent arms to their Overmen. He had not the slightest chance of reaching the safety of the ship and that was a bitter truth to digest.

But suppose the scout took off successfully with the man or men who had been rescued? There would remain that now open com chamber and the possibility he could try for it later, send in his own call. That was the hope he must hold to as he retreated now.

Kade crept from his ledge, started downward with the ridge rising as a wall between him and the only aid he could count on, using every tactic known to a hunter—and the hunted—to cover his trail.

Once he wriggled under a fallen tree, lay still, fighting the rapid pump of his own heart, the rasp of his breathing, while an Ikkinni paused within arm's-length, head up, nostrils distended, as if he could pick out of the light breeze which was ruffling his cockscomb of hair the scent of the off-worlder.

Kade blinked when he saw that that particular tracker wore no collar. If the slave Ikkinni had been loosed in the hills, their free brethren were also on the move with a purpose which drove them into dangerous proximity to the Overmen and their governed squads.

The Terran watched the native fade into the brush, and lay long moments in hiding, until he was sure of a detour which would not bring him treading on the other's heels. So tangled a path did Kade follow that he was honestly surprised when he came again into the meadow where the horses grazed. And the hour was close to sunset as he stayed under cover watching the animals.

But the peace of the scene was reassuring, especially when the stallion betrayed quick vigilance with his own examination and then welcome for Kade. Had the Terran been Ikkinni or Styor he was certain the herd would have been in flight before the invaders could get within blaster range of the animals.

However, with hunters boring into the mountain valleys, man and mounts dared not remain there in spite of the coming night. Kade mounted the lead mare, headed her back along the trail he had explored the day before, and was glad that the others came behind willingly, the stallion playing rear guard.

The Terran pressed the pace, wanting to be over the rougher stretches of trail while the daylight lasted. But he paused every time they were forced out of cover to look behind. And he regretted he had no chance to erase their tracks.

They came back, in the gray of the twilight, to the wooded slope where earlier he had met the mares. And now the leader he rode whinnied nervously, had to be urged on. Yet Kade could see nothing but empty country below, and he was sure they had outdistanced the hunting parties. There remained the free Ikkinni, nor did he forget that blood which made an ugly blotch on the saddle pad not far from his knee.

He let the mare pick her own choice of ways as long as she obeyed his selection of direction. And she went cautiously, pausing to sniff the air, survey the unending ocher vegetation ahead. Once or twice the stallion snorted, as if growing impatient at that slow advance, but he did not press ahead.

Kade was hungry, as he could never remember having been since the ceremonial fasting of his adolescence, and here in the shadow of the trees he was cold as well. Sooner or later he would have to choose a camp site.

The mare stopped short, her ears pointed forward, and now the stallion joined her, his whole stance expressing interest in something hidden from Kade's less acute sense. There was nothing to be seen save the trees, the sparsely growing underbrush, and countryside being blotted out by dusk.

Then the breeze, which awakened a murmur of sound, failed and Kade caught a quiver in the air—it was hardly more than that. Only the rhythm of that faint beat was manmade, he became convinced of that the longer he listened. And surely the Styor hunting parties would not advertise their presence by such means.

A village or gathering of cliff Ikkinni? Some ceremonial in progress? Or—His imagination supplied other explanations. He pressed his heel against the mare's round side, urging her on. And, as she obeyed, that faint pulsation grew louder. Then some trick of shifting wind brought it to him as a regular up-down ladder of sound. And his blood answered that alien cadence with a faster coursing, his heart accelerated to keep time to that drumming.

Horses and man came out of the trees into a glade, and here the drum was a hollow core of vibration which pulled, not only at the eardrums, but at the nerves of the listener. The horses were uneasy, nickering. Finally the stallion reared, gave his ringing challenge as his front hooves beat into the sky. Kade caught for dangling reins too late, aware that that fighter's scream of defiance could carry, echoed as it was by the rises about them.